Metaphysics VI, Reading 2: Accidental Being and Why No Reasoned-Out Knowledge Is About It

Orientation #

He says the first reading finished distinguishing wisdom or first philosophy from all the other parts of philosophy; Book Four had already made it about being as being, and Book Five divided being into many senses. He says the fourth reading (in Book Six) will treat being as true and non-being as false, and that Books Seven, Eight and Nine — probably Book Eight among them — are the main consideration of being as being (substance; act and ability).

The class, in order #

1. The recall of the senses of being (“being simply said is said in many ways”) #

Aristotle’s first paragraph of the second reading recalls Book Five’s senses. Being per accidens, kata sumbebēkos, is being “by happening.”

• Warning from Thomas (on Book Four): “accident” here does not mean accident as distinguished from substance. The division of being by the figures of predication (substance, quantity, quality, relation) is a division of being per se. Calling quantity and quality “accidents” is not this sense.
• Most accidental kind: two things happening to the same subject — white and the art of logic happen to him, so he is a “white logician”; white and logic do not come together to form one thing.
• Less accidental: “white man” — one thing happening to another; still white and human nature do not form one thing, yet in some sense there are white men and black men. Reverse the subject and adjective: “a human white thing,” “a human logician.”
• Aside: affirmative-action committees and the Christian Academy wanting to hire “a Christian geometer” are concerned with accidental being — and in some sense such people exist.

2. The other three kinds, all per se (“being is understood as true and non-being as the false”) #

All three are kath’ hauto.

1. Being as true / non-being as false. True and false are found primarily in the mind, so this being can cover what has no being outside the mind. Student exchange: is it true to say nothing is nothing? — yes, though “is” is used. Blindness seems more real than nothing, but outside the mind blindness is a non-being, a lack in a subject able and apt to have sight. Yet we say truly “he is blind”: there “to be” means it is true, not that being blind is in things.
2. Being according to the figures of predication. Here the wise man uses logic as a stepping-stone. The categories are distinguished by the way something can be said of individual substances — what we are (man, animal, living body, body, substance), how we are (healthy, wise, good), how much, where, when. That is why in the Categories Aristotle uses the concrete words (“how much,” “how toward what”) rather than quantity and quality: quality is not said of substance but the qualified is.
3. Being in ability and in act. Books Seven and Eight: being by the figures of predication, mainly substance. Book Nine: act and ability. Book Six says something about accidental being and being as true — important, but not the chief consideration, and for different reasons in the two cases.

3. First reason: no reasoned-out knowledge is of the accidental (“what belongs to things as such”) #

From the Posterior Analytics: science is only about what belongs to things through themselves.

• Two ways of “as such,” on the triangle: (a) what is in the definition — three sides, plane figure, rectilinear plane figure; (b) a property, which Porphyry says is outside the nature but follows on it — the interior angles equal two right angles (Proposition 32 of Book One), proved by drawing through one vertex a line parallel to the base and using the parallel theorem that a straight line falling on parallels makes alternate angles equal.
• Against these: the triangle happening to be green. Not in the definition, not following on the nature. The geometer says nothing of it. One could never reason out from what a triangle is that it is green; that would be a matter of sensation, and sensation is not reasoned out knowledge.
• Text read: no science pays attention to this, neither the doing, nor the making, nor the looking (the three groups of sciences from the first reading). The housebuilder does not make whatever happens to the house made, for they are endless — Katrina flooding it, the house being pleasant to some and harmful to others, robbers breaking in. The art of housebuilding produces none of these. Likewise the geometer does not consider what happens thus to figures.

4. Second reason: the accidental hardly is (“as it were, only some name”) #

Transition: if you are interested in being as being, there is hardly any here.

