Lowest Species and Highest Genera: Why Being Is Not a Genus

Orientation #

He refers back to having “spent a whole semester talking about Aristotle’s book, the Categories,” and to the argument “in the logic of the third act” that not every premise is a conclusion; no context-block resolution is needed. The verified source places this class at DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 185. The previous class treated the schema of the ten categories, the next continues with the division of substance, quantity, quality, and Porphyry.

The class, in order #

1. Not every division reaches lowest species evenly (“you don’t reach the bottom all across the board”) #

Point: when a genus is divided, the members on one level need not all be lowest species; deciding this often belongs to the expert in the subject, not the logician.

• Temperance may not be a lowest species: one man drinks all night but doesn’t eat to excess; another, asked “which is better, a woman or a bottle?”, says “a bottle.” Temperance is about what is pleasurable to sense, “especially touch and taste,” but may have species. Courage, which Aristotle limits to the battlefield, may be a lowest species.
• Triangle: equilateral is a lowest species; isosceles has kinds (you may have to go down to the ratio of equal sides to unequal, e.g. two to one, giving “the same shape at different sizes”). Square a lowest species, oblong not. Animal into man and beast: man perhaps lowest, beast not.
• Drama into tragedy and comedy: two kinds of comedy, “good-natured comedy” and satire (good-natured is “a better, or healthy form of life”), but only after much experience could you decide; Macbeth “chooses evil knowingly” in a way Othello doesn’t, yet Macbeth, Othello, Lear are tragedies “in exactly the same sense.”
• So the logician leaves it to the student of drama, the zoologist (dog, or golden retriever vs. Labrador?), the botanist (he is not sure whether there is one kind of tea plant).
• Government: monarchy, oligarchy, democracy — is there one kind of oligarchy? British vs. American government differ in known ways (parliament, prime minister); Aristotle’s best government for most men is middle-class government, which America has approximated, swinging toward oligarchic then democratic. The political philosopher must say whether the difference is accidental or essential. “But there certainly are lowest species.”
• Asides: prime minister Wilson answering a heckler shouting “garbage” — “I’ll come to your specialty in a moment, sir”; Churchill, “I’m not going to cast my pearls… before those who don’t want them.”

2. Does every genus have a genus before it? (“would you ever really know anything”) #

Point: the reverse question — whether every genus is a species — the logician answers universally, and the answer is no. Argument 1:

1. You must know the genus before the species: quadrilateral before square; “rectilineal plane figure” (a genus without a name) before quadrilateral; what it is to be contained by straight lines before contained by four rather than three or five.
2. If every genus had a genus above it, you would have to know an infinity of things before knowing anything.
3. So you would know nothing — but even the man who says we know nothing “claims to know what knowing is,” so his position is self-refuting. Argument 2: likewise you would never know anything by definition (infinity of definitions before any), yet we have come to know odd, even, perfect number, square, oblong, blank verse by definition. He compares this to the argument of “the third act” of logic that not every premise is a conclusion, though “many, maybe most” are.

3. An argument peculiar to genus: most universal names (“there’s nothing more universal than being”) #

1. A genus is always said of more than the species.
2. So if every genus had a genus above it, there would always be a more universal name than any name; you would never reach a most universal name.
3. But we do: being, thing, something. Whatever is in any way is a being; there is nothing that isn’t something. Conclusion: there must be a highest genus. But this does not tell you whether there is one or many; someone might say the most universal names give one genus of everything. Now the importance of knowing the definition of genus appears: if “being” were said univocally (one meaning, as quadrilateral of square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid), there would be one genus of all things. Plato somewhat anticipated, but mainly Aristotle saw that being and thing are equivocal — “equivocal by reason, but nevertheless equivocal.”

4. Man and dog vs. man and his health (“want me to flatten your nose?”) #

Point: the “example we always use” shows being is not said with one meaning.

• Man and dog in a room: two things; take the dog out, one thing. Someone says: no, two — the man and his shape, or the man and his health. Not the same thing (shape changes; health changes), but not two things the way man and dog are, since the health “is something of the man” while the dog is “another thing.” Yet health is not nothing: a man concerned about his health is not concerned about nothing.
• The working man: nose and ear are two things; nose and its shape? First inclination yes, then no — but “want me to flatten your nose?” shows a difference. Nose and ear are like man and dog.
• This is the philosopher’s distinction of substance (man, dog) vs. accident (health, shape). Substance and accident are not “a thing in the same sense.”

5. “To be” unqualified means substantial being (“To be or not to be, that is the question”) #

Point: unqualified “to be” is understood of substantial being — for a man, his life — and equivocal words are not said equally.

• Hamlet: understood for centuries as about living or dying, suicide. To mean married to Ophelia or a student, you’d have to qualify.
• “If you leave this room, you will cease to be” sounds like a threat; before a judge, “I meant cease to be in the room” — “nobody would have understood that.”
• “When did I come to be?” Born January 18, 1936, but came to be somewhat before, in 1935, in his mother’s womb; to ask when he came to be in Massachusetts or at the monastery you must add the place. Likewise “why will you cease to be?” asks why he will die.
• With a univocal word you don’t think of one before the other: “we have a pet, he is an animal” — dog, cat, bird equally; “I got a habit” — good or bad equally. But to die and to leave the room are not equally to cease to be. Conclusion: being, thing, something are one word said of all things but not with one meaning, so they don’t fit the definition of genus; to call being a genus uses “genus” in a looser sense (which we sometimes do), not the strict one. So there is more than one highest genus. He recaps the whole chain: most universal names → not every genus is a species → those names are equivocal → many highest genera.

