Metaphysics V, Reading 18 on 'Perfect' and the Start of Book VI: How Wisdom Differs from the Making and Doing Sciences

Orientation #

He begins at “the 18th reading” of Book Five and recalls that Thomas divides the many words of Book Five into three groups (beginnings/causes; being, substance, one; properties of being). Of the last group “perfect” and “whole” are the fundamental words, and “perfect” is the first word of that last group. At the end he announces he is going to California Saturday, will be in Denver in July, and may resume the first week of August.

The class, in order #

1. Book Five’s three groups of words (“the angelic doctor there divides them into three groups”) #

• Group 1: words pertaining to beginnings or causes — he took “beginning” first, then “cause.”
• Group 2: words naming the subject of wisdom or its parts — being, substance, one.
• Group 3: properties of being; the fundamental ones are “perfect” and “whole,” which are very close. English sometimes says “complete” for “perfect.”
• “Perfect” is the first word of the third group, as “beginning” was of the first.

2. First sense: having all your parts (“outside of which not even one part can be taken”) #

• Aristotle’s formula: perfect is that outside of which not even one part can be taken, as the complete time of a thing is that outside of which no time can be taken that is a part of it. More simply: you have all your parts.
• Repas complet on a Quebec restaurant menu: appetizer, main course, dessert — all the parts, as against à la carte.
• A complete man has both arms, legs, head, ears; missing one, he is incomplete. Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony; books that have come down to us missing a part. “Partial” means incomplete, imperfect. A complete word has all its letters.
• Here one sees how close “perfect” and “whole” are.

3. Second sense: the whole ability of one’s kind (“what has all the ability of its kind”) #

• Aristotle: not exceeded according to virtue and goodness in its kind, as a perfect doctor or perfect flute player, falling short of nothing in the form of their own virtue. This sense is like the first, being a little like whole and part.
• Homer, whom Aristotle calls “the poet” and Plato praises: he has all three parts of the poet’s power. (i) Plot — Aristotle in the Poetics praises him for teaching the Greeks that a plot is not everything that happens to one man (Odysseus), nor the whole Trojan War as a historian would take it, but one course of action with beginning, middle and end. (ii) Characters — Hegel (“if we can quote the devil here”) says French tragic characters are one-dimensional, a passion personified, while Homer’s are like a multifaceted diamond. (iii) Language — both Aristotle and Hegel praise it; his similes give, as Shakespeare says, “a smoothness to all your violence,” comparing the armored man to a flower falling to its side.
• Mozart as the complete musician: writes for human voice and for every instrument, catching the essence of each (violin, piano, oboe, bassoon, flute concerto), symphonies and divertimentos alike; unlike the Baroque habit of transcribing a trio for another group of instruments. Beethoven by contrast does not write well for the voice — singers find the Ode to Joy in the Ninth hard to sing. “When you’re tired of Mozart, you’re tired of music” — after Samuel Johnson on London.
• The complete rhetorician has all three means of persuasion: the image he projects of himself, the moving of the audience’s emotions, and the arguments. Earlier rhetoricians dealt only with the emotions; Aristotle showed that the image of a prudent man with your good in mind matters even more, since we cannot know these things well and tend to trust such a man; the argument counts least.
• Dryden on Shakespeare: as a young man he saw as many plays of Beaumont and Fletcher as of Shakespeare, then came to see that Fletcher was “just a limb of Shakespeare” — a part only. This metaphor shows how the second sense grows out of the first: a limb by itself is radically incomplete.
• Shakespeare did both tragedy and comedy (his brother Richard: “I didn’t realize Shakespeare was that funny”); Henry IV Part One mixes comic and tragic scenes smoothly in one play. Aristotle says Homer’s lost Margites (“the worthless fellow”) is to comedy what the Iliad is to tragedy — so Homer too was the complete poet.
• Alec Guinness plays comic and tragic roles equally; many actors get typed and “play themselves.” The San Francisco actor he first saw in Jonson’s The Alchemist later played King Lear too senile and ridiculous — a delicate thing, since Lear is somewhat out of it, but overdone he stops being tragic. The man had not got the alchemist out of the tragic role.
• A complete cook makes appetizer, main course and dessert, and handles steak, chicken, fish — his son Marcus’s friend from the Culinary Institute of America cooked a whole dinner. But the cook cannot write a symphony or a tragedy; the ability is whole within a kind.

