Consciousness and Self-Knowledge in Medieval Philosophy [1 ed.] 1527506789, 9781527506787

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
Information Processing and Me
Human Intellectual Potency and the Genus of Intelligibles
Artificial Intelligence, Actual Intelligibility, and Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge
Thomas Aquinas on Self-Knowledge of Habitus
Self-Knowledge by Participation
“Many Know Much, but Do Not Know Themselves”
Appendix
Contributors

Citation preview

Consciousness and Self-Knowledge in Medieval Philosophy

Also available in the series: The Immateriality of the Human Mind, the Semantics of Analogy, and the Conceivability of God Volume 1: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Categories, and What Is Beyond Volume 2: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Knowledge, Mental Language, and Free Will Volume 3: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Mental Representation Volume 4: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Universal Representation, and the Ontology of Individuation Volume 5: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Medieval Skepticism, and the Claim to Metaphysical Knowledge Volume 6: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Medieval Metaphysics; or Is It “Just Semantics”? Volume 7: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics After God, with Reason Alone-Saikat Guha Commemorative Volume Volume 8: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics The Demonic Temptations of Medieval Nominalism Volume 9: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Skepticism, Causality and Skepticism about Causality Volume 10: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Metaphysical Themes, Medieval and Modern Volume 11: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Maimonides on God and Duns Scotus on Logic and Metaphysics Volume 12: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics The Metaphysics of Personal Identity Volume 13: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Consciousness and Self-Knowledge in Medieval Philosophy Volume 14: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics

Consciousness and Self-Knowledge in Medieval Philosophy: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Volume 14 Edited by

Gyula Klima and Alex Hall

Consciousness and Self-Knowledge in Medieval Philosophy: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Volume 14 Series: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Edited by Gyula Klima and Alex Hall This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Gyula Klima, Alex Hall and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0678-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0678-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Alex Hall Information Processing and Me ................................................................... 7 JT Paasch Human Intellectual Potency and the Genus of Intelligibles: A Response to Therese Cory’s Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge............................ 21 Brian Carl Artificial Intelligence, Actual Intelligibility, and Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge: A Response to Critics .................................................... 33 Therese Scarpelli Cory Thomas Aquinas on Self-Knowledge of Habitus ...................................... 45 Enrico Donato Self-Knowledge by Participation: Hugh of St. Victor on Self-Knowledge .................................................................................... 63 Boris Hennig “Many Know Much, but Do Not Know Themselves”: Self-Knowledge, Humility, and Perfection in the Medieval Affective Contemplative Tradition .................................................................................................... 89 Christina Van Dyke Appendix ................................................................................................. 107 Contributors ............................................................................................. 109

INTRODUCTION ALEX HALL

The Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics (PSMLM) collects original materials presented at sessions sponsored by the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics (SMLM). SMLM was founded in 2000 by Gyula Klima (Director), Joshua Hochschild, Jack Zupko and Jeffrey Brower, in order to recover the profound metaphysical insights of medieval thinkers for our own philosophical thought. The Society currently has over a hundred members on five continents. Alex Hall took up the position of Assistant Director and Secretary in 2011, with secretarial duties passing to Timothy Kearns in 2014. The Society’s maiden publication appeared online in 2001 and the decade that followed saw the release of eight more online volumes. In 2011, PSMLM transitioned to print and republished volumes 1-8 as separately titled editions. Sharp-eyed readers of these volumes will note the replacement of our (lamentably copyrighted for commercial use) lions, who guarded the integrity of the body of an intellectual tradition thought to be dead, with the phoenixes that mark this print rebirth. Volumes 9 and 10 appeared in a dual print/online format, with Volume 11 PSMLM switched to print only. Friends of the lions will be happy to note that they remain at their post, protecting the first ten volumes of the PSMLM at http://faculty. fordham.edu/klima/SMLM/, where interested readers can also keep up with SMLM activities and projects. The papers in this volume are drawn from SMLM sponsored sessions on medieval accounts of self-knowledge at the 2015 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University and the 2016 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, sponsored by the University of San Francisco. Forthcoming volumes take up the themes of hylomorphism and mereology (volume 15) and axiology and the virtues (volume 16). Our meeting at the International Congress brought together JT Paasch, Brian Carl and Therese Scarpelli Cory to discuss Cory’s Aquinas on

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Introduction

Human Self-Knowledge, described by Robert Pasnau as “clearly the best [book] that has been written on the topic.”1 Contemporary introductions to the theme of self-knowledge trace its emergence in the history of philosophy to René Descartes,2 whose Meditations draws our attention to our intimate, first-person acquaintance with ourselves,3 inviting contrast with David Hume, who contends in his Treatise of Human Understanding that we have no impression and thereby no idea of the self but conceive only distinct ideas drawn from varied sensations.4 Yet despite the impression left by these studies, self-knowledge is a perennial theme. Plato and Aristotle, for instance, are, respectively, distant ancestors of Descartes and Hume in this regard. Medieval philosophical treatments of selfknowledge in the Latin West, for their part, emerge from the tension between Neoplatonic and Aristotelian accounts. Whereas Neoplatonic thinkers seek primarily to characterize and account for the aforementioned privileged access that we have to our own selves, Aristotelians are struck by the opacity that characterizes self-knowledge, which appears to them delimited to an inferential, i.e. mediated, grasp of the self in its activity. Cory finds in Aquinas a position that bridges the divide between mediated and unmediated self-knowledge: Aquinas . . . sets himself the task of grounding both an ineliminable selfopacity and a limited privileged self-access . . . With Augustine and other Neoplatonic sources, he argues that the mind has special, intimate selffamiliarity, while rejecting their view of the human mind as pure selfthinking in favour of a broadly Aristotelian concept of the human intellect that makes all our self-knowledge depend on the senses. Careful to protect privileged self-access, however, he denies that the latter should be interpreted as implying that everything we know about ourselves is derived abstractively or discursively from sensory experiences (3).

Cory argues that this balance between privileged and mediated selfknowledge rests on a “duality of conscious thought,” in keeping with her 1

Robert Pasnau, review of Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge, by Therese Scarpelli Cory, Mind, 124 (2015), 623-26. 2 See, e.g. Brian McLaughlin, “Self-Knowledge,” in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Donald M. Borchert, ed., 2nd ed., vol. 8 (Macmillan, 2006), 722-28; and Brie Gertler, “Self-Knowledge,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta, ed. (Summer 2015 Edition) . 3 See especially Meditations 2 and 3. 4 Treatise, 1.4.6.

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contention that, for Aquinas, intellectual acts are “bipolar,”5 inasmuch as in and by these acts the intellect grasps its agency and thereby has selfknowledge. For Aquinas and other realist medieval thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition, our intellect can come to know the essence of extramental entities by means of a process of abstraction that begins with sensation. External and internal senses work together to construct phantasms, characterized as internal representations of extramental entities.6 The active aspect of our immaterial intellect may abstract from these phantasms what are termed ‘intelligible species’, which function as noneidetic representations by which the passive or possible aspect of the immaterial intellect conceives traits essential to the natural kinds that these species represent.7 It is likewise by means of this possible intellect that we are able later to recall these traits.8 The possible intellect has its being in potency, i.e. when it is not conceiving, it exists as a capacity to conceive.9 When it is actualized in this act of conceiving, it is formally identical with the extramental essence that it grasps and in this way that essence is present for us. But, as the intellect is identical with what is conceived, in conceiving it grasps itself in a mediated manner. Hence Carl notes that: There is intellectual self-awareness just insofar as the human possible intellect is actualized by its reception of an intelligible species, which is abstracted from a phantasm.10

Put another way, to perceive its act is to perceive the agent in act.11 It is for this reason that Cory characterizes intellectual acts as “bipolar” on Aquinas’s account. Central to this model is, of course, the notion that we do in fact enjoy an intimate, first-person awareness of our mental states, an awareness that Paasch’s “Information Processing and Me” suggests Aquinas’s Aristotelian 5

Cory, 135-36. See Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s “De Anima,” II.24.553 and Summa Theologica (ST) Ia.85.1, ad 3. 7 ST Ia.84.7. 8 ST Ia.79.2-3. 9 ST Ia.79.2. 10 See p. 31 below and Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” (12.8). 11 Cory, 102. 6

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Introduction

psychology cannot accommodate. To illustrate this contention, Paasch constructs a hypothetical information-processing machine to model the way that Aquinas thinks that we process information. Paasch’s conclusion is that there is no reason to suppose that this device could acquire a firstperson perspective. Hence we’ve no reason to suppose that human beings who process information in an identical fashion would either. For Aquinas, the human intellect is on the lowest rung of a hierarchy that he terms the ‘genus of intelligibles (genus intelligibilium)’, which comprises every immaterial entity inasmuch as each is intelligible, i.e. known so far as it is in act by its essence (as, e.g. the human possible intellect has self-knowledge when in act).12 Carl’s “Human Intellectual Potency and the Genus of Intelligibles” explores the extent to which Aquinas’s concept of human self-knowledge is indebted to his notion of the genus of intelligibles and certain difficulties that any such dependence might pose. Can Aquinas’s theory of human self-knowledge stand on its own, i.e. without any reference to a genus of intelligibles? How do we conceive of other intelligible entities, e.g. God and angels, given that our possible intellect knows only the essences of sensible things?13 Finally, as what we know of other intelligibles derives from our understanding of our own immaterial intellects,14 Aquinas’s assertion that other intelligibles know themselves requires an argument to the effect that immateriality is a sufficient condition of self-knowledge. Aquinas views human understanding as involving the actualization or generation of an immaterial, self-manifesting, intelligible being: the possible intellect that is in act at the time that it conceives. Cory formulates responses to Paasch and Carl by attending to the characteristics of this intellect in act in her “Artificial Intelligence, Actual Intelligibility, and Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge.” The intellect owes its reflexive self-awareness to its immateriality, as Aquinas holds that immateriality is a sufficient condition for self-understanding.15 But inasmuch as we experience all thought as our own, unlike Paasch’s information-processing machine, we cannot fail to grasp our mental states as our own. In response to Carl, Cory argues that experiential awareness of our intellect in act is the foundation on which Aquinas builds a bottom-up, philosophical account of the genus of intelligibles. Whereas subsequent reflection on this 12

ST Ia.87.1c. See, e.g. ST Ia.84.7; Ia.85.3, ad 3; and Ia.88.1. 14 Summa Contra Gentiles 3.46. 15 See De spiritualibus creatures 1; Quaestioned disputatae de veritate 8.6. 13

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genus helps Aquinas to clarify his account of human self-knowing, Aquinas’s arguments regarding the nature and powers of the human intellect do not presuppose the existence of other intelligibles. The papers presented at the SMLM satellite session of the American Catholic Philosophical Association treat the theme of self-knowledge as it involves self-fulfilment. Enrico Donato’s “Thomas Aquinas on SelfKnowledge of Habitus” asks how a person who seeks fulfilment will know when she has acquired the moral and intellectual virtues necessary for human happiness, especially inasmuch as on Aristotle’s model human cognition is necessarily by means of phantasms.16 One may infer the presence of a virtuous disposition when one acts virtuously, i.e. takes pleasure in the activity, which is performed deliberately, in keeping with a firm character and for its own sake.17 But what about when one is not acting virtuously? How do we know that the virtuous disposition is present at that time? Donato finds Aquinas’s answer in what Donato describes as a principle of reflexive self-awareness, on which we may acquire the awareness that we have a virtuous disposition by recalling phantasms that are stored in our memories of acts performed in accord with this disposition, relying on moral consciousness (conscientia) as our guide to the moral rectitude of the act upon which we reflect. Boris Hennig’s “Self-Knowledge by Participation” sets out two species of knowledge: theoretical and practical, and asks whether there is some type of self-knowledge that is neither. To this end, Hennig presents a study of Hugh of St. Victor, a twelfth-century Neoplatonist, mystical theologian, in whose writings Hennig identifies a candidate for a type of self-knowing that is neither theoretical nor practical. This is not to say that Hugh denies that self-knowledge can be theoretical or practical, as when we know who we are or what to do in order to better ourselves, respectively. But, Hugh allows for a third type of self-knowledge that Hennig terms ‘divine’, wherein the knower, the act of knowing and the object known are the same. As fallen creatures, we no longer know our true selves in this way. Unlike our fallen selves, our true selves would truly know both themselves and God. Since we do not truly know ourselves in this way, we cannot engage in an act of knowing wherein the knower and object known are the same; hence, we cannot acquire this third species of self-knowledge absent transformative grace. 16

In Scriptum super libros sententiarum magistri Petri Lombardi III, d. 23, q. 1, a. 2, arg. 5. 17 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II 3, 1104b3-11; 1105a30-33.

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Introduction

Christina Van Dyke’s “Many Know Much, but Do Not Know Themselves” takes up the theme of self-knowledge in the medieval tradition of affective mysticism. Medieval mysticism seeks immediate union with the divine and may be classed under two broad heads: affective and apophatic.18 Whereas apophatic mysticism speaks of the complete loss of self in the mystical union with the divine, affective mysticism is self-preserving. Both traditions teach that knowledge of God requires self-knowledge. Van Dyke explores this theme in the affective tradition, discussing the role of humility in acquiring self-knowledge, the fulfilment that union with God brings to our emotional and physical selves and the authority to teach and counsel that this union confers.

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See Christina Van Dyke, “Mysticism,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, eds. Pasnau and Van Dyke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 720-34.

INFORMATION PROCESSING AND ME JT PAASCH

Abstract – In Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge (2014), Therese Scarpelli Cory examines what Aquinas has to say about the knowledge that humans have of themselves. Crucially, Aquinas seems to take it as a given that humans have a first person perspective. I take issue with this. If the human mind functions as Aquinas thinks it does, it is far from clear how it could be aware of itself in a first-person way. To show this, I model the human mind by constructing an abstract machine that functions in much the same way that Aquinas thinks the mind functions, and then I show that this machine cannot acquire anything like the sort of self-awareness Aquinas thinks the mind has.

Therese Scarpelli Cory recently published a fascinating book called Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2014). In the book, Cory provides a detailed account of the content, and the nature, of the first person perspective Aquinas thinks humans have of themselves. However, Aquinas seems to take this direct, first person self-awareness as a given. It is as if he thinks it is an obvious fact: a sort of ground-level assumption we can build from. But it is not clear to me how he could take this as given. When I look at the way Aquinas thinks the mind works – if I imagine the mind to be the sort of thing Aquinas thinks it is – I have a hard time seeing how such a mind could have any first-person awareness of itself at all. To clarify this, I want to model the human mind as Aquinas sees it. To do that, I will construct a simple abstract machine that functions in much the same way that Aquinas thinks the mind functions. In particular, it will model the kind of information processing Aquinas thinks the mind performs.

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Information Processing and Me

After that, I will argue that this sort of machine would not have any first person awareness of a self, and that it is hard to see how it even could. Before I begin, two points are in order. First, by constructing an abstract machine to model the mind (as Aquinas sees it), I do not mean to imply that Aquinas thinks the mind literally is a machine. All I aim to model are the causal mechanisms Aquinas thinks occur in the mind as it processes information, and abstract machines are easily designed for that purpose. Second, in what follows, I will not use the word “self” or any of its variants – I will not speak of “oneself,” “itself,” “myself,” and so on. The reason is that the notion of a self is the very thing we are trying to explain, so we cannot slip it in as we proceed.

The Basic Model When it comes to how the mind processes information, Aquinas thinks that first there are sense organs: eyes, ears, and so forth. These are specialized sensors in that they can only accept certain kinds of information. Eyes can only accept visual information, ears can only accept audible information, and so on. In reality, our world broadcasts all kinds of information through the atmosphere. These days we might speak of particles or sound waves or what-have-you traveling through the air, whereas the scholastics might have talked of forms traveling through the air. But however you prefer to describe it, let us assume that there is some kind of information traveling through the atmosphere. In order to keep things simple, let us suppose that the world broadcasts only two kinds of data: ones and zeros. It does not matter what the ones and zeros represent. All that matters is that we have two different kinds of data for our machine to process. Given that, let us begin to construct our information processing machine. Suppose that it has two sensors: Sensor A and Sensor B. Let us also suppose that these are different kinds of sensors: each is built to detect different kinds of information. Sensor A can only pick up sequences of two or more zeros, and Sensor B can only pick up sequences of two or more ones.

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For instancee, imagine if Sensors S A and d B were sittiing idle, when n they get bombarded with the folllowing stream m of digits: 0010001110. Sensor S A would pick uup 000, since that is the on nly sequence oof two or moree zeros in the input strream, while Sensor B would pick up 1111, since that iss the only sequence off two or more ones in the inp put stream. Seee Figure 1.

We could haave decided too start with seensors that picck up differen nt patterns from the inpput stream. I have h chosen two t or more zzeros, and two o or more ones, arbitraarily. What iss important is that the two sensors model human sense organss insofar as eaach only acceepts a certain kkind of input, different from the othher’s. In this case, Sensor A only deteccts sequences of zeros, Sensor B onlly detects just as the eyes only dettect visual daata, whereas S sequences of ones, just ass the ears only y detect auditoory data. A further feature of humaan sense organ ns (as Aquinaas understandss them) is that they do not just blinddly pass the daata they receivve through to the mind. They do som me sort of proccessing. To capture this, let us suuppose that Sensor S A and B each do a minimal amount of pprocessing. Thhat is to say, leet us suppose that they transform the data they recceive in somee minor way. Here H is one (aarbitrarily cho osen) way that might ggo. Suppose thaat Sensor A apppends a 1 to every 0 it recceives, while Sensor B appends a 0 to every 1 it receives. So,, if Sensor A receives threee zeros, it will append a 1 to each zero z and output: 01 01 01. Likewise, if Sensor B receives threee ones, it willl append a 0 to t each one annd output 10 10 1 10. See Figure 2.

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Infformation Processing and Me

In this way, Sensor A andd B model hum man sense orggans insofar as a they (a) can only recceive certain kinds k of inform mation (zeross or ones), and d (b) they perform a m minimal amounnt of processin ng: they transsform the raw data they receive into a different kinnd of output. Next, there is what Aquinnas calls the common c sensee. Of course, today we talk about common sensee as a kind of practical knoow-how. But that t is not what it meanns for Aquinaas. For Aquinas, common sense is a faculty in the m mind that takees all our sensations oof an object, and a bundles them togetherr. If I get nearr a horse, my commonn sense wouldd take the sigh hts, sounds, annd so on that my sense organs pick up, and it woould bundle them together aas a single colllection of sense-data aabout the horsee. To model thhis, let us suppose there is a module in oour machine called c the Aggregator. It takes thee output of Sensor A an and Sensor B, B and it aggregates tthe data into a single stream of output. How it aggreegates the data is not iimportant here. What we need n to modell is simply that it does combine thhe data someehow. So su uppose that, say, the Ag ggregator concatenatess the digits it receives into a single stringg of digits, in the order it receives thhem. For instancee, if the Aggrregator first receives 01 froom Sensor A, A then 10 from Sensorr B, and lastlyy 01 from Senssor A, it woulld concatenatee all those together andd output 01 100 01. See Figure 3.

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Next, there is the imaginaation. This is the faculty off the mind wh hich takes the bundle oof sense data produced by y the commonn sense, and then t from that, it geneerates an imagge. If you close your eyes and imagine the horse you just saw w, the imaginaation is the facculty that prodduces that image. To model thhis, let us suuppose that we w have yet aanother modu ule in our machine callled the Imagge Maker. It takes t the outpput of the Ag ggregator, and it produuces some sorrt of representtation of it. H How it producces that is not importannt, but here is one simple method: m it extraacts the first digit d from every pair oof digits it readds. So, for example, if the Aggregator outputs o 01 10 01, the Im mage Maker would w pick out 0 1 0, as in F Figure 4.

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Infformation Processing and Me

The output oof the Image Maker M is a kin nd of “image” in the sense that t it is a concise reprresentation of the collection n of digits it reeceives, similaar to how modern recoordings store a digital enccoding of thee sounds the recording r studio picks up. Next, there is what Aquinnas calls the active a intellectt. This is the faculty f of the mind thaat looks at sensory images and abstractss the common n features of those imaages. To model thhis, let us supppose that we have h a modulee in our machiine called the Pattern Recognizer. This module takes all outtputs produceed by the Image Makeer, and it deteects any and all a patterns inn those outputs. How it does this iss again unimp mportant. Whaat matters forr our model is that it identifies paatterns in somee fashion or other. Let us supppose that it sim mply pulls ou ut any sequennce of digits th hat it has seen beforee. For instancce, if on onee occasion thhe Pattern Reecognizer receives thee sequence 010, and then sh hortly thereaffter, it receivees another sequence, 00001, the Patttern Recogniizer would ideentify 01 as a pattern, because thatt sequence of digits occurs in 010 and thhen again in 00 0001. See Figure 5.

This modelss the active inttellect insofarr as the active intellect is responsible for extractinng the formal features of things, t which in this conteext means that the activve intellect is responsible for f figuring ouut repeating feeatures in the objects w we experiencee.

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Finally, there is what Aquinas A calls the possible intellect. Th his is the faculty of thhe mind that receives the information pproduced by the t active intellect. It iis a kind of reppository for th he active intel lect’s abstracttions. To model th the possible intellect, i let us u suppose thhat our machiine has a module callled the Receeptacle. This module doees nothing more m than receive the stream of ones and zeeros it receivves from thee Pattern Recognizer. Exactly how w it does thiss is again noot important, so let us assume simpply that it wrrites the sequeence of digitss it receives on o a tape. See Figure 66.

we have a baasic model off the mind, aas Aquinas seees it. To With that, w summarize, the Sensors only o accept sp pecific kinds oof data, the Ag ggregator concatenatess all the dataa it receives from the sennses, the Imag ge Maker generates a concise reepresentation of the sennse data, thee Pattern Recognizer extracts pattterns from im mages, and itt finally depo osits that output into tthe Receptaclle. A full diag gram of the m machine is preesented in Figure 7.

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Infformation Processing and Me

JT Paasch

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Is the machine/mind aware? Now that we have a fairly detailed model of the mind (as Aquinas sees it), we can turn to some basic questions. The first question I want to ask is this: is this machine aware? I see no reason to think that it would be aware of anything at all. I do not have any particular argument for this. I can only appeal to our everyday experience and intuitions. When I look at mechanical systems, I typically think they are not aware of anything. For example, when I flip on the light switch in my bedroom, the switch is not aware of the fact that it is on. It is not aware of anything, so far as I can tell. Similarly, when I turn my computer on, it is not aware that it is on. As far as I can tell, it is simply not aware of anything at all. So too with the machine I just constructed. Why should we think it is aware of anything? It is just a mechanistic system that processes inputs and outputs. Likewise for the human mind. Why should we think it would be aware of anything either, on this model? Aquinas has explained a set of mechanisms by which the human mind processes information, and I have modeled that with a simple abstract machine. But if we see no reason why such a machine should be aware, why should we think the human mind would be aware?

What does the machine have information about? There is another problem here. Suppose we could open a hatch on the back of the Receptacle and look at what is recorded on the tape inside. There we would see the information contained in the machine. In this sense, we could say that the machine has or possesses information. But what is the information about? It seems to me it is information about the external world. And it is about the external world because it is caused by the external world. There is a causal chain we can trace here: the Sensors pick up ones and zeros from the external world, and then they send them through the system. That causal chain explains why the information contained in the Receptacle is about this external object rather than some other external object.

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Information Processing and Me

Nevertheless, notice that the machine has no information about the machine. There is no information about the modules in the machine, nor is there any information about the processing that occurs in the machine. The only thing the machine has information about is the external world.

Self-monitoring Fortunately, this is easy to fix. Aquinas does not, so far as I know, ever make the moves I am going to make here, but allow me the freedom to work on Aquinas’s behalf. What I want to do is provide a way for the machine to gather information about the processing that occurs within it. To do that, let me attach a self-monitoring system to the machine. This self-monitoring system consists of a series of sensors that monitor the modules in the machine. For instance, we could attach to Sensor A a special module called Monitor 1. Monitor 1 would watch Sensor A and pick up any output that Sensor A produces. It would then make a copy of that output and prepend Sensor A to it. So, for example, if Sensor A outputs 01 01 01, Monitor 1 would detect that and produce its own output of Sensor A : 01 01 01. This output encodes the fact that Sensor A has produced the stream of digits 01 01 01. Monitor 1 could then pass that information directly into the Receptacle, where the Receptacle would write it to its temporary tape. See Figure 8.

