Denominative Speech, Nature's Steps, and the Order of the Acts of Reason

Orientation #

He opens by saying Aristotle “is kind of repeating himself here” on the seed example and “what’s really able to be it” (prev. lecture). Near the end he asks whether to anticipate the “second, third part” of the book or take “a little philosophical excursion” and leave “the beginning of the seventh lectio” for the afternoon; he chooses the excursion. The previous class treated when matter is truly in potency to a form and the denominative manner of speech; the next takes up the third part of Book IX on the priority of act over potency.

The class, in order #

1. Repeating the point: earth, bronze, statue (“must be turned into bronze”) #

Point: the matter that is strictly “able to be” the thing is the matter one step away. Bronze (chalkos) comes from earth; is earth able to be the statue? No: it must be turned into bronze, and then it can be made into the statue.

2. Named from the proximate matter; first matter (“is not said to be earthy”) #

Point: the way of speaking denominatively corresponds to what is really able to be the thing.

• Xylinon (idiomatic Greek, “kind of idiomatic” as Thomas says; he could not find it in his lexicon): a box, chair or table is said to be wooden, not earth or earthy, because earth is the remote matter and wood the proximate matter that “is able to be a table”. Wood may go back to elements, but the table is not denominated from them.
• If you reach a matter not denominated from a previous matter, that is first matter (prote hyle). Heraclitus’s example: earth from water, water from air, air from fire, fire from nothing; so fire is first matter and is not called airy, earthy or wooden.

3. Why the Categories says “how much”, not “quantity” (“posas, how much, and then poyas, how”) #

Point: denominative speaking is why Aristotle first enumerates the categories with denominative words.

1. In Categories ch. 1 Aristotle treats naming denominatively; when he first lists the ten he says substance, then posos (“how much”), poios (“how”), not quantity and quality. Translators who don’t know what they are doing put “quantity, quality”.
2. Reason: the categories are all distinguished by how they are said of individual substances, i.e. denominatively. Said signifying what the substance is: ousia. Said by reason of something in it: how much, how, towards what. Said by reason of something outside it: where, when, and so on.
3. Later, treating quantity or quality in particular (discrete/continuous; disposition, ability, sense qualities, form and figure), the abstract word does no harm, since “virtue or courage” and “virtuous or courageous” have the same relation there. But looking towards substance you must say Socrates is virtuous, courageous; “virtue of Socrates” only figuratively.

4. Line 29: universal vs. subject; substance named from accident (“we say Socrates is wise”) #

Point: two things are not named from something before them, and substance is named denominatively from accidents as the thing is from its proximate matter.

• Distinction: the subject underlying all change (hypokeimenon) vs. the universal (kath’ holou), which also is not named or defined from something before it; the one is a tode ti.
• Of man, body or soul we speak denominatively: not “he is music” (mousike) but musical (mousikon); not whiteness (leukotes) but white; not wisdom but wise; not motion but moving — speaking ekeininon [ed.: the “of-that” naming; ASR “ikinina”].
• Last part of the reading: perhaps it is appropriate that both matter and accidents are said denominatively, since both have something undetermined about them: accidents must be in a substance, matter must be formed into something. So “being in some respect” (secundum quid) is spoken of denominatively both ways.

5. The next number, the next thought, the next step (“one step away from Marchand de Vin sauce”) #

Point: “you have to be one step away before you’re really, in the strictest sense, capable of that.”

• Numbers: is two able to be four? Strictly two is able to be three, three to be four, four to be five.
• De Anima I: thoughts are like numbers; there is always a next thought. With “every B is A” and “every C is B” you are able to know “every C is A”; if “every B is A” is not yet known, you must prove it first and are not yet able.
• Student asks for the art examples again: any art; cooking — grind this, stir these two, heat that; only after all preparatory steps are you capable of the Marchand de Vin sauce (his mother, sister-in-law Dolores and himself in the kitchen). The recipe shows the many steps, and only the last, next step makes you capable.
• Student: this is how current biologists progress, seeing exactly what the next step is (one cell, so many divisions before the next stage of organization). He agrees: “big minds know exactly what is the proximate step.”
• Monsignor Dionne: to see the confusion of the modern mind, look at any college catalog — as if we were the centre of a circle able to go off in any direction and know anything. No: we are not capable of this without knowing that. Relevant to teachers and students: with fewer requirements now, a teacher can no longer suppose what his students have met.

