Ability and Lack: Sartre's Freedom, the Meaning of Bad, Fallacies, and the Perfection of Man

Orientation #

He opens with “we mentioned a bit why Plato might confuse these two” — matter and lack of form (prev. lecture) — and continues the same handout text (“this text today”), the end of Physics I on matter desiring form and the bad as lack (Aquinas, lectio 15, matched to the handout). The previous class developed the matter/privation distinction against Plato and the Manichaeans; the next finishes Book I and opens Book II on the four causes.

The class, in order #

1. Why Plato confused matter with formlessness: the mind and ignorance (“Can you teach God anything?”) #

Point: one thinks of matter as formless and so identifies it with its formlessness; the same move can be made with mind and ignorance, and Aristotle’s argument against it transfers.

• The tempting reasoning: you cannot teach God because He knows everything; you can only teach the ignorant; so it is because you are ignorant that you are teachable. He says this confuses the mind (the ability to know) with ignorance (an unbeing of knowledge). The mind “is almost knowing”; ignorance is “in no way knowing”.
• The argument against the confusion, parallel to Aristotle’s on matter, comparing both to a third thing, knowledge:
  1. Knowledge is godlike (God is all-knowing; to know is to become somewhat like God), hence good and desirable.
  2. Compared to knowledge, ignorance is bad, but the mind is good, because capable of knowing.
  3. The mind desires to know (is ordered to knowing, perfected by knowledge); ignorance cannot desire to know, for it would desire its own elimination.
  4. Conclusion: mind and ignorance cannot be the same; you learn through your mind, not through your ignorance.
• The source of the confusion: before you learn, your mind is necessarily ignorant — “a strange accidental thing to be necessarily there”. Usually we spot the accidental because it is not always present; here it always is.
• Aside: Hegel’s “portentous power of the negative” — “the negative doesn’t have any power at all”; Hegel universalizes the mistake.

2. A third case: Sartre’s freedom as nothingness (“he identifies man with his freedom”) #

Point: Sartre identifies man’s freedom with non-being, confusing the ability to choose with the lack of choice that precedes choosing.

• Moderns identify man with freedom rather than reason; it is good that existentialists defend freedom, but man would not be free without reason — Hamlet to Horatio: since his soul was “mistress of her choice” and could distinguish, her election sealed on him; reason first, then choice.
• How he leads students into Sartre: in the restaurant with the menu, if I am free between steak and chicken, my will is undetermined before I choose (if determined to chicken, I would not be free); so the indetermination makes me free; indetermination is a kind of non-being; so man is free by nothingness — “man is the one by whom non-being came into the world”.
• The refutation, via the third thing, choice: the ability to choose is for the sake of choosing and perfected by it; the lack of choice is eliminated by it. One cannot be the same as the other. The indetermination necessarily precedes choice, “but that’s not my freedom”, just as formlessness is not matter’s ability to be formed.
• Student: is it the will, then, that is the ability? — Yes, but the will is not its indetermination; the ability to choose is not a lack of choice.
• Aside: had Sartre gone in determined on chicken and been brought it raw, “I bet you he would have changed his mind.”

3. The fallacy of the accident deceives the wise most when the accident is necessary (“it especially deceives the wise”) #

Point: his “little addition” to Aristotle’s remark that the fallacy of the accident deceives even the wise: it deceives them especially when the accidental is necessarily found there, because then it seems to be as such.

• The relative from the Twin Cities: each visit a relative dies, so he stops coming — purely accidental; but if nobody ever died until he came to town, you would ask him to stay away. If A always precedes B, A looks like a cause.
• Swamp air and malaria: sufferers were always in swamp air; the man under a mosquito net did not get it; so not the air as such but the mosquito (or the germ it carries). There the two could be separated; where the accident is necessary, separation is hard.
• Berkeley’s line: I know only what is in my mind; therefore all I know is only in my mind. Reply with the square: that “square” is in my mind is necessary to my knowing it, yet “in my mind” is no part of Euclid’s definition (equilateral right-angled quadrilateral); it is accidental to what a square is. Otherwise, since your mind is not mine, we would never share a definition.
• Student: does the confusion come from taking “accidental” to mean “not necessary”? — “Part of it, maybe”; the root is that what is necessarily there seems to be as such.
• He rates Sartre’s case the most deceptive, and restates: the indetermination is necessary for choosing among the menu, yet is not the ability to choose.

