Aristotle, Plato and the Good Student: Preparing for Matter and Lack of Form

Orientation #

He says he is “stuck with what we saw in the twelfth and thirteenth reading” (matter, form, lack of form) and is preparing “the fifteenth reading” for next Tuesday, the last reading of Book I in Thomas’s division. He orders it alongside the Anaxagoras reading because the same three principles are at stake. The previous class treated Aristotle’s refutation of Anaxagoras and the size-limits of natural quantity; the next takes up the critique of Plato on matter and privation.

The class, in order #

1. Three principles and two confusions (“form and lack of form are very clearly not the same”) #

Point: becoming involves matter, form and lack of form; each of the three must be kept distinct, and the two great predecessors each collapse a different pair.

• Aristotle (readings 12–13, prev. lecture): you need not always have the contrary form, but you must have the lack of form; matter receives a form it before lacked.
• Which two are most obviously distinct? Form and lack of form: “the being a form and the non-being a form” cannot be the same.
• Anaxagoras confuses form with the ability of matter: everything that matter is able to be he puts actually in there; the form is merely hidden in the matter.
• Plato is more advanced: he sees matter and form are not the same. But once you think matter as distinct from form, you think it as formless, so Plato confuses matter with lack of form, “the ability of matter with its formlessness” (confusion “in the bad sense of the word”).
• Plato speaks aggressively of matter: if he could call it “something that is nothing, or nothing that is something,” he would. For the early Greeks, who could grasp only change of place, matter seemed almost nothing.

2. How Aristotle will handle Plato (“find a common understanding”) #

Point: Aristotle will force Plato to distinguish the two, but reverently and from shared ground.

• Plato is not named here (as far as he remembers), just as Thomas, otherwise quick to name who erred, never names Albert the Great when disagreeing with him.
• Method: first say how his own thinking differs from Plato’s and how Plato arrived at his position; then, following “the advice of the central thinker of human thought,” Heraclitus, find a common understanding and reason from it that Plato should separate matter and lack of form.
• Parallel: in readings 10–11 the common basis was shared by all Greek natural philosophers; in 12–13 by all men; here it is shared between Aristotle and Plato alone.

3. Aristotle as the best student of Plato; the good student is “earth” (“A good student is like the earth”) #

Point: to see why disagreement does not make Aristotle a bad student you must know what a good student is; Thomas’s Commendation and Partition of Sacred Scripture (his Paris inaugural, opened, as usual, with a Scripture quote) says the good student is metaphorically earth in three ways.