6. Student exchange: substantial forms and prime matter (“nothing would ever come to be”) #

Point: applied to substantial forms, the same order holds, though Aristotle here takes the limitation as a fact of experience rather than explaining it.

• Some think any substantial form can be induced in prime matter “in any” order; no: first matter receives the human soul only after passing through levels of organization, each capable of the next higher.
• Student: is there a first? For the ancients the elements (earth, air, fire, water). Heisenberg said he never thought the finding of level below level would go on forever; Berquist could never believe it either: nothing would ever come to be from an infinity of levels.
• Student: then the subject of a substantial form already has a substantial form? Reply: you must lose the old form, otherwise what comes would be accidental. Thomas in the Summa Contra Gentiles argues at length against a series of substantial forms: only the first would be substantial, the rest accidental; and no unity — “I’d be a tree and a dog and a man.”
• Student: if the former form corrupts, why doesn’t the later form directly form prime matter? Reply: the later form gives everything the previous gave plus more, taking on the role of the lower ones. Number comparison (as Thomas compares figures): three contains two and one, four contains three, two, one, but not as actually distinct, else four would be six.
• Student presses: then why can’t it give all that to prime matter at once? Reply: start from experience, “that’s the way it is”; nature proceeds step by step, which is why art is said to imitate nature; the accidental change in some way causes the substantial change. Compare: no proof of the Pythagorean theorem that supplies all previous demonstrations (though there the actuality of the earlier theorems is retained, “not identical obviously”). No fully formed man from the womb, no fully formed oak from an oak. Two sides: (a) the subject is not capable except one step away; (b) the agent is proportioned to a definite ability — as a teacher cannot show a student the later theorem until he has seen the earlier: “my ability is proportioned to his ability, they’re correlative”; “I don’t take knowledge out of my mind and put it into his head.” “I rest my case.”
• Student: the order of abilities seems to depend on a subject remaining at each step; with prime matter, which “isn’t anything”, why need the order? Reply: that would deny what Aristotle puts forth — that one three or four steps away is not strictly capable, as nature cannot go from two to four without three. Underlying in numbers: insofar as the number is one, something changes by addition. But this goes beyond the text: Aristotle takes the limitation as a matter of experience and then explains what strict ability is.

7. Application to learning: time before eternity (“you have to really know time to know eternity”) #

Point: there are things you must know before you can know others, and neglecting this makes teaching “a charade”.

• Student example: a wet log won’t burn, dried it will.
• De Koninck, teaching time in the fourth book of Natural Hearing, would add as a footnote Boethius’s definition of eternity, showing it involves as many as four negations of what you know about time and the now; so you cannot know God’s eternity without knowing time.
• Divine providence: Thomas was at Naples, apparently the only place in Europe where the Physics could then be got; without the eight books of Natural Hearing early, no Summa Theologiae as we know it. Seminary years of philosophy are perhaps not enough for theology; one must know motion before the unchangeableness of God. Aside: people at the Boston Theological Consortium say they can’t teach the sacraments because they don’t know what philosophy to use — “pretty hopeless.”
• Student aside on generation of living things: growth adds continually, yet at some point it is now the thing — “a quantum leap they’d say today.” He calls it strange but not the topic.

8. Excursion: the three acts of reason (“three acts of reason”) #

Point: the first before-and-after in the acts of looking (not practical) reason is the order of the three acts.

• Thomas, proemium to the Posterior Analytics (which Monsignor Dionne called the proemium to the whole logic) and to the Peri Hermeneias, distinguishes first, second, third acts: understanding what something is (however imperfectly); composition or division (must grasp man and animal before “man is an animal”, man and stone before “man is not a stone”); reasoning (need at least two statements to reason to a third).
• Euclid Book I shows the same order: definitions (what something is), then postulates and axioms (statements presupposing their parts: all right angles are equal; the whole is more than the part), then theorems. The same order is in every part of philosophy but not so nicely laid out: one must know what genus and species are before knowing a genus can be a species, and reason before knowing whether there is a genus that is not a species.
• Student: the need of time to understand some things? That falls under reasoning (and defining), not a further distinction of acts.

9. Guessing before knowing; Book Three of Wisdom (“reason guesses before it knows”) #

Point: a second order: even where knowing is easiest, reason guesses that something is so before it knows it.

