Act Before Ability, the Best Laws and the Best Life, and Feuerbach's Infinite Mind: 'Simply' vs. 'Somewhat' in Metaphysics, Politics, Ethics and Theology

Orientation #

He opens “now we’re going into even more serious mistakes,” continuing the simply / somewhat distinction from before; he says “I think I’ve spoken about this before” of Thomas distinguishing act and ability before ordering them, and “we’ve talked about this before” of order presupposing distinction (prev. lecture). He does not say what comes next. The previous class traced the simpliciter / secundum quid distinction through the Categories, Physics, De Anima and Rhetoric, with Descartes and mathematical certitude as examples of conflation.

The class, in order #

1. Book IX of “wisdom”: act and ability, distinguished before ordered (“distinguishes before he looks for order”) #

The point: Metaphysics IX is about act and ability, and Thomas first distinguishes them and only then considers their order.

• Why he says “ability” rather than “potency”: “potency” taken over from Latin sounds like “power,” i.e. only the active sense; “ability” in common speech covers both. Example: the carpenter is able to make a chair, table or door out of wood (active); the wood is able to be formed into them (passive) — you would not call the wood “powerful.”
• Order presupposes distinction, by what he calls the axiom or beginning statement about before and after: nothing is before or after itself; so before seeing this is before that you must see this is not that. Examples: if you could not distinguish today from tomorrow you could not say today is before tomorrow; if you could not distinguish Mozart’s music from Beethoven’s you could not say one is better.

2. The three parts of Book IX and the order of act and ability (“simply speaking, act comes before ability”) #

The point: the third part of Book IX yields the conclusion that ability is before act only somewhat, act before ability simply.

• Part one: ability for the act called motion — a particular, not universal, distinction. Example: working wood (able to move and form it; wood able to be formed) vs. air or water, which “doesn’t lend itself” to being formed (“just temporarily”). Then natural vs. rational ability to make: the natural is determined to one (reproduction always produces a human being); the rational can do contraries — Aristotle has “in a sense the same knowledge” of how to preserve a government and how to corrupt it.
• Part two: a universal distinction of acts — motion, operation, form, being itself — and correspondingly many senses of ability.
• Part three: the order of ability and act, many kinds of order “as we know from our chapter, the Categories.” The one that matters here:
  1. In the thing that goes from ability to act, it is an ability before it is an act (somewhat, ability is before act).
  2. But it goes from ability to act by reason of something already in act.
  3. Therefore simply, act is before ability — and so the beginning of all things is pure act. He points to the last argument of Summa Contra Gentiles I ch. 16.

3. The materialist mistake, and how it ties to the mathematical one (“matter is the beginning of all things”) #

The point: the early Greeks, the poets and modern scientists take what is before only somewhat (matter, ability) as before simply.

• First philosophers: water, then air, as beginning of all things; before them the poets, Mother Earth. Shakespeare’s Timon, digging for roots, addresses the earth as common mother whose womb teems and feeds all — earth, a kind of matter, as beginning.
• “By this kind of mistake you end up being a materialist rather than a student of God” — “that’s kind of important, isn’t it?”
• The two mistakes “fit together”: I want certitude, a perfection of knowledge but not the one that makes knowledge simply better; so I stick to mathematics; mathematics is tied to quantity, quantity to matter; and over here I think ability is simply before act, so matter is the beginning of all things. Both mix up what is so simply with what is so “in some imperfect way, or somewhat.” He flags: “see how fundamentally important this distinction is.”

4. Solon’s laws and Aristotle’s best government (“the best laws that they would accept”) #

The point: in political matters the same distinction separates the best simply from the best for a given people.

• Plutarch’s Life of Solon (read at his daughter’s house; “every educated man” in 19th-century America had read Plutarch; senators still called “Solons”): asked whether he gave the Athenians the best laws a city can have, Solon said no — the best laws they would accept.
• Aristotle’s Politics distinguishes the best government from the best government for a given people; the best is “the government according to a prayer,” needing unusual circumstances you cannot count on having in your power.
• Aside: he makes fun of “our state department,” which thought our government the best there is and so fitting for every country we came into contact with. A student adds that the founding of this country was an exceptional accumulation of conditions and people, now being lost; he agrees: “great opportunity lost.”

