Physics Book VI: The First in Change, Contradiction, and Relation in the Trinity

Orientation #

He looks back to “our first studies” in the first book of Natural Hearing (that everything changes from something to something; the three things in all becoming, twelfth reading) and forward to Aristotle’s next step: that the “first” in change is indivisible, and that there is no first distance or first time at the start of a motion, which prepares the seventh and eighth books and the argument that nothing moves itself. The previous class treated the division of motion by time and by the parts of the mobile; the next takes up readings seven and eight on order, before and after, and the absence of a first in motion.

The class, in order #

1. The first in change, and two ways of leaving behind (“in what way there is a first in change”) #

Aristotle will first show that there is a first in change: the changing thing is in that to which it has changed when it first has changed; then that this first is indivisible.

• The text’s dichotomy: the changing “leaves behind that from which it changes, or it itself fails.” Two kinds of change: when he leaves his house to come here the house does not cease to be, it is left behind; when one goes from sickness to health, sickness does not remain, it fails.
• “To change and to leave behind are either the same, or leaving behind follows change,” and likewise to have left behind and to have changed. Thomas in the commentary: it is called change from the term to which, and failing or leaving behind from the term from which.

2. Going home vs. coming home: same reality, different meaning (“are you and your mother talking about two different trips”) #

He tests Thomas’s remark against his own earlier teaching, which put “change” on the side of the term from which.

• You say “going home”, your mother says “coming home”: not two trips, not two vocabularies, but a difference in meaning though not in reality: you speak from the point of departure, she from the destination.
• “Becoming” plainly names the term to which; in the twelfth reading Aristotle takes for granted that in all becoming something comes to be that was not before, shows briefly (“kind of like an afterthought”) that it comes to be from something, and mainly that what you start from in one way remains, in another is lost. What he takes and does not try to show is on the side of the term to which.
• Butter in the refrigerator: “the soft becomes hard” and “a change from soft to hard” are the same reality, but “becoming” looks to where you are going, while “change” (not clear from the word) thinks more of what you leave: “everything changes” means nothing stays the same; the child “has changed” means he has departed from the way he was.
• Is Thomas then contradicting him? A student: add “leaving school” beside “going home” and “coming home”. His answer: “change” is not explicitly one or the other; it is in between. Contrasted with “becoming”, change leans to the term from which; contrasted with “leaving behind”, to the term to which.
• Lukewarm: compared to hot it seems cold, compared to cold it seems hot. The three pails (one hand in hot, one in cold, both into lukewarm: different sensations); the recent sudden warm weather that “hits you more” the first day.

3. Contradiction and contrariety (“the Greek word there for contradiction”) #

When the change is completed one is in the term to which and in no way in the term from which; Aristotle manifests this first in change between contradictories, so he explains contradiction.

• The Greek antiphasis (anti = contra, phasis) is just like the Latin: “said against.” Contradiction and contrariety both come from “against” but are different kinds of opposition.
• With simple terms: the contradictory of being white is not being white; the contrary is being black (black vs. white, virtue vs. vice are contraries). Textbooks usually treat contradiction only in statements.
• With statements: the contradictory of “every woman is beautiful” is “not every woman is beautiful”, equivalent to “some woman is not beautiful”; the contrary is “no woman is beautiful.”
• “Every priest is good” and “no priest is good” seem furthest apart, yet both can be false; contradictories (“every priest is good” / “some priest is not good”) cannot both be true nor both be false. “Some priest is good” and “some priest is not good” can both be true, so one person can think both. Two men holding the two contraries could both be mistaken; two men holding contradictories: you know one says the true and the other the false, “even without knowing which is true, which is false.”

4. Change between contradictories and the two axioms (“it’s impossible to be and not be”) #

Between contradictories there is nothing in between, so the case is clearest.

• You either are a sphere or not, a man or not. Generation: from not being a man to being a man; when generated, a man. Death: from being a man to not; when dead, not a man.
• Text: when something has changed from not being to being it has left behind non-being; “it will therefore be in being, for everything necessarily is or is not.”
• Thomas (the text is, he thinks, the Posterior Analytics) puts two fundamental statements: it is impossible to be and not be; it is necessary to be or not be. People call the first the law of (non-)contradiction (he does not know what to call it, given the ambiguity), the second the law of excluded middle; he calls them “the axioms about being and non-being.” Aristotle makes them precise: at the same time, in the same way.
• Why most fundamental: every other statement is either affirmative or negative, saying that something is or is not, not both; so these are presupposed to every statement.
• Aside: Weizsäcker wanted a new logic to avoid excluded middle for atomic affairs (the particle is here or not here), because they could not understand ability [ed.: potency]; Heisenberg understood it, and admired that in Aristotle.

