Metaphysics Book Nine, Reading 1: Distinguishing Kinds and Senses, and the Meanings of Ability

Orientation #

He ties this class to “what we saw a little bit the other day” in the fifth book of wisdom (the groups of meanings of being) and to the earlier remarks on “tyrant custom” (prev. lecture). He closes: “that’s the first reading of Book Nine,” with texts of Thomas on these abilities promised for later. The text-matching system flags Book V, lectio 3 and the handout “Note for Word Cause” for most of the hour; the transcript itself shows him reading Book IX ch. 1 (Thomas’s first reading), with Book V and the word cause recalled as background. The previous class treated the division of the Metaphysics and Physics II on method as custom; the next revisits this first reading with Thomas’s supplementary texts.

The class, in order #

1. Book Theta and Theos (“this is the most important book”) #

Opening prayer, then: Book Nine is Book Theta, the letter Theos begins with, “the most important book for getting to Theos.” Thomas says a small proemium shows how the book continues what went before and states its aim.

2. Two kinds of distinction that sometimes coincide (“killing two birds with one stone”) #

Point: distinguishing kinds of things and distinguishing senses of a word are different distinctions, but at the most universal level they come together.

• Thomas, in the Summa Contra Gentiles, on God as cause of the distinction and order of creatures, quotes Anaxagoras (mind responsible for distinction and order): distinction is basic for reason.
• A vs. B: distinction of kinds of a thing vs. distinction of meanings of a word. Euclid’s kinds of quadrilateral (square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid, trapezium): one meaning of “quadrilateral”; “parallelogram” said of the first four with exactly the same meaning. Students who say dog and cat are “two senses of animal” are confused: two kinds, one meaning.
• First example of coincidence: in Book One of wisdom Aristotle surveys his predecessors partly to test whether the four causes of natural philosophy (matter, form, mover, end) are complete; the result is that no one touched a fifth kind. Then Book Five distinguishes senses of words used in wisdom, and the first distinction of “cause” is the same four. So one distinction is both a distinction of kinds of cause in the real world and the most fundamental distinction of senses of “cause,” since “cause” is not said of the four with the same meaning (unlike “quadrilateral”).
• Student: how would you know that? “Just trying to define cause.” He sets it aside, but gives a sign: people who want to limit “cause” to the efficient cause are sensing that matter and form are not causes in the same way. Carpenter, wood, shape, and use of the table: one cause causes the causality of another; the end is causa causarum.
• Aside: Thomas gives a reason why there are only four; not today.

3. The proemium: substance, the categories, and the second example (“as we have said in the first speeches”) #

Point: Aristotle recalls that being is said first of substance and of the others as something of substance, then turns to the other division of being, ability and act.

• He reads: the first being (substance), to which the other categories are led back; poson (how much), poion (how), all have the notion of substance in them, “as in the first speeches” (Book Four; again Books Seven and Eight, chiefly material substance). Quantity is the size or measure of substance, quality its disposition, relation how it is toward another.
• Aristotle here says ti rather than ousia, and poion before poson. Aside against those who say Aristotle was unsure how many categories: he enumerates all ten only in the Categories and in the book about places (Topics), the same ten in the same order, except the first is ousia in one and ti esti in the other. No contradiction: the ten are distinguished by how something is said of individual substances (already distinguished from universal substance, universal accident, individual accident): by reason of what you are (man, cow, animal: substance); by reason of something in you besides what you are (size, disposition, relation); for the last six, by something outside you (clothed, in this room, sitting as arranged around the chair). Thomas unfolds the ten in Natural Hearing III and Wisdom V commentaries; he will not.
• In distinguishing the ten he distinguishes ten kinds of things (especially the first four: you, your size, your health, your geometry, your being a father or wife), yet also, as seen the other day in Book Five, one main group of meanings of being. Second example of the coincidence.
• Boundary: lower down (species of a strict genus) the two distinctions no longer coincide; only “in these most universal things” of wisdom.
• Hence a forecast: in this first reading Aristotle distinguishes kinds of ability and perhaps at the same time senses of the word, referring back to Book Five where “ability” also appears.
• He corrects his own rendering: since being is said one way by what/how much/how, and another way by ability and act, “let us now determine about ability and act.” Not “just distinguishing meanings of words”: kinds of things too. Wise men kill two birds with one stone: “that shows marksmanship.”

