Wisdom's Questions About Substance and the Plan of the Third Reading: Is There a Cause Besides Matter?

Orientation #

He opens by recalling the two questions treated last time: which causes the wise man should look for, and whether wisdom considers only the causes of substances or also the common statements that are the beginnings of all reasoned-out knowledge (prev. lecture). The class finishes the second reading’s questions and turns to the third reading. A handout, “The Royal Fragment” (Anaxagoras), belongs with this class; the transcript refers to “the great fragment of Anaxagoras” (verified source; the reading itself is not transcribed here).

The class, in order #

1. Thinking you don’t know what you do know (“a man can think he doesn’t know what he does know”) #

Why the common axioms need defending: people object against them with arguments most cannot answer, and so come to think they do not know what they do know.

• Aristotle’s proof of its possibility (Physics II, inferred): the reverse mistake is common — thinking you know what you don’t know, which Socrates spent his life exposing. Where a mistake can be made in one direction, it can be made in the other: if someone can take a man for a woman, another can take a woman for a man; if one can mistake Budweiser for Miller’s, another can mistake Miller’s for Budweiser. The root is that we sometimes can’t tell known from unknown apart.
• His teacher Kasurik, asked how to argue with a man who denies the existence of things outside him: “kick him in the ass.” Not a joke: the senses are closer to surrounding things than reason is, and touch is the most certain sense (doubting Thomas). If the senses don’t convince you, reason will not — as you cannot be sure of my mother on my report if I am not sure myself.
• Berkeley, who denied there is anything material, still opens the door of his study before trying to leave.

2. Whether only sensible substances exist (“whatever is must be somewhere”) #

The first of the questions about substance, which he takes out of order from page two, fourth paragraph.

• The common opinion of Aristotle’s predecessors (Physics IV, on place): whatever is must be somewhere; if it is nowhere, it does not exist. Ask anyone on Main Street and you get the same. But to be in a place, to be contained, is a property of actual bodies — so this amounts to saying that only bodies exist.
• Why the opinion is so strong: we never think without imagining, and imagination is tied to quantity. To think of what is not a body we must imagine and then negate — no length, width, depth.
• Three places in natural philosophy (wisdom for the Greeks for 200 years) where evidence of something immaterial appears:
  1. Anaxagoras’ great fragment: the order in plants and animals is like the order in this room, in an automobile, in a house, whose cause we know to be a human mind; so he guessed at a greater mind. (Sir James Jeans, the British astrophysicist: God is a great mathematician.) Anaxagoras adds a reason: this greater mind could not rule the world if it were mixed up with it.
  2. The soul (On the Soul III): reason, which knows universals, cannot be a body. His example: I know the square perfectly by its definition — equilateral and right-angled quadrilateral. But the definition is not continuous: the continuous has parts meeting at a common boundary, and genus and difference do not meet at a common boundary. The square known is continuous; so the uncontinuous way of knowing cannot come from the thing, and must come from reason, which is therefore not a body. Hence the soul has an operation not in the body, and its existence is not tied to the body.
  3. Motion (Physics VII–VIII): motion depends on a mover, moved movers on an unmoved mover, and no body moves without being moved — so the end of the eight books gives a mover that is not a body.
• Hence perhaps a good reason for calling wisdom metaphysics, after the books of natural philosophy: without them you stay stuck with imagination and “if it isn’t somewhere it doesn’t exist.”

3. One kind of separate substance or many (“is there one or many kinds”) #

Anaxagoras spoke only of the one greater mind; Plato of the forms and the mathematicals; Aristotle, counting them, does not want to go far from the distinct motions visible in the heavens, and speaks only of probability. Thomas in the Summa Contra Gentiles, with Dionysius, gives good reasons for many more than Aristotle thought. He notes these two are questions about things, not about what wisdom is about; Aristotle sticks them in here because answers to them are presupposed by the questions that follow, and later in Book III he will pull them out as a separate part.

4. One wisdom or two (“how could there be one knowledge”) #

Second paragraph: if wisdom is about substance, is there one knowledge of all substances or many?