5. The four kinds of opposition (“not everything sees or is blind”) #

A student asks whether distinguishing two from three is based on contradiction; he answers that contradiction enters into the other oppositions, and lays them out in order of decreasing opposition.

1. Contradiction: being vs. non-being, nothing in common.
2. Having and lacking (privation): a lack is non-being in a subject able to have. Everything sees or does not see (mere negation), but not everything sees or is blind; so the opposition is less, since the two share a subject.
3. Contraries: a common subject and a common genus. Vice is not simply the lack of virtue but “a real habit, a real disposition, a real inclination” to excess or defect (first book).
4. Relatives: quite different, since one does not take the other away. Virtue eliminates vice, blindness eliminates sight, but double does not eliminate half; it requires it, and one cannot be double to oneself.

6. Pros ti: relation in the Categories and in John (“what’s the Greek there for with God”) #

The distinction of Father and Son in the Trinity is relative, and the Greek of John’s prologue shows it.

• “The Word was with God”: the Greek preposition is pros, “toward”. Aristotle in the Categories does not say the abstract “relation” but pros ti, “towards something”, rendered in Latin logic ad aliquid; when John’s pros ton theon is translated “with God” the sense is lost.
• “Relation” is too abstract (people imagine “a relation between us” as something in between). Rather: I am towards you a teacher, you are towards me a student; taller/shorter, double towards two, half towards eight: “in myself, by myself, it’s nothing absolute.”
• His teacher Kasurik never applied this to John but always pressed how concrete Aristotle’s way of speaking is here. He does not remember Thomas or Augustine noting the point; a student: Albert has it; would Thomas have had the Greek? He occasionally discusses a Greek word in the commentary; Thomas follows Augustine and Chrysostom closely (Chrysostom might have picked it up); “may not claim to be original.” Pius XII: no one is a Thomist without Thomas’s commentary on John.
• Luke’s commandment of love: “from your whole heart” but “with/in your whole soul, mind, strength”: a different preposition for the heart, because the love of charity is in the will, the heart, while the other powers are commanded and informed by it.
• Asides: Hebrew is more concrete still (“I was an eye for the blind man”; Cornelius a Lapide; a parish reading the Old Testament); he never learned Hebrew, will ask Father Ratham (who teaches it Wednesdays) about a word; his Greek began with Father Peter, with Warren Murray the only other student, wanting “to read Aristotle.”

7. Nature and reason, two in three (“reason is a nature too”) #

A student asks what opposition underlies the distinction between nature and reason.

• Aristotle: nature is determined to one, reason open to opposites; but that is not the whole story, since reason is a nature too.
• Three vs. two: three is odd and two not; two is half of four and three not; yet there is a two in three (two plus one); a two without three is possible, not a three without two. So reason is in nature; Thomas explains it in several ways, this is one.
• Distinction is “kind of based on opposition, but it’s not” only that: “The Father and I are one,” yet there is a distinction. No distinction in what is absolute in the divinity (Father and divine nature, Son and divine nature), only in what is towards another; the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father, yet the Son is from the Father.

8. Two kinds of distinction and the Trinity by either-or (“we distinguish two kinds of distinction”) #

Asked for a definition of distinction, he gives instead its two kinds and the disjunctive argument used in Trinitarian theology.

• Formal distinction, based on opposition, vs. the distinction met in the continuous (one point here, another there): material.
• Thomas or Augustine proceeds by an either-or syllogism: not material, since God is not continuous; then among the four oppositions: not being/non-being (“I am who am”), not having/lacking (which is a form of being/non-being), not contraries (into which lack enters, first book); so it must be relative (taught, he says, by Justin and Boethius). The clue is in John: the logos is pros ton theon, where theon stands for the Father; cf. the creed, “God from God, light from light… begotten, not made… one in being.”
• “We better not get talking about the Trinity here because that’s the end of our studies.”

9. Back to the text: Worcester, Framingham, Boston (“when I have traveled from Worcester to Boston”) #

Aristotle’s general argument that what has changed is in that to which it has changed.

