The Common Basis of the Life of the Mind, Pride and Humility, and Pantheism Q&A

Orientation #

He is finishing (“in the last few minutes remaining, it’s almost five”) the point about Heraclitus begun before, and refers to “the last time” when he was reading Thomas’s commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians on the two kinds of pride (prev. lecture). He announces what comes next: Aristotle finding a common basis among the disagreeing predecessors and becoming strong in it “step by step”, a second set of readings from Physics I where the common basis is found among all men, and at “the eleventh reading” a stop on the role of contradiction. The previous class set up the despair-versus-audacity problem and the Heraclitean way forward; the next opens on Anaxagoras’s “greater mind” and continues Aristotle’s catalogue of Presocratic disagreements.

The class, in order #

1. The fragment: common law, common mind (“must be strong in what is common to all”) #

Heraclitus: those who speak with understanding must be strong in what is common to all, as a city is strong in its law, and more so, since the city’s law is “fed by divine law”. The point: as no common life in a city is possible without common law, so no common life of the mind is possible without something common.

• City example: if you drive by English law on the left and I by American law, “I don’t want to be on the same road with you.”
• He divides the life of the mind together into two ways:
  • As unequals (teacher and student). The teacher leads the student to what the student does not know through what the student already knows; so both must know those common things. Socrates leading the slave boy to double the square from what the boy knows; Euclid “my teacher in geometry” using theorems I have already learned to make me see the next.
  • As equals (discussion). When we disagree, each can call the other wrong “and you can return the compliment” — that ends the life of the mind together. The only way forward is something both agree on that can decide between us: two scientists with different hypotheses find a common experiment whose result the hypotheses predict differently; in geometry, go back to something both know.
• Aside: irony — as St Paul uses it in 2 Corinthians, saying how he “harmed” them by not being a financial burden.

2. What “strong in it” means, and what Aristotle will do (“see what does or does not follow from it”) #

To be strong in the common is to see what does or does not follow from it, what is or is not in harmony with it. His argument: (1) if there is something common to two disputants by which the dispute could be resolved, (2) they disagree only because they do not see what follows from the common; (3) so they must go back to the common and become strong in it. Aristotle follows “exactly the advice of Heraclitus”: he finds a common basis among the disagreeing predecessors and then goes through many steps becoming strong in it; later readings from Book I do the same starting from what is common to all men. This is why Heraclitus is “a central thinker” in human thought; he even “anticipates the common basis that Aristotle first finds.” He says it “suddenly dawned upon” him when translating the fragments how carefully Aristotle follows this — “sometimes I call myself a Heraclitean.”

3. The alternative: despair, or each asleep in his own world (“For the wake there is one world and it’s common”) #

The other alternatives — “I’ll look myself” or despair — he rejects; the natural thing is not to despair. Second Heraclitus fragment: we should not act and speak like those asleep; for the waking there is one common world, but each sleeper goes into his own world.

• Applied: Thales is in the world where water is the beginning, Anaximenes where air is, Democritus where atoms are — each in his own private world.
• Greek idios = private, whence “idiot”: the madman lives in a world of his own making.
• Dreaming after class, each somewhere else; waking, “we’re all on the table” and agree — the one true world.
• Bellarmine on the Protestants dividing down to private catechisms and creeds, departing from the one common creed.
• Student: the Casey decision, “the heart of human freedom is to define one’s own meaning of existence”; someone’s comment that this describes the schizophrenic, “the most free person in our society.”
• Aside: as a student he found philosophers’ meetings, where no two agree, discouraging; “not too good an idea to bring young students in there.”

4. Contradiction as the engine of learning (“look under that contradiction and see how it can be resolved”) #

Preview: at the eleventh reading comes the first major example, in the order of learning, of contradiction’s role in the development of knowledge; he will then return to Heraclitus’s fragments on contradiction, Aristotle’s statement of it in “the third book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics III], modern scientists who see something of it, and theologians and Christ himself. Already seen in the Anaxagoras fragment: an apparent contradiction between things he says, whose solution Socrates (who read Anaxagoras) suggests. A student notes he led them to it by offering two sentences. When there is reason to say both, and they seem opposed, one must look beneath the contradiction and resolve it — “that’s how we discover the way the mind can move itself.”

