Looking Before and After: The Senses of Order, Distinction and Error, and Two Ways of Dividing a Book

Orientation #

He returns to “the last part of the definition again” — Hamlet’s “looking before and after” (prev. lecture) — and at the end announces that the class meets again “at two o’clock” to divide the treatise of the fourteen books and locate Book Nine. Verified sources: the class treats Metaphysics I, read from his handout “Note for Aristotle’s Proemium to Wisdom”, p. 2. The previous class defined reason from Hamlet’s soliloquy and connected it to wisdom; the next divides the work into proemium and tractatus and traces Books One to Three.

The class, in order #

1. Four central senses of “before” (“the words before and after are equivocal”) #

Point: “before” and “after” are equivocal; the place to see this is Categories ch. 12, where Aristotle gives four central senses, pauses, and then brings in a “crowning sense” which he thinks is not fifth in order.

• First sense: time. Today is before tomorrow. Reason it is first: we name things as we know them (Thomas, “Fifth Book of Wisdom”), knowledge begins with the senses, and “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs” (Troilus and Cressida). In Natural Hearing IV [ed.: Physics] time is the number of the before and after in motion, so before and after in motion is most known to us. Before and after in the road you move down is led back here.
• Second sense: before in being. When this can be without that but not vice versa, this is before that. One before two (arithmetic, no motion). Sensible cases: bricks before the brick wall; letter C before the word “cat”; water before Kool-Aid; hydrogen before water (“they claim”). Boundary: before in being is often but not always before in time — twins born at once; a stamp printing “cat” all at once; a bakery machine cutting a loaf into fourteen slices at once. So the senses differ even when both apply.
• Third sense: before in the discourse of reason. Premises before conclusion; definitions, postulates and axioms before theorems; prologue before play, prelude before treatise. Further from the senses, “more in our knowledge”; any road in our knowledge is led back here.
• Fourth sense: better (“you come before with me”). He says Aristotle gives this in the Nicomachean Ethics, “not in the categories rather” [ed.: as spoken; he had just said all four are in Categories 12]. Often what is before in knowledge is before in being (square before cube in both); not always: hydrogen is before water in being but after in knowledge, hence named from water. What is better usually comes later in time, since things are perfected gradually, and often after in knowledge and even in being. Other senses can be led back to these by likeness; these are the central ones.

2. The crowning sense: cause before effect (“the cause is said to be before”) #

Point: Aristotle adds a sense most worth mentioning, where the cause is before the effect without being before in being or in time.

• Example: Matt sitting and the truth of “Matt is sitting.” The statement is true together with his sitting and false together with his standing — no before in time, and neither can be without the other. Yet the statement is true because he sits, not vice versa: “you make someone’s statement false every time you stand up.”
• His view: this is not fifth in order; it is most like the second sense, since what is after in being depends on what is before (bricks/wall looks like cause/effect), and the Matt example distinguishes the two.
• Why Aristotle brings it in: knowing the cause is the culmination for reason, especially for the philosopher — asking why, or even what (Posterior Analytics: the what is for the cause).

3. Shakespeare puns on the senses (“I see, said the blind man”) #

Point: Shakespeare knew the senses differ and puns on them, even at serious moments; a pun must be on senses far apart.

• His mother’s saying “I see, said the blind man, but he couldn’t see at all”: pun on first sense (act of the eye) and last (understand). Middle sense: to imagine — closer to eye-seeing than understanding is; sign: in a dream you think you see with the eyes when imagining, but never confuse understanding with seeing.
• All’s Well That Ends Well: the countess forces Helena to confess; “before high heaven and you” is the first sense (place, led back to motion and time), “before you and next unto high heaven I love your son” is the fourth (better): heaven first, son, then countess.
• In which senses does reason look before? All four plus the crowning one. Wisdom, being about first causes (proemium), most of all looks before in the crowning sense: cause, cause of the cause, very first cause. If the first cause is best, also the fourth sense most of all; the wise man distinguishing the roads of knowledge looks in the third.
• God is before creatures as cause before effect and also in the second sense: He could be without any creature, none without Him — “very important to see,” and why Thomas spends long in the Summa contra Gentiles showing creation is a free act of will, not something that naturally followed.