1. Isosceles triangle: one guesses the base angles are equal before finding the proof, and would not look for the proof without the guess.
2. A fortiori in natural philosophy, ethics and wisdom, where men make opposite and even contradictory guesses (some: all things possible; some: no possibility at all). This gives rise to dialectic, proceeding from reasonable, probable guesses.
3. Hence Book Three of Wisdom, wholly dialectical, comes before Books Four through Fourteen: roughly, the distinction of guessing and knowing and the order that we guess first; the details (untying contradictions) elaborate this insight. Asked why definitions precede postulates precede theorems, he goes to the first distinction; asked why Book Three precedes, to this one.

• Meno: we cannot know whether virtue can be taught before knowing what virtue is; neither knows, so they can only guess. Socrates guesses it can be taught (virtue is knowledge, knowledge can be taught; backed by: virtue directs to the good, what directs to the good is knowledge) and that it cannot; he cannot rest in the contradiction and looks for the weak point: maybe right opinion directs to the good. Meno: is knowledge any better than a right guess? Fork in the road to Boston or Providence: whether he knows or merely thinks this is the road, he takes it and arrives. The great men of Athens could not teach their sons, so they had right opinion. MacArthur’s Inchon landing (a backup plan if it failed; the right hunch got there); playing the lottery numbers on a hunch. “A beautiful introduction to this thing.”
• Descartes and Mill think guessing never leads to knowing; but even in mathematics one guesses first.

10. Distinction before order; dialectic then determining (“Socrates is not sure”) #

Point: one must see two acts are distinct before one can order them, and the guessing/knowing distinction cannot be denied without being used.

• All these are “before” in the third sense of before. Socrates, who rarely claims to know, says he knows that guessing and knowing differ; anyone objecting “you’re just guessing” admits the distinction, since knowing is being sure, guessing not sure, and nothing is both.
• Thomas commenting on Aristotle almost always says: first proceed dialectically, then determine the truth. In wisdom nearly the whole dialectic is in one book, Book Three; in Natural Hearing it goes piecemeal (dialectic about place, then the truth about place; then time). Reason: the affinity of wisdom and dialectic, seen by Plato, Averroes, Thomas and Aristotle himself.
• Student: a wild guess is not an act of reason? He always distinguishes a reasonable or educated guess from a wild one.

11. Continuous reasoning; thinking about vs. thinking out (“thinking out”) #

Point: a third order: thinking about something before understanding it, and the act between them, thinking out.

• Student offers “faith with a teacher” and “every syllogism leads to a statement”. The latter is part of reasoning: he calls two syllogisms continuous when the conclusion of one is the premise of the next, by likeness to the continuous proportion (4, 6, 9) whose parts have a common boundary; likewise continuous defining (quadrilateral used to define square). An elucidation, not a new distinction. Students also offer meanings of words and Physics I ch. 1 (confused to distinct, universal to special): “in a sense true.”
• Everyone has thought about something without understanding it; the act between is thinking out. When first teaching logic, with “Canon” (inferred: Dionne) having drummed in the eight senses of in and out, he distinguished senses of thinking out by them: thinking out a conclusion (7th sense), a definition (3rd), a division of genus into species (4th), the composing parts of a whole (2nd), the order of things (5th), “and so on”. Dion liked the phrase, could not say it in French, and again remarked on the superiority of English.
• Guessing mostly concerns statements; but in the book about places Aristotle says people don’t reach a definition at once: they guess a part, test by the dialectical places, add another part. So guessing precedes knowing there too, but defining is also thinking out.
• Book Five of Wisdom: Aristotle thinks out the meanings of words equivocal by reason and also their order — two distinct kinds of thinking out. In the text on the eight senses of in and out Aristotle gives the senses but not the order; Thomas, imitating Book Five, thinks out the order, which the more Berquist considered it the more it amazed him. Without both you fall into “the most common mistake of all”, mixing up the senses of a word. He is hesitant which sense of in and out thinking-out-the-senses reduces to; the order is like form and matter, so like the fifth sense.
• Thinking out the senses of “cause” also thinks out the kinds of causes; of “act” and “being”, the kinds. The figures of predication (as Thomas says) correspond to the ways of being: we say “man” of Socrates but not “music”, only “musician”, because of a difference in the way man and music are.
• Book Theta: first part thinks out the definition of ability (another kind of thinking out from Book Five), sees act through proportion, thinks out the distinction of act and ability; the third part will think out the order — “a little bit like Book Five.”
• Senses of “to see”: his mother’s “‘I see,’ said the blind man.” First sense: with the senses (we name as we know, knowing begins in sensing). Students say the second is understanding; he asks “look before and after”: Hamlet — Horatio will not believe without “the sensible and true avouch” of his own eyes; Hamlet sees his father “in my mind’s eye”: imagining/remembering. Sign that imagining is nearer eye-seeing: in a dream we confuse imagining with seeing, never seeing with understanding; yet people mix up imagining with thinking. So three senses ordered sense, imagination, understanding; students who say “understanding” see it comes after but not that it is third.
• The recording ends as he asks whether there is another order in the acts of reason worth mentioning.

