When a student begins to study Aristotle, he should be very careful not to accept, too easily, the initial judgments of the philosopher. Aristotle, being the master logician, makes it almost impossible for the student to reject his teachings once the initial premises are accepted. If you want to argue against a particular position that Aristotle takes, it will probably be necessary for you to go back and challenge the first judgments from which Aristotle's reasoning began.

I would suggest that the student is well advised to question the very first principles of Aristotle as we begin to present them. We will begin with the analysis of a few philosophical concepts that are taken from the field of logic. First of all, it must be understood that logic deals with the relationship between ideas and judgments as these are formed by our minds. Logic does not formally deal with the world outside of the mind. Please don't misunderstand this last statement. There are many, ma ny practical applications of logical thought to the real world, but the process of thinking logically,is essentially a mental activity.

I

THE THREEE ACTS OF INTELLECT

The following is the classical example of the way of reasoning that is natural to the human intellect:

a is b This initial judgment is called the Major Premise.

b is c This second judgment is called the minor premise.

a is c This is the concluding judgment, or conclusion.

The conclusion is drawn naturally by the human mind, and the act by which this is done is called the act of reasoning. The act of reasoning is the third act of the mind, and is defined, by Aristotle, as the act of the mind by which a person pa sses from already known truths to a new truth.

Why is it that Aristotle calls this act the third act of the mind? The act of reasoning presupposes two acts of judgment. I cannot see the relationship between A and C, except through the judgments that A is B, and that B is C. It follows that the minds activity in making judgments is prior to its activity in reasoning.

There is an important logical truth involved in this point. It is, of course, a fact that in reasoning itself the mind comes to a new judgment, but that act of coming to a new judgment is based on the relationship of two prior judgments. There fore, the act of judgment is simply prior to the act of reasoning. A little later we will ask if there is such a thing as a first judgment that is presupposed to all other judgments, and having answered this question affirmatively, it will become obvious that there must be a first judgment that precedes all reasoning, and is the natural basis upon which all subsequent reasoning depends.

Aristotle teaches that the act of judgment, being simply prior to the act of reasoning, is the second act of the human mind. But why is it called the second act of the human mind. Doesn't this imply that there is a prior mental act, upon which all judgments depend?

In considering the act of judgment, it is obvious that it is not completely simple, but is, rather, complex. It consists of a subject, a predicate and the observation that I must have an idea of A, and an idea of B, before I can come to the judgme nt that A is B.

Repeated in simple language, I must have ideas before I can form judgments, and I must have judgments before I can perform the act of reasoning.

Summing this up we have the three basic acts of the rational mind, i.e. the first act is the act of simple apprehension of an idea; the second act is the act of intellectual judgment; and the third act is the act of reasoning which presupposes the prio rity of the first two acts. (N.B. It is therefore contradictory to demand that each and every judgment made by the mind, be reasoned to from prior judgments.)

II

DISTINCTION BETWEEN AN IMAGE AND AN IDEA

The distinction between an image and an idea. . . .It is most important that, in examining the nature of an idea, you not use your imagination but rather that you function at the level of the intellect. The characteristics of a sense image are that it is particular and concrete, while those of an idea are that it is universal and abstract. Imagining a particular person involves the identification of specific characteristics such as color of hair, skin, eyes, etc. The thinking of the idea "human," i nvolves the intellect abstracting away from all such particular characteristics.

Adler, in his book: TEN PHILOSOPHICAL MISTAKES, asks this question: Is the human mind a single cognitive power, involving the functioning of our senses and whatever follows from their functioning, such as memory and imagination, or, does the human mind have two distinct cognitive powers - the senses and everything to which sense gives rise, on the one hand, and intellect, able to understand, judge and reason, on the other?

Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume represent the first position while Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant and Hegel endorse the second position. While Descartes, Kant and Hegel agree with Aristotle and Aquinas concerning the distinction betwe en intellectual and sensual knowledge, they differ from them insofaras both Aristotle and Aquinas affirm the intellect's dependence upon sense knowledge while Descartes, Kant and Hegel refuse to trust the senses as a source of knowledge.

Aristotle holds that a human being has knowledge of two specifically different kinds of objects. He holds that we have knowledge of sensible objects through the powers of our senses, and intelligible objects through the distinct power of our intellect s. While the senses give us awareness of particular and concrete things around us, the intellect has the capacity to understand abstract and universal mathematical concepts, scientific laws, and such ideas as liberty, justice, etc.