• Sign from Plato. Plato aligns being–knowledge, becoming–opinion, non-being–sophistry and error, because he thinks the way we know must be the way things are. Aristotle dissolves that (one can have opinion about being and knowledge about becoming), yet says Plato did not badly put sophistry about non-being: the sophists’ arguments are most of all about the accidental — whether the musical and the grammatical are the same or other, musical Coriscus and Coriscus.
• Fallacy of the accident, the first kind Aristotle treats outside those from words; it deceives even the wise. Can the sick become healthy? “Becomes” means comes to be, so the sick would be healthy — a contradiction. Heraclitus: day and night are the same because day becomes night; we say love turns into hate. Resolution (student supplies “subject”): it is the body that becomes healthy; being sick is something that happens to the body. So the sick do want to be healthy, the ugly to be beautiful, the weak to be strong — but not as such, since when the sick becomes healthy the sickness is eliminated, and nothing wants its own elimination. The body is not the same as its own ugliness.

5. No generation and no cause of the accidental (“there is not of the accidental”) #

Text: there is generation and corruption of other things, but not of the accidental.

• The Christian geometer: there is a way of becoming a geometer and a way of becoming a Christian, but no way of becoming a Christian geometer — you would have to learn Christian geometry, and there ain’t no such thing. Likewise there is something by which you are a Christian and something by which you are a geometer, but nothing by which you are a Christian geometer. Hence “you are not a Christian geometer, Mr. Burris” — and yet in some sense Christian geometers and black magicians exist out there, and the Academy would hire one.
• There is a knowledge of what a Christian is, and a knowledge of what a reasoned-out knowledge is (the Posterior Analytics, about e.g. geometry) — but no reasoned-out knowledge about Christian geometers; we have nothing really to say about them.

6. Who does treat it: historian, biographer, poet (“your life can be influenced by accidental being”) #

• You may get the job because you are a black magician or a Christian geometer, and the man who is not may lose it.
• Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, considered for the vice-presidential nomination in 1936 with Alf Landon of Kansas; denied it because “Landon Bridges falling down” would make a mockery of the ticket. Accidental being changes lives.
• The poet shows the terrible consequences of what merely happens, and likes to hint at a deeper purpose in them. Romeo and Juliet: Friar Lawrence’s messenger is boarded up in a plague town, Romeo believes Juliet dead, poison, her suicide — and at the end the Prince says heaven has found means to punish the feuding families through the love of their only son and daughter. Divine providence extends all the way down to what happens (to be studied in the Summa).
• Aristotle in the Poetics: the statue of the murdered man falls in the crowded marketplace and kills his murderer. A student: “poetic justice.”
• Conversions turning on a chance event: St. Alphonsus, who overlooked and misread a document in an important case, lost face, and feared he seemed to falsify the facts — he did not eat for three days; St. Ignatius of Loyola and the body of the beautiful woman he loved, seen after some days, showing how superficial it was. Kierkegaard: men have become saints over a woman they did not get.
• Assassinations and a leader’s sudden death change empires and nations. Historians and biographers treat these, but they are concerned with the singular; even the poet is more concerned with the universal than the historian.
• Oedipus the King: fleeing the oracle, not knowing his true parents, he meets and kills his real father and marries his mother — he did not intend it. John Paul I’s Illustrissimi letter to Goethe on the moral responsibility of the artist, occasioned by The Sorrows of Young Werther and the suicides it provoked: a moral cannot be tacked on, it must be intrinsic. His teacher Kasurik (ASR uncertain): you can tell a man’s understanding by the examples he chooses — John Paul I’s example is Oedipus, after which “one is anything but enthusiastic about incest.”
• Newspaper story: a husband faked leaving town to scare his wife, who had access to a gun and shot the man breaking in. A stupid joke, but hardly deserving death — being in the wrong place.
• Text (bottom of page three): nevertheless one should speak further about the accidental as far as possible — what its nature is and through what cause it is — and at the same time it will become clear why there is no reasoned-out knowledge of it. In general the philosopher can say something; in particular it belongs to the historian, biographer, or poet.

7. The division of things: always, for the most part, rarely (“some are always in the same way by necessity”) #

Page four begins the reason why there is no art or science of the accidental.

