Why Begin from Nature: Beginnings, Order, and Heraclitus on the Common

Orientation #

He recaps that this is the fourth of the four questions, the natural beginnings of philosophy: two desires (to know the cause, to live well) and two in our knowledge (the natural road from sense to reason “and the before and after along that road”, and the natural understanding of the axioms), “as we saw a few months ago” (prev. lecture). He refers to “the little passage he gave you from Thomas” on the commentary on the Ethics and to a handout of Heraclitus fragments with the Greek below. The previous class treated the order of knowing along the natural road; the next turns to dispositions of will and to defining reason.

The class, in order #

1. Before and after in every education (“what comes before for us is imperfect”) #

Point: in every kind of education what comes first for us is objectively the less perfect, because education is the development of something.

• Graduated exercise (the Canadian Air Force “5BX” plan he still owns): five push-ups produce less strength than a hundred, but a hundred at first would harm you. Shows: the first exercise is less productive in itself, more productive for me now.
• Education of the heart: “what is more lovable to us is less lovable”. Candy loved before wisdom; the boy who thought his father foolish for not filling the refrigerator with soda pop, and now, able to afford it, does not. Shows: sensible good loved before understandable good, because more known to us.
• Private vs. common good: Zhukov to Eisenhower in Berlin (“you work for profit, we for the good of the country: isn’t that higher?”); “Eisenhower was too dumb to know how to answer”. His answer: the common good IS the greater good; you cannot defend profit as greater; but the private good is more lovable to us, so men have to be led from it, and the Russians too appeal to the private good (Order of Lenin, being shot), only less efficiently than profit does.
• The businessman who joins the Chamber of Commerce for contacts and comes to delight in the good of the city apart from his own: “now he’s been morally educated”. Likewise the Christian led from fear of hell to love of God.
• Education of taste: marches (which he still loves) vs. Mozart’s Magic Flute (brother Richard brought it home; first hearing “I didn’t hear anything”, then more each time); Little Red Riding Hood exhausted, King Lear not; Christmas cards with famous paintings one keeps seeing more in; the child prefers his own drawing. Shows: “more hearable / more to be seen” objectively vs. more heard by us at first.
• Plato’s cave: the man coming out is blinded by what is more knowable; the Bible’s “God dwells in light inaccessible”: “too understandable”.

2. The axioms and how everything rests on them (“no one has ever tried to enumerate all the axioms”) #

Point: axioms are many and never fully listed; the most basic (Aristotle) are that something cannot both be and not be, and must either be or not be; even Euclid’s postulates presuppose them.

• Other axioms: the whole is more than the part; nothing is before or after itself (today is before tomorrow and after yesterday, but not before today); nothing is the beginning of itself. “To be or not to be” is a question because of the two basic axioms.
• All right angles are equal (postulate): the definition only says each pair made by one line is equal, not that this pair equals that pair; “how do you know it isn’t like” a line divided into unequal parts? Lay one line on the other: if the lines coincide the angles are equal; if not, one falls to a side, and then one angle is a whole containing the other as part, so greater (whole more than part), yet also equal to what the other equals; “both greater and equal” is impossible. Uses whole-more-than-part and non-contradiction.
• The diameter bisects the circle: students said “by definition”; no, the definition of circle (plane figure with one line, every point equally distant from the centre) and of diameter say nothing of bisecting. Flip one half over: if it coincides, equal; if it falls above or below, the radii are not all equal, against the definition, so “both equal and not equal”.
• Arithmetic: no odd number is even, known by itself; if an odd number were even it would both be and not be divisible into two equal parts.
• Deniers of the axiom of contradiction: those who deny it for a reason (some difficulty they cannot solve) say “it isn’t so because it is so”, i.e. they hold it while denying it; those who deny it for fun are told to step off the cliff, or pull the trigger and not pull it, and “quickly admit that they’re not the same”.

3. Recap and the new question: about ten reasons (“why do you want to come into philosophy”) #

Point: the natural beginnings having been laid out (two desires, natural road, axioms), he now gives reasons for entering philosophy from them: “about ten today”, the first four from the fact that they are beginnings, indeed the very first beginnings; the rest from their being natural. He announces about ten; the transcript contains nine before it breaks off.

4. Reasons 1-2: understanding from the beginning, and order (“will understand it the best”) #

Reason 1: the man who considers something from its beginning understands it best.

• A biography of Churchill goes back to his origin; a history of a country to its beginning; de Tocqueville could understand America better than France because he saw its beginning, and his volume on the Old Regime makes the Revolution “seem like a foregone conclusion”.
• C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: goes back to the origin of medieval romance; “the Renaissance was a ripple” by comparison. Shakespeare’s last plays (the “romances”) go back to the Hellenic romance, the romantic comedies to the medieval romance: seeing each from its origin shows what these forms are, distinct from tragedy and comedy. Reason 2: order is based on a beginning, so an ordered approach must start from the first beginnings.

