Why the Confused Is Known First: Imperfect Before Perfect, and Descartes Versus Aristotle

Orientation #

He continues Physics I, lectio 1 (verified source), picking up “that distinction that we spoke of before” — simply vs. in some respect (prev. lecture). He promises “next time” a summary of “the natural road” (the confused-before-distinct being one aspect of it), and hands out a sheet on confused and distinct with passages from Duhem, de Broglie, Heisenberg and Russell (handout, verified). Last time treated the proemium and confused-before-distinct knowledge; next time distinguishes two movements from confused to distinct and continues the Descartes/Heisenberg contrast.

The class, in order #

1. More known to us is not more known simply (“more known to us, and what is more known simply”) #

Point: Aristotle’s “more known to us” and “more known simply / by nature” are not the same, and the road runs from the first to the second; the converse is that what is more known simply is less known to us.

• “By nature” does not mean nature knows it; it means more known simply, i.e. known fully, completely, in contrast with known in an imperfect, diminished way.
• Example, a glass of red wine: I am surer it is a dry red wine than that it is a Cabernet Sauvignon, and surer of Cabernet than that it is from Napa Valley or a given vineyard. The more precise I try to be, the less sure I am. But the beverage is more fully known when known as Cabernet from Napa, from this vineyard — so what is more known to me is what is less known.

2. The same applied to effect and cause (“more known to us, day and night”) #

Point: in the Nicomachean Ethics he applies the distinction to effect and cause rather than confused and distinct.

• We agree with the ancients that there is day and night (effect) but may disagree about the cause (earth turning vs. sun going round); historians agree the French Revolution took place, disagree about its cause. Disagreement about cause more than effect is a sign the effect is more known to us.
• But when is an effect fully known? Only in the light of its cause. We know the effect more by itself, and often are ignorant of the cause altogether.
• So by induction from “these three kinds of examples” (confused/distinct, effect/cause, the wine) one sees the truth of what Aristotle says: what we are more sure of is what is less known. Confused knowledge is “still somewhat in the dark”; going to the distinct, or from effect to cause, is going from darkness to light — but we know things in the dark way more than in the light.

3. The basic reason: from ability to know to actually knowing (“able to know before they actually know”) #

Point: the reason, which Thomas touches on “in the ninth book of Wisdom” [ed.: probably his commentary on Metaphysics IX (inferred)], lies in the nature of our senses and reason.

1. Our senses and our reason are able to know before they actually know; they go from being able to actually knowing.
2. One does not go from ignorance to perfect knowledge all at once but through an intermediate step of incomplete, imperfect knowledge (Aristotle’s blank paper filling gradually with notes; a glass filling with beer goes from empty to partly full before full).
3. Therefore for man imperfect knowledge comes naturally before perfect; what corresponds to imperfect knowledge is what is imperfectly known, and to perfect knowledge what is fully known.

4. Analogue in every kind of education (“in any kind of education, what is imperfect”) #

Point: something proportional holds in every education, since education develops something and so goes from imperfect toward perfect.

• Physical education: the Royal Canadian Air Force 5BX plan, graded exercises. Five push-ups are less productive of strength than fifty, but for the beginner fifty is impossible or harmful; so “what is more productive of strength for me is less productive of strength.”
• Education of imagination and taste: Little Red Riding Hood strikes the child’s imagination more than King Lear, but the fairy tale is eventually exhausted, Shakespeare never — Shakespeare is more imaginable, the fairy tale more imaginable for us at first.
• Tongue: the child prefers the hot dog to Marchand de Vin sauce; his father who never filled the fridge with soda pop seemed foolish; first taste of dry red wine seems “bitter” (“that’s why they call it dry rather than bitter”). Sign that there is more to taste in the wine: wine is not served refrigerated because you could not taste it, whereas Coke at cellar temperature has no taste at all. “What is more tasty is less tasty to us.”
• Ear: as a boy in the Second World War he hunted the dial for marches; his brothers brought home The Magic Flute and, being docile, he listened to it all and “didn’t think I heard anything”; now he plays Mozart almost exclusively. Everybody loves a parade, not everybody loves Mozart opera (aside: Virginia Woolf on hearing a performance as a vindication of opera [unclear in recording]).
• Eye: the child likes the drawing in his book over the museum painting, but one returns to the painting and sees more.
• Conclusion for taste in all its senses: what is more tastable is less tastable by us in the beginning.

