Anaxagoras' Mind, Hope and Fear, and Heraclitus' Common Ways Forward

Orientation #

He picks up “a few more words about Anaxagoras and the greater mind” before the reading, and says “I think we looked already at reading two” and “we got so far last time” to the question which of the two ways forward comes first (prev. lecture). Near the end he says “we’ll come back to” what Plato said “later on.” The previous class treated the Heraclitus fragment on being grounded in what is common and previewed Aristotle’s use of disagreement; the next examines Aristotle’s argument that the principles of change are contraries.

The class, in order #

1. Mind vs. love and hate as mover (“was it hate that split the atom”) #

Point: Anaxagoras’s greater mind is a better guess at the mover than Empedocles’ love and hate, since it does with one cause what they do with two.

1. Hate separates, love unites. But which separates more, hate or mind? Mind: it is the mind that figures out how to split the atom, how to dry-clean dirt from cloth; in logic (definition, division, distinction) and in mathematics (sphere and cube separated from matter) the mind is always separating.
2. Love unites more than mind, he grants. But Empedocles has earth, air, fire, water combine in ratios to form flesh, blood, bone, and ratio is reason’s business: Latin ratio is one word for both, Greek logos likewise. Example: the man mixing a Manhattan two-to-one need not love Manhattans; he must know the ratio (“mixology” — no, logos).
3. So as far as uniting things in ratio and, a fortiori, in order, mind is the better cause. Qualification, “an element of truth in both”: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle stress there is the same knowledge of opposites, and the same knowledge enables you to do opposites — the cook knows what is too much cooking, the doctor knows abnormal as well as normal blood pressure, the moral philosopher knows vice, the logician knows how to reason badly, grammar lets him say “I use you, professor”; Socrates at the end of the Symposium tells Aristophanes and Agathon that one who knew what he was doing could write both tragedy and comedy. Hence Aristotle in the ninth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX]: since art can do contraries, it needs desire or will to determine which — the doctor’s art can cure or kill (abortion); his own logic could teach or deceive. So mind without will is not enough to explain even God’s making: there is no hate in God, but there is love, will. “The whole truth is not that God is a mind, but he is a mind with will.” Conclusion: still, one cause replacing two is better — fewer causes if they suffice, the principle of fewness or simplicity (“fewness and truth, as Shakespeare said”), which Einstein calls the underlying principle of all natural science from the Greeks to his own work.

2. Which mind has Anaxagoras reached? (“angelic mind would be the more immediate”) #

Point: not the human mind, and more the angelic than the divine. Reason: the divine mind is responsible for the existence of matter; Anaxagoras’s mind is not, but moves matter by change of place — which is what angels can do (move matter locally, not create it). In his fragments matter and mind are two independent realities, mind superior in acting on and ordering matter. Similar position in Plato’s Timaeus: the demiurge orders a chaotic matter but is not said to create it. He may have thought of it as divine, knowing nothing greater.

3. Marx and Engels’ division, and the missing middle (“there’s something diabolical in leaving out the middle position”) #

Point: the materialist/idealist division is logically incomplete, and omitting the middle removes the bridge reason needs.

• Division: (a) matter is the beginning of all things, even of mind — early Greeks (who think of mind as somehow material), many modern scientists, Marxists (“mind is the highest product of matter,” Lenin); (b) mind or thought is the beginning of all things, even of matter — “idealists,” Hegel (who gets matter out of his logic “boom!”, never clearly), and St. John’s prologue: the Word/thought before God, all things made through the logos.
• His question to students: does it exhaust the possibilities? Where do you put Anaxagoras (dualist: matter and mind each independent in existence) or the Timaeus?
• Why it matters: reason, starting from the senses, first thinks of matter as the beginning; it cannot jump from there straight to a mind responsible for the existence of matter. It must first see that mind (the ability to understand universals, seen first in one’s own understanding) is immaterial — which opens the door to angels, and then to God. Thomas thinks Aristotle reached the idea of creation (not spelled out; maybe not Plato), but only after Anaxagoras and Plato saw mind as immaterial. Cutting the middle is “too large a jump for mind” — diabolical whether or not Marx and Engels know it.
• De Koninck once said in passing it is easier to know the existence of angels than of God, without explaining; this suggests why. Against Catholics who say angels can’t be proved, only believed. Asides: an Assumptionist seminarian asked whether angels really exist — “they’re more real than you are”; all human minds ever (except Christ’s) rolled into one would not equal an angel; Casirer: after death your guardian angel will seem to be God, and will tear his hair out (if he had it) like St. Paul refusing worship; the angel watching you decide is like you watching an eagle.

