Metaphysics I, Proemium: Wisdom Is About the First Causes; Philosophy Begins in Wonder

Orientation #

He begins by recalling last time’s six-part description of the wise man and the reasoning from the first three marks to wisdom as about “what is said of all” (prev. lecture). This class completes the second half of that reasoning and begins the second part of the proem. The next class continues into wisdom as most liberal and most divine.

The class, in order #

1. From “most able to teach” to the first causes (“why did I hit you”) #

Point: the fourth mark yields wisdom’s being about causes, and about first causes.

• The man who knows the cause is more able to teach; so the wise man, most able to teach, most of all knows causes.
• But a cause can have a cause: why did I hit you? — because I am angry; why am I angry? — the cause of the cause, and so on back to a first cause.
• Aside: Aristotle only assumes here that there are first causes; he shows it in Book II, within each kind of cause. What is shown here is that the wise man goes as far as one can go in knowing causes.
• Contemporary version of the same regress: why are the terrorists blowing us up? — because they hate us; why do they hate us?

2. The fifth mark: knowledge most desirable for its own sake (“most knowable in themselves”) #

• He who desires knowing for its own sake desires what is most knowable — most knowable in themselves, not to us; and these are the first things and the causes, for other things are known through them and not conversely.
• The cause clarifies and explains the effect; the effect is fully knowable only in the light of its cause; nothing is more enlightening than the cause, and the cause of the cause more than the cause.
• So the man who knows the first cause knows what enlightens everything else — fitting with Scripture’s calling the first cause light, lux vera (Thomas’s after-communion prayer): to see God is to see the true light.

3. The sixth mark: the architectonic and the end (“the end is the cause of all the other causes”) #

• End or purpose is one of the four causes, and is said to be the cause of the other causes being causes: wood is the matter because the carpenter shaped it; the form is in the wood from the carpenter; but the carpenter acted for the sake of something to write or eat on. Sitting is why the carpenter made the chair as he did.
• To direct others is always to direct toward an end; hence (as in the Nicomachean Ethics) because health is the end of medicine, the doctor commands the pharmacist.
• So the most architectonic man aims at the end to which every other end is subordinated — the end of the whole universe, the best in all nature. God: “I am the Alpha and the Omega” — not only first maker and first mover but end and goal.
• Conclusion of the first part: wisdom looks at the first beginnings and causes, one of which is the good, “that for the sake of which.”

4. The two senses of “common to all” (“strong in what is common to all”) #

Point: from marks 1-3, wisdom is about what is said of all; from 4-6, about the first causes, common to all in another sense — and the two must not be confused.

• Ethics parallel: goods of body, soul, exterior goods are all “human goods” (common by being said of them); happiness, the end of man, is common in the other way, since all are for its sake.
• Army: soldier is said of everyone in the army; the general is common to all by his power and command.
• Heraclitus (on the board): “Those who speak with understanding must be strong in what is common to all.” Aristotle’s fourteen books try to become strong in what is common to all in both senses — and part of becoming strong is not confusing them.
• Error 1: Hegel, in his logic, identifies the being said of all things with the “I am who am” who is the cause of all — hence pantheism in modern thought. Thomas devotes a whole chapter of the Summa Contra Gentiles (bk. I, ch. 26 — “my favorite book”) to showing God is not the formaliter esse omnium.
• Error 2: Plato’s forms — taking what is said of many and making it a cause of all, as if apart from individual men there were man himself in which we partake. The same confusion later in Hegel.
• Shakespeare plays on the same ambiguity twice in Troilus and Cressida: Cressida kissed by the general (Agamemnon) but not kissed in general.
• Boundary case he presses: human good vs. the end of man. Water and clothing are my goods; knowing and loving God is not said of everything in life — though I may drink my water in a way that leads me there.
• Closing chain: wisdom is the highest perfection of reason; the perfection of reason is understanding (we reason in order to understand, the ultimate end); so the wise man most of all understands, and therefore by Heraclitus is most of all strong in what is common to all — in either sense.

5. Plan of the second part: four things about the kind of knowledge wisdom is (“wisdom is looking knowledge”) #

Each leads into the next: (1) wisdom is looking, not practical knowledge — practical is for doing or making, looking is for seeing and understanding; (2) therefore it is liberal or free; (3) it is not a human possession; (4) it is best and most honorable because most divine.

