A Prolegomenon Concerning the Objectivity of Second Intentions, Part 3 (The First Act of the Intellect in its Speculative Operation)
Introduction
The reader will likely notice from the somewhat verbose title of this article that I am making a very specific statement regarding the nature of what we will be discussing here. Very often, scholastics will speak of the “three operations of the intellect”: defining (or “understanding of indivisibles”), statement formation and judging, and reasoning. I am in no way opposed to the philosophical psychology that identifies these activities by using the expression “the three operations of the intellect.” However, in my own reading and writing, I take care to avoid reducing the intellect solely to its speculative activity. In the practical-moral domain of knowledge, we find that the human mind is at once “measured” by the truths of the natural law and the law of grace and yet, also, is itself a kind of “measure” of human action. By the exercise of prudence, human reason takes on a guise that can be called “ordinative,” an activity that is preeminently expressed in the act of command, by means of which human reason places a rational (and divine) order into our passions and actions. “To command,” therefore, is a unique kind of rational activity,1 not completely reducible to these three acts of speculative reasoning, though, granted, the process all three operations is engaged in prudential discourse, which is marked through and through by the process of defining, judging, and reasoning.
And, doubtlessly, something similar could be said also concerning the practico-artistic process of reasoning involved in artisanal and artistic fabrication. Here too, the fundamental unity of the human intellect is no doubt present throughout the process of grasping essences, judging complex statements, and reasoning to conclusions that, in this fabricative domain, however, will be measures of artistic creations. As the maximum goes: the speculative intellect becomes practical by extension. Nonetheless, the role of appetite and the aforementioned measuring capacity will mark the two domains of practical reasoning with unique characteristics (which we cannot take up in this essay).
Therefore, our consideration will be upon speculative reason, and when we do consider realities belonging to the practical domain, we will handle them in a speculative manner. But let us always be aware of the fact that there is more to the practical than at first meets the speculative eye. Nonetheless, given that all truth is in some way founded upon reality, we must indeed say that prudence’s “conformity to right intention” is founded upon “conformity to reality”2 and that art’s conformity “with what ought to be according to the rule and the measure of the thing to be effected”3 does not do away with art’s fundamental connection to nature.4 Therefore, it is not surprising that we find, even within the domain of the practical, a modality of the speculative.5
Let this parenthesis on behalf of the uniqueness of practical cognition suffice. We will now turn to our main task.
The Conception of Knowledge
Recall from the previous article that our focus is, so to speak, “logical.” The goal of our reflection is to consider the relational structure that is devised and manifested in the midst of our cognitional labor. Nonetheless, as is obvious by the very structure of the previous sentence, these relations cannot be understood without some preliminary sketch of what human cognition itself is.6
To be human is to be intellectual. But we are not intellectual after the manner of angels or of God. We are, properly speaking, rationally intelligent beings. We must fight our way toward knowledge step-by-step, on the basis of many experiences from our first day on earth until our last. We gather our knowledge not merely by sensation of brute facts but through the formation of many memories and imagined cogitations. We find ourselves surrounded by an environment that is present to us as a kind of “actional space,” corresponding to our species-specific needs as a particular kind of intelligent simian, with a personal set of past experiences. Moreover, even whenever we imagine or remember particular things, our experience of these realities is already marked by the fact that we are intelligent creatures. We do not experience brute individual facts. Rather, we experience individuals that in some way participate in a kind of universalizable intelligibility. Thus, when I look around my office, I experience two particular computer monitors, many books, and a drawer filled with coffee pods for my Nespresso machine. That is, I experience all of these various individuals as participating in some nexus of formal characteristics that provide them with intelligible unity.
But in the midst of such immediate experience, as I sit here working on this essay, I do not attempt to focus on what this intelligibility is. Rather, sedimented within my experience is the capacity to see these realities—not merely to construct them, but indeed to “see” them—with an active imaginative capacity7 that is marked by its close relationship to the intellect: namely, the “cogitative power,” a unique internal sense enabling me to grasp these particularized wholes, informed not only by my biological needs and capacities (as is the case for animals and their “power of estimation”) but also my intellectual insights, enabling me to see the universal intelligible structure of being in the various particular beings within my experience.