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We could atttach similar monitors m to ev very other moddule in our maachine, so as to monitoor all the proceesses that occu ur within the m machine. At this poinnt, if we liftedd up the hatch h on the back of the Recep ptacle and looked insidde, we would see not just in nformation ab out the extern nal world, we would aalso see inforrmation abou ut the processsing events th hat occur inside the m machine. Notice, how wever, that the t machine has no infoormation abou ut which machine is doing the processing. p The T informattion contained in the machine speecifies only thhat such-and-su uch processinng happened, and a that it was perform med by a moddule called so--and-so. But tthere is no infformation tying that m module to this particular p macchine. Likewise w with the humaan mind. Even n if there weere some kind d of selfmonitoring system that allowed a the mind m to know w about the processing

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Information Processing and Me

events that occur within it, if it only reported the processing events, the mind would have no information about which mind did the processing. This may seem like an inconsequential point, but remember that Aquinas believes in angels. And angels have no bodies. For Aquinas, this entails that angels see each other’s thoughts. The question, then, is how does one angel distinguish its thoughts from another angel’s thoughts? Or, if you do not want to talk about angels, do a thought experiment: imagine a number of disembodied minds. If there were a group of mindswithout-bodies floating around who could see each other’s thoughts, how would they distinguish whose thoughts were whose? If we are relying on the mechanisms I have modeled so far in this machine, the conclusion is this: at this point in its construction, the machine has no way of identifying which processes belong to which machine.

Pairing machines and processes Again though, the problem is easy enough to fix. The moves I am going to make here are again not moves Aquinas himself makes. But let me generate a strategy on his behalf. Suppose that the monitoring sensors do not pass their output directly into the Receptacle. Suppose instead that they pass their output into a new module called the Identifier. Suppose also that the Identifier has a hard-coded list of all the modules that belong to the machine. That is to say, it has a list that reads: Sensor A, Sensor B, Aggregator, Image Maker, Pattern Recognizer, and Receptacle. Suppose as well that other machines have differently named modules, so that each machine has uniquely identifiable modules – for instance, another machine might have a sensor called Sensor A*, another might have a sensor called Sensor A**, and so on. Now, whenever a monitor passes data to the Identifier, the Identifier checks the first part of the output: it looks at the characters before the colon: Sensor A, Sensor B, Aggregator, or whatever other sequence of characters appears before the colon. It then checks that name against its list. If the name is on the list, it prepends a 1 to the output (followed by a

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colon), and if the name is not on thee list, it prepeends a 0 to th he output (followed byy a colon). For instancee, if Sensor A produces thee output 01 011 01, Monitorr 1 would detect that aand output Seensor A: 01 01 0 01. The Iddentifier woulld in turn receive that and check iff Sensor A iss on its list. IIt is on the list, so the Identifier woould prepend a 1 (followed d by a colon) and output: 1: 1 Sensor A: 01 01 001. That outpput would theen go directlyy into the Reeceptacle, where the reeceptacle wouuld write it to its i temporary ttape. See Figu ure 9.

This is a simple way of o reporting whether w or noot the processsing was performed bby a module that t belonged d to the machiine. A 1 indiccates that the output w was processed by a module that belongs tto the machinee, and a 0 indicates that the output was produceed by a moduule that belon ngs to an external macchine. At this poinnt, if we openeed up the hatch on the backk of the Recep ptacle and looked insidde, we would see not just in nformation abbout the extern nal world

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Information Processing and Me

or information about processing events. We would also see information stipulating whether those processing events belonged to the same machine or some other machine. In this way, the machine could easily identify information about the external world, information about how that data was processed, and it could identify which processing events belong to this particular machine rather than some other machine.

How to identify a self? Even so, at this point, the machine does not know about itself. All it knows (if it knows anything) is that some one machine has performed such-andsuch a set of processes in order to parse information about the external world. There is no information that lets the machine identify itself or be aware of itself. If we were to open the hatch on the back of the Receptacle, we would find no information that could allow the machine to say, “Hey, that’s me!” We could, of course, introduce further modifications to the machine. And perhaps by doing so we could provide the machine with quite a bit of information about the machine that it is and its processing. But it is hard to see how any of that could get us beyond the point we have reached: it is hard to see how the machine could have any first-person awareness of itself. I have tried to buttress Aquinas’s account with some simple mechanisms that could provide a machine with (a) information about the machine’s processes, and (b) whether those processes belong to some one machine rather than some other machine. But I cannot see a way that such a machine could gather information about itself (as a self, in a first-person sort of way). It seems to me that Aquinas provides an account of the mechanisms that make up the mind’s information processing, but he does not provide us with any tools to explain how the mind becomes aware of itself as a self, with a first person perspective. But that is the very thing that needs to be explained.

HUMAN INTELLECTUAL POTENCY AND THE GENUS OF INTELLIGIBLES: A RESPONSE TO THERESE CORY’S AQUINAS ON HUMAN SELF-KNOWLEDGE BRIAN CARL

At the beginning of Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge, Therese Cory offers a helpful primer in Aquinas’s cognitive theory.1 It becomes clear as her work progresses, however, that no general familiarity with Aquinas’s views about human cognition will suffice for tackling his account of selfknowledge. Cory must contend with and develop accounts of topics such as the distinction between confused and distinct cognition, the intuitive character of the act of self-awareness, and the role of attention or focus as features of the intellect’s act. A number of times, Cory must remark that a given feature of Aquinas’s cognitive theory is lamentably underdeveloped by his interpreters. It becomes clear from Cory’s work that Aquinas’s texts on self-knowledge can function as a sort of proving ground for one’s understanding of his broader cognitive theory. My primary response in reading Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge was that I found it also invited broad reflection upon the relation between Aquinas’s cognitive theory and his metaphysics. This is particularly so with respect to one of the central claims in his theory, namely that the human intellect knows itself just insofar as it is actualized, when it understands something distinct from itself. In what follows, I aim (1) to draw out what I will call a “linchpin thesis” that underlies this claim and (2) to suggest that this linchpin thesis can be best understood insofar as Aquinas’s theory of human self-knowledge is situated within a broader I wish to express my gratitude to Alex Hall and to the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics for the invitation to present this paper. 1 Therese Cory, Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 9-12.

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Human Intellectual Potency and the Genus of Intelligibles

theory of self-knowledge that also includes angelic and divine self-knowledge. This will occasion questions about the extent to which Aquinas’s theory of human self-knowledge depends upon that broader metaphysical context.

1. The Linchpin Thesis of Aquinas’s Theory of Self-Knowledge Aquinas’s theory of self-knowledge is narrow in a certain respect, and both Cory’s presentation of this theory and my response to it reflect this narrowness. As Cory observes, Aquinas’s discussions of human selfknowledge concern the human intellect’s knowledge of itself or the soul’s knowledge of itself qua intellective soul. As a consequence, some features of ordinary, everyday first-person awareness are not directly treated by his theory: for example, it is not obvious how his theory accounts for my awareness of myself as the subject of acts of sensation or as the subject of acts of breathing and walking. There may be resources in Aquinas’s thought for accounting for these aspects of first-person experience, but they are not immediately at issue in the key Thomistic texts on selfknowledge. As Cory explains, Aquinas, like many of his medieval contemporaries, approaches the question of self-knowledge “under the innocuous guise of questions such as ‘Whether the mind always understands itself,’ or ‘Whether the mind cognizes itself by itself or by a species.’”2 Aquinas’s theory of self-knowledge is a theory of when, how, and why a human being is capable of intellectual acts of self-knowledge. These acts of intellectual self-knowledge can be distinguished into acts of self-awareness (awareness of the self as the acting subject) and acts of quidditative self-understanding (knowledge of what the intellectual soul is). Cory finds that a key component of Aquinas’s account of self-knowledge –and a component that takes on an increasing importance as his views develop over the course of his career – is the claim that there is intellectual self-awareness just insofar as the human possible intellect is actualized by its reception of an intelligible species, which is abstracted from a phantasm.3 Because the possible intellect is, of itself, purely potential with 2

Cory, 2. As Cory explains, Aquinas also holds that there is also an implicit awareness of the light of the agent intellect in every act of intellectual cognition through a received intelligible species. See Cory, 148. I have set this sort of self-awareness aside.

3

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respect to intelligibility, it is not capable of unassisted introspection or reflection upon itself, apart from its understanding of extramental objects. But when the possible intellect is actualized by an intelligible species, then self-awareness necessarily follows, precisely because the possible intellect, when actualized, is formally identical with the thing it understands. As Aquinas puts it, “it belongs to the nature of the intellect that it understand itself insofar as it assumes or conceives in itself something intelligible; for the intellect itself becomes intelligible by attaining something intelligible.”4 The abstracted intelligible species is, in Cory’s words, “the principle of Intelligibility not only for the object, but also for the Intellect itself.”5 The possible intellect thus acquires actual intelligibility by its act of understanding something extramental through a received species. On Cory’s account, this acquired intelligibility is sufficient for the possible intellect’s selfawareness: to be actually intelligible is necessarily to be understood, just as to be actually sensible is necessarily to be sensed.6 The linchpin of Aquinas’s theory of human self-knowledge is thus the thesis that the presence of something actually intelligible is sufficient for the possible intellect’s cognition of that object. The possible intellect itself (1) becomes actually intelligible by its act of cognizing some extramental object and (2) is present to itself, because it is identical with itself.7 This linchpin thesis, particularly as it applies in the case of the possible intellect’s self-knowledge, should be compared with Aquinas’s understanding of our cognition of extramental objects. Consider the following text from

4

Sententia super Metaphysicam 12.8 [Marietti 594]: “Et dicit, quod hoc est de ratione intellectus, quod intelligat seipsum inquantum transumit vel concipit in se aliquid intelligibile; fit enim intellectus intelligibilis per hoc quod attingit aliquod intelligibile”; translation from Cory, 155. 5 Cory, 154. This thesis is indebted to Aristotle’s Metaphysics 12.7 1072b19-21, where Aristotle asserts, in the context of discussing the self-knowledge of the unmoved mover, that thought itself becomes an object of thought, because thought and the object of thought are the same. Cf. Eudemian Ethics 7.12 1244b20 ff. 6 For the claim that what is actually sensible is necessarily what is actually sensed, see De anima 3.2 426a3-26. Cf. ST 1.87.1, cited below in n. 13. 7 Cf. Cory, 157. Although Aquinas sometimes describes the human intellect’s selfknowledge as occurring per speciem or by a mediating intelligible species, this does not mean that the intelligible species mediates the human intellect’s selfknowledge in the (limited) way that the species mediates intellectual cognition of something extramental. Along these lines, Cory argues that human intellectual selfawareness should in fact be construed as direct and immediate (in the most relevant sense) – and thus, as she puts it, intuitive. See Cory, 98-112.

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Human Intellectual Potency and the Genus of Intelligibles

Aquinas’s Commentary on De anima 3.5, in which he explains why Aristotle posited the agent intellect: Now, Aristotle was led to posit an agent intellect in order to exclude the opinion of Plato, who held the quiddities of sensible things to exist separate from matter and [to be] intelligible in act; whence it was not necessary for [Plato] to posit an agent intellect. But since Aristotle holds that the quiddities of sensible things exist in matter and [are] not intelligible in act, it was necessary that he should posit an intellect that would abstract them from matter and thus render them intelligible in act.8

The quiddities of corporeal, sensible realities – the first, proportionate object of the human intellect – are not in themselves actually intelligible; nor is the phantasm, as a sense image of a particular extramental reality, actually intelligible in itself. This means, most fundamentally, that neither a sensible reality nor the sense image representing it are able, of themselves, to cause the act of understanding in the possible intellect.9 The activity of the agent intellect is necessary in order for the phantasm to be able to cause the reception of the intelligible species in the possible intellect. The phantasm functions as an instrumental (or secondary) cause, able to cause the intelligible species by virtue of the agent intellect, which functions as a principal (or primary) cause.10 As light makes what is 8

In De anima 3.IV (commenting on De anima 3.5 by the modern division of chapters) [Leon. 45/1.219]: “Inducitur autem Aristotiles ad ponendum intellectum agentem ad excludendum opinionem Platonis, qui posuit quiditates rerum sensibilium esse a materia separatas et intelligibiles actu, unde non erat ei necessarium ponere intellectum agentem; set quia Aristotiles ponit quod quiditates rerum sensibilium sunt in materia et non intelligibiles actu, oportuit quod poneret intellectum aliquem qui abstraheret eas a materia et sic faceret eas intelligibiles actu.” 9 In other words, the human mind is not simply passive with respect to corporeal objects, and in this way, intellectual understanding differs from external sensation: our external sense powers are strictly passive powers, moved to their acts by their respective objects, such as color or sound (albeit through sensible species communicated through a medium). 10 Quaestiones disputatae de veritate (De ver.) 10.6 ad 7 [Leon. 22/2.314]: “In receptione qua intellectus possibilis species rerum accipit a phantasmatibus, se habent phantasmata ut agens instrumentale vel secundarium; intellectus vero agens ut agens principale et primum.” For extended discussion of this understanding of the role of the agent intellect and the phantasm in Aquinas’s understanding of human intellectual activity, see Therese Cory, “Rethinking Abstractionism: Aquinas’s Intellectual Light and Some Arabic Sources,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 53.4 (2015): 607-46.

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potentially visible to be actually visible, so the agent intellect makes what is potentially intelligible, the phantasm, to be actually intelligible. On Aquinas’s account, Aristotle needed to posit the agent intellect precisely because he rejected a Platonic theory according to which the human intellect understands by a vision of actually intelligible forms immediately present to it. The linchpin thesis I have identified above is in this respect somewhat surprising, especially if Cory’s claims about the immediacy and directness of human self-knowledge are correct. The possible intellect’s cognition of itself, when it has been rendered actually intelligible by its reception of an intelligible species, looks, for lack of a better term, rather more like “Platonic” cognition: it is the direct cognition of an actual intelligible whose presence is not mediated by a species.

2. The “Genus of Intelligibles” Key to Aquinas’s account of human self-knowledge, then, are (1) the expansion – relative to a possible limited impression – of the term ‘intelligible,’ as a term designating the object of the intellect, so as to include the human intellect-in-act; and (2) the thesis that the human intellect is capable of cognizing something actually intelligible by immediate presence rather than only by presence mediated by a species. As Cory notes, Aquinas’s account of human self-knowledge can be positively compared to his accounts of divine and angelic self-knowledge: in each case, an intellect-in-act necessarily knows itself as an intelligible present to itself.11 Indeed, in most of the texts in which Aquinas discusses human self-knowledge, he makes comparisons between the human possible intellect and higher, separate intellects by placing the human possible intellect within a hierarchy that he calls the genus intelligibilium or ordo intelligibilium.12 In Summa theologiae (ST) 1.87.1, the most important text concerning human self-knowledge in the Summa theologiae, Aquinas compares God, 11

See for example Cory, 149-50. For texts discussing the genus/ordo intelligibilium, see e.g. In Sent. 4.49.1.3 qc. 4, De ver. 8.6, De ver. 10.8, De Trin. 1.2 ad 4, SCG 3.46, ST 1.14.2 ad 3, ST 1.87.1. In addition to its role in his discussions of human self-knowledge, Aquinas appeals to the genus intelligibilium or ordo intelligibilium in order to argue for a range of conclusions, such as the incorruptibility of the human intellect, the claim that angels do not depend upon sensibles in order to understand, and the claim that the beatific vision is possible for the created intellect. 12

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Human Intellectual Potency and the Genus of Intelligibles

angels, and human beings with respect to both their self-knowledge and their knowledge of other things. Aquinas argues from the principle that “everything is knowable insofar as it is in act. . . for something is a being and true, which falls under cognition, insofar as it is in act.” He advances this thesis about the correlation between act and knowability on a general level, pertaining both to intelligibility and sensibility, and then he observes that “the eye does not perceive [what is] colored in potency, but only [what is] colored in act.” Similarly, the intellect does not know prime matter – because it is pure potency – except according to a proportion to form or act, that is, by analogy. These examples from sense cognition, in which whatever is cognized is actual rather than potential, lead Aquinas to asserting a principle concerning immaterial substances: each of them is intelligible to itself by its very essence just insofar as it is in act by its essence.13 It is with respect to this principle that Aquinas proceeds to classify God, angels, and the human soul within the genus intelligibilium. Aquinas first concludes that God as “pure and perfect act is simply and perfectly intelligible in Himself.” From this it follows, in Aquinas’s explanation, that God understands both Himself and all things by His essence (per essentiam). There is no indication in this text as to why God’s knowledge of all other things follows from His self-knowledge, but this is a conclusion for which Aquinas has argued earlier, in ST 1.14. By contrast, “the essence of an angel is something in the genus of intelligibles as an act, but not as pure or complete act.” As a consequence, “its understanding is not completed through its essence; for even if an angel understands itself by its essence, nevertheless it cannot know all [things] through its essence, but [rather] it knows others apart from itself through their likenesses.” That an angel does know itself by its essence and that it knows certain other things through impressed species are conclusions for which Aquinas has again already argued, in ST 1.56. The human possible intellect, finally, “is in the genus of intelligible things as a being in potency alone, just as 13 ST 1.87.1 [Leon. 5.355]: “Unumquodque cognoscibile est secundum quod est in actu, et non secundum quod est in potentia, ut dicitur in IX Metaph.: sic enim aliquid est ens et verum, quod sub cognitione cadit, prout actu est. Et hoc quidem manifeste apparet in rebus sensibilibus: non enim visus percipit coloratum in potentia, sed solum coloratum in actu. Et similiter intellectus manifestum est quod, inquantum est cognoscitivus rerum materialum, non cognoscit nisi quod est actu: et inde est quod non cognoscit materiam primam nisi secundum proportionem ad formam, ut dicitur in I Phys. Unde et in substantiis immaterialibus, secundum quod quaeque earum se habet ad hoc quod sit in actu per essentiam suam, ita se habet ad hoc quod sit per suam essentiam intelligibilis.”

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prime matter is in the genus of sensible things.” As prime matter stands in the hierarchy of sensible realities – as a principle of pure potency that is purely receptive and is not of itself the principle of being or of any action – so the human possible intellect is purely receptive and passive in the order of intelligibility, of itself not the principle of any intelligibility or understanding. When the possible intellect has been actualized, however, it is then also something intelligible to itself. From this it follows that the human possible intellect cannot be understood by itself “except insofar as it comes to be in act.”14 In ST 1.87.1, the genus intelligibilium is presented as a hierarchy consisting of God as pure act, angels as incomplete act, and the human possible intellect as pure potency.15 But what about the ordinary objects of human understanding, namely, the quiddities of sensible realities? In other texts where Aquinas mentions the genus/ordo intelligibilium, he does make reference to and include these intelligibles. For example, in SCG 2.96, in his discussion of why the angels do not depend upon sensation for their intellectual acts, he offers the following:

14 ST 1.87.1 [Leon. 5.355]: “Essentia igitur Dei, quae est actus purus et perfectus, est simpliciter et perfecte secundum seipsam intelligibilis. Unde Deus per suam essentiam non solum seipsum, sed etiam omnia intelligit. Angeli autem essentia est quidem in genere intelligibilium ut actus, non tamen ut actus purus neque completus. Unde eius intelligere non completur per essentiam suam: etsi enim per essentiam suam se intelligat angelus, tamen non omnia potest per essentiam suam cognoscere, sed cognoscit alia a se per eorum similitudines. Intellectus autem humanus se habet in genere rerum intelligibilium ut ens in potentia tantum, sicut et materia prima se habet in genere rerum sensibilium: unde possibilis nominatur. Sic igitur in sua essentia consideratus, se habet ut potentia intelligens. Unde ex seipso habet virtutem ut intelligat, non autem ut intelligatur, nisi secundum id quod fit actu.” 15 Aquinas does qualify in at least one text that God is not contained within the genus intelligibilium; rather, He is said to belong to this genus as its principle. De Trin. 1.2 ad 4 [Leon. 50.85]: “Deus autem quamuis non sit in genere intelligibilium quasi sub genere comprehensum, utpote generis naturam participans, pertinet tamen ad hoc genus ut principium.” This is also how Aquinas understands the claim that God is maxime ens or primum ens, with respect to ens regarded as a sort of genus. For discussion of the sense in which ens can be regarded as a genus, see Doolan, “Aquinas on Substance as a Metaphysical Genus,” The Science of Being as Being, ed. Gregory T. Doolan (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 99-128. I would suggest that the genus intelligibilium might also be construed as what Doolan calls a metaphysical genus, rather than a natural or logical genus.

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Human Intellectual Potency and the Genus of Intelligibles According to the order of intellects is the order of intelligibles. But those things which are intelligible according to themselves are superior in the order of intelligibles to those which are not intelligible except because we make them intelligible. But all intelligibles received from sensibles must be of this sort: for sensibles are not intelligible according to themselves. But intelligibles of this sort are those which our intellect understands.16

A little later in the same chapter, Aquinas even refers to such intelligibles received from sensibles and abstracted from phantasms as “our intelligibles.”17 Such objects are intelligible just insofar as they come to be present in the possible intellect – the “lowest in the order of intelligible substances”18 – through the abstractive power of the agent intellect. It turns out, then, that “our intelligibles” are to be thought of more as accessory, secondary members of the genus intelligibilium: such things are intelligible just according to their relationship with the possible intellect.19 But this raises a difficult question concerning the order of philosophical discovery: How does Aquinas justify the claim that the genus intelligibilium extends far beyond – and in fact only includes in a sort of accessory, qualified way – the objects that are “our intelligibles,” the very objects through which we discover the meaning of intelligibility? Along similar lines, I would raise two other questions about the philosophical order of discovery occasioned by Aquinas’s theory of selfknowledge. First, can Aquinas’s theory of human self-knowledge stand independently of the claims that he advances about intellects higher than 16

Summa contra Gentiles (SCG) 2.96 [Leon. Man. 219]: “Secundum ordinem intellectuum est ordo intelligibilium. Sed ea quae sunt secundum seipsa intelligibilia, sunt superiora in ordine intelligibilium his quae non sunt intelligibilia nisi quia nos facimus ea intelligibilia. Eiusmodi autem oportet esse omnia intelligibilia a sensibilibus accepta: nam sensibilia non sunt secundum se intelligibilia. Huiusmodi autem intelligibilia sunt quae intelligit intellectus noster.” 17 SCG 2.96 [Leon. Man. 219]: “Omnia autem intelligibilia a sensibilibus accepta sunt in aliquibus corporibus aliqualiter fundata: sicut intelligibilia nostra in phantasmatibus, quae sunt in organis corporeis.” 18 SCG 2.75 [Leon. Man. 180]: “Intellectus possibilis, secundum Commentatorem praedictum, est ultimus in ordine intelligibilium substantiarum.” 19 Aquinas holds that both God and angels do know material things. God knows them per essentiam suam, and angels know them through impressed species, but not species that are derived from or dependent upon material things. This raises a fundamental question about the meaning of the term ‘intelligible.’ Are material, sensible realities to be called intelligible insofar as they are known by God or angels? Or is something only called “intelligible” insofar as it is causally involved in an act of understanding?

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the human possible intellect? In the De veritate, by the time Aquinas treats the soul’s self-knowledge in De ver. 10.8, he has already treated God’s self-knowledge in De ver. 2.2 and angelic self-knowledge in De ver. 8.6.20 Similarly, within the Summa contra Gentiles and Summa theologiae – two works that follow what Aquinas calls the theological rather than the philosophical order21 – he has explicitly already considered both divine self-knowledge and angelic self-knowledge prior to his consideration of human self-knowledge, and his appeals to the genus intelligibilium in discussing the latter presuppose those earlier discussions. That is, Aquinas consistently approaches the topic of human self-knowledge in a theological mode, not in the sense that he depends upon any claims that he understands to be peculiar to revealed Christian faith, but rather in the sense that he discusses human self-knowledge in light of what he takes to be previously established, philosophically defensible claims about God and the angels. Could one affirm what I above called the linchpin thesis – that the presence of an actual intelligible is sufficient for the possible intellect’s cognition – while denying that there is any such thing as an intellect superior to the human intellect? Or, at the least, is it possible to provide a convincing philosophical defense of Aquinas’s theory of selfawareness without any appeal to higher members of the genus intelligibilium? Second, and more fundamentally, where does this top-down vision of the genus intelligibilium come from, in the philosophical order? (The question of where this top-down vision comes from in terms of historical sources is less mysterious.) Aquinas is aware, and he consistently repeats in other texts, that any philosophical knowledge of separate substances is in this life entirely dependent upon and derived from our knowledge of sensible realities. But he also highlights the importance of human self-knowledge in the larger order of philosophical discovery as he understands it: Therefore, concerning the separate substances, the soul, by knowing itself, knows that they are, but not what they are, which [would be] to understand their substances. For although concerning the separate substances, we may know that certain intellectual substances exist, either by demonstration or by faith, in neither way may we achieve this knowledge except by this, that our soul know from itself what it is to be intellectual. Whence also [our]

20

Even in Aristotle, the most illuminating remarks concerning self-knowledge occur not in the De anima at all, but in Metaphysics 12.7, which is concerned with the self-knowledge of the unmoved mover. 21 SCG 2.4.

