Touching on the Matter of Touch

A severely edited post from several years back, now with artificial illustrations. 

Thomas suggests that each of our senses is a kind of touch ordered to different objects, and why not?

All the other senses are based on the sense of touch.... Among all beings which have sense perception, man has the most delicate sense of touch.... And among men, those who possess the more refined sense of touch have the best intelligence.

So, who touches the most wins?

Not necessarily, because while there is knowledge in the senses, this knowledge can never be known by the senses. 

The eye, for example, sees color as a consequence of touching photons. But the eye has no idea of this. It cannot abstract from the colored shapes it apprehends, and know, for example, "redness." Nor does it know what it sees or even that it sees.

In short, the eye cannot reflect upon what it sees, much less on the meaning of sight. These latter reflections are wholly immaterial processes, whereas objects of the senses are material, e.g., surfaces, air vibrations, lightwaves, etc. 

Notice, however, that we still had to deploy a concept rooted in materiality -- reflection -- in order to make the point. The eye sees reflections of things, and our mind transposes this material process into a higher key in order to conceptualize its own functioning, which is again immaterial: senses reflect things, and thought reflects upon what is sensed.

Insofar as humans are concerned, we occupy an ambiguous space in the cosmic scheme between.... Or rather, between, full stop. The Great Between is necessarily a relation between perception and intellection,  or materiality and abstraction from it.  

It seems that this relational space is also a kind of stage upon our freedom plays out. Here is how Thomas describes it:

To judge one's own judgment: this can only be done by reason, which reflects on its own act and knows the relation between that upon which it judges and by which it judges. Hence the root of all freedom lies in the reason (emphases mine).

Well, good. This implies that freedom itself occupies the ambiguous space between our judgment and that which it judges. 

Oddly enough, this seems to mean that the purpose of freedom is its elimination (or collapse, so to speak) via judgment of what is. Thus, judging wrongly about what is can never be true freedom, but enough about the left.

Of course, we all know that keeping an open mind is a good thing, but not for its own sake; rather, the purpose of an open mind is to close it upon arriving at truth. Chesterton makes this same point:

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Now, for Thomas, "the truth or falsity of an opinion depends on whether a thing is or not." So, when we reach what is, we ought to shut our mouths. Then chew and digest -- or assimilate -- it. Which is again borrowed from a material process, but isn't that the way it is? 

The intellect is (potentially) in conformity to everything that is. At the same time, nothing in existence conforms to the infinitude of the intellect, for which reason Thomas says

This ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge.   

This infinite object of knowledge is also the object of infinite knowledge, which is to say, intelligible being.

There is nothing quite like a Principle for tidying the Intellect. About them, Thomas writes that "The principles of reason are those which are conformed to nature," i.e., to the nature of things. 

In a word, to reality.

How do we know a Principle when we find one? For the simple reason that "it is not even possible to think it can be false" (Thomas). They are self-evident, meaning that they cannot be understood without being believed (in other words, supposing you understand them, your mind spontaneously assents to them).

We ought to shut our minds on the principles of being, one of which is the principle of non-contradiction, which is equally the principle of identity. 

This may not sound like much, but it is the root of anything we can say of being and reality: a thing either is or is not, and these are truth (if it is) and falsehood (if it is not). 

Bottom line: being is, and we can know it. This reduces to absolute intelligence and infinite intelligibility, so keep chewing