Metaphysics II, Reading 5: Custom, Certitude, and Matching the Way of Proceeding to the Subject

Orientation #

He opens on the fifth reading of Book Two of wisdom (Metaphysics II), handout “Aristotle, Book Two of Wisdom, Reading Five”; the previous class had closed by introducing custom as against argument (prev. lecture). He says the differences among the ways of proceeding will be determined more fully when they reach the sixth book, and announces that after the break they turn to the third book.

The class, in order #

1. Why custom is stronger than argument (“Which is stronger in our thinking… custom or argument?”) #

He puts the question; everyone, here and at the college, answers custom. Three reasons, in order:

1. Head start — custom acts on the mind from birth, “and some say when you’re still in the womb”; argument does not reach reason for years.
2. It makes a habit — habit is called a second nature, so what you are accustomed to think seems naturally true, and how you think seems the natural way of thinking.
3. It becomes a principle — when a man first uses reason he starts from something customary; asked a question in class, people begin from what they have customarily heard. Having accepted it as natural, they proceed from it and judge other things by it. Hence the danger: if what you are accustomed to think is false, or the way you are accustomed to think unfitted to this matter, it harms the good of the mind. He notes Thomas on the force of custom in the Summa Contra Gentiles: custom can make something false seem true, and something true that needs proof seem obvious and in need of none. But here Aristotle treats custom’s influence not on what we assent to so much as on how we think, and how we expect the professor or author to proceed.

2. The text on listening (“Listening happens in agreement with custom”) #

He reads: we expect things said in the way we are accustomed to; whatever is outside this does not seem similar but harder to know and strange through unfamiliarity, “for the familiar is well known or seems to be well known.” The strength of familiarity is shown by the laws, in which mythical and childish things prevail against our knowledge of them — travelling, you meet strange laws and the citizens are surprised you do not do it that way. Examples: the woman writing to a popular religious magazine at the change from Latin to the vernacular, who had defended to her Protestant neighbours that Latin was essential to the Mass and found the ground cut from under her — though the Mass may have been said in Greek or Aramaic before Latin. His children home from Latin class: “the greatest accomplishment of the Romans — they spoke Latin,” Latin seeming an unnatural, artificial way of speaking. His French teacher on an idiom: “Now, don’t fight it, just accept it.”

3. Three customary demands: mathematics, examples, poets (“if one does not speak mathematically”) #

Aristotle’s exemplification; Thomas adds that this can come from custom (Aristotle’s emphasis) or from individual inclination — e.g. having a mathematical imagination.

• Mathematically. The Pythagoreans, who made even the virtues numbers (“I’ve got your number” — probably Pythagorean); Plato influenced by them in the Timaeus; Book One of wisdom, “for the moderns everything seems to be mathematical” — a relative term. In modern times: Descartes (called the father of modern philosophy), Spinoza (Ethica More Geometrico Demonstrata), Leibniz, one of the fathers of calculus — the 17th–18th-century rationalists as against the English empiricists (Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume). He wrote his doctoral thesis comparing Descartes and Aristotle on method. Natural scientists too: Lord Kelvin in his brother Richard’s high-school physics book — “No matter what the matter is, if it isn’t mathematical, it is not scientific.”
• By examples. “A little more weak-minded” — those who must go back to the senses; the historical or rhetorician’s way of proceeding.
• Poets. Probably meaning the poets taken as authority. Thomas: in philosophy the argument from authority is weakest, in theology strongest; the medievals, accustomed to theology, looked for something analogous to the Bible in every field — Aristotle in logic, Galen in medicine. Albert the Great meets the objection “Aristotle wrote no book on this” and dismisses it (maybe he never got around to it). A living case: dispute with the Orthodox over the filioque, where the words of a council may not be added to. He notes the romantics as a different case — Novalis: the more poetic a thing is, the more true. In Plato’s dialogues, when someone wants a poet brought in, Socrates says let us look at ourselves, since we are not sure what the poet means anyway. Aside: what is appropriate in one place is not appropriate in another.

