Natural Hearing III: Why Motion, Place and Time Come First

Orientation #

He refers back to “last time” and to the arguments for nature acting for an end which the class has just finished, and to fragment DK 12 of Anaxagoras “we took up when we were reading the fragments” (prev. lectures, not resolved by the context block). He announces that “later on we’re going to do a little bit from the sixth book. In fact, a lot from Book Six.” Verified sources place the handout “Note for Book One, Reading Ten” (p. 2) and DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 331 in this episode. The previous class worked through the objections to teleology in nature; the next opens the definition of motion in Book Three.

The class, in order #

1. What kind of arguments are these? (“more dialectical”) #

Point: the six arguments for nature acting for an end are not demonstrations.

• Opening remark (end of a prior exchange): “it’s really absurd to say that everything is accidental”; there must be something as such before what is accidental.
• Student: are they demonstrations or dialectical? He: “more dialectical”; they let you see the truth “from your sense experience.” Student: the first three were syllogisms whose second premise was backed by another syllogism, the later ones by induction. He: the thing is self-evident to someone who understands what nature and end mean; the arguments make it clear in sense experience, as geometry makes something clear in the imagination.
• Biology (experimental science) takes these questions up again more particularly; biologists are “coming around a little bit back to Aristotle’s position.” Intellectual history moves not in a circle but in a spiral: same spot, different level of experience.
• Denton: how much has to go right for the eye, and all at the same time. That is the thing Darwin never explained: insects changing colour piecemeal is one thing, but the eye and the basic plans of animals must be in place all at once. Bertalanffy, before Denton, saw that the large plans of life cannot come piecemeal.
• Heisenberg: science itself is like that; you sometimes replace the whole thing (Newtonian to quantum or relativity physics) rather than tinker; “we have to learn a new meaning of the word understanding.”

2. The six arguments reviewed (“division of the six arguments”) #

Point: at a student’s request he re-gives the division: Aristotle’s five arguments, the third split into two.

1. First two look at how nature produces the good. (i) Nature produces the good in animals, plants and their parts almost all the time, a sign of direction toward the good; aiming at a target you may miss, but aiming in any of 360 (times 360) directions the chance of hitting is “practically nil.” (ii) Nature produces the good from a definite beginning (a definite seed) through an ordered number of steps such as to result in that good; compared to art: the recipe for lemon meringue pie yields lemon meringue pie, not chocolate cream pie or filet mignon.
2. Third argument, divided in two, both from human art, which we know acts for an end. (iii) Art cannot act for an end without imitating nature: nature makes each part of a matter suitable for its function (heart not of bone, tongue not of what teeth are made of) and gives it a suitable shape; art must do the same two things (pillow not of what the saw is made of, saw not with the pillow’s shape). If this happened only sometimes, coincidence; since it is impossible otherwise, a very good sign nature acts for an end. Parallel: the Apology is the commonest introduction to philosophy because Socrates is the model; if you cannot be a philosopher without imitating Socrates, Socrates is doing something like philosophy. (iv) Arts that help nature (medicine helping a woman give birth, gardening or farming helping the seed): you cannot act for an end in helping another unless the other is trying to achieve something.
3. (v) Aristotle’s fourth, our fifth: inductive; studying insects, purpose “just jumps out at you”; the animal body is an organic body, a body of tools, and nothing is more obviously for the sake of something than a tool (eye for seeing, front teeth for biting, back teeth for chewing, heart for pumping).
4. (vi) Last, more abstract: matter is for the sake of form; nature is always forming matter, and when it breaks matter down (digestion) it is for the sake of building it into another form (flesh, blood, bone, fat).

3. Why the question matters: ethics, and men who deny it in words (“very important, as we said, for ethics”) #

Point: the answer yes opens the question whether man has by nature an end; the answer no makes everything arbitrary.