1. We order events from a chosen beginning: the birth of Christ (2001, 1789, 1776, 1066); an army from the general, the government from the president; memory recovers order by going back to the beginning.
2. Philosophy is a road toward wisdom, and the wise man especially orders.
3. Therefore to enter otherwise than from the natural (first) beginnings is a disordered approach, “most inappropriate”.

5. Reason 3: the beginning is half of all (“the beginning is half of all”) #

Greek proverb, archē hēmisu pantos, often quoted by Plato and Aristotle; Plato says it seems to him more than half. The beginning is like a seed: small in size, great in power, everything else contained in it. Hence “a little mistake in the beginning is a great one in the end”, like the wrong turn at a fork in the road: the further you go, the further you are from where you should be. Begin well and you are helped through all philosophy; begin badly and impeded throughout.

6. Reason 4: judging is by a beginning (“knowledge involves grasping and judging”) #

Point: knowledge is grasping what is said and then judging it true or false; judging is separating true from false by some beginning, ultimately by the natural beginnings, so without them one cannot judge.

• Complaint about modern philosophers: so obscure that grasping takes all the time and none is left for judging; at St Mary’s College a colleague spent the three years he was there figuring out what Heidegger meant by being.
• Euclid separates true from false by definitions, axioms, postulates. “Am I sitting or standing?”: the student separates true from false by going back to his senses, a beginning. The right-angle postulate was judged by the axioms.

7. Reasons 5-6: nature is wiser; the non-natural is acquired through the natural (“giving ear thereto”) #

Reason 5 (from the “royal fragment” of Heraclitus, on which he gave a talk at Thomas Aquinas College): wisdom is to speak the truth and act in accord with nature, giving ear thereto. Nature is wiser than we are; Aristotle: art imitates nature, nature being something of the divine art put into things, so listening to nature is listening to God; even the greatest scientists say so; “only a fool would think he’s wiser than nature”. Not to enter from the natural beginnings is not to listen to nature: “a very important reason”. Reason 6: two propositions: nature is before what is not by nature (natural things can be without artificial, not conversely), and we acquire what is not natural through what is natural.

• Ballpoint pen, hammer, saw: acquired through hands and reason, which we have by nature; the first man used a rock as a hammer and gradually perfected tools.
• Postulates acquired through the axioms; all knowledge by following the natural road; all philosophizing out of wonder and the desire to live well.
• Aristotle’s Poetics: man by nature the most imitative animal, delights in imitations, first learns by imitation (grandchildren imitating the cat, “a very convincing meow”); native language learned by imitating parents and elders; custom and fashion, not natural, arise because man is imitative. So the non-natural presupposes and is acquired through the natural; hence the rest of philosophy through its natural beginnings.

8. Reason 7: the end of philosophy is by nature (“the order of things to their end”) #

Point: we should enter from what is more known to us, and the naturally known is most known; more deeply, the order to the end is the ground of all other order, and the end of philosophy is by nature.

1. Thomas (passage handed out, commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics): the order of things among themselves vs. their order to the end; the latter is more fundamental. Chair: the angle of back to seat (slightly obtuse, not acute, not too obtuse) is on account of sitting; basketball team ordered to winning, army to victory.
2. The end of philosophy is determined by nature: not that nature suffices (you must use reason), but what the end is. Since wonder is the beginning, the end had to be knowledge of the first cause.
3. Theaetetus: Socrates says Hesiod’s genealogy, Iris the offspring of wonder, “wasn’t a bad genealogy”: Iris is messenger of the gods and the rainbow joining heaven and earth (cf. the rainbow in the Old Testament); wonder unites man with God by making us seek cause after cause up to the first cause, which is God.
4. The natural road goes from effect toward cause, from sensing to memory to experience to art or science, i.e. in the direction of wisdom. Student: why then conflicting philosophies? Because they don’t start from the natural beginnings (“Heraclitus talks about that a lot”). Not knowing the end, “the whole thing is cast into chaos”: that, he says, is modern philosophy.

9. Reason 8: the natural is the common (“we should not act and speak like those asleep”) #

Point: only by following what is common can the mind go forward, and nothing is more common than the natural.

