Ep. 378: Aquinas on God and Mind (Part Three)

0:00 Mark: everybody. Good night.

0:01 Wes: Good night.

0:16 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life. This is still episode 378. We're doing a third part of it reconvening two days later from our lengthy the discussion of God to hit this stuff about free will, mind and feelings. So that's sections 12, 15, 16 and 17 of Timothy McDermott's Oxford's Thomas Aquinas Selected Philosophical Writings. And we'll just see how much we can get done in the next hour. So I know, Wes, you wanted to start on free will, right?

0:51 Wes: Yeah, let's do that. So I think we should start with will as rational desire.

0:58 Mark: Okay, so that's 16. So yeah, will as rational desire is a three page section. I know this kind of connected to what we were talking about last time. We were talking about causality in the proofs for the existence of God. And so there was a question about how things fit together causally and how we fit together in with all that

1:19 Wes: that he begins by talking about activity in natural things. There's a very Aristotelian idea that the good is what all desire. And so we can think of, right, gravity in terms of natural desire when something, you drop something and it falls to the ground. But he wants to start making some distinctions here which will allow us to make room for the idea that we aren't simply being pushed and pulled around by desire, like just like physical objects are pushed and pulled around by gravity.

1:51 Mark: Is it too much to say that in the ancient Greek it would actually be an analytic truth that good is what everything desires. Or is that still substantial? Because, I mean, it sounds like a very substantial and controversial philosophical thesis for us. But if it is just, you know, everything aims at a target. And you know, the Greek word for good is something like target or something like. Or aim.

2:15 Wes: It's not, but it is according to the Platonic point of view, what we believe to be good. You know, that's always the reason for our action. So desire is subordinated to that. But we can have the wrong impression about what is good, right? We could think power is good or wealth is good. So it's not the good per se that desire tends to, but what seems to be good.

2:36 Mark: Right? Which on some philosophical accounts could be the whole origin of why anything would be called good. That Plato's making a substantial claim to say, oh, no, there actually is an objective good that you could be wrong about, as opposed to goods. You know, people desire goods. There are various things that we desire. We call them good. And that is actually the empirical origin of the term good. And it is, you know, a philosophical theory beyond that to say, well, some of you are just wrong. Those are not actually goods.

3:07 Wes: I think that the next move here is to say there's a sort of activity in things that originates in things, but they're not the master of it. If we want to get towards free will, we have to kind of account for something, some sort of movement that comes from the inside, right? But that's not to say that every movement from the inside is going to be free. And so that's what he's going to get into here, page 169 to 70. Activity comes from its form. And if we remember from Aristotle, metaphysics, right, that includes metabolic activity. That includes all the activities that help the thing stay what it is, Being at work, being itself, persisting.

So all of that activity comes from its form. And a lot of it, as we know, is just completely unconscious. It's not only not willed, it's just not. It's not even conscious. So that by itself is not going to be our model of agency. We need something more.

4:01 Seth: Can we pause for a second and talk about just the concept of agency?

4:06 Wes: Well, it's a word that I threw in there.

4:09 Seth: Well, no, it comes up in the text. The translation at least does use the word agent at some point.

4:14 Dylan: Yeah, you're right at the top of page 170.

4:17 Seth: Yeah.

4:17 Mark: In the Arguments for the existence of God section, he used the term agent causation there. So it just could be anything causing anything in anything else. We'll call the cause the first of the two, the agent.

4:30 Seth: And maybe that's what I'm trying to get at is that the concept of free will here is heavily tied to the concept of causality. So you start off with, if you have something which is passive, it has no agency. It's not an agent. It is acted upon by something external from it. Something external causes it to do something. You drop a stone in the river and it sinks or whatever. The stone doesn't have the agency, but it is acted upon from the outside. So it's passive. And what you were just talking about, Wes, was saying, like, anytime there's an external action, any external action on you is an argument Essentially against the concept of free will.

Like, we can't come from that direction and get to a notion of free will, because I think the word he uses is compulsion. But we can't get rid of the notion of causality either in the sense of acting upon. And so there's this sense in which he's trying to drive towards a notion of agency, which is a kind of acting upon. But it's not an acting upon from outside, it's an acting upon from inside. And so that's what makes this difficult. Am I right? Is that right?

5:41 Wes: That's very well put. So I think, Seth, you're getting a very, very important analogy that he wants to make here. And one is between the sensory forms as they get put into us via stimuli, right? So he's. He imagines animals sensing things as receiving forms from external things. These act on their senses, and then there's an instinctive judgment of nature. There's an instinctive response to those forms which you could say is part of the animal form, right? So you get these external forms interacting with the animal form, and then that produces a behavior.

