Crossing Two Divisions, How Words Become Equivocal by Reason, and the Start of the Chapter on Substance

Orientation #

He refers back to “the antepredicaments” and to the “eight senses of in” he had put on the board earlier, and to the chapter on “before” with “Shakespeare’s excitation” that he gave before. He closes: “we’ll be going through this thing on substance here next time.” Verified sources place the class between Categories ch. 4 and ch. 5, with about 20 minutes on ch. 5 read from the handout “Substance - Chapter 5”, plus pages from “Chapter Two of the Categories: Two Divisions” and “The Matter and Order of Wisdom”. The previous class worked through Thomas on Metaphysics V and how being divides into the categories; the next continues Categories ch. 5, first and second substance, and analogy.

The class, in order #

1. Crisscrossing two divisions: four slots, sometimes only three real (“beginning, a middle, and end”) #

Point: crisscrossing two divisions of two gives four combinations, but sometimes one is impossible, so the method yields three.

• Plot (Aristotle, book on the poetic art): Homer taught the Greeks that a plot’s unity is not “about one man” but a course of action with beginning, middle, end. A part is either before another part or not; either after another or not (no alternatives, “because of time”). Crisscross: before-and-after = middle; before-not-after = beginning; after-not-before = end; neither-before-nor-after = “not a real part… impossible.” So the three parts.
• Trinity: divine persons are distinguished by relations of proceeding. Either proceeds from another or not; either another proceeds from him or not. Proceeds-and-another-proceeds = Son; neither-proceeds-but-another-proceeds = Father; proceeds-but-none-proceeds-from-him = Holy Spirit; neither = “no possibility… the god of solipsis.” “So it can only be three persons.” Lesson: “you don’t want to leave out what, and just assume that they’re all real”; “examine the four and see, hey, they’re all real.”

2. The antepredicaments division and why Aristotle enumerates it in that order (“said of another, and not said of another”) #

Point: the same crisscross in Categories ch. 2 gives four members, and all four are real, at least in the mind.

• Said of another / not; exists in another (in a subject) / not (= exists in itself). Said-of + in = universal accident; in but not said-of = singular accident; said-of but not in = universal substance; neither = singular substance (“you or me”; “know thyself”).
• Are they real? Singular substance: yes. Universal substance: “let’s be careful” – in logic, which treats things as they are in our mind, “the cat and the dog” are universal substances, real in the mind; in wisdom, “it’s outside the mind” – not Plato’s “man himself, dog himself.” Singular accident: “my knowledge of geometry”; universal: knowledge in general. “They’re all beings in the mind.”
• Order: Aristotle does not take the all-affirmative or all-negative box first; he takes the two mixed cases first (universal substance, singular accident), then the doubles. Why? So you don’t confuse “said of another” and “exists in another,” which sound like synonyms; the mixed cases show they are “quite two different things.” Contrast: Porphyry’s approach (“you dummy, Porphyry”) – Aristotle would rather start from the extremes and then find the one that is both, as with the plot.
• Aside: Thomas “followed the rule of two or three” arriving at the ten categories, whereas Aristotle “just gives you the ten.” Likewise with the eight senses of “in” in Physics IV: Aristotle gives them without ordering (though indicating “to be in place” is first), and Thomas “orders them perfectly”; but in the Categories chapter on “before” Aristotle himself distinguishes and orders.
• Aside: his doctor told him he has been an old man since sixty, “for twenty years. I didn’t know it.”

