On The Basics of The Natural Law
Chapter 1: On Human Nature
Nearly all the philosophers, generally speaking, have included “rational” in their definition of man. Man understands. In case anyone denies it, let us remember that a rational case must be given for the denial to make sense in the first place.
Human nature is, in summation, a rational substance in relationship.
Insofar as a man acts in accord with his reason, he acts naturally, ethically, in a way that is suitable to his own form. Insofar as a man allows his irrational passions to cloud his rational thought processes and the actions which flow properly from them, he thinks and acts in an unnatural way, contrary to his own being.
Man is rational, but he is also vegetative and sensitive. Indeed, man is a hierarchical substance of vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual faculties in relationship. Each of the faculties overlap, from lowest to highest, so that the highest part of the lower faculty enables the lowest part of the higher faculty. The higher the faculty the more it tends towards the universal.
The lowest and most general faculty of man is the vegetative faculty, which is general to all life, even plant life, and is comprised, from lowest to highest, of the powers of nutrition, augmentation (growth), and generation (reproduction). Nutrition first supplies the body with what it needs to function and restores continually what the body has lost. Without the nutritive power other aspects of the vegetative faculty would cease to function and the human body would quickly expire. Augmentation comes next, which informs growth, confers fitting stature, and results in a healthy mature organism. Maturity intern enables reproduction, which confers being beyond the limits of the subjects own body and is concerned with the generation of a new embodied being, a subject exterior to itself. The higher faculties, the sensitive and the intellectual, depend upon the vegetative operations for their existence and subsistence.
The sensitive faculty comes next in the hierarchy of human nature and constitutes the divide between the plant and animal kingdoms. The sensitive faculty is comprised of the five exterior senses, the four interior senses, the power of locomotion, and the sensitive appetites. These faculties are called “senses,” specifically because they are operations belonging to the level of sensitive life and therefore are concerned only with knowledge of particulars. These faculties do not involve reason, which is concerned only with universals.
In regard to the senses, the lowest of the sensibles are those which modify the material aspect of the animal which experiences them. Such are the qualities of heat, cold, dryness, humidity, etc. Such sensibles must be in direct physical contact with an animal in order to be perceived. Thus, the lowest (because it is the most limited and particular) of the five exterior senses is touch. The next level of sensibles also involves a modification of the material aspect of the animal, yet is slightly broader in its scope, in that it involves both touch and flavor. It is taste. Next are the senses of smell and then hearing, which suppose a lesser degree of material affect and which are received from a distance, across an exterior medium. The highest of the five exterior senses is sight, which receives color and light through a medium which is least material. Here, an operation takes place which is most like the intellectual operations. Indeed, numerous are the comparisons between intellectual knowledge and sight, between the eye of understanding and the eye of the body. Over and above the five external senses come the four interior senses.
The Four Interior Senses
Common Sense
Each of the five exterior senses discerns a particular sensible. The eye cannot hear, however, and the ear cannot see, etc. In order to distinguish between sensible qualities then, as between color and sound, since each particular sense cannot move beyond its own scope, it is necessary to posit a common sense, which is able to recognize all sensory stimuli. The common sense therefore comes next and is able to collect, discern, and organize all forms of sensible data ascertained by the five exterior senses.
Representative Sense
It is not enough however, that a living being merely apprehend sensibles. The living being must also be capable of preserving and representing sensibles to itself even when the actual sensibles are absent, lest it would be rendered incapable of satisfying its need by seeking that which it has represented to itself as satisfying. After the common sense then, comes the representative sense (imagination) which gives an agent the power to preserve and represent sensibles detected by the senses even when they are not present in the agent’s immediate stream of sensory perception.
Estimative Sense
Over and above the representative sense (or imagination), we find that some particular sensibles stored are useful, some are harmful, and others are neutral. Man and in many cases animals, can compare this particular knowledge of cause and effect and come to distinguish the useful from the harmful. This faculty is called the estimative sense. It should be noted that the estimative sense is a sense rather than an aspect of the intellect because it is only concerned with particular knowledge, while the human intellect, as we shall see, is concerned only with universals or intelligibility. After the estimative sense comes the fourth interior sense, the remini sense.
