Is Truth Easy or Difficult? Aristotle's Metaphysics Book Two, First Reading: The Bat's Eye and Our Debt to Predecessors

Orientation #

He is continuing from the end of the previous session, where he had set out two questions in order (“So you see the order of those two”): how man stands toward knowing truth, and (later) how the road of a science is determined. He points forward to Book III’s account of how discovery is made, and to Book IX on act and potency. He ends with “we’re gonna stop around four thirty.” The neighbouring classes treat the Presocratic fragments before, and the continuation of Book II after.

The class, in order #

1. Why Aristotle does not ask whether man can know truth (“Is knowing truth easy or difficult for man?”) #

Point: Aristotle goes straight to how man stands toward truth, not whether he can reach it.

• A modern philosopher would begin: can man know truth? Aristotle assumes he can and asks only whether it is easy or difficult.
• Student: “How about — does truth even exist?” He accepts it as a further question of the same kind.
• Thomas: that truth exists is per se notum; the same for man’s ability to know truth.
• Arguments the class assembles: (a) you would not ask the question if man could not know the truth — you could not even use the answer; (b) the Cartesian doubter cannot doubt that he is doubting; (c) “truth does not exist” — if false, truth exists; if true, then some truth exists; either way self-contradictory; (d) the man who says statements do not exist cannot say so without making a statement.
• Parallel from Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics] II: the objection that Aristotle should first prove nature exists; he answers it is obvious, and the objector speaks as if he did not know what he does know.
• Aristotle: it would be laughable to try to prove what you know by what you don’t know — for besides what you know there is only what you don’t.
• Classroom picture: knock on every professor’s door down the hall and ask if truth is knowable — “difficult, if not impossible.” At the last door, marked Aristotle: in one way difficult, in another way easy. He notes Aristotle says difficult first.
• Aside: Cardinal Ratzinger on the present crisis of doubting truth itself; is there any explanation beyond moral perversity?

2. That a man can think he does not know what he does know (“he can think he knows, but he doesn’t know”) #

Point: Aristotle argues from the commoner mistake to its reverse.

1. It is more known to us that a man can think he knows what he does not know — Socrates went about examining such men.
2. A mistake that can run one way between two hard-to-tell-apart things can run the other way: a man mistaken for a woman (Michael Jackson), Miller’s for Budweiser, an orange for a lemon.
3. Therefore a man can also think he does not know what he does know.

• Two mistakes, two classes of men: the first is the mistake of most men; the second is the mistake of thinkers, fleeing the first into the opposite extreme. Aristotle’s counsel: avoid both, and use what you really do know to investigate what you don’t.
• Later, his own version: in Omaha he began slicing what he took for an orange and found it was a grapefruit (which his medicine forbids). If Berquist can take a grapefruit for an orange, another can take an orange for a grapefruit.

3. How the obvious gets denied: arguments one cannot answer (“sometimes the part is bigger than the whole”) #

Point: besides perversity of will, a man denies the obvious because of a sophistical argument he cannot solve.

• He sometimes gives students a sophistical argument that the part is bigger than the whole; they are deceived by a bad argument.
• Scientists who think change requires that something both be and not be; mathematical physicists who say higher mathematics is impossible without contradictions.
• The paradox of becoming (he cites a French article, paradoxe du devenir, in Le Vautier [ASR uncertain]): what is not a sphere becomes a sphere. Is the last instant of not-being-a-sphere the first instant of being one? If the same, it both is and is not; if different, there is a time between, and the same question returns, and that middle time would swallow the first. Hegel took this as proof that all change involves contradiction.
• The same difficulty arose in the medieval theology of the Eucharist: if the last instant of bread and wine were the first instant of the body and blood, you have heresy. Thomas goes back to Natural Hearing VI, as we must against Hegel: a very subtle explanation — there is no last instant in which it is not a sphere, but there is a first instant in which it is. Likewise in dying: no last instant of being alive, but a first instant of being dead.
• Why deniers of the principle of contradiction refute themselves: they deny it because something contradicts it — so they deny it because they accept it.
• Parallel in ethics: a man who argues that one should live by emotion rather than reason is already letting reason decide, and so admitting one should live by reason.
• Student point: this is why the axiom of contradiction cannot be made a hypothesis tested by consequences — testing means seeing whether consequences are contradicted, so you must assume the axiom to test it. Absurd.
• He notes Aristotle discusses such deniers in the fourth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IV].

4. Perversity of will in moral matters (“fair is foul, and foul is fair”) #

Point: in practical matters the defect is more often in the heart than in an unanswerable argument.

• Chesterton: pornography is not something to reason about but to stomp on with your foot — an obvious moral evil, unlike matters for reasoning.
• The judicial contradiction: kicking a pregnant woman and killing the child is homicide, yet abortion is allowed.
• Macbeth: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair; hover through the fog and filthy air” — the fog is the defect on the side of the knowing powers, the filthy air the defect of the heart. He adds Antony and Cleopatra speaks explicitly of filthiness of heart blinding the eye of the soul.
• He also grants pride can distort even the first kind of mistake: I think I know more than I do because I think I am better than I am.