4. Precision/certitude and stinginess (“less what, certitude, less precision”) #

The Greek word here may be rendered precision or certitude. As you go from mathematics toward the other sciences you get less of it. From the Nicomachean Ethics: it is equally ridiculous to let a geometer persuade you like a rhetorician and to demand of a rhetorician a geometer’s demonstration — two extremes. So men sometimes demand more, sometimes accept less, than the matter admits; one must seek the certitude proper to the matter — revolutions and governments do not admit the precision of triangles. Aristotle’s second cause: others are pained by precision, either through inability to follow the reasoning (weakness of mind) or through its stinginess — “for precision has something of the sort, so it seems illiberal to some in reasoning, just as in business transactions.”

• Young bachelor professors dining out: most tossed their money in; one old professor insisted on paying only what his own meal cost — stinginess.
• Shakespeare’s sonnet on “niggard truth,” i.e. stingy truth.
• Praising a dinner at someone’s house rather than saying what you really thought: the truth would make you persona non grata; accuracy can look stingy.
• Himself as a college freshman telling his English professor that the first sentence of his own book, “Words spoken are written in our thoughts,” is strictly speaking false.
• A student’s exchange: he caught an accounting professor’s miscalculation worth two points; “Well, do you do your accounting that way?”

5. One must be educated how each should be received (“Hence, one ought to be educated”) #

Point: the two preceding paragraphs described how men in fact proceed — by custom or individual inclination — but hint that this is not how to decide, since you and I would then proceed differently in the same matter. Aristotle: it is absurd to seek at the same time episteme (his rendering: “reasoned out knowledge/understanding”) and the way of reasoned out knowledge, and neither is easy to get. So do not try to learn geometry and how one should learn geometry at once; learn the how first, then learn geometry that way. Averroes, followed by Thomas: for this reason logic is to be learned before the other parts of philosophy, since it teaches the common way of going forward in reasoned-out knowledge. But each reasoned-out knowledge has besides its own way, to be learned at the beginning — as Thomas does in the first question of the Summa Theologiae (whether theology is argumentative, in what way, whether it uses metaphor and scripture), and Boethius at the beginning of the De Trinitate. Related distinction, from the beginning of De Anima I: one knowledge is better than another either by what you know or by how you know it; the criterion of what is more important, but both matter. Here the point is that you ought to know how you will know something before trying to know it.

6. Etymologies: eudaimonia / felicitas / happiness, and tropos / modus / way (“the synonym… suddenly has a different etymology”) #

A digression on the drift of etymology across Greek, Latin, English.

• The end of man: Greek eudaimonia, Latin felicitas, English happiness. “Happiness” is from hap, luck (Latin bona fortuna, Greek eutuchia); felicitas is from the word for fruit, suggesting happiness is the natural fruit of virtuous behaviour; eudaimonia means having a good daimon — and daimon means nothing bad — suggesting dependence on a higher being. Aristotle in the Poetics uses eutuchia of good luck in tragedy. Maybe there is truth in all three; but the emphasis of the Nicomachean Ethics is on what you can choose to do, since luck and a higher power are not in our control.
• Here the word is tropos; Thomas’s translation has modus; English “way.” Tropos goes back to the Greek for to turn — Washington Irving’s Mountjoy, a man with “a poetic turn of mind,” who wants everything poetic (again Novalis). The turn of mind of historian, geometer and theologian are not the same; going to another science you must turn your mind a little differently. Modus, as Thomas has it from Augustine, is determined by measure. English “way” is nearly path or road, though “the way of doing something” is more abstract — cf. modus operandi. Strictly, modus procedendi is “the way of going forward”; logic treats the common one.

7. The principle: the way must fit the matter (“in those things not having what matter”) #

Aristotle’s brief last paragraph: mathematical precision is not to be demanded everywhere, but in things not having matter; hence it is not the way of natural science, for probably all nature has matter. Thus one should first consider what nature is, and in this way it becomes clear what natural science is about and whether it belongs to one science or more to consider the causes and beginnings. Thomas: this is exactly what Aristotle does in the second book of Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics], determining what nature is and then finding the way of proceeding that fits that matter. The principle stated: the tropos/modus/way of proceeding in any reasoned-out knowledge is to be determined not by custom or individual inclination but by the matter; therefore you must know what a knowledge is about before you can find the way that fits it.

