Student Questions on the Continuous, Kant, Natural Law, and Shakespeare

Orientation #

He says Thomas divides this book of the Physics between the first four readings, “the philosophy of the continuous”, and the fifth reading, on the division of motion, which presupposes them; he does not name a next class. A student refers back to “the tape” on intellectual custom, and he says “we were talking about Kant the other day” (prev. lecture not resolved by the context block). The previous episode was on Physics VI and the proof that the continuous is not composed of indivisibles; the next takes up the senses of “end” in Metaphysics V.

The class, in order #

1. If points could touch (“falsely imagining the point to be something”) #

Point: a student asks what “continuous” would mean if points could touch; he answers that the supposition rests on a false imagination.

• If you think points could touch and “stop outside each other”, you imagine the point as something very small but with definite magnitude, “like a small circle”.
• The modern mathematician who says a line is composed of infinity points would still say it is infinitely divisible: halve the line and there are still infinity points, however small it gets.
• Aside: a mathematician who sat in on his class still held the line is composed of infinite points, yet saw there is no next point—between any two points are infinite points.

2. Is “continuous” equivocal in the first paragraph? (“the end of one line is together with the beginning”) #

Point: a student objects that continuous is first divided against touching and next, then used differently; he replies with the case of the two parts of a line.

1. Between the left part of a line and the right part there is no line in between, so one is next to the other.
2. The end of the left part is together with the beginning of the right part—so they touch.
3. Are there two points there? “Strictly speaking, no”: one point, but “two in definition”, end of the left and beginning of the right. Boundary case: cut away the right side and that point is the end of the former left side but no longer the beginning of anything. So “carefully” one can say end and beginning are together, though “more true to say” one.

• Comparison: these are ordered “a little bit like beginning, cause, element”. Everything continuous is touching, not everything touching is continuous; what is continuous or touching is continuous with or touches what is next to it (circle with a diameter: the two semicircles touch; move his house against the neighbour’s so they touch—still the next house).
• But here they are “taken kind of separately”, as one may say “I am an animal” or “I am not an animal, I’m a man”: here next is taken for what is neither touching nor continuous, though what touches is next too, “but more than that”.

3. Why bother whether a point can be next to a point? (“before you have moved any distance”) #

Point: the student says even if a point could be next to a point it would not be continuous; he grants it (“overkill”) but shows what the doctrine of the continuous is for.

• Thomas’s division: readings 1–4 the philosophy of the continuous; reading 5 on the division of motion, presupposing it.
• Consequence to come: before you have moved any distance you are moving some distance; but whenever you are moving some distance you have already moved some. Walking a mile: before I have walked a mile I have been walking; when walking a mile and not yet a mile, I have walked a foot or half a mile; but I was walking the half mile before I had walked it, and while walking it had already walked some. “Which comes first?"—left as the odd consequence of infinite divisibility he will bring out later.
• This is “part of the basis”, in the Summa Contra Gentiles and similar books, for motion depending on a mover: there is nothing first in motion.
• What next says about the continuous: there is an indivisible in the continuous, though it is not composed of indivisibles; those indivisibles are more than one; none of them is next to another—so it belongs to the understanding of the continuous.
• Aside: “It’s amazing how fundamental the continuous is in all our thinking”; the Berkeleys etc. seem to have no credit with the basic things—“where is the philosophy of the continuous?”

4. Kant: must one understand good before goodwill? (“the only thing unqualifiedly good is goodwill”) #

Point: Kant’s starting point sees an element of truth but begins from the less known.

• Kant: the only thing unqualifiedly (a student mishears “quantifiable”) good is a goodwill. He “sees the element of truth”, which Aristotle and Thomas saw more clearly.
• The element of truth: knowledge can be misused (logic to deceive, the art of cooking to burn the meat), so can strength (to rob or kill), money; the good use of hands, money, knowledge depends on the goodwill, and the will moves all the rest of us—“that’s why charity” is in the will.
• Objection: don’t you have to understand good before goodwill? “Why do you call me good? God alone is good”—even to understand that God is good, goodness itself, the good of every good, the summum bonum, as Thomas does in the Summas, presupposes understanding good in general. “Where do you find that in Kant?” He starts with the less known—hence the abstract way, categorical imperatives.
• Dionysius (often quoted by Thomas): for man to be good is to be reasonable; a good human act is a reasonable act (“What’s wrong with murder? It’s unreasonable”—sounds like an understatement). But is reasonable the starting point for understanding good? No.
• The real starting point: Socrates with the slave boy—candy, pizza, horse, vacation are good; what do they have in common? all are things he wants. First definition: the good is what all want; “that’s where it all begins” for ethics, by induction; then the Socratic questions (good because of what?) lead deeper—the good is the same as the end.
• Kant “can’t say that a good will is a will that wills the good”, for then there would be a good apart from the will.

