Why 'Metaphysics' Is the Wrong Name: Wisdom, Reason and Shakespeare's Definition of Reason

Orientation #

He says this is the first session of a summer course on “the ninth book of wisdom” and that before entering it he wants to situate Book Nine within the fourteen books, and before that discuss the title. He does not refer to a previous class. Verified sources: the class works from his handout on Aristotle’s proemium to Metaphysics I (“Note for Aristotle’s Proemium to Wisdom”, p. 2) and a handout “Causes of Love”, p. 2 (the transcript does not name the latter; probably it carries the Hamlet passage he has the students read).

The class, in order #

1. Prayer and plan (“situate the ninth book of wisdom”) #

After the opening prayer (to God, the guardian angels, and St Thomas “angelic doctor”), he states the plan: before Book Nine, place it within the whole of the fourteen books, and before that, talk about the title and his “unhappiness” with the name metaphysics, at least in English.

2. Custom as a tyrant (“The tyrant custom”) #

Point: the name “metaphysics” is kept by custom, and custom can tyrannise the mind.

• Othello, Act 1 Scene 3: “the tyrant custom” — a great metaphor. Custom is not always a tyrant (Hamlet praises custom to his mother; custom is needed to acquire the moral virtues), but it can be, in the moral life and in the life of reason.
• Aristotle, Book Two of wisdom: men accustomed to one method want to proceed everywhere by it; an error become customary rules the mind for some time.
• A tyrant: one who rules for his own good, not the good of the whole.

3. Where “metaphysics” comes from (“meta after ta the physica”) #

Point: the name is three Greek words, not Aristotle’s own, and names the books only from their place in the order of learning.

• meta (after) ta (the) physika (the books in natural philosophy); said to go back to the editor Andronicus of Rhodes (“not a Shakespeare”). Even the “Basic Works of Aristotle” puts these books after the natural philosophy.
• A second reason the name has some sense: Aristotle’s own name in the proemium is wisdom, but for 200 years the Greek philosophers identified wisdom with natural philosophy. Only with evidence of immaterial substances — from Physics (“Natural Hearing”) VII–VIII, or De Anima III — do you see that wisdom, the knowledge of all things, is not natural philosophy. So meta ta physika is in a way “more distinct” than wisdom: it both distinguishes it from natural philosophy and gives its place in the order of learning.
• Objection to the name: naming from order of learning is like calling natural philosophy meta ta mathematika (it follows Euclid) or calling Euclid meta ta logika (logic comes first). That is not “the way you should first name something.”
• Bookstore aside: the “Occult and Metaphysical” section makes him cringe; scientists use “metaphysics” almost pejoratively.

4. The right names: wisdom, first philosophy (“heaven preserve us from calling it the metaphysics”) #

• Aristotle usually calls it first philosophy: first by order and dignity; it has most of all the character of philosophy.
• What does philosophy mean? Not “love of wisdom” — that is the etymology, and philosopher does mean lover of wisdom — but the knowledge a lover of wisdom pursues; so philosophy means first of all wisdom.
• Three acceptable names: fourteen books of wisdom (his preference), of first philosophy, or “after the books of natural philosophy”. But custom is a tyrant: to be understood at a conference you may have to say “metaphysics”; he slips into it himself “in condescension”.

5. Wisdom and reason: why define reason first (“wisdom has a twofold what connection”) #

Point: wisdom is acquired by reason and is reason’s highest perfection, so you cannot know what wisdom is without knowing what reason is.

• Precision: first philosophy is in a way more precise, since in the proemium wisdom is the knowledge God alone or most of all has. Among human knowledges: natural philosophy is wisdom about natural things, ethics and politics wisdom about human things; only these fourteen books are wisdom about all things — wisdom simply. More precisely: the wisdom our reason can acquire, and which when acquired is reason’s greatest perfection.
• Argument:
  1. You cannot know the highest perfection of reason without first knowing what reason is.
  2. You cannot know how to acquire wisdom by the use of reason without knowing what it is to use reason.
  3. A definition is “speech making known what a thing is”, so the definition of reason gives (1); and since reason will be defined as an ability for certain acts, and those acts are the use of reason, the same definition gives (2). Conclusion: the definition of reason is the needed starting point.

6. Hamlet’s exhortation: the form of the passage (“What is a man”) #

Point: the definition of reason is found in Hamlet, Act 4 Scene 4, in “the best short exhortation to use reason.”

• Exactly forty-nine words (7×7, “may have some symbolism”), on seven lines of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter, ~ten syllables, accent on even syllables), amounting to six lines since it begins on the seventh syllable (“What is a man?”) and ends on the sixth.
• The passage does three things: (1) gives the elements of a definition of reason; (2) thereby tells what it is to use reason; (3) gives five most powerful reasons why we should use reason more than we do. It also serves as an introduction to ethics — “two birds with one stone” — but here it is taken only as an exhortation to use reason.
• Order of analysis: not Shakespeare’s order but “first in our analysis”: the elements of the definition.