His words #

• chalkos: bronze, which comes from earth.
• xylinon: “wooden”, the idiomatic denominative from the proximate matter.
• proximate / next matter vs. remote matter: the matter one step away, “really able to be it”, vs. the earlier matter.
• first matter, prote hyle: matter not denominated from any previous matter.
• posos, poios: “how much”, “how” [ed.: the denominative forms; quantity, quality are the abstract].
• ousia: substance, said of a thing signifying what it is.
• kath’ holou, hypokeimenon, tode ti: the universal, the underlying subject, a “this something”.
• mousikon, leukotes: musical; whiteness.
• ekeininon [ASR “ikinina”]: the “of-that” way of naming a substance from its accident.
• secundum quid: being in some respect (accident, matter), spoken denominatively.
• ability: his word for potency [ed.: potency].
• Natural Hearing: the Physics [ed.: Physics].
• Wisdom: the Metaphysics [ed.: Metaphysics].
• looking reason: speculative reason [ed.: speculative/theoretical].
• guessing vs. knowing; reasonable/educated guess vs. wild guess.
• the book about places: the Topics [ed.: Topics].
• continuous reasoning / continuous defining: syllogisms or definitions where the end of one is the beginning of the next, by likeness to continuous proportion.
• thinking out: the act from thinking about something to understanding it; several senses matched to the eight senses of in and out.
• equivocal by reason: words with ordered senses [ed.: analogous].
• the third sense of before: the sense in which all these orders are “before”.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (Theta) 7 (inferred): seed, bronze statue, xylinon, Heraclitus’s fire; “line 29” on subject and universal; substance named from accidents; matter and accidents undetermined. Mentioned
• Aristotle, Categories ch. 1 (denominatives; first list of the ten categories).
• Thomas Aquinas, proemium to the Posterior Analytics; proemium to the Peri Hermeneias (three acts of reason).
• Euclid, Elements Book I (definitions, postulates, axioms, theorems); continuous proportion; Pythagorean theorem.
• Aristotle, De Anima Book I (thoughts like numbers).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics Book III, Books IV-XIV, Book V; Book Theta first and third parts; the seventh lectio (next).
• Aristotle, Physics Book IV (place, time; eight senses of in and out, with Thomas’s ordering); Book I ch. 1.
• Aristotle, Topics (“the book about places”).
• Plato, Meno.
• Boethius, definition of eternity (via De Koninck).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles; Summa Theologiae (unity of substantial form, opinions on the soul).
• Shakespeare, Hamlet.
• Heraclitus; Heisenberg; Descartes; John Stuart Mill; Monsignor Dionne; De Koninck.

His questions #

• Is the earth able to be the statue? No; it must be turned into bronze, then made into the statue.
• Why does Aristotle first say quantus, qualis rather than quantity, quality? Because the categories are said of substance denominatively and are distinguished by how they are said of it.
• Is two able to be four? Strictly, two is able to be three; three to be four; four to be five.
• When are you finally able to make a Marchand de Vin sauce? When you’ve done all the preparatory steps and are one step away.
• Why isn’t the later substantial form able to give all the lower forms to prime matter directly? From experience nature goes step by step; the subject is capable only one step away, and the agent is proportioned to a definite ability.
• What’s the before and after in the acts of looking reason, and which do you see first? Three: the three acts (grasping, composing/dividing, reasoning); guessing before knowing; thinking about before thinking out.
• Why does Book Three of Wisdom come before Books Four through Fourteen? Because we guess before we know, and in difficult things guess opposite things; Book Three is the dialectic.
• Is knowledge any better than a right guess (Meno)? Right opinion also directs to the good — the road to Boston, MacArthur; hence the great men could not teach their sons.
• What is Aristotle doing in the fifth book of Wisdom? Thinking out the meanings of words equivocal by reason, and thinking out their order.
• What’s the second sense of “to see”? Not understanding but imagining (Hamlet’s “mind’s eye”); understanding is third.
• Is there another order in the acts of reason worth mentioning? left open (recording ends).