The Five Virtues of Reason: Foresight, Art, Natural Understanding, Episteme and Wisdom (with Equivocal Names)

Orientation #

He opens with “the old rule I gave you of two or three” and the logic division of the five predicables into three and two, both treated earlier, and recalls “the distinction we pointed out before” that understanding is to reasoning as rest to motion, and “the proem to wisdom” done earlier (prev. lecture). He says nothing about next time. The text-matching system reports Aquinas on Physics I (lectio 13, handout “Note for Book One, Reading Thirteen”) and ST I q. 79 a. 12 as matched to this episode’s audio; the transcript itself never names either, so those attributions are reported here only as the system’s, not his. The previous class established the general meaning of virtue and the split of intellectual virtue by speculative versus practical reason, setting up the fivefold division treated here.

The class, in order #

1. Rule of two or three; Thomas’s first cut (“divide one way, right”) #

Point: to understand a division into more than three you must first divide one way; Thomas divides the five virtues of reason into two: virtues of looking reason and virtues of doing (practical) reason.

• Parallel from logic: the five predicables (genus, difference, species, property, accident) were divided three and two, three signifying something inside the nature of the thing, two something outside; then subdivided.

2. Doing vs making (“you have nothing to show for it”) #

Point: the fundamental distinction within doing reason is doing vs making.

• Objection he raises against himself: how divide doing into doing and making? Reply: one particular sometimes keeps the general name and the other gets a new name, as Aristotle divides disposition into disposition and habit.
• Why making gets the new name: apart from the doing there is a product. A twenty-minute walk or a game of baseball: nothing to show for it; marinating and cooking steaks for a guest, or the men outside building a church: a product remains.
• Making adds something noteworthy but is not therefore higher; doing is higher, because what you do with the steak once made (eat moderately, drink the right amount) matters more; making is for the sake of the thing made, doing more its own end.

3. Foresight and art, and their species (“arts are differentiated by their materials”) #

Point: the virtue perfecting doing is foresight (Latin prudentia, from providentia, as Thomas explains in the question on the integral parts of prudence, and as the Latin dictionary confirms); the virtue perfecting making is art.

• Churchill prefers “foresight” to “prudence,” since “prudence” has taken a narrow, common-day sense; foresight is the real English name. First definition: right reason about doing. Art: right reason about making, art in the sense of definite rules (farming, carpentry, shoemaking, cooking with recipes), not the “artsy” sense.
• Both are genera, not lowest species.
• Arts distinguished by the matter out of which they make, more than by what they make: his brother-in-law the carpenter makes a wooden house, table, chair; a metal worker a metal table and chair; a plastic company plastic tables, chairs, cups. So no single art of chair-making. Different matter needs different tools and working: his father’s factory had a wood shop (saw, nail, screw) and a metal shop (heat, bend, weld); his wife and daughter use scissors and needle for dresses, which do not fit wood.
• Foresight distinguished not by matter but by the end aimed at: Thomas distinguishes at least four, foresight of the individual man, of a father, of a king or ruler, of a general.
• Student: is the difference one of numbers? Reply: Aristotle at the beginning of the Politics rejects the Platonic view that rule over a family and rule of a king over a city differ only quantitatively; they differ in kind by their end. Family: necessities of life (generation, nourishment, education); city: the good life, period; army: victory.
• Examples: reading Beatrix Potter to his small children rather than Shakespeare, which he would prefer for himself, is the foresight of a father, since the common good of the family is really the children. Being drafted as a good officer is not for the good of his family but for another good. Voting: what helps Duane Berquist, or his family, or the country? Nepotism and pre-Trent absentee bishops living elsewhere on diocesan funds: considering the family rather than the good of the church or diocese.
• Grading: more foresight is needed to see the good of the country than of the family, and more for the family than for oneself.

4. Possessing the art (“orderly, easily, without error”) #

Point: the man who possesses the art makes well; the one who lacks it does not.