6. The Categories is about the highest genera (“a genus that is not a species”) #

Aristotle, “historically the father of logic”; the first logic book that has come down to us, the Categories, is about the highest genera. Two ways of saying it: a genus with no genus above it, or a genus that is not a species — like Adam, a father without a father, or a father who is not a son; the first cause, a cause without a cause, or a cause that is not an effect.

7. How to distinguish them: kinds and senses at once (“many kinds and of many senses”) #

Question put: how would one go about distinguishing the highest genera? Student: examine the meanings of the most universal terms, inductively — “is being said in every case of substance?” What he flags as “kind of interesting”: here we distinguish many kinds of things and, at the same time, many meanings of the word “being.” Contrast, by his examples:

• Euclid divides quadrilateral into square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid, trapezium (the first four are parallelograms, but he doesn’t know that yet; the doctrine of parallelograms comes later in Book I). Five kinds, but not five meanings — each is “a plane figure contained by four straight lines” in exactly the same sense.
• Odd and even: two kinds of number, not two senses; number is “a multitude composed of units” (Euclid) or “measured by the unit” (Aristotle). Tragedy and comedy: not two meanings of drama.
• But the four causes in philosophy of nature — matter, form, mover, end — are four kinds of cause and four meanings of “cause.”
• “To see”: act of the eye, imagining, understanding — three meanings, and also three kinds of seeing. Gloucester in King Lear, blinded, “begins to understand” — sees “what he’d never seen before,” a much better way. Remembering him at home is “seeing me again,” another kind. “I see what you mean.”
• Aside: his mother’s saying, “I see, said the blind man, but he couldn’t see at all.”

8. Substance and accident crossed with universal and individual (“neither said of another nor do they exist in another”) #

Point: the first distinction of being is substance vs. accident; crossed with universal vs. individual it gives Aristotle’s four members, and everything refers to individual substances.

• Etymology: substance from Latin “to stand under”; accident from “to happen to” — accidents happen to substance.
• Aristotle in the Categories: accident exists in another as a subject and cannot exist by itself (health in my body, my shape, virtues, vices); you can’t put me in one room and my health or shape or vices in the next, but you can put me in one room and the dog in the next. Substance does not exist in another; man, dog, “maybe the tree.”
• Crossed with universal (“said of many”) vs. individual: four members. Individual substance: Socrates, Champion (Gene Autry’s horse, whom he met at a St. Paul rodeo), Lassie. Universal substance: man, dog, animal. Universal accident: health, shape, habit, disposition (health “is a habit-disposition”). Individual accident: the health of Socrates, the shape of Champion, the habit of Socrates.
• Aristotle’s four: said of another but not existing in another (man, dog: said of Socrates, Plato; horse of Champion); existing in another but not said of (health of Socrates); both (universal accident); neither (Socrates, Champion) — “two negatives” for individual substance, “two affirmatives” for universal accident. He finds the order “kind of clever”: Aristotle takes the two mixed cases first, showing that said-of and existing-in “can’t be the same thing,” then combines them. A student (Danny) compares the parts of a plot: before and not after, after and not before, both.
• From the chapter on substance: everything else is either said of individual substances or exists in them; so the highest genera can be distinguished by the ways something can be said of individual substances. Closing student question: “do you mean the way a name can be said of?” — the recording ends here, left open.

His words #

• lowest species: a species that is not further a genus; not all members on one level of a division need be lowest species.
• highest genus / genera: a genus with no genus above it; equivalently, a genus that is not a species.
• univocal: said “with one meaning in mind,” as quadrilateral of square and oblong.
• equivocal: many senses; being and thing are “equivocal by reason.”
• substance: what does not exist in another; from Latin “to stand under.”
• accident: what exists in another as a subject and cannot exist except in another; from Latin “to happen to.”
• said of another / exists in another: Aristotle’s two crossing marks in the Categories; said of = universal.
• number: “a multitude composed of units” (Euclid), “a multitude measured by the unit” (Aristotle).
• quadrilateral: “a plane figure contained by four straight lines.”
• “the third act” of logic: where it is argued that not every premise is a conclusion [ed.: Posterior Analytics, inferred].

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Categories: the fourfold division by “said of” and “existing in” a subject; the chapter on substance (everything else is said of or exists in individual substances). Handout: DHB Vol. III, p. 185 (verified).

Mentioned

• Euclid, Elements, Book I (inferred): definitions of quadrilateral (square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid, trapezium); parallelograms treated later in the book; definition of number.
• Aristotle on courage limited to the battlefield; on forms of government and middle-class government; four causes (matter, form, mover, end) in philosophy of nature; parts of a plot (raised by Danny).
• Shakespeare: Hamlet (“To be or not to be”), Macbeth, Othello, King Lear (Gloucester’s blinding).

His questions #

• Are all those on the same level of a division lowest species? No: equilateral is, isosceles isn’t; square is, oblong isn’t; man perhaps, beast not.
• Does every genus have a genus before it? No — else you’d need to know an infinity before knowing anything, and nothing could be known by definition.
• Can there be something that is not a being, or something that isn’t something? No; being and something are completely universal, so there is a highest genus.
• Are the man and his health two things like the man and the dog? No; the health is something of the man, the dog is another thing.
• When Hamlet says “to be or not to be,” what is he thinking about? Living or dying — substantial being, his very life.
• Is being said univocally of substance and accident? No; to die and to leave the room are not equally to cease to be, so being is not a genus in the strict sense.
• Has Euclid distinguished five senses of quadrilateral? Are odd and even two senses of number? No — kinds in the same sense; but being, cause, and seeing are divided into kinds and senses at once.
• What is an example of a singular individual substance? Socrates; Champion; Lassie.
• How can the highest genera be distinguished? By the ways something can be said of individual substances; student’s follow-up (“the way a name can be said of?”) left open.