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Aristotle—Cognition a Way of Being

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 1975

Joseph Owens
Joseph Owens*
Affiliation:
Pontifical Institute, Toronto
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Extract

Explanation of cognition as a special way of being appears in Aristotle without traceable ancestry. Earlier, in Parmenides (Fr. 16; DK, 288) and in Empedocles (Fr. 108; DK, 318), the notion that cognition is somehow equated with the physical constitution of the knower at any given moment had been put forward. But the now rather enigmatic fragments of those thinkers fail to show how this notion foreshadowed any new kind of being over and above the physical. In fact, would it not seem incongruous to use the term “being” for something proposed by them in terms of change? ·

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 1976 , pp. 1 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1976

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References

1 De An., III 8,432b21-23; Oxford trans. Cf. 2,425b25-426a28; 4,429a22-24; a27-29; b30-31; 430a3-8; 5, 430a14-21; 7,431a1-3; b16-17. On 6,430b23-24, see Rodier, G. Aristotle: Traité de l'âme (Paris: Leroux, 1900), II, 485–486Google Scholar; Siwek, P. Aristotelis Tractatus de Anima (Rome: Desclée, 1965), ad loc. (p. 338).Google Scholar

2 De An., I 4,.408b13-15; Oxford trans. Cf. III 8,432a1-3. The agent here, just as in the building of a house, or in weaving, is the composite of form and matter. On the use of the aorist at 431b20-21 to mean a recapitulation that is just beginning, see Ross, W.D. Aristotle: De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 De An., 111,412b4-6. A discussion of the nature of this definition may be found in my paper “Aristotle's Definition of Soul,” in Philomathes, ed. Palmer, Robert B. & Robert Hamerton-Kelly (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 125–145.Google Scholar

4 De An., III 7,431a1-6; Oxford trans. Cf. 5,430a19-21.

5 De An., 111 4,429b5-10; 430a2-3. Cf. Metaph., Λ9,1074b35-36. Norman, Richard “Aristotle's philosopher-God,” Phronesis, 14 (1969), 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, concludes that in separate substance the self-thinking “is nothing different from what we do when we think in the abstract.” This conclusion would seem to require that the Aristotelian separate substances become identical cognitionally with material things, from which they would abstract universal notions.

6 De An., 11 12,424a17-24. On the reception offorms for human intellection, see III 4,429a15-18. On the “proportion” required for sensation, see III 2,426a27-b8. Ross, p. 265, finds logos at a27-28 to mean a relation of percipient to object. However, at a31 it expressly means the sensation that is dissipated by either excess or deficiency in the stimulus. The notion that the specific character of the substance is not attained by the sense is easy enough to understand. The eye, for instance, sees the white grains scattered on the table without discerning whether they are salt or sugar. The point in finding the design apart from the gold or the iron seems meant merely to illustrate the reception of forms by percipients who are physically different from the original substrates of those forms.

7 Within a species the singulars are differentiated by their matter. See Metaph., Z 8,1034a7-8. Reception of a form “with the matter” (De An., II 12,424b3) is not cognitional. The plant, for instance, “becomes warm” when acted upon “with the matter.” It does not perceive the heat. This use of “with the matter” stands in quite apparent contr,ast to “without the matter” (a18-19), and accordingly shows that “matter” in the phrases refers to material possession of form.

8 See Metaph., Δ8,1017b15-16; Z 17,1041b7-28; H 2,1043a2-26.

9 De An., III 8,432a1-3; Oxford trans. Rosen, S.H. “Thought and Touch,” Phronesis, 6 (1961), 132CrossRefGoogle Scholar, rightly designates this assertion as “a passage of central importance.” Both soul and the received form are instruments by which cognitional being for the distant object is brought about in the cognitive agent. What is immediately perceived or known is accordingly the object itself. The difficulty that during the time ofthe transmission of the signals the object may have ceased to exist disappears, for the form itself is timeless and brings the object into new existence in the percipient. The form as instrumental, though, is known only subsequently, through the study of natural philosophy. On the meaning of “form of forms” (432a2) see Ross, p. 309.

10 For references to Aristotle's statements on these media, see Solmsen, Friedrich Aristotle's System of the Physical World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960), pp. 195–196.Google Scholar

11 On this cognitional primacy of the external sensible thing, as developed by Aquinas, Thomas see my article “The Primacy of the External in Thomistic Noetics,” Eglise et Théologie, 5 (1974), 189–205.Google Scholar A very different development of the basic Aristotelian notions, however, may be seen in another medieval thinker, for whom intellection is cut off from the aspect of being: “If the intellect, therefore, insofar as it is an intellect, is nothing, it follows that neither is understanding some existence” — Master Eckhart: Parisian Questions and Prologues, Q. II, trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), p. 51. Eckhart's view is discussed in comparison with modern conceptions of “the negativity of consciousness” by Caputo, John D. “The Nothingness of the Intellect in Meister Eckhart's ‘Parisian Questions',” The Thomist, 39 (1975), 85–115.Google Scholar Caputo (p. 109) explains that for Eckhart the essence of cognitive form “is not to be itself but to let what is ‘other’ or ‘without’ (extra) be.” Instead of cognition as a way of being, the two are set in stark contrast to each other: “To the extent that ‘cognitive being’ is being it is not cognitive; to the extent that it is cognitive it is not being” (Caputo, p. 99). The result is that one still has to face “the fundamental problem, indeed mystery, of knowledge, viz., the problem of how the knower is carried beyond himself into the object of knowledge” (p. 115). Epistemologically, that problem should never arise in an Aristotelian setting.