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Human Intellectual Potency and the Genus of Intelligibles knowledge of the soul’s intellect must be used as a principle with respect to everything that we know about separate substances.22

The entire philosophical order of discovery concerning separate substance in fact depends, according to Aquinas, on our knowledge of what it is to be intellectual. For Aquinas, such a knowledge seems to be achieved when one has come to recognize the immateriality and subsistence of the intellectual soul as necessary conditions for its intellectual operation. With a view to Aquinas’s philosophical theology, however, it also seems that the immateriality of a substance must be understood as a sufficient condition for its intellectuality and its capacity for immediate self-knowledge. In order for Aquinas’s account of the philosophical order of discovery to be consistent, it must be possible to discover that immateriality is a sufficient condition for intellectuality on the basis of our self-knowledge.23 In Cory’s presentation, the discussion of quidditative self-knowledge – the soul’s discovery of its own nature as intellectual, immaterial, and subsistent – comes after her treatment of Aquinas’s theory of the soul’s self-awareness. This order of presentation is understandable, insofar as Aquinas holds that self-awareness is, as Cory puts it, prephilosophical and common to all human beings.24 On Aquinas’s view, every human being knows that he knows; but not every human being knows what his soul is. But the theory of self-awareness Aquinas holds seems difficult to separate from Aquinas’s presentation of God, angels, and the human intellect as a hierarchical class. This top-down vision of the genus intelligibilium must 22 SCG 3. 46 [Leon. Man. 275]: “Sic ergo et de substantiis separatis anima, cognoscendo seipsam, cognoscit quia sunt: non autem quid sunt, quod est earum substantias intelligere. Cum enim de substantiis separatis hoc quod sint intellectuales quaedam substantiae cognoscamus, vel per demonstrationem vel per fidem, neutro modo hanc cognitionem accipere possemus nisi hoc ipsum quod est esse intellectuale, anima nostra ex seipsa cognosceret. Unde et scientia de intellectu animae oportet uti ut principio ad omnia quae de substantiis separatis cognoscimus.” 23 Consider, for example, Aquinas’s only argument for divine knowledge in ST 1.14.1, in which he argues from God’s immateriality to His intelligence. Fernand Van Steenberghen deems this argument less than rigorous. In his estimation, although immateriality is a necessary condition for intellectual cognition, it is not clear why the immateriality of a substance is a sufficient condition for intellectuality. Fernand Van Steenberghen, Le problème de l’existence de Dieu dans les écrits de s. Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain-la-Neuve: Éditions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1980), 307. 24 Cory, 174.

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ultimately be defended, if Aquinas’s position is to be philosophically consistent, on the basis of claims about what it is to be intelligible and what it is to be intellectual derived solely from our reflection on our own acts of understanding. This would suggest that Aquinas’s account of the soul’s quidditative self-knowledge – or rather, his understanding of the soul’s quiddity as immaterial and subsistent – must be prior, in the order of philosophical discovery, to his theory of what Cory calls prephilosophical self-awareness.25 In her conclusion, Cory claims that “Aquinas’s theory of the human intellect demands, in the very stroke of orienting the human intellect to sense-dependent cognition, that it enjoy precisely the sort of selfknowledge that we have seen him describe,” that is, an implicit selfawareness insofar as it becomes intelligible by its own act of understanding.26 As challenging as Aquinas’s theory of human selfknowledge may be, Cory has provided a most convincing case that the topic of self-knowledge is anything but incidental to Thomas’s broader cognitive theory. In light of what I have offered above, I would suggest that the topic of self-knowledge must also be anything but incidental to Thomas’s broader metaphysics and philosophical theology.

25

With respect to Aquinas’s philosophical sources, it is interesting that even in Aristotle, the statement closest to what I called the linchpin thesis above appears not in Aristotle’s De anima (which contains the rather cryptic claim that the soul knows itself as it knows other things), but in Metaphysics 12.7, in Aristotle’s discussion of the self-knowledge of the unmoved mover. 26 Cory, 218.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, ACTUAL INTELLIGIBILITY, AND AQUINAS ON HUMAN SELF-KNOWLEDGE: A RESPONSE TO CRITICS THERESE SCARPELLI CORY

In their interesting and incisive remarks, both Carl and Paasch have, in different ways, drawn our attention to the foundation upon which Aquinas’s theory of human self-knowledge rests. Carl directs our attention to the curious concept of intelligibility that Aquinas’s theory of self-knowledge assumes. Aquinas’s mature theory of self-knowledge revolves around the claim that in that moment of knowing, the intellect is constituted as a member of what Aquinas calls the “genus of intelligibles” – a genus that also includes God, angels, and abstracted intelligibles in the moment in which they are understood. To what extent, Carl asks, is Aquinas’s theory of self-awareness yoked to this notion of a “genus of intelligibles”? Do his claims about human self-knowledge ultimately rely on prior conceptions of divine and angelic self-knowledge? Paasch’s critique is that for Aquinas, the first-personality of self-awareness is unfounded. He configures a hypothetical information-processing machine according to the specifications set out in Aquinas’s theory of how extramental objects are cognized, and argues that nothing about this machine would enable it to be self-aware, and that no amount of tinkering with the machine could make it be self-aware. One might wonder, of course, why a machine built to cognize extramental objects should be selfaware at all. But this is a problem for Aquinas presumably because he holds that the intellect cognizes itself “by its acts” and “like other things,” i.e., in the context of cognizing other things. In other words, Aquinas gives us every reason to expect that we should be able to explain self-awareness in terms of the processes whereby we cognize other things.

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It seems to me that both Paasch’s and Carl’s comments invite a closer look at how Aquinas’s theory of human self-knowing depends on what I call his “metaphysics of cognition,” i.e., a metaphysical approach to cognition as the actualization or generation of a certain kind of being with special properties. This metaphysical approach to cognition is quite foreign to twenty-first-century readers of Aquinas. As inhabitants of the Information Age, we are accustomed to thinking of cognition in terms of informationprocessing, as when a camera encodes visual input as a JPG file, which can then be decoded and edited by the appropriate software. In contrast, my view is that Aquinas thinks of human understanding as the actualizing of a certain kind of being. In other words, for Aquinas, understanding is less like decoding a file containing information about a house fire, and more like the house actually being set on fire. This metaphysical approach is central to the picture of self-awareness that I present in Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge. Aquinas’s claims about how the intellect becomes aware of itself are inextricably linked to claims about what kind of being the intellect acquires in the act of understanding and to which it is in potency when it is not understanding – namely, intelligible being. In fact, if we can come to grips with his concept of “intelligibility,” we will have the answer to (1) Paasch’s question of why the intellect is self-aware, while an identically-configured informationprocessor is not, as well as to (2) Carl’s worry about the philosophical integrity of Aquinas’s theory of self-knowledge. My response to Paasch and Carl will proceed as follows. First, I will explain what Aquinas means when he says that the intellect becomes “actually intelligible” or “intelligible in act,”1 and how this metaphysical concept grounds his theory of self-awareness. Second, I will attempt to show that the metaphysics of intelligibility is precisely what Paasch’s information processing machine is missing. Third, I will address Carl’s concerns about whether Aquinas’s concept of intelligibility can stand on its own apart from theological considerations.

1. AI, or Actual Intelligibility Our understanding of Aquinas’s concept of intelligibility is warped by the “-ible” ending of the term ‘intelligible’ (intelligibile), which brings to 1 I examine Aquinas’s concept of intelligibility in much more depth in a work in progress; what follows here is merely a preliminary sketch.

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mind a disposition to be passively affected in some way. ‘Flammable’ indicates a capacity to catch fire; ‘breakable’ indicates a capacity to be broken. So one naturally assumes that similarly, ‘intelligible’ indicates a capacity to be intellected, either referring to something real in trees or cats or intellects whereby they are suited to become objects of an intellectual act (their essence), or else loosely designating the possibility that they might become objects of someone’s understanding. The problem with this assumption is that Aquinas not only distinguishes between being potentially intelligible vs. actually intelligible, but also maps this distinction onto materiality vs. immateriality. Material entities (trees and cats) are potentially intelligible, whereas immaterial entities are actually intelligible: “Not everything as it is in its nature is actually intelligible, but only immaterial things. Therefore material things are made intelligible insofar as they are abstracted from particular matter and its conditions, so that they may be assimilated in this way to the intellect, which is immaterial.”2 So if intelligibility is supposed to be a “capacity to be understood,” parallel to flammability or breakability, then Aquinas would be distinguishing between potential intelligibility (ostensibly the capacity for a capacity to be understood) and actual intelligibility (ostensibly a capacity to be understood). And on that reading, immateriality would be necessary, but not sufficient, for being actually understood. Aquinas clearly asserts, however, that immateriality (and hence actual intelligibility) is not only necessary, but sufficient for being understood: “If a box were to subsist by itself without matter, it would be selfunderstanding, for immunity from matter is the principle of intellectuality. And so an immaterial box would not differ at all from an intelligible box.”3 For him, to be actually intelligible is not to have the capacity to be understood but in fact to be actually understood. “Just as a shining body shines insofar as there is actual light in it, so too the intellect understands

2

Scriptum super libros Sententiarum (Sent) III.14.un.1.2, ad 2 [Moos 3.437]: “[N]on omnes res, prout sunt in sui natura, sunt actu intelligibiles; sed solum res immateriales. Unde et res materiales intelligibiles efficiuntur per hoc quod abstrahuntur a materia particulari et a conditionibus ejus, ut sic quodammodo intellectui qui immaterialis est, assimilentur.” 3 De spiritualibus creatures 1, ad 12 [Leon. 24/2.18:589-93]: “Si archa esset sine materia per se subsistens, esset intelligens se ipsam; quia immunitas a materia est ratio intellectualitatis. Et secundum hoc archa sine materia non differret ab archa intelligibili.”

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everything that is actually intelligible in it.”4 This formulation represents what Carl calls the “linchpin thesis,” namely, that it is sufficient for something to be actually intelligible and present to the intellect, in order to be actually understood. Now Aquinas accords to actual intelligibility a certain metaphysical status, as we just saw: Only that which is immaterial is actually intelligible. Thus to say that treeness is actually intelligible is not to describe some fact about an extramental tree (namely, that someone is understanding its essence), but to ascribe to treeness an immaterial mode of being whereby it exists as the actualization of an intellect and is actually known. From various texts throughout Aquinas’s corpus, one can glean three criteria for some x being actually intelligible, which are metaphysical criteria for x’s having a certain kind of being: (a) x must be immaterial, (b) x must be one with an intellect, and (c) x must be “in act” perfecting that intellect.5 Indeed, Aquinas stresses that “what is actually intelligible is the intellect in act,” to such an extent that “insofar as the intelligible is distinct from the intellect, both are in potency.”6

4

See Quaestiones disputatae de veritate 8.6 [Leon. 22/2.238:139-42], “Sicut ergo corpus lucidum lucet quando est lux actu in ipso, ita intellectus intelligit omne illud quod est actu intelligibile in ipso”; Summa theologiae (ST) Ia.87.4 [Leon. 5.363]: “Quod autem intelligibiliter est in aliquo intelligente, consequens est ut ab eo intelligatur.” 5 I discuss this in Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge, 157-58. In Sent I.35.1.1, ad 3, all three conditions are encapsulated: “[A]d hoc quod sit intelligens in actu, oportet quod intelligibile in potentia fiat intelligibile in actu per hoc quod species ejus denudatur ab omnibus appenditiis materiae per virtutem intellectus agentis [=immateriality]; et oportet quod haec species, quae est intellecta in actu [=actuality], perficiat intellectum in potentia [=presence]: ex quorum conjunctione efficitur unum perfectum, quod est intellectus in actu” [Mand. 1.820]. 6 Summa contra Gentiles (SCG) 1.51 [Leon. 13.148]: “Intelligibile in actu est intellectus in actu: sicut et sensibile in actu est sensus in actu. Secundum vero quod intelligibile ab intellectu distinguitur, est utrumque in potentia, sicut et in sensu patet: nam neque visus est videns actu, neque visibile videtur actu, nisi cum visus informatur visibilis specie, ut sic ex visu et visibili unum fiat. Si igitur intelligibilia Dei sunt extra intellectum ipsius, sequetur quod intellectus suus sit in potentia, et similiter intelligibilia ipsius. Et sic indigebit aliquo reducente in actu. Quod est impossibile: nam hoc esset eo prius.”

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This complex and fascinating view cannot possibly be here unpacked in detail,7 but the general gist is that for Aquinas, ‘actual intelligibility’ designates a certain kind of being, the immaterial being that is the activated being of an intellect. Nothing that lacks such immaterial, intellectual, intelligible being can belong to the “genus of intelligibles.” And hence Aquinas stresses repeatedly that nothing changes in material trees and cats when we sense or understand them, because “insofar as they are things existing in natural being” they are “outside the order of sensible and intelligible being.”8 When I understand catness, the change that occurs is entirely intra-intellectual and immaterial: My potency for intelligible being (the possible intellect), is actualized as actually intelligible catness. In this moment both catness and my intellect together begin to exist in the genus of intelligibles, as my intellect-understanding-catness or catness-asunderstood-by-my-intellect. This view of actual intelligibility – namely, as a certain kind of being that the intellect acquires when it is understanding – explains why Aquinas thinks the human intellect’s activation in knowing extramental objects is not only necessary, but also sufficient for its awareness of itself, as I tried to show in ch. 6 of Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge. In taking on actually intelligible catness, the intellect itself becomes actually intelligible and hence actually understood. “Our possible intellect does not cognize itself except by an intelligible species by which it is rendered into act in intelligible being.”9 To put it another way, a further property of actually intelligible being is that it is actually-self-knowing in some way.10 7

For further development, see Cory, “Knowing as Being? A Metaphysical Reading of the Identity of Intellect and Intelligibles in Aquinas,” forthcoming in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly; the view is unpacked and defended in detail in other work-in-progress. 8 ST I.13.7 [Leon. 4.153]: “Et hoc contingit quandocumque duo extrema non sunt unius ordinis. Sicut sensus et scientia referuntur ad sensibile et scibile, quae quidem, inquantum sunt res quaedam in esse naturali existentes, sunt extra ordinem esse sensibilis et intelligibilis: et ideo in scientia quidem et sensu est relatio realis, secundum quod ordinantur ad sciendum vel sentiendum res; sed res ipsae in se consideratae, sunt extra ordinem huiusmodi. Unde in eis non est aliqua relatio realiter ad scientiam et sensum; sed secundum rationem tantum, inquantum intellectus apprehendit ea ut terminos relationum scientiae et sensus.” 9 SCG 2.98 [Leon. 13.580]: “Intellectus igitur possibilis noster non cognoscit seipsum nisi per speciem intelligibilem, qua fit actu in esse intelligibili.” 10 This is why, even though angels are “actual intelligibles” by nature, one angel cannot know another angel without a species. To be actually intelligible is not to be manifest to any intellect, but to be self-manifest. SCG 2.98 [Leon. 13.582]:

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Thus in cognizing treeness, catness, etc., the intellect is manifest to itself as the subject to which treeness and toadness are manifested. And it is on the basis of these individual experiences of itself that the intellect can then further reason to its own immaterial nature.

2. Battle of the Titans: Aquinas versus The Machine With this more developed concept of intelligibility as immaterial, actuallyself-knowing being in hand, let us turn now to Paasch’s hypothetical information-processing machine (I will call it “The Machine” for short). The question that Paasch proposes to Aquinas is this: Why am I selfaware, but The Machine is not? Embedded in the blueprints for The Machine, however, are certain expectations that Aquinas would not have accepted. The first expectation is that there will be some “part” of The Machine that serves as a mechanism for self-awareness; indeed, when no existing part does the trick, Paasch’s strategy is to add new (and ultimately also dissatisfactory) parts, the Monitors and the Identifier. The second expectation is that the successful mechanism ought to transform third-personal input into first-personal output. Let me say a bit more about this, since it is the heart of Paasch’s critique. Paasch rightly notes that in order for The Machine to be self-aware, it is not enough for it to contain third-personal information about “some machine” that happens to be identical with The Machine itself. (The difference between first-personal and third-personal states is perfectly illustrated by John Perry’s wellknown example of seeing a trail of sugar on the floor in a grocery store and thinking in the third person, “Someone is making a mess” – and then looking down to see that the bag of sugar in his own cart has a hole in it, and realizing in the first person, “I am making a mess!”11). Now all the information that Paasch feeds into The Machine is purely third-personal. This is true not only of the input that The Machine acquires through its Sensors (equivalent to colors and sounds), but also of the information that “Intelligibile est intra intellectum quantum ad id quod intelligitur. . . . Aristotelis, qui ponit quod intelligere contingit per hoc quod intellectum in actu sit unum cum intellectu in actu. Unde substantia separata, quamvis sit per se intelligibilis actu, non tamen secundum se intelligitur nisi ab intellectu cui est unum. Sic autem substantia separata seipsam intelligit per essentiam suam. Et secundum hoc est idem intellectus, et intellectum, et intelligere.” 11 John Perry, “The Problem of the Essential Indexical,” Noûs 13 (1979): 3–20.

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The Machine has about itself, through the Monitors and Identifier. Notice how these two components operate with purely third-personal information. The Sensors receive an external feed of information (equivalent to ‘red’ or ‘bang’), which is then tagged by the Monitors with an additional bit of information encoding which Sensor picked up information (equivalent to ‘seeing’, or ‘hearing’), so that the Sensors and Monitors together produce the informational content ‘seeing red’, ‘hearing bang’. All of this content is purely third-person, however; there is nothing to identify whose seeing or hearing they are. Nor does the Identifier supply any first-personal content. The Identifier, as Paasch describes it, has a list of all The Machine’s components, so that when it receives information prefixed with the code for a given Sensor, and that Sensor stands on its list, it prefixes the information with a “1.” This “1” is therefore the bit of information that should theoretically correspond to first-personal terms like ‘mine,’ resulting in an informational string with the content ‘my seeing red’. But as Paasch points out, the information remains third-personal: ‘its seeing red’. The reason, I would suggest, is that the Identifier’s list of components could theoretically include any component from any machine. The fact that the list only includes parts of The Machine itself is merely an accident of The Machine’s construction. As long as the information is presented in such a way that it could in principle be information about any machine, then the information is de facto presented in a third-personal way. Even if we were to program The Machine to output a first-personal formulation every time the Identifier outputs the prefix “1,” The Machine still would not have this information in a first-personal way.12 The problem with The Machine, then, is that it is constructed in such a way that it cannot be self-aware unless it spins the straw of exclusively third-personal informational content into the gold of the first-person (per impossibile). And that is why I find myself in complete agreement with Paasch’s critique of The Machine. This thought experiment very neatly demonstrates the problem with higher-order-monitoring theories of selfawareness (such that self-awareness consists in a higher-order power monitoring the activities of a lower-order power), as well as theories of 12

The situation in this case would be like a malevolent older sibling who teaches a younger sibling from an early age to call apples ‘oranges’. The fact that the younger sibling outputs the word ‘orange’ when pointing to an apple does not mean that he experiences the apple as an orange; ‘orange’ is merely the word he has associated with the reality of apple. Similarly the word ‘my’ is simply the one that the programming has associated with the Identifier’s prefix “1,” and does not indicate first-personal self-awareness.

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self-awareness as self-identification (such that self-awareness requires my identifying some perceived object as ‘myself’). Such theories treat “the self” as an object perceived and identified through cognitive processes analogous to the perceiving and identifying of third-personal objects. If the first person is irreducible to the third person – as I believe to be true, and as Shoemaker, for instance, has argued13 – then it is not surprising that this rigorously third-personal process leaves no room for the emergence of the first-person perspective. Aquinas, however, does not make this mistake. In fact, he would not accept either of the expectations governing the construction of The Machine. First, for Aquinas, self-awareness irreducibly characterizes the actually intelligible stuff that the whole activated intellect is, not the function of a single cognitive mechanism. Second, for Aquinas, the firstpersonality of self-awareness results from the “from-the-inside” reflexivity that is proper to immaterial, intelligible being; it is not built up from thirdpersonal content. The solution to the woes of The Machine, for Aquinas, is to be found precisely in the properties of the immaterial, self-manifesting “intelligible being” that was described above. Where Paasch is looking for a component of the machine that will be the “self-awareness-producing mechanism,” Aquinas makes self-awareness into an irreducibly primitive property of the kind of being – the stuff – that the activated intellect is. When this “intelligible stuff” actually exists, it is self-aware. By analogy, suppose The Machine is made of rubber, so that when it is dropped from a crane, it bounces without breaking. If I ask, “what makes The Machine bounce?” the answer is not “one of its parts,” but rather the stuff the machine is made of as a whole. Similarly, for Aquinas, the human intellect is self-aware in virtue of being actualized in intelligible being.14 So in this picture, what accounts for the first-personality of selfawareness? Again, the answer is the being of the intellect. Because the being of The Machine is material, it is divisible into parts outside of other 13 Sydney Shoemaker, “Self-Reference and Self-Awareness,” Journal of Philosophy (1968): 555-67, esp. 562-63, where he specifically criticizes the “tendency to think of [self-]awareness as a kind of perception” (563). 14 Recall that for Aquinas, before it is activated in understanding, the human intellect is nothing more than a potency for understanding. It is not as though the intellectual part of the Machine is “off” when I am not understanding – rather, there is no intellectual part of the Machine, but merely a potency for one.

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parts, so that the Identifier is always other than the identified (which therefore necessarily presents itself as third-personal). In contrast, intelligible being is for Aquinas immaterial being, and immateriality is characterized by full reflexivity. What is immaterial can appropriate itself through and through without having to step outside itself for a vantage point. “The intellect reflects upon itself by acting, for it understands itself not part-by-part, but according to the whole.”15 This means that the intellect has a unique vantage point for cognizing itself: namely, it cognizes itself from the inside, by being its actualized self, rather than becoming acquainted with itself as though it were accessing itself from the outside through a species. The first person, it seems to me, expresses this from-the-inside cognitive vantage point, as ch. 8 of Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge argues. In this respect, first-personality is better described as a quality of our experience than as a kind of “information” about myself. Carl described as surprisingly Platonic the claim from my book, that for Aquinas, the intellect’s awareness of itself is “the direct cognition of an actual intelligible whose presence is not mediated by a species.” But perhaps it is now clear that the Platonic overtones of the theory are even more far-reaching: On Aquinas’s view, the intellect is directly aware of itself from the inside by being itself, merely insofar as it is actualized in intelligible, immaterial being. This internal self-manifestation is, for Aquinas, the prerogative of, and an essential characteristic of, what is immaterial.

3. The philosophical integrity of Aquinas’s account of self-knowledge We are now equipped to address Carl’s three related concerns about whether Aquinas, by invoking a “genus of intelligibles” in his account of human self-awareness, puts at risk the coherence of his philosophical anthropology. All three concerns stem from the fact that Aquinas’s theory of intellectual abstraction implies significant limitations on what we can 15

SCG 2.49 [Leon. 13.381]: “Intellectus autem supra seipsum agendo reflectitur: intelligit enim seipsum non solum secundum partem, sed secundum totum”; see also Super Librum de causis 7. For further discussion, see Cory, “The Reflexivity of Incorporeal Acts as Source of Freedom and Subjectivity in Aquinas,” in Subjectivity and Selfhood in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jari Kaukua and Tomas Ekenberg (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 125-41.

