The Last Six Categories, God's Eternity, and a Review of the Ante- and Post-Predicaments

Orientation #

He opens by saying he will “be more brief” on the last six categories, since Aristotle was; a student recalls the earlier discussion (prev. lecture) of where grace and the theological virtues belong. He closes: “next time we’ll maybe start to take up the postpredicaments… the first one is opposites.” A text-matching system found the class working from the handout “Chapter Two of the Categories: Two Divisions” (p. 3) and from DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 107. The previous class covered the species of quality and the reduction of grace and character to them; the next takes up the postpredicaments, beginning with opposition.

The class, in order #

1. The last six: named from something outside you (“they should be really translated where and when”) #

Point: the last six categories all name a thing by reason of something outside it, unlike substance, quantity, quality and even relation.

• Translation complaint: editions (he names the Loeb) render the categories of where and when as “place and time”; but place and time are species of continuous quantity, so that is a bad translation. It is rather denominative naming (cf. the Antepredicamenta: equivocal, univocal, denominative): to be in place, to be in time.
• Place and time are extrinsic measures: half a cup of rice, a 750 ml or 1.5 l bottle, a barrel of wine—the measuring cup is outside what it measures.
• Contrast with the intrinsic: to be a man is intrinsic; to be a geometer is from something in me (a little of Euclid); to be five feet eight is a size in my body; even relation (taller than you) has its foundation in me (my size) toward another. But the last six are by reason of something outside.
• Joke that shows the point: “you leave this room, you’ll cease to be”—not an intrinsic ceasing, but ceasing to be in this room.
• Student aside: people say “I’m not in a place where I can do that,” using place-talk for interior disposition; he agrees.
• The inner surface of the wine bottle or milk carton is the place containing the wine: the quantity is in the thing; where is not.

2. Position: order of parts, but still from outside (“I need a chair to sit down”) #

Point: position (order of parts in place) looks like something in me, but it too is said by reason of something outside.

• Examples: if I jump out of an airplane my parts are arranged exactly as when standing, but I am not standing; if I crouch, I am not sitting—“to be sitting, I really got to have a chair” (the guest who crouches instead of sitting on the offered chair “is crazy”). Standing needs the ground; the Romans lay down to eat.
• Student’s question: why a separate category for position of parts in place, but not for order in time? His answer: time does not exist all at once, and the order is already in the definition of time—“the number of the before and after in motion” (midnight, one o’clock… in the apparent motion of the sun). Aristotle in book IV of Natural Hearing even asks whether time would be at all without a numbering soul. But “I’m in this room” does not bring out whether I stand, sit or lie—so position adds something. Position has order in common with time, but it is order of parts in place; hence it comes third among the six.
• Aside: old professors leaning forward on the lectern.

3. Having: man’s category (“because it’s man’s category”) #

Point: having (clothing, arms) deserves a whole lecture because it says something about the nature of man.

• The other animals’ clothing is part of their body (fur, shed in summer); man must put on.
• Man has different clothing for different things: tuxedo, bride’s dress, priest at Mass, the soldier, menial work vs. meeting the president or the pope, the suit or dress one is buried in.
• “Have” will be one of the main meanings treated in the Posterior Analytics [as stated]; “have” is also found in habitus (first species of quality) and here.
• Asides: his brother Mark’s fixed weekly menu at Saint Mary’s (“Variety is the spice of life”—“more a woman’s thing”); his grandmother describing everyone’s dress after a social.

4. Acting upon and undergoing (“what’s the difference between being hot and warming something”) #

Point: the last two also name from outside, but through quality rather than quantity.

• His translation: acting upon and undergoing (or being acted upon).
• Why the four come before these two: the first four have a connection with quantity (where/when with place/time; position is order in place; clothing “has to fit… what’s your size”). Acting upon and undergoing connect rather with quality—the third species (passible qualities) and the second (ability).
• If I kick you: one is from me to you, the other in you from me; each is named from something outside.
• Distinction: hot is a quality in the thing (third species); heating something brings in something outside (the stove is hot in itself; you must bring something to it to heat it).
• Student: is becoming hot the same as undergoing? Answer: becoming hot is the change itself—alteration, one of the species of change in the postpredicaments—something incomplete in the genus of being hot, without naming an outside cause; being warmed names an outside agent, so it is an undergoing.
• Aside: the professor’s telegram to his wife—“where am I supposed to be now?"—illustrating how constant where/when are in life.

5. Digression: transcending place and time (“God’s knowledge is not in time”) #

Point: our imagination binds us to place and time, which is why eternity (and the soul’s separation) is so hard to understand.

