When Is a Thing Truly in Ability? Proximate Matter and 'One Step Away'

Orientation #

He refers back to “yesterday” (a student thought he had said Aristotle agrees with Plato that good is more universal than being; he corrects this) and to talking “the other day” about the distinction between nature, reason and will, and about Karl Marx. He announces that the seventh reading will be done this afternoon, because a student has to leave tomorrow; it contains “one of the key distinctions in arriving at the first cause.” The previous class treated substantial and accidental form and the analogy of form/matter with existence/essence; the next continues with denomination from proximate matter and the order of the acts of reason.

The class, in order #

1. Student question: is good more universal than being? (“I said that Dionysius speaks this way”) #

Point: he did not say Aristotle agrees with Plato; he said Dionysius speaks that way and Thomas to some extent defends it.

• Thomas’s defence: matter (ability of that sort) does not exist simply, since it does not actually exist; but ability is ordered to act, or to form, which is good; so good “extends down to” matter, which the Platonists especially call not-being. Hence good seems more universal.
• His reservation: matter does come under being in some way, as being in ability; so he does not think Thomas wants to maintain it “too strictly,” but he keeps reverence for Dionysius (thought the disciple of St Paul; Thomas speaks of his inferiority to Dionysius even more than to Aristotle). Student asks whether this is at “1806”; he does not have it with him.

2. The plan of the sixth reading (“When is the thing inability, and when not”) #

Point: Aristotle’s first sentence sets the question, and the two parts of chapter seven answer it in the thing and then in the way we speak.

• First part: when something really is in ability to something; he hints it is not just any time. Old physical science: is earth in ability man? Or must earth become something else, e.g. seed—and perhaps not even then? From seed to man there are a number of generations; only after the last is there something really able to become a man and receive the human soul.
• Second part: the denominative way of speaking that corresponds to this: the table is not wood but wooden. As a “footnote,” he compares it with denomination in substance and accident: I am not health but healthy, not color but colored, not music but a musician; why we use the denominative for both matter and accidents “tells you something.”

3. The medical example and the general principle (“when there’s nothing more that has to be changed”) #

Point: strictly speaking, a thing is able to be X only when it is one step away.

• Aristotle uses healing “by chance,” which Thomas explains as a loose use: nature does not act by chance for health, but to the man using the medical art, being healed without it looks like chance. Aside: in Natural Hearing Book II Aristotle defends chance against those who say it is just a name for ignorance, yet here uses it somewhat as a name for our ignorance.
• Argument: (1) to be healed, nature (or art) has to do many things; (2) you are able to be healed only when nothing more has to be changed, transformed or altered beforehand; (3) so when only one step remains—Thomas states this more clearly than Aristotle—you are strictly able to be healed.
• Greek read from the text: hotan boulēthentos gignētai … [rest unclear in recording]—“when, wishing, it comes about, nothing outside preventing”; and, for nature as a cause within the thing healed, nothing within preventing.
• Art: “I’ve got to do this to you, and then that, and then that”—you are not able to be healthy by my art until those are done.

4. Geometry: when are you able to know a theorem? (“you might use A to prove B”) #

Point: the same principle holds for reasoned-out knowledge.

• To know how to find the side of a square equal to an oblong (Euclid II.14), you must know Proposition 5 of Book II and the Pythagorean theorem; before those you are not really able to know it.
• Chain: A proves B, B proves C, C proves D; you are able to know D strictly when you know C; knowing only A you are not yet—“maybe the seed isn’t yet man.”

5. The house, and the proportionate matter for the soul (“only when the matter is one step away”) #

Point: the trees outside are not a house in ability; trees must be felled and cut into boards, clay made into bricks, before one can make a house; only matter one step from the form of house is able to be a house.

• Student: is this why Thomas says the proportionate matter for the human soul is not the early stages? Yes, following Aristotle: first something like a plant soul (not a primitive plant soul but “something on the way”), replaced by the animal one, and then the body is only one step from receiving the human soul.
• Text: “nothing that ought to be generative has to come about beforehand, or be taken away or changed—then it is in ability a house,” and likewise in all things where the beginning of the generation is outside (the things of art, as with the medical art).

6. Newborn girl, prerequisites, and the strict vs. loose sense of “able” (“Is she able to be a mother”) #

Point: the strict sense of “able” is narrower than ordinary speech, but ordinary speech uses it too.