• “Necessity” here is one of the four senses distinguished in Book Five: that which cannot be otherwise. The other senses are from the end — necessary to eat if you are to live; and necessary not to be but to be well, like a horse for a journey (you can journey on foot but not journey well). So: can you philosophize without logic? Yes — so logic is not necessary to philosophize, but necessary to philosophize well.
• Others are not by necessity nor always, but for the most part: for the most part men have five fingers — Anne Boleyn had six. (Aside: “the ultimate, to destroy your country for a six-fingered woman.”) [The transcript repeats this passage; it is one point.]
• The for-the-most-part is the beginning and cause that the accidental is, because what is for the most part sometimes produces what is not for the most part — the exception. What is neither always nor for the most part we call an accident.
• Examples read: storm and cold in the dog days — “it happened to snow in August,” which one would not say of January; a man happens to be white, but he is not an animal by accident; the housebuilder restores health by accident, since he is not apt to do this but the doctor is, and this housebuilder happens to be a doctor; the cook aiming at pleasure may make something healthful, but not by cookery. The medical art aims at health and speaks of what food is healthy, not whether it is tasty; the cook aims at tastiness, and his art does not take into account whether it is healthy. Two different arts.

His words #

• “being by happening” — his rendering of kata sumbebēkos / per accidens [ed.: accidental being].
• “being as such,” “through itself” — kath’ hauto, per se.
• “reasoned out knowledge” — his rendering of epistēmē / science; used throughout, once beside “science, or in my translation, reasoned out knowledge.”
• “figures of predication” — the division of being by the ways something is said of individual substances [ed.: the categories].
• “ability and act” — [ed.: potency and act].
• “the how, the how much, the where, the when” — the concrete category-words of the Categories.
• “property” — from Porphyry: outside the nature but following upon it.
• “the wise man,” “wisdom” — first philosophy, metaphysics; he calls Book Five “the fifth book of wisdom.”
• “doing, making, looking” — the three groups of sciences [ed.: practical, productive, speculative].

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI, second reading, paragraphs 1–2 and page 4 (recall of the senses of being; no science of the accidental; the housebuilder and the geometer; sophistry and non-being; generation of the accidental; the division into always / for the most part / rarely; snow in the dog days, housebuilder-doctor, cook).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI, bottom of “page three”: “nevertheless one should speak further about the accidental.”

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (Thomas’s lecture: “accident” not opposed to substance); V (senses of being; four senses of “necessary”); VII–VIII (substance), IX (act and ability); the fourth reading of VI (being as true).
• Aristotle, Categories; Posterior Analytics; the fallacy of the accident (inferred: Sophistical Refutations); Poetics (the falling statue).
• Euclid, Elements I.32 and the parallel theorem (inferred).
• Porphyry, Isagoge (property).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa (divine providence, to be studied later).
• Plato (being/becoming/non-being; sophistry about non-being); Heraclitus (day and night).
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Sophocles, Oedipus the King; Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther; John Paul I, Illustrissimi; Kierkegaard.

His questions #

• Is it true to say that nothing is nothing? — Yes; but “is” there means it is true, not that a thing is.
• Outside the mind, is blindness a kind of being? — No; a non-being, a lack in a subject apt to have sight.
• Does it belong to a triangle through being a triangle to be green? — No; not in the definition, not a property, so the geometer says nothing of it.
• Can the sick become healthy? — Not as such (that would be a contradiction); the body becomes healthy, sickness being what happens to it.
• Is there a way of becoming a Christian geometer? — No; there is no Christian geometry and nothing by which one is a Christian geometer.
• Is there a reasoned-out knowledge about Christian geometers? — No; only about what a Christian is and what a reasoned-out knowledge is.
• Who is interested in accidental being? — The historian and biographer (concerned with the singular), and to some extent the poet.
• Can you philosophize without logic? Is logic necessary? — Yes you can; logic is not necessary to philosophize, but to philosophize well.
• What do we call what is neither always nor for the most part? — An accident; and the for-the-most-part is the beginning and cause that the accidental is.