Despair, Boldness, and Finding What Is Common Among Disagreeing Philosophers

Orientation #

He opens “now, what Aristotle is doing in the second reading” and refers back to what was learned “in the first reading” about the more known to us. He closes: “Now we’ll see how Aristotle does this. Okay, next time.” Verified sources place this class on Aquinas’s commentary on Physics I, lectio 2, read from his handout “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading 2”. The previous class surveyed the movers of the early natural philosophers; the next takes up Heraclitus’s fragment on being strong in what is common.

The class, in order #

1. The logical division of the opinions (“it is necessary that there is one beginning or many”) #

The point: Aristotle’s second reading divides logically the opinions of all the men already studied, including non-natural philosophers such as Parmenides and Melissus.

• One beginning or many.
  • If one: immovable (Parmenides, Melissus: outside natural philosophy) or movable (the natural philosophers, who themselves disagree: air, water, fire).
  • If many: limited or unlimited.
    • Limited: two, three, four (“the famous one,” Empedocles, four) or some other number.
    • Unlimited: one in kind, differing in figure or form (Democritus), or also contrary (Anaxagoras).
• What you see once the division is laid out: disagreement at every branch, even those who say “one, immovable” split on limited vs. unlimited. “As many men as many opinions.”
• His standing question to students: is this an unusual state of affairs in the history of human thought? No, “a very common situation.”

2. The first reaction: discouragement and despair (“possibly everybody’s mistaken”) #

The point: put in Aristotle’s shoes, the first reaction is discouragement, even despair, since the disagreement looks like a sign of the weakness of the human mind.

• Argument: (1) if one is right all the others are wrong; (2) they cannot all be right (not one and many, not water and air); (3) so possibly all are mistaken, and being mistaken is “the usual state of the human mind.”
• De Anima aside: the earlier Greeks tried to explain knowing but gave no explanation of mistakes, which are more common and “even more in need of explanation.”
• Story of the older woman at a social function: the young man at the University of Minnesota read authors A, B, C, D, grew ever more confused, gave up, lives on a farm and “refuses to pick up a book”; a natural, common reaction. Universities are “filled with people who have despaired”; the honest ones leave, the rest stay and “spread despair.”
• Whittaker Chambers on returning to Columbia: his friends treated ideas “like ping pong balls,” knocked back and forth, never taken seriously, since truth is assumed impossible for man. Despair becomes “almost like a common opinion that man can’t know the truth.”
• Descartes, Discourse on Method (autobiographical sketch): fell into a kind of despair for a while because of this universal disagreement.

3. The Phaedo, the passions in thinking, and the natural desire to know (“I never admired Socrates more”) #

The point: despair is a defect of appetite, not of the mind alone, and it contradicts a natural desire that nature would not give in vain.

• Phaedo: Socrates’ friends, persuaded by his arguments for immortality, fall into despair when Simmias and Cebes object; in the interlude Echecrates recalls his “sinking feeling,” asks what Socrates did, and Phaedo answers “I never admired Socrates more.” Socrates gradually leads them out and takes up the objections.
• What the dialogue form teaches that a treatise cannot: the role of appetite, will and emotions in thinking; one can show someone angry and not seeing the truth (Anytus getting angry with Socrates in the Meno [ed.: transcript has “Anaxagoras”; Anytus is the likelier reading]; people angry under Socratic examination).
• Argument that despair is against nature: (1) we have a natural desire to know the truth; (2) truth is often hard, so we get discouraged, and habitual despair means giving up the pursuit; (3) but nature “doesn’t do more than is necessary”; if it gives hunger and thirst, food and water cannot be impossible, though not always obtained; (4) so knowing the truth must be possible for man in some way.
• Yet the natural desire is not enough: one also needs “the hope of overcoming the difficulties.” Hence a teacher’s duty, especially with the young, to encourage.
• Kasurik (Kaszyrik? [unclear spelling in recording]) went to Monsignor Dionne’s office and found him talking quite differently from class; Dionne: “It’s a duty of the teacher to encourage the student,” though this particular student needed cautioning; the hoi polloi needed encouragement.
• His own thesis outline: Dionne, after polite questions, raised “a more serious objection,” proposed a reordering so good “I could write the thesis by myself after that”; Berquist suspects he was being tested.