• Reading Thomas on God’s knowledge (is it variable? does He know future contingents?): the key is that God’s knowledge is not in time but measured by eternity, so past, present and future are all present to Him (what I did twenty years ago, what I’ll do five years hence).
• Parallel with place: the Greeks before Aristotle held “whatever is must be somewhere”; the Russian astronauts’ “there’s no God up here”; “when your soul leaves the body” originally names a change of place, and since we cannot imagine something not in place we conclude the soul is gone; the universe—if it is in some bigger place, it is not yet the universe; Aristotle concluded the universe is finite with nothing outside it.
• Student: we say God is “above” time and sees it all at once—spatial imagery; he agrees: “you can’t transcend your imagination,” and names equivocal by reason must lead us gradually from one meaning to another.
• The consideration of God’s eternity is attached to His being unchanging; so motion and time (natural philosophy) must be studied before the definition of eternity.
• Boethius’s definition, as he gives it: tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis [ASR garbles the Latin]. Simul negates before and after; interminabilis negates beginning and end—both found in things measured by time, neither in eternity. His own life: a beginning in 1935, an end to come.
• Asides: the Mozart bicentennial concerts in Minneapolis (first and last symphony in one concert; Così fan tutte in concert version); Mozart died in his 36th year; Thomas did not live long either; “Aristotle says the mind is best at the age of 49.”

6. The three parts of the book and the five antepredicaments (“customary to divide the book called the categories into three parts”) #

Point: antepredicaments, predicaments, postpredicaments; five antepredicaments, and he thinks five postpredicaments too.

1. Named equivocally / univocally / denominatively. A student proposes the universal-substance division first; he corrects: Aristotle began with equivocals. Why give this threefold distinction? The “great commentator” says: what is said of all ten categories (being, one) is said equivocally; within a category the higher is said of the lower univocally; from one category to another, denominatively (I am a man, not a quality, but denominated geometer, logician, healthy). It prepares the way because the ten categories are genera, and genus is said univocally. Porphyry could have made this clearer in the Isagoge (he told Monsignor so; Monsignor agreed).
2. Division tōn legomenōn (of things said): with symplokē (intertwining) or without—“man runs” vs. “man”. This distinguishes the second act of reason from the first; only things said without intertwining (man, health) go in the categories, not “man is healthy.”
3. Division tōn ontōn (of beings): universal substance (said of another, not in another) and individual accident (in another, not said of another) put first, so that what is affirmed in one is denied in the other; then universal accident (both), individual substance (neither). Compare his own pair: composed whole put together from its parts but not said of them, universal whole the reverse. The point of the order: “said of another” and “exists in another” are not synonymous, as one might think—he does it “very far” better than “dummies like me.” This division prepares the distinction of substance from the nine accidents (universal and particular substance in substance; universal and particular accident in each of the nine).
4. What is predicable of the predicate is predicable of the subject: a rule of order within each category (substance of body, body of animal, so substance of animal); and the differences are not the same in every genus.
5. Enumeration of the ten things said without intertwining, with examples.

• The predicaments then take the ten up one by one, mainly the first four.
• Aside: he fell twice on the ice and broke nothing—“you break something, that’s going to finish you off.”

7. The first three postpredicaments and their two uses (“opposites is the way we distinguish things”) #

Point: opposites, before/after, and together are equivocal by reason and found in more than one category; they illuminate the categories backward and carry forward into other sciences—and beyond that, they describe what reason does.

• Dividing is by opposites: substance into material/immaterial, quantity into discrete/continuous, quality likewise. Order: genus before species. Hama (together): discrete and continuous on the same level; line, place, time on a level with discrete quantity; living/non-living, then animal/plant. And the whole line—substance, body, living body, animal, man—is all said of me.
• Forward use: in another science (Thomas does this) one recalls that quality is where virtues and vices belong, then goes beyond the text—moral vs. rational virtues, later infused virtues; studying the soul one subdivides the second species of quality, Aristotle’s five groups of abilities.
• Universal importance: Plato and Aristotle say there is the same knowledge of opposites (medicine of health and sickness, ethics of virtue and vice, logic of fallacy and demonstration, “not equally”). Distinguishing is what the mind is always doing. Shakespeare: reason “looks before and after”; but nothing is before or after itself, so reason looks for distinctions before it looks for before and after. He goes to this text to understand Shakespeare’s definition. The commentators’ usual remark (many meanings, found in more than one category) is “something to do with it, but not the whole.”

8. Motion and having (“motion is found in some categories and other ones”) #

Point: the last two postpredicaments are different: found in more than one genus, but not in all.

