Substance as the First Meaning of Being, the Philosopher, and Why Wisdom Must Consider the Axioms

Orientation #

He is reading the fourth reading of Book IV and finishes it, skipping the part showing being and one are convertible, then begins on the fifth reading, which treats the axioms. He states what he will ask next time: why considering and defending the axioms belongs to the wise man rather than to someone else. The previous class ended by raising equivocity and the analogy of being. Class read from the handout “The Matter and Order of Wisdom,” p. 11 (verified source).

The class, in order #

1. One member keeps the common name, the other gets a new one (“four fingers and a thumb”) #

Point: a way of speaking he says will recur “again and again” through philosophy.

• Division where one member gets a new name because it adds something noteworthy: five fingers vs. four fingers and a thumb (the thumb “sticks out like a sore thumb,” is opposable); man vs. the animals — man adds reason, so the beasts keep “animal.”
• Applied to equivocal words: an equivocal word is simply a word with many meanings. Divide it into equivocal by chance and equivocal by reason. The one equivocal by chance keeps the common name (or is called “purely equivocal”); the one equivocal by reason adds something — an order among the meanings, a fundamental meaning to which the others refer — and gets the new name “analogous” or “proportional.”
• Caution: don’t lean on “proportional,” since not every analogous word is analogous by proportion (ratios); this is not that form.
• Aside: it would be equivocal to contradict yourself — Aristotle’s “not equivocally” means not purely equivocal.

2. Being is said towards one nature (“towards something one into some one nature”) #

Point: Aristotle’s fourth-paragraph thesis, with his two comparisons.

• Healthy: said of what preserves health, what makes it, what is a sign of it, what receives it (body receives, complexion signifies, diet produces).
• Medical: said of one having the medical art, of one naturally fit for it, of the work of the art. Aside: Aristotle’s father was the court physician at Macedon — which is why Aristotle was chosen to teach Alexander — hence his medical examples; in the Ethics, the man who hears the philosopher and doesn’t act is like a man who takes medical advice and ignores it (his friend whose lung collapsed and refused to stop smoking: a “useless hearer”).
• His own added example: political, whose fundamental meaning is the polis, the city.
• So beings are called beings as substances, as undergoings of substance, as ways to substance, corruptions, lacks, qualities, productive of substance — always in reference to substance.

3. Thomas’s four meanings of being, in order (“four meanings in direct order”) #

Following Thomas’s comment, the plethora can be sorted into four, each further from the first:

1. Substance — a man, a dog, a tree.
2. Accident in the sense of the categories (not accident opposed to property): exists in another as subject, cannot exist apart — the health of a man, the shape of a dog.
3. The coming to be of a substance or accident — becoming healthy, coming to know: it exists in some way, but not as much as knowing does.
4. The lack of one of these — blindness, death: “almost like what they call being of reason”; blindness is not being, yet we say a man has blindness.

• Digression on nothing: “nothing comes from nothing” (King Lear; the Sound of Music song). But does “nothing” mean something? Then you’ve stretched “something” as far as it will go. Plato’s dialogues worried that to tell a falsehood is to say what is not — yet we do say “you said nothing.” Joke: philosophy is the only subject you can get paid for talking about nothing.
• Conclusion: the fundamental meaning is substance, as the polis is for “political”; so “being” is equivocal by reason, and one reasoned-out knowledge covers it, as one knowledge covers all healthy things. It is clear that to look at being as being belongs to one reasoned-out knowledge — the same one that aims at the first cause. Hence the seventh and eighth books of wisdom are devoted to substance.

4. Substance is the subject, God the end (“God is not the subject of the science”) #

• The chief subject of this science is substance; the chief subject of revealed theology is God. Aristotle calls wisdom “theology” in the sixth book, but God is its end or goal, not its subject; revealed theology has more right to the name, since there God is both subject and end.
• The college course “natural theology” belongs more properly to metaphysics, as its culmination, than to natural philosophy.
• It makes no sense for a Catholic philosopher not to order his study to theology. His old teacher Kasurik (ASR uncertain) cited a passage of Albert the Great: if you are not studying everything for the sake of knowing God, you have a perverse attitude toward knowledge — barring necessity (the plumber who must do something else). Modern philosophy seems almost aimed at showing it is impossible to know or speak of God.

5. Why the wise man is called “the philosopher” (“chiefly about what is first”) #

• Text: knowledge is chiefly about what is first, on which others depend and from which they are named; if that is substance for being, the philosopher must have the beginnings and causes of substance.
• Question: the political philosopher, the geometer, the natural philosopher, the logician are all philosophers — why is he “the philosopher”? Because he pursues the highest part, so the name is most appropriately predicated of him.
• Aside on the word: etymologically philosophy is love of wisdom, but its meaning is the knowledge one pursues because of that love — “like Grant’s, who’s buried in Grant’s tomb.”