• A newborn girl: not able to be a mother, because she must first be changed herself; once one step away, she is. Same for a boy and fatherhood: “able” in some loose sense, “not in the strictest or full sense.”
• Student pushes: then no one is able to be wise except one step away from being wise—and if I don’t know natural philosophy I’m not able to know Metaphysics? “Precisely.” Happy? “a further thing… Maybe not even then yet, as Aristotle says.” Compared to an ape a man is able to be wise, but in a loose sense: “able to change so that he’s able.”
• Prerequisites: a student registering for solid geometry without plane geometry—“you’re not able to learn solid geometry”; that is the strict sense in common speech. Student: so we usually speak loosely? He grants we often do (“man’s able to be happy”), but we also speak strictly (“a boy can’t be a father”; prerequisites). Form of the argument: can’t know that without this; you don’t know this; therefore not able to know that.
• Is one ever one step from wisdom? “Presumptuous to say,” but there are many things in wisdom: aiming at first causes, you must first know act and ability, the kinds of causes; as in Euclid, when you know all the preceding theorems (and haven’t forgotten them) and the axioms, you don’t yet know the next theorem but are able to. Pythagorean theorem may require some 46 theorems (“I haven’t checked”); this gives insight into why Euclid orders things as he does—the amazing thing is seeing you become able to know something once you know other things.
• Generalised: every reasoned-out knowledge is like this, not only natural philosophy and mathematics. Example: the Categories are about genera, not species; to know that you must know genus, species, difference, proprium, accident—Porphyry’s teaching in the proemium of the Isagoge, written to a friend to understand the categories and useful also for definition and division. Porphyry says nothing not in Aristotle but “brings them together in a nice way for us.” Until you know that you are not able to learn the Categories (and other things are needed too).
• Aside: the math professor at the faculty dining room explaining something to an English professor, needing to explain thing before thing: “Are you sorry you asked?”

7. Simply vs. not simply, and the fallacy that corresponds (“Do you know my brother Mark”) #

Point (prompted by a student: can you have wisdom imperfectly at the end of the Physics, knowing something of the first cause?): yes, and this rests on a distinction found in every part of philosophy—what is so simply vs. what is so in some imperfect way—with a common mistake corresponding to it.

• The two mistakes outside of words: (1) from the accidental: “Do you know who’s at the door?” “No.” It is your mother—“don’t you even know your mother?” (2) from mixing up what is so simply with what is so in some way: “Do you know my brother Mark?” “No.” “Do you know what a man is, what a brother is?” “Yes.” “So you know him.” In knowing man and brother she knows every man and brother in some way, not simply.
• Meno: after Socrates shows Meno doesn’t know what virtue is and proposes to seek it, Meno asks how one can look for what one doesn’t know—the same mistake: you must know in some way what you seek; if you knew it simply there’d be no need to seek. Concrete form: the student who asks a question knows what he’s looking for (else he needn’t ask) and doesn’t (else how help him?).
• Socrates’ reply (preexistence of the soul; the slave boy who never studied geometry, from whose answers the doubling of the square comes; “so he must have known it already”) makes the same kind of mistake in different matter: coming to a new theorem by putting together what you know is being able to know it, not actually knowing it. He assumes Plato somewhat knows what he is doing.
• “you’re making this mistake every day of your life”: doing something bad because it’s good in some way, or not doing a good because it’s bad in some way. Socrates’ mistake corresponds to not distinguishing act and ability, “because to be in act is to be simply.”

8. Being simply and being in some way; preview of the seventh reading (“if you leave this room you will cease to be”) #

Point: the distinction is seen in the two main distinctions of being.

• “If you leave this room you will cease to be” sounds like a threat; the professor only meant cease to be in the room. Coming into the room you did not come to be, but came to be in this room.
• Substance is being simply, accident being only in some respect; act is being simply, ability being only in some respect.
• Seventh reading (this afternoon): those who think the first cause is matter—“most people”—are mistaken by mixing up simply and not simply; it is key to arriving at the first cause.
• Every mistake comes at least in part from not seeing or misunderstanding a distinction. Recalled: nature/reason/will, which the moderns cut off from each other, not seeing the distinction is like man/animal or two/three—one somewhat contains what the other has, “but something more.”
• Some distinctions and mistakes are common to every part of philosophy and are studied in the Sophistical Refutations (senses of a word; as-such vs. accidental; simply vs. not simply), unlike mistakes proper to one science. Marx: making perfects the maker as man’s ultimate perfection—the mistake of the accidental, which “deceives even the wise”; Plato in Natural Hearing Book I, mixing up matter and lack of form, makes it too. Many examples in modern philosophers.
• Schedule asides: an exception to every rule—lunch as the break between second and third part; “continuous is infinitely divisible.”