4. Reading 2: everyone disagrees — weakness of mind and the danger of despair (“as many thinkers, as many opinions”) #

Point: Aristotle’s logical division of predecessors leaves one thinker per box, and this can breed despair, against the natural desire to know.

• The division recalled: one matter or many; one — mobile or immobile; immobile (Parmenides, Melissus) — finite or infinite; one and mobile — water, air, fire; many — finite or infinite; infinite — same kind or different kinds. No two agree.
• What it shows: first, the extreme weakness of the human mind (at most one is right); second, being mistaken is the usual state of the mind — Aristotle in the second book About the Soul says his predecessors assigned the cause of knowing but not of being deceived, and one ought to, since that is more common.
• Effects: discouragement, despair of knowing the truth; either giving up the life of the mind or “playing games.” Whittaker Chambers (Witness; the Alger Hiss case): leaving Columbia he saw only suicide or communism — his brother did the one, he the other; returning to recruit his friends he found they treated ideas like ping-pong balls.
• Hence the philosopher needs not only the desire to know but the hope of overcoming difficulties, perseverance; as in the Phaedo, where Socrates leads them out of discouragement. Aside: his sabbatical spent investigating the causes of error left him like the psychiatry student who sees everyone as tottering — “a very fragile mental world.”

5. Descartes’s reaction; hope and fear (“What you need in the life of the mind then is hope and fear”) #

Point: Descartes’s desire revived but lacked humility and the fear of being wrong; the mind needs both hope and fear, balanced by a master.

• Descartes (Discourse on Method): first despair at disagreement; then “if they had found the truth they would have agreed; set them aside, I’ll do it myself.” Not against hope, but against humility and fear of adding one more opinion to an overlong list — audacity.
• Warren Murray: “Monsignor Dionne’s principal passion is fear” — first reaction to any new idea was to reject it; you could not pull anything over on him.
• Boldness after success: in the Phaedo, Socrates disposes of Simmias “three strikes” and they grow bold; Heisenberg and Bohr near despair (“how can nature be as absurd as it seems?”), then a breakthrough, then boldness about clearing up biology by quantum physics; Kant (things in themselves unknowable) to Hegel (everything open to the Hegelian mind).
• So: hope of knowing and overcoming difficulties, fear of being mistaken; the balance is hard, so a master like Socrates encourages or cautions as needed. Casirer found Dionne spoke differently in the office than in class — the teacher’s duty is to encourage, but Casirer didn’t need it; Dionne was shocked when Berquist agreed at once to a change in his thesis outline.
• Parallel in Christian life: hope of divine mercy against despair, fear of divine justice against presumption; Thomas on the Psalms (he thinks Psalm 32, “not sure”): hope without fear is presumptuous, fear without hope despairs. The confessor as master: a woman realising what her abortion was may need mercy; others who hear only “God loves you as you are” need straightening (“lukewarm, he will spit you out”). St. Gertrude’s autobiography conveys the Lord’s sweetness, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque’s his severity — need both. The politician: without hope no good campaign, without fear a bad one — the elder Bush thinking himself a shoo-in after the Gulf War.