5. What reason naturally knows: Topics and Ethics II (“he’s in need of a sensation”) #

Point: a student raises “intellectual custom” from a tape; he gives two places in Aristotle where things are taken as naturally known.

• Topics: a dialectical problem is something there is some reason to doubt. One who wonders whether snow is white needs not argument but a sensation; one who wonders whether to honour father and mother needs not argument but punishment—such a man is in the state of “thinking they don’t know what they do know”. Note: this is the fourth commandment.
• Nicomachean Ethics II: virtue is a mean between extremes, but there is no mean of the extreme. Adultery: not too much nor too little but the right amount with the right person—no; any adultery is wrong, because by definition it is in the extreme.
• Aristotle’s more known case from the arts: cooking the meat too much or too little is bad, the right amount good; but burning the meat is by definition cooking too much, so burning a little or a lot is bad alike (though worse to burn more).
• Same with murder (killing the innocent) and stealing: “steal just the right amount”—no; the act by definition pertains to an extreme.
• Plato’s Symposium: the first speaker defends all love as good, so any love, even homosexual love, would be good if in the mean; the second speaker has more distinct knowledge—there is a good love and a bad love.
• So Aristotle takes what we regard as the sixth and fourth commandments as outside question, and he had no Sinai, no Mosaic law or prophets: reason naturally knows these.
• Student: does a child know murder is wrong before he can reason? He: he naturally knows it, or naturally comes to know it once he realises what it is.

6. Abortion: they don’t know what they do know (“looking for a mean of the extreme”) #

Point: those who think abortion is fine are blinded by custom, not ignorant.

• Callahan (Hudson Institute) on abortion: set aside the “extreme” positions—all abortion allowed, none allowed—and find the mean; he assumes every act has a mean, i.e. looks for “the right amount to burn the meat”, the note just the right amount off.
• The woman nominated to the Supreme Court: equality of men and women demands abortion. Reply: nature has not given men and women the same burden in bringing a child into the world; if the premise is that they must be equal, abortion follows. Compare a child claiming the right to go to bed when he wants, since daddy and mommy do—“people are really getting crazy”. Parents and children are naturally unequal in many ways; she reasons “from the less known or the unknown”.
• Charles De Koninck: the whole history of modern philosophy can be done as the denial of the more known from the less known, or of the known by the customary. The woman “bogged down” with a child is less free for her career than a man, so must have the choice of abortion—“denial of nature”.
• Asides: spanking a child in a parking lot brings the police; a University of Minnesota Press book favouring sex with children and children’s rights independent of parents.

7. The sparks of nature (“putting the truck to bed like a baby”) #

Point: nature shows itself against contrived equality.

• Mother buys her daughter a truck instead of a doll; the daughter puts the truck to bed like a baby. Parents who refuse a toy gun: the kid makes one from a piece of the wooden map of the United States. His boys picked up his daughter’s dolls; he said nothing, they got bored and moved on. His niece saves babysitting money to fly out to see the babies—“hard to hide the sparks of nature”. A student: his little sister told her four brothers “girls are different than boys”.
• Harvard speaker: first principle the autonomy of the individual—autonomy means “make your own law”; “you live your life, and I’ll live mine”.
• Bumper stickers: “challenge authority”, then after some years “challenge reality”—when you don’t face reality.

8. Shakespeare’s Catholic sympathies (“nobody knows for sure what Shakespeare’s religion was”) #

Point: a digression on a book, Shakespeare: The Evidence, on the life of Shakespeare (he has not read Harold Bloom).

• Even Rowse, adamant that Shakespeare was not Catholic, admits it a very good book. Evidence gathered: the twins Hamnet and Judith named after their godparents, both known Catholics; Susanna, favoured in his will, on the recusancy list; his father’s will in the Catholic form of St Charles Borromeo; at retirement, having always rented in London, he buys the Blackfriars gatehouse—the most notorious place for hidden Catholics and secret mass (later a floor collapsed under 200–300 at a secret mass)—and its tenant Robinson witnesses his will; a contemporary said “he died a papist”; the plays present Franciscans and priests like Friar Lawrence as wise and noble, Protestant ministers as bumbling nincompoops; the “lost years”. His opinion: Catholic, but nobody can know for sure; the author calls himself a “liberal Roman Catholic, whatever that means”; it makes the English nervous.
• Aside: his yearly talk to the “legionaries” will be on Friar Lawrence on stumbling.