4. The second reaction: do it yourself, and the fear it lacks (“add another opinion to an already long list”) #

The point: Descartes’ revived desire led to “let’s forget about them, let’s do it ourselves,” which is not against hope but against the fear the mind needs.

• Descartes claimed what he said would be so clear nobody would dispute it; he published, got “all kinds of objections,” and had to reply.
• Question: what reason is there to think doing it yourself will do more than add another opinion to the list? None given.
• Distinction: despair is against the natural desire and against hope; boldness or overconfidence (“I can succeed where everybody else has failed”) is against “the fear of being mistaken or the fear of making a mistake.”
• Phaedo again: once Socrates has destroyed Simmias’ position with three arguments, the friends grow bold; Socrates checks them, Cebes’ objection will not be so easy. A good teacher sees when boldness must be tempered with fear rather than encouraged. Friar Lawrence: “wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast.”
• The philosopher needs a balance of hope and fear; hard for a teacher with a whole class, some needing encouragement, some cautioning.
• Political analogy: without hope of being elected one only goes through the motions; but the politician must “run scared,” and the incumbent who thinks things are “sewed up” and stays in Washington too long is defeated by his overconfidence.

5. Hope and fear in the religious life, and his three teachers (“a balance of hope and fear”) #

The point: the same balance holds analogously in the spiritual life, and must be adapted to the person.

• Thomas on the 32nd psalm (“one of the songs”): hope in the divine mercy without fear of the divine justice makes one presumptuous; fear of the justice without hope in the mercy makes one despair.
• Things get unbalanced: he found St. Anselm’s meditation to gain fear of the Lord in a Catholic bookstore, “you don’t read that very often now”; the four last things (death, judgment, heaven, hell) are gone from preaching; “God loves you just the way you are”: “be careful with that statement.”
• Adapting to the person: a woman who has had an abortion may be tempted to despair of salvation and needs her hope built up; someone who “thinks they’re pretty good,” as St. Margaret Mary Alacoque sometimes did in her autobiography, gets torn into by Christ, “a master” who knows when to be merciful and when to straighten one out with justice. A confessor must find what each person needs.
• Monsignor Daly at the cathedral parish in Worcester: “some of you are going to have a mighty unhappy eternity.” At funerals everyone talks as if the dead are in heaven; Father Steiner told his mother, on his father’s death, “never stop praying for him.” St. John of the Cross asked his friend to pray that he have his purgatory on earth; “these things are kind of frightening,” but one must not frighten people too much either.
• His three teachers in order: Kasurik encouraged him most; De Koninck; Dionne gave most of all the fear. Bad had Dionne come first: “I would have been afraid to think.” Warren Murray: “John Dionne’s predominant passion is fear,” which was good, as fear of being mistaken; much fear also in Socrates. Where there is despair, more fear is not the need.
• Summary of three kinds of the balance: spiritual (hope in mercy vs. fear of justice), philosophical (hope of overcoming difficulties vs. fear of making a mistake), political (hope of election vs. fear of being thrown out). Despair offends the natural desire and hope; do-it-yourself offends fear: the boldness of Descartes, “the audacity of Montaigne” [ed.: he pairs both names; transcript unclear whether one is a self-correction]. Another name for excessive lack of fear is boldness.
• Dionysius sums up the cause of error as “bold imagination”: on the side of the knowing powers, false imagination; on the side of the mind [ed.: appetite implied], boldness.

6. A third way: gather the parts of truth (Empedocles) (“having seen a part of life, they boast”) #

The point: there is an alternative to giving up and to going alone, namely going forward with the help of those who disagree; two fragments on his method handout suggest two ways.

• Empedocles: men do not live long, and having seen a part of life they boast of having seen the whole. Shows the danger of pride, but also that man sees a part of the truth before the whole; pride, a defect of will, makes them disagree “more than they maybe even have to.”
• Hence the parts of truth may be scattered among reasonable men who disagree, each seeing something. Empedocles himself did this: his four roots take up what Thales saw (water as the beginning, especially of living things), together with air and fire, plus the numerical ratios “of our friend Pythagoras,” and something of his own.
• Soul example (from his Dionysius discussion of the Phaedo that day): Socrates/Plato make the soul a complete substance in the body “like a man in his boat, man in his car”; Simmias makes it a harmony, an accidental form or order of the body, as modern biologists do. Aristotle gathers the part of truth in each: the soul is substantial (Plato’s part) and a form (Simmias’ part), but neither a complete substance nor an accidental form, a substantial form.
• Why dialectic lets opinions clash: like the Achaeans and Trojans before Troy, the weak men on both sides go down; stop the battle after the first clash and gather those who remain, Hector and Achilles in one army, “the invincible army,” better than either you began with. So when opinions clash the weak elements go down and the strong emerge to be gathered.

