Metaphysics Book III, Part 1: How Many First Causes? Corruptible and Incorruptible Things, the One and Being, and Universal vs. Individual Causes

Orientation #

He recalls “last time,” where the reason Plato governs the ordering of these questions was given (prev. lecture). The class covers the third reading, second group of questions, beginning at the third paragraph of page three of the text before them; the handout read from is “On the Natural Fragments (Natural Fragments of the First Philosophers),” p. 48 (verified; also DHB Vol I, The First Philosophers, p. 161). He breaks before the last two questions, on ability and act.

The class, in order #

1. Why Plato divides the questions (“almost the Greek philosophers proceeded as if natural philosophy was wisdom”) #

Plato was the first to speak at all of an immaterial world besides the material one; if there were only the material world, natural philosophy would be wisdom, and for nearly 200 years the Greeks proceeded as if it were. Plato’s two positions on separated things: mathematicals (answering to the pure mathematical sciences) and universals separated from singulars, the forms (answering to the definitions Socrates sought).

• Thomas’s division of the fourteen questions: first twelve on the separated universal, last two on mathematicals.
• Of the first six: two on universals (is the beginning the letters or the universal word? and if universal, the most or the least universal?), four on separation (is there any cause besides matter? does it exist only in matter, as the parents of a dog do, or apart from matter, like the unmoved mover and Anaxagoras’ greater mind? is it one or many? and, more particularly against Plato, is there, apart from individual men and cats, what-a-man-is and what-a-cat-is existing by itself?).
• Why Plato held the fourth: we do get truth through definitions; definitions are universal and separated from singulars; if truth requires that the way we know be the way things are, the separation must be real. Heraclitus, the teacher of his teacher, had said all things flow — and what does not stand cannot be understood.
• The second six: first four on one and many, the fifth and sixth (eleventh and twelfth overall) on act and ability. So in the first six the two come before the four; in the second six the four before the two.

2. Limited in number or in kind (“Suppose Berquist is the only typewriter in the world”) #

Question: are the beginnings limited in number or in kind, both those in the definition and those in the subject? A student answers: in kind, not in number. He asks whether they could be limited in kind one way and in number another.

• The likeness: Berquist typing endless pages. The intrinsic causes of the words are the letters — unlimited in number (no limit to how many A’s) but limited in kind (26 in the English alphabet). The extrinsic cause — Berquist as chief cause and the typewriter as his instrument — is one in number.
• Application: in Book XII of Wisdom Aristotle will conclude the first maker of the universe is one in number; but the intrinsic causes are limited in kind and perhaps not in number, as with animals and plants.

3. Same causes for corruptible and incorruptible? (“what is cannot cease to be by being cut”) #

Question as Thomas puts it: are the beginnings of corruptible and incorruptible things the same or other? Both horns are difficult:

• If the same causes, why do they have unlike effects, some corruptible and some not?
• If different, the causes of incorruptibles must be incorruptible; and the causes of corruptibles cannot well be corruptible either, since they could then disappear from a universe the Greeks held to go on generating forever. But then the first puzzle returns: why do incorruptible causes here yield incorruptibles, and incorruptible causes there yield corruptibles? “Puzzling, isn’t it?”
• Anaximander: the source of things is that into which they are broken down — “dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return”; so the beginning is found again at the end and persists through change. He hears an echo in the conservation laws of modern physics: something unchangeable underlying the changeable.
• From natural philosophy: change is between opposites (hard/soft, healthy/sick), and under the opposites a third thing, the subject. A strange reality: able to be different things, not at once, and while actually one, able to be another.
• Anaxagoras: “What is cannot cease to be by being cut.” However I slice you up, I cannot cut you into nothing, for you would then be made out of nothing. Even the physicists’ “annihilation” conserves energy; nothing is reduced to nothing in the etymological sense.
• So both first matter and the unmoved mover are in some way incorruptible causes of corruptible things — the unmoved mover causing by motion.

4. Anaxagoras’ greater mind, and how far it reaches (“what kind of mind is that? It’s angelic mind”) #

The argument he attributes to Anaxagoras: like effects have like causes; the order of parts in an automobile, a room, a briefcase, a ballpoint pen comes from the human mind; the order of parts in animals and plants is like it — teeth in the right place, not on top of the head, eyes well placed for walking and driving — so it too comes from a mind, and since the order is greater and more marvelous, a greater mind.

• That the artist would imitate nature confirms the likeness: false teeth are made hard, not of cotton or cardboard, biting teeth in front and chewing in back; a replaced blood vessel is a tube, not a square thing.
• His question to students: has Anaxagoras arrived at the divine mind? Answer: no — a mind separate from matter, able to move matter by locomotion, but not responsible for the existence of matter. That is an angelic mind. Plato’s Demiurge in the Timaeus likewise orders matter without causing its existence.
• A cause of the existence of first matter cannot itself be matter, and cannot cause by transforming matter: that would be creation in the strict sense. Creation “out of nothing” is grammatically affirmative but is to be understood negatively: making something not from matter, making the whole — which takes infinite power, and which our mind cannot understand.
• He thinks Aristotle had some understanding of creation, and would then be the first Greek to see it: in Book XI of Wisdom Aristotle says the human soul exists after the body but denies it existed before it; in Generation of Animals the human soul comes from without, not from the parents — so something begins to exist not by transforming matter. Aristotle also rejects Plato’s transmigration of souls, which Socrates reports from the priests in the Meno and which is still held in India.
• Why this matters for the present question: only such a cause could unite the first causes of corruptibles and incorruptibles into one set of first causes.