8. First likeness: the mechanical arts and their tools (“must fit the what matter”) #

From Nicomachean Ethics I, where Aristotle states the same principle by comparison with the mechanical (practical, servile) arts, which take an exterior matter — wood, cloth, metal, glass — and make something of it. His brother-in-law does carpentry with hammer and saw and never uses needle and thread; his wife makes dresses with scissors, needle and thread and never takes up hammer and saw. A glassblower has yet another set, and a hammer is little use on glass. In his father’s factory, in the forge shop they heat metal and bend it; in the wood shop they do not heat wood and bend it — not suitable to the matter. So both the tools and the way of using them must fit the matter; likewise in knowledge which is simply for understanding what and why. Extended to the fine arts: painter, musician, sculptor have different tools — Michelangelo at the Pietà and at the ceiling. And precision too follows the matter: the presidents’ heads in South Dakota are blasted out and cannot have the precision of a line on paper; sawing wood “you take part of the board with you,” whereas scissors cut much more precisely.

9. Second likeness: the use of the senses (“The way of knowing has to fit what you’re trying to know”) #

Mozart bringing his ear up to the paintings in the Uffizi, or Botticelli putting earplugs in and staring at Mozart’s music — nonsense. So too the wine: colour matters a little, the champagne bubbles even sound, but primarily smell and taste. The point: which way of knowing you use is decided neither by what you are accustomed to use nor by which sense you are best at or inclined to. The wine critic Parker tasting and spitting all day, or a tea taster, cannot use those senses at an evening concert. His brother Mark’s artist friends in Detroit, absorbed in shades of blue, are not thereby more sensitive to Mozart’s music. A girl in an earlier class on the proem of Metaphysics I, where Aristotle praises the eyes: she, a lover of music, would rather be blind than deaf — inclination, but not a criterion. Aside: Fantasia is criticized for trying to be visual about music; it is the wrong way to be introduced to classical music, which has to come through the ears, and one may be moved by the images rather than the piece.

10. Third likeness: the pleasure proper to each (“seek the pleasure that is appropriate to each”) #

From the Poetics: one should not expect a happy outcome for the characters in a tragic plot — that is to demand in tragedy the pleasure proper to comedy. In food and drink: Americans raised on soda pop seek soda-pop sweetness in wine; beginners prefer sweet to dry (calling dry “sour, bitter”) and white before red, though with experience red gives more to taste. Filet mignon with ice cream on top — regardless of which pleasure is greater, the pleasures are different. The St. Paul teen advice column: the girl whose boyfriend wants her to wear candy-flavoured lipstick; “buy him a lollipop” — he seeks in a kiss the pleasure proper to candy. Ketchup on everything; vegetarian recipes imitating meat; imitation bacon. In fiction: Fielding’s preface to Joseph Andrews, warning the reader that this form of fiction is one he may not be accustomed to and that he may expect a pleasure other than the author intends. C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, on a form of fiction more popular and longer-lived than the novel but unfamiliar to us — written partly to educate us how to approach it; and A Preface to Paradise Lost, on not reading Milton as one reads lyric poetry. Back to food as the parallel: what you like depends on family and nationality, and on the way you approach it — he first met Chinese food in Quebec, ordering American while his fellow students ordered Chinese, until he began ordering with them. Root beer is slurped; dry red wine drunk that way would be intolerable — you sniff it and let it roll to the sides of the mouth. His own case with Homer: he could not get into his brother Mark’s paperback, but with the Lattimore Iliad he resolved to read a book a night, and could not put it down — “all of a sudden I had started to read it the way it should be read.” Others he knows can read only detective and mystery stories; regardless of whether Sherlock Holmes is more enjoyable, you cannot read Holmes and Macbeth the same way. His friend Jim, frustrated teaching Macbeth in high school, finally told the class it was a mystery story — giving up the attempt to overcome the barrier. Many forms of fiction: epic, drama, tragedy and comedy, and at least four types of play in Shakespeare. Readers of Homer’s Achilles are dumbfounded by Troilus and Cressida — but that is black satire, not epic, and Shakespeare treats Achilles in the way proper to black satire, Homer in the way proper to epic’s grandeur. Where we are neither accustomed nor inclined, we need to be educated — a Lewis to teach us, as one must be taught how to drink wine differently from Coke.