3. First way a word becomes equivocal by reason: one thing keeps the common name, the other gets a new name (“he’s not just an animal”) #

Point: Aristotle says (Politics, he guesses) that one who sees how something comes to be sees it clearly; so, how does a word become equivocal by reason? First way: a name said of two things with the same meaning is kept by one as its own, and the other gets a new name. This happens in two sub-ways. (i) The other has something noteworthy in addition to the common meaning:

• animal/man: his mother was shocked when he called man an animal; “he’s not just an animal.” The merely-animal keeps “animal”; man gets a new name because of universal reason and will.
• disposition/habit (category of quality): habit is a “firm disposition”; the easily lost keeps “disposition.”
• understanding/reason (Thomas, an article “in the Summa even”): man’s understanding is his reason; angels and God keep intellectus; man has intellectus umbratus, “clouded… darkened understanding,” and gets “reason.” Aside: his son Marcus asked why we can’t be born knowing everything – “you want to be an angel rather than a human being?”; Dionysius: the angelic mind is full of forms. (ii) One has the meaning fully, the other imperfectly:
• puppy/dog, kitten/cat: a kitten is a cat against a puppy, but “a kitten and a cat” are distinguished when cat means the fully developed one; boy/man, girl/woman likewise (women he knew liked to be called “the girls”; men don’t like “boys” – he says “gentlemen”).
• theology/first philosophy: Aristotle calls wisdom theology, knowledge of God; revealed theology is a fuller knowledge, where God is not just the goal but “the very subject,” so it keeps “theology” and the other is called first philosophy or wisdom (Thomas gives wisdom as a synonym for philosophy).
• property/definition (book on the places): property is speech convertible with the thing; speech convertible and bringing out what it is has an excellence, so gets the name definition, the other keeps “property.” Both sub-ways “come under one way.”

4. Second way: dropping out part of the meaning (“the mind undergoes”) #

• undergoing (passio): first meaning is bad, being acted on harmfully – a pin stuck in you, bumping into things, a broken arm: then it is “extremely clear” you’re acted upon. But Mozart’s music acts on the ear while perfecting it (“the incorporeal motet,” John Paul II on Ave Verum Corpus; “no one knew how beautiful one’s voice could be until Mozart” wrote an aria for it). Drop “contrary to nature,” keep “receiving”: sensing is undergoing, still in the body; then drop the body: the mind undergoes, “acted upon by the agent intellect.” “That’s a beautiful way.”
• road: his son Paul, asked about “the basic road in human knowledge,” said “there are cars and trucks on it” – stuck on the first meaning. Carried to the first road of knowledge, the private road of each science, the road of reason: drop the stone/tar (“the concrete”), keep the before and after. Aside: Eddington, “new pathways in science.”

5. Third way: by a ratio, or by a likeness of ratios (“what can be without another”) #

• By the ratio of the second to the first: philosophy is knowledge a lover of wisdom pursues; logic is pursued out of necessity, so it is not philosophy but the tool of philosophy – the name carried over by its relation.
• By likeness of ratios (“the most interesting”): “before” – before in being (this can be without that, not that without this) and before in knowledge (this known without that, not conversely) are proportional, though not a numerical proportion like 4:6 :: 2:3.
• The eight senses of “in” (still on the board, “poor brother Jerome”): “I’m in this room” vs. “my teeth are in my mouth” – similar, but teeth are attached; a tooth loosened by a blow would then be in the mouth merely “in a place.”
• form as act, by proportion: I’m able to walk / walking; wood able to be a chair / a chair when it has its form; form is “the act of the wood,” knowing “the act of my ability to know” – a different sense, proportional. Aristotle: act cannot be defined, it is among first things known; known by seeing a likeness of ratios.
• prime matter (Natural Hearing I): first matter is to man and dog as clay is to sphere and cube – able to be either, not both at once, ceases to be one on becoming the other (“when the dog eats the man”). Since man and dog are substances while sphere and cube are qualities, first matter is “pure ability”; so one sense of matter is one sense of ability.
• Aside: Aristotle says the best metaphor is based on likeness of ratios, as in the simile “like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to the end”; his mother’s cross-stitch had something similar. Likenesses between things far apart – “you got to be careful.”
• Aside: substance and understanding both “stand under”: the church “the pillar of truth” (St Paul, quoted at Vatican II), faith “the substance of things hoped for”; connection with carrying “undergoing” up to the mind.