• His brother-in-law, who has the art of carpentry, looks at his basement carpentry and says tear it off and do it again; the plumber he calls sees “the stupid things I’d done” and it looks easy when he does it; the old relative who put coffee grounds in the coffee cake does not possess the art yet.
• Thomas: art enables you to do something orderly, easily, without error. Mrs. DeKay, a very good cook (“my husband taught me”); grandmother’s unwritten “pinch of this, pinch of that.”
• Greek names: foresight is phronesis (Latin prudentia), art is techne. Aside: sophrosyne, the Greek word for temperance, means “preserves foresight,” since drink or lust makes people lose their mind (Paris bringing back Helen and destroying his city).

5. Virtues of looking reason: before and after reasoning (“understanding is to reasoning like rest is to motion”) #

Point: since rest can be before or after motion, there is an understanding before reasoning and an understanding arrived at by reasoning.

1. Reasoned-out understanding: theorems of geometry (interior angles equal two right angles; the Pythagorean theorem; in the Meno Socrates helps the slave boy reason out that the diagonal of a square is the side of a square twice as big). Greek episteme (long e; we get “epistemology”), Latin scientia.
2. Natural understanding: argument that if you understood nothing before reasoning you would have nothing to reason from; so there is an understanding that comes without reasoning and more naturally. Examples: the whole is more than the part; something can’t both be and not be (pulling petals, “she loves me, she loves me not”: amid all that uncertainty you still accept that it can’t be both).
   • “Natural” does not mean born understanding it: you don’t go to school for it, you learn the whole is more than the part sharing candy with your brothers (easier in a smaller family; the boy who stuffs the remaining candy in his mouth before going into the house).
   • Aristotle calls this nous, Thomas intellectus; note that intellectus speculativus names the power, whereas here intellectus names a habit, a virtue; named so because it belongs more naturally to understanding.

• Student objection: is there not a virtue for the motion itself, since virtue makes the act good and reasoning can fall into error? He does not take it up further; the third virtue is wisdom.

6. Wisdom, head of both understandings (“the wise man distinguishes the meanings of the words”) #

Point: wisdom is a knowledge of the first causes and also knows the axioms more distinctly, so it perfects both natural and reasoned-out understanding and stands as a separate virtue.

• Why natural understanding needs it: given sophistical objections against the axioms, students are deceived and cannot distinguish the meanings of “whole” and “part.” His sophism: man is an animal but not just an animal, so animal is a part of what man is; but animal includes dog, cat, horse, elephant, so it is more than man; therefore the part is more than the whole. Resolution: two meanings of whole and part are mixed (Aristotle distinguishes four central meanings in “the fifth book of wisdom”): a composed or integral whole, put together from its parts (chair from legs, seat, back; the definition and its parts), always contains more than one part; a universal whole, not put together from but said of its parts (animal of dog, cat, horse). “Animal is part of man” takes composing part; “animal includes more than man” takes the universal. The average man could not sort this out; the man with only natural understanding, meeting such objections, begins to doubt the foundation of all his understanding.
• Why reasoned-out understanding needs it: wisdom knows the causes of the causes studied in the other forms of reasoned-out understanding. So sometimes Aristotle says Sophia is an episteme, sometimes divides it against episteme, as man is sometimes said to be an animal and sometimes divided against the animals.
• Importance: later we find human happiness consists especially in wisdom, knowing God; a harmony there between nature and grace.
• Is there a wisdom that is not an episteme? Foresight is sometimes called practical wisdom. At the end of the Ethics Aristotle compares political foresight with wisdom (better to be Aristotle or Churchill?): political foresight is about human things, Sophia about divine things, and God is better than man; if man were the best thing around, political foresight would win, but he is not; better to know the divine even though harder for us.

7. Aristotle’s own three-and-two in Ethics VI (“these are, in a way, more known to us”) #

Point: Aristotle also divides the five into three and two, but not Thomas’s three and two; Thomas’s scheme is from the Prima Secundae.