6. Two ways forward: Empedocles and Heraclitus (“the royal fragments of Heraclitus”) #

Point: two fragments suggest ways of going on with the disagreeing many, without Descartes’s presumption or the despairer’s surrender. Empedocles: men live briefly and see a part, yet boast of the whole; each seizes a part of the truth and insists it is the whole, unable to see the truth in the other. The pseudo-Thomas commentary on the Consolation of Philosophy: Lady Wisdom’s torn garments — people grabbing for truth have dismembered it. Way forward: gather the divided points, letting them clash so the strong points emerge; the Achaean and Trojan armies — the weak fall in the first clash (the man opposite Hector, opposite Achilles), then form one army of Hector, Achilles, Ajax: invincible. Heraclitus (read from the fragments):

• “We should not act and speak like those asleep.” Narrowly: the sleeper is cut off from the senses and follows imagination; accident witnesses agree more if written down at once — a month later imagination adds and subtracts.
• “For the waking there is one world, and it is common; when they fall asleep each retires into his own private world.” Hint that the true is one and common, the false many and private: everyone who knows 2+2 has one answer; imagined answers are five, six, seven, eight.
• “Therefore we ought to follow what is common; but the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.”
• “Those who speak with understanding must be strong in what is common to all, as a city in its law, and even more so, for the law of the city is fed by one divine law.” City life needs common law (drive on the right). But laws of cities conflict; Nazi laws are not bad merely for disagreeing with American ones — you must go back to a divine or natural law, more common still. Likewise if you and I disagree, each can only say “you’re wrong” unless we return to something common: two scientists with rival hypotheses devise an experiment both can observe; the teacher leads the student to what he does not know through what he already knows (Euclid), which the teacher must know too. No life of the mind, between teacher and student or among equals, without a common basis.
• “Wise is listening not to me but to reason, to agree that all things are one”: to listen to reason is to listen to what is common to your reason, mine, and the next man’s — what reason naturally knows.
• “Wisdom is to speak the truth and act in accord with nature, giving ear thereto”: the natural is the common. Reason, nature, the common all fit together; “with the truth all things harmonize” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics).

7. Which way first? (“the common is more known”) #

Point: seek the common basis first, then gather the parts. Reason: the common, which all men somehow see, is more known to us; a part of truth one man sees and others don’t is less obvious. This follows the inborn road of the first reading of Natural Hearing Book I: from what is more known to us to what is less known. That is what Aristotle does in Readings 8, 10 and 11.

8. End of Reading 2: the things that are, and being tied to bodies (“Whatever exists must be somewhere”) #

Point: for the early Greeks the study of natural things and of the things that are was the same. Text: “those seeking how many are the things that are also sought in the same way… whether one or many, if many, limited or unlimited.” In the fourth book of Natural Hearing Aristotle quotes their common opinion: whatever exists is somewhere, and being somewhere is a property of bodies — so being is identified with bodies. Only with Plato and Aristotle is substance not identified with bodies, bodies being the kind most known to us. That is why you cannot begin with metaphysics: the mind starts tied down here, never thinking without imagining, so it thinks everything is a body (some Catholics still imagine God with a body; without faith the separation of being from material being is very hard). Thomas’s “being is the first thing understood” is not the wise man’s being but being considered in material things — Cajetan’s ens concretum in quidditate sensibili.

9. Reading 8: the common bases within each group (“mixture and what segregation”) #

Point: Aristotle finds the common basis in two steps, first within each group.

• Parmenides and Melissus set aside as not natural philosophers (no change).
• One underlying body (water, air, fire, or something between): all generate the rest by condensation and rarefaction — clearer to Aristotle with more fragments; with one matter that is all you can do with it. Water to steam is rarefaction, back to water condensation; heated water expands. His joke to music students that beer is the beginning of all things: Berkus [name as heard] pouring beer from high for foam (rarefaction) settling into yellow beer (condensation) — even the crazy opinion shares condensation and rarefaction.
• Many (Empedocles, Anaxagoras; Democritus; perhaps Anaximander): at first only difference — four roots vs. infinitely small pieces of everything in everything; love and hate vs. greater mind. But love mixes and hate segregates (“segregation” is more accurate than separation: different kinds being separated); in Anaxagoras all is mixed at first and mind segregates. Common: mixture and segregation — Empedocles in a cycle, Anaxagoras in a straight line never completed. Democritus’s atoms are mixed and knocked apart too. Aside, following Empedocles’ advice for a moment: modern science suggests truth in both — recycling here on earth (Empedocles), expansion without enough force to contract on the whole (Anaxagoras); “but now we don’t care about the element of truth in both,” only the common.

