7.3 Thinking about SCG 1,44–71
7.3 Thinking about SCG 1,44–71
If you take Aquinas to be wrong in what he says about divine simplicity, you will think that there is little of value in SCG 1,44–71. That is because so many of its arguments presuppose that God is simple in the way that Aquinas takes him to be in SCG 1,16–25.
Again, you will find SCG 1,44–71 totally misguided if you are a thoroughgoing materialist and suppose that knowing or thinking or understanding is nothing but a material process undergone by particular physical things.
Yet again, you will reject SCG 1,44–71 if you are a philosophical idealist, if you think that there are no material things and that all we can know is our knowing, not things existing apart from us.43 That is because Aquinas’s account of knowledge in people arises because of an encounter with things in a material world, things that exist apart from us that can be known for what they are.44
I have already commented to some extent on Aquinas on God’s simplicity, and this is not the place to try to adjudicate between philosophers of mind who disagree about whether knowledge is material or between philosophers who argue as to whether or not there is a material world. Yet, if nothing else, Aquinas’s account of God’s knowledge strongly coheres with much that he has previously said in the SCG. Indeed, it seems to follow from what precedes it with a kind of inevitability.
Aquinas clearly has no time for philosophical idealism since, as is evident from SCG 1,13, he takes it as obvious that there is a material world in which various changes occur. While idealists typically hold that all that we know are ideas in us, Aquinas maintains that we know by means of ideas, some of which put us in touch with what is material and distinct from us. So it is not surprising that what we find in SCG 1,44–71 bears no trace of idealism, and it is equally unsurprising that these chapters make the distinctions they do between human knowledge and divine knowledge.
On the commonsensical assumption that there really are material objects, it would seem that we come to know having not started life with any knowledge at all while acquiring it somehow on the basis of encountering things physically, listening to or reading those who have better acquaintance with things in the world than we have, just believing what informed people tell us, or reasoning things out for ourselves. So, given the reality of material objects, knowledge in us arises over time, and at least partly because of the effects in us of what is other than us. Knowledge in us frequently arises on the basis of observation, as when, for example, I see you doing something; so there is often a looking of some kind involved when it comes to us acquiring knowledge. Yet Aquinas cannot think that God has knowledge as we do since he has already denied that there is potentiality in God and since he has already (whether successfully or not) defended the claim that God is the first cause who is not causally acted on by anything.
You might suppose that it makes no sense to say that God’s knowledge differs from human knowledge as Aquinas takes it to do since in “I know” and “God knows” the verb “to know” has to be understood univocally. As I have shown, though, Aquinas thinks that some words can be used analogically to speak of God and creatures. And in SCG 1,44–71 he is providing an account of how this is so when it comes to “knows.” He certainly thinks that there is something in common between knowledge in us and knowledge in God because he takes knowledge to arise as form comes to exist immaterially. So Aquinas takes the move from “God is immaterial” to “God knows” to be a relatively unproblematic one. What he manifestly takes to be problematic is the move from “God knows” to “God has knowledge exactly as people do.”
How unproblematic is the move from “God is immaterial” to “God knows”? A lot here depends on the worth of Aquinas’s claim that knowledge as it actually occurs is nothing but form liberated from matter. Yet there presumably has to be some isomorphism when it comes to what is in me when I know what a dog is and what is there in the dog. And since all that is in a dog would seem to be what it takes for something to be a real dog and not the idea of a dog, and since I am not a dog when I know what a dog is, it makes sense to speak as Aquinas does when he says that to know what something material is amounts to sharing what it is without being the physical thing that it is.
We might, perhaps, try to make this point by focusing on the word “meaning.” What it means to be a dog, say, is just to exist as a dog. So, it is confined exclusively to dogs. Yet I can meaningfully say that dogs are beings of a certain kind. So what it means to be a dog can enter into our world of thought and be expressed by language. We can have in mind what it means to be a dog. Yet our doing this can hardly amount to any of us being a dog, even though all of us can, in principle, understand what a dog is. So what can it amount to if not form or meaning not existing in a particular physical thing?
It would be odd to say that meaning exists in us individually or privately since meaning is expressed in language and since language is something shared. One cannot mean on one’s own as one can brush one’s teeth on one’s own, and one cannot declare that a word has meaning just by personal fiat. Meaning is essentially commonable or shareable. But the things in the world that we understand and can speak about meaningfully are not commonable or shareable. They are what they are as material individuals, and what it means to be them is to be the material individuals that they are. So, insofar as we understand what things in the world are, insofar as these things become part of our knowledge as expressible linguistically, what is in them comes to exist in a way that is not confined to particular physical existence in some physical thing. And Aquinas seems to have recognized this point in what he says about knowledge, form, and liberation from material existence.45
Aquinas believes that some things are purely material, and it never occurs to him to suggest that they have knowledge or understanding. Why not? Because he thinks that their being what they are amounts to them just being physical things having nothing but the material forms that they have. Nevertheless, he believes that some things are not merely physical. People, he holds, can talk, reason, and understand. People, he says, can assimilate other things intellectually without becoming anything other than what they are physically, even if their doing so involves them in somehow physically changing.46 Aquinas expresses this conclusion by claiming that we come to know as the thinkable or the knowable comes to exist in things that can contain in themselves a multitude of material things without being any of them.
You may, of course, think that Aquinas is wrong to make this claim. Yet it is, perhaps, not an idiotic or wholly indefensible one. At any rate, it has surfaced in various forms in the writings of many well-known philosophers. Aristotle defended it, and Aquinas is evidently indebted to what he says about it. But the claim can be seen to be there in what most philosophers have said insofar as they have subscribed to the view that thinking a thought is not a material process that can, therefore, be divided into material parts. Material things with parts go through physical processes that can be clocked. But can thinking a thought, or simply understanding what something is, be thought of as a material process divisible into parts spread out in time? Arguably not. Peter Geach once observed: “One may say that during half an hour by the clock, such-and-such thoughts occurred to a man; but I think it is impossible to find a stretch of physical events that would be just simultaneous, or even simultaneous to a good approximation, with one of the thoughts in the series. I think that Norman Malcolm was right when he said at a meeting in Oxford that a mental image could be before one’s mind’s eye for just as long as a beetle took to crawl across a table; but I think it would be nonsense to say that I ‘was thinking’ a given thought for the period of the beetle’s crawl.”47 Geach goes on to argue that thinking cannot be the activity of the brain or any bodily organ since “the basic activities of any bodily part must be clockable in physical time in a way that thinking is not” and since “no physiological discoveries could establish that thoughts occurred precisely when certain brain-processes occurred.”48 What Geach says here is not offered by him in defense of Aquinas on the immateriality of knowing, but it seems to support it.