Shakespeare's Definition of Reason, the Exhortation to Use Reason, and Wisdom

Orientation #

He opens by placing the class: the fifth reading begins the second main part of Book IX (the fifth and sixth readings), where act is treated “in a much more universal way”; but before that he “comes back” to Shakespeare’s definition of reason already introduced, and to the “fourth reading” (prev. lecture) on abilities acquired by use. Verified sources: the handout “Shakespeare’s Exhortation to Use Reason, with a Proemium” p. 2 is read from for about ten minutes; DHB Vol. III (School of Aristotle) p. 1214 is also matched. He ends by saying next time they meet in a new place in the morning. The previous class treated rational vs. non-rational powers in the fourth reading; the next opens on native English vs. Greek/Latin terms and the fifth and sixth readings on how act is known.

The class, in order #

1. Two connected questions about Shakespeare’s definition (“reason is the ability for discourse”) #

Point: the first part of the definition, “ability for discourse,” means the ability to know one thing through knowing another; he asks (a) is it a defect that it omits reason’s ability to know something through itself, and (b) is there a reason for defining reason by the one rather than the other.

• Student: the third act (reasoning) implies the first two; defining by discourse is “more proper” to reason, since “the first two are coming with the angels.”
• His argument: (1) if reason can know one thing through another, it must be able to know something through itself, else it would know one through another without end and know nothing; (2) an ability is defined “through its utmost”; (3) so knowing-through-itself is included, not omitted. Conclusion: the definition is not defective, and there is a reason for it.
• Weightlifting example: defining a man’s ability by lifting 100 lb does not leave out lifting 50 lb; “looking before and after,” if he can lift 100 he can lift 50, and more easily. Likewise reason, able to know one through another, “even more so” knows things through themselves; that is why Thomas sometimes speaks of that knowing as almost inborn — more precisely, “we naturally come to know these things.”
• Senses vs. reason: the senses know something through itself, not one thing through another. Dog-and-tree example (“look to the right of the tree — oh, there’s a dog”): you come to see the dog through seeing the tree, but once your eyes fall on the dog you are not seeing it through the tree — a faint imitation of discourse. Student: seeing through a medium? He: you don’t see the medium; seeing you in a mirror is “some similarity,” not knowing one through another.
• So had Shakespeare defined reason by knowing-through-itself, you would not clearly see its difference from the senses, and you would not see the full power of reason — “that’s not the way to define an ability.”

2. “Large” and “looking before and after” likewise include the lesser (“capable of looking before and after”) #

Point: the same defence applies to the other two parts of the definition.

• “Large discourse” includes the ability for small discourse; defining by small discourse would miss the full ability.
• “Looking before and after” vs. seeing the distinction between ability and act: if you know one is before another you must be able to distinguish them, but not conversely. Example: he can distinguish two students but does not know which is older; to know who is older he must first distinguish them. So the definition is not defective here either, and understanding it fully is seeing that it involves distinguishing.
• What convinced him the definition is as good as it is: “The main witness was Book Nine” — the third part, where Aristotle shows the before and after of act and ability in its many senses and one sees “the universal importance” of each.
• Thomas’s own proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics quotes the proemium of the Metaphysics (“it belongs to the wise man to order”) and gives the reason: wisdom is the highest or greatest perfection of reason, and it is most characteristic of reason to look for order; so wisdom must most of all be a knowledge of order, in more than one sense of before and after.

3. Angelic vs. human knowing; the breadth of “discourse” (“his knowledge is not discursive”) #

Point: a student asks what in the definition sets reason apart from angelic understanding; his answer: angelic knowledge is not discursive.