• Aristotle takes episteme, foresight and art first, then natural understanding and wisdom together, because these two are about beginnings: natural understanding about the beginnings of our understanding (the axioms), wisdom about the beginnings of reality (God, first things); the other three about things that are from the beginnings.
• His reason for Aristotle’s order: the three are more known to us. We recognise the useful carpenter, plumber, cook; we admire military foresight (Mad Anthony Wayne at Stony Point on the Hudson, who told Washington, who planned it, “I’d storm hell itself if you plan it”; MacArthur’s rescue of the prisoners on returning to the Philippines; Churchill’s ancestor who fought for England around the beginning of the 18th century; Napoleon); we remember first learning the Pythagorean theorem. Natural understanding is hidden because so natural (“it seemed like I always knew it”), and wisdom too.
• Both divisions valid: from his own experience as a philosopher, the same thing can be divided validly in more than one way, each illuminating. Example: names said of many things, which Thomas sometimes divides into three (exactly the same meaning, entirely different meanings, partly same partly different) and sometimes into two (same meaning, or other meanings, the second subdivided into entirely different, “equivocal by chance,” and connected, “equivocal by reason”); hence what is later called analogous is sometimes called equivocal by reason, while at other times “equivocal” is kept for equivocal by chance and analogous is the in-between. Both Aristotle and Thomas still keep the rule of two or three: divide into two, then subdivide into two and three.

8. Wisdom the most universal knowledge; the proem to wisdom (“towards the cause and towards the universal”) #

Point: wisdom not only reaches the first causes but is the most universal knowledge, which is why it casts light on the axioms.

• Recalled from the proem to wisdom: from sensation, memory, experience towards episteme you go from singular towards universal. Two differences between experience and art or science: (1) experience is knowledge of the singular, art or science of the universal; (2) experience knows only that it is so, art or science, as perfected, knows why.
• From (1) Aristotle reasons that the man of experience sometimes succeeds better, since what you do is always singular: his wife, after violent headaches from the standard dose given after childbirth, asked for half the amount at the second child, a better nurse of herself than the nurse, since she knows this individual woman; knowing your own son or friend can make you a better psychologist for him than the psychologist. From (2), art or science is superior.
• Guess confirmed: at the end of knowledge, wisdom is the most universal and knows the first cause. The words of the axioms (whole, part) are the most universal words, so they are the key words of wisdom too; the wise man sees when they are equivocal by reason and distinguishes their meanings, which helps wisdom, helps him understand the axioms more distinctly, and lets him defend them.
• Thomas’s grading of the three: wisdom on top, natural understanding above reasoned-out understanding (reasoned-out depends on natural, which is more certain); wisdom on top because it perfects the whole.
• Student: likeness in the supernatural order, gift of understanding penetrating the mysteries of faith as first principles, wisdom perfecting them, gift of knowledge less clearly tied in. Reply: be careful with those words; the gifts of the Holy Spirit are something different, though there is a connection in why the words are used. The gift of wisdom is more concerned with the divine and is attached to charity, since conformity of heart with God gives a certain experience of God and a saint’s wisdom about him; science is more tied to creatures. Also, in faith and theology you partake of God’s knowledge, which is one: primarily looking knowledge (of himself) but also eminently practical.

9. Board: names said of many things (“with the same meaning in each case”) #

Point (on a student’s request to go back): the division of a name said of many things, “many” meaning more than one, not many as opposed to few.

• Same meaning in each case: said univocally. Other meanings: said equivocally. Among the latter: no connection between the meanings, equivocal by chance (bat: baseball bat and the flying rodent, the Germans’ “flying mouse”; two students with the same name have nothing in common); connection, equivocal by reason (see: of the eye, then imagining, then understanding, because of likeness).
• Caution: an equivocal word (many meanings, as in the dictionary) can still be said univocally of many things, e.g. “bat” of three baseball bats.
• Aristotle’s discovery: the words of the axioms and of wisdom, used to some extent everywhere because of their universality, are all equivocal by reason. By distinguishing their central meanings he killed three birds with one stone: helped wisdom, helped all the sciences and arts, and made the axioms understood more distinctly and defensible. Student: this is the cause of the most common error in thinking. Reply: yes, mixing up the senses of a word.

