Is Moral Effect Accidental to the Poet? Accidental Causes, No Science of the Accidental, and Modern Determinism

Orientation #

He is working through the handout readings on Metaphysics VI. He says at the end: “next time we look at the third reading,” where Aristotle attacks determinism, “and then we’ll go on to the fourth reading, which will be about the being as true.” Verified sources place a reading from the handout “On the Natural Fragments (Natural Fragments of the First Philosophers),” p. 49, and DHB Vol I The First Philosophers p. 162, in this session (the closing Empedocles/evolution digression). The previous class treated Aristotle’s division of being and why accidental being falls outside reasoned science.

The class, in order #

1. Is the moral effect of poetry accidental? (“is it accidental to the poetic art to be moral?”) #

Point: he tests the per se / per accidens distinction on a live case.

• The popular view: the poetic art is like the art of cooking, aiming only to please. Witnesses: Shakespeare’s epilogue, “we’ll strive to please you every day”; Mozart’s letter to his father on representing Osmin’s anger in The Abduction from the Seraglio — the music must represent the anger, “but not in a way that is displeasing to the ear,” i.e. it would cease to be music. So it is more known to us that the musician aims to please the ear, the poet the imagination and emotions.
• Against this, Thomas: Poetae est inducere ad aliquid virtuosum per decentem repraesentationem — it belongs to the poet to lead us to something virtuous by suitable representation. “Thomas is not inclined to speak per accidens, but per se.” So it belongs to him as poet, not merely as a good man. He notes you would be “quite cacked” for saying this in an English class today.
• Student question: does it belong to him as poet or as a good man? — that is exactly the question, and “how would you show that?”
• His proof from Aristotle: tragedy is defined as a likeness of an action serious, complete and of some magnitude, in sweetened language, acted out rather than narrated, moving to pity and fear so as to purge these emotions — catharsis. Catharsis is a name first taken from medicine: elimination of something harmful from the body (simplest example: inducing vomiting after swallowing poison). Catharsis of reason: Socrates purging the slave boy in the Meno, who thinks you double a square by doubling the side (that gives a square four times as big). Catharsis of the emotions: reducing them to a more healthful state. Since catharsis is in the definition of tragedy, the moral effect belongs essentially to the poet as such.
• The contrast that seals it: the cookbook says mix this and that and you have a delicious sauce; it never says “and then you have a healthy sauce.” (Student aside: some cookbooks do — he replies that then two arts are combined; another aside on light beer, “tastes great, less filling.”)

2. The cook and accidental causes (“the cause is also what accidental”) #

Point: where the effect is accidental, the cause is accidental too — and in more than one way.

• Type 1 — something happens to the per se effect: the housebuilder makes a house; the house collapses and kills someone. He is in some sense responsible for the death, but he intended the house. Likewise the cook aims at the tasty, and the tasty happens to be healthy: he made something healthy, outside his intention.
• Type 2 — the agent’s descriptions coincide: if the housebuilder happens to be a cook, “the cook made a house,” and “a housebuilder made something tasty.” Accidental cause again.
• He notes there are more kinds than these two; these are where one begins.
• Physics II (Natural Hearing): luck or chance is an accidental cause of what happens rarely, as a result of something done for an end — done by will, luck; done by nature, chance (though chance is also said of luck).

3. Reading the text: what is by accident is neither always nor usually (“the matter which can be other than what it is”) #

He reads: since all things do not exist or come to be by necessity and always, but most usually, what is by accident must exist — “the white is musical” is neither always nor usually, but sometimes; otherwise all things would be by necessity. Hence matter, which can be other than it is for the most part, is the cause of the accidental.

• His gloss: this is exactly why evolutionists want things to develop by chance — they make matter the first cause and have no mover with a motive.
• Continuing: one must ask whether nothing is neither always nor for the most part, or this is impossible; there is therefore something besides these, what happens whichever way and by accident. Not true of eternal things.

4. Why there is no science of the accidental (“how else could one learn or teach it?”) #

The fourth paragraph gives the reason: every science — and you could say the same of every art — is about either the always or the usual. Otherwise it could not be learned or taught; it must be limited by the always or the for-the-most-part.

• Examples: learning to build a house, nobody tells you what will happen to the people in it; rules of grammar are given for what is always or for the most part.
• What might happen if you go to the bookstore? You might meet an old friend; the roof might fall in (the drugstore in Shrewsbury did one time); you might get shot or robbed. You cannot teach that.
• Conclusion as Aristotle leaves it: it has been said what the accidental is, through what cause it is, and that there is no science of it.