This grasping of my environmental particulars is a true work of knowing. For this reason, the later Thomist school (legitimately developing Thomas’s own texts and insights) would speak here not only of an “impressed” sensible species coming from the immediate environment but, also, of an “expressed” sensible species fashioned by the internal sense as it renders present to my mind a reality that is either immediately present now or, as is often the case with active imagination and memory, not present physically but can be present cognitionally. Knowledge—even such “internal sense knowledge”—is not formally speaking a kind of production of this “expressed” species. Nonetheless, this process of production is necessary, if we are to, in fact, have an act of cognition. Therefore, one will speak of such expressed knowledge as being “virtually productive.” Formally, knowledge is union with the other precisely as other (to know speculatively is to be the other objectively-intentionally); but causally (virtually), this other must be rendered present, and this is done in and through the expressed species (in this case, the “phantasm” produced by the cogitative power or memory).
As I noted, however, when I look at my monitors, books, and coffee pods, I do not think, explicitly, about their intelligibility. Rather, I experience the individuals as brought together through the unification of prior experience, which has sufficed to give them a unity amid their plurality. But, of course, I can turn my attention to this intelligibility. That is, I can consider what is potentially intelligible and render it actually intelligible and, even, actually known. This is the process of knowing undertaken precisely by the intellect itself.
When we make this transition toward intellectual knowledge, we take up the psychological processes known as illumination and abstraction. The intellect in its agentive capacity illuminates the phantasmic knowledge that we have, focusing (whether by comparison or by distinction) on the intelligibility that heretofore has remained only potential. And as this process moves toward actual knowledge, we cross a threshold—sometimes very difficult to point out, often arising hazily within our awareness, but nonetheless new—what had been merely potentially intelligible is now present to us as something actually intelligible, as something that indeed can be known. Although there are problems with certain scholastic theories that would speak of the intelligible species “radiating in the phantasm,” I nonetheless find the metphor at least evocative. Functioning as the objective instrument of the intellect, phantasm—that is, the expressed memory and / or cogitation of the sensible level—radiates with its intelligible light now in act. We find ourselves in the presence of what Maritain has called “a many eyed cloud” of intelligibility, the guiding notion—perhaps vaguely grasped—that will direct the noetic labors of actually knowing the reality now present to us but for now not clearly articulated in its essential lineaments.
Thus, the intellect first actualized and formed by the reality present to the mind, must form for itself its own internal expression of reality—its own response to the object which is now present to it. In fact, it will only be by working upon this very object that the intellect will be able to express for itself some knowledge of reality, not merely as intelligible (able-to-be-understood) but as intellected (actually understood). That is, the intellect must speak an internal word, in which it will grasp and be united to the object that is now rendered known.
Definition: One Kind of Internal Word, Involving Various Second Intentions
Although8 some contemporary Thomists dispute the philosophical importance, as well as the Thomistic bona fides, of the “internal word,” I believe that this notion is beyond dispute both for its noetic-psychological importance, as well as on the basis of Thomas’s own analysis both philosophically and theologically (though it is developed more extensively by later Thomists). The intellect must not only be actualized so as to have present to it an understandable object that is now actually understand-able; this object must be actually understood. The activity that brings about this understanding produces the internal word, as the means in which our knowledge is expressed. If I continue to repeat this point, it is only because this aspect of philosophical psychology is not always appreciated.
Now, there are actually two different kinds of internal words: definitional words and complex statements that combine or distinguish subjects and predicates.9 As the mind seeks to grasp reality, it must fashion definitions as well as statements, and these two cognitional activities bequeath different sorts of insights. Moreover, statements are not all equal in character. Some are non-discursive facts of experience and insight—most importantly those that are per se nota, self-evident, on the very strength of the terms making up the proposition in question. However, there also are statements that are known through the mediacy of reasoning, such that a given conclusion-proposition is understood, only in light of the middle term that has connected a conclusion’s subject and predicate. Thus, the second kind of internal word generated by the intellect—the “statement word”—can take on the additional modality of being a discursively known statement. Our focus in this article is the first kind of word, formed as the intellect seeks to perfect itself through the process of defining the essence of something.
When we seek to define something, we requisition a variety of cognitional tools. One of the most important preliminary such tools is the process of dividing and combining genera and species. This process—discussed by Aristotle in the 2nd book of the Posterior Analytics and in the Topics, and presupposed wherever he defines his own terms—played an important role in the dialectical labors undertaken in the Platonic Academy (cf. the Statesman and the Sophist). By means of the simplest generic-specific division, we already begin to find ourselves faced with a whole host of second intentional relations.
Let us consider, for example, the notion of book, taken for granted in the experiences mentioned earlier. We might say that book is a species in a wider genus of information-holding-artifact. And we also notice that in relation to book we have no subordinate species but, instead, only have individuals thereunder.10
So, right now, we noticed the following relations: information-holding-artifact is a genus in relation to book, which itself is a species of that genus and is a most specific species of individual books, such that the individual books only differ from each other in some non-specific, non-important way. (We are, in fact, here holding off on another important second-intention relation to be discussed soon, namely accident.)