• Plato’s picture: the soul looks out at changing sensible things; to know immaterial things it must be turned around. You do not turn 180° at once — mathematics is the 90° turn, about things not as immaterial as the forms but still somewhat separated. Proclus: mathematics purificat oculum mentis, purifies the eye of the mind. Then one turns to look at the immaterial.
• Christians speak similarly: St Paul carried into the third heaven, whether in the body or not he did not know; the dark night of the soul; turned away from the sensible world and facing another direction.
• The metaphor fits Aristotle’s word at the end of Book II, tropos — translated modus procedendi, English “way,” but the Greek carries the idea of turning. Washington Irving’s Mountjoy: a man with a very poetic turn of mind; we still say someone has a different turn of mind.
• The objection this generates: if one must turn 180° away from matter, how can there be one knowledge of both? Would the knowledge of animals (zoology) and the knowledge of angels belong to one science? At first one would say no.
• But then: if there are two knowledges, which is wisdom? Either there are two wisdoms, which seems strange, or one of them is not wisdom — and then wisdom is not a knowledge of all things, the wise man is not a know-it-all, and neither knowledge reaches the first causes of all things. He stops here: “You see a problem? — that’s what you want to see at this point. I didn’t get the answer, but a problem, a question.”

5. The Protagoras behind the last questions (“are these five names the same thing”) #

Where Aristotle’s questions about contrariety come from.

• In Plato’s Protagoras the criterion of the argument is whether the man contradicts himself; a more hidden criterion is the man’s appetite — Protagoras admits that had he always fought with his opponent’s weapons he would never have become famous through Greece.
• Socrates’ list of virtues is our four plus piety: practical wisdom (foresight), justice, courage, moderation, piety. He asks whether the five names name one thing or different things like ear, nose, eyes; Protagoras says different.
• Socrates’ argument that wisdom and moderation are the same: the contrary of wisdom (practical) is folly; the drunkard, opposed to moderation, acts foolishly — the word “fond” originally meant foolish, and a man fond of a girl acts like a fool. A thing has only one contrary; so folly is contrary to both, and the two virtues are one. (Compare Heraclitus: moderation is the greatest virtue, and wisdom is to speak the truth and act in accord with nature.)
• Student: didn’t Plato see he was using the word equivocally or analogously? — His reply: dialectical reasoning reasons from probable opinions, even to contradictory conclusions; a probable opinion always has some part of the truth, not the whole. In ethics we learn the moral virtues must partake of reason and of practical wisdom, and the opposed vices partake of folly without being folly. Folly is the pure contrary of wisdom; drunkenness only partakes of it.
• That emotions can partake of reason is why Mozart’s representation of the emotions convinces. Austin Ostley (ASR uncertain), “Towards an Evaluation of Music,” in The Thomist, compared Mozart’s period and the Baroque with the Romantics, who would not admit that reason should rule the emotions.
• Aristotle’s careful question: should reason rule the emotions as a master rules a slave or as a father rules a son? He concludes, as a father rules a son — the master rules for his own good, the father for the son’s good. Children under right discipline are emotionally happier than those allowed to run wild.
• Why Socrates never gets to courage and wisdom (Protagoras wants out): virtue is in the mean, but not equidistant from the extremes. Shakespeare: “they are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing… therefore it is no mean happiness to be constituted in the mean” — “mean” also meaning little. Moderation stands between puritanism and intemperance but is closer to the puritan side, so it looks strongly opposed to folly; courage stands between cowardice and foolhardiness but is closer to the foolhardy, so the courageous man almost seems foolish. Coriolanus is brave and the men think him foolhardy, though they are a little cowardly compared with him. So Socrates could not argue the same way about courage — which itself shows something.
• Aristotle’s last question in the reading: not only what contrariety is, but whether one is contrary to one — “kind of like the property of a property.”
• All change seems to be between contraries (Heraclitus, Plato’s Phaedo, Physics I), which is why contrariety takes on great importance. But these last two questions are more particular and not much developed in the dialectic, unlike the major question of material and immaterial substances.

6. The order of the questions (“you have to know what wisdom is about”) #

Except for the two about immaterial substances, this first group has been about what wisdom is about. Thomas’ reason for their coming first: you must know what wisdom is about before you can know the way of proceeding in it, and know the way of proceeding before you can proceed well to the questions about the things themselves — which is the third reading, about causes.

7. Why the third reading is arranged by Plato (“all the questions are divided according to the opinion of Plato”) #

About fourteen questions, all divided according to Plato’s opinion; everyone else’s opinion comes in as opposed to Plato’s. Very subtle Aristotle does here.