He's going to go on to say a little later that animals do you have a certain kind of agency, just like, you know, Tomasello thought. It's not like it's all just rote reaction. It's not rising to the level of free will. But the analogy I think you're getting at, Seth, is that there's something that in human beings comes from the inside. And that's another type of form. It's not just the form of instinct, the instinctive judgment of nature, not just the form of instinct as defined by us being a certain type of animal. It's the form of a plan or deliberation, something like that, which is on analogy to the craftsperson.

Right. To get back to that famous Aristotelian parallel, it's something that in some sense can come from us in the way that instinct, even though it's in us, isn't coming from us.

7:03 Seth: What I was trying to parse out a little bit was the concept of free will here is not. This is so difficult to talk about. I'm trying to throw my mind back to Arendt, who wrote that brilliant book about the history of the concept of will and all that. But, you know, he's not trying to talk about will in terms of. He's not thinly talking about it in terms of freedom of choice or something like that. It's like free will is having a certain kind of causal agency over yourself.

7:34 Wes: It is ultimately going to be about deliberation.

7:36 Seth: I feel like it's slightly more nuanced and a little richer then. I don't want to just use the words choice and free will and all that because that makes it too contemporary.

7:46 Dylan: In the middle of 170, I guess it's chapter 47, the end of the selection from 47. I think that he gets to just. Intellectual substances move themselves to activity and are masters of their own actions. They therefore have wills. And he starts by going through other forms of ensouledness effectively. But those are all forms of having desires that act effectively as forming things by external agency. External agents are forming them. So I didn't read this as animals having wills themselves, even if they have action. I don't think he went as far as Tomasello would go. Their will is not an agency that's born out of themselves from the inside. It is through actions upon them that then they react to it. Right? So it's like gravity pulling on us is the way food pulls on an animal.

8:42 Wes: Well, he'll say in a different section that animals can make choices between different possibilities. So in some behaviors. Some behaviors are just rote, right? You do a stimulus, and there's only one possible response to that stimulus. Sometimes you can give a stimulus, and depending on different contexts, you can get different responses. He wants to say, but that. Wait until we get to that section. But in this case, you know, he starts out, sensed or imagined forms that move them are not thought up by the lower animals themselves, but received into them from the external things acting on their senses.

And they're evaluated by an instinctive judgment of nature, which I was encouraging us to think about that in terms of one form coming from the outside and interacting with another form, the animal's form, to produce a behavior that cannot be attributed to free will. And then by the time he gets to the end of it. But the understood form by which the intellectual substances are active issues from the intellect itself as something conceived, in a sense, thought up by itself, as we see in the forms that craftsmen conceive and think up and operate according to.

So it's like the difference between, right, DNA is a plan, and in the sense we're governed by that, it's internal and it's a plan. But it doesn't mean that it's our plan. It doesn't mean we're acting freely. Just because we act according to something that's internal. And a plan or a form, there's got to be, in some sense that we have produced the form. The intellect has produced the form.

10:00 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.

10:01 Mark: So he gives that example. If you come up with a plan for a techne, for building something, then you have invented it. You are deciding on, based on this end that you have devised. Or maybe the end was given to you, right? You want a invention to accomplish X, but you have decided what the immediate goal, what the thing you're trying to create, and thus what you are going to do as part of the means ends to achieve that.

10:26 Dylan: The notion of a plan, like Wes gave the example of DNA, but you could have a plan for a house, whatever, and you could talk about that being your end, but exactly all of the actions that have to take place along the way to manifesting even that specific plan, there are a whole bunch of ways to do that. And in fact, like the house plan, one becomes interesting because two people build the same house but have a completely different understanding of why they're doing their individual actions on a given day. Maybe even that they're still building a house, but they have different notion of what the ends are of that activity. So it's still constrained by that plan, but it isn't explaining or articulating the way that agency is working.

11:12 Wes: Dylan, you're making a point that Aristotle makes in the physics that Mark and I were talking about earlier today. I think you're making this point, which is that. And when you're a craftsman, many times we're engaged in lots of activities that are learned and. But they're also habitual. So we're functioning on procedural knowledge, right? So Federer as a tennis player is doing lots of fancy things that he had to train himself to do, and it's part of his craft. And those are forms and he's acting according to those forms and they're internal and they're things that he worked on to get inside him.

But at the point where he's doing that, he's not deliberating on every single movement. So in a strict sense it's not an expression of his freedom, even though it's an expression of craft. So the very same thing, even in our capacity as artists are participating in some form of techne, we're often so into procedural knowledge that it doesn't rise to the level of the exercise of freedom where there really has to be deliberation. I think that's the point of chapter 48 here, where we're looking at different alternatives, different possibilities. And there are different possibilities because our understanding is oriented towards the good in general.