Both information-holding-artifact and book can be said to be universal in relation to those things that are inferior to them. Implied in this relation of universality is superiority, something that is a property of universality, whether generic or specific. We notice, also, that this universality takes on two different modalities. There is the relationship between genus and species, which is correlative, such that to be a genus implies its subordinate species and vice-versa. Moreover, there is the superordination of a species directly over individuals, which differ only in number but not in kind, as would be the case if we considered the relation of information-holding-artifact to another species such as digital tablet. Thus, the inferiors of information-holding-artifact (book and digital tablet) differ in kind, whereas the inferiors of the “most specific species” book differ only in number.
The process of division involves its own sorts of rules,11 so as to guarantee that one’s division is always immediate, per se, and adequate. This is a difficult process, and it already presages the labor of definition, which is, in fact, using such division as its instrument throughout this entire process.
We sense this fact when we realize that the little division that we have created already implies a kind of scaffolding of definitional structures. Thus, for example, let us consider the division of information-holding-artifact into book and digital tablet. Certainly, this division is neither per se, nor adequate, nor necessarily through immediate opposition. Nonetheless, it is a division, and we ask ourselves: What is the root of this division? We could say that a book is a spine-bound paper information-holding-artifact and a digital tablet a handheld digital computational information-holding-artifact with a screen. It is possible, therefore, that we could imagine yet another information-holding-artifact, perhaps an abacus. The latter could be descriptively defined as: a movable-bead mathematical information-holding-artifact. Each of the bold terms are differences that mark off some sub-domain within the genus information-holding-artifact—doing so, however, in a way that does not seem to isolate characteristics that belong only and always to the species. When such a difference is used, a definition can be referred to as a descriptive definition or an accidental definition.
This is not the place to rehearse the whole of Porphyry’s Isagogue or Aristotle’s Topics, going through the “predicables” (genus, species, accident, property, difference). What I wish to call attention to is this host of new relations that we have formed, while we have undergone this most rudimentary process of dividing and defining. We began with a single reality, book. This reality, experienced in individual cases by means of the cogitative power, offers itself to the intellect as a possible object of essential definition. That is, it offers itself as something to be objectively articulated by means of the first operation of the intellect.
But when we strive to express this object, we very quickly find that, in order to be clear with our knowledge, we must express a definition. This very notion of definition is a kind of relation, namely the combination of a genus and difference striving to express a particular species that our mind wishes to understand in some way. And from the very beginning of the process, we have a general sense that book is superior and universal in relation to the individual books that we could experience. Moreover, we realize that this relationship of superiority implies at least a potentially greater extension on the part of book in relation to individual books. As we attempt to define what a book is, we consider a candidate for its closest genus. This genus—proposed as information-holding-artifact—itself will have a greater extension than the species book. However, this extension will be marked by a unique characteristic, namely, the fact that the species subordinated to information-holding-artifact will differ in kind, whereas the individuals subordinated to book differ in number. Also, although we did not discuss this earlier, we have a sense that the genus information-holding-artifact is less rich; it expresses less meaning than does its two proposed species book and digital tablet. As scholastic logicians would say, the comprehension of the species is greater and more actual than the genus. Finally, our proposed definition, spine-bound paper information-holding-artifact, involves a qualifying difference, in fact a non-essential qualifying difference, which the tradition would come to call an accident or accidental difference.12 And thus, we have a kind of definition, namely, one that could be called an accidental definition or, as it is sometimes referred to, a descriptive definition.
Genus, species, universal, individual, comprehension, extension, accident, property, difference, definition, subordinate-and-differing-in-kind, subordinate-and-differing-only-in-number, superior (superordinate), subordinate, etc.: all of these are relations (or properties of relations) formed by the intellect when it strives to fashion a definition—which is nothing other than the perfected process of speaking the internal word of the first operation of the intellect in its speculative activity.
There are all sorts of nuances that could be added, even to this basic framework of defining. For example, a definition could be what was once called “metaphysical” (through a truly specific difference, formally isolating the nature of what is being defined) or “physical” through its various causes.13 This is something that sounds very abstract, so let’s take an example directly from Thomas Aquinas. In fact, he will even say that a definition that uses all of the causes of a thing represents the strongest case of definition. In ST I-II, q. 55, a. 4, he uses an Augustinian definition of virtue, parsing it in a marvelous fashion: “Virtue is a good quality of the mind, by which we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God works in us, without us.” This definition could be parsed thus:
Genus: quality (or, even more specifically, according to the Categories of Aristotle, habit)
Differences
From formal cause: Good
From “matter in which”: of the mind
From end: by which we live righteously and of which no one makes bad use”
From efficient cause (for the case of the infused moral virtues and theological virtues) which God works within us, without us
Now, obviously, one might wish to make certain adjustments. For example, as regards the “matter in which” or, subject, of virtue, we would want to make clear that “mind” means intellect, will, or the sense appetites as subject to the intellect and will. But, what I wish to note is that these different causes—whatever might be their natural philosophical analysis regarding the way that they establish dependence in being—function as differences revealing the essence of what is being defined. And we need to understand how they are manners of qualifying the definition-relation between a given genus and one of its species. Logic teaches us such things.
