Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

In his epistemology, Augustine reveals that he can see and has a sense of things, but there can be shadows, he says: “Therefore, we cannot say that the object that is seen generates sense; but it generates a form or its likeness, which is produced in the sense of sight when we feel something by seeing it.” (Augustine, 2008, p. 88), so knowledge is not innate.

Augustine’s example is interesting because he uses the idea of the signet (an imprimatur with a seal, for example), the image it produces: “when a signet is imprinted in wax, the image does not cease to be produced because it is only seen after separation. But because, after the wax has been separated, what has been produced remains, so that it can be seen, it is therefore easy to be persuaded that the form imprinted on the wax from the signet already existed, even before it was separated from it.” (Augustine, 2008, p. 88-89), but if it were liquid it would not remain.

This is how he explains the three forms of vision we can have: “The first of these, that is, the thing itself that is seen, does not belong to the nature of the living being, except when we look at our body. The second belongs to it in such a way that it is formed in the body and, through the body, is formed in the soul; it is formed in the sense of sight, which exists neither without the body nor without the soul. The third is the soul’s alone, since it is the will.” (Augustine, 2008, p. 90), which explains his view of the soul.

Thus, in the metaphor of the signet, a message is only engraved if the Soul is predisposed and thus receives the message (photo above).

Although these three forms of vision coexist, they need all three stages and are concretized in the will, seen as: “the will has such force to unite them both that it not only directs the sense that is to receive the form towards the object that is seen, but, after receiving the form, keeps it fixed on it” (Augustine, 2008, p. 91).

The forms that vision makes concrete on the outside help us not to see the shadows that degrade them, as Augustine puts it: “when he lives according to the trinity of the external man, that is, when he devotes to the things that form the sense of the body from the outside not a praiseworthy will by which he refers to them for something useful, but an unworthy concupiscence by which he attaches himself to them”. (Augustine, 2008, p. 91), so we tend to see shadows.

This is how I can understand the “illumination” of consciousness (Augustine would say divine), where: “… this is how that trinity is formed from memory and inner vision, and from the will which unites them both; the coming together* of these three things into one is called ‘thought’** from ‘coming together’*** .And in all three, not even the substance is different” ¬ (Augustine, 2008, p. 92). 

Thus, Augustinian linguistics is not dualistic, neither immanent nor transcendent.

AUGUSTINE, St. (2008) De trinitate, livros IX e XIII, Transl. : Arnaldo do Espírito Santo / Domingos Lucas Dias / João Beato / Maria Cristina Castro-Maia de Sousa Pimentel, Portugal: LusoSofia:press, Portugal, Covilhã.

¬The notes of the Portuguese translation explain: “coguntur.* cogitatio.** coactus**. The verb cogito, ‘to think’, is formed from the verb ago, ‘to take’, from which derives the verb coagere > cogere, ‘to join’, and the noun coactus, the result of the action of joining: ‘meeting’. Hence Augustine’s conceptual association between thought and gathering.