And there's a wide range of things that can fit into that slot. And then we have to make decisions based on context about which good it is that we're gonna choose. And that's where the freedom comes in. And animals are usually much more restricted in that. There's usually not a lot of different alternatives. There's a much narrow scope for what their good is. For human beings, it's very wide. So that's another way of talking about plasticity, let's say.

12:47 Mark: So, yeah, that quote from chapter 48. And just so you know, where are these 47? 48 is because we're no longer talking about the Summa theologica. This section 16 is from the Summa Contra Gentiles from 1264, four years before the Summa Theologica anyway. But whatever judgment of what to do is not fixed by nature. There is freedom to decide. And all creatures with understanding are of this sort. For understanding takes in not only this or that good, but the notion of good as such. So since will is moved by forms taken in by understanding, and what moves and what is moved must be proportioned with one another, the will of creatures with understanding is not fixed by nature on any particular good, but only on good as such.

The will then content toward whatever is presented to it as good, with no fixed imposed tendency of nature prohibiting it. So all things with understanding have freedom of will deriving from understanding's judgment, and that is freedom of decision.

13:42 Wes: Well, there's a really important comparison going on here, right, with sensation and understanding, where in sensation you have a little form photon that goes into the animal, interacts with its instincts, produces a behavior that's not free. And you would think that there's a real problem here in that you have little photons of whatever it is, forms that affect the understanding going in. But we don't want to think that they simply determine the understanding to do one thing or the other. Our response to them has to have a wide range. In other words, so we can't just be pushed around by, you know, sense photons or reason photons. We. There's got to be something beyond that.

14:22 Dylan: Doesn't this align with the Platonic idea that every action is always oriented to the good, the good as such in this case, and that to the extent that you have actions that one would judge are not good, it's because of a misunderstanding of what the good is, or maybe in an Aristotelian way, an inability or some kind of hiccup in orienting towards the good with a capital G. But you're still oriented towards good as such. In all of your actions, there'd be a distinction between those two things. Yeah.

14:55 Wes: I think the place to go for this is 176 and sweet. We don't have a huge amount of time and we can skip past all the preliminaries and get straight into his in reply.

15:05 Mark: We're now moving to a different source, which is Thomas's Public Disputations on Evil, which is a couple years after the Summa Theologica, Actually only a couple years before he died. So I don't know that I was aware of this until I was just listening to a podcast about this, but he died at, like, age 48 or 49. That's that despite his being so, so prolific, written so many more pages than you ever will.

15:31 Wes: Seriously?

15:32 Mark: He was dead before 50? Yeah.

15:34 Dylan: Yep.

15:35 Wes: Yeah.

15:35 Seth: Wow.

15:35 Wes: He wrote on average, like a thousand pages a day. From the age of what? I don't know. I mean, apparently there are millions of words, but, you know, he starts out giving a lot of prebuttals or, you know, give the opposing opinion. Seems like we must be compelled in everything we do. There's no such thing as free will. And then when he gets into the reply, his. The first thing he says, well, if there's no freedom, there's no ethics. And that's kind of a little throwaway remark. But then he really gets into this idea that Dylan was just discussing that basically human. Human tendencies are not fixed on particulars, they're fixed on general forms, and animals are going to turn out to be somewhere in between. So, yeah, I think it's worth running through the particulars of this argument here.

16:19 Mark: I wouldn't mind just throwing in that.

16:21 Seth: Right.

16:21 Mark: He has a lot of reasons to think that, prima facie, our wills are not free. Right. Because Aquinas has this total causal system. So you think something within the causal system, unless you're the unmoved mover, unless you're the first cause, has to be caused, so therefore we're not free. But then he also has the theological thing that, you know, God knows what you're going to do, and then also the sort of Platonic thing of God as the good is there attracting you. And you know what we were just saying of his Platonic doctrine that everybody pursues the good, so does the good, or what we perceive to be the good in any given circumstance?

Does that dominate our minds and just pull us toward it irrevocably? And we were just saying in the previous section, well, no, because we don't always know what that is. We might sort of decide he's going to end up saying like, well, we focus on one part of it or not one part of it. The cake that's in front of me, I know it's going to be delicious. Does that mean I just can't help but eat it? Well, if I really only focus on the deliciousness, then I'm going to feel compelled. But if I focus on the nutritional value or lack thereof, then I'm not going to necessarily be compelled.

So the fact that good is a multivalent thing, that there are a number of ways we could be attracted to different things and you know, let's just figure out how Are you going to think about the thing that's going to determine how compelling it seems to be for you? And the fact that we can make those decisions means that we have that, that's, that's enough to say we have freedom, that we can rationally deliberate between goods.

