Heisenberg on Natural Language, Number and One, and Student Questions on Nature and Motion

Orientation #

He returns to a Heisenberg passage he says he “had before the last lecture,” asks whether the papers on confused and distinct from the moderns were handed out, and a student follows up “my questions from last week” on nature and its properties. He points forward to “the thirteenth reading” (first matter), to Book III (definition of motion), Book V (change of habit), Book VI (the mobile is a body) and to studying the soul after the eight books of Natural Hearing. Verified sources place this class probably around Aquinas’s lectio 12 on Physics I, with readings from two handouts (“What Is Good & What Is Better,” p. 4; “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I,” p. 5). The neighbouring classes treat Physics I, readings 12–13, on “becoming” as a common basis of understanding.

The class, in order #

1. Heisenberg on Descartes: animals as machines (“res cogitans and the res extensa”) #

Point: he reads Heisenberg’s lecture on the development of philosophical ideas since Descartes as a modern physicist seeing the difficulty in Descartes.

• Descartes’ division into res cogitans and res extensa forced him to put animals and plants wholly on the side of res extensa, i.e. machines, their behaviour wholly determined by material causes.
• Heisenberg finds it hard to deny “some kind of soul in animals,” and says the older concept of soul in Thomas Aquinas is “more natural and less forced” than Descartes’ res cogitans, even granting that physics and chemistry hold in living organisms.
• A later consequence: once animals are machines, “it was difficult not to think the same of all men.”
• His gloss: Descartes “cut up quantity with substance” in man, and “we had a hard time putting man together” once he divided him that way.

2. Heisenberg on natural language and the unlimited mind (“the concepts of natural language, vaguely defined”) #

Point: the vague concepts of natural language are more stable, hence more certain, than the precise terms of science; this Heisenberg sees.

• Read: natural-language concepts, though vaguely defined, are more stable in the growth of knowledge than precise scientific terms. His summary: “the vague is more stable and therefore more certain than the precise.”
• Read: after modern physics our attitude to “mind,” “the human soul,” “life,” “God” differs from the 19th century’s, because these belong to natural language and so have “immediate connection to reality.” 19th-century confidence in scientific method bred skepticism toward natural-language concepts (e.g. religion); modern physics has turned skepticism against the overestimation of precise concepts, against optimism about progress, and against skepticism itself.
• Read: this does not limit rational thinking; “the human ability to understand may be, in a certain sense, unlimited” (his flag: “First thing that Heisenberg said… The mind is unlimited”); scientific concepts cover only a limited part of reality; any understanding “must be based upon the natural language,” since only there can we be certain to touch reality; hence we must be skeptical of skepticism about natural language.
• Aside: most great physicists are not believers, yet Heisenberg “doesn’t close the door.” De Broglie and Einstein also see that scientific precision comes by idealization, which departs from reality.

3. Why the mind is unlimited: it knows the universal (“activity by its object”) #

Point: the best fundamental reason for the mind’s unlimitedness is that it knows the universal.

1. The soul is known by its powers or abilities; the powers by the acts of which they are abilities; the acts by their objects (he anticipates the study of the soul after Natural Hearing).
2. A thing is singular when sensed but universal when understood (a student’s phrase he endorses).
3. A universal covers an infinity: knowing what an odd number is, “I know that no odd number is even,” so I know an infinity of things confusedly, and by confused-and-distinct can begin to know them distinctly. Knowing what a man is reaches all men past, present and future; knowing what a number is reaches all numbers.
4. Senses do not: the eye does not know sound, the ear colour, and neither knows universals. Conclusion: the mind, not sense, has the unlimited ability.

• Outward sign: man is always inventing something new; language can express any number of things.
• Student: “the object of the mind is knowledge.” Reply: the object is the what-it-is; for our mind, a what-it-is that can be sensed or imagined, through which we understand immaterial things by analogy and negation.

4. Is one a number? Equivocal by reason (“a multitude composed of ones”) #

Point: “number” said of two and of one is equivocal, but by reason (analogy), not purely.

• Number of two and three: univocal. Number of two and one: equivocal by reason. Euclid defines number as “a multitude composed of ones,” so one is not a number in the first definition.
• Why not purely equivocal — two connections: (a) one is in the definition of number; (b) one can have to a number the ratio a number has to a number (1:2 as 3:6). Contrast: point vs. line is purely equivocal, since a line is not composed of points and a point, having no length, cannot have to a line the ratio a line has to a line. Also: one can be subtracted from a number as a number can (6−2=4, 6−1).
• Theorems in Euclid depend on this equivocal sense: numbers prime to one another are the least of those in the same ratio, and the least numbers in a ratio measure all the rest, first the first, second the second. 2:3 measures 4:6, 8:12, 10:15; but for 2:4, 3:6 you must go down to 1:2 to get the measure, so one must count as a number there.