6. Categories ch. 5: structure of the chapter (“first and what second substance”) #

Point: Aristotle treats mainly the great categories (substance, how much, how, towards something), the last six briefly; chapter 5 has two parts.

• Part one: distinction and order of first and second substance (“you have to see a distinction before you can see the order”); note he now says first/second, not individual/universal as in the antepredicaments – “a connection there between order and first and second.” Sub-parts on the handout outline (his page 9, “page five in our text”): what each is; the order; among second substances, species more substance than genus (Greek “ho… antitho” garbled). Part two: the properties of substance.

7. Why substance is not divided into species here (“material and immaterial substance”) #

• Quantity is divided into discrete and continuous and subdivided; quality into species; substance only into first and second, “not a division into species.”
• Reason: in wisdom substance is divided into material and immaterial, but that is very hard to know by reason alone. Student: is substance predicated univocally of both? He: as far as logic goes yes (both “exist not in a subject”), but in things genus is taken from matter, difference from form; with no matter in immaterial substance “they’re not the same genus it seems.” Aristotle also thought heavenly bodies another matter; Thomas in the book on the universe says change in the stars may take longer than many lives, so Aristotle’s argument (unchanging except in place) is not necessary; Weizsäcker’s “hot stone” would not last so long. So this distinction is for the wise man, inappropriate in logic.
• Student: why not living/non-living? He: that is natural philosophy’s job.
• Aside, from the letter-writer: why did the first philosophers identify substance with body? Reason “has difficulty separating things that are never separated in its experience,” as it does not separate universal from singular until it sees many alike; only when reason finds immaterial substances does it separate substance from body. Miranda: “O brave new world” – Prospero: “‘Tis new to thee.”

8. Thomas: a division by diverse ways of being, “magis divisio analogi” (“not a division of a genus into species”) #

• Thomas’s text (read): division of substance into first and second is not a genus into species, “since nothing is contained under second substance that is not in first,” but according to diverse ways of being: second substance signifies the nature of the genus absolutely, first as individually subsisting – hence rather “divisio analogi.” So it is a division of meanings of the word.
• “Analogous” itself is another case of the first way: Aristotle uses “equivocal” for equivocal by chance, and the noteworthy case with an order among meanings gets the new name analogous. He is “leery” of it, since “analogous” means proportional – one way of becoming equivocal by reason taken for all; “so the word equivocal now becomes equivocal.”

9. Ousia as “what a thing is”; a “rash” of equivocal words (“logos tes ousias”) #

• In the first antepredicament Aristotle says of equivocals: homonyma legetai… onoma monon koinon, ho de kata tounoma logos tes ousias – the definition “of what it is” is not the same. Ousia there means what a thing is, found in any genus (courage: a habit, good habit, virtue). First act of understanding (Thomas, Proemium; On the Soul III) is understanding what something is (a student said “simple grasp”); connection between substance and understanding fitting.
• Dialectical question he proposes: is it necessary to understand words equivocal by reason? You cannot get through the category of substance without them. Aside: a political scientist at the College of St Thomas gave up on Thomas for having “so many meanings.”
• Whole and part: his sophism – animal is only part of what man is, yet includes dog, cat, horse; “so sometimes a part includes more than the whole” – deceiving students on the axiom “the whole is more than the part.” Solution (Metaphysics V): composed (integral) whole, put together from its parts but not said of them (chair legs), vs. universal whole, said of its parts (particular from “part”) but not composed of them; the definition “animal that has reason” is a composed whole of genus and difference. A composed whole is always more than a part; a universal whole always said of more than one part – again a likeness of ratios.
• Aside: told Warren Murray he can’t think of a modern philosopher who says “this word is equivocal by reason, here are the senses and their order.” The author who noted senses of opposites (contradiction, contraries, having/lack, relatives) vs. Marx, whose dialectical materialism is built on “opposites” without distinguishing.