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know about intelligibility. For Aquinas, the intelligibles that actualize a human intellect – abstracted ‘tree’ or ‘dog’ or even ‘chimera’ – must be in some way derived from sensory experience. So our familiarity with intelligibility is limited to abstracted and sense-dependent intelligibility; indeed, Aquinas frequently repeats that the human intellect’s proper object is “the quiddity of material things.”16 Carl raises three concerns regarding how this limited familiarity with intelligibility might affect the picture of self-awareness that I sketch in my book. Together, they set up the following difficulty for Aquinas. If we humans only have access to a certain limited intelligibility in this life, where does Aquinas think he can get the notion of the broader “genus of intelligibles” (including humans, angels, and God) within which he frames his account of human self-knowledge? The answer, as Carl expects, is that although we have no experiential acquaintance with higher members of the genus of intelligibles, we reason to their existence indirectly and conceptualize them in relation to what we know of our own intellects.17 Yet it seems that Aquinas is already presupposing some prior knowledge of the complete “genus of intelligibles” when he explains human selfawareness in terms of the human possible intellect’s status as lowest in the genus of intelligibles (a pure potency for intelligible being, like prime matter). So now Carl suggests that Aquinas’s concept of intelligibility is threatened by circularity: We know higher intelligibles only remotely, on the basis of our own familiarity with a sense-dependent intelligibility – yet our understanding of sense-dependent intelligibility (including the notion of the human intellect as “in potency to intelligibles” and hence “lowest in the genus”) seems to assume some prior grasp of the genus of intelligibles as “filled out” with other, higher members: angels and God. (And here one 16

See, e.g., ST Ia.84.7; ST Ia.85.3, ad 3; and ST Ia.88.1. See, e.g., SCG 3.46 [Leon. 14.123]: “Cum enim de substantiis separatis hoc quod sint intellectuales quaedam substantiae cognoscamus, vel per demonstrationem vel per fidem, neutro modo hanc cognitionem accipere possemus nisi hoc ipsum quod est esse intellectuale, anima nostra ex seipsa cognosceret. Unde et scientia de intellectu animae oportet uti ut principio ad omnia quae de substantiis separatis cognoscimus. Non autem oportet quod, si per scientias speculativas possumus pervenire ad sciendum de anima quid est, quod possimus ad sciendum quod quid est de substantiis separatis per huiusmodi scientias pervenire: nam intelligere nostrum, per quod pervenimus ad sciendum de anima nostra quid est, multum est remotum ab intelligentia substantiae separatae. Potest tamen per hoc quod scitur de anima nostra quid est, perveniri ad sciendum aliquod genus remotum substantiarum separatarum: quod non est earum substantias intelligere.” 17

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might also wonder whether his account of self-awareness is therefore capable of standing philosophically on its own.) The difficulty here has to do with a broader problem concerning our natural knowledge of realities “above” the human being. And the solution to the problem goes far beyond the scope of this short response. So let me just sketch some brief considerations that might at least clear up the role of the “genus of intelligibles” in Aquinas’s reasoning about the nature of the human intellect. For one thing, it is important to keep in mind that Aquinas does not construe these suprahuman intellectual realities as falling outside the scope of philosophical discussion. As he sees it, non-Christian philosophers such as Aristotle (in Metaphysics Lambda) and the author of the Liber de causis admit the existence of higher intelligences.18 So even if Aquinas’s account of self-awareness relied on some prior conception of higher intelligences or intelligibles, this would not suffice to show that his account of self-awareness depends on some prior theological schema. In fact, however, it seems to me that Aquinas’s concept of intelligibility, upon which his account of human self-awareness depends, does not depend on some prior commitment to the existence of higher, selfsubsisting intelligibles. Significantly, he rejects the view – familiar to him from a whole raft of sources such as Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Avicenna, and Averroes – that intelligible actualization in lower human intellects can only be explained by positing some higher, already-actualized Intellect. In his own account of human knowing, in contrast, the principles for our intellect’s actualization are naturally contained in us. We have a potency for intelligible form (possible intellect) and a power that gives forms intelligible being (agent intellect). So, in Aquinas’s parsing of human self-awareness, higher intellects are not required to account for how the human intellect is actualized and thus becomes intelligible to itself. One can attribute to the human-intellect-inthe-act-of-knowing an immaterial, intelligible, and self-manifesting kind of being, without thereby taking a position about whether there is anything 18

Moreover, Aquinas seems to have held that it is possible to demonstrate philosophically, not only the existence of God, but also the existence of created separate intelligences (angels); see Gregory Doolan, “Aquinas on the Demonstrability of Angels,” 13-44. B. Carlos Bazàn is more skeptical, arguing that Aquinas’s demonstrations are invalid and that Aquinas himself distanced himself from them after SCG; see his “On Angels and Human Beings: Did Thomas Aquinas Succeed in Demonstrating the Existence of Angels?” Archives d’histoire doctrinnaire et littéraire du Moyen Age 77 (2010): 47-85.

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else that has this kind of being. Similarly, one can describe the human intellect as a “pure potency for intelligible form” without taking a position on whether there are subsistent intelligences that are not merely inhering potencies. So what is presupposed by the notion of the “genus of intelligibles,” and what role, exactly, does it play in Aquinas’s account of human selfawareness? It seems to me that the answer runs along the following lines. From the phenomenon of self-awareness, one reasons to the nature of the activated human intellect as having a kind of being that is immaterial, intelligible, and intellectual (in the order of discovery). The intellect’s nature can then be used to explain why self-awareness occurs the way it does (in the order of causation). Aquinas extends the same concept of intelligible being to angels and ultimately to God, building the genus of intelligibles from the bottom-up rather than from the top-down. But once the genus of intelligibles is in place, both angels and God provide Aquinas with convenient points of contrast, to pinpoint what is precisely and uniquely human about the way that we understand.19 Thus it seems to me that his references to higher intellects are merely meant to clarify, rather than to justify, his account of human self-knowing. And in this way he escapes the specter of circularity described above.

19

See, for instance, ST Ia.87.1.

THOMAS AQUINAS ON SELF-KNOWLEDGE OF HABITUS ENRICO DONATO

1. Introduction Important parts of Aquinas’ thought are often motivated by problems arising from issues concerning different areas of the Aristotelian corpus. It is indeed common to see Aquinas trying to provide a comprehensive theory in the face of Aristotle’s brief and scattered remarks – or even silence – on this or that issue. In this paper I will examine a similar case, namely a meta-epistemological question that anyone familiar with Aristotle’s texts could formulate. It can be presented as follows: suppose someone decides to stick to Aristotle’s guidelines for human fulfilment by practicing hard what he says in his Nicomachean Ethics. At some stage, though, she probably may wonder whether she has correctly developed the moral and intellectual stable dispositions (héxeis) that are required for happiness.1 But how it is possible, for example, that someone knows whether she has the virtue of justice? Whatever the assessment may be, such self-examination is something that Aquinas and his contemporaries do not take for granted, especially insofar as it might be at loggerheads with the Aristotelian constraint that human intellection always requires the contribution of phantasms. Thus, when I wonder whether I am just, what exactly am I cognizing with my mind? I am going to argue in this paper that Aquinas’ theoretical model for explaining to what extent, if at all, the mind can have access to its stable dispositions (Utrum habitus in nobis existens cognosci possit) is an expansion of Aristotle’s idea of self-awareness and is ultimately grounded by Aquinas on a peculiar “inclination” (inclinatio) of the 1

Aristotle, Eth. Nic. I 6, 1097b22-1098a20.

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intellect, as far as it concerns intellectual stable dispositions, and on the activity of moral consciousness (conscientia), as far as it concerns moral ones.2

2. Aristotle and Aquinas: the starting points Aristotle uses the Greek term héxis to indicate those stable dispositions that can be acquired through practice and that belong to the rational or to the appetitive part of the soul.3 According to the Stagirite, one could become aware of her stable dispositions only if she is presently aware of an act she is freely performing. In this regard, I can pay attention to a present act and recognize it as mine on the basis of that fundamental selfperception already at work in the simplest operation of my soul: [S]omeone who sees perceives that he sees, and one who hears that he hears, and one who walks that he walks, and in the case of other activities there is similarly something that perceives that one is engaged in them, so that, if we perceive, we perceive that we perceive, and if we think, we perceive that we think.4

Even if self-perception is necessary, it is not a sufficient condition for knowing whether someone has a stable disposition. In addition, Aristotle maintains that one has to consider the pleasure (or pain) arising together with the act as a witness of the virtuous (or vicious) héxeis existing in the soul.5 For example, if I now take pleasure in giving my wealth for noble purposes, then now I am a generous person. Accordingly, since Aristotle focuses on the immediate self-awareness and on the emotional counterpart associated with a present act – namely on unintentional processes of the soul – it is impossible for anyone to ignore herself having a stable disposition. On the other hand, though, Aristotle does not provide an account for explaining how I could intentionally know whether I developed a certain stable disposition without perceiving a present act. Yet

2

Aquinas, In III Scriptum super libros Sententiarum (Sent.), d. 23, q. 1, a. 2. The question reappears in: De Veritate, q. 10, a. 9; Summa Theologiae, q. 87, a. 2; Quodlibet VIII, q. 2, a. 2. 3 I will henceforth render both the Greek héxis and the Latin habitus with the English “stable disposition” rather than “habit”, as the latter brings to mind something unreflexive and mechanical. 4 Aristotle, Eth. Nic. X 9, 1170a29-b9 (Roger Crisp’s translation). 5 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II 19, 99b25-27; Eth. Nic. II 3, 1104b3-11.

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this post festum scenario of spontaneous and cold-blooded reflection is precisely what captures Aquinas’ interest. Aquinas raises the question about self-knowledge of one’s stable dispositions in relation to moral and intellectual virtues. He is aware, however, that the problem taken in itself applies to fixed dispositions in general, without considering the difference between skills, virtues or other kinds of procedural expertise, for all these kinds of knowledge remain at the mind’s disposal even if they are not actualized. In this picture, the abilities that one acquires by perceptual judgments (as grammar or medicine), the virtues consequent to the exercise of natural reason (as justice or science) and those infused by God himself (as faith or charity), equally fall under the same category of habitus.6 Aquinas’ broad enough use of the term habitus here may then resemble what Gilbert Ryle used to call “knowledge-how”, that is the ability or inability to do certain sorts of things.7 Thus, we can put our question in a different way by asking how could we actually cognize our stable dispositions, our knowledge-how. Even in this way, however, we would face a serious objection against the possibility of acquiring such knowledge: If anyone says that [the stable dispositions] are known to us because there is a similitude of them in the intellect, [it must be said] in contrast that the similitude which is in the intellect is grounded in the similitude which is in the imagination or in the sense, since the mind in no way understands without phantasms, as it is said in De Anima III 5. However, those stable dispositions neither have a similitude in the imagination nor in the sense, and therefore they cannot be known through their similitude.8

According to what Aristotle says in his De Anima, intellect (nous) is the faculty by which human beings grasp the unenmattered essences of any concrete objects and formulate judgements about such objects and their properties.9 Yet, as the thought of indivisible and divisible things takes 6

The point is made by Aquinas in De Veritate, q. 10, a. 9, co. See Ryle (1949:27). 8 Aquinas, In III Sent., d. 23, q. 1, a. 2, arg. 5: “Si dicatur, quod cognoscuntur per hoc quod habent sui similitudinem in intellectu: contra; similitudo quae est in intellectu, fundatur in similitudine quae est in imaginatione vel sensu: quia nequaquam sine phantasmate intelligit anima, ut dicitur in 5 de anima. Sed hujusmodi habitus non habent similitudinem in imaginatione vel sensu. Ergo non possunt cognosci per suam similitudinem.” (Save where otherwise noted, all translations are my own.) 9 Aristotle, De An. III 5, 430b26-31. 7

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place in a ensouled body, it only occurs as final result of the abstractive process starting from sense perception, and in this context Aristotle states that we cannot actually think of something unless we have an image of it, since actual knowledge of, say, X can only occur when a phantasm – that is, a perceptible form – is presented to our possible intellect by imagination. The Aristotelian constraint on phantasms determines, then, the structure of self-knowledge insofar as the intellect can only think of itself whenever it thinks of an intelligible object resulting from the activity of sense-perception. This follows from Aristotle’s conception that mental acts are primarily intentional and only secondarily reflexive.10 Aquinas totally agrees with Aristotle on this point. He claims that it is impossible to understand something without phantasms, since – as it has been pointed out – they provide “the raw data for intellect’s concept formation” and “give content to the intellect’s actual thoughts, even after the relevant concepts have been formed.”11 If this is the case, then it seems that we cannot produce phantasms of the stable dispositions, insofar as they cannot be per se perceived or imagined, and therefore they cannot be known. Yet, Aquinas makes an argument to reconcile the intellectual necessity of turning toward phantasms with the fact that we cannot have phantasms that represents given dispositions in the soul.

3. Aquinas’ account In his Summa Theologiae Aquinas points out a key distinction between two levels of self-knowledge, namely the particular and the universal. As long as Socrates qua Socrates is aware that he has an intellective soul he displays the former kind of self-knowledge, while if he has to make the generalization that every human being as such has an intellective soul, then he needs the latter level of self-knowledge, which – Aquinas says – requires critical effort and philosophical examination.12 Yet, to the extent that our question concerns the existence of one’s personal stable dispositions and not those in the soul of every human being, we should test Aquinas’ theory on those particular judgments which on the one hand lie beyond the scope of philosophical psychology stricto sensu, but that on the other hand are still ruled by the grounding principles of that discipline.13 10

Aristotle, Metaph. XII 9, 1074b36. Of course this dependence on the phantasms does not imply that perceptible and intelligible objects are the same. 11 Pasnau (2002:278). See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 84, a. 7 co. 12 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 87, a. 1, co. 13 While I might be lacking of a stable disposition that you have, it is not possible that – as a healthy man – I could lack of a power of the soul.

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Despite having distinguished the two levels of self-knowledge, in the Summa Aquinas does not undertake the task of characterising particular self-knowledge per se, and he rather puts all his efforts into universal selfknowledge, thus dealing with self-knowledge of dispositions in a very concise manner. Here Aquinas basically draws upon the Aristotelian principle nihil cognoscitur nisi secundum quod est actu, which applied to our case entails that both the definitions of the stable dispositions and their instantiation in the soul can only be known via the consideration of the relative acts perceived in the phantasms, since “the stable dispositions lie in the intellect, not as intellectual objects [...] but as things through which the intellects knows.”14 A more thorough response to the question is given by Aquinas in his commentary on the third book of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, where he compares the way in which we know the real nature of a thing – namely its essence (quid est) – with how we know whether such thing actually exists (an est), given that the former kind of knowledge serves as a model for the latter. Thus, he states that the intellect is able to know the essence of a thing in three different ways: [1] by abstraction from the concrete thing, if the thing is immediately present to perception, [2] by perception of the sensible causes/effects related to the thing, if the thing is not directly perceivable, or [3] by recognizing that the thing is proportionate to a conventionally established telos, as in the case of artifacts.15 In an analogous way, we are able to know if such a thing exists [4] when we directly perceive it, [5] when we can infer its existence from its causes/effects, or – as Aquinas writes – [6] when “[the intellect] – because of its inclination towards any of its acts – knows that there is something within itself, and since it knows that it operates it knows such inclination as it reflects upon its own acts.”16 Since the problem of the cognition of the (non-)existence of inner dispositions is an example of an est question, Aquinas claims that we should account for it as a combination of the last 14 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 87, a. 2, ad 2: “Habitus sunt praesentes in intellectu nostro, non sicut obiecta intellectus […]; sed sunt praesentes in intellectu ut quibus intellectus intelligit.” 15 Aquinas, In III Sent., d. 23, q. 1, a. 2, co. 16 Aquinas, loc. cit.: “Tertio modo cognoscit aliquid in seipso esse ex inclinatione quam habet ad aliquos actus: quam quidem inclinationem cognoscit ex hoc quod super actus suos reflectitur, dum cognoscit se operari.” Though, while it is evident that [4] and [5] mirror respectively [1] and [2], only later will it emerge why we should relate [6] to [3], given that the former concerns artifacts and the latter the intellect.

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two points that I mentioned.17 Accordingly, first we know the stable dispositions through their actualizations, as well as the causes through their effects. Thus, regardless of whether we possess a disposition or not, if we know its quid est we should also be able to recognize if this or that act belongs to it, and, accordingly, we can go back from the effect to the cause. Such an inferential move is what grounds Aquinas’ abovementioned analogy between dispositional knowledge and artifacts, to the extent that in both cases we should be able to determine whether the concrete occurrence is akin to the model or not. On the other side, someone who possesses a stable disposition should be capable of recognizing through reflection (per modum reflexionis) a tendency (inclinatio) toward the relevant acts, to the extent that “he knows that he does what he does.”18 Self-awareness of one’s own dispositions is explained at length by Aquinas in his De Veritate, where he is more accurate in distinguishing the actual from the dispositional side of the process and, hence, in clarifying the causal mechanism of inclination we mentioned earlier. He says: We perceive that we actually have a stable disposition by means of the acts of the stable disposition that we perceive in ourselves, and so the Philosopher says in Nicomachean Ethics II 3 that we have to take the pleasure experienced in the operation as the sign of [having] the dispositions. But with reference to habitual knowledge, however, it is said that the stable dispositions of the mind are known through themselves. For the cause of habitual knowledge is that by which someone is rendered capable of entering into the act of knowing the thing which is said to be known habitually. Thus, due to the very fact that the stable dispositions are in the mind according to their essence, the mind becomes able to actually perceive that the stable disposition exists in itself, insofar as through its 17

It should be clear that direct perception (point [4]) has to be ruled out, for the stable dispositions are not at all object of the senses. 18 “. . . cognoscit se operari quae operator.” Putallaz (1991:203) maintains that Aquinas is here accounting for stable intellectual dispositions, but this is untenable, as Aquinas himself goes on to say that “inasmuch as the intellect knows the act of the will, it can know the stable disposition existing in the will” (In III Sent., d. 23, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3). Albert the Great already explained (1262ca.) the cognition of one’s own virtues in terms of recognition through “inclination”, see Ethica I, t. 1, c. 2: “Dicendum, quod cognitio virtutis duplex est, scilicet experimentalis, et quae est effectus demonstrationis. Et experimentalis quidem cognitio virtutis est, qua scitur virtus inesse per conscientiam virtutis et inclinationem virtutis ad motum, et per vigorem virtutis intelligendo medium. Et haec agnitio non procedit ex scibilibus immediate: sed illa quae est effectus demonstrationis, ex scientia quae docet de virtute haberi potest.”

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stable dispositions it is able to move to the acts in which the dispositions are actually perceived.19

Now, despite the fact that in the De Veritate the analogy between artifacts and stable dispositions has disappeared, one should still notice that the idea at work is substantially the same. First, Aquinas considers Aristotle’s account as a valid explanation for the following situation-type (we shall label it DSA: direct self-awareness): [DSA] When ij performs an H-like act, then ij is actually aware that ij knows how to H.

This entails that, for example, at the very moment I am speaking French, I am conscious of the fact that I know how to speak French. The term “knowledge” is used here in a weak sense, as to point out the basic selfawareness which is simultaneous with, and perceived in, the acts of that given disposition.20 Second, Aquinas states a further principle (we shall label it RSA: reflexive self-awareness): [RSA] If ij knows how to H, then ij is able to (deliberately) think to the Hlike acts in which ij acted in accordance with the definition of H,

which does not take into account the situation in which I am actually performing a relevant act, but that in which I am deliberately casting attention on my own dispositional skills by recalling the phantasms stored in memory in which I perceive that given disposition. 19

Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 10, a. 9, co. (italics mine): “Actualiter quidem percipimus habitus nos habere, ex actibus habituum quos in nobis sentimus; unde etiam philosophus dicit in II Ethicorum, quod signum oportet accipere habituum fientem in opere delectationem. Sed quantum ad habitualem cognitionem, habitus mentis per seipsos cognosci dicuntur. Illud enim facit habitualiter cognosci aliquid, ex quo aliquis efficitur potens progredi in actum cognitionis eius rei quae habitualiter cognosci dicitur. Ex hoc autem ipso quod habitus per essentiam suam sunt in mente, mens potest progredi ad actualiter percipiendum habitus in se esse, inquantum per habitus quos habet, potest prodire in actus, in quibus habitus actualiter percipiuntur.” 20 In Pasnau (2002:337-38) DSA-situations are referred to as ordinary, pretheoretic and casual knowledge of ourselves, and RSA-situations as higher-level philosophical or theological analysis. This is true, I think, only if we identify RSAsituations as occurrences of universal self-knowledge, which is clearly untenable, for we have shown all along this paper that Aquinas makes room for particular self-knowledge.

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Aquinas’ account clarifies how one can make comparative judgments both in situations of direct perception and later in the act of recollection. As we saw earlier, if someone who knows the essence/definition of a stable disposition H actually perceives someone else performing an H-like act, then she “knows – as Aquinas says – that someone has that disposition, even though he himself does not” and consequently both the presence and the lack of a disposition are ascertained by the fact that one possesses the essence/definition of that stable disposition in the soul.21 So, for example, even though a student might know that grammar is the discipline that deals with the rules of a given language, and even though he might be able to draw up a comprehensive list of those rules out of memory, this does not exclude the possibility that he can actually observe only a very small set of those rules. Aquinas’ line of argument seems to rest on the principle that if I have the capacity to recall the phantasmata in which I am doing something in accordance with the definition of a stable disposition, then I possess that disposition at least at some degree. On the contrary, if I am only able to recall the phantasmata in which someone else is properly performing it, then I lack the stable disposition even though I still know its definition. Aquinas’ theory of teaching sticks closely to this model, in so far as the process from knowing abstractly the definition of a stable disposition to mastering it begins with a magister turning to different signs and paradigmatic acts in order to cause the production of a species intelligibilis in the disciple’s mind.22 As far as concerns the epistemic validity of such reflexive judgments Aquinas holds that the process of induction from images of singular and contingent acts to the general statement of existence (or non-existence) of the disposition provides a sufficient degree of epistemic justification to our reasoning, insofar as everyone perceives the acts within his or her soul with the maximum degree of certainty.23 But, since he maintains that 21

Aquinas, In III Sent., d. 23, q. 1, a. 2, co.: “Ideo aliquis praedicto modo cognoscendo quid sit aliquis habitus, ex hoc quod videt talem actum exire qualis requiritur ad illum habitum, cognoscit quod ille habitus est in aliquo, etiam si ipse illum habitum non habeat; sed ille qui habet habitum, praeter hunc modum, tertio modo cognoscit se habere habitum, inquantum percipit inclinationem sui ad actum, secundum quam se habet aliqualiter ad actum illum.” 22 Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 11, a. 1, ad 14: “Homo exterius docens non influit lumen intelligibile; sed est causa quodammodo speciei intelligibilis, inquantum proponit nobis quaedam signa intelligibilium intentionum, quas intellectus noster ab illis signis accipit, et recondit in seipso.” 23 Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 10, a. 8, ad 8.

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“imagination neither composes nor divides” – in fact it is a retentive power, as well as memory – it is clear that we have to attribute the judgments at issue to an operation of the intellect.24 Thus, once the image of the act has been presented to the intellect by memory or imagination, the intellect is able to give or withhold its assent depending on whether the image is adequate to the essence of the stable disposition or not. It should be noted that the term “knowledge” has a stronger sense when it is used to describe reflexive self-awareness than when it is referred to its direct cognate; nonetheless, the former kind of knowledge is connected to and dependent on the latter, for once the phantasms which have been abstracted by direct perception in DSA are conceived by my possible intellect, they remain in memory as necessary conditions for RSAsituations to occur. Notice that this meets Aristotle’s requirement for selfcognition, since Aquinas admittedly establishes that the human intellect has to continue relying on phantasms even if it turns to the examination of its already acquired knowledge.25

4. Intellectual and moral stable dispositions Note that the criterion for RSA presented above does not take into account any distinction between intellectual and practical (or affective) stable dispositions, that is between the dispositions that are rooted in the intellect and those in the will. Aquinas holds that since the intellect is able to recall both its own act and the act of the will, the stable dispositions existing in the latter can be grasped by the former.26 Yet, we all recognize a sensible difference between a question that concerns a mathematical demonstration as, for example, “Do I know the Pythagorean theorem?”, and a question that raises a moral issue as “Am I just?”

24

Aquinas, In III De Anima, l. 4, n. 635. Aquinas, Sentencia libri De sensu et sensato II, l. 2, n. 6: “Non ergo propter hoc solum indiget intellectus possibilis humanus phantasmate ut acquirat intelligibiles species, sed etiam ut eas quodam modo in phantasmatibus inspiciat.” Matthew of Acquasparta (1240ca.-1302) openly attacks Aquinas’ solution in the fifth question of his Quaestiones disputatae de fide et cognitione (utrum anima cognoscat semet ipsam et habitus, qui in ea sunt, per essentiam suam an per actus tantum), arguing that the stable dispositions once they are acquired can be known by immediate individual cognition and not just by inference. 26 Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 10, a. 9, co. See also Yrjönsuuri (2006:174). 25

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On the one hand, the trait of absolute certainty intrinsic in mathematical truths forces the question to be a closed one – that is, “yes” and “no” seem to be the only meaningful answers to it. In Aquinas’ words, one can truly answer “yes” only if she can reproduce step by step the demonstrative chain in her mind, and thus verify its correctness in comparison to the theorem. Of course, one might have some hesitation or even forget a whole step while trying to recall the theorem, but this does not rule out the Leibnizian possibility of sitting down at the table with a friend and saying “calculemus!” Thus, in the moment in which the whole theorem is completely expounded, we can be sure that the two friends are actually thinking about the same thing despite the accidental fact that one underpinned his demonstration by remembering the image of the white triangle drawn on the blackboard by her blonde teacher, while the other visualized an abstract right triangle which only vaguely resembles the one printed on his handbook of geometry.27 It is worth noting that for Aquinas the kind of certainty which goes in hand with the intellectual dispositions does not always imply demonstrability, as with geometry, nor reproducibility, as in the case of technical skills (artes). The stable disposition of faith (fides), for example, cannot be verified with respect to its content as if it were a theorem, and nonetheless it is absolutely self-evident to the extent that the believer could deliberately think to the acts in which she grasps the precise content of her faith.28 Hence, what constitutes the common denominator among intellectual stable dispositions is the very fact that my present act of intellection – qualified either as deducing, believing or otherwise – shows its conformity to the universal analogue stated in the definition. In this regard, such a universal definition may be thought of as a “rule” discriminating between those cases that satisfy and those that are ruled out by the rule itself. Those rules that someone adopts to determine whether she possesses an intellectual disposition are public by their nature, and even Christian faith can be unambiguously distinguished from an unshaped act of faith in virtue of its own regula fidei, which is summarised in the Symbol of the Nicene creed.29

27

For a very similar case in Aquinas, see Sentencia libri De sensu et sensato II, l. 1, n. 10 28 Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 112, a. 5, ad 2. II-II, q. 4, a. 8, ad 3. De Veritate, q. 10, a. 9, ad 8. 29 Aquinas, In III Sent., d. 25, q. 1, a. 2, ad 4.