4. Third sense: having reached the end (“those are called perfect to which the end, when good, belongs”) #

• Different from the first two: a thing is perfect by having attained its end or purpose; they are perfect by having the end.
• Since the end is among the last things, we also speak metaphorically of bad things as “completely lost,” “completely corrupted” — a house “totaled” by insurance, though at that point it is far from being total or all.
• Which sense governs “better”? Both “the whole is better than the part” and “the end is better than what is for the sake of the end” hold, but the most basic meaning is that of the end, because the part is for the sake of the whole, so the whole is the end of the parts.

5. These senses fit creatures, not God (“God is not perfect in this way”) #

• God has no parts and no end to reach; He is the end of everything else, He is the good — Matthew 19, “Why do you call me good, when [God] alone is good”: ho agathos. So connect Him to the third sense not by His reaching an end but by His being the end of all else.
• Aristotle’s next paragraph (as Thomas explains) divides: some are perfect by lacking nothing in goodness, having nothing above and taking nothing outside — that is God, whom Thomas calls universally perfect; others are perfect by not having anything above them in some genus.
• So Homer or Shakespeare lacks nothing a poet should have, but lacks what Mozart has and what the cook has. God lacks nothing; His perfection is infinite — the Summa Theologiae takes up God’s perfection and then His infinity, not in a quantitative sense but as infinite perfection. All the perfection divided up among creatures is united in God in a simple way, and we shall never fully understand or fully love it.
• Mrs. Jamieson’s 19th-century book on Shakespeare’s female characters (seen at TAC; also something on Ophelia): a woman should be modest, graceful, and tender/merciful — without these she is not a woman. He connects “tender” and “Mother of Mercy” to the Blessed Virgin, and notes humility has modesty in it. Ophelia has the perfection of a woman, not of a philosopher or poet. Portia in The Merchant of Venice likewise.
• Gene Autry’s horse Champion, which he met as a boy, sidestepping around the auditorium: a perfect horse, but not with the perfection of a philosopher, cook or pianist.
• Aristotle’s last paragraph allows further senses — e.g. what produces one of these conditions — but the basic senses are the three.

6. Showing that the end is better than the means (“when the same belongs to two things”) #

• The whole is better than the part: almost nobody denies it — a whole automobile, a whole meal, a whole shoe, whole pants.
• That the end is better than what is for its sake is shown (i) inductively: health better than medicine, knowing better than learning, having money better than earning it; and (ii) by the general reason from Book Two: when the same belongs to two things, but to one of them because of the other, it belongs more to the cause. Good is said of end and of means, but of the means because of the end; therefore the end is better, when both are good.
• Aside on the first sense: men come back from the Iraq War missing an arm or a leg.

7. Aristotle as the complete philosopher (“Mozart with something missing”) #

• Johann Christian Bach went from Germany to Italy, married an Italian, became a Catholic, moved to London; Mozart at four or five sat on his lap in London and was devoted to him; his first concertos imitate J. C. Bach, and Alfred Einstein (not Albert), the Mozart critic, speaks of a pre-established harmony between them. Someone described J. C. Bach as “Mozart with something missing” — like Fletcher as a limb of Shakespeare. He jokes he would take “Berquist is Aristotle with something missing,” or Thomas Aquinas with something missing, as a great compliment.
• Aristotle’s universality: logic and philosophy of nature, which Boethius and Thomas call inward philosophy [ed.: as he says it], remote from experience; but also politics and the theory of how revolutions take place, from a study of 150 Greek city-states; the chronology of the Greek plays; anatomy, cutting up animals and plants, with Alexander sending back specimens from the East; marine biology. Historical research, very particular, together with logic and wisdom, very universal. “The most well balanced mind in history.” What he wrote on how tyranny is preserved is still used by tyrants.
• Aside: the Los Angeles airport, six or seven lanes each way, a murderous highway; the bus called the great stagecoach.

8. What Book Five was for, and the plan of Book Six (“a distinct knowledge of the axioms”) #

• Only three words of Book Five were treated; all of them should eventually be studied — cause, whole and part, nature — but it is not appropriate the first time to do all of them; “being” alone is enough to occupy you.
• Book Five may be considered the completing of a distinct knowledge of the axioms — e.g. that the perfect is better than the imperfect might be taken as an axiom — such knowledge as can defend them, especially against sophists who mix up the senses of words.
• The separation of wisdom has come in stages: in the proem, wisdom is about causes and at last the very first causes, unique to it; at the start of Book Four, wisdom is about being as being and the one and many, more universal than any other subject, and the others do not consider their subject as being (arithmetic considers numbers as numbers, not what kind of beings they are). Book Six adds more.
• Rest of Book Six and beyond: reading 2 recalls the senses of being from Book Five; readings 2–3 treat accidental being and why it need not detain the science of being as being; reading 4 treats being as true, saying very important things — both set aside. Then the three great books on being: VII and VIII on being according to the figure of predication, chiefly substance; IX on being as act and ability; X on the one and the many. That completes being as being, and then the search for the first causes can begin.