9. “Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse” (“extending the word birth”) #

Point: Friar Lawrence’s line shows nature as what a thing is, and abortion as revolt from it.

• Nothing so vile on earth but gives some special good; nothing so good but, strained from that fair use, “revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse”. “Birth” is extended as the Latin natura and Greek physis were extended to what a thing is: revolt from what you really are, and you stumble on abuse. The first sense (birth) is kept in mind—abortion for equality revolts from birth in the original sense, and from one’s nature as a woman; demanding equality is unnatural.

10. Woman more merciful, man more just (“Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy”) #

Point: nature gives the sexes different bents.

• Shakespeare puts the most beautiful words about mercy in a woman’s mouth (Portia); a cruel woman is more against her nature than a cruel man. Mary is Mother of Mercy, never of Justice; Christ came first in mercy, through Mary, who spoke to him of the wine running out; La Salette pamphlet: “I can no longer hold back the arm of my son”. At the second coming Christ comes in justice, the apostles sit judging, and no role is attributed to Mary in that judgment.
• Assumption College case: threatening letters to a girl student; FBI handwriting service identified a boy; the father admitted his son’s guilt, the mother could not—the father more objective, “more just”; he does not hold it against her. Moussaoui’s mother interceding. A father is more apt to disown a son than a mother.
• Boethius’s Consolation: Philosophy comes as Lady Wisdom, a woman, because the woman is more consoling; the bumped child runs to the mother first. That is nature; people are revolting from nature.
• Abortion, killing your own child, is revolt against nature and abuse of the medical profession; the Hippocratic Oath, from a non-Christian, explicitly forbade abortion. [recording ends here]

His words #

• continuous / touching / next: ordered “a little bit like beginning, cause, element”—every continuous thing touches, what touches is next, not conversely; here “next” taken for what is neither touching nor continuous.
• two in definition: the one point that is end of the left part and beginning of the right.
• readings: Thomas’s lectiones on Physics VI [ed.: lectio].
• unqualifiedly good: Kant’s goodwill.
• summum bonum: God as the highest good.
• the good is what all want: the first definition, reached by induction with the slave boy.
• no mean of the extreme: an act by definition in an extreme (adultery, murder, stealing, burning the meat).
• they don’t know what they do know: the state of one who questions the naturally known.
• denial of the more known from the less known (De Koninck): the history of modern philosophy.
• autonomy: “make your own law”.
• birth: extended like natura / physis to what a thing is.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Physics VI, opening on continuous, touching, next (the “first paragraph” the student refers to); Thomas’s division of readings 1–4 from reading 5.
• Shakespeare, Friar Lawrence’s speech: “revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse” (Romeo and Juliet, inferred).

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles and “similar books”: motion depends on a mover; the Summas on God’s goodness.
• Kant: the only unqualifiedly good thing is a goodwill; categorical imperatives.
• Gospel: “Why do you call me good? God alone is good”; Cana; the apostles judging.
• Dionysius (quoted by Thomas): for man to be good is to be reasonable.
• Plato: Socrates and the slave boy; Symposium, first and second speakers on love.
• Aristotle, Topics: dialectical problem; snow is white; honour father and mother. Nicomachean Ethics II: the mean; adultery.
• Callahan (Hudson Institute) on abortion; De Koninck’s remark on modern philosophy.
• Shakespeare: The Evidence; Rowse on Shakespeare; Harold Bloom on Shakespeare (not read).
• Hail, Holy Queen; La Salette pamphlet; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy; the Hippocratic Oath.

His questions #

• If points could touch, what would continuous mean? You would be falsely imagining the point as something small with magnitude.
• Are there really two points where the left and right parts of a line meet? Strictly no—one point, two in definition, end of one and beginning of the other.
• Are you walking some distance before you have walked some distance, or have you walked first? Left open—the odd consequence of infinite divisibility, to be brought out in later readings.
• Is a goodwill as fundamental as good? No; one must understand good before goodwill—Kant starts from the less known.
• Is “reasonable” the basic meaning of good, the starting point? No; the starting point is the induction: the good is what all want.
• Does a child know murder is wrong before he can reason? He naturally knows, or comes to know, it once he realises what it is.
• Why are men and women not equal in bringing a child into the world? Nature has given them unequal burdens; equality here is a denial of nature.
• Is it his opinion that Shakespeare was Catholic? Yes, but nobody can know for sure.
• Who does Friar Lawrence mean by “true birth”? Nature, what a thing really is, as physis and natura were extended.