5. Digression: the rule of two or three (“I kind of invent that rule, right? The rule of two or three”) #

Point: his own rule, offered as a rule for the most part — divisions are normally into two or three, and apparent larger divisions come apart into nested twos and threes.

• Metaphysics VI lists four senses of being; but Book V divides being into two — kath’ hauto (per se) and kata sumbebekos (by accident) — then subdivides. Accidental being: when two things happen to the same thing, that thing is said to be both; or when one happens to the other (two ways of doing that). Per se being divides into three: according to the figures of predication, as true, and as act and ability. So: two, one of which goes into three.
• Thomas, prologue to the Nicomachean Ethics commentary: four orders in relation to reason — the order reason does not make (natural things); the order reason makes in its own acts (thoughts and the words signifying them); in the acts of the will and what you do; in matter. Thomas “seeking brevity” leaves implicit that the first stands against the other three, divided by the maker: made by reason or not. Then the made-by-reason divides by that in which it is made, into three. Again two, then three.
• Aristotle’s ten categories: Thomas explains them by dividing into three — said of individual substance by reason of what they are; by reason of something in addition to what they are but existing in them; by reason of something outside them — then subdivides the second and third.
• Exceptions admitted: the four species of quality; he is not inclined to find a two or three there. Hence the rule is for the most part only. He contrasts Plato/Socrates (always divide into two) and Hegel (always into three); he puts the two together and does not say “always.” Could he give a rule for the exceptions? “Sometimes divide into four” gives no direction, so no useful rule.

6. Determinism as the absolute principle of modern science (“to doubt determinism would be to doubt science”) #

Point: setting up the third reading, where Aristotle attacks determinism.

• The modern principle of determinism, already in Democritus (“everything happens for a reason by necessity”): given position and momentum of every part of the universe at a time plus a supercalculating mind, the whole future unravels with necessity. It arises because the science is mathematical, and mathematics carries its determinism over to nature; it developed first in the physical sciences, which got the prestige, and biology, psychology and the social sciences then took on its robes.
• Witness: Claude Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (c. 1860), in three parts — the experimental method in general, the method in biology, and examples from his own ingenious research.
• Bernard understands that a hypothesis is never known for sure: if H then P; P is so; therefore H — invalid, since P could follow from something besides H. P is a sign but no proof. His classroom example: “if Berquist dropped dead last night, he will be absent from class; he is absent; therefore he dropped dead” — wishful thinking, not logic. Newtonian physics predicted so many things that people took it for true, until Einstein predicted the same things from a different hypothesis plus more; then “it became crystal clear to the physicists that you never know in the strict sense.” More predictions, and more precise ones (an eclipse at ten a.m.), raise probability only. Striking case: Dirac’s mathematics predicting a positive electron, later found (the positron) — still not a necessary inference.
• So Bernard says doubt is intrinsic to the experimental method — yet exempts determinism from doubt. That is his inconsistency, and it shows determinism was held as the absolute principle of science.
• Psychology’s version: his cousin’s wild dreams, the one where a tiger chases him down a dead end and, when he turns to face it, asks “would you like to buy a raffle ticket?” Nothing looks more irrational or less necessary. Freud, making psychology scientific, must say there is a reason, you had to dream it, and it tells us something about you.

7. Heisenberg, Bohr and Einstein (“indeterminism in modern physics seems to be there to stay”) #

• Determinism was not challenged in modern science until quantum theory; Heisenberg first clearly formulated indeterminism. Einstein never went along. The “Copenhagen interpretation,” so called because its men were students of or associated with Bohr in Copenhagen.
• The Solvay Conference of 1927, the last big showdown: Einstein brought thought experiments; Bohr stayed up all night and refuted each. A photograph shows Einstein walking off self-satisfied after his last and most devastating objection, with Bohr behind him looking worried. Bohr found Einstein had overlooked part of his own theory; that ended the public objections, though Einstein never accepted it. Ehrenfest, a personal friend: “I’m ashamed of you” — you cannot give an objection that fails to hold and still refuse to go along. It shows how strongly they wished determinism.
• Aristotle’s indeterminism in nature is tied to his understanding of matter: matter is really able to be other than it is even while it is this way. Heisenberg took an interest in Aristotle’s matter and potency and said quantum theory suggested such ideas to physicists — in the Gifford lectures.
• Student: is Heisenberg rooting this only in matter, or also in the evident fact that we are free? — He allows the second is another kind of determinism that Aristotle would also see, but as far as natural things go it is a matter of matter.

8. Why wisdom treats accidental being so little (“it hardly is a being”) #

Two reasons: no reasoned knowledge considers the accidental; and our knowledge is about being as being, and the accidental “hardly is.”