• If yes (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), one asks whether man and his parts have a natural purpose; Nicomachean Ethics I finds it, the rest is how to achieve it.
• If no (by the objections, by custom, or by misunderstanding), “everything’s up for grabs”: “I use you to fertilize my garden. Why not?” If nature made you for nothing, it made you for nothing higher than that. People don’t hear the full implications, but someone does: Brothers Karamazov, the miseducated one comes back saying everything is allowed, and is shocked by the consequence.
• Whittaker Chambers, Witness: looking at his little daughter’s ear in the kitchen, it struck him that could not have happened by chance.
• Biologists who deny it in words act as if it were true when they research (“what’s that for?”); Harvey’s conviction that nature acts for an end led him to the circulation of the blood via the valves keeping blood from flowing back. Calling this merely “useful in research” is “a little mental dishonesty.”
• Aside: his old professor Kasurik cornered a speaker in Chicago in a contradiction; the reply: “that’s a contradiction I’ve learned to live with.”
• Metaphysics II (this week’s other class): Aristotle assumes man can know truth and asks only whether it is easy or difficult. Why not ask whether man can know truth? It is laughable to prove what is obvious (“statements exist, true or false”: even the denier has made a statement; the whole is more than a part), and whoever investigates the question assumes he can know the truth about it, or at least investigate it. Parallel: those who reason out whether to live by reason or emotion have already accepted reason’s right to decide; those who deny the axiom of contradiction because they think they found a counter-instance.

4. Student question: in what sense is mind unlimited? (“mind is unlimited”) #

Point: Anaxagoras’s “mind is unlimited” (DK 12) means unlimited in ability, not in size or number.

1. Not unlimited as Anaximenes’s air goes on forever in every direction: Anaxagoras later says mind is “the thinnest of things.”
2. Not an unlimited multitude (his view of matter: infinity of infinitely small pieces of everything), since he posits only one mind (the greater mind).
3. So approach through our own mind, more known to us; DK 12 ends: every mind is similar, greater and lesser. Genus of mind: an ability to know. Its object is the universal, what is common to and said of many; some universals (odd number, even number, number, “something”) are said of an infinity. So the ability is unlimited.

• Further signs: the mind goes on forever with numbers (his children amazed he could count to 108, later to 1000); it keeps inventing and reinventing (automobile, airplane, atom bomb, computer out of date “before you bring it home”); versus the bee, whose hexagonal hives are made as they were when the Greeks described them, and insects that do one or two things intelligently and are lost outside them; language versus natural signs (groans, grunts, a cat’s limited meows).
• Inwardly: the mind is open to everything; even “I don’t know everything” understands “everything.”
• Consequence: only seeing God satisfies the mind; Summa Contra Gentiles I, around c. 43, ten reasons God is infinite; Book III, the unlimited ability satisfied only by an unlimited object.

5. The title “Natural Hearing” (“Eight books of natural hearing”) #

Point: “Physics” is a poor translation; the Greek title Phusikēs Akroaseōs is kept because it says three things.

• “Physics” loses the connection of phusis with birth (visible in English “nature”: prenatal, postnatal, nativity) and now names experimental science. Akroasis means hearing, could also mean lectures. Student: is there a different Greek word for hearing and listening? Probably, but akroasis is hearing; the Latin equivalent is auditus.
• First: hearing about natural things.
• Second: listening to nature as a student listens to his teacher. Kant, second preface to Critique of Pure Reason: in (Newtonian) physics reason learns from nature not as student from teacher but as judge or lawyer from witness. He: both proportions useful, but Kant chooses one; we should learn in both ways, first as student. The student listens to whatever the teacher says (a “prison audience”); the judge and lawyer allow the witness only to answer the questions put. That is true of experiment: one particular question. De Broglie: had we asked other questions science might have gone another direction. A trial lawyer’s book: never question a witness at random, go in with a plan. Schrödinger, “Is science a fashion of the times?”: we cannot ask all the questions, so only what we decide to be enlightened on comes to light. In experiment you observe what nature does when you act upon it, not simply sit and listen.
• The sight/hearing contrast from the “Proemium to Wisdom” read earlier: sight for discovery by yourself, hearing for learning from a teacher; hence Thomas quoting Paul, fides ex auditu. Heraclitus, “a central thinker of human thought”: wisdom is to speak the truth and act in accord with nature, “giving ear there too”; “see how compact that is.”