Reminiscence
Human beings need to be able to recall those representations which have been apprehended and preserved. This process of recollection, this spontaneous restoration of previously perceived sensibles stored in the representative sense, again becoming the object of consideration, is called the "remini sense.” The recollection of what was useful or harmful, originally generated by the estimative sense, is what causes the remini sense to bring back the representation of a previously perceived object, and when it does bring the object back, it is presented this time in the character of something past—a quite different quality than before, and a very different quality than any of the other exterior or interior senses could achieve on their own. Obviously, the sensitive faculties in man are very similar to the sensitive faculties in other animals. The higher efficacy in man, which constitutes the divide between the animal kingdom and humanity, comes from the intellectual faculty, with which man’s sensitive faculties are in constant contact, and in relation to which their operations are ordered.
The Appetites: Irascible Appetite and Concupiscible Appetite
Loco-Motion
The Intellectual Faculty
The highest faculty in the tripartite nature of man is the intellectual faculty, which includes the active intellect, passive intellect, and will. These powers are called “intellectual” specifically because they are operations belonging to the level of rational life, and therefore are concerned only with knowledge of universals. The intellectual faculty constitutes the substantial divide between man and animal. Animals are limited to knowledge of the particular and material aspects of reality.
With the intellectual faculty comes access to another aspect of reality. In order to fully understand the intellectual faculty therefore we must take a moment to make clear the kind of reality which must exist, for the intellectual faculty to have something to operate upon.
Intelligibles
If we start with the presupposition that intellectual knowledge exists, which we must, lest we involve ourselves in meaningless contradictions (how can one “know” that there is no knowledge, if knowledge does not exist?) we must postulate that some kind of “intelligible” data actually exists that we have access to –a kind of natural internet of which our intellect acts as a receiver.
For intellectual knowledge to exist intelligibles must exist, in reality, in some way, outside our own minds, in subjects themselves. These intelligibles are to the intellect as light and color are to the eyes or as scent is to the nose. Intelligibles compose the immaterial albeit real aspect of reality that is required for knowledge to exist.
Form
The intelligible aspect, technically speaking is called “form.” A form informs the matter in which it resides. It is like a natural html code that composes a webpage. We don’t see the html code with our eyes, but we know it exists because it is the in-“form”-ation upon which the webpage is based. Form is the active and universal aspect of a thing that make is what it is.
Matter
Matter is the particular, material and individualizing aspect of a thing, what it in particular is made of.
Substance, Essence, and Nature
Form and matter come together to compose a substance. Substance is the most basic unit of corporeal reality. The term essence is often used in place of the term substance because as a term, essence refers specifically to all that can be known about a substance. Natural law postulates that even the most basic substances carry within them more information than can ever be abstracted. Therefore the term essence is used to signify our limited access to all the information inherent in a substance. The term nature refers to all the acts which are suitable to a substance/essence.
The Intellectual Faculty Acts upon the Sense-Representation
While the sensitive faculty is concerned with the particular aspects of a substance, its matter, the intellectual faculty is concerned only with the universal aspects of a substance, its form, and the natural acts which enliven it into being.
The intellectual faculty does not have access to the extra-mental world however, as the senses do. The intellectual faculty therefore depends upon the sensitive faculty in order to obtain what it needs to conduct its operations. The process whereby knowledge passes from the sensitive faculty to the intellectual faculty is complex and a full treatment of the subject would be very long. In short however, the process works in the following way.
When an exterior sense apprehends a particular, as the eye would a man playing an instrument in a brown chair for example, the representative sense generates a sense-representation. The particular material objects and their qualities as represented are then presented to the intellect as they were perceived by the eye. Similarly, when the ear apprehends a particular musical note, take C-sharp for example, a sense-representation arises in the representative sense which represents the particular musical note to the intellect. The representative sense similarly represents all information gathered by the exterior senses from the extra-mental world to the intellect. The intellect is only able to naturally act upon that which is presented to it by the representative sense.
Active Intellect, Passive Intellect, and Species
Before moving on, it should be noted that in the case of the senses, the sensible is the active element and the sense, passive. Color impresses itself upon the eyes, sounds impress themselves upon the ears, and objects impress themselves upon the skin. Since intelligibles are immaterial, nothing is immediately impressed upon the senses and therefore nothing is impressed upon the intellect. For this reason, the intellect must contain within itself an active element.