11. Closing (“when you get to the sixth book of wisdom”) #

In Book Six Aristotle begins to distinguish the ways of proceeding of natural philosophy, mathematics and wisdom; the classic treatment is Thomas’s commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate, where Boethius takes off from Aristotle and expands. Those differences will be brought in then. A break, then the third book.

His words #

• “custom or argument” — the two things that shape how we think; custom is stronger for the three reasons above.
• “reasoned out knowledge / reasoned out understanding” — his rendering of episteme [ed.: science].
• “the way of going forward” — his strict English for modus procedendi; Greek tropos, Latin modus, usual English “way.”
• “precision (or certitude)” — the one Greek word of the fourth paragraph, translatable either way.
• “stinginess” / “illiberal” — Aristotle’s second reason why some are pained by precision; Shakespeare’s “niggard truth.”
• “turn of mind” — the sense he draws out of tropos, from to turn.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: the Physics], book two, where nature is determined.
• “mechanical arts,” “servile arts” — the arts taking an exterior matter, his first likeness.
• “the pleasure appropriate to each” — the principle from the Poetics governing the third likeness.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics II, Reading Five (handout), paragraphs on listening according to custom, the three customary demands, precision and stinginess, being educated how each is received, and the closing rule about matter — with Aquinas’s commentary (lect. 5, inferred).

Mentioned

• Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (force of custom); Summa Theologiae I, q. 1; commentary on Boethius, De Trinitate
• Boethius, De Trinitate, opening
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I; De Anima I; Poetics; Physics II (“Natural Hearing”); Metaphysics I (proem; “for the moderns everything seems mathematical”)
• Averroes, commentary (logic to be learned first)
• Plato, Timaeus and the dialogues generally; Albert the Great’s logical works
• Spinoza, Ethica More Geometrico Demonstrata; Descartes; Leibniz; Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume; Lord Kelvin
• Shakespeare, sonnet with “niggard truth”; Macbeth, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida
• Homer, Iliad (Lattimore translation); Fielding, Joseph Andrews (preface) and Tom Jones; C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, A Preface to Paradise Lost; Washington Irving, Mountjoy; Novalis

His questions #

• Which is stronger in our thinking, for the most part, custom or argument? — Custom; nobody ever answers argument.
• Why is custom so strong? — It gets a head start from birth, it makes a habit that seems second nature, and it becomes the principle from which one reasons.
• Why is Aristotle’s first example (speaking mathematically) significantly chosen? — Because the Pythagoreans and Platonists in his day, and the rationalists and mathematical physicists in ours, will accept nothing else.
• In what sense does Aristotle’s third example, the poets, work? — Probably poets taken as authority, as Aristotle was for logic and the Bible for theology in the Middle Ages.
• Why can precision seem illiberal? — Because exactness looks stingy, as in business transactions — insisting on your own two points or your own share of the bill.
• Can one learn a science and the way of that science at the same time? — No; it is absurd to seek both at once, and neither is easy to get; learn the way first, and logic first of all for the common way.
• By what, then, is the way of proceeding to be determined? — By the matter of that knowledge, not by custom or individual inclination — hence one must first know what the subject is.
• How do the mechanical arts show this? — Hammer and saw for wood, needle and thread for cloth; tools and their use must fit the matter, and so must the precision demanded.
• Which sense should one use to know a thing? — The one that fits the matter — ears for Mozart, eyes for Botticelli, taste and smell for wine — not the one you are used to or best at.
• What happens when we meet a form of fiction we are not accustomed to? — We approach it wrongly and miss the pleasure proper to it, and so need to be educated — by Fielding’s preface, by C. S. Lewis, or by reading it a book a night until it opens.