As a qualification on how we are to understand judgment in Aristotle, please note that, in the kind of analysis which we find in Aristotle and also in the manner of his conceptualization and language, in our acts of judgment thus, a dual nature is distinguished or two natures are indicated in a way which seems to juxtapose one nature with another. Two natures exist instead of one nature. A synthetic, constructive element is alluded to, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an affirmative, declarative element. Hence, questions exist (later questions were posed) which asked if Aristotle was successful in clearly distinguishing between the being of these two different aspects (existing as two distinct elements, each having its own distinct nature).¹ Did he, in fact, clearly distinguish between acts of direct understanding and acts of reflective understanding which exist as acts of judgment since, in Aristotle, judgment engages in two different kinds of tasks. On the one hand, allegedly within our judgments, (1) a composition or a putting together of different concepts occurs or, on the other hand, a separation of concepts when we realize that some concepts should not be combined or joined with each other. If an act of direct understanding (which, as noted, Aristotle conceptualizes as an act of “simple apprehension”) moves through the instrumentality of an imagined fertile, apt image (existing as a phantasm) toward a single, distinct concept or a definition which expresses the fruit or the grasp of one’s prior act of understanding (in Aristotle’s understanding of the nature or the intelligibility of all our direct acts of understanding as we move from the being and the order of sense to the order and the being of understanding: ta men oun eidê to noêtikon en tois phantasmasi noei; the “intellect grasps forms in images”),² a fortiori, if we should speak in this way about the being of a “simple apprehension,” then, to a greater degree, if we are to speak about how two or more concepts can be put together to reveal a greater unity or a link that exists between these concepts (leading to a larger, more general concept), then, in order to identify and to distinguish this species of intellectual act, we should or we must speak about the being of a “complex apprehension.” These exist allegedly as judgments. These judgments introduce an order which should exist among our ideas and concepts. However, if, for us, the intellectual object is not simply the apprehension of a conceptual complex unity but if, in fact, it is an understanding which wants to declare or know about the reality or the truth of one or more concepts (whether we should speak about simple concepts or about complex concepts), then, within this larger, greater, more demanding context, in Aristotle, a second understanding of judgment presents itself to us in terms of how it seeks to posit a relation or a synthesis which has been grasped by us in our prior acts of understanding. The object here is not essentially a synthesis, the apprehension or the grasp of a synthesis which points to a higher or a wider understanding of things but, instead, the taking of an already understood synthesis and further acts which would work toward an act of understanding which can conclude or move toward a declaration of its reality or a declaration of its truth (or which can deny the factuality of its reality or the factuality of its truth). This is so. This is not so. Either way, in affirmation or negation, a truth is known and it is grasped by us as known. In our awareness, a truth is known in terms of its reasonableness or cogency: hence, its being, its reality. The consciousness or experience that we have of evidence points to the being or the reality of a truth and, as an effect which would thus follow from this, with Aquinas, we would say about ourselves that “knowledge exists as one of the effects of truth” [cognitio est quidam veritatis effectus].³ The one comes from the other.

In Aristotle thus, depending on which passages or texts are being studied, a clear distinction does not exist between that which exists as understanding and that which exists as judgment (acts of direct understanding versus acts of reflective understanding) because judgment, in the language of “composition and division,” resembles acts of direct understanding in terms of the unities which are being grasped and understood by them (by our acts of understanding): unities which transcend pluralities and multiplicities as these exist initially among the givens of the data of our sense perception. However, in Aristotle, the being of judgments is such that they also seek to determine if a correspondence exists between that which exists as a form of mental synthesis within ourselves and that which exists as a species of real synthesis within the being of truly existing things (the being of truly existing objects). A real distinction accordingly exists between the type of answer that is given to this kind of question and the type of answer which is given to a question which asks about how concepts can be related to each other in ways that could lead to the understanding and eventually the expression of a new, more general concept.

On the basis then of this real distinction and as a species of new first principle, in the later work of Aquinas and also in the later work of Bernard Lonergan, clarifications were introduced into the thinking and the conceptuality of Aristotle’s analysis in a manner which attempted to introduce degrees of clarity that had not been too obvious to anyone or to most persons who had attempted earlier to read into the corpus of Aristotle’s philosophy in order to find, within it, a coherent understanding about how things exist within the reality of the world within which we all live (a reality which includes the kind of being which we have and which we are as human beings where our kind of being includes the kind of knowing which belongs to us as human beings and which does not belong to other kinds of living being). From an incoherent understanding about the nature of our human judgment (from an incoherent understanding about the nature of our human cognition), we can thus wonder if, for some in the subsequent history of reflection within philosophy, the result has been a defective, incoherent understanding about the nature of existing things where, in metaphysics, we turn to this science in order to move toward a comprehensive or a general understanding about the nature of all existing things qua the nature of being in general as it applies to all things which enjoy some form of real existence. What can be implied about the nature of our world if our point of departure is a particular belief or a particular understanding about the nature of our human knowing, an understanding which could be lacking in the degree of rationality which should belong to it?⁴

1Lonergan, Verbum, pp. 61-62.

2Aristotle, De Anima, 3, 7, 431b, as cited by Sala, Lonergan and Kant, p. 161, n. 72.

3Aquinas, De veritate, q. 1, a. 1, as cited by Sala, Lonergan and Kant, p. 147, n. 71.

4Randall, Aristotle, p. 6.