Modern academia exhibits a strange incongruity. The physics professor who assigns Aristotle to her students is a laughingstock, but the metaphysics professor who assigns Aristotle is typical. The ancient philosopher is equally comprehensible in either context. Historically, he exerted at least as much—if not more—influence in the empirical sciences as in philosophy. And in both cases, modern scholars roundly reject his views. Does this make any sense?

I dissent:

The heart of the issue is whether or not these writings represent the best exposition of their position, and whether or not these ideas are worth studying.

For instance, “[r]eading Aristotle and Aquinas at the expense of Wittgenstein and Quine conveys the notion that, despite centuries of development, you really can’t improve on the originals.”  Are Wittgenstein and Quine a development of Aristotle and Aquinas?  This is an assumption sorely in need of proof.  In many respects these thinkers are in conflict with each other.  Does coming centuries after someone you reference and in some respects disagree with necessitate salutary development?  One can believe that we can and do progress in knowledge in philosophy and science and also reject the extreme version of this view: that whatever comes after is always somehow better.

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

This passage in Genesis is often interpreted such that the movement described takes the form of a wind. In a quiet moment this evening I was listening to the wind blow through the trees. We live on top of a hill, and there is usually a breeze of some sort blowing through the Maples and the Pines. What is probably obvious to others occurred to me, as it often does for all of us: for the first time and in a flash. The reason that wind is tied to the notion of spirit and life in so many cultures, religions, forms of art and almost naturally in the thought of countless individual human beings is that the wind can only be known to us through its effects.

We can see the cloud of snow or sand it blows; we can sense the direction the wind is moving by watching it whip a flag or turn a weather vane. We can hear it rustle the leaves of the trees or flap the sails. We smell the scents it carries with it. Yet we cannot see the wind itself with our eyes. This brings to mind the assertion of medieval theology that angels could not be in place like physical bodies are, but rather “an angel is said to be in a corporeal place by application of the angelic power in any manner whatever to any place.” It is in place by virtue of its operation, or an application of its power, not in virtue of a physical body. The reason wind is taken by human beings as analogous to spirit is similar in that for the most part one only knows it by its power, or by its operation on other things we can sense directly. We can feel, see, smell and hear these things, but we are usually certain about the fact that we cannot see the wind itself with our eyes. We only know the wind directly through the sense of touch when it hits our skin.

Even then, we might wonder what the active power is that moves the air, given that we can only feel it through our bodies interrupting its motion. The reason the notion of life is tied to spirit, and that of spirit is tied to wind, is because we have the same question about every living thing around us. No matter how we break down living things physically, we cannot see the inhering, unifying principle within them that makes all their physical parts move and grow (into very determinate and regular forms) with our eyes. Even if one wanted to dispute this, at least no one would maintain that we have seen it yet. (I would argue that the idea we could, in fact, see the principle of life in things as some sort of physical construct, far from being scientific, is a primitive, ignoble, ugly notion whose refutation should be learned at a young age. But that’s another story). We generally and intuitively understand that what we do see moving in living things, whether it be the slow growth of a centuries old tree or a person running a race, are the effects of some interior principle that we are not able to physically grasp.

Sure, we say things like “in the mind’s eye,” and there are deep and weighty reasons for this sort of description, but such phrases are not, strictly speaking, explicating the way in which we grasp ideas. Strictly speaking we do not see ideas, nor do we properly understand them merely by means of a mental picture of some physical thing. In any event, the wind works as a stand in for spirit and life because it is an active force that is hard to sense directly, and is mostly sensed through its effects. We encounter it as a motion in nature that seems to us to be devoid of body, stripped down of physically attached effects growing out of itself, a principle of motion at play that we cannot sense except through the lowest form of sensation (touch), and for which the source of power is puzzling.

When we say the spirit left a man at death, blew over the face of the waters, moved through history, is in the trees, and so forth we are referring to something that we know primarily through its effects.

The endnote (112) to this passage reads as follows on page 352 of the hardcover edition:

The intelligence as such is a certain concrete nature, it is a natural appetite of its proper object, the intelligible. Being, considered as a term of this appetite, has beauty as a transcendental property. That is to say that every being, as an object of intelligence, is beautiful. Consequently, although mathematical being, being only a being of reason, does not at all participate in goodness, and cannot be an object of will, nevertheless it participates in beauty. And thus, like every object of intelligence, mathematical being can be indirectly an object of will insofar as will desires the concrete good of intelligence. In effect, one can distinguish a twofold good of intelligence: the good of the object considered as term of the desire to know for the sake of knowing, which is beauty–pulchrum proprie pertinet ad rationem causae formalis–but it is also the good of the concrete act which entails knowledge in intelligence taken as nature, and this act is an object of will and causes in it this characteristic joy which is as a complement to contemplation. Without being essential to the beauty which is formally in contemplation, delight is a quasi per se accidens. The enjoyment proper to beatitude which consists in contemplation is consequently an enjoyment of the object of intelligence as object of intelligence; this enjoyment, which one can call aesthetic, is the most noble of all pleasures.

If I understand this passage correctly it partly confirms a central portion of my senior thesis at Thomas Aquinas College entitled, “In Defense of Beauty,” but it also challenges and clarifies much of what I tried to say.