The First Road in Our Knowledge: From Sensation and Memory to Experience and Art

Orientation #

He is continuing the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: the first reading treated the first desire, and he says he will come back to that “in the third reading.” He announces that the next three paragraphs, with three kinds of examples or signs that the man who knows why is wiser, will be taken up next time. The previous class treated the proemium and Aristotle’s opening line that all men by nature desire to know.

The class, in order #

1. The hazy notion of wisdom (“beginning of our knowledge, or… at the end”) #

Man begins with confused, indistinct knowledge, so freshmen cannot define wisdom — but they have a hazy notion of it. His test question: does wisdom come at the beginning, the middle, or the end of our knowledge? Forced to choose, students say the end. Nobody calls a newborn baby wise.

• Supports: the barber’s plaque, “too soon old, too late wise” (an old German proverb, as his father called it); King Lear’s fool — “you’re old before your time” / “you should not have been old before you were wise”; Shakespeare’s “love, which graybeards call divine” (graybeards = the wise, said poetically); the old saying “to play the young man,” meaning to play the fool.

2. The word hodos, road (“what is the first road in our knowledge”) #

If wisdom comes at the end, we must ask about the road our knowledge takes and its direction. Greek hodos = road; hence “odometer,” which measures the road (miles).

• Christian use: John’s “I am the way” — hodos is more concrete: “I am the road.” Thomas: as God he is truth itself and life itself; as man he is the road — the road to himself as God. Note the order, ascending from what belongs to him as man to what belongs to him as God. Same order in Peter’s profession (Matthew 16): “Thou art the Christ” (as man, anointed), “the Son of the living God.” Same at the head of the third part of the Summa, where Christ as man is the via tending to God.
• Pagan use: Plato, Aristotle and their predecessors speak of a road in our knowledge; Empedocles speaks of the broadest road leading into our mind (from eyes, hands), and of the difficulty of knowing God along it.
• Aside: he asked his little son Paul about the basic road in our knowledge; Paul answered, “there are trucks and cars on it” — stuck on the first, material road.
• Why is “road” carried over from asphalt? Not by chance and not because of the asphalt: because of a likeness — a progression, an order, in each. An order in our knowledge means one thing is known or considered before another.

3. The syllogism for the first road (“the natural road in our knowledge”) #

Conclusion: the first road in our knowledge is the road from the senses into reason.

1. The first road in our knowledge is the natural road in our knowledge (middle term). Why: the natural road is the one made by nature, as distinguished from roads made by reason; reason presupposes nature. Taking nature as what a thing is: a thing must be what it is before it can be anything else, so nature is what is first in a thing.
2. The natural road in our knowledge is the road from the senses into reason. Why: the nature of man is to be an animal having reason. Animal is defined by having senses (this distinguishes animal from plant); reason is what is specific to man. In development, the general appears before the particular, and what is more specific develops later.
   • Example of the order of development: the fertilized egg first divides and grows — something we share with plants; then the senses appear; “seven is the age of reason.” So we go from the senses into reason, and naturally think at first only about what we sense.

• He stresses you must see the connection of the middle term with both the minor and the major term.

4. Why this road heads toward wisdom (“the perfection of reason”) #

Wisdom is the highest or greatest perfection of reason, so a road running from the senses into reason runs in the direction of wisdom; and what comes later on the road seems wiser than what came before.

• Sign: even scientists who loosely grant reason to apes still call man homo sapiens, the wise ape. Nobody counts acuteness of sensing as wisdom — the dog smells what I cannot and is not wiser; the child who needs no glasses and reads the small print for grandmother is not wiser.
• Method note: “like a good wise man, he often kills many birds with one stone” — Aristotle takes up the natural road not to unfold it completely but for the sake of getting some idea of what wisdom aims at, yet teaches much of value about the road itself. This holds throughout his works: the reason he takes something up in a place is not the only benefit of it.

5. The steps of the road, and sensation in animals (“born having sensation by nature”) #

The steps: sensing → memory → experience → art or science (art and science used interchangeably here), with other things brought out along the way.

• Animals are born having sensation by nature; this distinguishes them from plants. And the animal already seems wiser than the plant: saw a limb off the tree in the backyard and the tree does not know it is being mutilated, even when you graft a limb onto it; saw a leg off the cat and it is very much aware.

6. Memory as an advance (“would you be any wiser today than yesterday?”) #

From sensation memory does not arise in some animals, but does in others.