5. The education of love (“the private good is more lovable by us”) #

Point: the same holds of the heart: the sensible good is loved before the understandable, spiritual good, and the private good before the common good; education leads from what is more lovable to us to what is more lovable.

• Eisenhower and Zhukov in Berlin: Zhukov said Russians work for the common economic good, Americans for private profit — “isn’t that more noble?” Eisenhower didn’t know how to answer. The right answer is not to deny that the common economic good is greater than one’s profit, but that men must be led from the private good to the common good; the Russians in fact did the same (Order of Lenin for producers, death for squanderers, appeals to private good and private evil) — “we just do it better.”
• The businessman who joins the Chamber of Commerce for his own company’s standing and later, even retired, keeps working for the good of the city: he has been educated from private to common good.
• The act of contrition he learned as a child: “I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because of offending Thee” — from private evil to the common good, which is God himself.
• St. Rose of Lima: a young man first attracted to her outward beauty (it was dangerous to tell her so; she would disfigure herself), then, under her as spiritual guide, became holy himself; the inward things are more lovable, the outward more lovable by us at first.
• Socrates, “the ugliest man in Athens,” praised by Alcibiades in the Symposium for what is inside; Beauty and the Beast, where you must know the personality before the outward beauty.
• Merchant of Venice, “In Belmont is a lady richly left, and she is fair, and fairer than that fair, of wondrous virtue”: the order builds from wealth to bodily beauty to virtue; beauty of soul is more than beauty of body, but body is loved first.
• The ascent in the Symposium: from love of beautiful bodies, to all beautiful bodies, to virtue and the soul, up to “the beautiful itself, is God.”
• Summing up: education of the heart, of taste, of the body all go from imperfect toward perfect; so what is more knowable to us is less knowable. God is the most knowable thing there is, the most actual, but least knowable to us. This is Aristotle’s reason for confused before distinct. “People write doctoral theses on that… a very, very profound thing.”
• Student: the first sentence already says the road is inborn. — Yes, a natural road; summary of the “natural road” promised next time.

6. Excursion: Descartes against Aristotle on certitude (“accept nothing as true which I did not”) #

Point: Descartes, “father of modern philosophy” (c. 1596–1650), in the Discourse on Method seems to say the opposite of Aristotle (who closes the golden age of Greek philosophy, c. 600–322 BC).

• Descartes drops logic as too messy for four rules; the first: accept nothing not recognized so clearly and distinctly that there is no occasion to doubt it. So Descartes identifies certitude with clarity and distinction; Aristotle identifies it with the confused. “A very fundamental disagreement about something very fundamental.”
• Aristotle’s reason as a first-figure syllogism: (1) what is more known to us is more certain for us; (2) the confused is more known to us than the distinct; therefore the confused is more certain.
• Descartes gives no clear reason, but wants to proceed everywhere as in mathematics; his reason is at best a third-figure enthymeme: mathematics is more distinct than the other sciences, mathematics is more certain (Plato, Aristotle and Thomas agree it is the most certain science for us; a triangle is more distinct to you than love, friendship or soul), therefore the more distinct is more certain. Aristotle’s examples of the third figure: Socrates is just, Socrates is a philosopher, therefore philosophers are just; “Berquist is Swedish, Berquist is a philosopher, therefore philosophers are Swedish.”
• A bad argument that may also influence him: “confused” is equivocal — mixed up, mistaken — and in that sense it would be stupid to say we know more what we are mixed up about; this is the most common kind of mistake in thinking, and the man on Main Street will say we are surer when clear and precise.
• Even in mathematics: I am surer that 28 is a number than that 28 is a perfect number.

7. Precision goes down as certainty goes up (“the more precise you get, the less certain”) #

Point: worked examples showing that measurement does not reverse the balance.

