Answering by Induction: We Want Things Because They Are Good, and Why the Bad Seems Wanted

Orientation #

He opens “Let’s begin again. Now we’re going to try to answer this question,” and later recalls the “dialectic before” where both sides had objections (prev. lecture), and that “you gentlemen have just completed the treatise on love” of Thomas (prev. lecture). At the end: “That’s a little introduction to the what is good… It’s not the last word. It’s the first word”; next class, “in general, what is better?” The previous class reached the first definition of good as “what all desire” and posed the cause/effect question; the next class reviews this induction and moves to “better.”

The class, in order #

1. Two kinds of argument; induction is easier for us (“leading you into the whole from just some of the parts”) #

The point: we answer the question first by the most known way, induction.

• Syllogism: some statements laid down, another follows necessarily because of them. Induction (Greek epagoge): argument going forward from many particulars to the general.
• Which is easier for us? Induction—“for the same reason that we give examples before we have a universal definition.”
• Student: is Sherlock Holmes’ reasoning in reverse (effect to cause) induction? No—he is trying to syllogize, to deduce. Two kinds of syllogism (Posterior Analytics, demonstration propter quid): cause to effect, and effect to cause.
• Etymology: induction and introduction are the same, “leading in”—an introduction leads you into the whole from some parts; induction leads you into the universal whole from particular instances.
• The question to be answered: is wanting the cause or the effect of the good? Answer by induction, then come back to the objections on the other side.

2. The table of goods and their desires (“one column we’ll enumerate the goods”) #

The point: induction needs many particulars, so he lists the most natural, fundamental goods (many shared with the other animals) and the corresponding desire, named where it has a name.

• food / hunger; water / thirst (shared with the animals)
• sleep / “sleepiness,” “the desire to sleep” (no proper name)
• health / desire for health (no name)
• reproduction / desire to reproduce (“kind of strange it doesn’t” have a name)
• pleasure / desire for pleasure (“all the modern diseases”)
• knowing / wonder, curiosity—“a little more of a human desire”
• money / desire for money (“everybody agrees… very prevalent in our society”)
• a friend / desire for companionship
• wisdom / desire for wisdom “That’s long enough list to begin with.”

3. The induction: in each case the desire does not make the good good (“nature has given hunger to man and the other animals”) #

The point: for each pair, one can see a reason the thing is good apart from the desire; so nature gives the desire so we pursue what is in fact good and necessary.

• Food/hunger: without food we weaken, starve, die. Hunger does not make food good; nature gives hunger so we pursue food.
• Water/thirst: good for man, animals, “even for the plants… the tree up there.” “Kind of stupid” to say nature gave thirst to make water good; because water is good, nature gave thirst.
• Sleep: same. Examples of desire failing while the good remains: a sick child who has lost appetite is told by mother to eat “to maintain your strength”—she does not say “forget about eating”; his son at West Point on marches told to keep drinking a set amount of water whether he feels like it or not, and “he falls by the way” if he doesn’t; mother sending a cranky kid to sleep—“mama knows best.”
• Health: good because you want it? “No, it’s the reverse.”
• Reproduction (man, animals, even plants producing seeds): “enormous good,” the only way the kind continues in existence; nature makes the desire strong so animals pursue “so great a good for their species.”
• Pleasure/pain (“maybe the cynic would agree”): a friend’s big leg cramp—bad not because he suddenly didn’t want it but because he felt the contraction and pain. “If you know the difference between pleasure and pain, you know why you want one and why you want to avoid the other.”
• Knowing: good to know the way home, where the car keys are, where your house is—“not taking terribly profound examples”; it’s good to know these, that’s why you want to know them.
• Money: useful because everybody wants it, or wanted because useful? Student: “just a piece of ugly paper,” so you have to want it because it’s good; wanted because useful to buy a meal, gifts, shoes.
• Friend: all kinds of advantages, “even if it’s only a useful friend.”
• Wisdom: the philosopher thinks it best not because he wants it but because “he recognizes that’s the most divine knowledge.”
• Conclusion by induction: “something is not good because we want it, but we want it because it is good”—or, “good is the cause of wanting.” Provisional until the objections are answered.

4. Recalling the objections on both sides (“contrary causes have contrary what? Effects”) #

The point: the truth must be able to answer the objections against it.

• Against “good because wanted” (prev. lecture): wanting one more drink would make it good; wanting to drive 100 mph down Salisbury Street (a winding road) would have made it good—“since the hospital there, my car has been totaled,” even I admit it was not.
• Against “wanted because good,” two objections:
  1. The good is not always wanted—every parent says children don’t want what is good for them. “How can you have the cause and not the effect?”
  2. Contrary causes have contrary effects (and vice versa). If good causes wanting, the bad should cause the opposite, turning away, aversion—yet people sometimes want what is bad for them. “If you can’t solve those objections, you can’t rest completely in this conclusion.”