6. Third sense: close to what is naturally known (“forced on our mind, he says, by truth itself”) #

Point: what is heard is not all naturally known, but very close to it; back-reference to Book One, Reading Ten.

• Reading Two: logical division of predecessors, all saying something different; Reading Eight: common basis of those positing one matter and of those positing many; Reading Ten: a basis common to all, change between contraries, which “seems to be forced on our mind by truth itself.” Contrast Einstein: hypothesis is “freely imagined.”
• His usual pause: the civilization furthest from Greece was China (some contact with Middle East and India); “East is East and West is West,” yet the I Ching, the book of changes (Confucius would have spent ten more years on it), is built on contraries, yin and yang, broken and unbroken line. Moderns too: Newton’s equal and opposite reaction; Helmholtz (quoted by Einstein, Evolution of Physics) explaining by attraction and repulsion; centrifugal and centripetal forces; contrary nuclear forces in the atom. Like “the whole is more than a part,” something everyone has in his head.
• Student: was the definition of nature given at the start of Book Two a strict definition? He: you get closer when you see nature is matter and form; that is why he sometimes gives that definition before Book One, so that what is found in every change (Readings 10-13) is seen as relevant to natural science.

7. The first paragraph: nature defined by motion (“What motion is ought not to be hidden from us”) #

Point: since nature is the beginning of motion and change, motion unknown means nature unknown.

• We know motion in a confused way, so the definition of nature gave some understanding; to know nature distinctly we must know motion distinctly.
• Same pattern elsewhere: Nicomachean Ethics I draws a line around (Greek “perigraphic” [ed.: perigraphē, outline]) happiness as man’s own act according to virtue throughout life; the virtues are investigated through many books; Book X returns to which virtues happiness chiefly consists in, human happiness (foresight, the political leader, “Winston Churchill”) and the more divine (wisdom). Student challenges a detail; he declines to defend it now, the point is only that one part of a definition is first known confusedly.
• “Blank verse” defined as unrhymed iambic pentameter: you would not see why the iamb matters for Shakespeare’s exhortation to use reason unless you knew that definition. “Philosopher” = lover of wisdom, first definition of his intro class; raises what wisdom is, so wisdom’s definition is strictly prior, yet a confused idea of wisdom gives some idea of philosopher. The Seven Wise Men at Delphi, mēden agan, nothing too much; but the philosopher loves wisdom for its own sake as the end of his life.
• Aside: a marriage-quotes book attributes to Socrates “if you marry a bad woman, you’ll become a philosopher”; unverified, but was he a philosopher because she was a shrew, or she a shrew because he walked around Athens talking and brought no bacon home?

8. Second paragraph: the continuous and the unlimited (“motion seems to be among the continuous things”) #

Point: those determining motion must treat what follows on it; the unlimited first appears in the continuous.

• Book Six holds the philosophy of the continuous; its definition: the continuous is what is divisible forever (a straight line halved and halved without end), proven there. Hence the second part of Book Three treats the unlimited.
• Book Six shows line, motion along it, and time are all divisible forever. One way, sketched here, from two things everyone knows, some bodies are faster than others; the faster covers the same distance in less time and in the same time covers more distance: (1) slower body goes distance D in time T; (2) faster goes D in less time; (3) in that lesser time the slower goes less than D, so D is divided; (4) the faster covered that lesser distance in still less time; (5) in that time the slower goes a still lesser distance (else equally fast); and so on forever.
• “Those defining the continuous use many times the notion of the unlimited”: the continuous is what is divisible without limit.

9. Place, the empty, time: why treat them (“motion is impossible without place”) #

Point: place, the empty and time are connected with motion and common to all natural things.