5. First way truth is easy: everyone hits something (“no one is able to grasp it worthily, nor do all fail”) #

Point: Aristotle’s sign that truth is in a way easy.

• He notes the difference of emphasis: for easy Aristotle shows the ways it is easy (that is what is in doubt); for difficult he is little concerned to show it, but to give the cause of the difficulty.
• No one attains truth worthily; no one wholly misses it; everyone says something about the world. Frying hamburgers all day you will still see that a hamburger shrinks when cooked; what you see frying hamburgers and what he sees grooming horses need not be the same. You cannot avoid truth entirely.

6. Second way: many hands (“something great comes to be from all gathered together”) #

Point: even a large amount of truth is easy through the efforts of many.

• His mother’s Saturday proverb: “Many hands make light work.” He alone cannot lift the table; all together, easily.
• A hundred geometers each finding one theorem give a hundred theorems; this is how arts and sciences grew.
• Cookbooks: every family has a grandmother or aunt with one dish she does very well — his wife’s aunt and her cookies — and gathering all such recipes gives a fine time-tested book.

7. Third way: the door (“who misses the door?”) #

Point: a part of the truth is so easy that everyone sees it — the beginning, the introduction.

• A Greek proverb: walking the city you see every door, but not what is behind it.
• The whole is more than the part: a man who denies it, given part of his salary, part of the car he bought, part of the meal he ordered, will rant — he paid for more than a part.
• He orders the three: the truth everyone sees is the cornerstone; to it each man adds the little bit his occupation lets him see; bringing these together builds up an art or science.
• This adds a step to the proemium’s sequence (sensing, memory, experience, art and science): now sense, memory, experience, natural understanding (the doorway everyone sees), then reasoned-out knowledge, art and science, and last wisdom.

8. The difficulty, briefly (“to have the whole and be unable to have the part”) #

Point: a sign of difficulty is having the whole while unable to have the part.

• True of a composed whole — you can know water without knowing hydrogen and oxygen — and of a universal whole — you can know number without knowing the kinds of number, or virtue without the kinds of virtue.

9. The cause of the difficulty: in us or in the thing (“perhaps the cause of this is not in things but in us”) #

Point: a very important text, though very short — a subtle distinction, in two ways.

• Thomas’s commentary’s example: failing to start a fire either because the flame is too little or because the wood is too moist.
• Parallel in loving: if a man is hard to love, the defect is in him (“he’s not very lovable”); if God or wisdom is hard to love, the defect is in us. It is easier to love the private good than the common good, though the common good is better and so more lovable — so the defect is in me; easier as a child to love candy than wisdom — again in me. But difficulty in loving cancer or rock and roll is in the thing.
• Parallel in understanding persons: we understand best those neither more nor less reasonable than ourselves. The saint is harder to understand than the playboy though more reasonable — difficulty in us. (Trading temporal for eternal is far more reasonable than giving a twenty for every one-dollar bill — and we do something infinitely more stupid.) Hitler is hard to understand because there is nothing there: the makers of the German film told Charlie Rose you get in and find emptiness; even Mussolini found him hard to understand; John Paul II called such things an insane ideology. There the difficulty is in him.
• Academic version: the historian who devoted his life to Restoration England only because a college professor’s course was interesting; the colleague who learned Arabic for Arabic history and could not say what motivated him; men who devote their mental lives to Heidegger. Hard to understand — and such men often cannot understand themselves, which is why they are miserable.
• Applied to the sciences: geometry is proportioned to us; natural philosophy is difficult because its things are hardly actual (matter and motion — Anaxagoras tried to put actually in matter what is only an ability); wisdom is difficult because its things are most actual and most illuminating, and the weakness is ours.
• The eye: in a dark room things are hard to see — the cause is in the thing (lack of light); in bright sunlight I am blinded though things are more visible — the cause is in me.
• The decisive argument: the cause illuminates the effect, so the cause is brighter than the effect, and the first cause is the most illuminating thing there is; yet the first cause is hardest for us to know. Therefore the chief cause of difficulty is in us, not in things — though in a science like natural philosophy it is more in the thing.
• Aristotle’s comparison: as the eyes of bats are toward the light of day, so is the understanding of our soul toward what are by nature clearest of all. He notes Plato’s cave is similar but weaker — eyes adjust with time — whereas the bat’s difficulty seems innate.
• From Book IX: ability is knowable only through act, so act is more knowable than ability; God is pure act, hence most knowable — but not to us.
• Aside: Berkeley, in the Principles of Human Knowledge [he says “Human Understanding”], raises whether the difficulty is in us or in things and dismisses it, saying we insist upon wrong principles. “This is extremely profound what Aristotle’s saying.”
• Why the emphasis matters for the appetite: if you saw only the difficulty you would despair of knowing; if only the ease, you would not be careful enough — and the more difficult, the more careful the mind must be. Augustine on the Trinity (he cannot repeat it exactly): nowhere is knowledge acquired with more difficulty, nowhere more fruitful, nowhere more dangerous to make a mistake.

