Prior and Posterior: The Order of Thomas's Proofs, and Aristotle's Physics on Reason's Look Before and After

Orientation #

He says the priority of act to potency will be treated in “the third part of the book,” “the day after tomorrow”; the discussion of the senses of before refers back to what he “did to the students earlier in the course” (chief good of man). Verified sources: the handout “A Note on Practical Philosophy” (p. 10) was read from for about 19 minutes, and DHB Vol. III p. 1214 was matched. The previous class treated Thomas’s threefold division of act, the next the distinction of substantial and accidental form.

The class, in order #

1. Two orders, two sets of middle terms: the Summas compared (“what you can see better in this order”) #

Point: asked whether hule or materia is the better word, he refuses to rank at first and gives, as model, his comparison of the two Summas on God’s attributes: “because the order is different, your middle terms can be different.”

• Natural philosophy serves the via negativa: negating the general is closer to God than negating the particular (God has no parts vs. God is not two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen).
• Syllogism available in the Summa Theologiae order: (1) whatever changes is composed (Physics I, “in a very convincing way”); (2) God is not composed (shown first in ST); therefore God does not change — second figure. In the Summa Contra Gentiles God is shown unchanging before simple, so this route is closed; but its motion arguments are “so strong and more fully developed” that God’s being unchanging, eternal and pure act (a whole chapter) comes out at once, whereas in ST pure act is “kind of stuck” in the article on simplicity.
• Infinity and unity: ST shows infinite before one, so one can syllogize: no two infinities, “nothing by which they would differ.” SCG shows one before infinite, so it cannot; but it can do what ST cannot: since God is already simple (not infinite as continuous quantity) and one (not infinite as discrete quantity), the SCG chapter on infinity first “completely” removes quantitative infinity from the student’s mind — the Scotist’s “what the hell are you saying,” since infinite first refers to quantity.
• Aristotle takes infinite as imperfect and quantitative (Physics III; against Parmenides and Melissus: finite or infinite, being would have quantity and so not be altogether one). Christians saying infinitus, immensus of God use the word “in a quite different way.” Conclusion: “you can do something in one order you can’t do in the other, and vice versa”; to call one simply better would be presumptuous.

2. Hule vs. materia: what is good in each (“materia from mater”) #

Point: each word has its excellence; “you can’t really say what’s better if you don’t see what’s good about each” (Warren Murray on fiction: see what a man finds good in it before you put it in its place).

• Hule: concrete origin in human art — wood, “almost like we call lumber” (De Koninck), extended to matter because wood is what we make statues from; Aristotle’s examples of matter are from artificial things because they are more known to us.
• Materia from mater: links matter to nature, since mater is also the source of “nature” (birth). The first meaning of nature is matter, though form is eventually shown to be more nature; “Mother Earth does it very well.” Aside: he closes with “C’est tout” — his row of words has run out.

3. Distinction before order; in vino veritas (“you make distinctions before you can order”) #

Point: a student asks about act’s priority to potency; deferred to “the third part,” but he states the rule: you must see that this is not that before you can see that this is before that.

• Kierkegaard’s In Vino Veritas (his Symposium): men speak of woman only once they feel the wine, each from a different point of view (married man, student, tailor who rules the world through fashion, seducer distinguishing bait from hook); Niels Bohr had physicists read it for complementarity. Line that sticks: men became poets and saints for the woman they did not get (Dante and Beatrice).
• Student: does in vino veritas mean more than loosening the tongue? Answer built with the class: wine tells the truth about a man’s palate; Samuel Johnson — the man who does not think about what he eats is not apt to think about anything else. Appreciating wine in moderation is “starting a little bit on the contemplative life,” though still in the line of food.
• His scheme of education as a series of locked rooms: dinner and wine → Mozart and Titian → Homer, Shakespeare, Sophocles (“the three greatest”) → Euclid and philosophy → wisdom → theology; those who fail a room are sent back. Basis: “the beginnings are in desire”; music is very natural, more natural than drama (Politics), and “man is by nature the most imitative of the animals,” so fiction before Euclid. Student: children get music before wine; he grants nurture matters but love of good music is “quasi-natural,” corrupted only by something. Asides: liquor chocolates from Italy and his friend Jim Franzak; Warren Murray’s craving for candy when off the bottle; the monastery candy box “will bring you happiness”; scheduling of the evening visit.

4. Shakespeare’s definition of reason and the third sense of before (“looking before and after”) #

Point: seeing how universally Aristotle’s laying out of before and after matters convinced him Shakespeare “hit the nail on the head”: reason is “the ability for large discourse, looking before and after”; this is the key to reaching the first cause (SCG ch. 16, six arguments that God is pure act).

