Three Kinds of Beginnings, Custom, and the Role of Contradiction

Orientation #

He continues from the previous discussion of the “three beginnings” — the free hypothesis of experimental science, the truth forced on the mind in philosophy, and faith (prev. lecture) — before returning to page 3 of the handout on reading ten. He promises for next week (“I’ll be here next week”) texts on the role of contradiction from Heraclitus, Aristotle, the scientists and the theologians, as preparation for reading eleven. The previous class argued that natural philosophers converge on contraries as principles; the next is a discussion following on from reading eleven on how modern physics speaks of matter, substance and order.

The class, in order #

1. Custom makes the abnormal seem normal (“doesn’t everybody”) #

Point: what we are accustomed to seems the normal way, whether or not it is; this bears on how beginnings get accepted.

• Rose shocked by movie scenes that did not shock the young couple who went to movies regularly: custom removes the shock (“otherwise it’s falling apart”).
• Sergius’s example: the patient tells the doctor “I get up, I shave, I vomit, I brush my teeth” — “Doesn’t everybody?”
• Heisenberg on Einstein: revolutionary as he was, he could not accept the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory though the evidence was there, because he was so accustomed to the principle of determinism.

2. Faith as the third beginning (“the Trinity is not forced on the mind”) #

A student asks whether faith shares the “freely” of experimental science. His answer:

1. Faith is a free assent to the word of God — so the will is moving the reason to assent, otherwise it would not be free.
2. But the will is helped by divine grace, and the reason by the gift of faith itself, which disposes it to be moved by the will.
3. God also joins exterior motives of credibility, “as Vatican I points out.” [The transcript’s “not a sensus sensus” is unclear in recording.] Conclusion: it remains free; the Trinity is not forced on the mind now. Seeing God face to face, it will be as obvious as that the whole is more than the part — but reason does not see that by itself.

• Aside: “it takes a long time to study three beginnings,” but note that there are three different beginnings in our thinking.

3. Imagination and age in science (“like writing a novel”) #

A student finds modern astronomy more science fiction than science. He agrees in part: Einstein said the creation of scientific hypotheses is like writing a novel — science is much more tied to imagination than philosophy is.

• Hence great theories are invented by young men (twenties, sometimes thirties, rarely later): imagination is most perfect then. Einstein produced nothing comparable after coming to America.
• Heisenberg’s original ideas date from his twenties, but reading his semi-popular writings through the years he understands what he invented better and better: imagination is better at twenty or thirty, reason better at fifty.
• Student: does custom hinder imagination with age? Partly, but also something bodily, since imagination is in the brain and slows down — “combination.”
• Mozart reusing a melody from an earlier piece and improving it: the imaginative idea comes from the earlier period.

4. Second and third steps: kind of beginning, and the first pair (“the third paragraph of page three”) #

Point: he recaps the second step and adds the third.

• Second step: the Greeks’ beginning is one forced on the mind by truth itself rather than a hypothesis — “a very important step.”
• Third step: they all try to take the most fundamental pair of contraries, but some judge what is most fundamental more by the senses (hot and cold, moist and dry), others more by reason (odd and even — “these crazy mathematicians, they don’t follow their senses”; Empedocles’ hate and love, less sensible than hot and cold).

5. Fourth step: all say the same proportionally (“the same, however, in so far as proportional”) #

Text: “Thus they say the same thing in some way and something different from each other… the same, however, in so far as proportional.”

• “Proportion” here is analogy in the Greek sense, which he translates by Euclid’s sense: not a ratio but a likeness of ratios.
• Math illustration: thinker A says the causes are 2 and 3; B, 4 and 6; C, 8 and 12; D, 10 and 15. At first sight “nobody agrees with anybody… it’s hopeless.” But 2:3 :: 4:6 :: 8:12 :: 10:15 — not the same, yet proportionally the same.
• Woman and man: she is to him as the other woman is to her husband — women like a man a little taller (the tall girl in grade school chasing the one tall boy).
• Hair: when men wore their hair longer, women’s reached nearly to their ankles; what is natural is not the absolute length but that the woman’s be longer than the man’s (“a woman’s glory is her hair,” as the Bible says; complimenting a man on his hair is an insult). Proportionally it has not changed much.
• Applied: dense is to rare as mixed is to segregated, as love to hate, as full to empty, as hot to cold.
• Tying to the beginning: they all say the same in two ways — the same in general (the beginnings are contraries, though they disagree in particular which) and the same proportionally.
• Student: “but the principles are contrary.” He: it is more than that — saying “contraries” only names what they have in common; proportion says one principle is to the other as the other’s is to the other’s.

