Understanding

Use in the book

Socrates allows that the saying about like may be wholly true while “we do not understand.” The verb locates the possible failure in interpretation rather than immediately in the poets’ words.

This charitable starting point leads to the proposal that “like” really means good people, since bad people are inconsistent. The ensuing examination shows that a more favourable interpretation still requires testing; understanding an intended meaning and accepting it as true are different achievements.

Places to read

1. 214bἀλλ’ ἡμεῖς οὐ συνίεμεν — But we do not understand.

Use in the book

The account introducing Empedocles’s verses treats blood as an instrument of understanding. The quoted lines then identify thought with blood around the heart. The reader should distinguish the commentator’s instrumental formulation from the more compressed poetic statement it introduces, rather than flatten both into a single proposition.

Places to read

1. I.49.53.11Blood and heart are discussed in relation to the instrument and occurrence of understanding.

Translation in this edition

“Understanding” is clear here. It need not carry the specialized sense assigned to a different Greek cognitive term elsewhere.

Use in the book

Understanding is not merely an inward report about an absent world. An act of it is described as the soul’s presence with its object, allowing the person to participate in distant creatures and events. Its activity gives the soul form and employment; capacities become perceptible through what they know.

Traherne therefore makes mature understanding necessary to assured enjoyment. A person may receive beliefs through implicit faith while not yet seeing the glory of the things believed. The aim is not to discard belief but to deepen it into a perception as compelling as familiar light. The understanding must also discern value and relation: knowledge that leaves the knower indifferent has not reached the form of communion the book seeks.

Places to read

1. I.55The presence of understanding reaches beyond bodily place and present age.
2. II.76An act of understanding is the soul’s presence with its objects.
3. II.84The perfected soul becomes an act of knowledge and wisdom.
4. IV.6Mature understanding grounds assurance and full enjoyment.

In this edition

Understanding can be singular as a faculty or as its activity. “Full assurance” in IV.6 is argued through apprehended excellencies, not offered as a synonym for unexamined certainty.

Use in the book

Empedocles does not present a single technical mental noun with one English equivalent. B 4 asks the hearer to know an account once it has been sifted through the inward parts. B 5 shelters what the editor calls doctrines within a speechless breast. In B 172 learning increases the phrenes, while Love must be looked on with noos. B 110 asks that the objects of instruction be secured beneath the prapides. These several images make understanding an inward reception and transformation of what is heard.

They also frustrate a sharp modern division between bodily metaphor and literal mental theory. Elsewhere, B 105 identifies thought with blood around the heart, and B 107 associates thinking, pleasure, and pain with the constituents out of which things are formed. The linguistic evidence here should be read beside that physiology, but not collapsed into it: a mention of prapides is not a concealed exact name for cardiac blood, and every invocation of phrenes is not an anatomical proposition.

The imagery can rise to divine knowledge. B 129 praises a man for wealth of understanding and his capacity to reach across many human lifetimes. B 134 calls its non-anthropomorphic divine subject a sacred phrēn, whose thoughts dart through the ordered whole. The same general field thus accommodates human inwardness and divine comprehensiveness without proving that their modes of knowledge are identical.

For a reader moving among fragments, the safest procedure is to ask what the mental term is doing locally: receiving an argument, holding teaching, recognizing a power, or naming the divine subject. An English index under “mind” alone would conceal that variety; an insistence that every Greek term names an entirely distinct faculty would impose a system not stated in the surviving verses.

A further distinction is essential. B 103 says all things have thought, B 107 says the fitted constituents enable thinking, pleasure, and pain, and B 110 ends by assigning all things a share in thought and intelligence. These are wider claims than B 105's location of human thought in blood around the heart. Their scope should not be narrowed to human minds, but “all things” also does not supply a detailed account of the experience of every stone, plant, or root. Modern labels for universal consciousness can indicate a question; they cannot substitute for what the verses actually specify.

Places to read

1. B 4.2–3The account is sifted through inward parts.
2. B 5Safekeeping takes place within a speechless breast.
3. B 17.14, 212Learning enlarges the mind and Love is recognized with mind.
4. B 110.1–2Instruction is to be fixed beneath close-packed understanding.
5. B 134.4–5The divine subject is called a sacred mind.
6. B 103Thought is ascribed to all things in a statement involving Chance.
7. B 107Fitted constituents are linked with thinking, pleasure, and pain.
8. B 110.10The final line assigns all things a share in thought and intelligence.

Translation in this edition

“Mind,” “wits,” “understanding,” “breast,” and “inward parts” translate an overlapping vocabulary. These English words should neither erase the Greek's bodily register nor import a separable Platonic soul. The physiological claims of B 105–108234 require their own contextual treatment.