17:52 Wes: Mark, I think you want to go through all these 23 arguments against free will here. No, I'll just give you my. I will say in light of the fact that you. Yeah, you've given a good summary of some of what's in there. One of them is just this idea that we're creatures of desire and the will is basically a faculty of des passive to the thing that's producing the desire. You know, he gives another point about us living in this deterministic causal order where laws and principles, which he refers to those, the heavens govern things and the will doesn't really fit into that because it would be something outside of the causal order.

Order. It'd be like a miracle. Right. An uncaused, almost like an uncaused type of cause. So he gives a lot of really good, interesting, sophisticated arguments against the possibility of freedom of the will. And at the end of this, he does another point by point rebuttal, as usual, is each, you know, of each one of those. But this part that we're looking at, the reply is just the more general account in between. And at this stage, the beginning of this argument is about the fact that the will is focused on the good in general. And that opens up room to choose between different possibilities.

19:05 Dylan: On the first paragraph, at the beginning, on 176, he does say human beings like other things, human beings originate actions. When I first read that, I thought, isn't he sort of saying human beings have wills just by saying that they're originators of actions?

19:22 Mark: We have wills. Are they free wills? But yeah, sure, okay, fair enough, fair enough.

19:27 Dylan: Further down he's making the point we've been talking about that the forms taken in by mind are general forms covering a number of individual things. So that the willed tendencies remain open to more than one course of action. Actions being individual and none matching the generality of the power.

19:44 Wes: So then he gives like the architecture analogy, right? The form of a house must meet certain requirements. It must provide shelter, for instance. But there are many, many different possibilities for what a house might be. The style of the house, the size of the house, all the rest of the shape. We're bound. If we set out to build a house, we're bound by the general form. Right. If we produce something that actually doesn't provide shelter, we actually haven't produced the house. In a way, once we've taken on that task, we are compelled. We just have to follow the rules and produce something that gives us shelter. But we, the rules don't include am I going to put in shag carpeting now? Is it going to be round or is it going to be square? The rules don't tell me that. And can choose between those.

20:26 Dylan: Yeah. And he has a nice summary of this distinction. I mean just before the part that I read, I think was. I mean the end, I guess. But he says that effectively that natural actions they have a one to one cause and effect. The actions in nature originates from the things form which give them natural tendencies leading to action. And that just as human beings from forms taken in by mind where their will tendencies leading to external activity. That's true and common. But then this last bit where you have actions taken by mind, mind actions don't have this one to one cause and effect relationship.

21:04 Wes: The next part of this is a bit of a complicated type of argument that begins with the difference between what he calls subjective effects on faculties where. Right, so the I might have jaundice or there might be some other organic factor that's making it unhealthy or circumstance that requires us to squint, for instance, or something like that. But that effect on the eye is not the same as the effect of an object on the eye, which is an objective effect. He's going to want to make use of this distinction in trying to get us to think about what free will could be.

21:39 Mark: If we think of the way the soul's abilities are affected in the exercise of their action. The first source of such affection is will. For it is always the ability of pursuing the goal that activates abilities that pursue the means. Is there a jump here? This is. I'm 177 here. That's the note that I had after the part that you just read, Wes. But I'm in looking at this, I'm not actually completely seeing the connection. I mean, I already gave that example of looking at the pie. And so there are things like, well, if I'm really hungry, I'm going to focus on the deliciousness of the pie.

If I am in a more calm, rational tone of mind, then I'm going to be able to focus. So the pie itself has not changed. It is me subjectively that has changed. And is this whole edifice going to be sufficient for us to say, oh, well, the fact that I, I might be hungry on some days and not on other days, therefore I am free when I'm contemplating the pie. The pie does not rule me just because I might change. It doesn't have invariable effects, but it seems like whatever effect it does have is going to be law like and unfree. The pie will rule over those who are in a certain level of hunger.

The pie will not rule over those who. You know that you could sort of do sub laws. It's just that there's not a single law. So for practical purposes, we are free. Maybe that's all we need here.

23:01 Seth: Yeah, I struggled with the objective aspect of this argument as well. Versus subjective. Is this an argument like basically saying, it's not always this way. Will can be compelled by the object or by an object, but it is not always compelled by an object. So is that just him opening the door to the possibility of freedom of the will with respect to the object? It's confusing to me. I'm sorry.

23:31 Wes: I initially took him to be giving us an account of something like reason and responsiveness, such that it's not like when I see an object on my desk. It's not like someone has put a gun to my eyes head, my eyes head. He's put a gun to my eyes head and said, you know, you're going to see this now because I'm compelling you, because it's perception and it's actually my sensitivity to the world and something true about the world. And that openness to the world is more than a compulsion. And, and likewise, when we reason about things and deliberate to come to some course of action, there's a sense in which I am compelled by reason.

