GOR: I think we shall do much better for now to stick with the topic of whether Clarke would include cognitional acts, such as acts of direct and reflective understanding, under real being or mental being. For we have not yet reached agreement about it. I shall therefore keep the focus on that question, rather than falling in with your proposal to broaden the discussion by, as you put it, getting “another issue and concern into the discourse” via a consideration of the pages from Gerard Smith to which you refer. The evidence for what Clarke was thinking is in what he wrote, which Smith does not discuss. In any case, I think the evidence provided by what Clarke wrote is sufficient to answer the question with at least a very high degree of probability.
HW: So, I cannot agree with David that a cognitional act of a thinking creature is a real being as opposed to a mental being, as Clarke defines these terms. I say this because I would hold in contrast that cognitional acts are mental beings of the thinking creature who would be a real being in Clarke’s sense. This is because the cognitive act is not present by its own act of existence but by virtue of the act of existence of the human existent or creature.
GOR: We evidently agree that the thinking creature who engages in such cognitive acts as direct understanding and reflective understanding is a real being in Clarke’s sense. So far, so good.
However, you claim in this paragraph that in Clarke’s sense such cognitional acts are mental and not real because they are not present by their own act of existence. However, if we read the whole of Clarke’s account on pp. 30-31 carefully (rather than focusing on, say, just the first part of the first sentence) we find that this claim of yours can hardly correspond to Clarke’s intention, though I would agree that he expressed himself badly.
Let us therefore begin by examining more closely how he introduces on p. 30 of The One and the Many his account of what he means by ‘real being’:
Clarke: “Real Being = that which is present by its own intrinsic act of existence outside of an idea, i.e., is present not just as being thought about, but on its own, so to speak. It is what exists, in the strong sense of the term, and is the ordinary meaning of being unless otherwise specified. It has two main modes: 1) a complete being, or substance which can be said simply to be as a whole entity subsisting in itself and not as part of any other being; and 2) any part or attribute of a real being which cannot be said to be in itself, on its own, but only to be in another, e.g., “He is a kind man.”
GOR: You seem to have read this paragraph very selectively, or at least to be using it very selectively. In characterizing real being in your would-be refutation of David’s conclusion, you took account only of the ‘positive’ characterization of real being in the first part of the first sentence (as ‘that which is present by its own intrinsic act of existence’). You failed to notice, or at least failed to take into account, (a) the ‘negative’ characterization of real being (which follows “i.e.” in that first sentence) and (b) the main divisions and examples of real being he gives. (You also ignore (c) the criterion of action by which real and mental being are to be distinguished, which Clarke treats on p. 31, and to which David appealed in support of his conclusion.)
If that ‘positive’ characterization (Real Being = that which is present by its own intrinsic act of existence) were all there is to his account of the distinction, you would be correct in saying that, in terms of the distinction, cognitional acts such as direct and reflective understanding are not real. And if you also took ‘mental’ in its commonsense ordinary use rather than examining how Clarke actually characterizes it (something I addressed in an earlier post), that might easily reinforce the prematurely drawn conclusion that they are mental..
But, as briefly indicated above, and discussed below, it is far from all there is to his account.
(i) You go badly wrong by overlooking, or at least taking no account of, what Clarke says in this paragraph about the two main modes of real being. The first mode is that of a complete being or substance, which fits the description, ‘that which is present by its own intrinsic act of existence’. But the second mode of real being, Clarke says, is that of “any part or attribute of a real being which cannot be said to be in itself, on its own, but only to be in another, e.g., “He is a kind man.” And this kind of real being, which you ignore, does not fit the description, ‘that which is present by its own intrinsic act of existence’. Here the man’s attribute or property of being kind, his kindness, is not something that can be said to be in itself, on its own, present by its own intrinsic act of existence, but only in (as an attribute or characteristic or property of) the kind man. But it is quite clear that Clarke calls attributes, including this one, real.