• Student: is the proemium the best or the most known example of order in speech? Answer: the third sense takes the before and after of the discourse of reason, broadly; “forward” [foreword] and proemium both carry “before.” Against students who say “the third sense is order”: every sense is of order, since order means before and after; Aristotle does not name the third sense, but the examples show it.
• Why reason: reason intrinsically has a before and after in its knowing; sensing does not (no before and after in “my seeing you,” though sensing comes before memory, which is a different thing).
• Text read (English translation): “In the third place the term prior is used with reference to any order, as in the case of science and of oratory”: in geometry elements before propositions; in reading and writing letters before syllables; in speeches the exordium (proemium) before the narrative. His comment: one liberal art from the quadrivium, one from the trivium (“this stuff is trivial, we all know it”), contrasted with speeches — rhetoric dominated the ancient world (Augustine’s vanity; Jerome asked “Ciceronian or Christian?”; the Sophists all taught it); Aristotle calls rhetoric an offshoot (paraphues) of logic and political studies; its power in courts and assemblies.
• Order in speech to a hostile audience: Mark Antony after Brutus; Gorgias (quoted in the Rhetoric): kill the opponent’s seriousness with jesting, his jesting with seriousness — Lincoln (“if I had another face, would I wear this one?”), Reagan on Mondale’s “youth and inexperience”; Dirksen nominating Taft.
• Geometry as most people’s first experience of order (student: because distinctions are so clear — yes: definitions, postulates, axioms, theorems in sequence); cousin Donald’s first experience of order was a logic course; Greek grammar likewise. Aside: Nixon — “understanding may not bring peace, but misunderstanding could bring war.”

5. Discourse is necessary to see before and after: the goods of man (“by a discourse… we come to see a before and after”) #

Point: Shakespeare’s definition also says a discourse is needed to see before and after; shown by how the order among human goods is reached only by reasoning.

• Chief good of man better than the beast’s (the fourth sense of before): if man’s chief good is no more than the beast’s, man is no more than a beast; but man is more; therefore… — reached through a proportion, alternating it, an extended statement, then a syllogism.
• Socrates in the Apology examines the Athenians on which goods are better. His own procedure: (1) the end is always better than what is for the end; (2) induction that outside goods are for inside goods (feet for shoes or shoes for feet? you for your books? for your clothes? — else “a mannequin in the department store”); so the bronze prize to outside goods; (3) goods of soul vs. body: which are more godlike (soul; God is better than us) and which more beastlike (body); or from the end of man, which involves reason, the goods of the soul being those of reason.
• Thomas on original justice: highest powers subject to God, lower to higher, outside things to us; lost, reversed, regained through the three theological virtues; Augustine: tranquility of order is peace — “we philosophers don’t know about that though.”

6. The distinction and the order between higher and lower belong to the higher (“always belongs to the higher”) #

Point: the principle he tries to inculcate, shown inductively.

• Senses/imagination vs. reason: only reason can see the distinction (as Aristotle does in the Dialectic), hence only reason decides the order.
• Political rhetoric vs. political philosophy (Plato’s main aim): the philosopher distinguishes; rhetoric (persuasion) and the military art (force) are his tools — “some people I’m going to persuade; terrorists I’m going to destroy.”
• Mathematics vs. natural philosophy: natural, which is also the criterion for using mathematics on natural things. Wisdom vs. both: the wise man.
• First philosophy vs. revealed theology: theology, which shares God’s knowledge. Moderns who rejected it can no longer distinguish — Feuerbach on the Incarnation; “they’re up the creek.”
• Knowledge in words vs. in symbols and equations: can an equation say what an equation is? No; words can say what words are, so science “can’t know itself,” and the distinction belongs to knowledge in words — a sign this is spiritual knowledge.
• Student: was Thomas the first to distinguish philosophy from theology? — He does it in theology, not in philosophy. Student: does the higher distinguish the two beneath it (metaphysics distinguishing mathematics and natural science)? Answer: in Physics II Aristotle distinguishes only natural philosophy from mathematics, not from wisdom; in the sixth book (of the Metaphysics, inferred) wisdom is distinguished from both; Thomas in his proemium to the Physics may distinguish all three, “standing back as a wise man,” which Aristotle will not do in the Physics.
• Plato, Republic X: poets readmitted only if they defend themselves by reason, not poetry — you cannot say by metaphor what a metaphor is. Thomas on figurative speech: the speaker’s meaning is not the meaning of his words, but connected; in metaphor by likeness (“you’re a rat”), in irony by opposites (commentary on St Paul, who uses irony): “what a fine example of a college student” to one drunk under the table; the James Bond audience’s “nice guy.”
• Hamlet says what a play is both metaphorically (a mirror; “a dream of passion”) and properly (a likeness or imitation; a work of the imagination): “strange guy, that Shakespeare.”