10. Gratitude to predecessors, even the superficial (“it is just to be thankful”) #

Point: man is brought toward truth by other men, both those he agrees with and those he refutes.

• Aristotle: thanks are due not only to those whose positions one shares but to those who spoke more superficially, for they exercised our habit.
• Augustine: heretics are necessary for theology to develop — hence the many titles contra, contra; and the development of sacramental theology at the councils and at Trent came of heresies.

11. Why the example is taken from music (“if there had been no Phrynis, there would have been no Timotheus”) #

Point: he asks why Aristotle chooses music, and answers: music is named from the muses, the most seemingly spontaneous and unteachable art — so if even a great musician owes debts, much more everyone else.

• Mozart: if melodies do not come to you as piddling comes to the cow, you should not be a musician. Aristotle in the book on the poetic art: you cannot teach a man to make good metaphors — a natural gift; and Mozart’s gift showed earlier than Shakespeare’s. Wagner: Mozart above all masters in all the arts and all the ages.
• Aristotle’s case: Timotheus, the great musician (favourite of Alexander; Dryden’s St. Cecilia ode shows him rousing Alexander to battle and then to love) — without him we should not have much of our music; but without the lesser Phrynis there would have been no Timotheus.
• Mozart’s case: Haydn told Mozart’s father, as an honest man before God, that his son was the greatest composer known to him; Mozart dedicated to him the six “Haydn” quartets, saying Haydn taught him how to write the quartet. Alfred Einstein’s book on Mozart traces the influence of Haydn’s so-called Russian quartets, which gave equal play to all instruments. Mozart’s first piano concertos are arrangements after Johann Christian Bach, the Catholic son of Johann Sebastian; and Mozart discovered J. S. Bach’s manuscripts with pages all round him. Mozart himself: “there is not a master in the art of music before me whose works I have not studied.”
• “So it has been the same with those speaking about the truth: we have received certain positions from some, while others were the causes of those coming to be.” Aristotle spent twenty years in Plato’s school (age 17 to 37, until Plato died) and got a tremendous amount from him — and from the Greek fragments too, both where they held some truth and where he refuted them. No man’s an island to himself.
• He closes: “Pretty impressive reading. It’s short, but an awful lot in there to think about.”

His words #

• Natural Hearing — [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics]; he uses it throughout (“second book of Natural Hearing”, “sixth book”).
• per se notum — self-evident; used of the existence of truth and of man’s ability to know truth.
• the fourth book of wisdom — [ed.: Metaphysics IV]; “wisdom” is his name for the Metaphysics.
• ability — [ed.: potency]; “ability is knowable only through act.”
• natural understanding — the grasp of the doorway-truths everyone sees, inserted between experience and reasoned-out knowledge.
• the door — the beginning or introduction of truth, from the Greek proverb “who misses the door?”
• the eye of our soul — the understanding, in the bat comparison.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics II, first reading — read phrase by phrase: “no one is able to grasp it worthily, nor do all fail to hit it”; “although one man adds little or nothing… something great comes to be from all gathered together”; “who misses the door?”; “to have the whole and be unable to have the part”; “perhaps the cause of this is not in things but in us”; “as the eyes of bats are towards the light of day”; “it is just to be thankful”; “if there had been no Phrynis there would have been no Timotheus.”
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics, on this passage — the fire example.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics II (nature exists is obvious) and VI (no last instant); Metaphysics IV (contradiction), IX (act and ability), III (how discovery is made), proemium of I.
• Augustine: on doubting truth; heretics necessary; on the Trinity.
• Plato, Republic, the cave.
• Shakespeare, Macbeth; Antony and Cleopatra.
• Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge.
• Dryden, ode for St. Cecilia’s day.
• Alfred Einstein on Mozart; Chesterton on pornography; Ratzinger on the crisis about truth; “Le Vautier”, paradoxe du devenir (French; title/author uncertain in recording).

His questions #

• Should there be a prior question, “Can man know truth?” No — that truth exists and that man knows some truth is per se notum; you could not even use the answer otherwise.
• Is knowing truth easy or difficult for man? In one way difficult, in another easy — and Aristotle names the difficulty first.
• Why does Aristotle reason from “a man can think he knows what he doesn’t” to “a man can think he doesn’t know what he does”? Because a mistake between two easily-confused things can run in either direction.
• Is the last instant in which it is not a sphere the first instant in which it is? No — there is no last instant of not being, but there is a first instant of being.
• Why do men deny the principle of contradiction? Because something seems to contradict it — so they deny it because they accept it.
• Is the difficulty of loving the common good more than the private good in me or in the thing? In me, since the common good is better and therefore more lovable.
• Is the difficulty of understanding the saint in him or in us? and of understanding Hitler? The saint: in us, for he is more reasonable; Hitler: in him, for there is no reason there.
• Is the cause of the difficulty of knowing truth chiefly in things or in us? Chiefly in us — the first cause is the most illuminating and yet the hardest for us; though in natural philosophy the cause is more in the things, which are hardly actual.
• Why does Aristotle take his example from music? Because music seems the most spontaneous, unteachable gift — so if even Timotheus depended on Phrynis, all the more everyone else.