4. Order of Book Nine: ability said chiefly vs. most useful (“things in motion sooner catch the eye”) #

Point: Aristotle begins with the ability first named ability, ability in reference to motion, though it is not the most useful for the present purpose; this gives the two parts of the book.

• Motion is nearly first known to us because knowledge begins from sense; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs.” His line to students: if you don’t understand motion you don’t understand moving things; unmoving things are known by negation of them; “from first to last, if you don’t understand motion, you don’t understand nothing.”
• epi pleon gar estin hē dunamis: ability is said of more, and likewise energeia, than those said only according to motion. Part one (readings 1-4): ability only in reference to motion, one kind of act, motion. Part two (from readings 5-6): act universally, including form, and activities like understanding and loving that are not motions; since ability is for the sake of act, further senses of ability follow.
• “The ninth book most explicitly reveals this order of wisdom”: from less universal to more universal. Parallels: substance (material substance, then substance generally, then immaterial substances, the culmination); one (the undivided continuous, beginning of number, then the one convertible with being). This coincides with the other formula, from Monsignor Dionne, that wisdom goes toward the immaterial: we begin from material things and need something more universal to talk about the immaterial, separated substances and God.
• Contrary: natural philosophy goes from more universal to less universal and toward matter, the two going together; likewise political philosophy descends to classes of the city to get the particular kinds of government.
• Return to “tyrant custom”: men who jump into the later parts of natural science are so toward matter that it seems the only reality. The eight books of Natural Hearing and the three about the soul are the threshold of wisdom; Natural Hearing ends at the unmoved mover, De Anima goes from sense (Book Two) to understanding (Book Three), both a little toward the immaterial, which is how one discovers there is something immaterial. Going on down through the universe, generation and corruption, the lost books, minerals, is “deeper and deeper into matter”; hence great physicists he admires tend to be agnostics or atheists.
• Student: academic Thomists who deny natural philosophy must precede metaphysics aren’t materialists. He grants it (“they don’t like Gilson”) but points to the difficulty.

5. Kasurik, Dionne, De Koninck: what prepares for wisdom (“purificat oculum mentis”) #

Point: natural philosophy prepares for wisdom in its propositions, logic in its mode.

• Story: Kasurik objected to Dionne’s claim that logic prepares for wisdom more than natural philosophy, since natural philosophy shows there is an unmoved mover and immaterial substances, and Aristotle says in the sixth book of wisdom that if there are no immaterial substances natural philosophy is wisdom. Dionne’s reply: “we’re not talking about the propositions, we’re talking about the mode”; logic defines without matter and so is more like wisdom; the approach to being through the figures of predication is led in by logic. He saw at once Kasurik had missed the point.
• Proclus (in Heath’s notes): mathematics purificat oculum mentis; Dionne: true, but logic even more, being more immaterial than geometry.
• In Kasurik’s defence: Dionne said everyone else stood where they had before, but Kasurik was always advancing. Also: De Koninck answered his early questions “very carefully, fully.”

6. Translating dunamis (“the first meaning of dunamis or ability”) #

Point: “ability” is the best English, because it carries over from active to passive sense as Greek does.

• “Power” sticks on the first sense (ability to act upon another); “potency” leans to the passive (matter) yet “potent/impotent” to the active. “Able” carries over.
• Berkus in the ring with Cassius Clay: only Clay has ability, yet Berkus is beatable, breakable, bustable: “able” by a different kind of ability. Paper is burnable by a different ability than the fire has. A great pianist has ability; the piano is playable (not if a key sticks), an ability to be acted upon that refers back to the pianist’s. The other senses involve a ratio back to the active ability.