6. “Worse and better”: one contrary is lacking (“only Thomas would notice that”) #

Point: in the words “and worse and better” Thomas sees a further step — of the two contraries one is better or more positive, the other lacking something.

• A mug of yellow beer vs. a mug of beer foam at the same price: the man with the foam objects, he gets less — dense vs. rare.
• The mixed has something the segregated lacks (salad dressing); love better than hate, which seems to be missing something; the empty obviously lacks compared to the full; even the cold we think of as involving a lack of heat.
• So the proportion must be set the right way: not “dense is to rare as empty is to full” but as full is to empty, since rare and empty are the lacking members.
• “That’s a very important thing”: this idea of lack will come out later in the first book and in some way become even more essential than the idea of contraries; here it is a hint.

7. Recap of the steps (“almost five or six what steps”) #

The steps by which Aristotle “becomes strong”: (1) he gives a reason for what everybody says without a reason; (2) the thought is forced on the mind by truth itself, not hypothesis or the probable; (3) they all seek the very first pair, some judging by sense, some by reason; (4) all say the same proportionally — and, if you make two of this, the same in general; (5/6) one member of each pair is lacking or inferior. “The main thing is, it is clear that the beginnings should be contraries.”

• Marriage again: two marriages have in common that each is a union of man and woman; but this woman is to that man as this woman is to that man — a proportion. Two nuts and two bolts: each is a nut and a bolt, but this bolt fits that nut.
• Brother Mark’s two couples: each well matched, but swapped they “would have had horrible problems” — she is the wife he needs, not the wife the other needs.
• Wine and meal: “food with wine” is the general; Chardonnay is to chicken as Chianti is to spaghetti (“the main reason to eat spaghetti is so I can drink Chianti”).
• Pythagorean table of about ten contraries (Aristotle, reported by Thomas in the Metaphysics): a good column and a bad — right/left, male/female — anticipating that one contrary seems better. Tragedy in the good column, comedy in the inferior.

8. Preview of reading eleven: from two to three by contradiction (“the father of the progress of the human mind”) #

Point: the major step comes in reading eleven — a third thing is required besides the two contraries — and it is forced by the truth itself, through the role of contradiction.

• Structure of reading eleven: (a) the question of the number of beginnings; (b) eliminate one — the beginnings are contraries, so at least two; (c) eliminate an unlimited multitude, by four brief arguments; (d) “with philosophical modesty,” some reason to go beyond two — three arguments, the first being where “the royal contradiction appears”; we are really forced from two to three; (e) then a couple of arguments that three is enough.
• Principle of fewness (modern “principle of simplicity”; “fewness and truth, as the great Shakespeare says”): not that fewer are better, but fewer are better if they are enough — fundamental for Newton, Galileo, and Einstein says it underlies the whole of natural science. Two is fewer but not enough.
• Why this is the first major example of contradiction in the order of learning: our knowledge starts with the senses; “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs” (Ulysses, Troilus and Cressida); everyone sees change between contraries and says one becomes the other. But “becomes” means comes to be: if the dry comes to be wet, the dry is wet — something wet and not wet at once, impossible. If the dry never becomes wet, things stay dry forever; the healthy never sick, the sick never healthy. Heraclitus first emphasised this apparent contradiction, which “got Parmenides all excited.”
• The untying (Aristotle) or breaking down (Einstein) of a contradiction — in your thinking, apparently in the thing but not really, or between thinking and thing — is the discovery of something hidden before. Philosophers, 20th‑century scientists (Einstein, Bohr) and theologians all say this in different language; “get it from the horse’s mouth” rather than at second, third, fourth hand.
• Heraclitus (“war is the father of all things”; “hidden harmony is better than apparent harmony”) first saw it, so he is “the central thinker of human thought” and “the father of the progress of the human mind.” Anticipated by Heraclitus, more by Plato, fully in evidence in Aristotle.
• He will bring short key texts next week from Heraclitus, Aristotle, the scientists and the theologians.

9. Digression: Shakespeare and the senses of “before” (“looking before and after”) #

Point: Shakespeare, whose “looking before and after” he uses as the definition of reason, was aware that “before” has more than one meaning (cf. Aristotle’s chapter on before and after in the Categories).

• Hamlet: his mother married so soon after her husband’s death (first sense, time — the funeral food could serve the wedding) and a man so inferior to him (fourth sense, better) — “doubly bothersome.”
• The prologue to Romeo and Juliet: the third sense of before.
• All’s Well: Helena, kneeling to the Countess, confesses “before you and next to heaven I love your son” — punning place (first sense) with the fourth.
• Polonius seeking the cause of Hamlet’s madness, with a joke on the scholastics’ efficient vs. deficient cause.
• Whether Shakespeare saw it as fully as Aristotle is another question; the Aristotle text is brought in because it explicitly unfolds the meanings.