10. Understanding words and being wise (“then he is not wise”) #

Point: two statements to judge. “If a man understands the words he uses, he is wise”: false, since wisdom does not chiefly consist in knowing meanings of words but in knowing God. “If a man doesn’t understand the words he uses, he is not wise”: true.

• Parallel: understanding plane geometry does not entail understanding solid geometry, but not understanding plane geometry entails not understanding solid.
• Augustine saw through Faustus, the great Manichaean: he could not judge what Faustus said about God and the heavenly bodies, but found he did not know the liberal arts, and you cannot be wise without these.
• Aside: the modern philosophers, so focused on words, do not understand the words they use; that alone shows they cannot be wise, though it is hard to see all their mistakes.

His words #

• rule of two or three; a division into more than three is understood by first dividing one way.
• looking reason / doing reason [ed.: speculative / practical reason].
• doing vs making; making has a product apart from the act.
• foresight; his English for prudentia (from providentia); “right reason about doing” [ed.: prudence].
• art; right reason about making, definite rules.
• phronesis, techne; Greek for foresight and art.
• sophrosyne; Greek temperance, “preserves foresight.”
• reasoned-out understanding; episteme, scientia [ed.: science].
• natural understanding; understanding before reasoning, of the axioms; nous, intellectus (as habit, not power).
• wisdom; Sophia; knowledge of the first causes, head of both understandings, the most universal knowledge.
• axioms; the whole is more than the part; something can’t both be and not be.
• composed (integral) whole vs universal whole.
• equivocal by chance / equivocal by reason; analogous as the in-between in the three-way division.
• univocally / equivocally; how a name is said of many things.
• “the fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]; “the proem to wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics I].
• practical wisdom; a name sometimes given to foresight.

Texts #

Read in class

• none read verbatim; all treated from memory and the board.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI (five virtues of reason, divided three and two); end of the Ethics (political foresight vs wisdom).
• Aristotle, Politics, beginning (family vs city not a merely quantitative difference).
• Aristotle, “the fifth book of wisdom” (four central meanings of whole and part) (inferred: Metaphysics V).
• Aristotle, “the proem to wisdom” (sensation, memory, experience, art) (inferred: Metaphysics I).
• Plato, Meno (slave boy and the doubled square).
• Thomas, Prima Secundae (the two-and-three scheme of intellectual virtues); question on the integral parts of prudence (prudentia from providentia) (inferred: ST II-II).
• Augustine on Faustus the Manichaean.
• System-reported matches not named in the transcript: Aquinas on Physics I lectio 13 (handout “Note for Book One, Reading Thirteen”); ST I q. 79 a. 12.

His questions #

• How can you divide doing into doing and making? One particular keeps the general name, the other gets a new one, as disposition into disposition and habit.
• Are foresight and art lowest species or also genera? Genera: many arts under art, several foresights under foresight.
• Do you have one art to make chairs? No; arts are distinguished by matter (wood, metal, plastic), not by what is made.
• Is there an understanding before reasoning and one arrived at by reasoning? Yes: natural understanding (axioms) and reasoned-out understanding (geometry).
• Is there some virtue for the motion of reasoning itself? Left open; he passes to wisdom.
• Is there any kind of wisdom that is not an episteme? Foresight is sometimes called practical wisdom.
• Better to be Aristotle or Churchill? Aristotle: wisdom is of divine things, and God is better than man.
• If a man understands the words he uses, is he wise? False; wisdom is chiefly knowing God.
• If a man doesn’t understand the words he uses, is he not wise? True.