10. Could we avoid equivocal words? (“a glimpse of what is not seen”) #

• Student: give each new sense its own name and avoid deception by equivocation. He: you’d lose the connection; the mind naturally extends words; with likeness of ratios one sense is more known to us, and by discourse through the eight meanings you come to know the less known from the more known; the mind must see the likeness of later senses to the first. Hank Sager: “things seen are a glimpse of what is not seen.” Saying “God is pure act” has in mind act and ability first seen in creatures – “act with no ability to be actualized.”
• Next time: continue the substance chapter.

His words #

• crisscrossing two divisions: two affirmative/negative divisions combined, four slots, “only three of them real” sometimes
• relations of proceeding: how divine persons are distinguished
• antepredicaments [ed.: Categories chs. 1-3]: said of another / exists in another (in a subject)
• equivocal by reason: word with many meanings that have an order among them; vs. equivocal by chance
• “book on the places” [ed.: Topics]; “book on the poetic art” [ed.: Poetics]; “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics]; “fifth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]; “book on the universe” [ed.: De caelo]
• intellectus umbratus: “clouded, darkened understanding” (man’s, vs. angel’s intellectus)
• undergoing / passio: first sense being acted on harmfully; then receiving; then sensing; then the mind’s undergoing
• ability [ed.: potency]; act “known by proportion,” cannot be defined
• first matter: “pure ability,” known by likeness of ratios
• likeness of ratios = proportion: the “most interesting” way of becoming equivocal by reason
• first / second substance: his rendering of the chapter’s terms, chosen over individual/universal to show order
• magis divisio analogi: Thomas’s phrase; “analogous” the new name for equivocal by reason, which he is “leery” of
• ousia / logos tes ousias: “what a thing is,” one sense of substance, found in any genus
• composed whole (integral) vs. universal whole; subject parts
• “Berquist the sophist”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas on Categories ch. 5 (handout “Substance - Chapter 5”): division of substance into first and second not into species but by diverse ways of being, “magis divisio analogi”
• Aristotle, Categories ch. 1 (Greek: homonyma legetai… logos tes ousias) and ch. 2 division (said of / in a subject); ch. 5 outline (distinction and order, properties) Mentioned
• Aristotle, Poetics (plot parts); Politics (seeing how a thing comes to be); Categories on quality (habit/disposition) and on “before”; Physics IV (eight senses of “in”), Physics I (first matter by proportion); Metaphysics V (whole); Topics (property/definition); On the Soul III; Aristotle on metaphor
• Thomas: Proemium to logic; an article on understanding and reason (Summa); “book on the universe”
• Porphyry; Dionysius; John Paul II on Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus; Weizsäcker; Eddington; St Paul (“pillar of truth”, faith as substance of things hoped for); Shakespeare (Tempest, sonnet simile); Euclid’s axiom; Marx; Warren Murray; Hank Sager

His questions #

• Is the fourth part, neither before nor after another, a real part of the plot? No – impossible; so beginning, middle, end.
• Who neither proceeds from another nor has another proceeding from him? No one – “it can only be three persons.”
• Is there such a thing as universal substance? Yes, in the mind (dog, cat); in wisdom, “outside the mind,” a different matter.
• Why does Aristotle enumerate the mixed cases first? So you don’t confuse “said of another” with “exists in another.”
• How does a word become equivocal by reason? Three ways: one keeps the common name (noteworthy addition or fuller meaning); dropping part of the meaning; by a ratio or a likeness of ratios.
• Why doesn’t Aristotle divide substance into species as he does quantity and quality? Material/immaterial is only known by the wise man; not fit for logic; living/non-living belongs to natural philosophy.
• Is substance predicated univocally of material and immaterial? In logic yes; in reality genus is from matter, so apparently not the same genus.
• Is it necessary to understand words equivocal by reason? Proposed as a dialectical question; left open, though he argues you cannot get through the category of substance without them.
• Could we avoid equivocation by giving each sense a new name? You’d lose the connection and the road from more known to less known.