6. The second way of keeping the common name (“because that’s all it has, nothing more”) #

Point: the other reason a member keeps the common name — not because it alone has it, but because it has it most of all, the other getting a new name through defect.

• Understanding (intellectus) divided into understanding and reason (ratio): the angel keeps “understanding” because everything it knows is under that aspect; man gets the new name because we understand only first principles that way and must reason out the rest — reason is an overshadowed, very weak understanding (Thomas).
• Contrast with §1: dividing animal into animal and man is the first way (man has all that “animal” means, plus something noteworthy); dividing understanding into understanding and reason is the second.
• Boundary/mixed case: dog vs. puppy, cat vs. kitten. And thinking vs. knowing — asked whether the Republicans will win (“I think so”), asked whether two is half of four (“I know that”); whether knowing adds certitude to thinking, or thinking is an imperfect knowing, “could almost be either.” Socrates’ opinion/knowledge is already more particular. Also man vs. beast (each with its own name) against man vs. the animals; plant vs. tree (“I want to buy a plant” excludes a tree).
• Summary: two ways one member keeps the name — because it alone fully has what the common name means, or because that is all it has and nothing more.

7. The species of being belong to this one science (“one grammar looks at all speech”) #

As one grammar looks at all speech, so looking at the species of being as being (using “species” loosely, the more particular ways of being) belongs to this one knowledge — the division is not a division of being as being, but it pertains to the science. So: wisdom is about the first causes; and about being as being. He skips the passage showing being and one are convertible (so wisdom is about being and the one), and moves to the fifth reading: wisdom is about the axioms, a third thing.

8. What an axiom is (“the genus of axiom is statement”) #

Not the modern sense. The genus is statement; every axiom is a statement, not every statement an axiom. In logic a statement is speech signifying the true or the false; speech is vocal sound significant by human agreement, no part of which signifies by itself.

• An axiom is a statement known through itself, not through other statements.
• Argument that such must exist: if every statement needed to be known through others, you would have to traverse an infinity of statements and reasonings, so no statement would be known — including that one. And you cannot deny that statements exist without making a statement.

9. Known per se to all men vs. to the wise (“common beginnings” and “private beginnings”) #

Boethius (Book on the Trinity) distinguishes statements known through themselves by all men from those known through themselves by the wise. The axioms are the first kind.

• Known to all: a whole is more than one of its parts — everyone knows what whole and part are; you cannot live without experiencing them, “unless you take your steak in one gulp.”
• Known to the wise: every perfect number is a composite number. A composite number is one measured by some other number (one not counted a number); a perfect number equals the sum of what measures it. Six is the first: measured by 1, 2, 3, which sum to 6 and stand in perfect order. Augustine and Thomas use this for the six days of creation — not days in the ordinary sense, but symbolizing the perfection of what God made. Also: every rhombus is a quadrilateral.
• In the Posterior Analytics these are the common beginnings (common to many or all sciences) and the private beginnings of a single science (the perfect number to arithmetic, the rhombus to geometry). The common beginnings are the axioms; the private ones are those known per se by the wise in some art or science. “A very important distinction.” The wise-man’s kind must be taught (he learned the perfect number from Euclid); the other comes from experience.

10. Why the axioms must be considered at all (“leaving the cistern open”) #

Question raised in the third book of wisdom: since axioms can’t be proved and everyone knows them, why not just use them?