10. Reading 10: all make the beginnings contraries (“All make the beginnings contraries”) #

Point: dense/rare and mixed/segregated are each a pair of contraries, so all share contraries as beginnings — the first sentence of Reading 10. They add further pairs: Parmenides, condescending to the illusory natural world, hot and cold; earth, air, fire, water; Democritus full and empty, and contraries of position, figure, order (above/below, before/behind, straight/angular); the Pythagoreans odd and even, a whole world in two columns (good: male, odd; bad: female, even). All their thought is dominated by change being by, or from, contraries. The class ends here.

His words #

• “greater mind” — his rendering of Anaxagoras’s nous [ed.: usually “Mind” or “Intellect”]
• ratio / logos — the same word for reason and for ratio, in Latin and Greek
• “the ninth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX] — art knows opposites, so will determines which it does
• “the principle of fewness or simplicity” — fewer causes are better if they suffice
• “the second book About the Soul” [ed.: De Anima II]
• “ping pong balls” — ideas not taken seriously (Chambers on Columbia)
• “the royal fragments of Heraclitus” — his name for the group on the common
• “segregation” — preferred to “separation”: separating different kinds
• “condensation and rarefaction” / “dense and rare”
• “the inborn road” — from the more known to us to the less known
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• ens concretum in quidditate sensibili — Cajetan: being concrete in a sensible nature
• “the beginnings” [ed.: principles] — “all make the beginnings contraries”

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Physics I, Reading 2 (Aquinas, lectio 2), esp. its last paragraph on “the things that are”
• Aristotle, Physics I, Reading 8 (his numbering): the two ways of the natural philosophers
• Aristotle, Physics I, Reading 10 (Aquinas, lectio 10): “all make the beginnings contraries”
• Heraclitus, fragments on sleepers, the common world, following the common, strength in the common as a city in its law, listening to reason, acting in accord with nature (handout, Natural Fragments)
• Empedocles, fragment on men seeing a part and boasting of the whole Mentioned
• Plato, Symposium (end), Timaeus (demiurge), Phaedo (Simmias and Cebes)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX; De Anima II; Physics IV (place); Nicomachean Ethics (“with the truth all things harmonize”)
• St. John’s Gospel, prologue
• Descartes, Discourse on Method
• Aquinas, commentary on the Psalms (Psalm 32, he thinks)
• pseudo-Thomas, commentary on Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
• Whittaker Chambers, Witness
• autobiographies of St. Gertrude and St. Margaret Mary Alacoque
• Marx and Engels; Lenin; Hegel; Kant; Einstein on simplicity; Heisenberg on Bohr

His questions #

• Which is the better guess as mover, love and hate or the greater mind? Mind: it separates more than hate and unites in ratio and order better than love, one cause for two.
• Which separates things more, hate or the mind? The mind (splitting the atom, dry-cleaning, definition and division, mathematics).
• Is the greater mind the human, the angelic or the divine mind? The angelic: it moves matter locally but is not responsible for matter’s existence.
• From a logical point of view, is Marx and Engels’ division a good one — where would you put Anaxagoras? No: it leaves out the middle (dualist) position, the bridge reason needs.
• Is there another way of going forward, without Descartes’s audacity and without despair? Yes: Empedocles’ gathering of parts and Heraclitus’s being strong in the common.
• Which should you do first, gather the scattered parts or find what all have in common? The second, because the common is more known to us.
• Is mixture and segregation in the universe a cycle or a straight line? A student says cycle; he says an element of truth in both, but here only the common matters.
• What do dense/rare and mixed/segregated have in common? Both are contraries: all make the beginnings contraries.