Right. If I know all the information and I know what's good for me, then it's an algorithmic. What I should do just spits out of that algorithm. But being compelled by reasons is much different than Being compelled by some internal organic factor. In other words, it's much different than saying, well, my brain compelled me to do it as if I didn't deliberate in the first place. So it's kind of, it kind of goes towards Korsgaard saying to really understand morality in action, we have to get into the first person point of view. We can't simply abandon it, even if we know that it's underwritten by the brain and things that we might take a third person point of view towards and say, oh, everything is compelled.

24:56 Dylan: The follow up here is explicating that subjective portion is really the opening for deliberation, which is really the engine of the will. The will moves itself by way of deliberation. The will does not compel itself to will. So the activity of willing is via deliberation.

25:16 Seth: And another aspect of that is the deliberation is I want this. What's the best way to get it? And so the will moves by deliberation, by calculating essentially how to achieve it, its aim. He distinguishes here between the will and the understanding. And the will doesn't prove right. It's not a truth mechanism. It just deliberates on alternative options for achieving a goal.

25:42 Wes: Yeah, so we get this dichotomy between objects affecting the mind and then the will affecting or initiating other faculties like thinking or deliberation. So there's a sense in which the mind is passive and even the good, which is primarily an object of the will, is filtered through the mind, through the understanding. So we are affected by the good as an object, almost like a sense object. And then that arouses the will and then we get this thinking deliberative process. So he'll say the will itself kind of moves itself into this deliberative process. Although I think actually that may not be true, but we'll get to that.

26:25 Dylan: Well, it says the will moves itself by way of deliberation. Yes, a kind of investigation which doesn't prove some one way correct, but examines the alternative. The will doesn't compel itself to will.

26:37 Mark: Before that he says, I think, because I want to. So I think that tells me that you start the deliberation of your own accord.

26:44 Wes: Well, later on I think he's going to say, this is why I got confused. I do think he's going to say we can't get into this infinite regress, where I say I'm willing myself to will. At some point we are just responding to a stimulus and we don't have any control over whether we start that process. But once it fires up once the engine gets running, even if it's because of an external stimulus that we have no control over, then we can find some scope of freedom within that. But that's a bit later here. I think it's enough to know that this deliberative process, you know, we're given a.

An end in a way, a goal in the most general sense. So it might be happiness. Like that's the one goal we're all compelled to seek. We don't have any choice. It's not like some people want happiness and some don't. So there's no free will about that particular goal. But then we have to choose these sub goals that might get us to happiness. In other words, we have to choose means to that end. And that's where free will starts coming into play.

27:40 Mark: Is this all compatible with what Plato just told us in the Laws with the gold thread is that we have desire on one hand and thumos on the other hand. We have these things, but then we have this sort of willing myself to will and playing the two off of each other. That is this is this slender golden thread that is pulling us. I don't know. At least that image that he put there is jiving with this.

28:03 Wes: To me, on 178, the willing of the medicine is thus preceded by deliberation, which has itself issued in turn from the willer's will to deliberate. Again, it does sound like he's saying we will ourselves to will, but he is going to qualify this later. The will moves itself by way of deliberation, but yeah, right, so the larger goal is to become healthy. And then we say, okay, medicine is the means to that. I'm going to take my medicine and that's the product. That's what the deliberative process can do for us. If we had a bad deliberative process, we might say, oh, I'm just going to sit on the couch and eat chips, I want health. But I am not reasoning very well.

28:46 Mark: Well, this infinite regress thing is like the next sentence. It hasn't always been willing deliberation. So something must have moved it to will deliberation. And if that was itself, then deliberation must have preceded that movement too. Preceding that deliberation, yet another act of will. This can't go on forever. So we're forced to admit that in any will that is not always willing, the very first movement to will must come from outside side, stimulating the will to willing. And I like that stimulating because that is very much compatible with the oak tree or the acorn grows to the oak tree because of its own internal telos, but it needs a stimulus.

So sure, that's fine if, you know, to become free we need to be the sort of animals that are capable of being free and who get up in the morning and eat a nice breakfast. And this gives me the strength to be able to deliberate and act in a non animalistic way.

29:40 Wes: But the stimulus also is just. It could be a desire, right? And this is a point that anti free will people are very fond of, including Sam Harris makes a big deal out of this is that this kind of infinite regress idea where, well, it's not really free because it just bubbles up from the brain or it bubbles up from a stimulus, right? To truly be free, I would have to have actually initiated my own willingness, but I didn't initiate my own willing. So you can't say I'm free. That kind of idea still has some currency, I think, and I don't think it's right. But here we see that Aquinas understands this, that the ignition to the willing process is not our own freedom, it's not our own free will.