5. The missing middle position (“something kind of diabolical in leaving out that middle position”) #

Marx and Engels divide all thinkers in two: those who say matter is the beginning of everything, including mind (Lenin: mind is the highest product of matter), and those who say mind is the beginning of everything (St. John the Evangelist; Hegel speaks his way of it).

• His objection: where do you put Anaxagoras, or Plato’s Timaeus? They set mind above matter but do not make it the cause of matter’s existence — a dualism of two beginnings independent in existence, though one can act on the other.
• Why the omission is “diabolical”: human reason cannot pass from the almost inevitable first position (matter is the beginning of all) to the truth without first seeing that mind is immaterial and independent of matter for its existence. If mind is only an organization of matter, one never even raises the question whether mind could cause the existence of matter. Leaving out the middle takes out the bridge.

6. Are one and being the substance of things? (“whether the one and being… are not something other, but the substance of what is”) #

He calls this, with the text, “the most difficult of all and having the most questions.” One and being are both subject of wisdom (Book IV); the Pythagoreans and Platonists, influenced by mathematics, begin from the one, the beginning of number.

• The analysis: two contains two ones, three contains three ones; one measures and composes every number. But what is this one? One point? one line? one circle? one man? Not any of these — if it were one point you could not speak of three lines. A student answers: “just one.” So the Pythagoreans and Platonists say it is one period.
• Why one seems bound up with substance: things resist division. Divide me at the guillotine and that is the end of me; saw the table in half and it is no table; “divide and conquer”; the newly elected pope as the unity of the Church, so that to adhere to the unity is to adhere to the being of the Church; “a house divided cannot stand” (Lincoln, borrowing the words of Christ, when accused of casting out devils by Beelzebub). Hence: one is the beginning of number, and number is the key to all things.
• Obscurely the same question is asked of being: is there something that is just being? “I am who am” — you want to add something, and you may not. Hilary, in the autobiographical opening of his book on the Trinity, was struck by this on reading the Old Testament; Thomas in the Treatise on the Trinity follows Augustine most, and after him quotes Hilary a great deal.
• The contrary party: unity is not one period but one something. Empedocles: love unites the four matters, hate separates them — love is the unity of things; when we studied love and friendship the first effect of love was to unite; and in Shakespeare’s poem reason is puzzled at love because it makes two one. Others make one matter the unity: Thales’ water, Anaximenes’ air, Heraclitus’ fire. Shakespeare’s Henry IV on Englishmen “of one substance bred” — we are all flesh and blood, made of the same metal, therefore should be friends. Red, rosé and white wine from the same grapes; green, black (Chinese: red) and oolong tea from the same leaves, differing by fermentation — that sameness is their unity. Heraclitus: all things are exchanged for fire and fire for all things; Heisenberg said substitute “energy” and you may repeat it word for word.
• His verdict: there is some truth in what Empedocles and even the materialists say about the unity of these things, and some truth in the Platonic side as well — but one must distinguish being said of all things from the Being who said “I am who am.” “The supreme confusion is to confuse the being said of all things with the cause who said, ‘I am who am.’” Hegel makes this confusion.

7. Student question: is this what is meant by the analogy of being? (“equivocal by reason”) #

No — analogy first concerns the word being, which has many meanings; analogous means equivocal by reason, i.e. having many meanings with a connection among them. (He prefers “equivocal by reason” to “analogous” or “proportional” as more precise.) In Book IV, showing that wisdom is of being as being, Aristotle must show that one knowledge can cover all that is called being.

• Purely equivocal by chance: “bat,” the baseball bat and the flying rodent out of the belfry. I can understand either without the other; there is no reason to study them in one science.
• Equivocal by reason: “political” is said of the city (polis), the government, the law, revolution. The government is not the city but rules it; the law is neither, but the government rules the city by laws; revolution (Politics V) is neither, but is a change of government — and you could not understand change of governments in one science and governments in another.

8. The one of number and the one convertible with being (“very hard for our mind to separate”) #

Everything that is, is one: things are either simple or composed; the composed is not unless it is put together, which is a kind of unity; and if the composed is one, the simple is one. But is that one the one that is the beginning of number? The Platonists could not distinguish them and so made everything numbers. Aristotle says they are not the same: the one that is the beginning of number is limited to the genus of quantity, tied to the continuous and infinite divisibility. The one of number is the one we know first — hence the perennial difficulty.

• Parallel difficulty: separating substance from body. In Book IV of Natural Hearing, on place, Aristotle reports the common Greek opinion that whatever is must be somewhere, else it does not exist — making being in place a property of what is, when it is really a property of natural bodies. We always think with images, and what cannot be imagined is hard to think about.
• He thinks Aristotle had arrived at the idea that God is being itself; it is made more explicit in the great Arab philosophers, starting with Alfarabi, and Thomas takes it over and develops it.