• Why Plato: he is the only philosopher before Aristotle who talks much about immaterial things (with a partial exception, Hank Seger [unclear in recording]); he is asked to have said, to Anaxagoras’ question why it is better to be born than not, that one may contemplate the universe. In a way Plato is the first metaphysician, the first to see wisdom as coming after natural philosophy.
• Why natural philosophy was wisdom for 200 years: sensible things are natural and artificial; in this room almost everything but faces and hands is artificial, in the woods almost nothing is. But artificial things come from natural material, made by hands man has by nature — maker and matter are natural. So the first causes of natural things are the first causes of all things.
• Against the relativist charge that they called it best because they wanted it: they wanted it most because it seemed to be about the beginning of all things. When immaterial things were recognized, they wanted that knowledge more — first philosophy, which nonetheless must be learned after natural philosophy.
• Plato’s two opinions about immaterial things: the separated forms answering to the definitions Socrates sought, and the mathematicals (unique to Plato). The reason Thomas often gives: the way we know must be the way things are if we truly know — if we truly know numbers and figures apart from the sensible, they must be apart; if definition knows the universal apart from the singular, universal forms must exist by themselves. (“Idea” is a transliteration, not a translation.)
• Division: twelve questions on the forms, two on the mathematicals; of the twelve, the first six are more closely tied, the second six more particular. Of the first six, the first two concern universals, the next four the separated.

8. Is there a cause besides matter? (“whether there is some cause as such besides matter”) #

He jumps to the third question first, calling it one Aristotle says most of all should be sought and considered.

• The poets say Mother Earth; Shakespeare addresses her: “common mother thou, whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast teems and feeds all” — teems meaning gives birth. Thales: water; Anaximenes: air. Later thinkers (Empedocles, Anaxagoras, to some extent Pythagoras) add another kind of cause but keep matter as a cause.
• So the question is not whether matter is a cause — no one disagrees — but whether it is the only cause. Modern instance: Marxism is officially dialectical materialism; Lenin: mind is the highest product of matter.

9. Is that other cause only in matter? (“is it only in matter”) #

The next question in order, once some cause besides matter is granted.

• Cases where another kind of cause exists only in matter: your parents are a cause of you and are not your matter, but they are material things; the front teeth have a different shape than the back teeth, so shape is a cause besides matter, but exists only in matter. Likewise those who thought the soul moves the body but that nothing moves unless itself in motion, so made the soul out of very mobile atoms (Democritus): a moved mover, another kind of cause, but a body.
• Cases on the other side: Anaxagoras’ greater mind exists without matter; Plato’s separated form of man himself involves no matter, though you all partake of it.
• Perfect order, can’t be other way: one must first conclude that there is some cause besides matter before asking whether any such cause exists apart from matter.
• Then the next question, like the earlier one about substance: is that cause one, as with Anaxagoras’ mind, or many, as with Plato’s forms? These are questions because the great thinkers gave different answers.
• Then a more particular fourth question about the forms: whether there is something besides “the whole together” [ed.: synolon] — you are a whole together, involving what a man is and also your own private matter; is there something besides that, man himself, or not?

10. “Ground,” and understanding (“the English word for cause is ground”) #

Why the questions rightly start from matter: our mind naturally starts there, and the English word shows it.

• Digression on Shakespeare: he asks which play title best describes modern philosophy — Much Ado About Nothing or Comedy of Errors; the latter is interesting if you care how errors are made. In it, as in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare puns on “understand”: the servant beaten about the head could hardly stand under the blows.
• He maintains “understanding” is better than the Greek word for knowing and better than Latin intelligere (which Thomas interprets as intus legere, to read within, others as to read between), because in English etymology and meaning correspond closely. To understand a word is to know what is said to stand under it — its meaning; Thomas speaks of impositio nominis, a name placed upon a thing, as if the thing stood under the name. We say “the underlying cause,” as if the cause supported the effect; to understand an effect is to know the cause standing under it. Same etymology in substance: reason knows substance, the senses know only accidents — which is why the modern thinks he does not know substance, and treats his wife as a hypothesis.
• In the same act of the Comedy of Errors the wife says her husband is “the ground of my defeatures” — the cause of her declining beauty. Shakespeare does not make the connection with the pun on “understand,” but one can put two and two together.
• Which cause is “ground” most like? Material — the one you start from, most like Mother Earth; earth and ground are much the same. So both the poets’ Mother Earth and our word “ground” show that matter is the cause we first know and recognize; that it is a cause is not in doubt, and so not a question for the wise man.
• Closing exchange: “The Lord is my rock” — a rock is something you can stand on, you build your house on rock. A student asks whether the Aramaic word for truth is rooted in the same word as rock; he answers he is not aware of that. Left open.