• Aristotle mentions the empty though he does not think motion needs it: Thomas, “the best student Aristotle ever had,” notes that before determining a subject Aristotle speaks according to the common notions of his compatriots. In Book Four he takes up place (which exists), then the empty (shown not to exist), then time. Same thing at the start of the Nicomachean Ethics: household art aims at wealth, commonly said; Politics I denies wealth is the end of the household, a mere instrument; not a change of opinion but an illustration the audience would accept.
• First reason: all connected with motion, which defines nature. Change of place is the commonest motion, and other changes presuppose it: to toast bread you carry it to the toaster; to get warm you walk to the fire; to grow you put food in your mouth. And motion takes time.
• Aside: Shakespeare’s “the wisdom of nature”, an amphiboly he likes: the philosophy of nature is about the wisdom nature shows, something of the divine wisdom; Heraclitus’s fragment again: speak the truth (looking philosophy), act in accord with nature (practical philosophy); only a fool thinks himself wiser than nature, “which shows how many fools there are today.”
• Second reason: they are common to all; natural things in general are considered here, and everything natural is somewhere and at some time. The Greeks held that whatever is must be somewhere, which is really a property of bodies, but they thought all that was at first was bodies; in natural philosophy (not wisdom, which is about all things) that suffices. The class ends here.

His words #

• dialectical arguments; make the thing clear in sense experience, as geometry does in imagination
• spiral; intellectual history returns to the same spot at a different level
• organic body; a body composed of tools
• Natural Hearing; Phusikēs Akroaseōs [ed.: Physics]; akroasis = hearing, also lectures; Latin auditus
• unlimited (of mind); an ability open to everything, not size or multitude [ed.: infinite]
• universal; what is common to many and said of many
• fides ex auditu; faith is from hearing (Paul, via Thomas)
• “forced on the mind by truth itself”; versus Einstein’s hypothesis “freely imagined”
• “perigraphic”; to draw a line around (happiness) [ed.: perigraphē]
• mēden agan; nothing too much
• the continuous; what is divisible forever, without limit
• the empty [ed.: the void]
• the wisdom of nature (Shakespeare); amphiboly: philosophy of nature / the wisdom nature shows
• looking philosophy [ed.: speculative] vs. practical philosophy

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Natural Hearing (Physics), Book III, first two paragraphs of the opening chapter (his translation, read and commented).
• Anaxagoras, fragment DK 12 (from memory).
• Heraclitus, fragment on wisdom (quoted from memory, locus not stated).
• Aristotle, Physics I, Reading Ten (recalled; handout “Note for Book One, Reading Ten”, p. 2 per verified sources).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics Book IV (place, the empty, time); Book VI (the continuous).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I and X; Politics I; Metaphysics II (beginning).
• Plato, Apology.
• Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, second preface.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I c. 43 (approx.), Book III; his Physics commentary (on Aristotle’s use of common opinion).
• “Proemium to Wisdom” (read earlier in the course).
• Denton; Bertalanffy; Heisenberg; de Broglie; Schrödinger, “Is science a fashion of the times?”; Einstein, Evolution of Physics (Helmholtz); Newton.
• Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov; Whittaker Chambers, Witness; Harvey; the I Ching; Shakespeare (blank-verse exhortation; “wisdom of nature”).

His questions #

• Are the arguments for nature acting for an end demonstrations or dialectical? Dialectical; they make clear in sense experience what is self-evident to one who understands nature and end.
• Why did Darwin never explain the eye or the basic plans of animals? Because everything must be in place at the same time, not piecemeal.
• If nature made you for nothing, what follows? Nothing higher than fertilizing my garden; everything is allowed.
• Why doesn’t Aristotle ask whether man can know the truth? It is laughable to prove the obvious, and the questioner already assumes he can investigate it.
• In what sense is Anaxagoras’s mind unlimited? In its ability: it knows the universal, which covers an infinity.
• Why call the work “Natural Hearing”? Hearing about nature, listening to nature as a student to a teacher, with what is naturally known.
• What major civilization was furthest from Greece? China; yet the I Ching rests on the same contraries.
• Why must motion be defined for natural philosophy? Nature is the beginning of motion; motion unknown, nature unknown.
• How does faster and slower show distance and time divisible forever? The faster covers the same distance in less time, the slower less distance in that time, and so on without end.
• Why mention the empty if Aristotle does not think motion needs it? He speaks first according to the common notions of his compatriots (Thomas’s observation).