• Caution on metaphor: see in what way it is alike. Lion is a metaphor for Christ and for the devil; fire for charity and for God, but also for anger or lust.
• Humble (earth is below): the student places his mind under the teacher’s. Not for “just anyone, Tom or Dick.” Plato’s Protagoras: the young man wakes Socrates, wanting an introduction to Protagoras, but knows little of him; Socrates questions him first. The point of the preface: the dialogue teaches not only the subject but who is or is not to be taken as a teacher, and how to judge that. His own case: his brother Richard judged Kasurik the wisest in the department and arranged him as advisor; Kasurik, who had once given up philosophy because of bad teachers, went to Laval, told De Koninck he would not tolerate philosophy taught as it had been, then became devoted to him; when De Koninck came to town Kasurik put Berquist’s questions to him. Thomas on Timothy: on the side of the will the chief cause of error is pride, in two ways: the proud man overestimates his ability and attempts what is beyond him; and he does not learn from those he should, who would keep him from or call him back from mistakes. Aristotle spent twenty years under Plato, from seventeen to thirty-seven.
• Stable: the student needs discretion (discrimination); not everything the teacher says has equal value. Euclid on triangles and numbers, yes; Euclid on happiness or the soul, “I don’t think he’s qualified.” Monsignor Dionne, asked about Bach, prefaced that nothing he said here was necessarily true; he preferred Mozart (“Bach is too severe”; later, “Mozart’s a separate substance”). Aristotle himself on the bees: hypotheses not observed long enough, to be revised if contradicted; the animals can be taken apart, the sun, moon and stars are too far away. Illumination: Aristotle and Thomas held it is not a change of place; the argument is valid in form (if illumination is change of place it takes time; it takes no time; therefore it is not change of place), but one could say light travels too fast to perceive; now the Michelson-Morley experiment lets us measure the speed of light, “86,000 miles per second” [ed.: standard figure 186,000]. To follow Aristotle there would be to lack the second quality. Likewise earth, air, fire, water accepted for two thousand years (Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, Shakespeare), but refusing to look at Lavoisier’s experiment would lack it. Ordinary experience suffices for the general things; there Aristotle is more trustworthy.
• Fruitful: the student takes what he learned and develops it, sees further consequences and conclusions, does not stop with the teacher’s understanding. Anaximander from Thales: if water is the beginning of all things (Thales thinking mainly of living things, as Aristotle says), then fish are closer to the beginning and water animals come before land animals; and he looked for confirmation in the frog, which begins fish-like and becomes semi-terrestrial. Further: Thales chose water rather than orange juice, red wine or sugar because it seems without qualities; Anaximander sees water is still wet and cold, so the problem of contraries remains, and goes all the way to the unlimited. Element of truth in water: Thomas explaining Genesis, following Augustine, takes the waters as a metaphor for first matter, because water is shapeless and takes on all forms, as air does.
• Applied: Aristotle put his mind under Plato, showed stability in rejecting some things, and developed seeds already in Plato. Nicomachean Ethics: he quotes Plato as right to ask whether we are on the way from the beginnings or to the beginnings, and applies it to reasoning from cause to effect or effect to cause.

4. Thomas the best student of Aristotle, and of Augustine (“always taking something Aristotle and developing it”) #

Point: the same three qualities show in Thomas toward Aristotle.

• Stability: he rejects the eternal world, as a Christian.
• Fruitfulness, example 1: Aristotle in the “second book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics II] distinguishes two causes of difficulty, in us or in the thing; Thomas transposes it to two causes of ease and to merit. Is a harder act more meritorious? Not necessarily: if easy because the thing itself is little, that is one thing; if easy because the heart is so full of the love of God that even hard things seem easy, that is more merit, done “with the firm will.”
• Example 2: the word “in,” “extremely important in philosophy.” Aristotle distinguishes its central meanings in the fourth book of Natural Hearing but does not order them; Thomas orders them as Aristotle ordered “beginning,” from the most sensible and most known to us, each next meaning adjacent to the one before. “I don’t think anybody else would do it but Thomas”; the more he studies it the more he sees it must be so.
• Student: Thomas the best student of Augustine? Yes; Cajetan’s preface to his Summa commentary (quoted also by F. M. Wright [name unclear in recording]) says Thomas seemed to inherit the mind of all the Fathers, and in a way of the philosophers too.
• Plato was surely the best student of Socrates: hard to say where Socrates ends and Plato begins; Plato thanked the gods for three things, being born a man not a woman, a Greek not a barbarian, and meeting Socrates. To some extent Plato was also a student of Heraclitus.
• Warning: people take “student of Plato” to mean one who repeats him, and set Aristotle against him where he disagrees; “that’s part of the truth” but dangerous.
• Aside: he is “probably not doing justice” to Thomas’s text; go back and read it.

5. Requisites for the philosophical life; love and difficulty (“where love is, either no difficulty is felt”) #

Point: Dionne’s account of what the philosophical life requires on the side of reason and will parallels Thomas on the causes of error, ex parte appetitus (pride) and ex parte intellectus (false imagination).