10. Digression: the good student as the earth (“he humbles himself under the master”) #

Point: Thomas’s prologue to Sacred Scripture compares the good student to the earth — lowly (humble under the master), stable (has judgment, does not take anyone’s word), fruitful (takes the master’s thought and sees what follows, possibly what the master had not thought).

• Anaximenes deducing from Thales’ water that water animals came before land animals, confirmed by the frog/newt, fish‑like at first.
• Euclid: from Propositions 5 and 6 one deduces that the equilateral triangle has all angles equal — “big deal,” but that is what a student does.
• Did Heraclitus see all he finds in the fragments (asked at TC)? He does not know; compare Planck in 1900, walking in the park with his son: “I think I discovered something as great as Newton” — without foreseeing Einstein five years later (light needs the quantum) or Bohr thirteen years later (the atom does).
• Dionne’s last year lecturing at Laval on the dependence of the mind’s life on the will, shown through Augustine’s Confessions; he found Thomas on Paul dividing the causes of error the same way — on the side of the will and of the knowing powers — a development Dionne “never thought of exactly that way.”
• Heath: the Pythagoreans attributed their own discoveries to Pythagoras — reverence for the master. Whether master or student saw a consequence “what difference does it make?”
• “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast”: a line he quotes constantly and this year found more in than he had unfolded — hence a talk to the Legionaries, “Friar Lawrence on stumbling.”

His words #

• becoming strong: the steps by which Aristotle confirms that the beginnings are contraries.
• forced on the mind by truth itself: the kind of beginning in the Greeks, vs. hypothesis or the probable.
• proportion: Euclid’s sense, a likeness of ratios, not a ratio; his rendering of the Greek analogous [ed.: analogy].
• the same in general / the same proportionally: the two ways all the ancients say the same.
• worse and better: Aristotle’s words, read by Thomas as one contrary better or positive, the other lacking.
• lack: the idea hinted here, “more essential” later in Book I [ed.: privation].
• principle of fewness: fewer are better if they are enough [ed.: principle of simplicity / parsimony].
• untie (Aristotle) / break down (Einstein): what the mind does to an apparent contradiction.
• the royal contradiction: the first of the three arguments for going beyond two in reading eleven.
• looking before and after: Shakespeare’s phrase, used as the definition of reason.
• efficient cause / deficient cause: Shakespeare’s joke on the scholastics in Hamlet.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Physics I (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 10), handout “Natural Hearing, First Book, Reading Ten,” p. 3, third paragraph and “worse and better.”

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics I, lectio 11 (inferred), previewed: number of beginnings, two to three.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics (Pythagorean table of contraries, via Thomas).
• Aristotle, Categories, chapter on before and after.
• Thomas Aquinas, prologue to Sacred Scripture (the good student as the earth); commentary on the Epistles of St Paul (causes of error).
• Vatican I on the motives of credibility.
• Heraclitus fragments; Parmenides; Empedocles; Thales and Anaximenes.
• Euclid, Elements I.5–6.
• Shakespeare: Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida (Ulysses), Romeo and Juliet (prologue; Friar Lawrence), All’s Well That Ends Well.
• Heisenberg on Einstein and the Copenhagen interpretation; on the history of quantum theory (Planck, Einstein, Bohr).
• Augustine, Confessions (as used by Dionne); Heath on the Pythagoreans.

His questions #

• Would there be a sharing of the “freely” of experimental science in faith? (student) Yes, but the will is helped by grace and reason by the gift of faith, so the Trinity is not forced on the mind though the assent is free.
• Would custom hinder the imagination as you got older? (student) Partly, but also something bodily, since imagination is in the brain — a combination.
• Two is to three as what? Four is to six, as eight to twelve, as ten to fifteen — not the same, but proportionally the same.
• Which way should the proportion run — dense to rare as empty to full? No: as full to empty, because rare and empty are the members lacking something.
• If the dry comes to be wet, is the dry wet? Then something is wet and not wet at once — impossible; but if it never becomes wet, things stay dry forever. Left as the apparent contradiction reading eleven will untie.
• Did Shakespeare know these senses of “before” as Aristotle did? He was aware the word has more than one meaning; whether as fully as Aristotle is another question.
• Did Heraclitus see all this in his fragments? He does not know — no more than Planck foresaw Einstein and Bohr.