• The memoryless: the lowly forms attached to the ocean floor (Aristotle did marine biology after leaving Athens at Plato’s death) — they do not move from place to place, their food comes to them in the moving water, they react to being stuck but seem to have only sensation of what touches them.
• The remembering: his cat comes up the stairs and round the corner to where the dish is; Tabitha went after breakfast to her favorite hunting ground, the vacant lot down the street.
• Argument that memory is an advance: without memory you would be no wiser today than yesterday — “in one ear and out the other”; you would be no wiser than one born yesterday, and perhaps inferior, since his eyes and ears may be sharper. (His mother to a salesman: “I wasn’t born yesterday.”) The cat that leapt onto the hot electric stove, singed its paws, and never tried again was wiser afterward; without memory it would do the same dumb thing again.
• Subtle point: those having memory Aristotle calls prudent — the cat is more prudent about the stove. Thomas in his commentary quotes Cicero that memory of the past and foresight of the future are integral parts of prudence. Animals that in addition have hearing can be taught — a lesson for us, and why Plutarch says we have two ears and one mouth.

7. Experience, and what it is not (“a collection of many memories”) #

Men have sensation, memory and hearing too, but begin to differ by experience: the other animals live by images and memories and share only a little in experience, while the race of men lives by art and reasoning.

• Warning about the word: people call a broken leg or any striking sensation remembered “quite an experience.” That is not what Aristotle means. Experience is many memories of the same sort of thing, brought together — a colatio, a bringing together. That bringing together already shows the influence of reason, which is why other animals share little in it.
• Text: “experience comes to be from memory in man; for many memories of the same thing perfect the power of one experience.”
• That the man of experience seems wiser than the man of one memory: one date with one girl versus many dates (parents say the young are “not dating enough” to know what to expect and avoid); one political campaign versus twenty; a soldier in his first battle versus one in ten wars; one time up to bat versus millions.

8. Art or science: knowledge of the universal (“one universal understanding about like things”) #

Art or science comes to men through experience — “for experience makes art, as Polus says, speaking rightly, but inexperience chance” (beginner’s luck); Polus is a character in a dialogue of Plato, Aristotle’s master for twenty years.

• First difference: art begins when one universal understanding about like things comes to be from the many things kept in mind by experience. Experience, like memory and sensing, is knowledge of the singular — of many singulars, but still singulars; art is the beginning of knowing the universal, i.e. what is common to many and stands instead of many (not necessarily everything in the world).
• Aristotle’s medical example (he is a doctor’s son): that this benefited Callias, and Socrates, and so in each case — experience; that it benefits all of such a condition suffering this disease, e.g. the phlegmatic or choleric with brain fever — art.
• His own: you took an aspirin and your headache went away, and yours, and everyone’s; summing what they have in common gives the rule of a primitive medical art, “aspirin relieves headaches.”

9. Why experience may beat art in doing (“all doings and makings are about singulars”) #

Aristotle is not naive about the failure of the man of art.

1. As far as doing goes, experience does not differ from art, and we sometimes see experience succeeding more than those having reason without experience.
2. Reason: experience is knowledge of singulars, art of universals; but all doings and makings are about singulars. The doctor does not cure man except accidentally, because Callias or Socrates is a man. One having reason without experience, knowing the universal but not the singular, will often make a mistake in treatment, for it is the singular that is treated.

• Examples: the standard dose (Demerol) after his wife’s first childbirth made her worse, not more comfortable; the second time she asked for half, and it relieved her — she was a better physician of herself than the nurse. Likewise people know from experience what relieves their own nausea, where another’s remedy makes them worse.
• The freshman psychology professor who worked afternoons in a mental home, honestly admitting there are not enough psychologists to know the patients; patients are classified at a board meeting and given the treatment for the class, which he thought often makes them worse.
• Your depressed child or friend: you know what will perk him up quicker than the psychologist who knows all the subdivisions of mental ailment but not your friend. (For himself: a picture of the grandchildren, some Mozart, or a bottle of wine.)
• The American students in Quebec teaching conversational English: long experience of English, but stumped by a technical question about a grammatical rule; a Frenchman may recite the rules better and still not speak it as well.
• The professor of comparative government who explains prime minister versus president, against the man twenty years in Washington who knows whom to promise and whose arm to twist: legislation does not go through legislature in general but through this legislature with these people, their needs and foibles.

10. The second difference: knowing why (“they know the cause while the others do not”) #

Text: “we think that knowing and understanding belong more to art than experience, and we hold that the artists are wiser than the experienced” — so wisdom is more a matter of knowing than of doing — “and this is because they know the cause while the others do not. The experienced know that it is so, but do not know why; these know why it is so and the cause.” (“We think” is not the editorial we: he means men in general.) Ask anyone who is wiser, the man who knows the way things are or the man who knows why, and all answer: the one who knows why.

