Reason as Ability for Large Discourse, Looking Before and After: Defining Reason

Orientation #

He opens by saying they will “explain the rest of the definition” and then go through the questions; he refers back to “two meanings of the word discourse” already mentioned, to Boethius quoted before on singular-when-sensed/universal-when-understood, to the “road from the senses into reason”, and to having earlier defined blank verse through unrhymed iambic pentameter (prev. lecture). He also asks “Did I mention that before?” about “ground” as the English word for cause. The previous class began the reading of the “What is a man” speech and reached the definition of reason; the next takes up Aristotle’s senses of “before”.

The class, in order #

1. The genus: reason is an ability (“the fundamental part of a definition”) #

Point: the first, fundamental word of a definition is the genus, which says in a general way what the thing is; the genus in Shakespeare’s definition is “capability”, which he shortens to “ability”.

• Square: genus quadrilateral, differences equilateral and right-angled complete it. So here “ability” is completed by saying what it is an ability for.
• You know an ability only through what it is for; you do not even know you have one until you do the act — athletes who say “I didn’t know I had it in me”.

2. Two rules for defining an ability (“the utmost of which it is capable”) #

1. An ability is defined by what it is an ability for (Shakespeare’s remaining words all say this).
2. An ability is defined by the utmost of which it is capable:
   • a man who can lift 300 lb but not 301 (the straw that broke the camel’s back) can also lift 100 or 200, more easily; but his ability is defined by 300, since that includes the lesser;
   • a five-minute mile: he can also run it in 10 or 15, but the ability is the five-minute mile. He asks the class to keep both rules in mind for every word Shakespeare uses.

3. Discourse: two meanings, and why reason is defined by it (“it’s an ability for discourse”) #

Two meanings of discourse (from the Latin “to run”, hither and thither): (a) going from one thing to another; (b) coming to know one thing through another — as in reasoning (a statement known through statements already known; Euclid using earlier theorems), defining (blank verse known through iamb, unrhymed; iamb known through syllables and accent), and calculating (an unknown number through two known ones). Since (b) includes (a), reason is defined more by (b), which shows the utmost.

Why “discourse” rather than what reason naturally understands? Student answers: because sense too can do something like that (react to a thing coming at you); and reason uses what it naturally understands to reach what it does not. His development:

1. If nothing were known without discourse, there would be nothing to reason from or define with — so the naturally known is before discourse.
2. But what reason understands naturally is general, “natural”, not very precise; through discourse it goes beyond this, more particularly and more expansively.
3. Even the naturally known (“a whole is larger than its part”) is reached by a spontaneous discourse of sorts, since experience of whole and part comes before the universal.
4. Sign: the act named from reason — reasoning — is a discourse, as tasting is most characteristic of taste. Discourse is broader than reasoning (includes defining, counting, calculating). Aside: Albert the Great describes logic as the art of using what you know to come to what you don’t, dividing it into defining and reasoning.

4. “Large”: six senses under three heads (“the ability for large discourse”) #

He says “large” has about six meanings here: three ways a discourse is large, each with two under it. (My count: 3 x 2 = 6, matching his.)

A. About the large

• A1. About the universal: Boethius, singular when sensed, universal when understood; “no odd number is even” says something about an infinity of things — very large coverage.
• A2. Large vs. small, as in “small talk” (about unimportant things): reason can discourse about great things — the soul, its immortality, the order of the universe, God. Reason can also discourse about the singular and the little, and more easily; but “small discourse” would not give its full ability (rule 2).
• The philosopher’s discourse is larger than other men’s in both senses, the theologian possibly excepted (set aside). The wise man: “we saw that inscription there, the sixth part” [unclear reference in recording] — he talks about what is said of all things and about the first cause, God; so his discourse is the largest of all.

B. Its limit is large (limit said of both beginning and end)

• B1. Large beginning: a “large induction” from many singulars to one universal, simple truth (an expression he finds in other authors).
• B2. Large end: from one simple, very universal truth many consequences or applications — F = ma yields an infinity of accelerations; Euclid’s axioms are used in almost every theorem.
• The wise man again largest in both: the largest induction — he needs experience not just of many singulars but of all the particular parts of philosophy before he can see universally [passage partly unclear] — and principles applicable everywhere.