5. Something between the good and the wanting: an act of sense or reason (“Look before and after”) #

The point: between the good and wanting there comes knowledge—the good as known is what is wanted.

• Student’s suggestion: separate subject and object—desire is because of a good, but sometimes a problem in the subject means no wanting. He takes it up via Thomas’s question with four articles on the causes of love (prev. lecture) and Shakespeare’s “look before and after.”
• Beauty of Juliet vs. Romeo’s wanting: Romeo first wants Rosalind (Friar Lawrence: “he’s talking about Rosalind. Who says Juliet?”). Juliet did not suddenly become beautiful; what came between was the party—he saw her. Act of the senses (the eye). Similarly food: seeing, smelling, especially tasting comes between the good food and your wanting it.
• Wisdom vs. Berquist wanting it: as a little boy he wanted candy; understanding, an act of reason, came between. So “an act of the senses or reason comes between the good and our wanting it.”
• Thomas: the good is a cause of love (art. 1) and knowledge is a cause of love (art. 2), “for the same reason, in a sense”—the object of love; “more precisely, the good as known is the object of love.”
• Before and after: beauty of Juliet → Romeo seeing her → Romeo wanting; excellence (“godlike character,” “most divine knowledge”) of wisdom → reason recognizing it → wanting wisdom more than candy.

6. Answering the objections: ignorance, deception by likeness, incomplete knowledge (“the bad as bad is not wanted”) #

The point: since the good arouses wanting through sense or reason, the good may go unwanted through ignorance, and the bad may be wanted only as resembling the good—per accidens, not per se.

• Objection 1 answered: people don’t know what wisdom is; a food never tasted is not wanted. “I might not want something because I simply don’t know it.”
• Objection 2 answered: senses and reason “can be deceived by the likeness of things.” The bad is desired not as such but because it seems good, i.e., resembles what is truly good; the original cause is the truly good.
  • Mushrooms: his wife’s Italian relatives gathered mushrooms under a self-appointed expert, had a feast, all had stomachs pumped; even real experts find it very difficult to tell good from poisonous; in France, men had gathered mushrooms, two restaurants refused, the third prepared them and the man died. Did they want the poisonous mushrooms? They wanted them “because they seem to be the good mushrooms.” Good mushrooms are the first cause; “if all mushrooms were poisonous, no one would want to eat any mushrooms.” Poisonous ones wanted only secondarily, “not per se… per accidens.”
  • Navy: his cousin’s shipmates broke into a compartment of alcohol, mixed it with coke, woke up blind. They wanted it insofar as it seemed like the alcohol that “in moderation, is not bad for you”—not “the bad as bad.”
• The distinction: “the bad as bad is not wanted… It’s the good as good that is wanted.” Good as such not always wanted because not always known; bad wanted “in some qualified sense” only because it resembles the truly good.
• Added point: knowledge of sense and reason “is often incomplete”—a delicious poison is wanted because it smells and tastes good; the badness is accidental to your wanting; you are attracted by the real good you know and ignorant of the real bad in the same thing.
• So one wants the bad either because it resembles the good (poisonous mushrooms) or because one is attracted by the real good in it while ignorant of the real bad.
• Further cases: bank robber before the judge—“Why do you rob banks?” “That’s where the money is”—not because it’s unjust; a student cheats to get a good grade, not because cheating is good; Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky): the student murders the old lady not for money but to show he’s above the law—a false appearance of a good (being above everybody); even the devil departing from God “in the name of liberty.” “There’s an apparent good that the bad are pursuing, even when they seem to choose the bad itself.”

7. Recap of the whole path so far (“It’s not the last word. It’s the first word”) #

The point: he retraces the order of the inquiry as basic.

• Little boy asked what is good gives examples (candy, pizza, bicycle, vacation); asked why call them all good—not all sweet, not all edible—only “these are all the things that you… want” → first definition: the good is what all want.
• Next step: the Socratic question (wanting cause or effect?). Next: difficulties on both sides—greater on “good because wanted,” since everyone has examples in their own life of something wanted very much later recognized as bad; but also difficulties on “wanted because good” (good not always wanted; people attracted to bad things).
• Then the provisional answer by induction (“about ten or fifteen” goods); then answering the objections with Thomas’s treatise on love and “looking before and after, which means using your reason.”
• Fresh examples of likeness: walks in wooded areas where a friend points out what’s good to eat; berries in Shrewsbury; grandchildren gathering leaves where there is poison ivy—picked “not because they want to get poison ivy, but because they resemble the good ones,” or because of the good in the leaf’s beauty, not its irritating the skin.
• “That’s important distinction between as such and by happening.” Poisonous drink: attracted to the drink as such by good taste and smell, which happen to be poisonous—“at the tragic end I’m wanting something good.”
• Aside: “I have to tell your parents you don’t know what good and bad is.”