• The shape of the whole: Aristotle begins with the being that least of all is and goes all the way to the one who says “I am who am” — a picture of our mind going from what seems more real to us but is less real, to what is most real but least known to us. Many start from motion, and motion hardly is; accidental being is sometimes even less real.
• But God is the cause of being as being, so His causality extends even to accidental being. As Thomas would say, God’s causality is so strong that not only is what He wants to be, but it is in the way He wants it — some things by necessity, some by chance. That shows how transcendent His mind is compared with ours, which cannot foresee the accidental.
• Application: New Orleans, and today’s news of hurricane Rita, a hundred-mile line of cars at two miles an hour, a woman who turned back home rather than be stranded out of gas. “There’s an awful lot of accidental being in these things”; you cannot altogether blame people for the accidental.

9. Closing digression: a part of the truth taken for the whole (“they boast of having seen the whole”) #

Occasioned by a fragment of Empedocles.

• Marx: the economic mode of production has something to do with social and political structure — part of the truth — but is said to explain everything. Freud: sex explains everything. Can both be right?
• Evolution’s standing problem: you cannot introduce a whole basic pattern of an animal piecemeal. Variations in colour or length of nose connect to environmental change; the moths (he says birds, then corrects to an insect) in smoky industrial England survived because predators could not see them. That is minor compared with the whole structure. Cell chemistry requires many coordinated things in place before the cell works at all — not doable piecemeal. He notes Catholic magazines saying “John Paul II accepts evolution” as though it were the whole truth.
• Behind it: matter, mindless matter, as the beginning of all things, so everything must be explained by luck or chance. Chesterton mocked it: the universe is a giant egg that laid itself by accident.
• In human things, chance leads to chaos: put a book anywhere in the shelves and the collection goes from order to disorder; a desk over a semester; a house left with magazine, book, wrapper, cup. The physicists say the same in thermodynamics. Student aside: his mother emptied all his drawers into the middle of the room — “practical experience with intelligent design.”

His words #

• “Natural Hearing” — [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics].
• per se / per accidens — through itself / by happening; he glosses the Greek kath’ hauto and kata sumbebekos.
• “catharsis” / “purgation” — from medicine, the elimination of something harmful; extended to reason and to the emotions.
• “ability” — [ed.: potency], in “being divided into act and ability.”
• “figures of predication” — [ed.: the categories].
• “the rule of two or three” — his own coinage: for the most part, divisions are into two or three.
• “principle of determinism” — everything happens for a reason by necessity; the past necessarily determines the future.
• “the accidental” — what is neither always nor for the most part, but sometimes; its cause is matter, which can be other than it is.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI, second reading, pp. 3-4 of the handout: the passage on the accidental being neither always nor usually, matter as its cause, and the fourth paragraph on there being no science of the accidental.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V — senses of being, per se and per accidens.
• Aristotle, Poetics — definition of tragedy.
• Aristotle, Physics II — luck and chance as accidental causes.
• Aristotle, Categories — the ten categories, with Thomas’s threefold explanation.
• Thomas Aquinas — Poetae est inducere ad aliquid virtuosum per decentem repraesentationem; commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics prologue (four orders); God’s causality reaching the accidental.
• Plato, Meno — the slave boy and doubling the square.
• Shakespeare — epilogue, “we’ll strive to please you every day.”
• Mozart, letter to his father on Osmin in The Abduction from the Seraglio.
• Claude Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine.
• Heisenberg, Gifford Lectures.
• Chesterton — the universe as an egg that laid itself by accident.
• A fragment of Empedocles (handout, “On the Natural Fragments of the First Philosophers,” p. 49 — verified source; the transcript names only Empedocles).

His questions #

• Is it accidental to the poetic art to be moral? No: Thomas speaks per se, and Aristotle puts catharsis into the very definition of tragedy.
• Does the moral effect belong to him as poet or as a good man? As poet.
• What does catharsis mean first of all, in medicine? The elimination of something harmful from the body.
• How many senses of being does he have here? And what does he do in Book V? Four here; in Book V he divides into two (per se, per accidens) and then the per se into three.
• Are there exceptions to dividing into two or three? Yes — the four species of quality; hence the rule holds only for the most part.
• How else could one learn or teach a science, if not about the always or the usual? One could not; so there is no science of the accidental.
• P is so; can you syllogize that H is so? No — invalid, since P could follow from something besides H.
• Is Heisenberg’s indeterminism rooted only in matter, or also in our being free? In matter, as far as natural science goes; freedom would be a different kind of determinism, which Aristotle would also see.
• Can Marx and Freud both be right that their principle explains everything? No — each has seen a part of the truth and boasts of having seen the whole.