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On the other hand, if we take at face value the case of a stable disposition like justice – taken here both as particular justice (that rectifies the person’s relationships to other individuals) and legal justice (which aims at the good of the community) – it seems that we are left without any kind of reassuring more geometrico that would help our self-examination. If such a rule for ascertaining one’s justice existed, then the Leibnizian scenario depicted above could be repeated here with good reason. Yet, if there is a clear moral to draw from the story of Job, it is that any attempt to prove one’s justice is inherently doomed to failure to the extent that it would imply having the last word on one’s justification before God. Now, Aquinas is happy to distinguish the justice-justification which proceeds according to the point of view of human morality, from the justicejustification which comes freely and unpredictably from God himself. In this regard, the existence of the former – which is an acquired disposition – does not entail the existence of the latter – which is an infused one – and, consequently, even if someone recognized himself to be just according to human standards, he could not be sure to be so before God.30 But then, how about the more modest purpose of ascertaining one’s justice according to the standards and the “rules” of human morality? This is where conscientia – or “moral consciousness” – comes into the picture. According to Aquinas, conscientia is not a capacity on its own, but a concomitant activity of the rational soul which is defined as “the application of science to something.” Its most obvious task consists in the process of applying the first principles of behavior grasped by synderesis to concrete situations, in order to evaluate the goodness and badness of particular acts.31 Importantly, the range of conscientia applies to past acts as well, to the extent that one could know [a] whether she performed a given act or not, or [b] whether one of his or her acts was morally right or wrong.32 Of course, I must be conscious that I performed X before I can turn to the examination of its goodness or badness, and for such reason Aquinas labels [a] as the “first application” (prima applicatio) of conscientia. This entails that moral consciousness can only produce a judgment about acts of the past by recollecting a phantasm that carries relevant cognitive data about the act that we want to take into

30

Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 100, a. 12, co. See Langston (2001:39-40) and Davies (2014:138-39). 32 Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 17, a. 1, co.: “Applicatur autem aliqua notitia ad aliquem actum dupliciter: uno modo secundum quod consideratur an actus sit vel fuerit: alio modo secundum quod consideratur an actus sit rectus vel non rectus.” 31

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consideration.33 Therefore, in this self-examination one compares a general principle with the act she is currently thinking of, in order to determine whether the latter is adequate to the former. The outcome is a judgment about oneself: But, in so far as knowledge is applied to an act by way of examining things which have already taken place, conscience is said to accuse or cause remorse when that which has been done is found to be out of harmony with the knowledge according to which it is examined; or to defend or excuse, when that which has been done is found to have proceeded according to the form of the knowledge.34

Note that although the philosophical background in which conscientia is explained concerns moral action, Aquinas repeatedly insists on the fact that it has not to be conceived as a kind of practical choice, but as a cognitive judgment in which someone shows his or her awareness about whether X is in accordance to some general principle or not.35 This concretely means that beyond judging the goodness or badness of something, conscientia – in virtue of its mere witnessing (testificari) – is also the source of those judgments concerning those acts that in themselves are morally neutral, as picking a blade of straw from the ground.36 Thus, when Aquinas qualifies conscientia as “the application of science to something” he takes the term scientia in a very loose sense and ultimately as a synonym of notitia, thus encompassing not just the realm of scientific and absolutely true propositions, but every sort of natural, infused and acquired cognition, so that each moral and non-moral 33 Aquinas, loc. cit.: “Sed sciendum, quod in prima applicatione qua applicatur scientia ad actum ut sciatur an factum sit, est applicatio ad actum particularem notitiae sensitivae, ut memoriae, per quam eius quod factum est, recordamur; vel sensus, per quem hunc particularem actum quem nunc agimus, percipimus.” 34 Aquinas, loc. cit.: “Secundum vero quod applicatur scientia ad actum per modum examinationis eorum quae iam acta sunt, sic dicitur conscientia accusare vel remordere, quando id quod factum est, invenitur discordare a scientia ad quam examinatur; defendere autem vel excusare, quando invenitur id quod factum est, processisse secundum formam scientiae.” 35 Aquinas, In II Sent., d. 24, q. 2, a. 4, ad 2: “Iudicium per se vel est in universali, et sic pertinet ad synderesim; vel est in particulari, tamen infra limites cognitionis persistens, et pertinet ad conscientiam; unde tam conscientia quam electio, conclusio quaedam est particularis vel agendi vel fugiendi; sed conscientia conclusio cognitiva tantum, electio conclusio affectiva.” See also De Veritate, q. 17, a. 1, ad 4: “Iudicium conscientiae consistit in pura cognitione, iudicium autem liberi arbitrii in applicatione cognitionis ad affectionem.” 36 Aquinas, In II Sent., d. 39, q. 3, a. 3, co. ST I, q. 79, a. 13, co.

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statement could be taken by conscientia as general principle or – as Aquinas says – as a “root” (radix) to move to the examination of singular acts.37 To investigate one’s justice is possible, then, to the extent that the principles for recognizing justice itself are present to conscientia, together with the relevant phantasms stored in memory pointing to what the person has perceived as a just or unjust action.38 As it is well known, Aquinas believes that the core principles of justice cannot be derived merely by drawing upon worldly experience, in so far as they are grounded upon those very fundamental principles of natural law (common to all human beings) which are adopted by conscientia as its highest premises of deduction and “rules” for judging on a given case. Of course, experience has its key role as well, to the extent that it fills the gap between first principles and concrete cases, which is the reason why conscience could go astray first of all in seeing something as (un-)just and secondly in formulating a judgment on one’s justice taking its previous mistake as a basis for inferring the (non-)existence of the stable disposition. It is noteworthy that from a first-person point of view conscientia cannot properly speaking be mistaken: if at the present moment I take a particular principle of justice to be true – suppose the principle is “subprime mortgages ought to be taken out, if someone applies for them” – then I cannot consider the correlative act of actually taking a mortgage out as if it were unjust (as it is indeed!), as much as I cannot deceive myself about possessing or not possessing justice (the fact that I could lie to myself and to others in both cases is no objection to that): the principles I accept severely determine my self-knowledge.39 Still, if we consider the issue 37

Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 17, a. 2, ad 2: “Cum dico conscientiam, non implico scientiam solummodo stricte acceptam prout est tantum verorum, sed scientiam largo modo acceptam pro quacumque notitia, secundum quod omne quod novimus, communi usu loquendi scire dicimur.” See also: ST I, q. 79, a. 13, ad 3; De Veritate, q. 17, a. 1, ad 9. One may even wonder why Aquinas did not use the term “conscientia” as well in those passages concerning the self-knowledge of intellectual stable dispositions. Indeed, in both conscientia and RSA one should be able to recall a past act that she performed and then to evaluate it under the light of habitual knowledge. 38 De Veritate, q. 10, a. 9, ad s.c. 2: “Species illa per quam iustitia cognoscitur, nihil est aliud quam ratio ipsa iustitiae, per cuius privationem iniustitia cognoscitur. Haec autem species vel ratio non est aliquid a iustitia abstractum, sed id quod est complementum esse ipsius ut specifica differentia.” 39 See Aquinas’ example in De Veritate, q. 17, a. 1, ad 4. The hypocrite is an interesting figure in this respect; see ST II-II, q. 111, a. 3, ad 1: “Hypocrita

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from a third-person point of view (which in Aquinas’ texts often corresponds to God), misjudgements of conscientia might occur not only to the extent that I take some bad principle to be true, but also because I may fail to associate this or that act with this or that principle, and these are the reasons why I could believe that I possess a disposition that I actually lack.40 It has been shown that stable dispositions taken in their abstract sense are conceived by Aquinas as general principles or “rules” – either learned or naturally preexisting – that could be turned over and applied reflexively to explore one’s character. This has some important consequences with respect to how any moral subject experiences his development within time. Aquinas’ account of psychological unity across time is grounded on the very fundamental and implicit activity of intellectual memory, by means of which I can actually recognize some past acts as my past acts.41 From a certain point of view, this has been already at stake in the above discussion on the Pythagorean theorem: if now I think of it, I immediately recognize that I had already thought of it in the past and, therefore, my soul relentlessly links together my time-bound experiences to constructs my “intellectual history”. According to Aquinas, the same holds for what might be called the “moral history” of the soul, namely the assessment resulting from a free act of self-knowledge which clears up the matter with respect to how the individual is morally oriented. As Aquinas illustrates with the example of charity, If someone ceases to have charity according to its natural being, then charity still remains within himself according to its intelligible being, and thus he can know what is charity. Also, the acts of charity that he performed remain in his memory, and also in sensible memory because of the sensible acts of charity, which undoubtedly remain according to their similitude, and because of other sensible objects as well. Hence, from these things someone can remember that he had charity.42 simulans aliquam virtutem, assumit eam ut finem non quidem secundum existentiam, quasi volens eam habere; sed secundum apparentiam, quasi volens videri eam habere. Ex quo non habet quod opponatur illi virtuti, sed quod opponatur veritati, inquantum vult decipere homines circa illam virtutem.” 40 Aquinas, In II Sent., d. 39, q. 3, a. 2, ad 4: “Quamvis autem scientia semper sit verorum, non tamen quidquid aliquis aestimat se scire, verum est: et ita non oportet quod semper sit conscientia vera.” 41 Cory (2013:212-13). 42 Aquinas, Quodl. VIII, q. 2, a. 2, ad 2: “Postquam aliquis desinit habere caritatem secundum esse naturale caritatis, adhuc caritas in ipso manet secundum esse

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First, the fact that Aquinas’ choice falls on the infused disposition of charity is not without significance, in so far as charity – that is, the kind of love which unites us to God – seems by its nature poorly suited to the task of self-assessment. As it has been said, the point is that we cannot have a clear knowledge of what charity specifically consists in, and therefore we could not ascertain where natural love (dilectio naturalis) ends and charity begins.43 Although the particular scope of charity remains unclear to us, Aquinas does not fall back to skeptical positions at all. Rather, his argument counts as a strong piece of evidence in favour of the binding power that acquired intellectual knowledge has on our reflexive judgments. Thus, if someone finally comes to conceive the intelligible essence of charity by combining those much simpler notions which are naturally known by everyone (ens, unum, verum...), still he cannot precisely separate the realm of charitable acts from other kinds of act. Nonetheless, if he goes on asking himself whether he has charity or not, then his conscientia cannot but formulate a judgment according to the “rule” given by the intelligible essence in its mind. This means that the caveat not to regard our reflexive judgments as the last word on our character comes epistemologically later, in so far as it could be accepted only if a reflexive judgment actually exists. Accordingly, since this is true in the case of charity – which is the most convoluted habitus – then it will be a fortiori true for all other stable dispositions as well.44

5. Conclusions In line with Aristotle, Aquinas argues that the situations in which we are aware of the stable dispositions in ourselves by immediately experiencing pleasure and desire are the most common in everyday practical and intellectual life. Yet, the Dominican also pays attention to those situations in which we think post festum to the stable dispositions by contemplating the relevant acts that provide the fundamental cognitive material so that we can make judgments about ourselves and others. Since the stable dispositions are examined through the correlative phantasms which are stored in memory, the account respects the Aristotelian condition of turning towards phantasms. intelligibile, et sic potest scire quid sit caritas. Manent etiam in memoria eius actus caritatis quos facit, etiam in memoria sensibili propter actus sensibiles caritatis, qui utique manent secundum sui similitudinem, sicut et cetera sensibilia; et ex his aliquis memoratur se habuisse caritatem.” 43 Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 10, a. 10, ad 4. 44 Aquinas, Quodl. VIII, q. 2 a. 2, co.

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Aquinas’ criterion states that if someone has a stable disposition, then he must be able to recall at will those past acts in which he perceives the essence of that exact disposition. As far as it concerns intellectual stable dispositions, as music or mathematics, such recollection concretely means that one “is inclined” – as Aquinas says – to deliberately start playing a tune or prove a theorem. Thus, recollection implies here (possible) replication of the act, and therefore the certainty of (non-)existence is absolute. In examining the existence of moral stable dispositions, instead, recollecting does not imply (possibly) replicating, but rather taking into consideration singular past acts and comparing each of them with some general moral principle under the supervision of conscientia. Both in the case of intellectual and moral stable dispositions, the process of selfknowledge is similar to the process of reflexively applying a rule to oneself in order to determine whether the rule itself has been observed. In this sense, since the rules at stake are precisely the essences/definitions of habits within the intellect, it can be said that Aquinas’ conception is intimately “intellectualistic”. In this regard, what I believe myself to be is almost entirely determined by how I apply to my concrete experiences my conception of justice, charity and all other stable dispositions.

References Sources Albert the Great, Ethica, ed. Borgnet, vol. 7, Paris 1891. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. R. Crisp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000. Matthew of Aquasparta, Quaestiones disputatae de fide et cognitione, ed. Collegium S. Bonaventurae, Quaracchi 1957. Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, ed. Leonina, vols. 1, 5, 22, 45, Rome 1882-1985. —. Commentaries on Aristotle’s On Sense and What Is Sensed and On Memory and Recollection, translation introduction and notes by K. White–E. M. Macierowski, Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press 2005. —. Scriptum super Sententiis magistri Petri Lombardi. Tomus tertium, ed. M. F. Moos, O. P., Paris: P. Lethielleux 1933.

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Literature Cory, T. (2013), Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, B. (2014), Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae: A Guide and a Commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yrjönsuuri, M. (2006), Types of Self-Awareness in Medieval Thought, in V. Hirvonen–T. J. Holopainen–M. Tuominen (eds.), Mind and Modality. Studies in the History of Philosophy in Honour of Simo Knuuttila, Leiden–Boston: Brill. Langston, D. C. (2001), Conscience and Other Virtues. From Bonaventure to MacIntyre, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Pasnau, R. (2002), Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae 1a 75-89, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Polansky, R. (2007), Aristotle’s De Anima: A Commentary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putallaz, F.-X. (1991), Le sens de la réflexion chez Thomas d’Aquin, Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin. Ryle, G. (1949), The Concept of Mind, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE BY PARTICIPATION: HUGH OF ST. VICTOR ON SELF-KNOWLEDGE BORIS HENNIG

1. Preliminaries I want to know what kind of knowledge self-knowledge is. In the initial phase of this project, I am looking for outliers in the wide spectrum of views that are held, or have been held, about self-knowledge. In order to leave ample space for such views, I will keep the notion of knowledge as wide as possible: There shall be knowledge that something is the case, knowledge of why something is the case, knowledge of how to do or make something, knowledge of a place or person, knowledge of what something is, who someone is, and so on. Within this broad range, there seems to be a main division between theoretical or descriptive knowledge on the one hand, and practical or somewhat normative knowledge on the other. In this paper, I will ask whether self-knowledge is a species of either of these, or perhaps rather a third kind of knowledge, distinct from and on a par with theoretical and practical knowledge. More specifically, while there may well be theoretical and practical self-knowledge, my question will be whether there is a kind of self-knowledge that is neither theoretical nor practical. Given this task, we should begin by asking what all kinds of knowledge have in common. I will highlight only a few select things. First, all instances of knowledge are the successful exercise of a capacity, exercises of which may also be unsuccessful. Second, in many cases of knowledge, success seems to involve the fitting of one item to another one. Third, all knowledge is knowledge of something. These three general characteristics need not add up to anything like a definition of “knowledge”. However, reflecting on them may well enable us to distinguish between different kinds of knowledge. There may be different ways in which claims to knowledge succeed, different ways of fitting one thing to another one, and

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different ways for knowledge to have an object. Let me say a couple more things about the latter two.1 For many kinds of knowledge, success seems to be a matter of fitting an account to an item, or an item to an account. To know what a thing is, for instance, is to be in the possession of something like a specification or description of this thing, such that this specification or description fits the thing. To know how to make a thing is to have some sort of blueprint in one’s mind, and to be able to shape certain materials such as to fit this blueprint.2 These two kinds of knowledge are often thought to differ in their “direction of fit” (as popularized by John Searle, Expression and Meaning, p. 3). An attempt to classify self-knowledge in terms of this distinction, however, immediately leads to a dead end. As Kim Frost points out, the idea of a direction of fit naturally comes with the assumption that theoretical and practical knowledge involve the very same relation R, which is supposed to apply in two different directions: either R(a,b) or R(b,a) (Very Idea, p. 444). This implies that there can only be two directions of fit among two items. Therefore, if self-knowledge has a direction of fit, it cannot differ with respect to it from both practical and theoretical knowledge. Again, in self-knowledge, the knower coincides with the known, so that both directions of fit would seem to take the same form: either the self fits the self, or vice versa. The upside of this is that we might be able to classify self-knowledge as the kind of knowledge that has no direction of fit. Still, this would tell us almost nothing about what selfknowledge is. What about the object of self-knowledge? Elizabeth Anscombe urges us to not distinguish between theoretical and practical knowledge in terms of the object known (Intention §32). She points out that when I successfully do what I intend to do, I may have two different kinds of knowledge of the very same thing. “I do what happens”, as she puts it (§29). I know what I am doing in a practical way, as the exercise of my capacity to act intentionally. But I may also know what I am doing in the way in which I know what happens: by observing how my body moves while I move it. 1

For the first, see Hennig, Self-Knowledge as Knowledge of the Good. In the above two cases, I think, the notion of a direction of fit is actually helpful. Anyone who is tempted to put it to more extensive use, e.g. in order to distinguish beliefs from intentions, should read Frost’s recent and important paper, “On the Very Idea of Direction of Fit.”

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Something similar should apply to self-knowledge. I may know myself from the inside, as it were, but I might also know the very same thing, myself, by observing how I appear in the public sphere. It is true that the label, “self-knowledge”, picks out this kind of knowledge in terms of what it is knowledge of, namely the self, but this object might still be known in many different ways, and one may want to refer to only one of them as self-knowledge proper. Self-knowledge, then, will not be unique with respect to its object, since other kinds of knowledge can have the same object. Still, there is a distinction that remains of interest: the one that Michael Dummett draws between immanent and transcendent objects of knowledge (More about Thoughts, p. 17). To consider knowledge in terms of this distinction is not the same as defining it as knowledge of a certain sort of object, because objects are immanent or transcendent only with respect to certain instances of knowing them. A leap, for instance, is an immanent object of an act of leaping (cf. Frege, Negation, p. 126 n.), but the very same leap might will be a transcendent object of my act of watching myself leap. So the question, whether the self is an immanent or a transcendent object with respect to self-knowledge, should still be raised. So much for my general agenda in search of self-knowledge. I will not pursue the above issues by directly presenting thoughts and arguments of my own. Rather, I will engage with the writings of a twelfth-century mystical theologian, Hugh of St. Victor. I do this, first, because selfknowledge occupies a central place in Hugh’s thought, and second, because his idea of self-knowledge is distinctive in a way that might introduce unfamiliar thoughts into a contemporary debate. It is always good to be inspired by competent but, from our perspective, odd thinkers. More specifically, Hugh is interesting because he has some things to say about (what I call) immanent objects of knowledge. He also has a strong taste for trinitarian schemes, which may come in handy when attempting to carve out a place for self-knowledge as a third kind of knowledge, separate from but on a par with both practical and theoretical knowledge. As Frost notes, not many philosophers attempt to do such a thing (Very Idea, p. 442). The latter is important because I suspect that our understanding of selfknowledge is impeded by our otherwise healthy tendency to think in terms of binary distinctions. This tendency seems to be stronger under the influence of Aristotle. This, in turn, adds to the above reasons for turning

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to Hugh, because he writes in a time that is relatively free from Aristotelian influences (cf. Dillard, Foundation, p. 2). Also, as Foucault notes, Aristotle is not particularly concerned about self-knowledge and selfcare (Herméneutique, p. 18-19 / 17). I suspect there are systematic reasons why Aristotle and his followers neglect the topic of self-knowledge. Before I turn to Hugh, I want to show this by illustrating the impact of binary, Aristotelian thinking on two 13th century debates, one concerning moral conscience, the other the status of theological knowledge.

2. Some Aristotelian Thinking The topic of moral conscience, or conscientia, is clearly related to our main topic, self-knowledge. Moral conscience is almost universally considered to be a kind of self-awareness.3 As Aquinas has it, conscientia is an act of applying knowledge to one’s own action. His discussion of conscientia is of particular interest in the present context because he distinguishes three ways of applying such knowledge. First, to be conscius is to know what one has done. Second, to be conscius is to know what one ought to do. Third, it is to know the moral value of what one has done (Summa Theologiae Ia 79,13). Two things should be noted here. The first is that conscientia (ıȣȞİȓįȘıȚȢ) is not an Aristotelian notion. Aquinas finds it in writers such as St. Paul and Augustine, and he is trying to find a place for it in an otherwise fairly complete Aristotelian theory of agency. He does this by turning conscientia into something like a shadow image of practical reasoning. Practical reasoning proper is an application of knowledge that leads to an action. Conscientia, in contrast, does not lead to the action it is about (cf. De Veritate 17,1 ad 4). It applies the same kind of knowledge that is also involved in practical reasoning to a given or planned action, with the three kinds of result that Aquinas lists: an awareness of what is done, of what ought to be done, and of the value of what is done. The second thing to note is that although Aquinas distinguishes three ways of applying knowledge to a given action, he still operates with a binary distinction. The third kind of conscientia is simply a combination of the first two: I know the moral value of what I did by (1) knowing what I did and (2) knowing what I ought to do (or ought to have done). 3 The exception being writers that take conscientia to be God’s knowledge about us (Hennig, Conscientia bei Descartes, p. 122-26).

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The first kind of conscientia, the knowledge of what I did, is something that most of Aquinas’ contemporaries would not be willing to call conscientia at all.4 Franciscans, in particular, draw a very similar distinction, but they do not frame it as a distinction between three kinds of conscientia. Rather, they situate conscientia in between two other kinds of knowledge with different names. Alexander of Hales, for instance, distinguishes between purely cognitive and purely practical knowledge, and then describes conscientia as a kind of knowledge that is not only cognitive but also makes us inclined to act (Summa Halensis IV, I, II, q. 3,4,2, cap. 1; p. 498). Abstracting from the terminological differences, the picture is the same as in Aquinas. There is a third kind of knowledge beyond purely theoretical and practical knowledge, but it turns out to be a mix of the first two. Bonaventure seems to turn conscientia into something slightly more practical, when he describes it as a habitus of our understanding that is practical and governs our actions (In II Sent 39,1 q. 1 conclusio). He does not think, however, that our conscientia makes us act, except in the way in which a judgment about what we did in the past might make us avoid or repeat this kind of action in the future (39,1 ad 4). We see, in this instance, that while Aquinas, Alexander, and Bonaventure are on their way towards a threefold distinction of kinds of knowledge, they end up characterizing the third kind as a mix of the first two. Something similar happens in discussions of the status of theology, as they came to be customary in the prologues to Sentence Commentaries. In this context, medieval theologians will certainly try to avoid reducing theology to a species of theoretical knowledge (such as physics or metaphysics), or a species of practical knowledge (such as ethics and politics), nor will they want it to be a mere mix of these two. They will try to establish theology as a third branch of knowledge that is higher or more fundamental than the other two. Bonaventure, for one, distinguishes three kinds of knowledge in this context: (1) contemplation or speculative knowledge, (2) practical or moral knowledge, and (3) “a habit that occupies an intermediate position between purely speculative and practical [knowledge], and which embraces both” (In Sent. proœmii q. 3). This third kind of knowledge is theology, the kind of knowledge that Peter Lombard conveys in his Sentences. It may not be a mix of theoretical and practical knowledge in the sense that it results from a combination of these two. Still, 4

For instance, Walter of Bruges, Quaestiones Disputatae 10, s.c., p. 94: “si conscientia est actus applicativus non erit nisi scientiarum quae de bono fidei vel morum sunt.”