7. Genus and first difference: ability for discourse (“reason is the ability for discourse”) #

• Genus: capability, which he shortens to ability (ability and act will be the theme of Book Nine). An ability is defined by what it is an ability for.
• Discourse: from Latin for running; names the act of reason, which is like a motion. Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs” (waving to get attention; a revolution makes the news) — so reason in motion catches the eye more than anything.
• Two senses (Thomas): merely going from one thing to another vs. knowing one thing through knowing another. Wine tasting, or the eye moving from painting to painting in a museum: the first sense, which does not separate reason from sense. Reason is defined by the second sense, which includes the first, because “you define an ability by the utmost of what it can do” (lift 100 lb, the 101st breaks your back: your ability is 100, not 50).
• Ways of knowing one thing through another: reasoning (the most characteristic, since named from reason; later medieval logicians made discursus almost a synonym for it, but discourse is broader) — knowing a statement through two known statements, as Euclid does; defining — knowing the species through genus and difference, “what we are doing right now”; statements known through their parts (“no odd number is even”, “a whole is more than a part”); calculating — a number known through other numbers.
• Application: ability is not knowable by itself but only through its act; hence ability is known only by reason, which alone knows one thing through another. Important for the study of ability in Book Nine.

8. “Large” discourse: six senses (“brevity is a soul wit”) #

Point: a discourse is called large for three reasons, each said in two ways.

1. About the large. (a) Covers a large area: reason’s discourse is about the universal, which sense (knowing only the singular) cannot reach. Demonstrating that a triangle’s angles equal two right angles covers all triangles; “no odd number is even” covers an infinity. The philosopher’s discourse is larger than other men’s: the doctor talks of health, the carpenter of the good chair; Socrates of all the goods of man (soul, body, exterior), of “the good is what all want”. The wise man’s is largest: being as being (Book Four), “whatever is in any way”; first attribute of the wise man in the proemium, knowledge of all things in some way. (b) About the great, opposed to small talk (talk about small things): happiness, the soul, the universe, God.
   • Why define by the large though reason is more capable of small discourse: define ability by its utmost (the 500-lb lifter; a quart pitcher holds less but “quart” gives its capacity; “how fast can this car go”). Moral: “not to cut yourself short.”
2. Limit is large (beginning or end). (a) A “large induction” — from many examples; one kind of large discourse, applying to wisdom eventually. (b) From something one and simple, many consequences: force = mass × acceleration yields an infinity of calculations; Euclid draws all kinds of consequences from one premise.
3. The discourse itself is large, i.e. long. (a) Many steps: Euclid’s chain, “as strong as its weakest link”; asked to show the Pythagorean theorem, the only proof he knows is Elements I.47 with the earlier propositions presupposed — reason is more capable of one step, but that does not give its full power. (b) Between things very far apart: the first proof for God’s existence goes from motion, “which hardly exists”, to God, “I am who am” — “almost an infinite distance”, fewer steps than a late geometry theorem but far apart. Aristotle in the De Anima on understanding as a suffering/undergoing: from a pin-prick all the way to understanding (a student notes the English word “undergoing”).

• Flag: Shakespeare says six things in one word — “brevity is a soul wit” (his rendering of the Hamlet line).

9. “Looking before and after”: reason seeks order (“looking before and after”) #

• Looking = trying to see, in the sense of understand, not with eye or imagination. Note: large and look are both equivocal, but with large many senses are meant, with look only one.
• Before and after is “the culmination”: reason seeks order. Signs: all great minds see it — scientists speak of law (“law and order go together”); Heisenberg in the Gifford Lectures: the universe is first a medley of colours and sounds, and to understand it we must find order.
• Othello’s father-in-law says nature could not “so preposterously” err: preposterous = before-after, “the cart before the horse”, something most opposed to reason — a magnum indicium that reason consists mainly in seeing before and after.
• He calls this “scratching the surface” of the definition.

10. Thomas on the orders reason considers (“order which reason does not make”) #

Point: Thomas, in the proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics (and to the whole of practical philosophy), divides the knowledge of reason by the order it considers — appropriate because reason looks before and after, and before-and-after is the basic meaning of order.

• Four orders: (i) order reason does not make but only considers — natural things (spring, summer, fall, winter): natural philosophy and wisdom; (ii) order reason makes in its own acts (syllogising): logic; (iii) order reason makes in the acts of the will and consequent actions: ethics and practical philosophy; (iv) order reason makes in exterior matter (the table, wood): the mechanical or servile arts.
• Thomas there quotes Aristotle’s culminating description in the proemium to wisdom: the wise man orders everyone else and is ordered by none. His reason: wisdom is the highest perfection of reason; it is proper to reason to know order; so the wise man most of all knows order and can order things. “You see what I was saying”: you must know what reason is to see its greatest perfection.