• First reason: the words in all the axioms are equivocal — by reason, not by chance — and sophists tie people up with that.
• His classroom sophism: man is an animal, but more than animal, so animal is a part of man; yet animal includes dog, cat, horse, elephant — so the part is more than the whole. The students are convinced; to leave them there Thomas calls “leaving the cistern open.”
• Answer from Metaphysics V: the composed whole (put together from its parts) vs. the universal whole (katholou, from kata + holos, said of its parts but not composed of them; the particular is named from part). Animal as a composing part of the definition “two-footed animal” vs. animal as universal whole said of man, dog, cat, horse. Keep one sense and the axiom holds. This is the most common mistake in thinking, says the father of logic: mixing up senses of the same word.
• Second instance, on “before”: nothing is before itself. Chaucer is before Shakespeare in time (first sense); the critics put Shakespeare before Chaucer in goodness (the fourth sense, better). Two senses, so no contradiction — just as animal is a part of man in one sense and man a part of animal in another.
• Second reason: objections not resting on equivocation.
• The grasping objection: to grasp a thing you must separate it from everything else; everything else is infinite; therefore you can never grasp anything (he cannot grasp the center of the table without cutting it off). His joke: “my first objection to this objection is to say I can’t grasp your objection.” Answer: it proceeds from ignorance of the universal — to separate seven from every even number one by one is endless, but knowing seven is not an even number separates it from an infinity at once.
• De Koninck’s article in the Revue Thomiste, “Paradoxes du devenir par la contradiction” (in French): the apparent contradiction in all becoming against the axiom that something cannot both be and not be — untied by Aristotle in the sixth book of Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics], revived as a mistake by Hegel in the 19th century; the article shows the trouble it caused in medieval theology.
• The decisive reason: Aristotle points out in the second book of Natural Hearing that one can think one does not know what one does know. So long as an unanswered objection stands, a man thinks he does not know the axioms, and therefore thinks he knows nothing — fatal to the life of the mind. Hence the axioms must be considered, both for distinct knowledge of them (everything is built on them) and to answer the objections.
• Aside: Roger Haight judges the articles of faith by fashionable postmodernism — cart before the horse. Anselm has it right: theology is faith seeking understanding; you believe three persons in one God, then seek to understand. Likewise philosophy is the natural understanding of the axioms seeking a reasoned-out understanding of things; if a man doubts that, it must be cleared up first. Socrates spent his life on the reverse problem, people thinking they know what they don’t know — and nearly fell into this one himself; Aristotle sees both must be avoided.

11. What comes next (“we’re in trouble with the powers that be”) #

Next time: why does considering and defending the axioms against sophistical objections belong to the wise man rather than someone else? Left open.

His words #

• “reasoned-out knowledge” — [ed.: science, scientia].
• “equivocal by chance” / “purely equivocal” — a word with many meanings and no order among them.
• “equivocal by reason” — many meanings with an order, one fundamental meaning; also called analogous or proportional.
• “towards one” / “towards some one nature” — how being, healthy, medical, political are said.
• “undergoings of substance” — [ed.: affections/passions of substance].
• “being of reason” — what blindness is “almost like.”
• “statement known through itself” — [ed.: per se nota].
• “common beginnings” / “private beginnings” of reasoned-out knowledge — [ed.: common and proper principles].
• “composed whole” / “universal whole” — katholou, from kata + holos.
• “Natural Hearing” — [ed.: Physics].
• “leaving the cistern open” — Thomas’s phrase for raising a difficulty you don’t resolve.
• “the father of logic” — Aristotle.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV, fourth reading, paragraph 4 and following (being said towards one; healthy, medical; substance first) — with Thomas’s commentary on it.
• Handout, “The Matter and Order of Wisdom,” p. 11 (the two-page reading he works through).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V — composed and universal whole; the senses of “before.”
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI — where Aristotle calls wisdom theology.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics III — the problem whether the axioms must be considered.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VII–VIII — devoted to substance.
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics — common and private beginnings.
• Aristotle, Physics II and VI.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics — the useless hearer.
• Boethius, On the Trinity.
• Albert the Great (passage cited by his teacher); Augustine and Thomas on six as perfect number; Euclid; Anselm (“faith seeking understanding”); Charles De Koninck, “Paradoxes du devenir par la contradiction,” Revue Thomiste.

His questions #

• Why does the thumb get a new name and the other four keep “finger”? Because it adds something noteworthy to the common meaning.
• Is “being” equivocal by chance or by reason? By reason: many meanings, all referring back to one nature, substance.
• Is blindness a being or not a being? Not a being, yet we say a man has it — the fourth and most remote sense, a lack of substance or accident.
• Does the word “nothing” mean something? Yes, in some sense — which is stretching “something” as far as it will go.
• Is God the subject of this science? No; he is its end or goal. In revealed theology he is both subject and end.
• Why is the wise man called “the philosopher”? Because he pursues the highest part, so the common name is most properly his.
• Why does the angel’s understanding keep the name “understanding” and man’s get the name “reason”? Because everything the angel knows is under that aspect, while man understands only first principles so and reasons out the rest.
• Are there statements known through themselves? There must be, or every statement would require an infinity of prior statements and none would be known.
• Are the axioms known per se to all men or to the wise? To all men; those known per se to the wise are the private beginnings of particular sciences.
• Must we stop and consider the axioms, or just use them? We must consider them: their words are equivocal, and unanswered objections make a man think he does not know what he knows.
• Why should considering and defending the axioms belong to the wise man? Left open — asked for next time.