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Bonaventure says that it embraces both, so that conversely, the other two kinds of knowledge can be seen as derived from it, or as emerging out of it. On the other hand, theology certainly has its own distinctive flavour. Bonaventure describes it as wisdom, sapientia, and he follows Alexander in associating the latter with taste, sapor (In I Sent. proœmii q. 3, conclusio). Alexander had contrasted knowledge secundum visum with knowledge secundum gustum (Summa Halensis, tract. intro. cap. 1, solutio; p. 2-3), and Bonaventure turns this into a threefold distinction by distinguishing both speculative and gustative knowledge from practical knowledge (In Sent. proœmii q. 3; Köpf, Anfänge, p. 203). Theology is thus affective knowledge, as opposed to observational and prescriptive knowledge. This, of course, is only the beginning of a possible account. One will want to know how exactly tasting differs from observing and acting. Bonaventure is still struggling to distinguish theology from both theoretical and practical knowledge. Initially, he still describes it in terms of these two, as in between and embracing both of them. This issue, I think, is that Aquinas and Bonaventure have a clear understanding of what theoretical and practical knowledge are, and although they occasionally try to make room for a third kind of knowledge, they fail to give an equally clear account of it. They tend to describe it in terms of the two kinds of knowledge they understand. A very similar pattern can be seen in a recent book on self-knowledge. In Socrates and Self-Knowledge, Christopher Moore writes: ... self-knowledge is effected with a double attention, to the ideal and to the actual. ... It is also effected with a double judgment, of the theoretical and the practical. Self-knowledge coincides both with the discerning (theoretically) of one’s level of goodness and with the (practical) application of the skill of discipline or improvement. (238)

Moore, too, has a clear understanding of two kinds of knowledge: descriptive knowledge of the actual and prescriptive knowledge of the ideal. And he attempts to capture self-knowledge by combining these two, such that self-knowledge, like conscientia in Aquinas, is somehow both observational and evaluative. One possible explanation for the emergence of “double attention” views of self-knowledge is that the authors who arrive at them think of the

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distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge in terms of their direction of fit. There can only be two directions of fit, after all, so there can only be two main kinds of knowledge. If this is so, self-knowledge will have to fall under one of these kinds or be some sort of mixture of them.5 However, that this would explain “double attention” views should not mislead us into thinking that everyone who holds a “double attention” view must do so because they distinguish the theoretical from the practical in terms of the distinction between two directions of fit. Frost’s criticism of the latter distinction, after all, ultimately rests on Anscombean and thus Thomistic thought. However this may be, we should feel free to look for alternatives to “double attention” views, and the Franciscans point us to an author who might be able to show us one of them. This author is, of course, Hugh of St. Victor. Before I move on, I need to ask the reader to bear with me while I go into details of theories that are either obsolete, or rest on Christian doctrine, or both. The views I am going to sketch will provide the background for the ideas that I am going to develop; not the premises from which they follow. There will be no need to accept them as true, only to understand their significance. The reader will not need to be an extramissionist or a Christian in order to appreciate the thought that comes out of the following considerations.

3. Hugh of St. Victor When referred to Hugh in the present context, two things come to mind. The first is Hugh’s distinction between three ways of reading the Bible: historical, allegorical, and tropological (Didascalicon V 2, 789C, p. 120). Historical knowledge is factual knowledge, and tropology concerns what one ought to do. The allegorical way of reading sits in the middle between these two as a third option, and one would like to know what kind of knowledge corresponds to it. 5

Here is a more complete list of options. (1) Self-knowledge could be a subspecies of theoretical knowledge or (2) a subspecies of practical knowledge, (3) a mixture of both, or (4) there might be two different kinds of self-knowledge, each being a subspecies of one of the two main genera. Or (5) self-knowledge could be a higher kind of knowledge, of which theoretical and practical knowledge are subspecies. Finally, (6) self-knowledge might be both theoretical and practical at once. The final option will make an appearance later on in this paper.

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The second thing that comes to mind is Hugh’s image of the three sets of eyes that humans had before the fall (De Sacramentis I 10,2, 329C-D, p. 167). This is not only because each pair of eyes represents a kind of knowledge, but more importantly because the second pair of eyes, the one in the middle, is the one by means of which Eve and Adam knew themselves. Unfortunately, we cannot simply put these two trinities together, so that self-knowledge ends up in between theoretical and practical knowledge. In the three ways of reading, we do get a hint at a kind of knowledge in between theory and practice, but this knowledge is not clearly identified as self-knowledge. In the picture of the three eyes, on the other hand, we have self-knowledge in the middle, but it is sitting in between the knowledge of bodily things and the knowledge of God. Still, the three ways of reading and the three eyes are related to one another in an interesting way. Roughly, Hugh wants us to practice the three ways of reading the Bible, beginning with the historical one, as part of an attempt at restoring within ourselves what we humans have lost through the fall. What we have lost is, in terms of the three eyes passage, a clear knowledge of ourselves, and all direct knowledge of God. The second pair of eyes is impaired, the third blind. So the three ways of reading are ways of improving our self-knowledge, and means for ultimately regaining direct knowledge of the divine. In Hugh, our overall path towards the restoration of our true selves consists in a nested sequence of patterns, each of which starts with some kind of factual knowledge. According to the picture that he suggests in Didascalicon V, the first step is to acquire plain historical knowledge, in the traditional sense of factual knowledge about physical objects, plants, animals, people, places, and the like. The second step is to read the Bible and the third is to act on it. The same pattern reoccurs within the second step, in the form of the three ways of reading the Bible. We read the Bible, first, as an account of historical events, then we pay attention to the spiritual meaning of this account (allegorical reading), and finally we draw lessons from it for our own life (tropological reading). A similar pattern occurs, again, within tropology (V 9, 797A-798A, p. 132-33; Rorem, Hugh of St. Victor, p. 36-37). We apply the lessons we learned by doing what we ought to do: reading and meditation, then prayer, then action, and finally contemplation. This last sequence looks like the other ones, with theory, something in between, and practice. However, Hugh appends a

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further step, contemplatio, as the culmination of the entire series. Also, in the middle between the theoretical and the practical, he now locates prayer. This is Hugh’s way of saying, at this point, that one cannot proceed from meditation to practice and contemplation without divine assistance. Given this sequence of tasks to be performed in order to restore our selfknowledge, what is self-knowledge for Hugh? The three eyes passage places self-knowledge in the middle between the empirical knowledge of bodily things and the contemplative knowledge of God. This is, for one thing, simply a hierarchical ordering. As humans, our proper place is in between the physical and the divine (positus est in medio: De Sacramentis I 2,1, 205C, p. 28). Bodily things are inferior, and God is superior to our selves. For another, self-knowledge is something like our gateway to God. For, as Augustine has it, we ultimately find God in ourselves, if at the same time far above ourselves (e.g. Confessiones VII 10,16). For Hugh, our path to God leads, on the one hand, through self-knowledge. On the other hand, it leads through the Bible, prayer, and good works. We will see whether, how, and why these two paths can be the same.

4. Bodily Vision It is significant that the three eyes passage depicts self-knowledge and knowledge of God as kinds of vision. One might think that when Hugh uses the image of visual perception, he insinuates that self-knowledge and knowledge of the divine are observational and receptive kinds of knowledge. And by doing so, he might seem to miss an important point. Alexander, after all, will contrast knowledge secundum visum with knowledge secundum gustum, the latter being knowledge of the divine. However, Alexander’s generation no longer thinks about vision in the same way as Hugh. As Margaret Miles reminds us, St. Augustine accepts an extramission theory of vision, and this has important consequences for his idea of intellectual vision (Vision, p. 127).6 The same holds true for Hugh, the “second Augustine”. Hugh does not actually go into much detail about how vision works, but what he says in passing is clear enough. He says, in one place, that vision differs from all other senses in that it goes outwards, towards the object seen (De tribus diebus I 7,3, 818A, p. 68). In another 6

On Augustine, see also Miles, “Augustine on the Body,” ch. 2; Smith, From Sight to Light, ch. 4 sect. 3.

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place, he says more specifically that vision occurs when the eyes emit a “ray of vision,” which hits upon an object, takes on the visual form of this object, and then bounces back to the eye (De unione 287B). According to this view, as Miles puts it, “[t]he object does not ‘catch the eye’: The eye catches the object” (Image as Insight, p. 45). The underlying theory of vision had been clearly stated in Plato’s Timaeus (45b-46c), the relevant portion of which was available to Hugh in a translation with a commentary by Chalcidius. We can fill in some more details by looking at two of Hugh’s contemporaries, Adelard of Bath (Quaestiones Naturales #23-30) and William of Conches (Dragmaticon VI 19-20). The gist of their account is that the eyes emit a certain fiery substance, which is not quite the same as light because it is not itself visible. In any case, this substance is a physical, material thing. According to William, the fiery substance can travel only in the presence of brightness, so that it needs ambient light as its medium. The visible object, on the other hand, emits its own kind of light, which explains how the object can inform the fiery substance once the two meet. After taking on the form of the visible object, the fiery substance returns to the eyes and travels beyond them into a certain cavity in the brain, at which point the soul takes over. As both Adelard and William emphasize, all this has to happen incredibly fast, since we are able to see very distant stars. For this to be possible, the fiery substance must be able to travel to a distant star and back before we can even blink (because otherwise it might be left floating around, unable to re-enter the eye). One thing to note at this point is that both Adelard and William treat extramission as a purely physical movement. That the eyes emit rays has no implications for the question of how active the mind is. Since the mind is not a bodily object, it cannot travel through physical space. The mind itself, therefore, cannot reach out towards the object of sense perception. All it can do is to wait for bodily images to come in. In this sense, all sense perception is passive (as Hugh says in De unione 287D-288A). In another sense, however, the mind is purely active. Since, again, it is not a bodily thing, it cannot be acted on by any bodily thing, a fortiori not by a fiery substance in a brain cavity. In order to process any perceptual information, it has to actively and freely emulate it. The mind has to apply a form to itself, which it finds within its own depths, such as to match the bodily image that has reached the cavity in the brain (Adelard, Quaestiones

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Naturales #28, p. 150/51).7 The downside of this is that we cannot ever perceive anything radically new. And, although the mind is indeed active, this has nothing to do with the extramission theory of vision. The mind is no less active when it comes to olfactory or auditory perception. So much for bodily vision.

5. Intellectual Vision Intellectual vision, as Hugh describes it, differs from bodily vision in a couple of important respects. The objects of intellectual vision are incorporeal: the soul, its attributes or contents, and God. No ontological gap separates the eye of the mind from its object. The mind does not need to fashion a mental copy of the object of its intellectual vision. It can act on its object and its object can act on it. The mind itself can reach out and “catch” the object of its vision,8 and the object itself can enter the mind. This also means that in intellectual vision, the mind can experience something genuinely new. The eyes of the mind, says Hugh, can penetrate into their object, and they can see the past and the future (De vanitate 704B, p. 158). Moreover, the mind’s eyes emit no physical substance, and whatever else they might emit will not travel through physical space. This is, presumably, why Hugh says that bodily vision is comparatively slow (703C-D), and that intellectual vision does not depend on anything like ambient light (704B). We may safely suppose that intellectual vision happens instantaneously. Now, since extramission has to do with the way in which the space in between the eye and a visible object is traversed, it does not seem to make a difference if there is no such space. So if there is any sense in which an extramission theory applies to intellectual vision, it is rather like the smile of a vanishing Cheshire cat. We should keep in mind, however, that we are dealing with metaphorical eyes and metaphorical space. If there is a metaphorical sense in which the eyes of the mind can reach out towards their object and catch it, rather 7

Adelard is presenting and approving of what he takes to be Plato’s theory of innate ideas: “Cum itaque nova ad presens forma visibilis insignitur spiritus, anima statim non illam set similem explicans, non corpoream set intelligibilem ostentans, sue habundantie exprimit qualitatem, indeque ad iudicium irritatur. Cum igitur … nec etiam formarum traditio obsit, auctor huius divine rationis Plato simul cum suis celebretur, ametur.” 8 Adelard firmly rejects this option in the case of bodily vision: Quaestiones Naturales, #23, p. 136/7.

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than merely being affected by it, there will still be a meaningful difference between extramission and its opposite, intromission. Abstracting from the physical story behind bodily extramission, this distinction seems to concern the direction of fit. Fitting, after all, need not be a physical process. For instance, there may be a fit between a number and a mathematical property, such that there still is a distinction between (a) the property fitting the number and (b) the number fitting the property. In this sense, intellectual vision might still exhibit a distinctive direction of fit. Upon consideration, however, the direction of fit involved in both bodily and intellectual vision turns out to be complex. Both involve an active and a passive element. When the bodily eyes catch their object, they do something in order to get something. They act in order to passively receive. This should also be true of intellectual vision. In intellectual vision, there is one further twist. Usually, when we do something in order to get something, doing and receiving are distinct moments of a complex movement. When I go upstairs to fetch my camera, I do something and I get something, such that what I do is not what I get. The same is true for bodily vision. What I am doing is to make my eyes emit the fiery substance, what I am getting is something different, namely a copy of the form of a visible object. In intellectual vision, in contrast, there is a sense in which I am doing and getting the very same thing. There is, to begin with, a sense in which the mind does something and receives something. Before we can direct our attention towards an intellectual object (be it a thought, an idea, or a memory), we need some preconception of what to consider, or at least some framework within which we can locate it.9 We “cast” the object of our intellectual vision as fitting a certain description, in order to bring it into view.10 In this sense, the mind can be said to “reach out” towards the object of its intellectual vision. Once we attend to this object, we receive further information about it. The gaze of our mental vision is informed by the object and returns to the mind. Now the important point here is that in intellectual vision, the thing done and the object received are ultimately the same. In order to see this more clearly, we will need to recall the distinction between immanent and transcendent objects. 9

As Augustine emphasizes in Confessions X 18,27-23,34, one cannot search for a thing that one does not at all know. The ultimate source for this is, of course, Meno 80d. 10 For “casting,” see Austin, “How to Talk”, p. 140.

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The point to note here is that in intellectual vision, there is no need for the mind to emulate and thus duplicate the form of the object seen. As Augustine says in Confessions X, immaterial objects can directly enter the mind. His examples are our knowledge of grammar (X 9,16) and mathematics (X 12,19). If these things require no mental counterpart in order to be understood, then the act of “seeing” them does not involve two items, such that one represents the other one. In order to understand intellectual vision, then, we need to understand non-representational knowledge.11

6. Knowledge by Participation To perceive a bodily object is to represent it, to understand an intellectual object is not to represent it. In a passage in the Didascalicon, Hugh writes that when the mind achieves “pure understanding, it becomes more blessed through participating in intellectible essence” (II 3, 753D, p. 64).12 We might thus say that generally, our understanding of intellectual objects is knowledge by participation, as opposed to knowledge by representation (cf. Dillard, Removing the Mote, p. 206-211). Presumably, when the mind understands, it participates in intellectible essence in the sense in which people might participate in a dance. Participating in a dance is the same as dancing it. The dancer performs the dance itself, not a mental counterpart of it, and their knowledge of how to dance need not involve any such mental representation. If intellectual vision is knowledge by participation, what it understands will likewise be what it performs by understanding it. In Dummett’s terms, then, the object of intellectual vision will be an immanent object with respect to intellectual vision. Dummett introduces the distinction between immanent and transcendent objects in order to maintain that the act of thinking may be said to have a thought as its object, while at the same time registering the difference between thinking a thought and perceiving an object (More About Thoughts, p. 17). If thoughts are objects of the act of thinking them, they are not transcendent objects of this act. That is, they are not on the other 11

Cf. Annette Baier’s important paper, “Intention, Practical Knowledge, and Representation.” 12 Taylor has “intellectible substance”; but “substance” in a 12th c. writer often means the same as “essence”.

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side of an ontological gap, so that the mind would have to represent them in order to deal with them. We can think a thought without fashioning a mental representation of it, because the thought can be a direct, immanent object of our thinking. There are thus two ways of describing how non-representational knowledge works. First, we may say that it is knowledge by participation. To know a thing without representing it is to actually be part of it, rather than fashioning something in the mind that corresponds to a part of it. Second, we may say that the object of non-representational knowledge is immanent, rather than transcendent, with respect to this knowledge. Both descriptions amount to saying that in intellectual vision, the object seen is the same as the act of vision by which it is seen. We should keep in mind, though, that Hugh does not draw a terminological distinction between knowledge by representation and knowledge by participation. He does not have a theory of “knowledge by participation”. We can see this conception at work without it being labeled, and when Hugh contrasts sense perception with pure understanding in Didascalicon II 3, he associates the latter with “participating in intellectible essence”. But he does not usually use this term, “participation”, in connection with knowledge. There are a couple of passages where he speaks of participating in something inferior, for instance when he raises the question whether God participates in evil (De Sacramentis I 4,13, 239D, p. 67), and when he argues that the soul, not only the body, participates in original sin (I 7,3435, 302D-303D, p. 138-39). In the Didascalicon, he also says that humans participate in mutability (I 7, 747A, p. 54). In the majority of cases, however, he speaks of participation in God (e.g. I 2,3, 207D, p. 31), in future redemption (I 11, 8, 347A, p. 186), in the spirit of Christ (II 2,2, 416D-417A, p. 254-5), and in the sacraments (De archa noe IV 8, 674B, p. 141). On the face of it, these instances of participation are not cases of knowledge. Hugh does point out that those who “eat the body of Christ” without the right mindset do not thereby merit “spiritual participation in Christ” (De Sacramentis II 11,11, 498B, p. 344). So a certain mental attitude seems to be involved in proper participation. On the other hand, however, he says that whereas many people participate in the Church, not all of them are faithful, and he draws this contrast by distinguishing those who merely participate in the house of God from those who actually are the house of God (De archa noe I 2, 621B, p. 49). When we contrast knowledge by participation with knowledge by representation, we are therefore extrapolating quite a bit on the basis of one passage in the

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Didascalicon. In this passage, Hugh is talking about participation in God’s essence, and we have generalized this to participation in the essence of incorporeal objects in general. We might also be stretching Dummett’s distinction between immanent and transcendent objects beyond its intended use here. For Dummett, the act of thinking a thought has two objects: an immanent and a transcendent one. When Hugh says that the mind participates in intellectual essence, however, I do not take him to merely be saying that the mind’s activity is, in some sense, the immanent object of the mind. He is saying that what the mind’s activity is about is its immanent object, too. When intellectual vision succeeds, it has no transcendent object. This being said, let us stipulate that the object of intellectual vision is an immanent object with respect to intellectual vision, and that to “see” it is to participate in it. If this is so, the movement by which the mind reaches out towards its object and the thing that it gets as a result of this movement are one and the same. In this sense, we are doing and receiving the same thing in intellectual vision: to receive an intellectual object into one’s mind is the same as participating in it, that is, engaging in it. Let us now apply this result to self-knowledge. We can, of course, know ourselves by representation. More interestingly, however, we may also know ourselves by participation, as an immanent object. The latter kind of self-knowledge will be non-representational. When we know ourselves by participation, we do so by participating in our own essence, that is, by participating and engaging in what we are. This is to say that when we know ourselves by participation, we know ourselves by simply being ourselves, in the sense in which the truly faithful participate in the house of God by being the house of God. To know oneself, in a nonrepresentational way, is to be oneself. This result ought to give us pause. On the one hand, Hugh seems to claim that we know ourselves by simply being what we are. On the other hand, he claims that self-knowledge is restorative. How is this possible? It seems that no one can restore themselves by simply being what they are.

7. Restoration by Self-Knowledge Let us retrace our steps. When we perceive bodily things, two things happen. First, as we have seen, our mind shapes itself, or a part of itself,

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such as to match this bodily thing. All such knowledge involves assimilation. Now according to Hugh, bodily things are ontologically inferior to us. Therefore, whenever we know bodily objects by representation, our soul will have to give itself, or part of itself, an inferior form (cf. Ostler, Psychologie, p. 137). The result will be a kind of pollution of the mind. The second thing that happens, says Hugh, is that our mind “rushes out” towards bodily things (Didascalicon II 3, 753C-D, p. 64). This is not a hint at Hugh’s extramission theory of bodily vision. As we have seen, this theory does not actually imply that the mind itself moves anywhere in physical space. Rather, Hugh suggests that the mind, when it pays attention to bodily things, directs its mental energy, its attention and awareness, towards what it is not. At least, it will invest its energy into emulating something that is ultimately alien to it. As a result, the mind will become dispersed, weaker, and less focused (cf. Miles, Vision, p. 128). Quite generally, therefore, knowledge of bodily things threatens to alienate the soul from itself. None of this needs to happen in intellectual vision. Suppose the soul sees itself or its own attributes (concepts, thoughts, memories, character traits, and the like). By doing so, it will not assimilate any part of itself to what it is not, and its energy will not be dispersed. It will remain focused (Miles, Vision, p. 133), and may even consolidate its focus, by being “gathered to itself” (ad se ipsum colligitur: De archa noe III 2, 648A, p. 95). This will of course also depend on what the concepts, thoughts, and memories are about. Even when the mind knows intellectual objects other than itself, it need not represent these objects in order to know them, since these objects will directly enter the mind. The mind will participate in them. When this happens, the mind will still shape itself, or be shaped, such as to participate in the essence of what it knows. As Hugh sees it, however, this will never be a bad thing. The object of intellectual vision is either the soul itself, or some attribute of the soul, or something ontologically superior to it. The more such things the soul participates in, the more incorporeal it will become. Intellectual vision is thus the antidote to alienation. The point of self-knowledge is, then, to direct the energy of the soul towards what it is, and thus expend less energy towards what it is not. The intended result is a fortification of the soul. Also, because the soul is incorporeal, for it to know itself is to know something incorporeal. And since all knowledge involves assimilation, the knowledge of immaterial

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things will turn the soul into something more immaterial. This is supposed to purify the soul. Will this work? Suppose that my soul is thoroughly corrupted. Not only is it burdened by the original sin, so that my second eyes are impaired and my third eyes are blind. In addition, my soul is attached to many bodily things. I know, desire, and fear many of them. As it stands, my soul is alienated to a considerable extent. When Hugh now asks me to purify myself, I may have two worries, one motivational, the other practical. First, it may seem that by attempting to purify myself, I throw out the child with the bath water. Foucault brings up this issue: A fundamental element of Christian conversion is renunciation of oneself, dying to oneself, and being reborn in a different self and a new form which, as it were, no longer has anything to do with the earlier self in its being, its mode of being, in its habits or its Ɲthos. (Herméneutique, p. 203 / 211)

Hugh would of course reply that we are not asked to renounce our selves. We are asked to renounce only and exactly that within ourselves which is alien to ourselves. But who is to say that anything of value will be left once we have done this? And if so, will there be any continuity, will I still be in any sense the same person? There are reasons to think that the thing that Hugh marks as alienated is actually the best self I can be. After all, when I abstract from all my bodily attachment, there might be nothing distinctive about who I am. I think there is something important to Foucault’s complaint, but I will set it aside for now. I want to address the second, practical worry. Supposing that I see some value in purifying myself and I want to do it, how can I achieve this by looking at my present self, which is not yet pure? I understand that by turning to myself, I somehow consolidate my mental energy; even though I am not quite sure what this means in less metaphorical terms. What I might not understand as readily is how, in this situation, I can become more purified by knowing myself. If knowledge works by assimilation, to know something pure will be to assimilate myself to something pure, and thus become purer. But I am not pure to begin with, and when I assimilate myself to myself, nothing much happens. This is, presumably, what the third pair of eyes used to be good for. If only I could see God, I would be able to know something that is superior to my

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own soul, and since knowledge involves assimilation, my soul could actually become better than it was before. Also, given that we find God within ourselves, knowledge of God will not force the soul to rush outwards towards the object of its knowledge. Further, as we may see our bodies in a mirror, we may see ourselves by looking at someone who is looking back at us. As Socrates says in Plato’s Alcibiades, we might then see ourselves, in God, like in a mirror (133c; cf. Soliloquium 953D-954A, p. 15). However, as Hugh tells us, our third pair of eyes is in fact blind. We cannot use it in order to restore our true self, because the only way to cure its blindness is to restore our true self. We seem to be trapped. In order to become better, we need to know something that is superior to our soul, and for this, we need the third pair of eyes. But as long as we are as corrupt as we are, our third eyes will remain blind. There is thus a sense in which self-knowledge is far from trivial. It may be easy to know one’s self in its current state, if this amounts to simply being this self. It seems impossible, however, to know one’s true self, the self one would be when all of it is fully restored, before already being restored. The reason is, again, that the sort of self-knowledge in question amounts to being what one knows. If we know ourselves by being ourselves, the object of our self-knowledge cannot be better than we already are. There are a couple ways of gradually getting off the ground, however (paulatim: De vanitate 714B, p. 175-76). First, there are certain images that we can put before our bodily eyes. He goes through a number of such images in De vanitate, and the lesson there is that all we see is vain (705C712A, p. 160-170). Note that the vanity in question is the vanity of the human condition. For the world is, as such, beautiful. What is mutable and thus imperfect is the human life in it (705A, p. 159). These images therefore invariably culminate in the judgment: “Of what quality is this work of man? It is vanity, and vanity of vanities” (e.g. 706B, p. 161). The idea is that we may begin to improve ourselves by realizing how deficient we are. On the other hand, there are images that may edify our souls in a more direct, positive way. In bodily vision, as we have seen, the mind actively emulates the image that reaches the brain. When confronted with the appropriate visual stimulus, it may therefore assimilate itself to something good (foris uidebit oculus tuus, ut ad eius similitudinem intus fabricetur

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animus tuus: De archa noe I 3, 622B, p. 52). Such a positive image is, for instance, the elaborate mental diagram that Hugh describes in the Libellum de formatione arche. When we engage our attention to look at such things, says Hugh, “we may be getting ever nearer to some semblance of true stability” (De archa noe IV 2, 666A, p. 126). Further, there are other selves that we might know, in whatever imperfect way. We may improve our own selves by knowing others who are better than we are (De laude caritatis 973A, p. 15). As Socrates puts it, we may be able to know our better selves by looking at the best in another person (Alcibiades, 133b). Hugh, however, warns us to not place our trust and hope in other humans (De substantia dilectionis 18A, p. 190). Further, there are reasons to suspect that we might not even be able to see the best in another person without also exemplifying it, for the same reasons for which we cannot understand the thoughts of other people without in some way thinking them. If I know the good by participation, I will not be able to know it unless I actually participate in it. For a Christian thinker like Hugh, there is of course one human being that we may always look at in order to discover our own best self, namely Jesus Christ. This very fact, however, will be something we need to accept as given. When we imitate Christ, we treat Christ as a paradigm, which means that we cannot apply our own standards beforehand, in order to determine whether we should follow him or not. Our faith will have to come before our understanding. As St. Paul puts it, faith is the substance of things to be hoped for (Hebr. 11,1). Hugh explains this as follows: the things we hope for may already subsist in us, if only on the basis of our faith (fide sola subsistunt in nobis: De Sacramentis I 10,2; 329A, p. 166). Faith itself is something we can practice and comprehend. We practice faith, however, in order to achieve something that we cannot yet practice or comprehend. The faith we have thus signifies something that is not in our mind, but it does this neither by representation nor by participation (cf. 328D-329A, p. 166). By faith, we can establish a relation to God while remaining blind (De archa noe IV 3, 667D, p. 129). And this relation will help us eventually overcome our blindness. As Hugh puts it, “there are some who begin to taste what they believe through faith” (gustare incipiunt quod fide credunt: De Sacramentis I 10,4, 332D, p. 170).13 Here, “tasting” seems to stand for knowledge by participation. 13 We see a connection to the Franciscans here; as also in De archa noe III 1, 647A, p. 94: gustando autem cognoscimus.