• Digression on “liberal”: the liberal arts go back to the Greeks. Pythagoras introduced the four mathematical arts — geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, music — later the quadrivium (“four ways”); with the sophists and Plato come grammar, rhetoric, logic — later the trivium. Called arts because they make something, though a mental thing (constructions in geometry, syllogisms and definitions in logic). These seven were only the beginning of liberal education; wisdom was its end, and so is most liberal, not for the sake of anything further.
• On “not a human possession”: he warns not to misread it. Thomas takes possession strictly — a book or pen I own I can pick up any time; a library book with a due date and a penalty is not my possession. Man has bodily needs and needs of external goods; even a wealthy man must sleep, eat, see the doctor, exercise. So he cannot pursue this knowledge whenever he wants; it is a more divine thing.

6. First sign that wisdom is looking: philosophy began in wonder (“no other beginning of philosophy than wonder”) #

• Source: Plato’s Theaetetus. The young geometer Theaetetus is introduced to Socrates by his teacher Theodorus as “a little bit of a philosopher”; when Theaetetus breaks out in wonder Socrates says Theodorus guessed rightly about his nature — and says it more strongly than the paraphrase: there is no other beginning of philosophy than wonder.
• The argument is from the desire that gave rise to philosophy: had it begun in hunger it would have produced hunting, fishing, farming; in thirst, well-digging or brewing; in the desire for health, medicine; in the desire for wealth, some other practical art. Having begun in wonder, it is pursued for understanding alone.
• Democritus: “I would rather discover one cause than be master of the kingdom of the Persians” — the greatest kingdom the Greeks knew: wealth, worship as a god, a thousand chefs who lost their heads if dinner was bad, a harem; all the pleasures, wealth, power, honor in abundance. How much more to discover the first cause of all things.
• Aristotle’s text as read: men began to wonder at strange things close at hand, then at greater things — the changes of the moon, sun and stars — finally at the origin of the universe. The man in doubt thinks himself ignorant; so if they philosophized to escape ignorance, they sought knowledge for understanding, not for any use.
• Aside: “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.”

7. The philomythos is in some way a philosopher (“the myth is put together from wonders”) #

• Philo- = lover; mythos first means something like our fairy tales. Hearing about Little Red Riding Hood you wonder what will happen at her grandmother’s house — not in order to make or do anything. Later mythos broadens to story, and in the Poetics takes the precise sense of plot. In any of these senses the comparison holds: we do not love stories to help us make or do something. People read a novel or watch a movie past their bedtime and lose the sleep their job requires, learning nothing useful for tomorrow.
• Order of dependence: it is easier to be a philomythos than a philosophos; one can be the first without the second, but not the reverse. The wonder of the lover of stories is a stepping stone to the wonder of the philosopher.
• Homer is estimated at least 150 years before the first philosopher, and by arousing wonder prepared the way. Plato in the Republic says that among all the poets Homer arouses this wonder; Plato is said to have been something of a poet himself before Socrates led him higher. Aristotle’s love of Homer appears in the Poetics; he worked on Homer for Alexander, who kept a copy by his bedside on campaign. He has never known a great philosopher — Plato, Aristotle, even Charles De Koninck — who was not also something of a philomythos, with an appreciation of Homer and Sophocles.
• Albert the Great commenting here: poesia dat modum admirandi — poetry gives us the way of wondering, teaches us how to wonder.
• Aside: “one of those dumb professors that makes a living giving lectures about stories.”

8. Why fiction is a stepping stone: it is about the universal (“poetry is more philosophic than history”) #

• From the Poetics: is fiction about the universal or the singular? Great fiction is more about the universal; poetry is more philosophic than history, since history is about the singular as such.
• Romeo and Juliet: nominally a historical pair in 14th-century Verona, but what you see is young lovers — the universal.
• Sophocles (greatest Greek poet after Homer; the Greeks said Homer is Sophocles writing epic and vice versa): at Oedipus’s downfall the chorus does not say “Oh, Oedipus!” but “Oh, you generations of men!” — something universal about man and the human condition.
• Shakespeare’s sonnets (about 150): the theories about which woman or man he was involved with are beside the point; the sonnets say something universal — the thought or feeling one might have in such circumstances. Likewise the history plays alter ages and facts (Hotspur and Prince Hal, actually of different ages, made rivals for glory) to bring out something universal; do not judge them as historical documents.
• Why it matters: philosophy wonders about the universal, history and biography (Churchill, Lincoln) about the singular; since our knowledge starts from sense, which knows the singular, it is hard to pass from one to the other — and fiction stands in between, “the universal singularized, or the singular universalized.”
• Contrast at the bottom: supermarket magazines about movie actresses and Princess Diana, and soap operas with their endless dilemmas — idle curiosity, nothing universal, far from the wonder of the philosopher.
• Job: man’s life on earth is a warfare — which is what you get from the Iliad (not an account of the Trojan War as D-Day photographs in Life magazine). Hence his standing question to students: “How are you doing in the great struggle of life?”
• Personal: reading through all the plays of Shakespeare, “you’ve seen the whole life in some general way.”