7. Setting aside the homonymous senses: equivocal by chance and by reason (“let those be set aside”) #

Point: Aristotle keeps only the senses said toward one form; Thomas calls these “by analogy.”

• “Equivocal” in general: has many meanings. Divided: by chance (no reason for the shared name: Hillary the visitor and Hillary Clinton) vs. by reason (some order among the meanings).
• General rule: when a word is said of two things and one adds nothing noteworthy to the common meaning, that one keeps the common name; the other gets a new name. Example: episteme vs. sophia (scientia vs. sapientia), two virtues of reason in the Ethics, yet in the book on sophia Aristotle calls sophia an episteme: knowledge of all things through the very first causes adds to knowledge through causes, so it gets the new name. So “equivocal by chance” keeps the name “equivocal,” and Thomas gives “equivocal by reason” the name “analogous”; hence in Thomas “equivocal and analogous,” though analogous is equivocal in the broad sense.
• His caution: “analogous” originally means proportional, only one kind of name equivocal by reason; Thomas uses it for all; there is “a certain danger in that,” so he prefers “name equivocal by reason.” Already two kinds met: being said of quantity by ratio to substance; “equivocal” both opposed to and including analogous. He promises his own division of such names before the fifth reading.
• Senses excluded here: the purely homonymous, and those by likeness, almost metaphorical, as in geometry (“to the second power”).

8. The senses of ability given by Aristotle (“a beginning of change in another as other”) #

Point: the senses kept are all said toward one first sense, whose definition is archē metabolēs, beginning (source, that from which) of change in another as other.

1. Ability to move or act upon another as other. Textual note: his Greek reads “in another or as other”; Thomas’s text, which they take, reads “in another as other.”
2. Ability to undergo (pathein), in the one undergoing, a source of being changed by another as other; refers back to (1).
3. The hexis of not undergoing from another, especially toward the worse and corruption, by a changing beginning: durable things resist being changed; refers back to (1).

• Student: why is the third called a hexis? He: hexis often means form, opposed to matter whereby you undergo; De Anima III calls the active understanding a hexis, and Thomas has to explain it is not habit (species of quality) but hexis as opposed to matter and privation. So the third is form or act, contrasted with the second, which is based on matter. Thomas’s texts (to come) say the third goes with the first: an impeded ability to move others is not really the ability; one must resist what would stop one’s acting.
• Line 15: in all these definitions is the definition of the first ability. These two (active and passive) are “the two most important meanings here, perhaps.”
• Further distinction: ability to do a thing in any way whatever vs. only if one can do it well (Warren Murray: “when are you going to learn to speak French?”; a man who can do a few things on the piano is not “able to play”; wood burnable only when dry, smoky otherwise). A different kind of distinction from the first three, applicable to each; doing well includes doing, so all link back to the first sense.

9. One ability or two; nothing undergoes itself (“nothing undergoes itself from itself”) #

Point: acting upon and undergoing are in a way one ability, in a way two.

• One, because the ability to undergo is the ability to be acted upon by the other; two, because one is in the mover or maker, the other in the thing moved (line 27); consequence, line 28 (sum pephuken): nothing undergoes itself from itself.
• poiein/paschein, actio/passio, best in “the superior language of English”: act upon and undergo. Nephew Thomas knocked over what his uncle built in contempt, but once the tower stood taller than him, admired it and left it alone: sensing it could come down on him, act upon him. The one acting is above, the one undergoing under (hammering into a ceiling is tiring). Not necessarily spatial, and “not the most profound reason,” but concrete: you cannot be above and under yourself.
• Aside: he translates the last two categories as to act upon and to undergo (or be acted upon).