7. Shakespeare’s usefulness, and what tragedy and music are defined by (“which was to please”) #

Point: Shakespeare is more useful in philosophy than any other poet, though that was not his purpose — like the wooden chair, made to sit on yet the best example of the four causes; he wrote to make a living.

• Aristotle defines tragedy by the catharsis of pity and fear, i.e. the good of the emotions — not, as Socrates calls his method, a catharsis of reason. Contrast: demonstration is defined as a syllogism making us know the cause, i.e. by the good of reason. If plays were for learning, tragedy would be defined by that end (Othello “to make known the danger of jealousy”). The order of a plot moves emotions, unlike the order of a syllogism, which makes a statement known. Student: comedy as species — yes, a catharsis of joy, mirth, hope, purging melancholy.
• Fiction’s ranking: good of the emotions first (hence the definition), good of the imagination second, good of reason third. Music: good of the emotions, then of the ear, least of reason. Student objection: why not hearing first? — hearing is the way through which the emotions are reached, not the end (“you rat” gets at your emotions through your ears). Student’s parallel: eating defined by health, socializing secondary — accepted.
• Tempest epilogue quoted: his project “was to please” — emotions and imagination, not primarily reason.
• Final student question: is it the good of the emotions or their pleasure, since pleasure and good are not the same (against Mill)? — left open; recording ends.

His words #

• via negativa — negating the general (no parts) is closer to God than negating the particular.
• second figure — the syllogism “whatever changes is composed; God is not composed; so God does not change.”
• pure act — what SCG ch. 16 makes explicit; the term he ties to “looking before and after.”
• immensus — “immeasurable”; the Christian use of infinite is not the quantitative one.
• hule — Greek for matter, from wood/lumber; materia from mater, tied to nature.
• “Natural Hearing” — Aristotle’s Physics [ed.: Physics].
• in vino veritas — wine loosens the tongue; also tells the truth about a man’s palate.
• third sense of before — before and after in the order of the discourse of reason; fourth sense — the better.
• proemium / exordium / “forward” — what paves the way; the word itself says “before.”
• paraphues — rhetoric as offshoot of logic and political studies [ed.: paraphues, Rhetoric I].
• discourse of reason — Shakespeare’s “large discourse”; reasoning as looking before and after.
• original justice; tranquility of order — Thomas and Augustine, marked as beyond philosophy.
• figurative speech — the speaker’s meaning is not his words’ meaning; metaphor by likeness, irony by opposites.
• catharsis of emotions vs. catharsis of reason — Aristotle’s tragedy vs. Socrates’ method.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Categories 12, the third sense of prior (“with reference to any order, as in science and oratory”; geometry, alphabet, exordium) (inferred).
• Shakespeare, Hamlet: “large discourse, looking before and after”; The Tempest epilogue, “which was to please.”
• Berquist handout, “A Note on Practical Philosophy”, p. 10 (verified source; the passage on distinction and order belonging to the higher, probably).

Mentioned

• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles ch. 16 (God pure act, six arguments); chapter on God’s infinity; Summa Theologiae I, order of simplicity, unchangeableness, infinity, unity; Thomas on original justice; commentary on St Paul (metaphor vs. irony); proemium to the Physics.
• Aristotle, Physics I (what changes is composed), II (natural vs. mathematical), III (infinite); Parmenides and Melissus; Metaphysics VI (inferred); Poetics; Rhetoric (Gorgias); Politics (music); “the Dialectic” (senses vs. reason).
• Plato, Symposium, Apology, Republic X; Kierkegaard, In Vino Veritas; Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Mark Antony), Othello; Augustine, Confessions (inferred); Feuerbach; J. S. Mill.
• DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 1214 (verified source).

His questions #

• Which is the better word, hule or materia? Neither simply; hule has the concrete artificial origin, materia links matter to nature through mater.
• Can you show God unchanging from his simplicity in the Summa Contra Gentiles? No — the order is reversed there; but SCG can eliminate quantitative infinity, which ST cannot.
• Does in vino veritas mean more than loosening the tongue? Wine tells the truth about the palate; a man who does not think about what he drinks is not apt to think about anything else.
• Why does Aristotle take the before and after of reason as the most known in our knowing? Reason intrinsically has a before and after in its knowing; sensing does not.
• Whom does the distinction between senses and reason belong to? Reason; and so the order too — the distinction and order always belong to the higher.
• Can you write an equation that tells you what an equation is? No; so knowledge in words distinguishes the two, and science cannot know itself.
• Does the higher distinguish the two beneath it? Not in Aristotle’s Physics; wisdom does so in the sixth book, and Thomas may in his proemium.
• What does Aristotle define tragedy by — reason, imagination, or emotions? By the catharsis of pity and fear: the good of the emotions.
• Why are emotions first and hearing second in music? Hearing is the way through to the emotions, not the end.
• Is it the good of the emotions or their pleasure? left open