In partial defence of your oversight, I think it must be said that, unfortunately and disappointingly, this is a most uncharacteristically imprecise and consequently confusing account by Clarke. The first phrase in his characterization of real being, if taken as definitive of all real being, doesn’t allow for the second main kind or mode of real being he describes and exemplifies further down the paragraph. As another example, when he says on p. 31, during the course of discussing the criterion for distinguishing real from mental being, that “What is real can act on its own..”, his words all too easily convey the impression to the reader that he is thinking only of the first (and most obvious) mode of real being, that of a complete being or substance. This is very careless on his part, and I suspect it is that which has ‘thrown’ you. But whether or not my suspicion is correct, the presence of some misleading phrases in that section of the book (pp. 29-31) on the ‘primary division of being’ hardly seems a good enough reason to ignore or discount the other perfectly clear statements contained in this section and elsewhere in the book, and thereby to misrepresent the distinction as Clarke explains it, for example, by omitting reference to such an essential element of it as the second main mode of real being.
Besides, if we read further and deeper into Clarke’s book, we find (as I did only last weekend—otherwise I would have mentioned it before) in chapter 8 (entitled ‘Self-Identity in Change: substance and accident) a more precise account.
He writes there (pp. 130-131):
Clarke: “We are now in a position to give a precise definition of [substance and accident] in philosophical terms. We notice that the various accidental or non-essential attributes are not the ultimate subjects of predication, as that which exists and acts, in the full sense of the term. They are always in a substance, belonging to a substance as parts, aspects, properties, etc., not as wholes. On the other hand, the substance itself is not in or part of anything else, but is that which exists and acts in its own right, as the ultimate subject of predication, existence, action. All attributes are predicated of it; it is predicated of nothing else (save in a proposition of pure identity or a tautology). It is that which makes a being stand on its own, as a unity-identity-whole. Hence the following definitions:
Substance = that which is apt to exist in itself and not in another (i.e., not as a part of any other being).
Accident = that which is apt to exist not in itself but only in another.
The latter, properly speaking, do not have their own being, but share the being of their substance. Their being is being-in-a-substance; the substance is a being-in-itself. Thus, in ‘This is a man,’ man indicates a substance [whereas] in ‘This man is kind,’ kind indicates an accident of this substance.”
And again (p. 131), “It is not possible for an accident to exist by itself, but only in another.”
GOR: This clear, careful, and more accurate passage on substance and accidents makes it, I would say, abundantly clear that the kinds of attributes that accidents are (and remember that on p. 30 Clarke explicitly classified attributes as real being, even though they do not possess their own intrinsic act of being) constitute them, according to Clarke’s understanding of the matter, as real being rather than mental being. It is not the case that such an accidental attribute of a real being as kindness exists only as an idea in the mind, or only as being-thought-about, which it would have to if it were to count as mental being as Clarke characterizes it.
I prescind from Lonergan’s account of ‘conjugate forms’ (which I imagine you may not accept) but, as regards accidents, I wonder if you would be inclined to follow something along the lines of the traditional Aristotelian scheme of categories, as Clarke broadly does, in accepting quantity, quality, action, passion, and relation as accidents, but rejecting the others in Aristotle’s list on the grounds that they are reducible to relations: see pp. 134-5. In that scheme, action is (and is accepted by Clarke as) a kind of accident, so you might perhaps for that reason be willing to accept that cognitional actions and acts count as accidents and therefore as real.
More specifically, Clarke’s account requires the act or action of direct understanding to be classified as accidental change. See p. 114, where he says:
“Accidental or non-essential change = A transition from one real mode of being to another remaining within the same identical being, i.e., its essential self-identity remaining intact. Example: a man is now hot, now cold; now angry, now happy.”
GOR: Similarly, as a result of a direct act of understanding, one who up to now was puzzled now has an answer—though whether the answer is correct is a further question.
It is, I suggest, only by concentrating your attention on the admittedly careless and confusing initial phrase in the paragraph on p. 30 about what counts as real being, and then discounting the rest of the paragraph, that you can deny Clarke’s otherwise clear position even on p. 30 that attributes of a real being are also real, even though they do not possess their own intrinsic act of being.
But in any case, your argument that cognitional acts must be mental rather than real (as David had concluded) “because the cognitive act is not present by its own act of existence but by virtue of the act of existence of the human existent or creature” clearly does not work.