10. Inability and the senses of lack (“the full meaning of lack”) #

Point: the many senses of “lack” (needed for inability) are equivocal by reason; see the full meaning and the lesser ones drop out an element.

• Full meaning: not having what you are able to have, when able, and when you should. Dog before it can see: “blind” not in the full sense; the table “blind”: a very loose sense, strictly not blind at all.
• Parallel from logic: Porphyry’s property has three elements (one species only, every member, always): half of four is a property of two. “Less than ten” drops “only”; “geometer” of man drops “every” and “always”; still properties, not by chance.
• Marriage: “the stable union of a man and woman by mutual choice for the sake of children,” all four causes (form, parts as matter, mover, end). Unstable marriages, marriages without intending children, the infertile old: marriage in lesser senses; without a man and woman it would be purely equivocal, “a faith postulate.”
• “So that’s the first reading of Book Nine.”

His words #

• wisdom; his name for the Metaphysics, “the fourteen books of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics]
• Natural Hearing; [ed.: Physics]
• book about places; [ed.: Topics]
• distinction of kinds vs. distinction of senses; two kinds of distinction that coincide only at the most universal level
• causa causarum; the end, as cause of the causality of the other causes
• ability; his rendering of dunamis [ed.: potency/power], chosen because “able” carries over to the passive sense
• act, deed; energeia
• beginning; archē, a source, that from which something proceeds [ed.: principle]
• equivocal by chance vs. equivocal by reason; the latter has an order among the meanings; Thomas’s “analogous”
• hexis; here form or act, opposed to matter and privation, not “habit” the species of quality
• act upon, undergo; poiein/paschein, actio/passio [ed.: action and passion]
• lack; full meaning: not having what one is able to have, when able, and when one should [ed.: privation]
• property (Porphyry); to one species only, to every member, always

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (Theta) ch. 1, proemium and first reading of Thomas (lines 15, 27, 28 cited); alternate Greek reading “in another or as other” vs. Thomas’s “in another as other”

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I (survey of predecessors testing the four causes)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (substance the first meaning of being); VII-VIII (material substance); V (senses of cause, of being, of ability); VI (if no immaterial substances, natural philosophy is wisdom)
• Aristotle, Categories; Topics (the ten categories enumerated)
• Thomas, commentary on Physics III and Metaphysics V (the ten categories unfolded)
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (God the cause of distinction and order; Anaxagoras)
• Aristotle, De Anima III (active understanding as hexis, with Thomas’s comment)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (episteme vs sophia)
• Euclid (kinds of quadrilateral); Porphyry (property); Proclus, in Heath’s notes, “purificat oculum mentis”
• Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (“things in motion sooner catch the eye”); Shakespeare on tyrant custom
• handout: “Note for Word Cause,” p. 1 (flagged by text-matching; he speaks of the word cause but does not name the handout)

His questions #

• Are square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid different senses of the word quadrilateral? No, different kinds; the word has exactly one meaning.
• Is “cause” said of matter, form, mover and end with the same meaning? No; the four are both kinds of cause and the basic four senses of the word.
• How would you know that? Student: by trying to define cause; he leaves it aside for today.
• Which ability does Aristotle treat first, and why is it not the most useful? The ability in reference to motion, first known to us; the universal sense needed for separated substances and God comes in the second part.
• Does natural philosophy or logic prepare more for wisdom? Natural philosophy in its propositions (immaterial substances), logic in its mode (Dionne).
• Is Berkus’s being breakable an ability? Yes, but a passive ability referring back to Clay’s active ability.
• Why does he call the third sense a hexis? Because hexis means form, opposed to the matter by which one undergoes.
• Is acting upon and undergoing one ability or two? One by their order together; two because one is in the mover, the other in the moved; nothing undergoes itself.
• Is “less than ten” a property of two? Not in the full sense (not “only”), but a lesser sense, not by chance.
• How many causes are in the definition of marriage? All four; deficient marriages are marriage in a lesser sense.