And let us consider one further point of extreme importance within the logic of science in particular. The various sciences are differentiated precisely in view of the way that they isolate their subject matters. Traditionally, one would say that the various sciences are distinct as regards their “abstraction.” I personally prefer the somewhat neologistic expression of Maritain, “eidetic visualization,” to make clear that what really is going on with such abstraction is our intellect’s attempt to isolate a given subject matter vis-à-vis materiality and immateriality. One of the marks—a kind of property (as Simon and Maritain, following John of St. Thomas, note)—of a given degree of abstraction is the way we define, that is, the way that we focus on a reality in our definition, setting out of consideration certain characteristics and focusing on others as constituting the knowability of what we are trying to express for ourselves. In an essay such as this, it is inappropriate to attempt to adjudicate all of the traditional questions concerning the “degrees of abstraction.”14 Such topics help to spell out more properties belonging to the various relations that we form as our mind seeks to define the terms of particular sciences. It is up to the sciences themselves to define their methods and boundaries (always subject to the critical gaze of metaphysics). But logic must explain how it is that there can be a distinction of sciences giving rise to different modes of defining, at least as regards the most general rules of such defining. That is: scientifically specified definition and scientific abstraction are themselves second intentions of a very technical but important sort.
And allow me to make one final remark regarding three very important relations that the intellect forms as it attempts to define things: univocity, equivocity, and analogicity. Technically, the domain of definition is above all the domain of striving to find univocal definitions that express the essence of something. The relation of univocity exists between a term and its inferiors, telling us that this one term is used to express one meaning for various things. Equivocity and analogicity arguably requisition the labors of the other operations of the intellect in ways that deserve to be investigated by Thomist logicians and “philosophical psychologists.”15 Nonetheless, to the degree that they establish kinds of quasi-superiority between a given term and its inferiors, equivocity and analogicity are akin to definitions, though using order in unique ways—either “completely by chance” (in the case of true equivocity), by “managed impropriety” (in the case of metaphor, which is a kind of improper analogy), or by “managed propriety” (in the case of analogy, itself subdivided into attributional analogy and proportional analogy, the latter containing the former in a formal-eminent way).
The essential point is this: univocity, equivocity, and the various kinds of analogicity are each second intentions. They designate a particular kind of relation between a term and its inferiors. Even if one speaks of “metaphysical analogy” with regard to the mind-independent likeness and difference that metaphysically grounds our logical relationships, nonetheless, when the mind forms analogical objects of knowledge, it establishes a relational structure that must be studied in its own right so that we might understand the structural relations among terms and objects of knowledge. This is a topic of pivotal importance for the logic of the sciences and demonstration, especially in those disciplines (e.g., metaphysics and also supernatural theology) that utilize analogical and superanalogical terms.
Conclusion
All of this has been quite superficial. I have attempted only to draw attention to the fact that within the very first genus of speculative-intellectual operation, the intellect fashions many kinds of relations among the objects of our knowledge, and these relations have sufficient “consistency” to be able to be studied in their own right. As Socrates and Plato saw so many centuries ago, a huge amount of intellectual labor (as well as misunderstanding and disagreement) is tied up with the work of defining. And one need only think of the scholastic “distinguo” to realize the immense importance of these “relations of reasons” formed by the intellect as it expresses its knowledge to itself. Such defining is only part of the overall work of the mind. It will often even need to use extrinsic dialectical or scientific reasoning to pave the way for us to see the essence that we wish to define. But, in the absence of good definitions, no amount of reasoning is of much use: cheap flour makes wretched bread. It is important, therefore, to try to understand how these unique “relations of reason” are truly something of interest. Even if they do not exist in things insofar as those things are mind independent, they most certainly do exist in those things insofar as they are objects of our labors of dividing and defining the objects of our knowledge.