5. Happiness simply and happiness as men can have it (“let us say that they are happy as men”) #

The point: Aristotle’s “happy as men” is happiness somewhat, against happiness simply, which God would have.

• Happiness is the end of life and the greatest good, a perfect good; but Aristotle is not naive about the human condition — an old man is less hopeful than a young man because he has seen how things turn out; Sam Johnson’s joke about the second marriage, “hope over experience.” Thomas, on the imperfection of our happiness on earth, points to the fact that you know you will die.
• So is anyone really happy? Aristotle finally says: let us say they are happy as men — they have happiness somewhat. Augustine says of heaven that if we knew it would end we would not be happy. Boethius calls happiness a state made perfect by the accumulation of all goods — which no one has here. So one may have had a happy life, as a man can, without everything being perfect (“I hate the world, it’s so wicked and so stupid”).

6. Vocation: the best life is not necessarily the best for you (“the celibate life is better, simply”) #

The point: what is best simply need not be best for this person; erasing the distinction is a mistake.

• Church example: celibate vs. married life — the celibate is better simply, but not suitable for everyone; some who try it fail and are worse off than had they married; for such a one the married life is better, “in some way, for him.” Parallel with Solon: not the perfect government but the one they could live with.
• A student: people want to do away with the distinction, saying whatever is best for you is simply the best; he replies: “I don’t think that’s true.” The best life is not necessarily the best for you.
• Aristotle on different lives: professor or cook, king or cook — which is higher simply may not be better for this person. Would it have been better for Mozart to be a philosopher than a musician, for Shakespeare a philosopher than a dramatist? “You can write a reflection on that.” His father, a businessman, said his three professor-philosopher sons could have a better life than he had — but would the philosopher’s life have been better for him? “Maybe not.” The distinction “runs through all the parts of philosophy.”
• Ethics: contemplative life better than active — but suitable for most? His mother, in grade school on vocation day: “since the religious life is the best kind of life, that’s what we should all be doing” — sister: “sit down and shut up, because you don’t know what you’re talking about.” She didn’t see the distinction. (Aside: good thing she didn’t follow it, or “you would be deprived.”)

7. Descartes and the way of proceeding (“proceed in every science as we do in mathematics”) #

The point: the same mistake in method — the most certain way simply is not the way that fits every matter.

• Descartes sees the clarity of geometry and concludes we ought to proceed in every science as in mathematics. But even if that way is most certain, does it fit ethics and politics? You must find the way that fits this matter and how our mind is related to it. Euclid’s Elements: he remembers no real inductive arguments, all syllogisms; medicine is a lot of induction. Rush Limbaugh on hurricane forecasts in Florida — not an exact science, storms hitting the town they were supposed to avoid; you wouldn’t want the forecaster “syllogizing all the time.” So adopt the way that fits, which may not be the best way simply.

8. Gregory, married clergy, and a Maronite patriarch (“it’s not as simple as you think”) #

The point: more instances that the life simply best is not best for everybody.

• Gregory the Great (or “one of the Gregories”): the contemplative life would ruin some people, the practical life others, because it doesn’t fit the person. Monk vs. parish priest. His children’s piano teacher was the wife of an Orthodox priest — “a middle thing” between celibate and married life.
• A student: some in the West think married priests would alleviate the vocations problem; his retired Maronite patriarch told such bishops that a married priest has a family, cannot be sent wherever the bishop needs him, is less available — appropriate in some circumstances, “not simply a solution.” He agrees.
• He states the method: this is “a way to approach these fallacies outside of language” — harder to classify than fallacies in words, but seeing many examples shows their frequency “in very serious matters.”

9. Feuerbach: the infinite is God, man’s mind is infinite (“man’s mind is God”) #

The point: the “supreme example” of the fallacy, and its refutation from Thomas’s two articles on the infinite.