9. First reading of Book Six: every science seeks causes, but of a part (“the beginnings and the causes of beings are sought”) #

• Title: the beginnings and causes of beings are sought, and it is clear, as beings — the causes of being as being.
• Every science seeks some causes: there is a cause of health and vigor; there are beginnings, elements and causes of mathematical things. “Science” is episteme, reasoned-out knowledge or reasoned-out understanding; every such knowledge is about some causes and beginnings, more precisely or more loosely, more certainly or less.
• But each draws a line around something more particular: it is about some being in a kind, not being simply (the first difference, from Book Four); and it does not consider that thing as being (the second). Consequently they give no account of what it is: some make it clear by sensation, some take the what-it-is as laid down and demonstrate, more necessarily or more loosely, what belongs as such. Hence by induction it is clear there is no demonstration of substance or of the what-it-is, but another way of showing it, like definition.
• Likewise they say nothing as to whether their kind of thing exists, since it belongs to the same understanding to make clear what a thing is and if it is. He notes obscurely that the other sciences need to be propped up a bit by wisdom: the arithmetician just assumes there are numbers and forgets the way they exist.

10. Natural philosophy separated by its cause: nature vs. art and choice (“the beginning of things made is in the maker”) #

• Natural science is about such substance as has in itself a beginning of motion and rest — the definition of nature from Book Two of the Physics: a beginning and cause of motion and rest in that in which it is, innate, as such and not by happening.
• Therefore it is neither a doing nor a making science: the beginning of things made is in the maker, not in the thing made — mind, or the art in the mind, or the power to carry out what the art prescribes; and for things done, choice is in the doer.
• The first difference: nature is a cause within the thing, art a cause outside it. The tree’s growing taller is caused within the tree; the wall’s growing taller is caused in the bricklayer, and the bricks do not build themselves. The carpenter’s art is not in the chair, the carpenter is not inside the chair “to the best of my knowledge”; the cook is not in the pie, and should not be.
• Why “nature” is taken from birth: its original meaning is birth, and in birth the baby comes from within — if a woman makes an apple pie she acts on something outside her, but the baby comes from within. Then the word was carried over to the source within the birth, and in a third meaning generalized to the source within any change, growing, falling, and so on.
• Heraclitus: “nature loves to hide,” because it is within. Yet that things behave differently in the same circumstances is a sign of something within: rock and tree in the same soil, rain and sunshine — one grows, the other does not, so it is not the water or sun alone.
• Ethics, domestics and political philosophy are about things that are originally by choice, and choice is not in the action but in the doer; so choice is not nature. Shakespeare in Hamlet: “nature cannot choose its origin.”
• Conclusion: if every reasoned-out knowledge is doing, making or looking, natural philosophy will be a particular looking science, about being as able to be moved and about substance which by definition is “for the most part” not separable from matter — he says for the most part because he is aware of the human soul.

11. Why separating natural philosophy suffices (“Maine and Vermont from Canada”) #

• Aristotle does not here separate the looking sciences as a group from making and doing, as he did in the proem; he separates only natural philosophy, the one closest to doing and making because it is about motion. If that one is not a making or doing science, then a fortiori mathematics, which is about quantity and number and further from matter and motion, and a fortiori wisdom, about immaterial things not subject to our art or choice.
• Image: if Maine and Vermont are not part of Canada, Massachusetts and Connecticut, further away, obviously are not. “If you two guys are different, then he must be even more different from you.”
• In the proem the looking and practical sciences were distinguished by their end: the end of looking knowledge is to see in the sense of to understand (“theoretical” is just the Greek for looking); the end of cooking is not to know and understand food but to make dinner; the end of doing knowledge is not to know what it is to be just, modest or courageous, but to be and do those things. Here they are distinguished instead by the cause — nature, art, choice.
• Aristotle, with some help from Plato, discovered how the kinds of looking philosophy are to be distinguished and that there are only three. Thomas often traces the mistakes of pre-Aristotelian philosophers to not seeing or not weighing some distinction; most academics do not know how to distinguish the kinds of knowledge. Monsignor Dionne: for a good example of confusion in the modern mind, just look at any college catalog.
• Aside: he asks his guardian angel to think something out of his mind, not telling him “I choose for you to do this.”