(À suivre)
One might think, for example, of the role played by “performative utterances.” Although most know of this topic from the work of Hare, the topic was not unknown to scholastic theologians, especially in their treatment of the sacraments.↩︎
See Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “The Threefold Foundation of Thomist Realism,” Philosophizing in Faith: Essays on the Beginning and End of Wisdom, ed. and trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019), 47–62 (here, 61).↩︎
Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, ch. 4; cf. the whole of Cajetan, In ST I-II, q. 57, a. 5 and also John of St. Thomas, In ST I-II, q. 62 (Vivès, vol. 6), disp. 16, a. 4. The whole of Maritain’s oeuvre concerning art is of great use for preventing one from reducing art and poetic insight to a kind of naturalistic imitationism.↩︎
For a careful reflection on this, see Marie-Dominique Philippe, L’activité artistique: philosophie du faire, vol. 1 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1968), pt. 2, ch. 2 (L’art imite la nature).↩︎
The topic of the “speculatively practical” deserves detailed consideration by Thomists, but this is not the place for such matters to be taken up. For a brief foray, with further citations, see Matthew K. Minerd, “A Note on Synderesis, Moral Science, and Knowledge of the Natural Law,” Lex naturalis 5 (2020): 43–55; “Appendix 2: On the Speculative, the Speculatively-Practical, and the Practically-Practical,” in Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “Remarks Concerning the Metaphysical Character of St. Thomas’s Moral Theology, in Particular as It Is Related to Prudence and Conscience,” Nova et Vetera (English) 17, no. 1 (2019): 245–70 (here, 266–70).↩︎
For what is presupposed here, I can only gesture toward various essays by Garrigou-Lagrange, Peifer’s The Concept in Thomism, Simon’s Introduction to Metaphysics of Knowledge, elements from throughout the works of John Deely, Robert Sokowlowski’s essay on making distinctions, and Maritain’s Degrees of Knowledge, Réflexions sur l’intelligence, and Creative intuition in Art and Poetry. Also, on the role of the cogitative power, consider the various essays by Julien Peghaire, Daniel De Haan, John Jalsevac, George Klubertanz, Mark Barker, and Robert Schmidt. Of interest from a purely Aristotelian perspective is also the work of Groarke.↩︎
For the purposes of this essay, I will at times use the somewhat ambiguous “active imaginative capacity” (or “active imagination”) for the “cogitative power,” although technically our distinct faculty of imagination is also active in its own way. For a good summary of the distinction between the imagination and the cogitative power, see Austin Woodbury, Natural Philosophy (Psychology), The John N. Deely and Anthony F. Russell Collection, (Latimer Family Library, St. Vincent College Library, Latrobe, PA), nos. 766–774.↩︎
In general, regarding the processes of division and definition, see Vincent Edward Smith’s The Elements of Logic, Jacques Maritain’s An Introduction to Logic, Peter Kreeft’s Socratic Logic. Also, see Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “On the Search for Definitions According to Aristotle and St. Thomas,” Philosophizing in Faith: Essays on the Beginning and End of Wisdom, ed. and trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019), 21–34; M.-D. Roland-Gosselin,”Les Méthods de la définition d’après Aristote,” Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 6, no. 2 (1912): 236–252; ibid., no. 4 (1912): 661–675.↩︎
In the background of this discussion here is John of St. Thomas; however, this distinction of two kinds of internal words can find textual support in Thomas himself, as Louis-Marie Régis briefly discusses in his Epistemology text. The point is also noted, with dependence upon John of St. Thomas, in Yves Simon.↩︎
Whether or not this is the most specific species need not detain us in this article.↩︎
See the texts cited in note 8 above.↩︎
I feel the need to note that many years ago it was the mere chapter title, “The Framework of Definition,” in Smith that helped me to see this obvious point regarding the predicables.↩︎
On this, although eclectic, Kreeft, cited above, provides a good series of examples on p. 129.↩︎
In addition to questions, for example, concerning how to understand the relationship between natural philosophy and the various sciences, we could also add that the way that analogy is essential to the very constitution of metaphysics presents unique problems for this schematization (which I believe can hold, with appropriate nuances). However, as I have hinted in passing elsewhere, analogical knowledge of being bears witness to the fact that abstraction does not only use the labor of definition but, also, the threefold “way” of causality, negation, and eminence, as well as priority and posteriority. This is, in the end, only another way of saying (with Simon) that where abstraction comes up short, the mind then makes use of order as a means for at least forming an imperfect abstraction. See Yves R. Simon, “On Order in Analogical Sets,” in Philosopher at Work: Essays by Yves R. Simon, ed. Anthony O. Simon (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 135–71.↩︎
Of the greatest importance in these matters, one must study the role of order, mentioned in the previous footnote.↩︎