11. The wise man’s discourse is the largest (“largest of all”) #

Point: in five of the six senses of large, the wise man’s discourse is the largest of all.

• Sense 1a: about the most universal, being as being — “can there be a thing that isn’t something?” Largest, “except perhaps a theologian, but kind of wisdom too”. Sense 1b: about the order of the universe and God himself.
• Sense 2a (beginning): Msgr. Dionne’s text from Albert the Great — natural and political philosophy depend on long experience, geometry does not (you can do it in your room, or in your head; you make what you study, e.g. the equilateral triangle); yet Albert says wisdom depends on experience. Dionne: not experience of being; “experience” takes a new meaning — the particular sciences (logic, natural philosophy, practical philosophy) are the experience presupposed to wisdom, from which one ascends to the most universal science. Example: natural philosophy shows a first mover; ethics an end that is not a means; logic a genus without a genus; then Book Two of wisdom shows this universally of any cause — “wow.” So the whole of our knowledge leads up to wisdom: “the largest induction of all.”
• Sense 2b (end): the wise man knows the axioms, which have almost infinite applications; from beginnings small in size but infinite in power he keeps seeing consequences. Boethius, De Trinitate: wisdom proceeds intellectualiter; Thomas explains this as getting one from many or many from one, which the wise man does most of all. He will start using “induction” in the fifth reading of Book Nine.
• Sense 3a: probably not — the geometer’s steps may be more numerous. Sense 3b: very much so — Book Nine will go from the act least actual but most known to us, motion, to the act purely actual but least known to us, the first cause: “an infinite distance”, the largest discourse of the human mind.
• Aside: the recorder “did that click?”

His words #

• wisdom: his name for Aristotle’s fourteen books, from the proemium [ed.: Metaphysics]; wisdom simply = about all things, vs. wisdom about natural or human things.
• first philosophy: Aristotle’s usual name; first by order and dignity.
• Natural Hearing: “the so-called physics” [ed.: Physics].
• about the soul: [ed.: De Anima].
• philosophy: the knowledge a lover of wisdom pursues, i.e. wisdom — not “love of wisdom”.
• tyrant: one who rules for his own good, not the whole’s.
• definition: speech making known what a thing is.
• capability / ability: genus of reason; defined by what it is for, and by its utmost [ed.: potency].
• discourse: from Latin “running”; the act of reason, like a motion; properly, knowing one thing through knowing another.
• discursus: later medieval near-synonym for reasoning.
• large discourse: six senses (about the universal; about the great; large beginning/induction; large end/consequences; many steps; far apart).
• small talk: talk about small things.
• looking: trying to see, i.e. understand.
• before and after: the basic meaning of order.
• preposterous / praeposterum: before-after, cart before horse; “a magnum indicium” that reason is of order.
• intellectualiter: Boethius’s mode of wisdom; per Thomas, one from many or many from one.
• experience (Albert via Dionne): for wisdom, the particular sciences presupposed to it.

Texts #

Read in class

• Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 4 Scene 4 (“What is a man… godlike reason to fust in us unused”)
• Shakespeare, Othello, Act 1 Scene 3 (“the tyrant custom”; “preposterously”)
• Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses’ speech (“things in motion sooner catch the eye”)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I, proemium (handout) — the wise man knows all things in some way; orders others

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics II (custom and method; no infinite causes), IV (being as being), IX (fifth reading, induction)
• Aristotle, Physics VII–VIII; De Anima III; De Anima on understanding as undergoing
• Euclid, Elements, I.47 (Pythagorean theorem); I.1 equilateral triangle (inferred)
• Thomas Aquinas, proemium to the commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics
• Albert the Great, on the parts of philosophy and experience (locus not given; via Msgr. Dionne)
• Boethius, De Trinitate, with Thomas’s commentary (intellectualiter)
• Heisenberg, Gifford Lectures
• “Basic Works of Aristotle”; Andronicus of Rhodes as editor

His questions #

• What would be the synonym for philosophy in English? Wisdom — “love of wisdom” is only the etymology.
• Can you know what the highest perfection of reason is without knowing first what reason is? No; hence define reason first.
• Where do you find the definition of reason? Hamlet, Act 4 Scene 4.
• Reason is the ability for large discourse, looking before and what? After — reason seeks order.
• What does a “large induction” mean? Many examples (a student’s answer, accepted).
• A chain is as strong as its what? Weakest link — the long chain of Euclid’s proofs.
• Preposterous means what? Before-after, cart before the horse; opposed to reason.
• Before and after is the basic meaning of what? Order.
• Can there be a thing that isn’t something? No — so wisdom’s discourse about being is the largest.
• In how many senses is the wise man’s discourse the largest? Five of the six; number of steps (3a) probably not.