30:20 Dylan: The way I understood this ignition is, you know, the kind of stimulus that you have. You know that the engine for this is a kind of, for lack of a better term, a difference detector that we have. Our minds are sensitive to difference, mind are sensitive to things, difference between what we perceive and what we expect to have happened. And that engine of how those things align. You know, the next section, whether things are like one another or not. And that judgment, that judgment of likeness is born out of an engine of difference.

30:53 Wes: And a lot of this is perceptual. If we weren't running around getting simulated by sense perceptions, we wouldn't have any decisions to make. And we don't just pull decisions. We don't pull the deliberation process out of our ass, so to speak. It's got to be motivated by something, right? As Hume would say, there's got to be. It's got to be connected to our effective life. That doesn't mean that it can't be free, but it's got to be. It's somehow got to be connected to all this other stuff that we don't think of as particularly free. But in this next section he's going to get at another aspect of the openness of freedom or our openness and how it relates to freedom, which is that we have to make this application to particulars, into particular contexts.

And I'm taking context here, right? So he'll he'll say, well, are we going to choose pleasure or are we going to choose health? And so that's the circum. He uses the word circumstance, right? What's good and appropriate in a given circumstance and the circumstances. Circumstantial thing is the circumstance is whether we're thinking in terms of something that's pleasurable, which is a variety of good, or something that's healthy, which is another variety of good. And those two things may conflict. And so we have to get into this deliberative process because.

So, because good means different things in different contexts. That's part of why deliberation is important and how it is that we can be free and deliberating. This is very reminiscent of Korsgaard's normative points of view, normative povs by which we might endorse one action or another. And she suggests, you know, we inhabit all the different points of view and see if they line up right. I'm wondering whether it's good to do a thing. I might look at it from the standpoint of pleasure, look at it from the standpoint of health, look at it from the standpoint of any of these other circumstances or contexts.

And if I get full alignment, then ding, ding, ding, I should do it.

32:44 Mark: So it looks like we've gone to bottom 179. When the disposition to see something as good and appropriate is innate, not subject to will, will is compelled to prefer it in the way that everyone naturally desires existence, life and knowledge. But if the disposition is subject to will and not innate, some acquired disposition or passing emotion disposing us to see something in these particular circumstances as good or bad. So maybe it's circumstances, not context. Then will won't be compelled by it, since the disposition can be removed and things seen differently. For example, someone can calm down his own anger so as not to judge something while still angry. Yeah. So the conclusion. Sometimes the will can be compelled by an object, but not always to exercise its act.

33:24 Wes: It can never be compelled and just to continue on, that something apprehended to be good and appropriate in any and every circumstance that could be thought of would, to be sure, compel us to will it. And this is the reason human beings compulsively will total happiness. So you can't say I choose happiness of my own free will. That is the final goal that is fixed. It's not variable between people.

33:46 Mark: I mean, Cioran might disagree.

33:49 Wes: He just being miserable is what made him happy. Being was his happiness staring into the void.

33:55 Mark: Shall we spend a Little bit of time here. Not more than 10 minutes on the mind and feelings, or are we just saving this for a potential supporter only? Dylan Free, Part 4.

34:08 Wes: We can look at mine if you guys want.

34:10 Mark: We did this second because we wanted to make sure we hit the free will stuff. But in some ways it's very preparatory. So in this mind section, a lot of it is just. Is mind active or passive? Matter is what makes things passive. So this is all, again, Aristotelian sort of stuff. And there's quite a lot of talk about potential and actuality and things like that that you made me very curious again, to remind myself of what we said in our Aristotle's De Anima and Metaphysics episode. And what is the conclusion, though? It's the. On 149.

34:48 Wes: Yeah, there's a paradox, right, with the mind, which is that it's got to be passive in a sense, but we don't want it to be passive, as in the way that passions are passive. Like we just get affected by something. So he gives these three different senses of what passivity might mean. And in the strict sense, it means going from good to bad. There's a kind of loss in it. So maybe going from health to sickness. And then in the less trick sense, we might lose something whether or not it's a good thing or not. So we might lose our sickness and gain, get health.

That's another form of loss. But it's loss of something bad. And then we get this third kind, which is going to be the type of receptivity that the mind has, where you. You can actualize a kind of potential in the mind, the potential to understand something, but it doesn't involve a loss. So it's passivity without the pure passivity of the type that occurs, for instance, with the senses.

35:52 Mark: I mean, again, the voice of Cioran is in my head of like, yo, you had this nice Buddhist empty mind. And then. And then you started learning stuff about Thomas Aquinas and you just lost that purity. And

36:07 Wes: the human mind has the potential to understand, and then that's actualized. You know, it's. When we do understand something, it's actualized, but it doesn't mean that we. But what's the case of actualization with loss? Maybe that will help to illustrate this.

36:25 Dylan: You mean something that actualizes but then becomes less of what it was before?