• The angel does not reason from one thing to another; even knowing God through himself he sees God “as it were in the mirror” — seeing you in a mirror, not reasoning. Thomas’s treatises on the angels and on God’s knowledge both say the knowledge is not discursive.
• Discourse is broader than reasoning (Cajetan and other medieval logicians tend to use discursus as a synonym for reasoning; Shakespeare intends it more broadly). Kinds of knowing one thing through another, in descending fullness: reasoning and defining (the greatest); the axioms (knowing a whole is more than a part through knowing what whole and part are; no square is a circle); names equivocal by reason, where the order in the meanings corresponds to order in our knowing (Monléon and Dionne); counting and calculating — adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, where you know a number you did not know through two you did.
• Thomas compares the syllogism to adding: two numbers give a third, two statements give a third statement. “For the amusement of students” he compares it to sex: two dogs give a dog, two cats a cat, two statements a statement, two numbers a number — reason imitates nature (proemium to logic).
• Student: the angel doesn’t do this because his knowledge starts out perfect? He: yes, his mind is full of forms by his natural knowledge; we start empty and discourse fills us. Aside: his son Marcus asked why we can’t be born knowing everything — “you want to be an angel.”
• Student: do angels lack anything implied by what they know? He: one angel illuminates another, but directly, not as Euclid teaches (“now think about this… ah, nice, Euclid”). Student: more like giving a glass of wine? He: yes — you get the flavour by tasting, not by putting two things together. Angels know particulars through the forms they already have, not by reasoning from them.
• Asides: De Koninck — rub all human intellects together and the result is still inferior to one angelic mind; the soul meeting its guardian angel takes it for God, as St John fell down before the angel in his visions.

4. Why the fourth reading’s examples are from doing (“men of ability”) #

Point: a student notes the distinctions in the fourth reading are made mostly through living things; he answers that they are more known.

• “Ability” (his chosen translation) is probably taken from powerful men, men of ability; you would not naturally call fire “a very capable fire” or a seed “full of ability.” You start with human beings — “is he able to walk yet?”, “Mommy and Daddy are capable of all kinds of things” — and carry the word over to natural things.

5. The exhortation: what reason is, what its use is, five reasons to use it (“chief good and market of his time”) #

Point: “for the sake of completeness” he goes back over the exhortation: it teaches what reason is (the definition), what it is to use reason (an ability is defined by its act, and that act is its use), and five reasons to use it.

• “His chief good and market of his time”: mark = the end aimed at, time = metonym for life; so the end of man is his chief good, “as Aristotle teaches.”
• The first lines rest on a proportion (likeness of ratios), four terms: man, beast, chief good of man, chief good of the beast (given as “to sleep and feed” — “fits my cat pretty good”). Alternate it (“you Euclideans”): as chief good of man is to chief good of beast, so man to beast. Then syllogize: if the chief good of man is no more than the beast’s, man is no more than a beast; but man is more than a beast (put the denier in a cage and he will rave); therefore the antecedent is false. The same rigor as in math: if x:y::a:b and x > y, then a > b, equal then equal, less then less. One could syllogize the other way (man is more, so his good is more), but Shakespeare argues the first way; the next part will then ask what more man’s chief good has — reason.
• Two reasons so far: without reason you fall to the level of the beast; you cannot get your chief good without it.
• “He that made us… gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unused”: two more — God made you for it (you obey His plan), and using reason makes you like God, who is better than you.
• Looking at man himself: the chief good involves reason; and, less explicit, “this above all, to thine own self be true” — man is an animal that has reason, so using it is being true to yourself.
• Tally, “five, is five”: two before man (God: His plan, likeness), one after (beast), two at man himself (chief good, self). Each is compelling; all five “overwhelming.” All in 49 words — his standing challenge to any audience to find an equal exhortation in 50 or even 100 words. “Brevity is a soul of wit,” where wit means wisdom.

6. Wisdom as savory knowledge (“dulce sapere”) #

Point: a digression on Shakespeare’s understanding of wisdom via Thomas’s Adoro te devote.