• Age: students agree he is over twenty, thirty… “we expect to go through the decades,” less sure the more precise.
• The blackboard: sure the horizontal is longer than the vertical; less sure it is a third longer, or one foot; “let’s be scientific,” measure with a ruler — two people get one foot one inch, one foot two inches; the ruler stops at a certain size, and it may really be one foot one inch and a hundredth or millionth of an inch, in which case “one foot one inch” is strictly incorrect. So you are still not surer of the precise figure than that it is longger.
• Weight: surer between 100 and 300 pounds, then 150–250, than exactly 195; two weighing machines give 195 and 196; it may be 195 and a quarter.
• Age by birth certificate: certificates contain mistakes (the clerk drunk or distracted) and are falsified; his own father’s documents gave two birth years (1892, 1893), so one is surer he was born in the last decade of the last century than of the year.

8. Descartes’s two derived mistakes and the modern neglect of the general (“two other kinds of mistakes that follow”) #

Point: one identification yields two errors.

• (a) Where he is sure, he thinks he knows clearly and distinctly: “I think, therefore I am” — very sure he thinks, so he must know what thinking is; does that follow? I am sure I am alive without knowing clearly what life is. He refuses to define motion because he is sure of it (Shakespeare: “things in motion sooner catch the eye”). Being sure is no sign of clarity unless the two go together — and they go in reverse.
• (b) Where something is clear and distinct, it must be so: his mathematical picture of the world.
• Bearing on general vs. particular: particular knowledge is more distinct; if it were also more certain the particular would simply replace the general and the moderns “would have their cake and eat it.” But you do not replace the more certain with the less certain: knowing I drink Cabernet does not cancel knowing I drink dry red wine. Hence the modern tendency to jump into the particular and neglect the general. He says this thinking “dominates the modern world.”

9. Duhem: certainty of ordinary observation, precision of experiment (“a sort of balance between precision and certainty”) #

Point: from about 1900, physicists began returning to Aristotle’s position on their own.

• The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (c. 1903; still reprinted fifty years later by Princeton with preface by de Broglie): Duhem was a thermodynamicist, then historian of science, then wrote on physical theory. He corrects the handout: “the initiated believe” should read “uninitiated.”
• Duhem’s claims read: the result of an experiment is not more certain than ordinary observation but less; its superiority is in the number and precision of details; ordinary testimony is certain only at the expense of not being detailed; theoretical interpretation removes immediate certainty but permits precision exceeding current language; a law of physics has a much less immediate certainty than a law of common sense but surpasses it in precision, gained “only by sacrificing” fixed certainty (bottom of page two of handout).
• Duhem’s image: a balance — precision/distinction on one pan, certitude on the other; as one goes up the other goes down. Berquist re-runs the liquid → red liquid → wine → Cabernet, the over-20/30/60 and the weight examples to show it: “you can’t have your cake and eat it… that’s kind of the defect of man’s knowledge.”

10. De Broglie and Einstein: precision comes from idealization (“nothing is more misleading than a clear and distinct idea”) #

Point: the twentieth-century physicists explain why precision loses certainty.

• De Broglie (father of wave mechanics, “greatest French physicist of the 20th century”): forty years earlier many physicists preferred thermodynamics, which pictures only bulk appearances, over “more precise but more hazardous” conceptions; yet the mind wants to go on to the precise (I want to know Cabernet or Pinot Noir while knowing I will be less sure).
• Einstein, The Evolution of Physics, the cart: push it, it rolls and stops; oil the wheels, it rolls farther; smooth the road, farther; imagine all friction removed and it would go forever — but there is not one example of a body in the absence of external forces; the precision came from going into imagination, departing from reality.
• De Broglie: idealizations are less applicable to reality the more complete they are; “contrary to Descartes, nothing is more misleading than a clear and distinct idea” — strong from a Frenchman with patriotism about Descartes.

11. Heisenberg and Russell (“more stable in the expansion of knowledge”) #

Point: Heisenberg (father of quantum mechanics, first to say the nucleus is protons and neutrons in 1932, author of the principle of indeterminism, “to be talked about later”) says the same in the Gifford lectures, Physics and Philosophy.