5. Nature is known by motion; the kinds of change (“nature is defined by motion”) #

Point (student’s follow-up on knowing nature by its effects, many of which fall under quality): the key to the definition of nature is motion.

• Aristotle at the start of Book III: nature is defined by motion, so if motion were unknown nature would be unknown; nature is “the beginning and cause of motion and rest.”
• Subject of natural philosophy per Thomas: ens mobile, the mobile thing, not body, because that the mobile is a body is shown in Book VI; the next book (on the universe) can begin from bodies because of that. Body is thus a property.
• Particular natures are studied by how they change: a tree grows, absorbs, reproduces; a stone does not. Joke: little stones with their kidneys running around.
• Student: does motion fall under one of the ten highest genera? No; Aristotle takes it up in the Categories after the ten, because it is found in more than one: change of place (where), of quality (third species, sensible quality), of quantity (growth), of substance.
• The Greeks before Aristotle did not see substantial change as possible: they took first matter as an actual substance, so all forms would be accidents; hence they could not understand substantial form or the soul. First matter comes in the thirteenth reading.
• Student: why limit alteration to sensible quality — what of change of shape, habit, ability? Reply: that is a question for Book Five; left there.

6. Shakespeare: nature the measure of virtue and vice (“revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse”) #

Point: Shakespeare’s order in Hamlet’s advice to the players is perfectly ordered because nature measures virtue and vice, and the age is judged by its virtues and vices.

• He toys with a lecture title “Friar Laurence on stumbling”: two statements in Romeo and Juliet — “wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast,” and the lines ending “revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.” The important phrase: true birth = true nature.
• Student links it to his earlier example of the alcoholic not true to himself; he assents, adding Macbeth: “by natural deeds to breed unnatural troubles.”
• Hamlet’s advice (Kittredge is right that it states Shakespeare’s own view): not to overstep “the modesty of nature”; the end of playing is to hold the mirror up to nature, show virtue her feature, scorn her image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
  1. Mirror to nature first, because nature is the measure: virtue is a habit in accordance with nature, vice not.
  2. “Scorn” is a metonym for pride (scorn, contempt of others, is the effect of pride; pride is queen of the vices), so “virtue… scorn” means virtue and vice without sounding pedantic.
  3. The age is judged, characterised, by the virtues or vices predominant in it.
• Nature comes from birth, so “revolts from true birth”; to abuse is to use against nature.
• Foundation in nature for good and bad: the chief good of man is tied to what he is; if it were but to sleep and feed he’d be no more than a beast; if to grow, a plant.

7. Proving that the end is better than the means (“that on account of which more so”) #

Point (student: how best to convince someone the end is better than the means?): first by induction, then by syllogism.

• Induction (argument from many particulars to the general): medicine or health? study or know? (if you could know without studying you would not study; his son Marcus asks why we can’t be born knowing everything — “you ought to be born an angel”); a house or making a house? having money or making money (if you work only for money and don’t enjoy the work, money is obviously better)?
• Syllogism, from the principle Aristotle and Thomas state “with the brevity of wisdom”: propter quod unumquodque tale, illud magis — “that on account of which, more so.” His expansion: when the same belongs to two things, but to one of them because of the other, it belongs more to the cause.
  • Simple examples: hot said of fire and the air around it, air hot because of fire, so fire hotter; sweet of sugar and coffee; wet of water and dishcloth; salty of salt and French fries.
  • Application in logic: known is said of premises and conclusion, conclusion known because of premises, so premises more known; if not, they would not prove it.
  • Application to responsibility: he pushes you off a cliff with a pole; the pole moved you insofar as moved by him, so he is more responsible than the pole.
  • Application to the good: good = desirable; desirable is said of end and means (health, medicine), but of the means because of the end; so the end is more desirable.
• He shows it by induction first because that is more proportioned to the learner, then by syllogism.

8. Inside goods over outside goods; why God is better (“the end is better than what is for the sake of the end”) #

Point: the same principle settles Socrates against the Athenians and orders the goods of man.