• Feuerbach (before Marx and Engels, who became enthusiastic Feuerbachians): even the theologians say the infinite is God; man’s mind is infinite; therefore man’s mind is God. Marx’s preface to his doctoral thesis rejects anyone who does not accept the human mind as the greatest divinity. Question put: is this a mistake in words, or a mistake of simply and somewhat?
• Setting: the five attributes of God’s substance in the two Summas. First shown is that God is altogether simple, quoting Augustine’s De Trinitate, God vere et summe simple. Difference of order:
  • Summa Theologiae: eight articles; the first six exclude six kinds of composition — not a body; not matter and form; no distinction of what makes him individual from his nature; no distinction of substance and existence; no accidents in him and he is not an accident; then the seventh shows universally that he is altogether simple. “Beautifully ordered”: the first three compositions are found in material substances but not angels; the last three in all created substances. Written for beginners, led from particulars to the general — “the same reason I’m giving you many examples.”
  • Summa Contra Gentiles: the reverse — ch. 18 (he says “question 18”) shows universally God is in no way composed, then takes up almost all the particulars later; proceeding more syllogistically, whereas the ST is “a little more inductive.” Written at the command of the Dominican superior general for theologians going down to Spain where Avicenna and Averroes had been; divided into what can be known of God by reason as well as faith, and (Book IV) what only by faith — “the powerhouse of the order.”
• Second shown in both: God is perfect, tied to simplicity. In material things the composed is more perfect than the simple — stone simpler than tree, tree than dog or cat, man more complicated than dog and more perfect; in God the reverse, all simple and universally perfect. A student: exactly where Richard Dawkins and other atheists stumble, assuming God must be more composite. Angels: the angel knows primarily himself, but not everything else as God does; the less perfect, the more extra thoughts he needs; a Dante-esque ascent from your guardian angel through the nine orders is an ascent in perfection and simplicity together. Then infinite and one: unity tied closely to simplicity (so the Compendium of Theology puts unity under simplicity); infinity to perfection — no end to God’s perfection. The Summas differ most on God’s unchangeableness: SCG, with its developed arguments from motion, begins the substance of God from changelessness; ST takes it up fourth.
• The article on God’s infinity is followed at once by: is anything infinite besides God? Thomas: immaterial substances like angels, having no matter, are somewhat infinite; our soul, able to exist without matter, somewhat infinite; and insofar as we know the universal, which covers everything (being, one — even number, “a set of infinity of things”; the “large discourse” Shakespeare speaks of). So only God is simply, haplōs, simpliciter infinite; man, and a fortiori the angels, somewhat. Anyone who understands the two articles laughs at Feuerbach. Joke with students: “you know everything, don’t you? — everything is something,” but that is a very imperfect knowledge, not simply infinite.
• Wisdom likewise: Aristotle in Book XII treats the cause of all, and elsewhere what is said of all — wisdom is about being and one, distinguishing per se and per accidens. Pythagoras, told he was wise after his theorem: “God alone is wise… call me a lover of wisdom” — origin of the name philosophy, a (true) humility. Aristotle’s proemium: either God alone is wise, or only God fully; God wise simply, man somewhat; so natural philosophy is somewhat wisdom (about natural things), ethics somewhat wisdom (about human life, true happiness, the necessity of virtue).

10. Digression: the one God among the Greeks, Chesterton, feminism (“call me a lover of wisdom”) #

• A student asks what Pythagoras or Aristotle meant by “God” — the one true God; how common in Greece, given the pantheon? He: there was a supreme god among them who might have originated the others; a student: Native Americans with many gods still recognized one great spirit over all — “kind of natural to recognize”; the Olympians were offspring of predecessors; that is the marvel of Chesterton’s Everlasting Man on poets and philosophers (“I’ll talk about it later”).
• Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World (son Marcus reading it): “very good.” Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (sixties; “feminine mistake” quip, attributed maybe to Buckley; she was a Marxist revolutionary — his mother came home from a meeting: “a bunch of Marxists”). Chesterton on feminism: contempt for anything truly feminine; his paraphrase, contempt for the chief feminine characteristics, “and often lacking them as well.” Teddy Roosevelt late in life on our debt to women for giving birth and preserving the race. A student: nineteenth-century feminists recognized divorce and abortion as bad for women — not spoken of today.

11. Recap: the three fallacies, and Hegel (“Man himself is God”) #

The point: the three mistakes restated as one fallacy.