• Fifth quatrain: “praesta meae menti de te vivere et te illi semper dulce sapere” — to sweetly savor Christ, who is wisdom itself.
• Romeo, about to take his life, as a foolish ship captain running on the rocks: “Come, bitter conduct [conductor], come, unsavory guide” — folly, the opposite of wisdom, is bitter and unsavory, “exactly the opposite” of dulce sapere. “What a mind.”
• Thomas’s etymology of sapientia as sapida scientia, savory knowledge; wine the most savory of things, wisdom the most savory of knowledge, chiefly about truth.
• Asides: he learned the prayer from the Psalterium Romanum his brother Mark gave him; the words were found under old lettering on the baldachino at Nativity Parish.

7. Why Shakespeare in a course on Book IX (“a double connection between wisdom and reason”) #

Point: wisdom is the highest or greatest perfection of reason and is acquired by the use of reason (cf. the start of the fourth reading, abilities acquired by use); one definition of reason tells you both what reason is and what it is to use it — “kill two birds with one stone,” as Aristotle and Shakespeare both like to do.

• From the definition: wisdom must be, most of all, a knowledge of before and after (Thomas’s proemium to the Ethics), to be filled out through the senses of before and after in Categories ch. 12.
• The discourse of the wise man is the largest discourse in “maybe five of those six senses”: most universal; about the best things, ultimately God; reached by a long induction (the fifth reading begins by coming to act by induction); its discoveries apply throughout human thought; largest from its limits, from motion up to God — “almost an infinite distance,” the longest in that sense. Not longest in number of steps, which is no perfection.
• But knowledge, not discourse, is the end: he most of all knows before and after “in the crowning sense,” the cause before the effect — not only the cause but the first cause.
• Left open: does Aristotle or Thomas anywhere put together a definition of reason as well as Shakespeare? He couldn’t have seen the goodness of Shakespeare’s without them as teachers, but knows no such place; Shakespeare may have had their benefit.

8. The exhortation as introduction to ethics (“happiness by virtue specially to be achieved”) #

Point: the exhortation also introduces practical philosophy, since it teaches about the chief good and that one is to live by reason (Aristotle: one who lives by passion is useless for ethics).

• He adds two passages: Taming of the Shrew — the part of philosophy “that treats of happiness by virtue specially to be achieved” (a nutshell of the Nicomachean Ethics); Two Gentlemen of Verona — “as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing… no mean happiness to be constituted in the mean,” with its pun, connecting happiness and virtue.
• For the whole of philosophy it stays “an exhortation to use reason”: one not exhorted by it has no sense in pursuing wisdom. Student: isn’t the Summa Contra Gentiles an exhortation to use reason? He: it, like Aristotle on why wisdom is the best of studies, urges you to pursue wisdom — not the same as an exhortation to use reason. Student presses (Thomas one of the colleagues you upbraid?); he: no, Thomas wants you to use reason.
• The Nicomachean Ethics as a whole served him as an exhortation, but drawn out; Book X (“we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things… make ourselves immortal”; reason small but surpassing in power) he memorized on the back steps, to his businessman father’s impressed puzzlement.

9. The “second definition”: reason’s own object, and why De Anima omits reasoning (“the what it is of a thing sensed or imagined”) #

Point: a student asks what the second definition would be, since he calls Shakespeare’s the first.

• What Shakespeare’s does not bring out: reason’s own object, the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined (De Anima III); that “large” hints at the universal, but the proper object is a later thing to see; and that reason is not a body — essential to deep knowledge of reason.
• Pre-Aristotelian witnesses: Anaxagoras, great fragment on mind (DK 12), mind is unlimited; Heraclitus, you never find the end of the soul in any direction, “so deep is its reason.” Something unlimited is easier to see about reason than its proper object.
• Why “discourse” first: etymologically from running (“let me run through that with you”); “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs”; hence “looking,” which does not imply arriving at seeing.
• Thomas’s major proemium to logic takes the two acts Aristotle gives in De Anima (understanding what a thing is; composition/division, the true or false) and adds reasoning. Why Aristotle omits reasoning there: it is less natural and basic; and human reasoning is so bad, usually reasoning itself into mistakes, that nobody would study it for its own sake out of wonder — only to straighten it out, which is logic. Plato: “an opinion without a reason is an ugly thing.” The study of the soul is among the first and nearly the highest part of natural philosophy, knowledge being better for being about more wonderful things; “to be mistaken is the usual state of the human mind.”
• Closing logistics: tomorrow morning meet in the conference room in the middle part of the building where they stay.