• Student objection: most people have more reason to despair, since these thinkers disagreed and were more intelligent than most, so if they could not find the way… — He agrees (“yeah, yeah”) without further reply; left there.

5. “As if wisdom began with them”: the species of pride (“they speak as if wisdom began with them”) #

Thomas, against the Latin Averroists (he thinks in De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas): they speak as if wisdom began with them — which is the modern philosopher, each in turn. He calls this a defect in the will. From Thomas on 2 Corinthians and Gregory’s division of pride (prev. lecture), the fundamental division: pride makes me think I am better than I am, either

• in what I have — thinking I have a good or excellence I don’t (e.g. thinking I understand what I don’t); or
• in how I have it — I do understand, but think I discovered it myself when I learned it, or think I am the only one who has seen it.
• Monsignor Dulac (from his obituary, quoting Fr Stromberg) would say “I don’t understand that” — not doubting, just not understanding; a good sign.
• Plato and Aristotle held the universe eternal, so the arts and sciences were discovered many times, lost in cataclysms leaving a few hill farmers or shepherds, then rediscovered. Though false, this kept them humble: Aristotle, “the first man to understand what the soul was”, did not realise how unique he was — “divine providence using the mistaken notion of eternity of the world to keep Aristotle from being too puffed up.” Compare St Paul (2 Cor 12): the man carried to the third heaven, then given the thorn — physical suffering or, as Augustine allows, concupiscence — to keep him from being puffed up.
• Aristotle’s balance (he says in the Politics): try to say some things better than predecessors, and others as well as they did. Some things are said so well one only tries to equal them: Heraclitus here; Shakespeare’s sonnet lines on children (“thou art thy mother’s glass”) — seeing loved ones return in children and grandchildren. Washington Irving, in his last conversations, said it was idle for the rest of them to take credit, “because Shakespeare said it all.”
• Thomas (in the Corinthians commentary): charity is the greatest virtue because it unites us with God, the end, and the end is the beginning in practical matters, so charity is the root of the virtues; pride is the worst sin because it seeks one’s own excellence not ordered to God — a turning from God, “the beginning of all” (Old Testament verse quoted).

6. Humility in his teachers (“How could I miss that all these years?”) #

Stories illustrating true humility versus pretending to know:

• De Koninck and Dionne as periti at Vatican II: Dionne pointed out something in philosophy of nature and De Koninck said “How could I miss that all these years?”; Dionne recalled how childlike he was.
• Berquist’s first meeting with De Koninck at Kasurik’s house: De Koninck answered all the questions Kasurik could not; listened to Berquist’s ideas on Mozart and said “write it up, we’ll publish it”; took his own articles to Dionne to check. Most teachers, by contrast, “puff up.”
• Student: Dr MacArthur would often answer “I don’t know”, or “I never read him,” while others talk of authors they haven’t read.
• Berquist reading physicists’ semi-popular books on De Koninck’s list (“from the horse’s mouth”, so as not to be misled by second-rate scientists); the rumour that he had or was about to get a PhD in physics though he has forgotten calculus — how easy it is to give the impression one knows more than one does.

7. Pantheism and false imagination of ability (“you make it actual in your imagination”) #

Student question on the prevalence of pantheism in the East (India). He mentions C. S. Lewis (via Warren Murray): pantheism is almost natural, “the state of the unwashed mind” — not only democracy makes men think so. His explanation:

1. Without an understanding of ability [ed.: potency], one thinks whatever is in the ability of a thing is actually in it.
2. So Anaxagoras thought everything in the ability of matter is actually in it.
3. Likewise God has an active ability for all creatures; imagine that ability as composed of everything it can make, and creatures are actually in God — pantheism.
4. The first cause of error on the side of the knowing powers is false imagination rather than the senses; von Weizsäcker: when you imagine something you make it actual, so imagining ability makes actual what it is an ability for. This is involved in Anaxagoras on matter and in misunderstanding God.

• Scripture: God to Moses, “I will show you every good” — Thomas: “that is myself”; God will be omnia in omnibus. God contains everything in a simple way; imagine it as a “concoction” and you have pantheism.
• Dionysius on the first hierarchy: seraphim see the order of the universe in the divine goodness (the end), cherubim in the divine substance (the form, less than the end), thrones in the divine knowledge (less than the substance); Thomas warns these are not three different things but different considerations of one.
• Kasurik’s joke: on seeing your guardian angel you would start to worship it and it would say “No, I am not God.”