• Motion: generation and corruption in substance; growth and shrinking (“am I shrinking now?”) in quantity; alteration in quality; also in where. Motion is imperfect: growing to be six feet is not the same as having that height (the tall grade-school kid; Richard at six feet four, who should be playing basketball).
• Having: equivalent to the category of having, yet Aristotle distinguishes many senses—having a quality, a size; a thing has a name, a genus has species, a species has a genus and differences, substance has accidents; the last, an alien sense, “to have a wife.”
• Why the postpredicaments: the common answer—things not placeable in one category must not “escape” (his own catch-phrase “things in motion sooner catch the eye,” natural philosophy proceeding per modum motus—so where does motion belong?). “But I don’t think it’s the only reason”: they also say what you do with the categories going forward—ethics from the first species of quality, the powers of the soul from the second, Euclid’s books I-VI on continuous quantity and VII-IX on number, Physics V’s qualitative and quantitative division of motion (continuous, divisible forever—Zeno’s half-way-to-the-door paradox).
• Boethius, “great mind,” always quoted by Thomas (definition of eternity; “singular when sensed, universal when understood”); he admired the Categories and wrote a commentary.

9. Closing: Marx and the undistinguished senses of opposites (“nowhere does Marx really distinguish the kinds of opposites”) #

Point: a preview of next time—failing to distinguish equivocal words is the commonest source of confusion.

• A doctoral thesis at Laval on Marx: dialectical materialism—matter as beginning, dialectic (borrowed from logic, arguing both sides as in a disputed question) as the clash of opposites through which things develop. But Marx never distinguishes the four senses of opposites; “contradiction” is used for what is contrariety (rich and poor). Applied to society: the economic mode of production and its “contradictions” give rise from capitalism to communism. He adds “Hegel comes before Kant” [ed.: as stated], Hegel accepting contradictions. He never sees a modern philosopher distinguish these equivocal words, though crucial to their thinking.
• Aristotle names the fallacy of equivocation the most common source of error; current example: is Trump’s ban “on Muslims” or “on terrorists”?

His words #

• where / when: his translation of the two categories; not “place and time,” which are species of continuous quantity; naming is denominative, “to be in place, in time”.
• extrinsic measure: what place and time are (measuring cup, wine bottle).
• position: the order of parts in place; requires something outside (chair, ground).
• having: “man’s category”; clothing put on, unlike the animals’ fur.
• acting upon / undergoing: his rendering of the last two categories [ed.: action/passion].
• alteration: becoming hot as change of quality, incomplete in the genus, without naming an agent.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis: Boethius’s definition of eternity; simul negates before/after, interminabilis negates beginning/end.
• antepredicaments / predicaments / postpredicaments: the three parts of the book.
• tōn legomenōn / tōn ontōn: the divisions of things said and of beings; symplokē: intertwining.
• hama: together, on the same level of a division.
• equivocal by reason: names with many meanings led gradually from one to another; the postpredicaments are such.
• per modum motus: natural philosophy proceeds by way of motion.
• dialectical materialism: Marx’s own name for his philosophy.

Texts #

Read in class

• Handout “Chapter Two of the Categories: Two Divisions”, p. 3 (verified); DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 107 (verified).
• Aristotle, Categories ch. 2 (tōn legomenōn, tōn ontōn), reviewed in Greek from memory.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Categories: ch. 1 (equivocal/univocal/denominative), ch. 3 rule of predication and differences (inferred), ch. 4 enumeration, the postpredicaments (opposites, before/after, together, motion, having).
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing IV (time and the numbering soul), V (division of motion).
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (senses of “have,” as stated); the fallacy of equivocation.
• Thomas Aquinas, articles on God’s knowledge and providence (no locus stated).
• Boethius, definition of eternity; “singular when sensed, universal when understood”; commentary on the Categories.
• Porphyry, Isagoge; Euclid, Elements I-VI, VII-IX; Shakespeare, “reason looks before and after”; the “great commentator” (unnamed) on the threefold naming.

His questions #

• Why translate “where” and “when” rather than “place” and “time”? Place and time are species of quantity; the categories name denominatively, from an extrinsic measure.
• Am I standing when I fall from an airplane, or sitting when I crouch? No; position needs something outside—ground, a chair.
• Why is there a category for position of parts in place but not in time? (student) Time does not exist all at once, and order is already in the definition of time.
• Why do the first four of the six come before acting upon and undergoing? The four connect with quantity, the last two with quality.
• What is the difference between being hot and warming something? and is becoming hot an undergoing? Hot is a quality in the thing; heating brings in something outside; becoming hot is alteration, being warmed is undergoing.
• Why does Aristotle begin the Categories with equivocal, univocal, denominative? Being is said equivocally of the ten, univocally within a category, denominatively across categories—and the ten genera are said univocally.
• Why put universal substance and individual accident first? So what is affirmed in one is denied in the other, showing “said of” and “exists in” are not synonymous.
• Where does motion belong among the categories? In more than one—substance, quantity, quality, where—hence the postpredicaments.
• Are the postpredicaments only there so nothing escapes the categories? Not the only reason: they are also the tools for going forward and of universal use to reason.