4. Order presupposes distinction (“nothing is before or after itself”) #

Point: Thomas’s best text on order says order is defined by before and after and that distinction is presupposed to order.

1. Axiom of before and after: nothing is before or after itself (today is not before today; nothing can be without itself).
2. Hence there is always a distinction between what is before and what is after.
3. Distinction can be without order (milk vs. syllogisms — no real order); order cannot be without distinction.
4. Also before in knowing: you must distinguish before you can rank — Budweiser vs. Miller; two wines; his brother Marcus long unable to decide Cabernet Sauvignon vs. Pinot Noir though he distinguished them; Homer vs. Shakespeare; which Shakespeare play is better. Conclusion: Shakespeare’s definition includes the ability to see a distinction, but seeing before and after is beyond it, so reason is defined by looking before and after, because you define an ability by its [unclear in recording; the word is not completed — presumably its act (inferred)].

• Aside: asked his favourite book of Thomas he said the Summa contra Gentiles — “the edition I have has got a bigger print.”

5. Error and mistake confirm the definition (“how nature could so preposterously err”) #

Point: the two words for the same defect of reason have different etymologies, one opposed to order, the other to distinction.

• Error from Latin errare, to wander: a disordered movement of reason. Christ to the Sadducees in Matthew 22 (seven brothers, whose wife in the resurrection): planasthe, same etymology, whence “planet,” the wandering stars.
• Mistake: in The Comedy of Errors (plot back to Plautus and the Greeks; Shakespeare doubles the twins) “I was mistook for you” — opposed to distinction.
• So distinction and order, the ideas in the definition, are confirmed by their opposites. Preview: in Book Nine Aristotle first distinguishes act and ability (parts one and two), then treats their order (part three) — it “couldn’t be done otherwise.”

6. Why reason before wisdom (“wisdom is acquired by the use of reason”) #

Point: this excursion was needed because reason and wisdom are closely connected in two ways: wisdom is acquired by using reason and is reason’s very greatest perfection. Homo sapiens (the wise ape) vs. rational animal points to the link. Thomas’s proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics explains the culmination of the six-part description of the wise man — he orders most of all — because wisdom is the highest perfection of reason and it is proper to reason to know order; exactly what Shakespeare says with “looking before and after.”

7. Etymology vs. meaning (“philosophy is the love of wisdom”) #

Point: every mistake of reason comes in part from missing a distinction; example, taking “love of wisdom” as the meaning of philosophy. Plato and Aristotle use “philosopher” for the lover of wisdom but “philosophy” for the knowledge he pursues. Thomas: id a quo nomen ponitur (what the name is taken from) vs. id ad quod (what it is applied to); lapis from laedens pedem, hurting the foot — the etymology, not the meaning.

8. Two kinds of division of a work (“editorial and reference division”) #

Point: A. the editorial and reference division, needed for citing; B. the logical and understandable division, found in Thomas’s commentaries, following the logical rule of two or three and giving true understanding.

• Matthew: 28 chapters and verses made (he thinks) in the 12th century at Paris for consistent reference — no understanding. Thomas: Matthew stresses the humanity of Christ (the man among the four figures), so three parts: coming into the world (chs. 1-2), proceeding through it preaching (3 to about 20), going out (21-28), then subdivided by two or three. John divided in two.
• Psalms: 150 cannot be understood as a division. Thomas after Augustine: Psalm 50 (old numbering) asks forgiveness (St Teresa of Avila’s favourite), 100 is good deeds and progress in virtue, 150 rest in God — three stages of Christian life (purgation, progress, rest — Teresa near death saying her union is already complete); then fifties subdivided (only the commentary on the first fifty survives).
• B refers back to A: “the third part is chapters 21 through 28.”
• For the fourteen books: books, chapters, Thomas’s lectiones, Bekker numbers — all editorial.