8. Anaxagoras’s greater mind: angelic, not divine (“easier to know that the angels are than God”) #

Question: is Anaxagoras’s greater mind the divine or an angelic mind? Answer: angelic — it moves matter by changing place, as angels can, but is not responsible for matter’s existence. Theodoric [ed.: likely Dietrich/Theodoric; name uncertain] said it is easier to know that angels are than that God is: easier to reach a mind separate from matter than a creator — “creation is very hard to understand.” One might take the greater mind for God because one knows nothing better. Student: Michael Bailey’s [name uncertain] argument from mind — “I haven’t proved God, just some mind.”

9. Philosophy independent of faith (“you see what human reason can achieve”) #

Closing exchange: Augustine seems to have known only Aristotle’s Categories; he takes too seriously the suggestions that Plato met Jeremiah or Philo learned from Moses. Pedagogically it is better that the Greeks developed philosophy independently of faith, so one sees what reason can achieve. Comparison from the Church Fathers: the unconverted Jews, enemies of Christianity, were witnesses to the antiquity of the Old Testament books from which Christians argued prophecies to the Gentiles. Likewise Porphyry, whose Isagoge is fundamental and used by Thomas and everyone, was anti-Christian (his diatribes burned). His cousin, reading Aristotle in a “miniature” great books course, was amazed a non-Christian could know anything about God. Recording ends mid-sentence.

His words #

• “strong in what is common” — able to see what does or does not follow from, or agree with, the common.
• “life of the mind together” — as unequals (teacher/student) or equals (discussion).
• “return the compliment” — mutual accusation of error that ends discussion.
• idios — private; source of “idiot”, the man in a world of his own making.
• “as if wisdom began with them” — Thomas’s charge against the Averroists, applied to moderns.
• “puffed up” — pride’s effect (from 2 Cor).
• “ability” [ed.: potency]; “active ability” — God’s power to make.
• “false imagination” — first cause of error on the side of the knowing powers.
• “third book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics III].
• omnia in omnibus — God “all in all”.
• “from the horse’s mouth” — reading the scientists themselves.

Texts #

Read in class

• Heraclitus, fragment on being strong in what is common (with the city/law and divine-law clauses).
• Heraclitus, fragment on the waking sharing one world, sleepers each in his own.
• Shakespeare, sonnet lines on children and the mother’s glass (inferred: Sonnets).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics I (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 2) (inferred) — the readings to come; “the eleventh reading” on contradiction.
• Aristotle, “third book of Wisdom” on contradiction; Politics on surpassing/equalling predecessors (inferred); Categories (as known to Augustine).
• Thomas Aquinas, De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas; commentary on 2 Corinthians (pride; charity); on Dionysius’s hierarchies.
• 2 Corinthians 12 (third heaven, thorn); Old Testament verse on pride as beginning; Exodus “I will show you every good” (locus not stated).
• Gregory the Great, species of pride; Augustine on the thorn; Bellarmine on the Protestants; Casey decision; C. S. Lewis on pantheism; von Weizsäcker on imagination; Porphyry, Isagoge; Washington Irving’s last conversations.

His questions #

• Is it possible for you and I to live together in a city without a common law? No; so also the life of the mind together needs something common.
• If you and I disagree, what is the only way to go forward? Find something both agree on to decide between us (a common experiment; a shared theorem).
• Why are we disagreeing in the first place, if there is something common that could resolve it? Because we don’t see what follows from the common; so become strong in it.
• Once you see there is reason to say both of two opposed things, what must you do? Look under the contradiction and see how it can be resolved.
• What is the fundamental division of pride? Thinking oneself better either in what one has or in how one has it.
• Why is charity the greatest virtue and pride the worst sin? Charity unites us to God the end; pride seeks one’s excellence not ordered to God.
• Why is pantheism so natural? Without grasping ability, false imagination makes actual in God what is only in His ability.
• Is Anaxagoras’s greater mind divine or angelic? Angelic: it moves matter but does not account for its existence.
• Was it an advantage that not all Jews converted? Yes: they witnessed to the antiquity of the books; likewise Porphyry to philosophy’s independence.