His words #

• ability for discourse; the ability to know one thing through knowing another [ed.: discursive knowledge]
• to know something through itself; the ability presupposed to discourse, “almost inborn” — better, we naturally come to know these things
• ability [ed.: potency]; his translation, taken from “men of ability”; defined by its utmost act, which is also its use
• large discourse; includes small discourse; the wise man’s discourse is the largest
• looking before and after; includes distinguishing; “looking” does not imply having seen
• discursus; Cajetan’s near-synonym for reasoning, but broader for Shakespeare
• names equivocal by reason; a likeness of ratios; order of meanings matches order of knowing
• reason imitates nature; two statements make a statement as two dogs make a dog
• market of his time; mark = end, goal; time = metonym for life
• proportion; likeness of ratios, four terms; alternated and syllogized
• dulce sapere; to sweetly savor
• sapientia as sapida scientia; savory knowledge
• wit; in “brevity is a soul of wit” means wisdom
• kill two birds with one stone; one definition gives what reason is and what its use is
• reason’s own object; the what-it-is of a thing sensed or imagined

Texts #

Read in class

• Shakespeare, Hamlet, the exhortation to use reason (49 words), from the handout “Shakespeare’s Exhortation to Use Reason, with a Proemium,” p. 2 (verified); also “this above all, to thine own self be true”
• Thomas Aquinas, Adoro te devote, fifth quatrain (quoted in Latin)
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, “come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide”
• Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew, on the part of philosophy treating happiness by virtue
• Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, “no mean happiness to be constituted in the mean”
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X, “we must not follow those who advise us, being men…” (recited from memory)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX: fifth reading (beginning of second part; act known by induction), third part (senses of before and after); DHB Vol. III p. 1214 (verified)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics, proemium: it belongs to the wise man to order
• Thomas, Proemium to the commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics
• Thomas, Proemium to logic (major and minor)
• Thomas, treatise on the angels; treatise on God’s knowledge
• Aristotle, Categories ch. 12 (senses of before and after)
• Aristotle, De Anima III (object of reason; two acts of reason; reason not a body); De Anima I opening (study of soul among the first)
• Anaxagoras DK 12; Heraclitus on the soul; Plato, “an opinion without a reason is an ugly thing”
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (student’s suggestion)
• Psalterium Romanum

His questions #

• Is Shakespeare’s definition deficient for not saying reason knows something through itself? No: knowing one through another presupposes knowing something through itself, as lifting 100 lb includes lifting 50.
• Is there a reason to define reason by knowing one thing through another rather than through itself? Yes: an ability is defined by its utmost act, and this marks it off from the senses.
• Do the senses know one thing through another? No; they know things through themselves, the dog-and-tree case being only an imitation.
• Was he right to say “looking before and after” rather than seeing the distinction between ability and act? Yes; knowing before and after includes distinguishing, not conversely.
• What sets reason apart from angelic understanding? The angel’s knowledge is not discursive; his mind is full of forms, ours starts empty.
• What are the four terms of the proportion in the first lines? Man, beast, the chief good of man, the chief good of the beast (to sleep and feed).
• What is the connection between wisdom and reason? Double: wisdom is the highest perfection of reason, and is acquired by using reason.
• What is the Nicomachean Ethics about? Happiness by virtue, specially to be achieved.
• Do Aristotle or Thomas anywhere put together as good a definition of reason as Shakespeare? Left open.
• Why does Aristotle not treat reasoning among the acts of reason in the De Anima? It is less natural, and human reasoning is so defective one studies it only to correct it (logic).