9. Proemium and treatise, via Romeo and Juliet (“the prologue and the play”) #

Point: Thomas’s logical division of an Aristotelian work is almost always into two, proportional to Romeo and Juliet — a manuductio; Charles De Koninck: read good literature before philosophy.

• Students’ guesses (courtship/marriage; before/after the cousin’s death) refused: unlike most plays it has a prologue and a play; the prologue is small but paves the way.
• Physics, Nicomachean Ethics and the fourteen books: proemium (Greek, “paving the way”) against the rest — in the Ethics only part of book one; in wisdom the first lectiones of Book One against the rest of Book One and Books Two to Fourteen.
• What a prelude does: say what you aim at, declare its desirability, sometimes how you will proceed.
• The prologue is a Shakespearean sonnet: three quatrains and a couplet. First quatrain: two households feuding to civil bloodshed (tragedy about those above us); second: the pitiful, star-crossed lovers’ deaths burying the parents’ strife; third: the fearful — the two emotions of tragedy; couplet: asks for patient ears.
• Thomas divides the proemium to wisdom into two, the Ethics proemium into three (as Matthew three, John two). One is a proemium to practical philosophy, the other to looking (contemplative, speculative) philosophy. Both end with an epilogue recalling what was done: Ethics, three things (aim, how to proceed, who is suitable); wisdom, two parts — the goal (to know causes, ultimately the first causes) and what kind of knowledge it is (looking, liberal, not a human possession, best and most honourable, most divine).
• Left for the afternoon: dividing the treatise, Books One to Fourteen, to see where Book Nine comes — “neither before nor after.”

His words #

• before / after: equivocal; four central senses (time, being, discourse of reason, better) plus the crowning sense (cause before effect)
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• before in being: this can be without that but not vice versa
• axiom of before and after: nothing is before or after itself
• error: from errare, to wander; disordered movement of reason
• planasthe (Matthew 22): same etymology; “planet”
• mistake: opposed to distinction
• ability [ed.: potency]; act
• id a quo nomen ponitur / id ad quod: source of the name vs. its meaning
• lapis from laedens pedem
• editorial and reference division vs. logical and understandable division (rule of two or three)
• manuductio
• proemium / prelude: “paving the way”; tractatus: the drawing out
• looking philosophy [ed.: speculative]
• fourteen books of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics]

Texts #

Read in class

• Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well (Helena and the countess)
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, prologue
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I, proemium and its epilogue (via handout p. 2) Mentioned
• Aristotle, Categories ch. 12; Physics IV; Posterior Analytics; Nicomachean Ethics (book one, proemium)
• Thomas Aquinas: commentary on Metaphysics V (“Fifth Book of Wisdom”); proemium to the Ethics; Summa contra Gentiles; commentaries on Matthew, John, Psalms; a text on order (locus not stated)
• Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida, Othello, The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet (definition of reason)
• Matthew 22 (Sadducees); Augustine on the Psalms; Plautus; Charles De Koninck; Pride and Prejudice (quotes All’s Well)

His questions #

• Does the statement “Matt is sitting” become true some time after he sits? No — together with his sitting; but the statement is true because he sits, not vice versa.
• Which senses do you pun on? The ones farthest apart (first and last, or first and fourth).
• In which sense of before does reason look? All four, plus most of all the crowning sense; wisdom looks at what is before everything else.
• Can today be before or after today? No — nothing is before or after itself, so distinction is presupposed to order.
• Is there any real order between milk and syllogisms? A distinction, but no real order — distinction can be without order.
• What is the logical and understandable division of Romeo and Juliet? Prologue and play, not courtship/marriage or before/after the cousin’s death.
• Does the division of Matthew into 28 chapters give any understanding of the gospel? No; Thomas’s three-part division does.
• Where does Book Nine come in the fourteen books? Left open for the afternoon session.