• Transposing Thomas on difficulty: Augustine says where love is, either no difficulty is felt or the difficulty itself is loved; putting yourself out for someone you love is easy because of you, not because the thing is easy.
• Was it easy for Christ to die on the cross? In some way; the cause could not be in the cross, a painful and shameful death, but in him, in the greatness of his love. Some saints say he would come down and die again; “one’s enough.”
• Aside: Peter leaving Rome meets Christ on the road (“I’m going to be crucified”), turns back; Paul VI called attention to the scene.

6. Why the fifteenth reading matters (“the fallacy of the accident deceives even the wise”) #

Point: the reading distinguishes matter from lack of form, and is also the key text for what good and bad are.

• The ninth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX] on good and bad can be misunderstood without this text first.
• It illustrates Aristotle in the book on fallacies (Sophistical Refutations): the fallacy of accident deceives even the wise; that is Plato’s kind of mistake, and Plato is wise if anyone is.
• Sequence: first distinguish matter and form, ability and act (against Anaxagoras); then, once matter is thought as formless, distinguish the ability of matter from its formlessness (against Plato).
• Hegel universalizes the confusion: “the portentous power of the negative” attributes ability to the negative. Aristotle’s way of refuting Plato can refute similar mistakes elsewhere.
• The fifteenth is the last reading of Book I as Thomas divides it, though not all readings were done. Next week Tuesday; possibly Wednesdays after.
• Aside: he forgot the granddaughters’ pictures.

7. After class: potential and kinetic energy (“What does height have in common with motion?”) #

Point: the language of science looks like ordinary language and is not.

• Roller coaster: at the top maximum potential energy, descending it loses potential and gains kinetic, then the reverse, not regaining full height; the rest is said to be in heat. But height and motion have nothing in common in any concrete way, unlike a four-sided and three-sided figure; only a numerical correlation between the number for height and the number for speed (and with a frictionless track the same height would return), so they are called “the same thing, different forms of energy.”
• Warren Murray on the language of science; when he first wondered whether “force” is like the mover, the researchers laughed. Some physicists say “we define these things by the way we measure them.”
• Student (recalling Dominic Rochelle): in the Big Bang all the mass was concentrated in a tiny thing; “that’s incredible.”
• Student: the canteen/molecule-of-water example helped; the idea of a smallest piece came into chemistry in the 19th century before physics.

8. Guarding against false imagination (“You can’t judge by your imagination there”) #

Point (student’s question: is there anything besides knowledge that protects us from error by imagination?): the role of imagination differs by science.

• Boethius, De Trinitate (Thomas expands it into an article): in theology do not judge by imagination, because those things cannot be imagined. In geometry, to some extent you can: Euclid’s fourth theorem (two sides and the included angle equal, so the triangles are equal) is seen by imagining one laid on the other, lines coinciding, same endpoints. But the fifth postulate is about lines that meet (angles less than two right angles), not “the parallel postulate”: parallels never meet when extended to infinity, and an infinite line cannot be imagined, so geometry does not resolve to the unimaginable.
• In natural philosophy imagination deceives: you can imagine something smaller than a molecule of water (The Incredible Shrinking Man, which his brother Mark saw: nearly eaten by the cat, grass towering), but if man is mostly water and the molecule has a limit, so does man. Judge by the natures of things, hidden to us and revealed by motion (nature is defined by motion): nature causes growing and also stopping growth at a certain height. Natural philosophy resolves ultimately to the senses; immaterial things transcend sense and imagination, “that’s why we struggle.”
• Even in geometry imagination can deceive: Euclid III, the horn angle between a circle and a tangent meeting at one point is smaller than any rectilineal angle, yet imagination sees open space above the point where a line could be drawn. “Unusual example, but a wonderful example,” and it rouses wonder as contrary to expectation. Aside: his politician friend Robert Monroe, who laughed at his studying Euclid, was led by him to this theorem (“wow”).
• The Greeks imagined a line small enough to measure any two lines, and found incommensurables, lines without the ratio of number to number or one to number.
• A fortiori, to imagine what cannot be imagined at all is to be false: Socrates in the Parmenides imagines the universal as a tent over the singulars, so only part covers each and the contradictions follow; moderns make the universal a class because they cannot understand it and turn it into something imaginable.