9. Are the beginnings universal or individual? (“what you need is the reality of the individual… the extent of the universal”) #

Last question of the group: are the beginnings universals, as the Platonists said — man himself, dog himself — or individual things, this father, this cat?

• The difficulty is the difficulty of a universal cause: you want a causality extending to many, even to infinitely many, and only the universal seems to extend that far (odd number and even number are each said of infinitely many).
• Against universals being real: Marx mocks Hegel — from orange, apple, pear, peach he gets the idea of fruit, and must then deduce apple, orange, banana back out of fruit in general. Is fruit only an abstraction of the mind? Yet the universal fruit does somehow extend to all of them.
• Real causes are individuals: this pregnant woman bears this boy, the cat bears this kitten, the carpenter makes not table in general but this table he raps with his fingers. But an individual’s causality does not reach far: mine reaches my children and some to my grandchildren, not the whole race — “maybe Adam’s does.”
• So the thing sought is an individual that is a universal cause. The general commanding the army is not the universal “soldier,” said of all; MacArthur is an individual, called general because his causality extends to everybody. The sun is cited as the nearest example: an individual body whose causality reaches all plants and all life on earth.
• Why the mind stumbles: when we express the universality of a cause we borrow a universal said of many — “God is the cause of all things,” “the chief of staff’s commands extend to all soldiers” — but the universality of a cause is a different kind from universality said of many.
• Ties back to the first question of the group: if there is one cause in number it must extend to everything; yet what extends to everything is the universal, which does not seem real.
• Aside on poetry, as a different combining of the two: the great poet represents the universal singularized and the singular universalized — a commentator on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King notes that at his fall the chorus does not cry “O Oedipus” but “O you generations of men”; Romeo and Juliet are said to be young lovers, not just one pair. That too is mysterious, but what we need here is harder.

He breaks here, before the last two questions of this group, on ability and act.

His words #

• wisdom — his name for Aristotle’s Metaphysics (“the twelfth book of wisdom”).
• Natural Hearing — [ed.: Physics].
• beginnings — [ed.: principles; archai].
• ability — [ed.: potency], paired with act.
• one period — the one that is just one and nothing more, as the Pythagoreans and Platonists take the beginning of number.
• greater mind — Anaxagoras’ separate ordering mind; he identifies it as angelic, not divine.
• equivocal by chance / equivocal by reason — “bat” vs. “political”; the latter is what others call analogous or proportional.
• annihilate — in “the etymological sense,” reduced to nothing; he denies the physicists mean it.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics (Wisdom) III, the second group of the fourteen questions — read from the handout, p. 3, third paragraph onward (handout “On the Natural Fragments,” p. 48; DHB Vol I, The First Philosophers, p. 161).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics XII (first maker one in number); XI (soul exists after but not before the body); IV (being as being; equivocal by reason); Generation of Animals (soul from without); Physics IV, on place; Politics V (revolution).
• Plato, Timaeus (the Demiurge); Meno (the priests and transmigration).
• Anaximander, Anaxagoras (“what is cannot cease to be by being cut”), Empedocles, Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, the Pythagoreans; Heisenberg.
• Hilary, On the Trinity, opening; Thomas, Treatise on the Trinity; Augustine; Alfarabi.
• Marx and Engels, the twofold division of thinkers (inferred: The German Ideology); Lenin; Hegel.
• Scripture: “I am who am”; “dust thou art”; the house divided; Beelzebub; St. John the Evangelist; Lincoln.
• Shakespeare, Henry IV; the poem where reason is puzzled at love; Romeo and Juliet. Sophocles, Oedipus the King.

His questions #

• Are the beginnings limited in number or in kind? — In kind as to intrinsic causes (the 26 letters), in number as to the first extrinsic maker (Berquist and his typewriter).
• Are the causes of corruptible and incorruptible things the same or other? — Left as a knot: something incorruptible (matter, the unmoved mover) underlies corruptibles, but why incorruptible causes yield corruptible effects remains puzzling.
• Can you cut something up into nothing? — No: you would have to be made out of nothing.
• Has Anaxagoras arrived at the divine mind? — No — at an angelic mind: separate from matter, moving it, but not causing its existence.
• Does the Marx–Engels division of thinkers exhaust them? — No: it omits the middle position of Anaxagoras and Plato’s Timaeus, and thereby removes the bridge to the truth.
• What is the one that is the beginning of number — one point, one line, one man? — Just one, nothing more, say the Pythagoreans and Platonists.
• Is the one that is the beginning of number the one convertible with being? — No, says Aristotle: the one of number is limited to the genus of quantity, though it is the one we know first.
• Is that distinction what is meant by the analogy of being? — No; analogy means the word “being” is equivocal by reason, as “political” is of city, government, law, revolution.
• Are the beginnings universal or individual? — The individuals are the real causes, but their causality does not extend far; what is needed is an individual that is a universal cause, and how to combine the two is left as the philosophers’ problem.