8. The order of Plato’s dialogues and the question of the better (“The ball game is now over for these guys”) #

The point: after the good, the better; and the five dialogues fit together so that Apology’s dispute presupposes knowing what is better.

• Apology: most commonly read in introductions to philosophy. Apologia is a transliteration, not a translation—the Greek for a legal defense in court; kategoria the accusation. Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua (Latinized) is not an apology but a defense of leaving the Anglicans for Rome, “like Socrates is doing here.” Socrates’ conviction leads to the great change in Plato’s life.
• Euthyphro leads up to the Apology: Socrates at the porch of the King Archon to see the charges (impiety); Euthyphro there to indict his own father for impiety—which itself sounds impious—so must be the expert on piety, hence the conversation.
• After the trial: Socrates found guilty, sentenced to death, kept in prison during a Greek festival. Crito comes with a plan to bribe the guards; Socrates reasons he should not disobey the law and break out—“kind of surprising.”
• Phaedo: the last day; longest conversation, does the soul survive death (Socrates’ joke: philosophers always discuss what is relevant); also whether the soul is better off after death; plus a muthos about what happens to the soul after death. At the end Socrates dies.
• Before the Euthyphro, the Meno: what virtue is, whether it can be taught; Anytus, one of the accusers, comes in and goes off angry—an anticipation of the charges. The five fit together with “a kind of symmetry.”
• What each gives us: Meno—the good is what all want (not its main thing); Euthyphro—the question “is it pious because the gods approve it, or do the gods approve it because it is pious?”, to be applied to the good (“you have to put two and two together”); Apology—the disagreement between Socrates and the Athenians about which goods in human life are better, which presupposes knowing what better is.
• The Athenians think goods of the body and exterior goods are greatest; Socrates, goods of the soul. Someone might say “if you want those more, go for it”—but if something is not good because you want it, you cannot say it is better because you want it more; “they’ve got to give a reason.” Next class: the false answer (whatever you want more) and the true answer to what is better, using what was learned about the good.

His words #

• induction; argument from many particulars to the general, “leading in” like introduction (Greek epagoge)
• syllogism; some statements laid down, another follows necessarily because of them
• propter quid; demonstration from cause to effect (the other kind, effect to cause)
• wanting / desire; used interchangeably for the effect of the good
• “the good as known”; the object of love, more precisely than good and knowledge as two causes
• “look before and after”; his phrase (from Shakespeare) for using reason to find what comes between good and wanting
• as such vs. by happening; per se vs. per accidens; the good as such is wanted, the bad as bad is not, the bad only by happening
• apparent good; what the bad pursue even when they seem to choose the bad itself
• apologia; legal defense in court, not “apology”; kategoria; accusation
• muthos; the story Socrates tells in the Phaedo about the soul after death
• porch of the King Archon; “we call it the courthouse”

Texts #

Read in class: none read verbatim; Thomas Aquinas, treatise on love, question on the causes of love, articles 1-2 (good and knowledge as causes) commented on. Mentioned: Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (demonstration propter quid); Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Rosalind, Friar Lawrence, the party) and “look before and after” (Hamlet, inferred); Plato, Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo; Newman, Apologia pro vita sua; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; “Show me the way home” (old song).

His questions #

• Which kind of argument, induction or syllogism, is easier for us? Induction, for the reason we give examples before a universal definition.
• Is it hunger that makes food good for man and the other animals? No; without food we starve; nature gives hunger so we pursue what is in fact good.
• Does the philosopher think wisdom the best thing because he wants it? No, because he recognizes it as the most divine knowledge.
• How can you have the cause (good) and not the effect (wanting)? Because the good must be known; senses and reason can be ignorant of it.
• What came between the beauty of Juliet and Romeo’s wanting her? He saw her—an act of the senses.
• Did they want to eat the poisonous mushrooms? Not as such; they wanted them because they seemed to be the good ones—per accidens.
• Does the bank robber rob banks because it’s unjust? No, “that’s where the money is”—drawn by the good in it.
• Can you say something is better because you want it more? No; if not good because wanted, not better because wanted more—a reason must be given (to be pursued next class).