• Heraclitus’s fragments (read from the handout when a student asks him to repeat): we should not act and speak like those asleep; for the waking there is one common world, but each sleeper turns aside into a private world; therefore follow what is common; though reason is common, the many live as if having a private wisdom; those who speak with understanding must be strong in what is common, as the city in its law, and more so, since all human laws are fed by one divine law. First sense: the sleeper is cut off from his senses and follows imagination; second: those who follow the private are as if asleep. Round this table awake we know one thing; asleep, many private and possibly false dreams. Truth one, falsehoods many: 2+2 has one true answer.
• Induction, first case, teacher and student: the teacher can only lead by helping the student put together what the student already knows and see something new; so it must be common to both, or else “believe me, because I’m the teacher”. Meno: Socrates says the slave boy knew it all along; actually he was mistaken (doubling the side gives a square four times as big; the diagonal is the side of the double square), but the truth comes out of his own answers. Euclid leads to a new theorem from axioms, postulates, definitions and prior theorems, as he did with the diameter. Student: that was the problem with Parmenides, who “wasn’t saying what was common”; he agrees.
• Second case, equals in discussion: “you’re wrong because I’m right” returned in kind brings nothing forward; only something both know can decide which opinion is true. Aristotle, Physics I, disagreeing with Plato, goes back to an understanding they share and reasons from it.
• Experimental science: nothing actually common, since experiments are not common even to scientists, but they follow Heraclitus as far as possible: Schrödinger’s first condition of an experiment is that it be repeatable with the same results (Professor “Berquist’s lab” unrepeated gets no credit); repeatability is a sign of being able to be common. De Broglie’s wave mechanics mocked as the Comédie Française until Einstein said there might be something in it; the Bell Telephone Laboratories experiment came out as predicted, repeated in Europe. Two hypotheses are decided by an experiment both can perform that they predict differently.
• Nothing more common than the natural, unlike the customary, fashionable, chance or chosen. Greek idios, private: an idiot lives in his own world, not the true one; philosophers not following the common are like sleepers, each imagining his own starting point; modern philosophy seems able to “begin anywhere and go anywhere and end up anywhere”.
• City law and divine law: as the city’s life needs common law, so the life of the mind needs a common basis; the natural law (“don’t kill innocent life”) feeds the speed limit, gun laws, each new invention that threatens life giving birth to laws. Disagreement is inevitable but resolved only by going back to the common; departing from it gives the private, “the false imagination”.

10. Reason 9: everything needed for a good philosopher (“everything that is necessary to be a good philosopher”) #

Point: entering from the natural desires introduces the whole question of the dispositions of will and emotion that philosophy requires.

• Beyond wonder and the desire to live well: love of wisdom (not the same as wonder; he once gave a talk on the difference), humility.
• Empedocles: men live briefly and see a part, yet boast of having seen the whole; boasting is a species of pride “that Gregory talks about”, and a source of disagreement, since it is natural to see a part before the whole. Example begun: Karl Marx, “everything can be explained by the economic production” — recording ends here.

His words #

• more lovable to us / more lovable: the private or sensible good vs. the greater good, in the order of the heart
• axioms: many, never enumerated; the basic two: cannot both be and not be; must either be or not be
• known to itself [ed.: per se nota]: “no odd number is even”
• axiom of contradiction: cannot be denied for a reason without being used
• natural beginnings: two desires, the natural road, the natural understanding of the axioms
• archē hēmisu pantos: “the beginning is half of all”
• grasping and judging: the two things in knowledge; judging = separating true from false by some beginning
• royal fragment (Heraclitus): wisdom is to speak the truth and act in accord with nature, giving ear thereto
• order among themselves vs. order to the end (Thomas): the latter fundamental
• the common vs. the private (Heraclitus): the waking vs. the sleeping
• idios: private; an idiot lives in his own world
• repeatable with the same results: Schrödinger’s condition, the scientist’s substitute for the actually common

Texts #

Read in class

• Heraclitus, fragments on sleeping and waking, the common, and law fed by divine law (his handout, with Greek; verified: “Natural Fragments”, p. 2)
• Euclid, definitions of circle and diameter, postulate on right angles (inferred, Elements Book I)
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, passage on the two orders (handed out; locus not stated) Mentioned
• Handouts verified in the audio: “The Before and After in the Acts of Reason”, p. 7; “An Introduction to the First Road in Our Knowledge”, p. 9
• Plato, cave (Republic, inferred); Meno, slave boy; Theaetetus, Iris offspring of wonder (Hesiod)
• Aristotle, Physics I (disagreement with Plato from a common understanding); Poetics (man the most imitative animal); Aristotle on the basic axioms
• Heraclitus, “royal fragment”; Empedocles on boasting
• De Tocqueville; C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love; Shakespeare’s romances and comedies, King Lear; Mozart, The Magic Flute
• Schrödinger on experiment; de Broglie, Einstein, Bell Telephone Laboratories

His questions #

• How do you know that these two right angles are equal, if the definition only speaks of each pair? By superposition, using “the whole is more than the part” and “cannot both be and not be”.
• How do you know the diameter bisects the circle? (Students: by definition.) No: flip one half over; if it does not coincide the radii are unequal, against the definition.
• Which is more fundamental, the order of many things to their end or their order among themselves? To the end; all other order depends on it (chair, team, army).
• Why do we have conflicting philosophies? (student) Because they don’t start from the natural beginnings.
• Can the teacher lead the student forward without following what is common? No; only by helping him use what he already knows, otherwise mere belief.
• How can two equals who each say “you’re wrong because I’m right” go forward? Only by finding something both know from which to decide.
• Are there dispositions of will or emotion needed besides wonder and the desire to live well? Yes: love of wisdom, humility; list left unfinished.