9. Wisdom simply: God vs. man, first philosophy vs. the other sciences (“only God is wise simply”) #

Point: “wise simply” shifts with what you compare.

• First of the six attributes of the wise man: he knows all things. Aristotle: not all in particular (that would be simply), but in some way, by knowing universals said of all—like the girl knowing his brother. So if to be wise is to know all things, only God is wise simply; man is wise in a qualified way.
• Within human knowledge (all the epistēmai, reasoned-out knowledge): natural philosophy is wisdom about natural things, political philosophy about human things—wisdom in a qualified sense; first philosophy, wisdom about all things, is wisdom simply. Compared with God’s wisdom, it is wisdom only in some way. “You have to be very careful with those things.”
• Socrates speaks the same way: wisest man in Greece, yet knows little—wise in a qualified sense compared to other men, not as God is.
• Student: the angel is in between—doesn’t know particulars beforehand but as they come into existence, whereas God knows them even before. He assents.

His words #

• in ability: [ed.: in potency]; strictly, when a thing is one step away from the form.
• denominative way of speaking: “the table is not wood but wooden”; “I am not health but healthy.”
• by chance: Aristotle’s loose use for healing outside the intention of the art; a name reflecting our ignorance.
• Natural Hearing: [ed.: Physics].
• one step away: his phrase for the strict sense of being able; nothing to be added, taken away or changed beforehand.
• reasoned-out knowledge: knowledge where several things must be known before another can be.
• simply / in some way (not simply, in a qualified sense): [ed.: simpliciter / secundum quid]; the distinction found in every part of philosophy.
• mistake from the accidental; mistake from mixing up what is so simply with what is so in some way: the two mistakes “outside of words” [ed.: fallacies extra dictionem].
• to be in act is to be simply; ability is being only in some respect.
• first philosophy: wisdom simply within human knowledge; wisdom in some way beside God’s.
• epistēmē: “all the forms of reasoned-out knowledge.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics ch. 7 (Book IX inferred), Thomas’s sixth reading: opening sentence, the healing-by-chance passage with its Greek, the house passage, “where the beginning of the generation is outside.”
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the same reading (on chance; “one step away”).

Mentioned

• Dionysius on the good as more universal than being; Thomas’s defence of it (student cites “1806”, unconfirmed).
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing Book II (chance) and Book I (against Plato on matter and privation).
• Euclid, Elements II.5, II.14, the Pythagorean theorem.
• Thomas on the proportionate matter of the human soul (no locus given).
• Aristotle, Categories; Porphyry, Isagoge, proemium.
• Plato, Meno (virtue; the slave boy); end of the Physics on the first mover.
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (mistakes outside of words).
• Karl Marx on making as man’s perfection.
• Aristotle on the six attributes of the wise man (Metaphysics I inferred).
• Seventh reading (this afternoon): those who make matter the first cause.

His questions #

• Is earth in ability man, or must it first become something else, e.g. seed—and maybe not even then? Only after the last of several generations is something really able to become a man.
• When are you able to be healed by nature, or by art? When nothing more has to be changed beforehand—one step away.
• Are the trees out there a house in ability? No; they must be chopped and made into boards, clay into bricks.
• Is a newborn baby girl able to be a mother, according to this text? No, she must first be changed herself; once one step away, she is.
• Are we then speaking loosely for the most part when we say man is able to be wise or happy? Often, yes; but prerequisites and “a boy can’t be a father” show the strict sense in common speech.
• Are you ever one step away from wisdom? Presumptuous to say; wisdom has many parts, like geometry, each needing the prior ones.
• Can you have wisdom imperfectly, say at the end of the Physics? Yes—wisdom in some way, not simply.
• Do you know my brother Mark? In some way (knowing man and brother), not simply—the second mistake outside of words.
• When you came into this room, did you come to be? No, you came to be in this room: being simply vs. being in some way.
• Is first philosophy wisdom simply? Within human knowledge yes; compared with God’s wisdom, only in some way.