(ii) What you included in your selective characterization of Clarke’s initial account of his distinction is what I called the ‘positive’ characterization in his initial ‘definition’ of real being. Something else you omitted, and I think this is also a serious omission, is the immediately following negative characterization of real being in the same sentence, which Clarke signals as extensionally equivalent to the positive characterization by the use of the phrase ‘i.e.’:
“Real Being = that which is present by its own intrinsic act of existence outside of an idea, i.e., is present not just as being thought about, but on its own, so to speak.”
The extensional equivalence of the negative characterization should also be clear from p. 30 of The One and the Many, for immediately before his characterization of real being he writes that being “breaks up into two basic irreducible orders: real and mental being.”
Accordingly, for Clarke, all being is either real or mental and, since these two orders are irreducible, real and mental being are mutually exclusive, and “are defined by contrast with each other” (p. 30). Consequently, the ‘negative’ version here of his characterization of real being—as ‘that which is present not just as being thought about’—is simply (with otherwise insignificant verbal differences) the negation of the positive characterization of mental being that follows, namely:
Mental Being = that which is present not by its own act of existence but only within an idea, i.e., as being-thought-about.
This implies that we have an alternative way of identifying the set of things that (under Clarke’s distinction, despite its initially inaccurate description of real being in the first phrase) count as real, namely, as the set of things that aren’t mental.
On this approach, quite apart from the fact that Clarke doesn’t include cognitional acts and actions anywhere in his description of the main varieties of mental being, such cognitional acts as intelligere, the act of understanding, are obviously present not ‘just’, not ‘only’, as being within an idea, or as being thought about. (At least I hope that’s obvious to you—if not we may be in big trouble!)
My act of catching on to something doesn’t occur within an idea. My act of thinking up a hypothesis doesn’t have its being by being thought about—even though the formulated hypothesis is a mental construct and therefore counts for Clarke as mental being. Most acts of insight are not even noticed, let alone thought about, by the one who has them. It’s true, of course, that if I’m into cognitional theory and practising it I might think about the act subsequently and occasionally even catch myself ‘in the act’; but that still wouldn’t mean that the cognitive acts I happen to think about when doing cognitional theory are, in terms of Clarke’s distinction, mental rather than real. For he characterizes mental being precisely as being present only as being thought about. Indeed, if the mere fact of being thought-about made something mental being, it would seem to follow, given that according to his distinction real and mental being are mutually exclusive and irreducible, that we never could think about real being. Those acts of understanding, according to Clarke’s distinction, clearly fall on the real side of the distinction and not on the mental side.
There are further unfortunate consequences of the criterion of real being (taken only from Clarke’s first phrase and not reflecting his account as a whole) by which you sought to refute David’s conclusion with a knockdown argument. Since, on the narrowly selective criterion you used, real being would have to have its own act of existence, then either the division between real being and mental being would fail to be exhaustive or exclusive or such attributes as being tall or being material or being alive would have to be understood as examples not of real being but of mental being. I haven’t come across any evidence to suggest that Clarke would accept either of those consequences.
In short, under the mistaken interpretation of Clarke’s distinction you give in your latest post, with a view to refuting David, the whole distinction seems to fall apart.
(iii) I readily grant you it seems odd and contrary to common sense to divide real and mental in such a way that cognitional acts don’t count as mental being. (When I said earlier that I was puzzled by some aspects of Clarke’s account of his distinction, it was (a) because he had carelessly and confusingly expressed himself inconsistently and (b) because I wasn’t clear why he chose to cast the distinction as between ‘real’ and ‘mental’ being, and I feared the term ‘mental’ rather invited confusion. I was already clear enough, though, about the general thrust of his distinction and its application to cognitional acts such as direct and reflective understanding, and my further reading in The One and the Many has confirmed that, as well as confirming that Clarke is not consistently confused about his distinction.) However odd it may seem to common sense, that is nevertheless the clear implication of what he says as a whole about the distinction in The One and the Many.