9. Second sign: philosophy began when necessities and amusements were provided (“then such knowledge began to be sought”) #

• Aristotle’s text: when almost all necessary things and those of recreation existed, then such knowledge began to be sought. A hungry, thirsty or shivering man seeks practical knowledge; after the day’s work he wants amusement — music, fiction. Only afterwards does philosophizing begin. Note the direction of the sign: having those things does not make men philosophize, but before having them they do not begin — which shows philosophy is not something practical.
• His family as a case: grandfather Berquist came from Sweden at fifteen and was the blacksmith in Parkers Prairie, Minnesota — exhausting work, little money, no time to philosophize. His father, in a town without a high school, worked his way through high school in Alexandria, sleeping in the factory because he could not afford a room; he never went to college, but worked up to manager and then his own company. Once necessities were provided — and a phonograph for Mozart and a complete Shakespeare for recreation — the three sons all became philosophers. “So now what do you do? Now you start to pursue knowledge for its own sake. Or else become a playboy.”
• His joke about how to introduce someone to philosophy: a room with good food and wine; a further door opened, after moderation and appreciation, onto a room of Mozart; a further door onto beautiful bound Shakespeare, Homer and Sophocles; and beyond that the room where philosophy begins — each step further from the necessities of life. Some stop at dinner, some at the music, some go on.

His words #

• “looking knowledge” — knowledge for the sake of seeing and understanding, as against practical knowledge for doing or making [ed.: speculative/theoretical].
• “said of all” vs. “cause of all” — the two senses of common/universal [ed.: universale in praedicando vs. in causando].
• formaliter esse omnium — the “to be” said of all things; what SCG I.26 denies God is.
• lux vera — the true light, from Thomas’s after-communion prayer.
• “most knowable” — in themselves, not to us: the first things and the causes.
• “architectonic” — the ruling science, commanding others because it knows the end.
• quadrivium / trivium — “four ways”; the mathematical and the verbal liberal arts.
• “possession” (of wisdom) — strictly, what one can take up and use at will, like an owned book, not a library book.
• philomythos — lover of myth or story; mythos = fairy-tale, then story, then (in the Poetics) plot.
• poesia dat modum admirandi — Albert the Great: poetry gives the way of wondering.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I, proem, second half — the fourth, fifth and sixth marks of wisdom (his pages 3-4), and the opening of the third reading on wonder and on the necessities of life.
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics, on the proem (his explanation of “possession”).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics II (first causes within each genus of cause); Nicomachean Ethics (medicine and the pharmacist; the division of human goods); Poetics (plot; fiction, universal and singular; love of Homer).
• Plato, Theaetetus (Theodorus, Theaetetus, wonder); Republic (Homer arousing wonder).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, ch. 26.
• Heraclitus, fragment on what is common to all; Democritus, “one cause rather than the kingdom of the Persians.”
• Albert the Great, commentary on the Metaphysics.
• Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; the sonnets; Romeo and Juliet; the history plays. Homer, Iliad and Odyssey. Sophocles, Oedipus. Job (“man’s life on earth is a warfare”). Hegel’s Logic. Charles De Koninck.

His questions #

• Why did I hit you — and why am I angry? Because you look for the cause of the cause, and so on to the first cause; the man who knows it is most able to teach.
• What most of all makes us know? Knowing why a thing is as it is — its causes; so the lover of knowledge for its own sake seeks the first causes.
• In what two senses is something “common to all”? By being said of all (soldier, being) and by being a cause of all (the general, God); these must not be identified.
• What is the highest or greatest perfection of reason — thinking, reasoning, or understanding? Understanding; we reason in order to understand, so the wise man most of all understands.
• How does Aristotle show wisdom is not practical knowledge? From the desire that gave rise to it: wonder, not hunger, thirst, health or wealth — hence knowledge sought for understanding alone.
• Would a man become a philosopher if he were not a philomythos first? No; one can be a lover of stories without being a philosopher, but not the reverse — the one wonder is a stepping stone to the other.
• Is fiction about the universal or the singular? Great fiction is more about the universal — poetry is more philosophic than history.
• If a man is hungry, thirsty, shivering, will he philosophize? No; only when necessities and some recreation are provided does such knowledge begin to be sought — though then one may become a playboy instead.