4. The key text on badness: the first meaning of “bad” is lack (“the first meaning of bad is always”) #

Point: “bad” is equivocal by reason (its meanings are ordered), and the first meaning, met in this text, is lack.

• Three ordered meanings: (1) a lack; (2) what has a lack; (3) what causes or produces a lack.
• Definition of lack: not just non-being, but the non-being of something one is able to have — and, strictly, should have. Blindness vs. the chair: the chair does not see but is not blind; blindness is absence of sight in a subject (man, dog) able to have and owed sight.
• Applied: blindness is bad (1); to be a blind man is bad — the man has the lack (2); what blinds you, e.g. poking out an eye, is bad (3). He calls this “a very important text for understanding what badness is”.
• Augustine, quoted often by Thomas: “sin is nothing, and the man who sins becomes nothing” — badness ultimately an unbeing, i.e. a lack.
• Ethics uses sense (2): a good human act is reasonable; a bad one unreasonable, i.e. lacking what it should have. Reason orders and measures; so the bad act is disordered or unmeasured — eating more than one should, drinking before (not after) operating.
• Student: blindness is not a moral evil. — No, but it is a kind of badness.
• He returns to this text from Metaphysics IX (“the ninth book of wisdom”) on ability and act, good and bad, since here Aristotle is more explicit.

5. Nothing is totally bad; being as such is good (“Could there be something totally bad?”) #

Point: since the bad is always a lack in a subject able to have, and that ability is itself good, the subject of bad is always good; there can be no totally bad thing.

• Against the Manichaeans’ two first causes, a good God and a totally bad God: the ability to see is good; the bad is only not having sight one should have.
• Christ to St Catherine of Siena: “I am who am, and you are she who is not”; God’s name to Moses. God is entirely good; so being as such is godlike and good; if evil were a kind of being there would be a contradiction. Even the devil’s nature is good, with a disorder in it.
• Being as ability is good too, because capable of and desiring the good; matter as such desires the good, as Aristotle says here; lack of form cannot desire form, since it would desire its own elimination.
• If being as such is good, how is there badness? Strictly, badness is an unbeing. We extend “is” to it (“he is blind”, “you have a lot of ignorance”) — reason treating a non-being as if something; blindness as a being is only a being of reason, in reality an unbeing.
• Repeats: the disordered act, premarital sex “out of order… preposterous”. Evil at its root is powerless. Student: what about Hitler? — The evil was the lack of order, not strength as such; more strength applied than appropriate, not ordered to the right end.
• Asides: is the hole of the doughnut a privation? (it should be there — otherwise a bun); “I’m not handicapped, I’m handicapable” turns the notion on its head — the ability is what is lacking; and refusing to call a missing arm an imperfection.

6. Anaxagoras’ mistake and the first fallacies, in language and outside it (“the first two fallacies in language”) #

Point: those who put actually in matter what is there only in ability commit the fallacy of simply and in some respect (as well as equivocation).

• “You can’t get something out of nothing” is true; so chairs must be in trees — but in ability; taking what is so in some respect as so simply is the second fallacy outside language.
• Equivocation vs. amphiboly: one word with many meanings vs. one speech with many meanings. Equivocation: “happiness is the end of human life; the end of human life is death; so happiness is death”; “if nature acted for an end, all things would come to an end” (two senses of “end”, as Aristotle points out). Amphiboly: “the Bible is the Word of God; the Word of God is the Son of God; so the Bible is the Son of God”; “the wisdom of nature” (Shakespeare’s name for the philosophy of nature) is about the wisdom of nature, as the Word of God is about the Word of God; “knowledge of reason” = knowledge reason has (geometry) vs. knowledge of what reason is (Shakespeare’s definition); “knowledge of the soul” — geometry only as knowledge the soul has, not as the three books on the soul; textbook case, “Aristotle’s book”: owned or written.
• These two come first because the many meanings are actual (of a name, of a speech); later fallacies of language have many meanings only potentially, and one only imaginatively — he does not go through them.
• First two fallacies outside language: the accident, and simply/in some respect. Ethical use of the second: we do bad because it is good in some way (skipping church to sleep, murdering an annoyance, robbing a bank) or avoid good because bad in some way (not studying because tired or a party); as such studying is good.
• Confusing act and ability, matter and form, is the fallacy simply/in some respect (there is in reality a difference between what is so fully and what is so in a diminished way); confusing freedom with indetermination is the fallacy of the accident.
• Asides: Shakespeare’s age and the pun — an intellectual thing, making one aware of many meanings; Vatican II compares the Bible and Christ as each the Word made flesh, and the Bible is chiefly about the Son of God.