12. The puzzle he leaves (“how would you distinguish the making sciences”) #

• Paragraph four will begin separating natural philosophy from the other looking sciences, mathematical philosophy and first philosophy or wisdom — but how should one separate them? “We got a few minutes to say it. I’ll think about that.”
• Homework puzzle: how would you distinguish the making sciences, and how the doing sciences? Aristotle does not subdivide them, since his purpose is to separate wisdom. The three ways of distinguishing — looking, making, doing — are all different, and there is a reason why. Left open.
• Closing arrangements: California Saturday, Denver in July, possibly resuming the first week of August; he will speak to the Abbot.

His words #

• “Reading” — a lectio of the commentary; he numbers the Book Five reading 18.
• “Perfect” / “complete” — used interchangeably for Aristotle’s term; sense 1, having all your parts; sense 2, having the whole ability of one’s kind; sense 3, having reached one’s end.
• “Ability” — [ed.: potency/power]; “the whole ability of its kind,” and “being as act and ability” for Book IX.
• “Universally perfect” — Thomas’s phrase for God as lacking nothing whatever, against perfection “in a genus.”
• “Looking knowledge / looking philosophy” — [ed.: theoretical, speculative]; “theoretical is just a Greek word for looking.”
• “Doing” and “making” knowledge — [ed.: practical and productive/art].
• “Reasoned-out knowledge” / “reasoned-out understanding” — his rendering of episteme, science.
• “Natural hearing” — [ed.: the Physics], where nature was defined in Book Two.
• “Figure of predication” — the categories, the subject of Books VII–VIII.
• “Inward philosophy” — Boethius’ and Thomas’s term as he reports it, for logic and philosophy of nature as remote from experience.
• “Premium” [ed.: proem] — the opening of the Metaphysics where wisdom was first separated.
• Ho agathos — “the good one,” from Matthew 19.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V, reading 18: the three senses of “perfect,” the distinction of God’s perfection from perfection in a genus, and the closing paragraph on further senses.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI, reading 1, paragraphs 1–3: every science seeks causes of a part; natural science is about substance having in itself a beginning of motion and rest, hence neither doing nor making.
• Aristotle, Physics II: the definition of nature as an innate beginning and cause of motion and rest.

Mentioned

• Thomas, commentary on the Metaphysics (the three groups of words in Book V; the two ways of being perfect).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae: the perfection of God, then His infinity.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II (“the second book”): when the same belongs to two things but to one because of the other, it belongs more to the cause.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV: wisdom about being as being and the one and many.
• Aristotle, Poetics: Homer’s plot; the lost Margites.
• Aristotle, Rhetoric (inferred): the three means of persuasion.
• Aristotle, Politics (inferred): revolutions, the 150 constitutions, how tyranny is preserved.
• Plato, Republic: praise of Homer.
• Matthew 19: “Why do you call me good…?”
• Shakespeare, Henry IV Part One; Hamlet (“nature cannot choose its origin”); The Merchant of Venice (Portia); Hamlet’s Ophelia.
• Homer, Iliad; Jonson, The Alchemist; Mrs. Jamieson on Shakespeare’s female characters; Hegel on Homer’s characters; Dryden on Fletcher; Samuel Johnson on London.

His questions #

• Why is Homer called “the poet”? Because he has the whole ability of a poet — plot, character, language — and could write comedy as well as tragedy.
• What do the three senses of perfect mean for God? None applies as to a creature: He has no parts and no end to reach; He is the end, and is universally perfect, lacking nothing.
• Which is the more basic ground of “better,” whole over part or end over means? The end, since the part is for the sake of the whole, so the whole is the end of the parts.
• How do you show that the end is better than what is for the sake of the end? Inductively (health over medicine, knowing over learning, having money over earning it) and by the rule that what belongs to two things, to one because of the other, belongs more to the cause.
• What was Book Five for? For a distinct knowledge of the axioms, able to defend them against sophists who mix up the senses of words.
• How does Book Six separate wisdom further than the proem and Book Four did? By the cause rather than the end: nature, art and choice mark off natural philosophy from making and doing, and so a fortiori mathematics and wisdom.
• What is the first difference between nature and art? Nature is a beginning within the thing; art is in the maker, and choice in the doer, not in the thing made or the action.
• Why does Aristotle say natural substance is “for the most part” not separable from matter? Because he is aware of the human soul.
• How does separating only natural philosophy suffice? It is the looking science closest to making and doing; if it is not one of them, the more remote ones a fortiori are not.
• How would you distinguish the making sciences, and the doing sciences? Left open as a puzzle; he only says the three ways of dividing differ, and for a reason.