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Then there are the sacraments. Sacraments are visible signs of an invisible content (De Sacramentis I 9,2, 317D, p. 155). By performing certain rituals, for instance, we prepare the ground for God’s cooperation and thus for our restoration. Hugh emphasizes that these rituals need to be performed with the right mindset. The actual rituals might be indispensable in certain contexts, but they are in principle neither necessary nor sufficient. Baptism, for instance, will remain ineffective without faith in the Trinity, and where this faith is clearly present it does not actually matter whether the ritual is performed exactly according to rule (II 6,2, 447C, p. 288).

8. Self-Knowledge Without Representation So there are certain steps that we can take in order to know our better selves and thus be restored. This makes restorative self-knowledge look like a kind of practical knowledge. It is a knowledge that restores what it knows, and thus it is “the cause of what it understands” (Anscombe, Intention §48). There is in fact a kind of fitting involved: In restorative self-knowledge, we fit our current selves to our better selves. However, there are two important differences between practical knowledge and restorative self-knowledge. The first is fairly obvious. Practical knowledge is the knowledge of how to do or make something, where the thing done or made is something other than the doer or maker. In restorative self-knowledge, the thing known and restored is the subject of knowledge, that which does the knowing and restoring. The knower is the known. This turns restorative self-knowledge into what Foucault brings under the heading of spirituality. It is a kind of knowledge that is achieved by a “certain transformation of the subject; not of the individual, but of the subject himself in his being as subject” (Herméneutique, p. 18 / 16). That is, I take it, the transformation is achieved in the self as the subject of selfknowledge, not in the self as an object of self-knowledge. The other important difference between practical knowledge and restorative self-knowledge is the following. Whereas in practical knowledge, we start out with a plan, however vague, of what we want to achieve, and then measure the result of our endeavours by comparison with our plan, we do not actually have any such plan before we begin to know our true selves. This is Foucault’s point, referred to earlier, about renouncing the self. Before we are our better selves, we cannot possibly have any idea of what we will end up being as a result of knowing our better selves. This is the force of the claim that restorative self-knowledge is non-representational:

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it does not involve having any plan whatsoever of what to become. For all we know, this sort of knowing ourselves might well amount to a renunciation of our current selves. And Hugh is rather honest about this. He says that when we give up all attachment to worldly things, we are initially left without anything to cling to (our soul will be omnino a delectione aliena), so that God will have to step in and refill our hearts with “spiritual joy” (De archa noe III 3, 648C, p. 96). So before we know ourselves by participating in our true essence, we cannot have any plan of how this will work out. It takes a leap of faith to know yourself, and faith is the operative word here. As we have seen, Hugh puts prayer in between us and our better selves: after reading and meditation, he tells us to pray, so that we will have the strength to perform the good works that will eventually enable us to reach the stage of contemplation (and the third eye is the eye of contemplation). This prayer is a request for assistance. Prayer is a form of doing something in order to get something, with the important addition that the doing is ours, but the getting is beyond our control. God has the plan of the self that we do not have. When prayer succeeds, God will work through us, for to will according to grace is to will because God wills (De Sacramentis I 6,17, 274A, p. 106). Restorative self-knowledge thus differs from practical knowledge in that it is not a matter of fitting our own self to anything that we already comprehend. The fit in question is rather achieved by a cooperation between us and something that is beyond our control, of which we will only know more once we have relied on its support. Once our true selves are restored, we will properly know ourselves. Our second pair of eyes will be cured. The kind of endeavour that will lead to this, however, is not yet knowledge in the sense of hitting a mark or succeeding at something. It is a quest for knowledge.

9. Conclusions Predictably, an engagement with Hugh of St. Victor’s account of selfknowledge has landed us deeply in the middle of Christian doctrine. I think, however, that our discussion has raised issues and introduced ideas that are relevant to anyone’s understanding of self-knowledge. Our guiding question has been whether self-knowledge might conceivably be a third kind of knowledge, separate from but on a par with theoretical and practical knowledge. There is, of course, such a thing as the theoretical

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knowledge of who I am or used to be, and there might be practical selfknowledge in the sense of having a specific understanding of what to do in order to become someone different. Hugh, however, points us to a kind of self-knowledge that is neither theoretical nor practical. This kind of selfknowledge sits in the middle in between theoretical and practical knowledge, without either being a mixture of them or embracing both of them. One reason why this is so is that, as we suspected, it has no direction of fit. This point is interesting in its own right. Hugh describes it as a kind of vision. Bodily vision is an instance of doing something in order to get something, and is thus both spontaneous and receptive. Self-knowledge by participation, however, is intellectual knowledge, such that the doing and the getting coincide. When we understand a concept, we understand it by conceiving it, and this is to say that our understanding is the same as what it understands. The object of such an understanding is an immanent object, it is known by participation rather than representation. Further, selfknowledge is a special kind of intellectual knowledge in that the self is both the knower and the known. The self is what it knows, and if the object of intellectual knowledge is the performance of the act of knowing it, we get the peculiar result that in self-knowledge, the self is all of the following three: the knower, the known, and the act of knowing. Because of the identity of knower, known, and act of knowing, the kind of self-knowledge that Hugh points to is similar to divine knowledge, as Aquinas describes it (Summa Theologiae Ia 1,5 c.a.). Aquinas argues that theology has features of both theoretical and practical knowledge because it receives its first principles from God’s knowledge. This latter knowledge is at the same time theoretical and practical, since God knows himself and what he creates by the same knowledge, he creates by knowing, and he knows by creating. Divine knowledge is thus not a mixture of theoretical and practical knowledge, it is rather a case where both coincide.14 It is, actually, a case where all three kinds of knowledge coincide: theoretical knowledge, practical knowledge, and self-knowledge. Or, alternatively, it is a case where the distinction between these kinds of knowledge does not apply. To be sure, human knowledge cannot at the same time be knowledge of all creation. At least, however, it is knowledge of what it restores, it restores what it knows by knowing it, and what it thus knows and restores is itself. In its own limited way, it is divine. “Divine,” here, can be given a very 14

This is option (6) in fn. 5 above.

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precise meaning: knowledge is divine when the knower, the act of knowing, and the object of knowing are one and the same. Not all selfknowledge is of this kind. We may know ourselves by having a representation of ourselves, and we may have practical self-knowledge, in the sense of having a specific plan of who to become. Hugh, however, points to a third kind of self-knowledge, which is neither theoretical not practical, and is in this sense a species of divine knowledge. It is a knowledge that humans had before the fall, which they can aspire to achieve, a knowledge that coincides with the knower and the known. We postlapsarian humans lack this sort of self-knowledge. Now if the knowledge we lack is divine knowledge, our lack of it cannot simply be a matter of there being something that we fail to know. Since the knower and the known in divine knowledge are the same, it must at the same time be a matter of not being the sort of knower that it takes. We don’t merely fail to know who we are; we fail to be who we would know if we knew who we are. This is, again, the idea that Foucault illustrates in so many ways in the Hermeneutics of the Subject, which he however fails to render precise. It can be stated concisely in three steps: (1) Self-knowledge is a sort of knowledge that coincides with both the knower and the known. (2) To lack this kind of knowledge is to fail to be the knower as well as the object known. Therefore, (3) to acquire it must consist in a transformation of the subject of knowledge as such. That the kind self-knowledge in question is knowledge by participation, rather than by representation, distinguishes it from both theoretical and practical knowledge in a further respect. It implies that although we may improve ourselves by knowing ourselves, this cannot proceed according to any sort of preconception of our future selves. Any such preconception would be a representation of what one is to become, and self-knowledge by participation does not involve any such representations. In the absence of representations, we need to rely on hope, faith, and guidance. This is why Hugh can replace self-knowledge, the knowledge that leads us from historical knowledge to contemplation, with prayer and work. To know oneself by participation is to improve oneself, relying on faith, hope, and trust in others, rather than on a prior understand of who to become. And the faith involved need not be a faith of any particular brand. All it needs to be is something like the substance of things to be hoped for, anything that grounds our hope that we may eventually become the knower that it takes.

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—. De archa noe. Libellus de formation arche. CCCM 176, Brepols 2001. Transl. of De archa noe in: Selected Spiritual Writings. Harper and Row, 1962. —. De laude caritatis. In: H. Feiss et al., L’oeuvre de Hugues de SaintVictor, vol. 1. Brepols, 1997. Transl. in: The Divine Love. Mowbray and Co., 1956. —. De sacramentis christianae fidei, PL 176. Transl.: On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, tr. R. J. Deferrari. Medieval Academy of America, 1951. —. De substantia dilectionis. PL 176 (= Institutiones in decalogum IV). Transl. in: Selected Spiritual Writings. Harper and Row, 1962. —. De tribus diebus, ed. D. Poirel. CCCM 177, Brepols, 2002. Transl.: On the Three Days, tr. H. Feiss. In: Boyd T. Coolman and Dale M. Coulter, Trinity and Creation, Brepols 2010. —. De unione corporis et spiritus. PL 177. —. De vanitate mundi, PL 176. Transl. in: Selected Spiritual Writings. Harper and Row, 1962. —. Didascalicon de studio legendi, ed. T. Offergeld. Fontes Christiani 27, Freiburg: Herder, 1997. Transl.: The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, tr. J. Taylor. Columbia University Press, 1961. —. Soliloquium de arrha animae. In: H. Feiss et al., L’oeuvre de Hugues de Saint-Victor, vol. 1. Brepols, 1997. Transl.: Soliloquy on the Earnest Money of the Soul, tr. K. Herbert. Marquette University Press, 1956. Köpf, Ulrich (1974). Die Anfänge der theologischen Wissenschaftstheorie im 13. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Mohr. Miles, Margaret R. (1983). “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s ‘De trinitate’ and ‘Confessions’”. The Journal of Religion 63 (2), 125-142. —. (1987). Image as Insight. Beacon Press. —. (1979). Augustine on the Body. American Academy of Religion. Moore, Christopher (2015). Socrates and Self-Knowledge. Cambridge University Press. Ostler, Heinrich (1906). Die Psychologie des Hugo von St. Viktor. Münster: Aschendorff. Plato. Republic, tr. Griffith. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Rorem, Paul (2009). Hugh of St. Victor. Oxford University Press. Searle, John R. (1979). Expression and Meaning. Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. Mark (2015). From Sight to Light. University of Chicago Press.

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Walter of Bruges. Quaestiones Disputatae, ed. E. Longpré. Louvain: Institut supérieur de philosophie de l’Université, 1928. William of Conches, Dragmaticon, ed. I. Ronca. CCCM 152, Brepols, 1997. —. A Dialogue on Natural philosophy, tr. I. Ronca and M. Curr. University of Notre Dame Press, 1997.

“MANY KNOW MUCH, BUT DO NOT KNOW THEMSELVES”: SELF-KNOWLEDGE, HUMILITY, AND PERFECTION IN THE MEDIEVAL AFFECTIVE CONTEMPLATIVE TRADITION CHRISTINA VAN DYKE

In an earlier paper, I described self-knowledge as a persistent and paradoxical theme in medieval mysticism: persistent insofar as the injunction to know oneself is ubiquitous in the contemplative tradition, paradoxical insofar as focusing on oneself seems inimical to the contemplative goal of losing oneself in God.1 Self-knowledge is also a popular topic in medieval scholasticism – addressed in disputations by Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and any number of others – but scholastic and contemplative discussions differ widely in both how they approach this topic and what they say about it. In particular, scholastic discussions tend to focus on the mechanics of self-knowledge (whether and how we could know ourselves) and to embed these discussions within general epistemological frameworks, while discussions in the contemplative tradition usually concentrate on the importance of self-knowledge for the moral and religious life. Today, philosophers interested in self-knowledge usually look to the scholastic tradition, where the topic is addressed in a systematic and familiar way. Contemporary conceptions of what medieval figures thought about self-knowledge thus skew toward the epistemological. In so doing, however, they often fail to capture the crucial ethical and theological importance that self-knowledge possesses throughout the Middle Ages.

1

“Self-Knowledge, Abnegation, and Fulfillment in Medieval Mysticism,” page 131, in Self-Knowledge: A History, ed. U. Renz (Oxford Philosophical Concepts Series, Oxford University Press, 2016) 131-145.

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This paper continues my efforts to complement existing discussions of medieval scholastic views of self-knowledge with resources from within the contemplative tradition. The scholastic focus on the possibility for and mechanics of self-knowledge cannot explain why we should seek to know ourselves, nor can it account for the widely-acknowledged importance of such searching and its outcomes. Human beings are not transparent to themselves: in particular, knowing oneself in the way needed for moral progress requires hard and rigorous work. Yet, medieval contemplatives insist, without this work we will never attain our final end. In this paper, I trace the connection drawn in this tradition between self-knowledge, humility, and self-fulfillment, arguing in section 1 that the humility that results from introspection needs to be understood in the context of contemplative expectations for eventual perfection. Self-knowledge is key for developing the relationship with God that leads to mystical union, but (as I show in section 2) in the affective tradition of the 13th-14th centuries, which emphasizes the role of emotion and the body, such union with God tends to restore rather than annihilate us. In fact, I argue in section 3, the outcome of such union even in this life is often knowledge that benefits not only the individual who experiences it but also their broader community.

1. Putting the Self into Perspective In the prologue to Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue, Truth speaks the following words: “You ask for the will to know and love me, supreme Truth. Here is the way, if you would come to perfect knowledge and enjoyment of me, eternal Life: Never leave the knowledge of yourself.” This injunction might come as a surprise to modern readers, who might expect something more like “pray unceasingly” or “meditate upon my works”, but by the time Catherine (who describes herself in the opening paragraph as “dwelling in the cell of self-knowledge”) reports these words in the late 14th century, this advice is completely commonplace in the contemplative tradition. Indeed, a persistent theme across the wide range of geographic regions and religious orders in this period is that the search for the truth about God requires first coming to terms with the truth about oneself. An important source for this theme is the popular Meditations, attributed at the time to the 12th century Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux (although

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more likely written in the early 13th century).2 A text that consistently stresses the importance of self-knowledge for sapientia, or “true” wisdom, the Meditations opens with the observation that serves as the title of this paper: “Many know much, but do not know themselves.” Following a path that can be traced back to the Delphic oracle’s command, the Meditations picks up on themes common to Pseudo-Dionysius and the Augustinian Victorines (particularly Richard and Hugh of Saint Victor); one of the most widely read pieces of devotional literature at the time, it has enormous influence on later contemplative movements, setting the stage for a persistent emphasis on the centrality of introspection and selftransparency in the journey towards God. If the final goal for medieval contemplatives and mystics is union with God, however, why should it matter if we know ourselves? Answers given to that question are complex and varied, but one common reply is that human beings aren’t the kind of creatures who can jump straight to contemplating God’s essence: we must start a little closer to home and hone the relevant abilities with respect to ourselves first. As the anonymous 14th century English Book of Privy Counselling explains, experience of God requires refinement beyond the original ‘rudeness’ of our spiritual feelings. “To let thee climb thereto by degree,” it advises, “I bid thee first gnaw on the naked blind feeling of thine own being.”3 The progression towards union with God thus begins by learning how to contemplate the ‘naked blind feeling’ of our own existence. One common reason given for why we need to gnaw on ourselves before we can contemplate God is that the single most serious impediment to spiritual growth (and, thus, mystical union) is inappropriate attachment to self. Self-knowledge is required for seeing the depth of our self-attachment, and it proves essential for releasing our hold on our egos. Meister Eckhart, an influential late 13th-early 14th century Dominican, sums up this two-fold role neatly when he issues the recommendation: “Examine yourself. And whenever you find yourself, take leave of yourself.”4 Although at first 2

For a brief history of the meditative tradition in medieval mysticism, see “Meditatio/Meditation” by Thomas Bestul, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, 157-166. 3 Text from English Mystics of the Middle Ages, ed. Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 94. 4 Counsel 3, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense. E. Colledge, O.S.A. and B. McGinn, eds. (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1981), 250.

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glance paradoxical, the use of self-examination to recognize and then to overcome self-centeredness lies at the heart of the contemplative life. Catherine of Siena, for instance, counsels that only self-knowledge can motivate us to “shed the cloud of selfish love” that obscures our vision of God.5 The apparent paradox of focusing on self in order to counteract obsession with self further dissolves when we see the extent to which contemplative introspection (grounded in prayer and undertaken as one practice among many in the spiritual life of the subject) differs from the self-satisfied navel-gazing of selfishness or self-pride. Understood as a spiritual discipline, self-knowledge has an inherently humbling effect. Indeed, according to this tradition, one of the main effects of self-knowledge is humility – a virtue central to both the moral and religious life. Humility is consistently portrayed as the inevitable consequence of frank introspection: when we see ourselves clearly, we recognize not just our particular failings and quirks but also the extent of general human finitude and our relative place in the grand scheme of things. To modern ears, however, the humility that results from such introspection can sound more like self-loathing than self-knowledge. When Clare of Assisi consistently refers to herself as an “unworthy servant” and “useless handmaid” of Christ, for instance, when Julian of Norwich calls herself “a woman, lewd, feeble, and frail,” and when Mechtild of Magdeburg describes herself as a “filthy puddle”, we children of the positive selfesteem era recoil from what appears to be negative assessment of selfworth (particularly when it seems rooted in internalized misogyny). The impression that medieval contemplatives encourage intentionally dwelling on our shortcomings is only reinforced by comments like the following, from the early 14th century Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec: “If you have self-knowledge you should always descend in a sense of unworthiness and self-disdain.”6 Meister Eckhart and Marguerite Porete appear to go even further, counseling not just detachment but annihilation of the self. 5

Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke, O.P. (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980), pg. 30. Catherine later describes three principal vices, the first of which is “selfishness, which in turn gives birth to the second, self-conceit. From this conceit comes the third, pride, with treacherous injustice and cruelty as well as other evil filthy sins generated by these.” (Dialogue, pg. 80). 6 “Spiritual Abandonment and Consolation” in John Ruusbroec: The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, ed. and trans. J. A. Wiseman, O.S.B. (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1985), 196.

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It’s highly tempting to read those injunctions in the framework of familiar narratives about ‘Medieval’ vs. ‘Enlightenment’ worldviews and relative conceptions of self-worth. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce this emphasis on humility to the view that medieval religious movements fostered self-hatred or selfloathing. First, it’s important to note that feelings of unworthiness and self-disdain are not taken to be states that we should seek for their own sake. Rather, they are portrayed as appropriate attitudes to adopt when comparing ourselves with God. Comparison with God functions in these texts as an important corrective to the human inclination towards pride and inflated self-worth; such an exercise should make it impossible to maintain an inflated sense of self-worth. Most contemplatives are clear, however, that it would be equally inappropriate to loathe oneself in the context of considering one’s status as beloved by God or as a being capable of spiritual growth and union with the Divine. Second, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, Eckhart’s and Porete’s push toward self-abnegation is motivated by the belief that our highest state is one in which we become God, and that this state is one we can achieve only if we relinquish our attachment to self as we currently conceive it.7 God fills whatever space we open by removing selfish love and pride, and our selves become transformed as a result. As Eckhart puts it, “You should know that there was never any man in this life who forsook himself so much that he could not still find more in himself to forsake…But as much as you go out in forsaking all things, by so much, neither less nor more, does God go in” (Counsel 4).8 Porete goes even further, explaining that in the process of conforming our wills to God’s, we can reach a state in this life in which we no longer need to attend mass, partake in the sacraments, or even pray. The reason for this is that we have become so close to God that we no longer need the mediation of the church. (In the ecclesiastical context of the early 14th century, it comes as little surprise that Porete was burnt at the stake in 1310 for refusing to recant this view.) The selfabnegation Eckhart and Porete recommend thus stems not from self-hatred but from deeply held views about the nature of human beings and of God – and about the power human beings possess to participate in bridging the gap between us. 7

See the discussions of the apophatic tradition in “Self-Knowledge” and “What Has History to Do with Philosophy.” 8 Meister Eckhart, pg. 250.

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Third, human beings demonstrate a wide range of shifting behavior, feelings, and attitudes, and we need to examine ourselves frequently in order to assess both where we are and where we want or need to be. Selfknowledge in this context will be humbling – we are rarely where we think we are, and even more rarely where we would like to be. Yet, this recognition is not the same as self-denigration. To see this, it helps to look at the advice the 13th century Flemish mystic Hadewijch gives to a fellow beguine: If you wish to experience this [namely, God’s perfect love], you must first of all learn to know yourselves: in all your conduct, in your attraction or aversion, in your behavior, in love, in hate, in fidelity, in mistrust, and in all things that befall you. You must examine yourselves as to how you can endure everything disagreeable that happens to you, and how you can bear the loss of what gives you pleasure...And in everything pleasant that happens to you, examine yourselves as to how you make use of it, and how wise and moderate you are with regard to it (Letter 14).9

Here it is clear that the rigorous work of introspection is ultimately aimed not at highlighting our inadequacies, but at allowing us to experience God’s love in the most perfect way. Self-knowledge inevitably leads to humility, but humility is, as Hadewijch puts it elsewhere, “the worthiest and purest place in which we receive love” (Letter 12).10 Self-knowledge leads to humble recognition of our dependent status, but it’s the recognition of beings who are dependent on a God who loves them, and who can’t fully appreciate that love in the absence of accurate selfappraisal. The idea that self-knowledge puts the subject in a better position to love and be loved runs throughout the medieval contemplative tradition. As Truth says to Catherine of Siena: “You will find humility in the knowledge of yourself when you see that even your own existence comes not from you but from me, for I loved you before you came into being” (Prologue 4). Furthermore, as I discuss in more detail in section 3, love and knowledge are so closely linked in this tradition that the humility that results from self-knowledge and leads to recognition of God’s love in turn yields greater understanding of God and self – an understanding which

9

Hadewijch: The Complete Works, ed. and trans. Mother Columba Hart, O.S.B. (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980.), 77. 10 Hadewijch: The Complete Works, 72.