• He flags that this is so important a point that Aristotle will devote the next three paragraphs to three kinds of examples or signs of it — next time.
• His tea: from experience he knows that leaving the leaves in beyond four or five minutes (or ten or twelve) makes a bad-tasting cup. The dummy’s answer is “it gets too strong” — but then adding water would fix it, and it does not; the taste is different. A chemist explained that different chemicals are released at different times, the first ones in four or five minutes, others at seven, eight, nine, ten. He knows why; he seems wiser.

11. Student question: is this “reasoned out knowledge”? (“I do translate episteme”) #

A student asks whether the science he means is what he has before called reasoned-out knowledge. Yes — that is how he translates episteme. But Aristotle is not here distinguishing episteme from techne, science from art; he explains that in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics. Here he uses them interchangeably for knowledge of the universal and of why it is so, as against knowledge of singulars and only that it is so.

• Closing aside: a question whether they meet next week; probably a problem, since “father wants to be in there.”

His words #

• hodos — road; the Greek word behind “odometer” and behind the “way” of John’s Gospel; more concrete than “way.”
• via — the Latin for hodos; Christ as man, the way tending to God.
• Road in our knowledge — an order in which one thing is known or considered before another; the likeness to a physical road is the progression in each.
• The natural road in our knowledge — the road made by nature, as against roads made by reason; the road from the senses into reason.
• Nature — here taken as what a thing is; what is first in a thing.
• Experience — not a striking sensation remembered, but many memories of the same sort of thing brought together.
• colatio — the bringing together of many memories that makes experience [ed.: collatio].
• Universal — what is common to many and stands instead of many; not necessarily everything in the world.
• Art or science — used interchangeably here for knowledge of the universal and of the why.
• episteme — his translation: “reasoned out knowledge.”
• techne — art, distinguished from episteme only in Ethics VI, not here.
• Prudent — Aristotle’s own word for animals that have memory.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I, ch. 1: paragraph 2 (animals born having sensation; memory in some and not others; those with hearing can be taught); paragraph 3 (men differ by experience; others live by images; the race of men lives by art and reasoning); paragraph 4, p. 1 of his text (experience from memory; “experience makes art, as Polus says”; art from one universal understanding about like things; Callias and Socrates; the phlegmatic or choleric with brain fever; experience versus art in doing; the doctor does not cure man except accidentally); first complete paragraph of p. 2 (artists wiser, because they know the cause and the why).
• Handout, “Distinction of the Roads in Our Knowledge,” p. 1 (probable source of the read passage, per verified sources).
• Handout, “The Royal Fragment,” p. 16 (probable source of the read passage, per verified sources).

Mentioned

• Gospel of John, “I am the way, the truth, and the life”; Thomas’s explanation of it.
• Gospel of Matthew, ch. 16, Peter’s profession of faith.
• Thomas Aquinas, beginning of the third part of the Summa Theologiae.
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics, quoting Cicero on memory and foresight as parts of prudence.
• Empedocles, on the broadest road into the mind and the difficulty of knowing God.
• Plato, the dialogue in which Polus appears.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI, on the difference of science and art.
• Shakespeare, King Lear (the fool); “love, which graybeards call divine.”
• Plutarch, two ears and one mouth.

His questions #

• Does wisdom come at the beginning, the middle, or the end of our knowledge? — Toward the end; nobody calls a newborn wise.
• Is it by chance that we carry the word “road” over to our knowledge? — No: because of a likeness, the progression and order — one thing known before another.
• What is the first road in our knowledge? — The road from the senses into reason, because it is the natural road and nature is first in a thing.
• Why is the natural road the road from the senses into reason? — Because man’s nature is animal having reason, and what is general and animal in him develops before what is specific.
• Does an animal seem wiser than a plant? — Yes: the animal senses what is done to it, the tree does not know it is being mutilated.
• If you had sensation but no memory, would you be any wiser today than yesterday? — No, and perhaps inferior to one born yesterday with sharper senses.
• Does the man of experience seem wiser than the man of one memory? — Yes — one date, one campaign, one battle, one time at bat, against many.
• What does Aristotle mean by experience? — Many memories of the same sort of thing brought together, not one striking remembered sensation.
• Who is wiser, the man who knows that it is so or the man who knows why? — The man who knows why and the cause; Aristotle will give three kinds of signs of it next time.
• Can the man of experience do better than the man of art or science? — Yes, since all doings are of singulars and experience is knowledge of singulars.