7. The other way: become strong in what is common (Heraclitus), and which to do first (“must be strong in what is common to all”) #

The point: despite disagreement, the disputants may share something; find it, become strong in it, make it the cornerstone.

• Heraclitus: “those who speak with understanding must be strong in what is common to all”; as much as a city is strong in its law, even more so, for the law of the city is nourished by one divine law.
• Example: Parmenides (contradiction impossible in things, so no change) vs. Heraclitus (change is real but involves contradiction). One had to choose, but the need to choose rested on the fact that one seemed to contradict the other; so something is common to both, and bringing that out is the beginning.
• Aristotle will do both. His question: which first? Students usually say gathering the parts; he says the common. A student’s reason: simplicity, one truth common to fifty rather than fifty different things. His reason: the order of learning from the first reading, more general before particular, confused before distinct, more known to us before less known; and what everyone sees to some extent is more known to us than what one man alone sees. So do what Heraclitus says first, then gather the parts.

His words #

• logical division: Aristotle’s dividing of the opinions on the beginnings by one/many, movable/immovable, limited/unlimited.
• “as many men as many opinions”: his tag for the universal disagreement.
• despair of knowing the truth: the habitual giving up of the pursuit, against the natural desire to know and against hope.
• “nature doesn’t do more than is necessary”: his form of the principle that nature gives no desire for the impossible [ed.: nature does nothing in vain].
• do-it-yourself: Descartes’ reaction, “let’s forget about them, let’s do it ourselves.”
• boldness / overconfidence / audacity: the excess opposed to the fear of being mistaken.
• fear of being mistaken: what the philosopher needs alongside hope.
• balance of hope and fear: spiritual (mercy/justice), philosophical (overcoming difficulties/making a mistake), political (election/defeat).
• bold imagination: Dionysius’ summary of the cause of error.
• gather the parts of the truth divided among them: the Empedoclean way forward.
• strong in what is common to all: the Heraclitean way forward.
• complete substance vs. accidental form vs. substantial form: the three positions on the soul.
• more known to us: the order of learning invoked to decide which way comes first.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Physics I, second reading, in his handout “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading 2” (Aquinas, lectio 2 per verified sources): the division of opinions.
• Empedocles, fragment on men seeing a part and boasting of the whole (from his fragments on method).
• Heraclitus, fragment “those who speak with understanding must be strong in what is common to all,” with the city-and-law comparison.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima, on earlier philosophers not explaining mistakes.
• Descartes, Discourse on Method (autobiographical sketch).
• Plato, Phaedo (Simmias, Cebes, Echecrates interlude); Plato, Meno (anger at Socrates).
• Aquinas on Psalm 32 (“the 32nd song”), hope and fear.
• St. Anselm, meditation to gain fear of the Lord.
• Autobiography of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque; life of St. John of the Cross.
• Dionysius on bold imagination as cause of error.
• Shakespeare, Friar Lawrence’s “wisely and slow” (Romeo and Juliet, inferred).
• Whittaker Chambers on Columbia (work not named).

His questions #

• Is this an unusual state of affairs in the history of human thought? No; almost universal disagreement is very common.
• What is the first reaction, in Aristotle’s shoes? Discouragement, even despair; taking it as a sign of the weakness of the human mind.
• If nature gives us a natural desire to know the truth, can knowing it be impossible? No, as hunger and thirst show food and water are not impossible.
• What reason is there to think that doing it yourself will do more than add another opinion to the list? None; Descartes expected no dispute and got objections from all sides.
• What must a good teacher do when students grow bold after Simmias is refuted? Temper their boldness with the fear of making a mistake, as Socrates does.
• Is there any alternative to despairing or to doing it yourself? Yes: go forward with the help of those who disagree.
• Might those who disagree have something in common? Yes, as Heraclitus and Parmenides share the principle over which they seem to contradict.
• Which should you try first, gathering the parts of truth or finding what is common? The common, because what everyone sees is more known to us than what one man sees.