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many contemplatives describe as increasing both practical and theoretical wisdom. Finally, the emphasis on humility in the affective contemplative tradition must be understood in the context of its final end: ultimate perfection via union with God. While self-knowledge engenders humility, it is not a humility grounded in recognition of our static lack of worth, but rather a humility explicitly conceived as the starting point in a dynamic journey towards perfection. The 14th century Franciscan Angela of Foligno, for instance, recounts that in mystic union she sees herself as wholly fulfilled: “Moreover, in that state I see myself as alone with God, totally cleansed, totally sanctified, totally true, totally upright, totally certain, totally celestial in him.”11 The confidence that we are capable of such perfection, whatever our current state, is central to medieval mystical and contemplative accounts of self-knowledge. Indeed, an honest assessment of self and our place in the created world is what grounds such radical reports such as the following, again, by Angela of Foligno: “On one occasion, when I was in that state, God told me: ‘Daughter of divine wisdom, temple of the beloved, beloved of the beloved, daughter of peace, in you rests the entire Trinity; indeed, the complete truth rests in you, so that you hold me and I hold you.’” (Memorial IX). This intimate and reciprocal experience of divine union is a far cry from self-abasement or annihilation, and yet it is made possible by the humility that results from self-knowledge.

2. When Self becomes God Self-knowledge is often portrayed in the contemplative tradition as important preparation for experiencing God’s love in its most perfect form – and, thus, as important preparation for mystical union. In this section, I turn to a closer examination of the self in that union. Mystical union is often described in terms of self-loss or erasure, but many figures in the medieval affective tradition also speak of retaining a sense of self even as they become one with God. In what follows, I examine what seems distinctive about this second sort of mystical union before moving (in section 3) to showing how such union is portrayed as having transformative effects for the subject, particularly with respect to practical and theoretical knowledge.

11 Memorial IX, in Angela of Foligno: Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance, O.F.M. (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), 215.

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To appreciate the relevant differences between apophatic or self-abnegating union and what I’ll call ‘affective’ or self-preserving union, it’s helpful to look at a few examples.12 Angela of Foligno describes frequently experiencing the ‘darkness’ of God: “When I am in that darkness, I do not remember anything about anything human, or the God-man, or anything which has a form. I see all and I see nothing.”13 When she tries to speak about this sort of union from “outside” the experience, however, she complains that the words she uses “come nowhere near describing the divine workings that are produced in my soul.” In fact, she says, “My statements about them ruin the reality they represent.”14 This inability to speak accurately about what one has undergone is paradigmatic of apophatic experiences. An extreme form of this first type of mystical union is the radical selfabnegation described by Marguerite Porete in her Mirror of Simple Souls – the longer (and much more infrequently used) title of which is The Mirror and Annihilation of Simple Souls. On Porete’s account of mystical union, not only does the person’s knowledge and will cease to exist separately from God, but individual being itself appears to be transcended. “She retains nothing more of herself in nothingness, because He is sufficient of Himself, because He is and she is not,” Porete writes towards the close of her treatise. “Thus, she is stripped of all things because she is without existence, where she was before she was created.”15 This desire to merge so completely with God that it is as though the individual person never existed also appears in Eckhart’s work and in the work of various other medieval contemplatives as well. In a letter to a fellow beguine, for instance, the 13th century beguine Hadewijch explains that one must lose 12

Bernard McGinn draws a similar distinction–namely, between a type of union in which the soul is “utterly” united to God and one in which the experience is of oneness, but with a remaining ontological distinction–in his chapter, “Unio/Union” in the Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism. We differ, however, in whom we consider exemplars of each type of union. McGinn considers Hadewijch a prime example of the first type, for instance, whereas I think her case is much more complex and that she is actually someone who describes both types at different times; it’s also not clear to me how we should read Mechtild of Magdeburg’s reports along these distinction, whereas McGinn counts her as describing the first sort of union as well. I also do not count Angela of Foligno as a purely apophatic mystic, since she’s careful to herself distinguish between two different sorts of unitive experiences in her mystical life. 13 Memorial IX, pg. 205. 14 Memorial IX, pg. 214 15 Chapter 135, Marguerite Porete. The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. E.L. Babinsky. (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993),

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oneself in love: “For when the soul has nothing else but God, and when it retains no will but lives exclusively according to his will alone; and when the soul is brought to naught and with God’s will wills all that she wills, and is engulfed in him, and is brought to naught – then...the soul becomes with God all that he himself is.”16 This sort of identification of the self with God becomes central to contemplative spirituality in this period.17 It is not limited to apophatic union, however. Although this has gone mostly unnoticed in the secondary literature, more ‘affective’ descriptions of union also frequently employ the language of self-identification with God. Catherine of Siena, for instance, claims that in humble prayer, “grounded in the knowledge of herself and of God,” the human soul is “united with God, following in the footsteps of Christ crucified, and through desire and affection and the union of love he makes of her another himself.”18 At the same time a reference to Aristotle’s theory of friendship (in which the virtuous person considers her friend ‘another herself’) and a comment about our final end, Catherine’s words are carefully chosen to emphasize the sense in which appropriate emotions – e.g., desire, affection, and love – can make us one with God.19 Angela of Foligno also describes this sort of identification with the embodied Christ: “[The God-man] draws my soul with great gentleness, and he sometimes says to me: ‘You are I, and I am you.’ I see, then, those eyes and that face so gracious and attractive as he leans to embrace me.”

16

Letter 17, in Hadewijch: The Complete Works, 90. See, for example, the ‘Sister Catherine’ treatise, heavily influenced by Porete and Eckhart, in which Sister Catherine wakes from a mystical death to proclaim that she has become God. (The treatise can be found in translation by Elvira Borgstädt, in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1986).) For further discussion of the tradition of identifying oneself God, although with primary emphasis on Eckhart, see Ben Morgan’s On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). In his The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300-1500) (vol. 4 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. New York: Herder and Herder, 2005), Bernard McGinn describes this movement as the result of a “widespread yearning to give expression to a new view of how God becomes one with the human person” (87). 18 Prologue to the Dialogue, I. 19 The opening words to the Prologue signal the importance of emotion for Catherine: “A soul rises up, restless with tremendous desire for God’s honor and the salvation of souls.” 17

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The importance of the incarnate Christ for the affective tradition is paramount. Explicitly encouraged to develop a more emotional and embodied piety as a counter to the sort of gnostic tendencies which run through apophaticism, many contemplatives in the 12th-14th centuries describe mystical union as involving Christ’s humanity and co-corporeity. As Angela of Foligno goes on to say, “I am in the God-man almost continually. It began in this continual fashion on a certain occasion when I was given the assurance that there was no intermediary between God and myself. Since this time there has not been a day or night in which I did not continually experience this joy of the humanity of Christ.”20 Thus, although she also has profoundly apophatic experiences of mystical union, the experience Angela has of being one with the humanity of Christ is already unmediated. In general, what I’m calling ‘affective’ or self-preserving union is characterized by an experience of merging with God in which the subject retains self-awareness, as opposed to becoming one with God in a way that involves self-erasure or the complete loss of personal experience. Descriptions of such union often sound highly erotic, partly due to the 13th century popularity of the Song of Songs, and partly for lack of other metaphors that involve two beings merging into one while retaining a sort of separateness. In a letter to a fellow beguine, for instance, Hadewijch describes the “wondrous sweetness in which the loved one and the Beloved dwell one in the other,” in terms of simultaneous self-loss and self-recognition: “They penetrate each other in such a way that neither of the two distinguishes himself from the other. But they abide in one another in fruition, mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, and soul in soul, while one sweet divine nature flows through both, and they are both one thing through each other, but at the same time remain two different selves.”21 The mention of physical (mouth and body) and emotional (heart) as well as spiritual (soul) aspects of the human being is intentional – this union affects every part of the human being, not merely the soul. Significantly, this state of self-preserving union is often portrayed as our final end. (Hadewijch ends the passage quoted above with: “Yes, and [they] remain so forever!”) The 13th century beguine Mechtild of Magdeburg, for instance, who at one point refers to herself as the ‘filthy

20

Memorial IX, 7th Supplemental Step, pg. 205. Letter 9, in Hadewijch: The Complete Works, pg. 66.

21

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ooze’ on which Christ will build his golden house,22 is clear that we will be perfected in both body and soul in the life to come – and is also clear that the incarnate Christ provides the model for our future selves, as well as representing that to which we will be joined eternally. “When I reflect that divine nature now includes bone and flesh, body and soul, then I become elated in great joy, far beyond what I am worth,” she writes. Christ’s humanity is not shed when he ascends into heaven: rather, it constitutes the everlasting bridge between us and God. As Mechtild continues: “The soul with its flesh is mistress of the house in heaven, sits next to the eternal Master of the house, and is most like him. There eye reflects in eye, spirit flows in spirit, there hand touches hand, there mouth speaks to mouth, and there heart greets heart.”23 As with Hadewijch, the reference to physical, affective, and spiritual aspects is highly intentional. Through union with God, every part of the self is transformed and fulfilled.

3. Knowledge as Perfecting the Self This experience of transformation and self-fulfillment has lasting effects on its subjects, who also stress the need for ongoing introspection with their frequent use of the metaphor of the ‘tree of self’. This familiar image, which appears throughout Judaic, Islamic, and Christian religious literature (Psalm 103, e.g., describes the righteous person as “like a tree planted beside the streams of water which yields its fruits in season, whose leaves shall not fade”), is consistently used in the 13th and 14th centuries to demonstrate both the importance and the effects of self-knowledge. In this section, I discuss what this metaphor tells us about the relation between self-knowledge, mystical union, and self-fulfillment, with particular attention to the ways in which mystical union is portrayed as increasing practical and theoretical knowledge in ways that grant their subjects authority to instruct and counsel others. The very first vision that Hadewijch recounts – her initiation into the mystical life – involves being shown the ‘tree of self- knowledge’ by an angel. In her words: “I understood, just as he revealed it to me, that the tree was the knowledge of ourselves. The rotten root was our brittle nature; the solid trunk, the eternal soul; and the beautiful flower, the 22

Flowing Light of the Godhead II.26, in Mechtild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1998), pg. 97. 23 Flowing Light IV.14, pg. 157.

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beautiful human shape, which becomes corrupt so quickly, in an instant” (Vision One).24 The insight that this vision provides her about human nature guides her throughout her mystical life, and inspires her to advise others as well about the importance of self-knowledge for becoming able to fully receive God’s love. She counsels a fellow beguine in words that echo the tree vision: “Even if you do the best you can in all things, your human nature must often fall short; so entrust yourself to God’s goodness, for his goodness is greater than your failures. And always practice…doing your utmost to examine your thoughts strictly, in order to know yourself in all things” (Letter 2).25 Human nature is so ‘brittle’ that we inevitably fail in our efforts to live in union with God; nevertheless, we should continue the practices that make this possible – including rigorous self-examination – in trust that God will assist us in our spiritual growth. Relying on God to provide what introspection tells us we lack in turn yields greater knowledge of God. “May God grant you to know yourself in all things what you are in want of,” Hadewich writes in another letter, “And may you thus attain to a knowledge of the sublime Love that he himself, our great God, is” (Letter 27).26 On this account, self-knowledge thus relates directly to knowledge of God in a way that perfects us (in the medieval sense of ‘perfects’, which entails an ongoing process of completion according to one’s nature). Toward the beginning of the Dialogue, Catherine of Siena also uses the metaphor of a tree to explain the relation between humility, selfknowledge, and love. First, she asks us to imagine a tree with a shoot grafted into its side, and that the tree is growing within a circle that’s drawn circumscribing the area of soil from which the tree gets its nourishment. Next, she advises us to think of our soul as that tree, “made for love and living only by love,” and as the graft as the gift of discernment. The soil that nourishes the tree is humility, and the circle in which the tree’s roots grow and are fed is “true knowledge of herself, knowledge that is joined to me [Truth], who like the circle have neither beginning nor end.” This sort of self-knowledge requires union with God, for “if your knowledge of yourself were isolated from me there would be no full circle at all. Instead, there would be a beginning in self-knowledge, but apart from me it would end in confusion.” The quest for knowledge (of self or anything else) is doomed in separation from God, but when love roots itself in humility and “branches out in true discernment,” we develop 24

Hadewijch: The Complete Works, 263. 49. 26 Hadewijch: The Complete Works, 107. 25

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fruit that serves as “grace for the soul and blessing for her neighbors.” Most significantly, we also attain our ultimate end. When our souls have become one with Love via humility and knowledge of ourselves, we gain union with God: “And so [the soul] does what I created it for and comes at last to its goal, namely, to me, everlasting Life, life that cannot be taken from you against your will.”27 Earlier in this passage, the speaker has also identified itself as Truth; what is being described here is radical selffulfillment as a result of joining with Christ: “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” In some contemplatives, the metaphor of the tree as self is explicitly extended to include fulfillment of the body as well as the soul. Marguerite of Oingt, for instance, a 13th century French Carthusian nun, describes a vision in which she is a withered tree with dry leaves that have the names of the five senses drawn on them. A stream (which she later makes clear represents Christ) then rushes down from a mountain so powerfully that the tree is turned upside down, representing the way in which relation between self and God becomes inverted – but with the result that the tree, rather than being washed away or absorbed into the stream, becomes healthy and green. As she describes the vision (in the third person): It seemed to her that she was in a large deserted open space where there was only one high mountain, and at the foot of this mountain there stood a marvelous tree. This tree had five branches which were all dry and were bending down. On the leaves of the first branch there was written “sight”; on the second was written “hearing”; on the third was written “taste”; on the fourth was written “smell”; on the fifth was written “touch” ...And after she had looked attentively at the tree, she raised her eyes towards the mountain, and she saw a great stream descending with a force like that of the sea. This stream rushed so violently down onto the bottom of this tree that all its roots were turned upside down and the top was stuck in the earth; and the branches which had been bent downwards were now stretching towards heaven. And the leaves which had been dry were all green, and the roots which had been in the earth were all spread out and pointing towards the sky; and they were all green and full of leaves as branches usually are.28

Here, the effect of union with Christ both turns roots into verdant branches and also rejuvenates the body and its five senses. Moreover, as Marguerite makes clear in other letters, this vision takes place in the context of a 27

Dialogue 10, pgs. 40-41. Letters, 66-67

28

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spiritual life in which mystical experiences grant knowledge that she feels compelled to share.29 This causal connection between mystical union and increased knowledge plays an important role in the lives of many female contemplatives. Indeed, the relation between mystical union and subsequent wisdom appears throughout the 13th-14th centuries, and across a wide range of geographic regions, religious orders, and languages (scholastic Latin and a variety of early vernaculars, including Middle English, Middle High German, Middle Low German, Francoprovençal, Old French, and Umbrian and Tuscan dialects). Hildegard of Bingen, for instance, writes in her Vita of a pivotal experience in 1158 that leaves her with both a complete understanding of the gospel of John and the authority to write a commentary on it: Just after this time I saw a mystical and marvelous vision, so that my whole frame was shaken and the sensation of my body was extinguished, for my knowledge had been transformed into another mode as if I no longer knew myself. And from the inspiration of God, drops as of gentle rain splashed into the knowledge of my soul – just as the Holy Spirit inspired John the Evangelist when he sucked the most profound revelation from the breast of Jesus, when his mind was so touched by the holy divinity that he could reveal the hidden mysteries and works...This vision taught me every word

29 See, for instance, the following: “My sweet father, I do not know whether the things that are written in the book are in the Holy Scriptures, but I know that she who put them in writing was one night so enraptured by our Lord that it seemed to her that she saw all these things. And when she came back to her senses, she had all these things written in her heart in such a way that she could think of nothing else, and her heart was so full that she could not eat, drink, or sleep until she was so weak that the doctors thought she was on the point of death. She thought that if she put these things into writing in the same way that our Lord had put them into her heart, her heart would be unburdened. She began to write everything that is in this book, in the order that is was in her heart; and as soon as she had put the words into the book, everything left her heart. And when she had written everything down, she was all cured. I firmly believe that if she had not put all this down in writing, she would have died or gone mad, because for seven days she had neither slept nor eaten and she had never before done anything to get herself into such a state. And this is why I believe that all this was written down through the will of our Lord.” Letters, paragraphs 137-138, from The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic (d. 1310), translated from the Latin and Franoprovençal with an introduction, essay, and notes by Renate BlumenfeldKosinski (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 64-65.

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of the Gospel which treats of the work of God from the beginning and allowed me to expound it.30

These drops of inspiration also, she states, grant her understanding of philosophy as well as theology. Thus, when she expounds on topics usually left to formally educated men, her words are worthy of serious attention because they have been granted divine authority.31 (The fact that her works – and the works of the other women cited in this paper – remain extant demonstrates that such claims were often taken seriously.) Angela of Foligno makes a similar claim about mystical union granting theological understanding. “Because my soul is often elevated into the secret levels of God and sees the divine secrets,” she says, “I am able to understand how the Scriptures were written; how they are made easy and difficult; how they seem to say something and contradict it; how some derive no profit from them; how those who do not observe them are damned and Scripture is fulfilled in them; and how others who observe them are saved by them.”32 In short, in this state, Angela comprehends Scripture from a God’s eye point of view. This comprehension is complete but not lasting, however, in her case. Immediately after mystical union, she says, she can speak truly about such mysteries, but as the experience fades, she loses the ability to put her knowledge into words.33 Yet, as we saw in section 2, she also claims that she is united with the God-man “almost continually” and that he often speaks to her in this state. As with Hildegard and with Hadewijch, Angela’s mystical experiences thus ground the knowledge from which she advises others. Julian of Norwich, a late 14th-century English anchorite, reports being similarly enlightened by the mystical experience she recounts in the Showings of Divine Love. Indeed, she takes the short text of the Showings, which dates to shortly after the experience itself in May 1373, and reworks 30

Hildegard of Bingen Vita II.16, translation by Barbara Newman in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, Mooney, Catherine (ed.) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pg. 25. 31 See Catherine Mooney’s Gendered Voices for a collection of essays exploring this topic. 32 Memorial IX, pg. 214. 33 “When I return to myself after perceiving these divine secrets, I can say some words with security about them, but then I speak entirely from outside the experience, and say words that come nowhere near describing the divine workings that are produced in my soul. My statements about them ruin the reality they represent.” Memorial IX, pg. 214.

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it over the next twenty to thirty years in light of the continued insights that vision continues to grant her. This long text, which is approximately six times as long as the earlier version, is theologically rich, complex, and offered to the reader as the work of an “unlettered” creature whose wisdom comes directly from God. Although she never left the cell in which she was walled up (and we have lost her original name – ‘Julian’ most likely coming from the church to which her cell was joined), her reputation grew to the point where people such as Margery Kempe (the author of the first autobiography written in English) came to visit her to seek counsel on theological and moral matters. Julian’s revelations did not render her speechless, but rather grounded an active ministry. Catherine of Siena portrays the relation between mystic union and increased understanding as an upward spiral: “I have told you this, my dearest daughter, to let you know the perfection of this unitive state in which souls are carried off by the fire of my charity. In that charity, they receive supernatural light, and in that light they love me. For love follows upon understanding. The more they know, the more they love, and the more they love, the more they know. Thus, each nourishes the other.” (Dialogue 85). Earlier, we saw Catherine stress the importance of selfknowledge for engendering the humility and love for God that makes this union possible; here, she explains how the mystical union “in which souls are carried off by the fire of charity” leads to greater knowledge, which in term increases love of God, which increases our understanding of God, and so on. Such union is linked explicitly to perfection and to ongoing fulfillment of self. One particularly striking case of the practical effects of this sort of illumination is reported by Margaret Ebner, an early 14th century German Domincan nun (at the Monastery of Maria Medingen near Dillingen). In her Revelations, she reports an experience that has left her with a gift of “divine understanding”: The next day I was very sick and began to wonder about what was happening to me. I perceived well what it was. It came from my heart and I feared for my senses now and then whenever it was so intense. But I was answered by the presence of God with sweet delight, “I am no robber of the senses, I am the enlightener of the senses.” I received a great grace from the inner goodness of God; the light of truth of divine understanding. Also, my mind became more rational than before, so that I had the grace to

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be able to phrase all my speech better and also to understand better all speech according to the truth. Since then I am often talked about.34

Margaret’s experience here is significant for our purposes along several dimensions. First, she demonstrates self-knowledge at the outset, which allows her to hear God’s reassurance. Second, the reassurance that God is the ‘enlightener’ of the senses (a phrase which also appears later in the Revelations) is followed by a gift of wisdom. That is, God promises to fulfill rather than transcend the senses – a promise that echoes Marguerite of Oingt’s vision of sensory, embodied self-fulfillment. Third, this gift of wisdom is not abstruse or mystical, but is explicitly linked to increased rationality, both with respect to understanding and with respect to speech. She even offers external support for her claims – namely, the fact that she is now “often talked about.” And, as in the case of Hildegard, Angela, Julian, Catherine, and numerous others, her personal report of increased wisdom via mystical union is corroborated by the respect and veneration of the surrounding communities.

4. Conclusion The idea that knowing God requires first knowing oneself runs throughout the medieval contemplative tradition. I began this paper by outlining the connection between self-knowledge and humility, arguing that the humility that results from introspection should be understood in the affective tradition as the ground for mystical union and in the context of eventual self-fulfillment. I then demonstrated that one characteristic of affective union is that such merging tends to restore rather than annihilate a sense of self – a fact which is deeply indebted to the incarnational piety and emphasis on Christ’s humanity prominent in the 13th-14th centuries. 34

Margaret Ebner: Major Works, trans. and ed. Leonard Hindsely (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), pg.100. Margaret reiterates this experience later, and expands it by describing a gift she was given that allows her to tell when someone is telling the truth or not: “The third time it was granted me after matins before receiving the Eucharist – again with great sweetness and with a new movement of interior grace in which many new gifts were given me. I could understand, read, and write what I could not before, as I have already written. In particular, a new understanding of truth was granted me, and with it I can often detect when someone speaks untruthfully in my presence. When that happens I can answer nothing except that I often have to say, “I believe that is not true.” Sometimes I notice that someone intends these things in the heart differently from what comes out of the mouth. Then I respond according to the intention and not to the words.” (155)

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Finally, I examined the persistent metaphor of the ‘tree of self’ and its relation to the flourishing and self-fulfillment that often results from mystical union even in this life. As the affective contemplative tradition makes clear, the beneficial effects of self-knowledge can extend beyond the individual to their broader community, both theoretically and practically.35

35 I would like to thank the Society of Medieval Logic and Metaphysics for inviting me to give the first draft of this paper at their session at the American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting in November 2016, and for the audience’s helpful feedback. I owe Alex Hall my deepest gratitude both for encouraging me to write this paper in the first place, and then for remaining surprisingly patient while I proceeded to change every word of it and to present various different versions of it at five further venues: Shieva Kleinschmidt’s UCS Metaphysics Conference in the philosophy of religion in January 2017, Christia Mercer’s workshop on Rethinking Philosophy’s Past at Columbia in February 2017, Brooklyn College’s Minorities and Philosophy chapter in March 2017, T. Ryan Byerly and Meredith Warren’s Workshop in Religious Experience at the University of Sheffield in April 2017, and Oliver Crisp’s analytic theology seminar on love at Fuller Theological Seminary in May 2017. The feedback I received from those audiences was extremely helpful, and this paper is much better – and much longer! – as a result. In addition to the organizers of those events, I also owe further individual thanks to Helen DeCruz and Bob Pasnau for ongoing discussions on this topic, and finally to Andrew Arlig, for being my professional and personal sounding board.

APPEN NDIX

Volume 14,, 2017 The Proceeedings of thee Society for Medieval Loogic and Meetaphysics (P.S.M.L.M M.) is the pubblication of th he Society forr Medieval Logic L and Metaphysicss, collecting original o materrials presentedd at sessions sponsored s by the Socieety. Publicatioon in the Proceedings consstitutes prepu ublication, leaving the authors’ rightt to publish (aa possibly moodified version n of) their materials elssewhere unafffected. The Society for Medievall Logic and Metaphysics M (S S.M.L.M.) is a network of scholars founded withh the aim of fostering f collaaboration and d research based on thee recognition that t ™ recovvering the proofound metaph hysical insight hts of medievaal thinkers for oour own philosophical thou ught is highly desirable, and, despite the vvast conceptuual changes in the intervvening period d, is still possiible; but ™ this rrecovery is onnly possible if we carefullyy reflect on th he logical frameework in whhich those in nsights were articulated, given g the paraddigmatic diffe ferences betw ween medievaal and moderrn logical theorries. The Societty’s web sitte (http://facu ulty.fordham.eedu/klima/SM MLM/) is designed to serve the puurpose of keeeping each otther up-to-datte on our current projeects, sharing recent r results,, discussing sccholarly questtions, and organizing m meetings. If you are innterested in joining, pleasee contact Gyuula Klima (Ph hilosophy, Fordham Unniversity) by e-mail e at: klim [email protected] © Society foor Medieval Logic L and Mettaphysics, 20117

CONTRIBUTORS

Brian Carl, Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception Enrico Donato, Université de Genève Boris Hennig, Ryerson University JT Paasch, Georgetown University Therese Scarpelli Cory, University of Notre Dame Christina Van Dyke, Calvin College