This also seems to be confirmed by the way Clarke uses the distinction in his 1992 paper, ‘The “We are” of interpersonal dialogue as the starting point of metaphysics’ (reprinted in 1994 in Explorations in Metaphysics, pp. 31-44). There, in the note immediately preceding the note you quoted in which he details his criticism of Insight on the basis of his distinction between real and mental being, he writes (note 1, pp. 42-43) as follows:
Clarke: “Objects ... which do not themselves exist in actuality are knowable through some connection with something existing, as possibles in their causes, abstractions, hypotheses, etc., in the real act of the mind which thinks them up and sustains them in thought.” (gor: italics added.)
GOR: I take that, together with the account of the distinction in The One and the Many, taken as a whole, as clear evidence that Clarke himself thought that, in terms of his distinction, acts of the mind which think up abstractions, hypotheses, etc., are to be classified as real, while by contrast the abstractions and hypotheses that are thought up are mental. Surely this applies in particular to the acts of direct understanding and reflective understanding, of which the two kinds of inner word are “effect and product” (Verbum, p.23), whereas mental beings “are concepts constructed by us, whose only ‘being’ or presence is their being-thought-about by us, or by some real intelligence” (The One and the Many, p. 44).
Note that, as I said in an earlier post, I have not been concerned to assess the merits or otherwise of Clarke’s distinction, merely to engage in the prior (and not entirely routine) task of understanding it.
Now, if I am correct, where should we go from here?
Back to chapter 2 of Verbum, I hope!
Back to trying to address the issues Lonergan says he is dealing with there, which, broadly, are psychological issues in Aquinas’s cognitional theory rather than metaphysical issues he explicitly said before Chapter 2, in Chapter 2, and subsequent to Chapter 2 that he would postpone, was postponing, and had postponed—you should remember that I have previously quoted or cited several passages showing all this. Back, also, to trying to understand what he says in the course of dealing with those psychological issues in that chapter. If we do that, we shall have some chance of gaining a decent understanding of the chapter. At any rate, we shall not quickly run out of rich matter to discuss!
I have raised a few times in the course of this thread the point that you have seemed resolutely set on bringing to the table your criticisms of Lonergan rather than making a serious effort to engage with the prior task of understanding what he says in Verbum. I have suggested that you have been in too much of a hurry to get to dialectic, so much so that you have tended to skip the work of research and interpretation. This has largely remained so, I fear, despite your reassurances (on 30 December) firstly, that you still agreed we should be trying to come to an agreement on what the issues he was dealing with in Chapter 2 of Verbum actually were, and, secondly, that you accepted that if you were not interpreting him accurately, your criticisms were likely to miss the target. You also at that time accepted my point about your (understandable) temptation to hurry into Dialectic and my statement that “there really is no need to hurry.”
So I once more make a plea: First Things First. Since you have accepted that if you were not accurately interpreting what Lonergan says in Verbum, chapter 2, your criticisms were likely to miss the target, it strikes me as almost inevitably self-defeating for you to continue the policy of criticizing before engaging with at least some seriousness in the work of interpretation.
With regard to Norris Clarke’s distinction between real and mental being, which he made the basis of a criticism of Insight, I have argued before that it has no clear relevance to the prior task of understanding what Lonergan writes in chapter 2 of Verbum, but that it is nevertheless worth discussing in connection with Clarke’s criticism of Insight, though that would be matter for another thread. (If we proceed to such a discussion at some point, it would not be difficult to reformulate Clarke’s distinction to tidy it up and make it consistent with his evident intentions.) As far as I am aware, you have neither responded to my argument casting doubt on its relevance to chapter 2 of Verbum nor otherwise produced any argument to show that it needs to be discussed before we can address the interpretation of Chapter 2. Indeed, it seems to me to have become (though interesting in itself!) a continuing distraction from Verbum, chapter 2, all the more so because (as I suggested and to some extent argued in earlier emails and have argued in more detail in this one) you seem not to have understood the distinction accurately.
In addition to returning to the fascinations of Verbum, chapter 2, I also hope, among other things, to be able to find time this week to respond to your post in which you offer textual evidence to show what you think Lonergan gets wrong about Gilson...