36:30 Wes: Yeah, some forms of actualization, you're losing something because you're transitioning out of the previous state. But I forget what he says about this.

36:40 Dylan: A caterpillar turning Into a butterfly, or is that too complicated of an example?

36:45 Wes: I think that might be too complicated.

36:47 Mark: A nose, it's full of gunk. Once it's lost the gunk, then it can breathe freely. It's actualized as a nose, even though it generated that gunk. Like that was part of. I don't know. I don't know what a good example of what you're asking, Wes.

37:01 Wes: Yeah. I can't remember what would count as a good example of that. We're trying to emphasize this point that he emphasizes, but it's that there's actualization without loss. Yeah. It's hard to make sense of why that's important if we don't explain how actualization usually involves loss. In the end, he'll say, right. Human minds are sheer potentials of understandings. They're basically tabula rasa, which later become actual understanding after acted upon. So passive in a sense, but without loss.

37:27 Seth: Well, he says that the transition from potentiality to actuality, from potential to actual, is an undergoing. And things that undergo things are passive in that sense. But what distinguishes the understanding is it's immaterial and imperishable. So maybe. Wes, I don't know what the example is. You're trying to think of a transition or a transformation with loss, but that would ultimately be embodied. There would have to be some bodily aspect, because for there to be loss, it would have to be in something that has the ability to be diminished. And the understanding is not that sort of thing.

38:09 Wes: That's very good. Yeah, that's the main point. Right. So even if you're getting healthy, you're losing something, you're losing the sickness in a way, that is actualizing a potential, but it leaves behind the state.

38:22 Seth: It actualizes a potential, but in the process of actualizing a potential, it also essentially effaces or erases or transforms an actuality into something else or makes it disappear.

38:33 Wes: Exactly.

38:34 Seth: Whereas a pure potentiality of understanding becomes an actuality. And there's nothing loss of another actuality by gaining that particular actuality.

38:42 Wes: Am I. Am I not losing my ignorance? Seth? Is that not a.

38:48 Seth: I'm not.

38:49 Dylan: I thought that the small discussion of evil was bringing up the point that some things are only determined by their lack, not by their actualization. Right. So there's some things that. That can be actual. And there's a distinction between someone that's merely characterized as a lack. So it's not clear to me that all of those cases of. Is becoming healthy. Really, the progressive balancing of becoming less unhealthy so that I'm actualizing unhealthiness in a certain state. And then as I get healthy, I'm more actualizing my healthiness. I don't know that that's right. Even the way he's thinking about it. Certainly it's not the way evil works.

39:29 Wes: Well, I think it really all comes down to this tabula rasa idea where the potentiality involved in having a mind is much different than other types of potentiality. So that when it transitions to knowledge, it's not like other transitions in which there's loss. And that really is weird when you think about it. And it's related to this again, this idea of being open to the world in this particular way. The fact that it's. It involves representation, I think, but. So I think it's an important idea. It's hard to express, but it's very important.

40:05 Mark: So let's just get to the conclusion. It's hard for me to see what the real import of this is. He'd been asking, do we need an agent sense? And says, we actually don't need this. Since things outside us are already actually able to be sensed. Our sense powers are all receptive powers. Our intellectual powers are part active and part receptive. If there's no agent, there's nothing that a disposition in the receiver can do. I'm not even understanding my own notes here.

40:33 Dylan: That's on page 149.

40:35 Mark: Yes, exactly.

40:36 Wes: Yeah.

40:37 Dylan: Which.

40:37 Wes: So these are. Yeah. Specific rebuttals to the first bullet points. The against that. So the first rebuttal. Right. The against that had said, well, mind is immaterial, matter is passive and form is active.

40:49 Seth: What's the question that's being posed here?

40:51 Dylan: It's the existence of the agent mind. Right. The conclusion of this is that the mind is an active agent. Right. So at the top, just before the hence says our minds need to have a power to make things actually understandable by abstracting their forms from their material conditions. And this is why we have to acknowledge the existence of an agent mind. And then in the third hence, given an agent, of course, its imprint will be received into different things in ways determined by their different dispositions positions. But if there's no agent, there's nothing disposition in the receiver can do.

Now, the natures of the things we sense don't exist as actually understandable anywhere in nature, since those things exist in matter. So the immateriality of a receptive mind is of no use to understanding without an agent mind to make things actually understandable by a Process of abstraction. So there's no such thing as understanding unless you have an agent mind.

41:50 Wes: We've skipped into Article 3. Or maybe I'm just not following.

41:54 Dylan: I just read the whole of Article 3.

41:56 Wes: I was back on Article 2 looking at that. Hence. But I don't know which one Mark was thinking of here.