Immediately after the representative sense produces its representation, the active intellect, which is only capable of perceiving the universal, illuminates only the universal aspects of the substance –its form. Once the active intellect has illuminated the form, it abstracts that form, as a warm rubber stamp descends upon its mold, carrying away with it the form of that metal mold. It leaves behind the individualizing and material aspects of the substance (metal mold) however. It only carries away the form of the mold. Abstraction simply means to isolate intellectually the universal aspect of a substance from the particular aspects. In the case of the metal mold, the original metal, its color, temperature, etc. constitute the particular, the form however, which is carried away with the new rubber stamp is the intelligible aspect of what it is.
Here we must pause in order to introduce the notion of species. The element in an object assimilable to thought is its form. However, the original form is not transmitted in total. If it was, the metal mold would lose its shape to the warm rubber stamp. All beings would lose their form to each time an intellect beheld it. Obviously this is not the case. It is therefore necessary to assume that the form of the metal was transferred to the warm rubber stamp, not perfectly and totally, but in a reproductive mode, called its species. The species of the metal mode was transferred.
Species must be introduced into the equation because knowledge of an object is actually the presence of that object in thought. The object however, must not invade upon thought to the extent that it ceases to be thought. The sense of sight perceives stone but it does not turn to stone. The intellect conceives the idea of stone, but does not turn to stone. Instead, it remains what it was and continues to be capable of becoming still other things. Here the problem which species solves emerges. How can a knowing subject become the object known, without ceasing to be itself?
In every order of knowledge there exists a subject, an object, and an intermediary between the subject and object. This intermediary, species, must, without ceasing to be the object, become the subject. The species must not be thought of however as separate from the object. Species is the object, under one particular mode of its being. Thus, objects come to actually exist in thought, through the mode of their species, which is an aspect of form. The whole “objectivity” of human knowledge depends in the last analysis upon this fact, first, because if species were simply conceived of as an intermediary wave of information conveyed off into space and picked up by the intellect, like radio waves being picked up by antennae, rather than the object itself actually existing as itself, under a particular mode of its being, then all our knowledge would cease to deal with external realities and would only deal with representations within our own consciousness. Here we would fall into Plato’s error, which regards knowledge as a science of ideas rather than actual objects. If we follow this error to its logical conclusion, we find a contradiction, in that it would erase all criteria for certitude. Each would be the sole judge of what is true, since under such a system, what matters is what is thought rather than what actually is, outside thought. Such a system would encapsulate the human intellect, in a “windowless room,” so to speak, rather than immersed in the splendor of existence. Knowledge would cease to be true and thus it would cease to be knowledge at all. Since however, we have demonstrative knowledge of things, and not mere opinions, the objects of knowledge must be things in themselves and not mere waves of information, substitutes, if you will, of the objects. Species then, is not what the object knows, but that by which it knows it.
For knowledge to exist, therefore, it becomes necessary for the objects of contemplation to establish an actual presence within thought. Knowledge then is a kind of becoming. Just as food assimilates with the body so too do intelligible realities assimilate to the intellect. It is upon this supposition that the whole notion of objective knowledge hinges. Pieper writes that, “knowledge involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world.” This is what Aristotle meant when he defined the mind as that power which is capable of knowing all things. The Greeks called us micro-cosmoi, tiny beings, in whom the whole of creation could come to exist. Aquinas once remarked that, “The whole universe may dwell in our minds.”
After abstracting the intelligible form or species contained in the particular sense representation, the active intellect, being purely active, cannot impress the universal aspect on itself, so it impresses it on the potential or passive intellect and produces a species impression, analogous to the way in which an active rubber stamp, itself formed by a metal mold then produces an impression into passive warm wax. In this act, the form of the substance becomes the form of the passive intellect, through the mode of its species. Last, the reaction of the passive intellect to the determination by the active intellect produces a “species expression,” as in consummation, and this act renders possible the birth of the universal concept within the whole intellect, active and passive, the formation of the species expression, which is the concept, is called conceptualization and is the first operation of the intellect.
Judgment...to be continued...
Ratiocination...to be continued...
Self-conscious awareness...to be continued...
One The First Concept and First Principle,
On Secondary First Principles...to be continued...
On Tertiary Frist Principles...to be continued...
Theoretical and Practical Reason: Science and Conscience...to be continued...