Aristotle argues that these two distinct objects of our awareness, are known by two distinct powers of knowledge, i.e. the senses, with their power of touching, tasting, seeing, hearing, smelling, remembering and imagining, on the one hand, and the int ellect with its activities of abstraction, judgment, and reasoning, on the other.

Since Aristotle is convinced that a person's intellectual knowledge requires the prior testimony of the senses, both he and Aquinas would reject the position of Descartes, Kant and Hegel, all of whom hold that the intellect is an autonomous power of kn owledge independent of sense experience. Aristotle would hold that the extreme position of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, implicitly denies the validity of the human's sensual awareness.

He holds that the intellect depends for all its primary apprehensions upon sense experience, and that, while some objects of thought are purely intelligible, our sense experience provides us with objects that, with rare exceptions, are never purely sen sible. We not only perceive it as this one individual thing, but we also understand it to be a particular thing of a certain sort, i.e. a universal, arrived at by abstraction away from the particular and concrete instance.

For Hobbes, Berkeley and Hume the mind is an entirely sensitive faculty without any trace of intellectuality about it. They would say that our perceptions are miscalled "ideas" and are seen as the immediate object of our consciousness rather than that BY WHICH we become aware of reality.

The critical question can be stated this way: Do we or do we not have abstract ideas as well as sense-perceptions and images? Hume says: "Let any man try to conceive a triangle in general, which is neither ISOSCELES nor SCALENUM, nor has any par ticular length or proportion of sides; and he will soon perceive the absurdity of all the scholastic notions with regard to abstraction and general ideas."

What is said here about triangles can be said in the same of everything else. We are never aware of anything except particular individuals. We do have a name for three sided closed plane figures, i.e. triangle, but we have no idea or understan ding of triangularity as such. Nothing in reality is general. Generality exists only in the words of our language. Universal and abstract ideas have absolutely no existence outside of the human mind. (Note that this goes back to the problem of th e reality of ideas that we have already addressed.) This is the general position called "nominalism," which denies the valid awareness of the universal and with this denial, denies any specifically different mode of knowledge in the human being as compare d with brute animal life.

In denying the reality of intellectual knowledge distinct from the knowledge of our senses, it seems to me that Hume loses the principle mode of distinguishing between the rational animal and the brute.

Both Aristotle and Aquinas, opposing this thought, hold that we, as rational animals, are able to apprehend what is common to two or more entities, or apprehend respects in which they are the same. We, as humans, possess the ability to understanding t he unities underlying a multiplicity of concrete particular things. We understand universal, abstract ideas. To affirm that what is common to two or more things can be apprehended, is to posit an object of apprehension which is quite distinct from the ob ject apprehended when we perceive this or that singular particular as such. That is to say there are objects of apprehension other than perceived particulars. There are ideas.

To say that the objects of conceptual thought are always universals is not to assert that these universals exist AS SUCH in reality, independent of the human mind that apprehends them. The intelligible universals are public in the sense that two or mo re persons can talk about liberty or justice as common objects of thought, or about triangularity and circularity, or about the difference between tree and shrub as distinct kinds of vegetation.

Were there nothing common to all particular instances of a general idea, the instances in question could not be apprehended as particular instances. To apprehend something as a particular instance of a certain kind involves an apprehension of the kind itself.

Darwin's DESCENT OF MAN (1871) rejected the view that man as a rational animal differs radically in kind from all other animals by virtue of the fact that man and man alone has an intellect in addition to senses that humans share with other animals. H obbes and Hume would hold, because of their inability to distinguish between sensual and intellectual knowledge, that humans and brutes differ only in degree and not in kind.

Concluding this reflection, Adler says: "There is no empirical evidence whatsoever that concepts, thus precisely defined, are present in animal behavior. Only animals with intellects, only members of the human species, have the conceptual powers that enable them to deal with the unperceived, the imperceptible, and the unimaginable. The action of the brain is only a necessary, but not the sufficient, condition for the functioning of the human mind and for the operations of conceptual thought."(1)1

III

THE SIMPLE PRIORITY OF THE IDEA OF BEING

OVER ALL OTHER CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OR IDEAS

a.- The general notion of the priority of one idea over another. . e.g. the concept of football player as related to the concept of quarterback. . .the concept of living as related to the concept of nutrition. . . the concept of 1 as related to the con cept of 87.

b.-the dependence of a posterior idea upon one that is prior, e.g. I cannot conceive of the number 87 without the concept of the number 1. I cannot conceive of the various functions of a living substance without the concept of living. I cannot concei ve of the various properties of a physical being (e.g. motion, space, time, etc.) without the concept of physical being.