• Materialist: matter is the beginning and comes before everything — but what goes from ability to act is an ability before it is an act only in some way: the water on the stove in the morning is able to be hot before it is hot, but becomes hot by reason of the stove or electricity already actually hot; so simply, act comes before ability — “they miss that.”
• Then wanting to be mathematical, which seems simply better but is only in some way better.
• Feuerbach “the last word”: man himself is God — “sounds pretty good, sort of,” and took in Marx and the rest.
• Aside on Hegel’s system (the old edition with the whole diagram): thinking of being you seem to say nothing, so being turns into non-being, and their union is becoming, in which a thing both is and is not — “so you have Hegel all over.” He ends there.

His words #

• “wisdom” — his name for Aristotle’s Metaphysics ([ed.: Metaphysics]); “the ninth book of wisdom.”
• “ability” — his rendering of potency, covering active and passive ([ed.: potency / dynamis]); “potency” in English slides toward the active sense, like “power.”
• “act” — as in act and ability; “pure act” — the beginning of all things.
• “the axiom, or the beginning statement about before and after” — nothing is before or after itself.
• “simply” / “somewhat” — his renderings of simpliciter / secundum quid (“or somewhat, as I say”); also haplōs.
• “determined to one” — the natural ability, vs. the rational ability that can do contraries.
• “student of God” — what the materialist fails to be.
• “government according to a prayer” — Aristotle’s best government, needing circumstances one can only pray for.
• “happy as men” — Aristotle’s qualified attribution of happiness.
• vere et summe simple — Augustine’s phrase for God, quoted by Thomas.
• “the five attributes of the substance of God” — simple, perfect, infinite, one, unchanging (as he lists them).
• “companion of theology” (ASR) — Thomas’s Compendium of Theology.
• “lover of wisdom” — Pythagoras’s self-description, origin of “philosophy.”
• “fallacies outside of language” — the class of mistake being studied, vs. fallacies in words.

Texts #

Read in class (commented on from memory):

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX — its three parts and the order of act and ability.
• Plutarch, Life of Solon — the exchange on the best laws.
• Shakespeare, Timon of Athens — Timon’s address to the earth as common mother.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, question on the simplicity of God (eight articles, six compositions); articles on whether God is infinite and whether anything besides God is infinite.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, ch. 18 (simplicity, universally); ch. 16, last argument (pure act).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I proemium — God alone wise / only God fully.

Mentioned:

• Aristotle, Categories (“our chapter” on kinds of before and after); Politics (best government vs. best for a people); Ethics on happiness, lives, active vs. contemplative; Metaphysics XII (cause of all).
• Augustine, De Trinitate; Augustine on heaven ending; Boethius on happiness; Thomas on the imperfection of earthly happiness; Gregory (the Great?) on lives that ruin people.
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles IV (known by faith only); Compendium of Theology.
• Euclid, Elements; Descartes on method; Feuerbach; Marx, preface to doctoral thesis; Hegel’s system.
• Chesterton, The Everlasting Man; What’s Wrong with the World; Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique; Teddy Roosevelt (book on his last years); Samuel Johnson’s joke; Dante (the nine orders).

His questions #

• Order presupposes what? — Distinction: nothing is before or after itself.
• Since the thing goes from ability to act, by reason of what? — Something already in act; so simply, act is before ability, and the beginning of all things is pure act.
• What did the early Greeks and the poets say is the beginning of all things? — Matter (water, air, Mother Earth); the common opinion of modern scientists too.
• What distinction is Solon making in political matters? — The best laws simply vs. the best a given people will accept (Aristotle’s best government vs. best for a given people).
• “Let us say they are happy as men” — what is that saying? — That they have happiness somewhat, not simply.
• Is the celibate life or the married life better? Does that mean the celibate life is suitable for everybody? — Celibate better simply; for a particular person the married life may be better, in some way.
• What was Feuerbach’s argument that so pleased Marx and Engels, and what kind of mistake is it? — The infinite is God, man’s mind is infinite, so man’s mind is God; a mistake of simply and somewhat, since only God is simply infinite and man’s mind only somewhat.
• How can Thomas reverse the order between the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles? — The ST is for beginners, led from particular compositions to the universal; the SCG, for Dominican theologians, proceeds syllogistically from the universal.
• Why do simplicity and perfection go together in God but not in material things? — In material substances the composed is more perfect; in immaterial substances (angels ascending) simplicity and perfection rise together, and God is wholly simple and wholly perfect.
• Is it better to be a dramatist or a philosopher (Shakespeare, Mozart)? — Left open (“you can write a reflection on that”).