9. Heisenberg, elementary particles, and merit recap (“every elementary particle is composed of all the rest”) #

• Student: Heisenberg sees that every element is not in every other, unlike other moderns. Reply: the common way of speaking among students of elementary particles is that each is composed of all the rest; “composed of” makes it actual; pin them down, and they would meet Anaxagoras’s difficulty.
• Birthday-card regress (card picturing a postman bringing a card picturing a postman…): cards and postmen get smaller and smaller and eventually break down. Fine if electrons or protons came in any size, but experimentally all protons are the same in size, mass and charge (about two thousand times an electron); atomic number is the number of protons. The point: definite size.
• Student recap of merit: easier for me is not less meritorious if easier because I love God more. His examples: getting dressed is hard for some people; getting you breakfast vs laying down my life; the man who lays down his life finding it easier than another finds breakfast gets more merit, because he loves you more. Aside on diaper-changing with the grandchildren; recording cuts off.

His words #

• lack of form: the third principle of becoming besides matter and form [ed.: privation]
• ability of matter: what matter can be, distinct from its formlessness [ed.: potency]
• confusion “in the bad sense”: Plato’s identifying matter with lack of form
• the central thinker of human thought: Heraclitus, whose advice is to find a common understanding
• earth: Thomas’s metaphor for the good student: humble, stable, fruitful
• discretion / discrimination: the stability of the student, not weighing everything the teacher says equally
• ex parte appetitus / ex parte intellectus: causes of error on the side of will (pride) and intellect (false imagination)
• second book of wisdom / ninth book of Wisdom: [ed.: Metaphysics II, IX]
• Natural Hearing: [ed.: Physics]
• fallacy of the accident: the error that “deceives even the wise”; Plato’s kind of mistake
• portentous power of the negative: Hegel’s universal version of Plato’s confusion
• horn angle: angle between circle and tangent, smaller than any rectilineal angle
• false imagination: judging by imagining things other than they are, or imagining the unimaginable

Texts #

Read in class

• None read verbatim; the handout page 33 (Natural Fragments of the First Philosophers) and DHB Vol. I, The First Philosophers, p. 146 are drawn on for Anaximander and Thales (verified sources).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics I, readings 10–15 (Thomas’s division); Physics IV (meanings of “in”)
• Thomas, Commendation and Partition of Sacred Scripture; commentary on Timothy (causes of error); commentary on Genesis waters (via Augustine)
• Plato, Protagoras; Parmenides
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Plato on the beginnings); Metaphysics II and IX; Sophistical Refutations; on bees
• Boethius, De Trinitate with Thomas’s article
• Euclid, Elements I.4, fifth postulate, III horn angle (inferred loci)
• Cajetan, preface to the Summa commentary; Augustine on love and difficulty; Hegel; Heisenberg

His questions #

• Of matter, form and lack of form, which two are most obviously distinct? Form and lack of form; being a form and non-being a form cannot be the same.
• If you think matter as distinct from form, what do you necessarily think matter is? Formless; hence Plato confuses matter with lack of form.
• What is the relation of Aristotle to Plato? His student, and the best one.
• In what way is the good student like the earth? Humble, stable, fruitful (Thomas’s three).
• If I follow Aristotle that illumination takes no time despite Michelson-Morley, what do I lack? The second quality, stability or discretion.
• Is it more meritorious if it is more difficult for you? Not necessarily; easy because of the thing is one thing, easy because of great love is more merit.
• What does height have in common with motion? Nothing concrete; only a numerical correlation makes both “energy.”
• Can you imagine a line extended to infinity? No; so geometry does not resolve to it.
• Is it possible for a man to keep getting smaller and smaller? No; the water molecule’s limit limits him, whatever imagination shows.
• Was it easy for Christ to die on the cross? In some way, and the cause was in him, not the cross.