42:02 Mark: It was that one. Yes. What is disposition? The function of disposition in a mind. By talking about an agent mind, we are setting up ourselves for the free will thing, right? That if the mind were merely a passive, a link in the great chain of being, then there would be no room for rational deliberation to put a temporary stop to the pull of necessity such that we could be reason responsive.

42:27 Wes: The ultimate point of this section is that we need an agent mind to. To abstract form from matter. Right? Do you remember that in the. In the. In reply. So it's a weird idea. I mean the forms are not understandable until the understanding does this abstraction process.

42:44 Dylan: And that requires an agent mind to actively do that.

42:48 Wes: So it's not like we're a piece of wax and we're getting forms stamped on us. I don't really know how that fits with Aristotle. It seemed to me Aristotle, it was like the form was pressing itself on a piece of wax. It was kind of a.

43:01 Mark: This is what I remembered from the De Anima discussion is that the mind is the form that uses all the forms, right? Just like the hand is the tool that uses all the other tools. So that the mind does not just make itself. The sense organs shape themselves. The eye might literally turn red when you see a red thing or it becomes. Some part of. It becomes circular when it sees a circular thing. But the mind is not like that. The mind is more flexible. So this is I think capture a different way of capturing. So I think what he's saying is entirely compatible with Aristotle here.

43:36 Wes: I mean he makes a distinction with sense where things outside of us are quote, already actually able to be sensed.

43:42 Mark: Yep, yep.

43:43 Wes: It's such a weird idea. But they're not actually able to be understood in the sense that they're only potentially able to be understood. And we have to actualize need that age in mind.

43:56 Mark: Is this an intellectually satisfying point to end on? Because that's what we're doing. Any closings here from this? Three hours of chatting.

44:07 Wes: I really like Aquinas, but I know I'm not in the majority.

44:11 Mark: I mean, I'm not giving up on him. It is interesting to me insofar as Aristotle is interesting to me. And I'm Also fascinated by the way in which Aristotle gets slightly simplified and disseminated. So Porphyry, I know, is another one of these figures that, like, was very, very, very widely read because that's how people got their Aristotle. But I don't know anything about. So it's a big gap in my own knowledge. And yeah, the medievalness. So I was on the lookout for the Averroes Ibn Rushd, as he's referred to in here, Averroes references, because I think that's the next guy that we would read on this within that stream.

And when we're not talking purely about God, it's all the better. Right. If we can actually talk about psychology and free will and, you know, other things that maybe have more resonance to us than arguments for the existence of God, then that's another reason to find this worth your time for me.

45:11 Wes: Yeah, but you have us do all these religious read. I don't really get it. All these religious readings which aren't even that philosophical. You seem to like them.

45:20 Seth: If this guy wrote a thousand pages a day from, you know, age 14 to 49 or whatever, surely he's written something that would be that we don't have to, like, rehash the same old. It's like, oh, isn't this a clever version of the medieval appropriation of Aristotle? Oh, isn't this a clever variation on Neoplatonism? It's like.

45:45 Mark: But I think that's what he saw and that's what philosophy saw itself as doing at this time, that it was beholden to authority and tradition in a way. And so it is just a matter of, here's what this wise person says and here's what this wise person said, and let's sort between them and come up with a way that can still acknowledge that everybody was wise.

46:07 Wes: But yeah, that's not my experience of reading him, that that kind of stereotype. And I think the. The guy wrote the introduction to this book agrees with me.

46:15 Mark: I should read these.

46:16 Wes: Of course, he isn't. He's an Aquinas scholar, so of course would have to say that. But yeah, I don't think it's just Aristotle, regurgitation or adaptation. I think this stuff is quite brilliant, actually. And it's making me rethink my automatic rejection of medieval philosophy as something that's interesting to do. We should do more of it. I've always had the stereotype of it being boring and rehashed Aristotelianism and then at best, arcane philosophy of language and, you know, more analytic than the analytics. But this I actually think is quite brilliant.

46:48 Mark: So I am looking forward to our future discussion on Dylan's return from his trip of Aquinas on ethics and law. However, we're going to have a few detours before then. We've had Peter Adamson from the History of Philosophy without any Gaps podcast on a couple times I reached out to him. They put out another book capturing the Africana philosophy stuff. And just like we had Karyn Lai on after they had done the Chinese one together. The co author of this whole series is Chike Jeffers. And so in consulting with him, he has picked out some things in ancient Egyptian philosophy for us to look at.

So this might be. Maybe it'll be too religious, maybe it won't feel like it connects with anything that we discuss in any other philosophical context. Or maybe we'll find it is one of the, you know, the top five ancient civilizations that people learn about in grade school. So I would love to hear what their philosophy was.

47:47 Wes: Yeah, in quotation marks.

47:48 Mark: Broadly speaking, that's one of the things that we can discuss. So check that out. You can Again, email us paartialexaminedlife.com