C. The discourse itself is large, i.e., long (stretching the word, but allowable in Shakespeare’s time)

• C1. Many steps: to show the Pythagorean theorem he knows only Euclid I.47, so forty-six things must come first; the king’s protest and Euclid’s “there is no royal road to geometry” — king, commoner or slave must go through all the steps. Again, reason is more capable of a two-step argument, but the many-step shows the ability; perhaps mathematics is where discourse is longest in this sense.
• C2. Between things very far apart: the first proof of God’s existence goes from motion — the least actual of acts (the part gone by no longer exists, the part to come not yet; no part ever fully actual) — all the way to God as pure act. Thomas sometimes goes from matter, further still, with its ability to be infinitely different things, to God’s infinite ability. Scripture’s metaphors: “The Lord is my rock” — the rock is even further from God than the soul. The wise man especially goes this way: “the books in wisdom” eleven through fourteen, especially eleven and twelve, where Aristotle goes from the most imperfect beings up to God — the longest discourse the mind makes in this sense.

Summary: in at least five of the six senses the wise man’s discourse is largest. Even other parts of philosophy are larger than other men’s discourse: natural philosophy more universal than experimental science, and it treats the soul, a very great thing; ethics treats all the goods of man and man’s purpose (what Socrates and the Athenians disagreed about — the order of all the goods), against cooking or medicine, which deal with one particular good. “So Shakespeare was saying an awful lot.”

5. “Looking”: the three senses of “see” and why looking is added (“let’s just take the word looking”) #

Looking defined (student): trying to see. Three senses of “to see”, in order:

1. The act of the eye — its only proper name.
2. To imagine — Hamlet, before his friends can tell him of the ghost seen on the ramparts at Elsinore: “I can see my father now… in my mind’s eye”; later he sees him with his eyes.
3. To understand. “See” is a word equivocal by reason (not by chance): its meanings have a before and after. Thomas: we name things as we know them, so the order of naming follows the order of knowing, which is the road from the senses into reason; hence the act of the eye is named first. Imagining is closer to seeing than understanding is:

• sign: in a dream we think we are seeing when we are imagining, and only waking distinguishes them; but even in a dream we do not confuse understanding with seeing.
• Yet people mix imagining and thinking (“I imagine that’s so / I think that’s so”); Locke and Berkeley use “idea” now for an image, now for a thought, and cannot tell them apart. The image is always singular, the thought basically universal.
• Imagination imitates reason a little: two images combined into a new one — the glass mountain of the fairy tale (mountain seen, glass seen and felt, glass mountain imagined), or a golden mountain. Not knowing one thing through another, but a resemblance of it. Shakespeare uses the third sense. Why add “looking”? Student: you can go through all the steps but without a conclusion you don’t understand. His statement: the motion of reason is not for the sake of motion but for understanding; the mind in motion is coming to rest in understanding, so “large discourse” alone would leave you thinking discourse is the ultimate aim. Aside: Aristotle calls philosophy theoria, Greek for looking; philosophy in the end is a reasoned-out understanding of things.

6. “Before and after”: spatial images for cause (“looking before and after”) #

Point: most prepositions’ first meaning is tied to place, and the same non-spatial thing gets named from different spatial images.