• Text: clear in change according to contradiction, “and if in this, also in the others, for as in one, likewise in all.” Thomas: he begins there because it is more clear (nothing in between).
• When I have gone from Worcester to Boston, where am I? Boston. Not Worcester (I have left it behind; change and leaving behind are the same reality). Why not Framingham? Then I still have to go from Framingham to Boston, so I have not completed the journey. Between being and non-being the Framingham objection cannot even arise.
• Text: what has changed is necessarily somewhere, since it has left behind that from which; either in the term or in another, C; but then what has changed to B changes again from C to B, “for B is not next, the change being continuous”; so what has changed is still changing to that to which it has changed, which is impossible. Hence what has come to be, when it has come to be, will be; what has ceased to be will not be; and “what has changed, when it has first changed, is in that to which it has changed.”

10. Preview: the first is indivisible, and no first at the start (“when I’m first in Boston, how long is that”) #

The first arrival is indivisible; the departure has no first part.

• When I am first in Boston, how long is that? Zero. If “this hour”, then in its first half hour I was already in Boston, so the hour is not when I was first there.
• At the other end: is there a first distance? Before a mile, a half mile; before that a quarter; the continuous is divisible forever, so no first distance and no first time in which the motion starts. Before you have gone some distance you are going some distance, and before you are going some distance you have gone some, “and this goes on forever.”

11. Why this matters: motion and its mover (“the philosopher doesn’t really ask”) #

This is the starting point for showing that nothing moves itself.

• To be seen in the seventh and eighth books, and in Thomas’s summary in the first book of the Summa Contra Gentiles (much more at length than in the Summa Theologiae): the dependence of motion on a mover, argued partly from the definition of motion and partly from this book, and eventually of movers on an unmoved mover, Thomas’s most manifest argument for God.
• Descartes gave up defining motion, Locke follows him, and they do not do the sixth book; the consequence is that God cannot be known by reason. “So very serious.”
• De Koninck: the philosopher does not ask “Does God exist?” (the theologian does); studying motion he realizes it depends on a mover… [recording ends mid-sentence]

His words #

• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]: his name for the work.
• leaving behind / failing: the two ways the term from which is lost (house remains; sickness ceases); named from the term from which, as “change” is named from the term to which (Thomas).
• becoming: names the term to which, “right in the meaning of it.”
• contradiction: antiphasis, “said against”; being white vs. not being white.
• contrariety: white vs. black; both can be false as statements.
• the axioms about being and non-being: impossible to be and not be; necessary to be or not be; called by others law of (non-)contradiction and excluded middle.
• ability [ed.: potency].
• lack [ed.: privation]: non-being in a subject able to have.
• pros ti / ad aliquid: “towards something”, Aristotle’s concrete term for relation.
• formal vs. material distinction: based on opposition vs. found in the continuous.
• first: the indivisible “when it has first changed”, taking no time.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Physics VI, the passage on the changing leaving behind, change between contradictories, and the C-to-B argument (ch. 5 inferred), with Thomas’s commentary.
• John 1:1 (pros ton theon), in Greek.
• Luke, the commandment of love (preposition “from” with heart).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics I (first book; the twelfth reading on becoming; contraries and lack).
• Posterior Analytics (as the source of the two axioms; “I think”).
• Aristotle, Categories (pros ti).
• Physics VII and VIII; Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles I; Summa Theologiae (arguments for a mover).
• Thomas’s commentary on John; Augustine; Chrysostom; Albert; Justin; Boethius; the creed; Cornelius a Lapide; Descartes; Locke; Weizsäcker; Heisenberg; De Koninck; Pius XII.

His questions #

• Are you and your mother talking about two different trips? No; one trip, but you speak from the departure (“going”), she from the destination (“coming”).
• Is the change from soft to hard anything other in reality than the soft becoming hard? No; but “becoming” looks to the term to which, “change” leans to what is left.
• Is Thomas contradicting me about the word change? Not necessarily: change is in between, like lukewarm, and takes its lean from what it is contrasted with.
• What is the contradictory of “every woman is beautiful”? The contrary? “Not every / some woman is not beautiful”; “no woman is beautiful.”
• Can contraries both be false? Can contradictories? Contraries yes; contradictories neither both true nor both false.
• Is the distinction of two from three based on contradiction? Contradiction enters all four oppositions; he lays out the four in order.
• What is the Greek for “with God”? Pros, “toward”; the relative opposition that grounds the distinction of persons.
• Can you give a definition of distinction? Not a definition; two kinds, formal (opposition) and material (the continuous).
• When I have gone from Worcester to Boston, where am I? Why not Framingham? Boston; in Framingham the journey would still be to be completed.
• When I’m first in Boston, how long is that? Zero; any duration has a first half in which I was already there.