His words #

• Natural Hearing — his rendering of Aristotle’s Physics, “the so-called Physics.”
• reasoned-out knowledge — [ed.: science / scientia], demonstrated knowledge from beginnings.
• separated substances — what the Greek philosophers call immaterial substances; “what we Christians call angels.”
• metaphysics (meta ta physika) — wisdom so named after the books of natural philosophy, since it is through those books that one reaches the immaterial.
• tropos — Aristotle’s word at the end of Book II for the way of proceeding; Latin modus procedendi; the Greek carries the idea of turning.
• purificat oculum mentis — Proclus on mathematics: it purifies the eye of the mind.
• fond — originally foolish.
• the golden mean — “not the mean that is diminishing,” as in Shakespeare’s pun on “no mean happiness.”
• the whole together — [ed.: synolon], the form together with this matter, as you are a man and also your own matter.
• intelligere — Thomas’ intus legere, to read within; others, to read between.
• impositio nominis — the placing of a name upon a thing.
• ground — the English word for cause; most like the material cause.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics III, second reading, p. 2 §2 and §4 (questions on substance, on sensible vs. other substances) — and its last paragraph (contrariety; whether one is contrary to one).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics III, third reading, opening paragraphs (third and fourth questions, bottom of the page): whether there is a cause besides matter; whether it is only in matter; whether one or many; whether something besides the whole together.
• Handout, “The Royal Fragment” (Anaxagoras) — verified source; referred to as “the great fragment of Anaxagoras.”

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics II (one can think he doesn’t know what he does know); IV (place: whatever is must be somewhere); I (change between contraries); VII–VIII (movers, the unmoved mover).
• Aristotle, On the Soul I (opinions on the soul as mover); III (immateriality of reason).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics X (contrariety).
• Plato, Protagoras; Republic (turning the soul, inferred); Phaedo.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (number of separate substances).
• Sir James Jeans; Proclus; Dionysius; Heraclitus; Thales; Anaximenes; Empedocles; Democritus; Pythagoras; Berkeley; Lenin.
• Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Coriolanus, and the lines on the mean and on “common mother”; Washington Irving, Mountjoy; Austin Ostley (uncertain), “Towards an Evaluation of Music,” The Thomist.

His questions #

• Can a man think he does not know what he does know? Yes — shown from the reverse and commoner mistake of thinking one knows what one doesn’t.
• Do only sensible substances, that is bodies, exist? No: natural philosophy gives three approaches to an immaterial substance — Anaxagoras’ mind, the immateriality of our reason, the unmoved mover.
• Is there one kind of separate substance or many? Anaxagoras says one, Plato many; Aristotle stays near the heavenly motions and speaks of probability; Thomas gives good reasons for very many.
• Would zoology and the knowledge of angels belong to one knowledge? At first you would say no — and then the problem follows.
• If there are two knowledges, which is wisdom? Left open as the problem to be seen: either two wisdoms, or wisdom is not about all things.
• Should reason rule the emotions as a master rules a slave or as a father rules a son? As a father rules a son — for the good of the ruled.
• Is moderation as opposed to folly as courage is? No: moderation lies nearer the defect side, courage nearer foolhardiness, so the courageous man almost looks foolish (Coriolanus).
• Why are the third reading’s questions divided by Plato’s opinion? Because Plato is the only earlier philosopher who says much about immaterial things — in a way the first metaphysician; all others enter as opposed to him.
• Is matter a cause? Not really in question — the poets’ Mother Earth and the word “ground” show it is the cause first recognized; the question is whether there is any cause besides it, and whether that cause exists apart from matter.
• Is the Aramaic word for truth rooted in the word for rock? Left open — “I’m not aware of that.”