• “In”: first we are in this room, second part in a whole, other meanings further off. “Before”: first “I’m before you now”. “Under”: first spatial.
• “Understand” is from “under”; Shakespeare could have said “looking under” but says “before and after” — two spatial images leading to the same thing.
• Cause vs. effect: we say the cause is before the effect (not the original sense — “before the table”, or yesterday before today, involve no causing), and the effect follows / comes after; but we also say the underlying cause, as if the cause supported the effect.
• English word for cause: ground — little used because we borrowed Latin causa, but kept in conservative usage like law (“grounds for divorce”).
• Elizabethan punning: Shakespeare always puns on “understand” — one servant to another, “you don’t understand me… my cane understands me [stands under me]”; a low joke, but it shows “to stand under” and “understand” share an etymology, not by chance. To understand a thing is to know what stands under it, or to know it through what is said to stand under it — to understand an effect is to know its underlying causes.
• Romeo and Juliet, tomb scene retold (Romeo kills the “Count de Paris” [ed.: usually just “Paris”], drinks the apothecary’s poison; Juliet wakes from Friar Lawrence’s potion, kills herself; the watchmen arrive): the watchman’s “We see the ground whereon these woes do lie, but the true ground of all these piteous woes we cannot without circumstance descry” — ground as earth vs. ground as cause, unknown until Friar Lawrence explains.
• Latin uses another image: the effect depends on (hangs from) the cause, like a pendant. So three images: cause supporting from below (ground, underlying), holding up from above (Aristotle’s “highest causes”; Latin dependere), and cause before the effect in time-like order. Latin and Greek also speak of the underlying cause.
• Conclusion (he is cut off): you should not be tied to any of the spatial images, “but you should recognize…” [recording ends mid-sentence].

His words #

• genus; the fundamental word of a definition, stating in a general way what the thing is
• ability; his shortening of Shakespeare’s “capability” [ed.: potency]; defined by what it is for and by its utmost
• discourse; from Latin “to run”; (a) going from one thing to another, (b) knowing one thing through another
• reasoning; the act named from reason, a discourse; narrower than discourse (which includes defining, counting, calculating)
• large discourse; about the large (universal; great things), of large limit (large induction; many consequences), long (many steps; between things far apart)
• small talk; talk about little, unimportant things
• large induction; from many singulars to one universal truth
• pure act; what God is found to be at the end of the proof from motion
• looking; trying to see; “see” in the third sense, to understand
• equivocal by reason; a word with several meanings ordered before and after, as opposed to equivocal by chance
• theoria; Greek for looking; Aristotle’s name for philosophy
• understand; from “under”: to know what stands under a thing, its underlying causes
• ground; the English word for cause (earth vs. cause), kept in “grounds for divorce”
• depend; Latin image of the effect hanging from the cause

Texts #

Read in class

• Shakespeare, Hamlet, “large discourse, looking before and after” (continued word by word)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet, “In my mind’s eye” (recounted and quoted)
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, the watchman’s “we see the ground… but the true ground” (quoted from memory) Mentioned
• Euclid, Elements, book I, prop. 47 (Pythagorean theorem); axioms used in almost every theorem
• Boethius, singular when sensed, universal when understood (quoted before)
• Albert the Great on logic as defining and reasoning
• Thomas Aquinas: naming follows knowing; the first proof of God from motion; the argument from matter to God’s infinite ability
• Aristotle, “the books in wisdom”, eleven through fourteen [ed.: Metaphysics (inferred)]; the “inscription of the wise man”, “sixth part” [unclear]
• Scripture, “The Lord is my rock”
• Locke and Berkeley on “idea”
• Shakespeare’s pun “my cane understands me” (play not named)
• The glass-mountain fairy tale
• The anecdote of Euclid and the king (“no royal road to geometry”)

His questions #

• What’s the genus here of the definition of reason? Capability, which he shortens to ability.
• If a man can lift 300 pounds, do you define his ability by 100, 200 or 300? By 300; the ability to lift 300 includes the lesser.
• Why does Shakespeare define reason by discourse and not by what it naturally understands? Sense too can recognise without discourse; the naturally known is general and imprecise, and reason uses it to reach what it does not know; reasoning, the act named from reason, is a discourse.
• How many things does “odd number” cover? An infinity — so “no odd number is even” is a statement about infinitely many.
• How would you define looking? Trying to see.
• In what sense of “see” is Shakespeare using “looking”? The third: to understand.
• Why does he add “looking” to “large discourse”? Because the motion of reason is for the sake of understanding, not for its own sake; without it you might think discourse is the aim.
• What is the English word for cause? Ground, as in “grounds for divorce”.
• Should understanding be tied to any of the spatial images (before, under, above, hanging from)? No — “you shouldn’t be tied to the spatial image”; the rest is cut off.