7. Marx, teaching, and what perfects the doer as such (“making perfects the what maker”) #

Point: Marx makes man’s ultimate perfection lie in making, which requires that making perfect the maker — but that is accidental, the fallacy of the accident again.

• Teaching perfects the student, not the teacher; most teachers learn when they teach (“if I had known at the beginning what I know now…”; bouncing ideas off someone), but that is accidental — one does not teach insofar as one is ignorant. Christ: there is only one teacher, and He is ignorant of nothing and learns nothing by teaching.
• Likewise the carpenter learning from a more experienced man, or the chef learning by making: insofar as he is learning how, he is not yet a master; the maker as such does not perfect himself. Making a chair perfects the chair. God was not perfected by making the universe.
• So, as Aristotle takes it up in the Nicomachean Ethics, happiness must be an activity that as such perfects the doer: not teaching or making but understanding, which remains within reason and perfects it — ultimately understanding God.
• The mind’s perfection is to understand the cause, and the cause of the cause (why did he hit me? he was angry; why angry?), back to the first cause; one could also reason that its end is to understand the best thing. No problem if first cause and best thing coincide; the moderns, like the early Greeks, take the first cause as matter, which is imperfect compared to form — two ends, “a schizophrenia situation”. In the fourteen books of wisdom it arrives naturally that the first cause is the best; “with the truth, as Aristotle says, all things harmonize” — the recording ends here.

His words #

• unbeing — his rendering of non-being; ignorance is “an unbeing of knowledge” [ed.: non-being / privation]
• lack — the non-being of something one is able to have and should have [ed.: privation]
• ability — as in “the ability to know”, “the ability to choose”, “in ability” [ed.: potency]
• equivocal by reason — a word with many meanings ordered among themselves, not by chance
• being of reason — blindness taken as a being is only this; in reality an unbeing
• out of order / unmeasured — his terms for the disorder of a bad human act
• fallacy of simply and in some respect — taking what is so in a diminished way as so fully [ed.: secundum quid et simpliciter]
• amphiboly — one speech with many meanings (vs. equivocation: one word)
• book(s) of wisdom — “ninth book of wisdom”, “fourteen books of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics]
• three books of the soul [ed.: De Anima]
• portentous power of the negative — Hegel’s phrase, which he rejects

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Physics I, end of book, on matter desiring form and the bad as lack (Aquinas, lectio 15; handout “Matter and privation distinguished… end of Book I”) — the “very important text” of the day

Mentioned

• Plato (confusion of matter and privation)
• Hegel, “the portentous power of the negative”
• Sartre, Being and Nothingness (freedom as nothingness)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet to Horatio on choice
• Aristotle on the fallacy of the accident deceiving even the wise (inferred: Sophistical Refutations)
• Berkeley
• Euclid’s definition of square
• Augustine, “sin is nothing”, as quoted by Thomas
• Christ to St Catherine of Siena; God’s name to Moses
• The Manichaeans
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (“ninth book of wisdom”) on ability and act, good and bad
• Anaxagoras
• Second Vatican Council on the Bible and Christ as Word made flesh
• Marx
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, happiness as activity
• Aristotle, “the fourteen books of wisdom”

His questions #

• Can you teach God anything? Why not? No — He knows everything; only the ignorant are teachable — but that is not why you are teachable.
• If ignorance were to desire to know, it would desire its own what? Elimination; so mind and ignorance cannot be the same.
• Before I choose, is my will determined to choose chicken? No — but that indetermination is not my freedom; it is the lack that necessarily precedes choice.
• Is square being in my mind accidental or necessary to my knowing what a square is? Necessary — yet “in my mind” is no part of the definition; accidental to what a square is.
• What is lack? The non-being of something one is able to have and should have.
• Could there be something totally bad? No — the subject of the bad is always something good.
• What kind of mistake was Anaxagoras making? Equivocation, and the fallacy of simply and in some respect.
• Does teaching perfect the teacher? No, the student; the teacher’s learning is accidental.
• Was God perfected by making the universe? No.