• The concepts of natural language, vaguely defined, are more stable in the expansion of knowledge than the precise terms of science; stable means more certain (Thomas often says stabiliora, certiora). Reason: scientific concepts are idealizations from limited groups of phenomena, precisely defined through axioms so as to fit a mathematical scheme, and through this “the immediate connection to reality is lost”; natural-language concepts are formed by immediate connection to reality.
• Bottom of the page: this changes our attitude to concepts like mind, soul, life, God, which belong to natural language; the nineteenth century’s confidence in precise scientific terms led to skepticism about natural concepts; modern physics turns skepticism against the overestimation of precise concepts, and the human ability to understand may be unlimited (he links this to the first thing said about mind in the fragment on Mind [ed.: “an Exegesis of the Mind” in the recording; unclear which fragment]). Proceeding from known to unknown we may have to learn the meaning of “understanding” — to be taken up with the second page of the reading.
• Russell, of whom he seldom says nice things, on his own method: start from something vague but puzzling, indubitable but not specifiable with precision — something certain but not precise, “a little bit of what Aristotle said.”
• Closing: some thinkers, mainly the great scientists of the twentieth century, have come back from their experience of physics to Aristotle’s understanding that the confused is more certain than the distinct [ed.: recording has “more uncertain,” evidently an ASR error given the whole argument].

His words #

• more known to us / more known simply (“by nature”): known imperfectly vs. known fully, completely; “by nature” does not mean nature knows it.
• confused / distinct: knowing “still somewhat in the dark” vs. in the light; “confused” not in the equivocal sense of mixed up, mistaken.
• able to know / actually know [ed.: potency/act]: the source of imperfect before perfect knowledge.
• natural road: the inborn road of the first sentence, of which confused-before-distinct is one aspect.
• education of taste / of love / of the heart / physical education: each goes from what is more X for us to what is more X simply.
• sensible good vs. understandable (spiritual) good; private good vs. common good.
• first-figure syllogism vs. third-figure enthymeme: strength of Aristotle’s vs. Descartes’s reasoning.
• certitude vs. clarity and distinction (precision): Descartes identifies them; Aristotle reverses.
• balance (Duhem): precision and certainty on opposite pans.
• idealization: departure from reality that yields precision (de Broglie, Einstein, Heisenberg).
• stabiliora, certiora: Thomas’s pairing of “more stable” with “more certain.”
• principle of indeterminism: Heisenberg’s, “the greatest change in physics since Newton.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Physics I, lectio 1 (handout p. 5): more known to us vs. more known simply / by nature.
• Descartes, Discourse on Method: the first of the four rules.
• Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory: on uninitiated belief in experimental certainty; ordinary testimony vs. experiment; validity of the laws of physics; the balance of precision and certainty.
• Louis de Broglie: paragraph on thermodynamics and “more precise but more hazardous conceptions”; passage “contrary to Descartes, nothing is more misleading than a clear and distinct idea.”
• Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (Gifford lectures): stability of natural-language concepts; idealization; mind, soul, life, God; understanding unlimited.
• Bertrand Russell: passage on his method.
• Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice: “In Belmont is a lady richly left…”

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (effect more known than cause).
• Thomas Aquinas, “ninth book of Wisdom” [ed.: probably Commentary on Metaphysics IX (inferred)].
• Aristotle on the mind as blank paper (locus not stated).
• Plato, Symposium (Alcibiades on Socrates; the ascent of love).
• Einstein, The Evolution of Physics (the cart and friction).
• The act of contrition; life of St. Rose of Lima; Beauty and the Beast; Shakespeare, “things in motion sooner catch the eye.”
• The 5BX plan (Royal Canadian Air Force).
• The “fragment” on Mind [unclear in recording].

His questions #

• Is the beverage more known when known as dry red wine or as Cabernet Sauvignon? More fully known as Cabernet from Napa, but less known to me.
• Which is more known to us, day and night or the cause of day and night? Day and night; we disagree more about causes than effects.
• When is an effect fully known? Only in the light of its cause.
• Do we go from ignorance to perfect knowledge all at once? No, through the intermediate step of imperfect knowledge.
• Is doing five push-ups as productive of strength as fifty? No, but for the beginner five is more productive than fifty.
• Which will strike the child’s imagination more, Little Red Riding Hood or King Lear? The fairy tale; but there is more for the imagination in Shakespeare.
• Which is more loved by us in the beginning, the private good or the common good? The private; education leads from it to the common good.
• Are you more sure it is one foot one inch longer after measuring, than that it is longer? No; instruments and records do not reverse the balance.
• Am I more sure that 28 is a number or that 28 is a perfect number? That it is a number.
• I am very sure I am thinking; does it follow I know clearly and distinctly what thinking is? No; certitude and clarity go in reverse.