Now it is impossible for a thing’s being to be caused by its essential principles, for nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own being, if its being is caused—Thomas Aquinas

In previous posts, we spent some time thinking about how the intellect works and receives reality. The intellect is potency to knowledge and can only receive that which is in act (being) through sense experience. As St. Thomas reminds us, “intelligence is compared to sense, as act is to potency”.¹ It is important in this discussion to understand the distinction of simple apprehension and concept because the blurring and conflating of these categories is one of the greatest errors among Idealists. We have seen that through induction and abstraction, the essence of the external object is married to the intellect. This union of essence, or universal, with the intellect is also known as, concept, idea, species or intention. For now, we will use the term concept.

There are many different kinds of concepts, of course, and it is the task of metaphysicians and logicians to catalog, classify, and put them in proper order. For classical realists, knowledge is always of being – of that which is in some order. In this way, epistemology would be better understood as the ontology of knowing—an examination of the first principles and the order of knowing reality.

In the order of knowing, the concept is not the being of the external object, it is the essence. (Being, or that which is in act, is always matter and form.) The concept resides in the intellect as the essence or universal abstracted from external reality through the senses. To confuse the concept, or idea, with being itself is the error of the idealist.

The realist philosopher Daniel Sullivan puts it this way:

It is important to recognize that while the concept is necessary to rational knowing, it is only a means by which we know, and not that which we know. It is a necessary means, just as eyeglasses may be necessary for me to see with; yet just as it is really the table I see and not the lenses of my eyeglasses, so too it is really the thing itself I know and not my concept of it. To say that the objects of my knowing are concepts rather than things would be to fall into the trap of those philosophers called Idealists. For if all we ever know is always idea, then we can never know whether or not there is anything existing outside our mind corresponding to our ideas. Thus, following the Idealist, all reality would consist of minds and the thoughts they think.²

If one does not properly make the distinction between concept and real actual being, skepticism, uncertainty, and doubt about reality results. The perennial questions of reality will always be reduced to subjectivism. One would have no certain contact with reality outside their mind.

Drawing from St. Thomas, Dr. Adler explains:

This distinction between the id quod (that which) and the id quo (that by which) of our intellectual acts prevents us from ever saying that our concepts are that which we are conscious or aware of when we understand ideas. We could not be aware of the concepts in our minds and also at the same time be aware of their intelligible objects. If we were, we could not distinguish between them, which would mean we could not affirm that such objects exist and are shared by other minds.³

Our concepts do not tell us that things are, they tell us what things are; they reveal nature or essence, not existence. “The existence of things is outside the order of concepts,” wrote St. Thomas.⁴ The point to remember is that the being of an idea or concept in the mind is a different mode of existence than that of the actual external object – each belongs to a different order. Physical reality and knowing are different orders. Cognitively, humans have the ability to distinguish between that which and that by which they are aware of something. This allows one to affirm or deny the reality of something through the intellectual faculty of judgment. When the mind engages in careful and critical reflection, the essence in the intellect always points back to concrete reality. (I explained a little how the faculty of judgment works in my posts on Berkeleyan Idealism. I hope to develop the idea further as we move along.)

The process by which the intellect grasps the essence or universal is what classical realists call simple apprehension: apprehension, because the mind receives and comes to understand the essential nature of the sense object; simple, because the mind naturally takes in the intentional concept without affirming or denying it through the faculty of judgment. The operation of simple apprehension is the first act of knowing.

Without these concepts firmly understood, it is easy to fall into the error of Idealism. However, the idealist must conclude that the essence, or concept, is the cause of reality (indeed, that is the very definition of Idealism) but this is impossible because no contingent being can be the cause of its own existence.

Works Cited

Adler, Mortimer. Adler’s Philosophical Dictionary: 125 Key Terms for the Philosopher’s Lexicon. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica Volume 1. The Great Books of the Western World, edited by Mortimer J. Adler et al., Vol. 17, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996.

Sullivan, Daniel. An Introduction to Philosophy: Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition. Charlotte, North Carolina: TAN Books, 2009.

Wilhelmsen, Frederick D. Man’s Knowledge of Reality: An Introduction to Thomistic Epistemology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1956.

Notes

1Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Trans. by Father Laurence Shapcote of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996) 1a, q.3, art. 5.

2Daniel Sullivan, An Introduction to Philosophy: Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition (Charlotte, North Carolina: TAN Books, 2009), 79.

3 Mortimer J. Adler, Adler’s Philosophical Dictionary (New York: Scribner, 1995), S. V. Idea.

4Frederick D. Wilhemsen, Man’s Knowledge of Reality: An Introduction to Thomistic Epistemology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1956) 29.