IV

ARRIVING AT THE LOGICALLY PRIOR

CONCEPT OF BEING AS SUCH

Holding in mind a number of individual people, I can abstract the universal concept of "human." Proceeding in the same manner I can abstract the successively more general and prior ideas "animal," "living," "material," and"BEING."

a.- This concept is simply prior logically to all other concepts.

b.- It is presumed in all other conceptualizations including that of "non-being."

c.- It is most simple and therefore cannot be strictly defined in terms of any other concept.

This concept of "being as such" is the product of an inductive intuition that represents the inception of the intellectual life. It is an intuition rooted in the data of sense experience and most fundamentally in the sense of touch. as the powers of sensual awareness bring us into contact with particular, concrete reality.

This concept is not the object of metaphysics. It is not the concept which makes the metaphysician a metaphysician. It is a concept common to every person who begins to think.

The difficulty arises when the validity of the concept of being is challenged by the philosophers of change, beginning with Heraclitus in ancient Greece, and continuing into the modern era with Hegel, Nietzsche and others. Heraclitus and many moderns t each that the whole of reality is nothing more than a process of incessant change. All is flux. We should note carefully that they are not saying that everything changes. To state their position in this manner would be to presume that things must first be for them, in order to then experience change.

That is the problem. These philosophers are claiming that there is, indeed, no such thing as being; that all is "becoming" and that "being" is an illusion of the intellect and a word that we have to use when we attempt to talk about reality. Plato, attempting to outline this position, has Socrates say in the THEAETETUS:

"I am about to speak of a high argument in which all things are said to b e relative; you cannot rightly call anything by any name, such as great or small, heavy or light, for the great will be small and the heavy lig ht - there is no single thing or quality, but out of motion and change and admixture all things are come to be rel ative to one another, and which "becoming" is by us incorrectly called " being," but is really becoming, for nothing ever is, but all thing s are b ecoming. Summon all philosophers - Protagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, a nd the rest of them, one after another, and with the exception of Parmen ides they will agree with you in this. "(2)1

The consequences of this position should be noted. If I accept the idea that all is flux, it follows that I can never say of anything that it "is." I can never say of anything that such and such it "true." I can never say of anything tha t such and such is "good." I can never s ay of anything that such and such is "beautiful." For th e philosophers of "becoming" in the very moment of sayin g: "A being is what it is," it has ceased to be what it w as. As a matter of fact, for the se philosophers of "be coming," things are not. All that is, is flux.

Heraclitus uses the example of a person seated by a river. The river represents the whole of reality. The man touches the river, withdraws his finger and again touches the river. He will never touch the same water. Likewise, the human mind turning toward the incessant flux which is the whole of reality, will never be able to say what is, or what is true, or what is good, or what is beautiful, because nothing is. All is change.

Since the concept of "Being, as such" is prior to all other concepts, and is therefore presumed in all judgments and in all acts of reasoning, it is impossible to demonstrate the validity of the concept. We come to the concept by way of an immediate i ntuition that is rooted in our sensual contact with reality outside of our minds. As has been pointed out, this concept, from one point of view, is the most obvious and commonplace of all ideas. Without conceiving of "Being," there could be no other con cept, simply because all other conceptualizations presume the concept "Being."

From another point of view, there is an intuition of the concept of "Being, as such," that is extraordinary, and which stands at the very beginning of the discipline of metaphysics. Attempting to make this concept clear, we will follow the teaching of Jacques Maritain.(3)1 He says:

"I have now to deal with being insofar as being, ens in quantum ens. This is the ultimate object to be attained by the intellect, which it attains at the summit of its natural knowledge. . It sets out from being, but from being as it is immedi ately apprehended when the mind first wakes in the sensible world. (Maritain is speaking here of what we have called the "commonplace notion of being." ) That is its starting point. And at the end of its course it arrives at being, but being envisaged in itself, disengaged from its matrix, viewed in its own light and in accordance with its own type of intelligibility. . . .It is real being in all the purity and fullness of its distinctive intelligibility - or mystery. Objects, all objects, murmur thi s being; they utter it to the intellect. . .Being is then seen in its distinctive properties, as transobjectively subsistent, autonomous, and essentially diversified. For the intuition of being is also the intuition of its trancendental character and an alogical value. It is not enough to employ the word being, to say "being." We must have the intuition, the intellectual perception of the inexhaustible and incomprehensible reality thus manifested as the object of this perception. It is this intuition that makes the metaphysician. . . . We are confronted here with a genuine intuition, a perception direct and immediate. . . It is a very simple sight, superior to any discursive reasoning or demonstration, because it is the source of demonstration. It is a sight whose content and implications no words of human speech can exhaust or adequately express and in which in a moment of decisive emotion, as it were, of spiritual conflagration, the soul is in contact, a living, penetrating, and illuminating contac t, with a reality which it touches and which takes hold of it. . . . It is by producing in conjunction with reality a mental word within itself that the intellect immediately attains being as such, the subject matter of metaphysics. . . . .Thus we are con fronted with objects, and as we confront them, the diverse realities made known by our senses or by the sciences, we receive at a given moment, as it were, the revelation of an intelligible mystery concealed in them. . . .it is always,so to speak, a gift bestowed upon the intellect, and beyond question it is, in one form or another, indispensable to every metaphysician. But we must also observe that although it is indispensable to the metaphysician, it is not given to everybody, nor to all those who eng age in philosophy, nor even to all philosophers who desire to be or are believed to be metaphysicians. . . . . . .It is worth remarking at this point that there are concrete approaches which prepare for this intuition and lead up to it. They are differen t paths which, however, it is important to observe, are radically insufficient if we stop short at them but which may prove useful to particular individuals if they will transcend them, if they will go further. Here I will mention three of these. One is the Bergsonian experience of duration. Within limits it is a genuine experience. . . . .Duration is apprehended by an experience of motion in which, on a level deeper than that of consciousness, our psychic states fuse in a potential manifold, which is, notwithstanding, a unity, and in which we are aware of advancing through time and enduring through change indivisibly, yet that we are growing richer in quality and triumphing over the inertia of matter. This is a psychological experience which i s not yet the metaphysical intuition of being, but is capable of leading us up to it. . . . .The German philosopher, Heidegger, assures us that no man can become a metaphysician who has not first experienced anguish, this anguish being understood not only psychologically but also as metaphysically as possible. It is the feeling at once keen and lacerating of all that is precarious and imperiled in our existence, in human existence. As the effect of this feeling, of this anguish, our existence, loses its commonplace and acquires a unique value, its unique., it contronts us as something saved from nothingness, snatched from nonentity. . . .My third example is not a thesis fully worked out, but suggestions put forward in preliminary sketches or in t he course of conversation. Therefore I must speak of it with all due reserve and without committing its author to my interpretation. It would seem that M. Gabriel Marcel is seeking a method of approach to metaphysical being by deepening the sense of cer tain moral facts, such as fidelity. As Heidegger attaches himself to a personal experience, a psychological experience such as anguish, while warning us that he is not concerned with psychology, so the notion of fidelity is here understood in a se nse which does or should transcend ethics and conveys strictly metaphysical value and content. We may observe that the consistency, steadfastness, firmness, and victory over disintegration and oblivion contained in this virtue and suggested by the word f idelity are strictly dependent upon a certain steadfastness in reality itself in virtue of which I dominate the flux of my own life and possess my metaphysical consistence. Therefore, if I rightly understand M. Marcel's thought, if we follow its directi on we shall conclude that a philosophy of life which confuses any self with the flux of my life is inconsistent with the experience of fidelity. The experience, the irreducible reality of what I experience and know as fidelity, is pregnant with an ontolo gical realism.

After all of these reflections we come back to the only idea that serves this most basic of all intellectual discoveries. It is the concept of "Being, as such." It is an intuition of the intellect rooted in the senses and most radically in the sense o f touch. It is something primordial, and very simple, basic, and yet rich. It is indefinable because it is the most immediate concept, and therefore the concept though which I am immediately aware of what is most obvious and yet most frequently unseen. It is the pure activity of being, at once precarious and indomitable. By this actuality of "esse" objects come up against me, and possess in themselves whatever is requisite for this while simultaneously being immersed in flux."

V

THE PRINCIPLE OF IDENTITY

The principle of identity follows immediately upon the idea of being, and is stated as follows: "A being is what it is." A negative statement of it would be: "A being cannot both be and not be at the same time and under the same aspect."