1. Outside goods are for the sake of inside goods (shown by induction, as above); the end is better; so inside goods are better.
2. Body for soul: if one knows matter is for the sake of form, one could syllogize the body is for the soul; but usually students don’t know that much, so instead: the end of man, already reasoned out (Ethics I), is the act with reason done well throughout life; the virtues are the goods of the soul, closer to the end, therefore better.
3. If one admits God is better than man (“only probable”), godlike goods beat merely human goods; nobody thinks the body more godlike than the soul, and reason is godlike.
4. Man better than beast; goods of the body are shared with beasts, goods of the soul proper to us.

• Why is God better? Either because he is the end of the universe, or from the whole being better than the part: God is universally perfect, his perfection not limited to a genus; creatures are perfect when they lack nothing of their kind (Metaphysics V distinguishes the senses of perfect, XII demonstrates God is perfect in that way).
• The two most general propositions about the better: the end is better than the means; the whole is better than the part. “Perfect is better than imperfect” is more general still, but its meanings tie into whole and end; seeing the part is for the sake of the whole is two steps toward the end. The one he emphasises: the end is better than what is for the sake of the end.

9. Relativity and admitting one does not understand (“Neither do I. Class dismissed”) #

• Student (studying general relativity with Father Anthony): would a ruler bend near the sun; must space be material? He: “we don’t know that”; “few people understand relativity theory, and Einstein is not one of them.”
• Story: at West Point the professor asks MacArthur, the best student, if he understands the theory; “No, I do not, sir.” “Neither do I. Class dismissed.” Military professors “more manly than the rest of us.”
• Monsignor Albert Dionne’s obituary (per Father Stromberg): he was not afraid to say “I don’t understand this.” Recording ends mid-remark.

His words #

• res cogitans / res extensa — Descartes’ thinking thing and extended thing, as read from Heisenberg.
• confused and distinct — knowing a universal covers an infinity confusedly, then distinctly.
• activity by its object — the soul known by powers, powers by acts, acts by objects.
• the what it is — the object of the mind; for us, something sensible or imaginable [ed.: quiddity].
• equivocal by reason — “number” said of one and of two; not purely equivocal [ed.: analogy].
• Natural Hearing — the eight books [ed.: Physics].
• ens mobile — the mobile thing, Thomas’s subject of natural philosophy.
• metonym — “scorn” for pride, its cause.
• induction — argument from many particulars to the general.
• propter quod unumquodque tale, illud magis — “that on account of which, more so”; expanded: when the same belongs to two things but to one because of the other, it belongs more to the cause.
• outside goods / inside goods — the Socrates–Athenians disagreement.
• universally perfect — God’s perfection not limited to any genus; creatures perfect when lacking nothing of their kind.

Texts #

Read in class

• Heisenberg, lecture on the development of philosophical ideas since Descartes; and the passage on natural-language concepts, skepticism and the unlimited mind (Physics and Philosophy, inferred).
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Friar Laurence’s two “stumbling” lines); Hamlet (advice to the players); Macbeth (one line).
• Handouts (verified): “What Is Good & What Is Better - The Order of the Discourse,” p. 4; “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I,” p. 5.

Mentioned

• Papers on confused and distinct from the moderns.
• Euclid, definition of number; theorems on least numbers in a ratio (Elements VII, inferred).
• Aristotle, Physics III beginning (nature defined by motion); VI (the mobile is a body); Book V (change of habit); the “thirteenth reading” (first matter); the next book on the universe [ed.: De Caelo].
• Aristotle, Categories, motion after the ten.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (senses of perfect) and XII (God perfect).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (end of man).
• Kittredge on Hamlet’s advice; Louis de Broglie; Einstein.

His questions #

• Which is hotter, the fire or the air around the fire? Sweeter, sugar or the coffee? The cause: fire, sugar — “that on account of which, more so.”
• Which is more known, the premises or the conclusion? The premises; otherwise they would not prove the conclusion.
• Who pushes you off the cliff, me or the pole? He is more responsible; the pole moved you insofar as moved by him.
• Which is better, to take medicine or be healthy? to study or to know? a house or making a house? The end in each case — the inductive step.
• Is “number” said of two and one univocal or equivocal? Equivocal, but by reason: one is in the definition of number and can have a number’s ratio.
• Why wouldn’t you call a point a line? Purely equivocal: a line isn’t composed of points and a point has no ratio to a line.
• Does motion fall under one of the ten highest genera? No; found in more than one (where, quality, quantity, substance), so treated after the ten.
• Scorn is a metonym for what? Pride, queen of the vices.
• Why is God better than other things? Because he is the end of the universe, or because he is universally perfect (whole over part).
• Why limit alteration to sensible quality, given change of habit and ability? Left open — a question for Book Five.