Act Before Ability: The First Cause as Pure Act and the Sophistical Objection (Metaphysics IX)

Orientation #

He refers back to “last class” for the Meno example of mixing up simply and in some way (prev. lecture), and to an example “I gave earlier today” (the young lady who does not know his brother Mark). He points forward repeatedly to “the eighth, the ninth reading,” where act is shown before ability in substance, i.e. perfection. The recording begins mid-sentence and ends with “should we stop there?”

The previous class walked through the priority of act over potency in definition and time in lectio 7; the next class turns to orderings within the acts of reason.

The class, in order #

1. Act before ability: same individual vs. different individuals (“blow this up so you can see it”) #

Point: act is simply before ability even when a thing moves itself from ability to act, but the case of two individuals (teacher/student) is clearer and is taken first.

• Our understanding: the agent understanding actualizes the passive understanding using the images as instruments; “that’s why we invoke the angels’ strings in the light of our mind, but also to order images” [ed.: garbled; sense unclear]. Always something actual moves what is able to act.
• Why the teacher example first: teacher and student are different individuals, so the order is more clear. Aristotle will later reason first from act and ability in the same thing, then (ninth reading) in different things.
• Republic I-II: Socrates seems to conclude in book I, is asked whether he wants really to convince, and “blows up” the soul into the city: reason / irascible / concupiscible against rulers / soldiers / commoners — the order is easier to see when big. Likewise Aristotle: should reason rule the emotions like master over slave or father over son? Father and son, master and slave, are two people, so easier to see.
• Self-discovery: what I actually know (the premises) moves me from being able to know the conclusion to actually knowing it — so act is before ability there too, but harder to see because act and ability are in one individual.
• Student: is the point only that some act is before any ability, or (as “man generates man” suggests) that the same act is before the ability for it? Answer: man generates man is an example — something already actually a man makes the matter a man; air able to be hot becomes hot by fire, already actually hot. So act is before ability in time and “in a way in causality.” Student: must knowledge of the same thing be in act before the ability to know it? Answer: not necessarily — the cause may be in act “in the same way, or something in a higher kind of act.”
• Student: scientific discoveries that surprise the discoverer (“the prepared mind”)? Answer: still they are acted upon by something actually out there, the sensible.

2. The text: “in those reasons about substance” (“everything that comes to be comes to be from something”) #

Point: Aristotle refers back (Greek en tois peri tēs ousias logois, i.e. Books VII-VIII, probably VII) to the result that everything that comes to be comes to be from something (matter) and by something the same in species, in univocal generation — dogs from dogs, cats from cats, “statements from statements.”

• Aside: this leads to the second part of the reading, on the strange abilities where the act seems to come first — you acquire the ability to play the piano by playing the piano.

3. The key: the first cause must be pure act (“this is one way of reasoning to the beginning of all things”) #

Point: since act is before ability simply (though ability is before act secundum quid), the first cause has no passive ability — otherwise something would be before it.

1. Act is before ability simply. 2. The first cause is before everything. Conclusion: the first cause is pure act.

• Thomas, SCG I.16 (God is pure act): the second argument joins ch. 13 (God is first mover, first maker, first being) with this priority. The sixth argument stands alone: things in this world go from ability to act; they do so by something already in act; no infinite regress; so there is something pure act, “and this we call God” — “like another proof for the existence of God,” not depending on ch. 13. He calls this “kind of beautiful.”
• The argument from motion also uses act and ability as a middle term, but concretely in the phenomenon of motion; this one stands by itself.
• Same chapter also gives the argument from contingency and necessity (the third argument of the Summa Theologiae, not among the arguments of SCG I.13): things able to be and not be are not so of themselves; go back to something necessary, finally necessary through itself; then what is necessary through itself cannot not be, so has no passive ability — used to conclude God is pure act.
• Aside on counts: SCG has two arguments from motion, then the maker (efficient cause) argument; the ST has one from motion, the efficient cause second, contingency third.

4. The second mistake outside speech: simply vs. in some way (“we’re making this mistake all the time”) #

Point: Sophistical Refutations lists 13 kinds of mistake common to all matters, 7 from words (commonest: mixing senses of a word), 6 outside speech; the first is the fallacy of accident (as such vs. by happening), the second mixes up what is so simply with what is so in some way.

• Meno: Meno makes it; Socrates, answering Meno’s attack on investigating what you don’t know, makes it too in a different matter; the beginning of the Posterior Analytics refers back to the Meno to clear it up.
• Politics: “I’m richer, therefore altogether better” (better in some way, not simply); “we’re all equal in a democracy in some way, therefore simply equal.”
• Why people do bad: the bank robber (“that’s where the money is”) — robbing is bad, but in some way good; murdering an annoying student would be bad, but removes an annoyance. Conversely good things are bad in some way: studying keeps you from the party, Mass from sleeping in. “There’s nothing so good that doesn’t prevent you from doing something else that’s good.” So every bad deed is done as good in some way, every good omitted as bad in some way.

5. Materialism as the same mistake; SCG I.17 (“matter is the beginning of all things”) #

Point: the main alternative to a first cause that is pure act — early Greeks, modern natural scientists, materialists — is matter as the beginning; this is the simply/in-some-way error.

1. If ability were before act simply, the beginning would be most in ability. 2. Matter, first matter, is most in passive ability (able to be formed and built up). So the first cause would be matter. But act is before ability simply; so the first cause is pure act, and it is “a big mistake” to think matter is first.

• The materialist’s mistake: ability is before act in some way; they say simply.
• SCG I.17 (God is not matter) follows I.16 directly, before simplicity begins at ch. 18 — which puzzled him as a reader of the ST, where “is God composed of matter and form” falls under simplicity. His suggestion: Thomas, seeing that God is pure act because act is before ability simply, sees “the other side of the coin,” the deception that makes matter first. The chapter title (“whether there is matter in God”) is probably not Thomas’s; his text says God is not matter.
• Long history: Anaximander and before; Anaxagoras, seeing nothing comes from nothing, concludes everything that comes out of matter is in there — but is it in there simply and in act? He says yes and gets into difficulties.
• “The fundamental dichotomy of opinion”: is the first cause most in act and most perfect, or matter, most potential and least perfect?

6. End of knowledge: first cause and best thing coincide (“with the truth, all things harmonize”) #

Point: the ninth reading will show act before ability in perfection, so a first cause that is pure act is also most perfect; on the materialist view the first cause is least perfect, and two lines of argument about the end of knowledge would split.

• Proemium of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics I]: wonder makes us seek the cause, the cause of the cause, up to the first cause — the end of our knowledge is knowing the first cause.
• De Anima, beginning: all knowledge is good; one is better than another either for a better object or for knowing it better (more certain). Parts of Animals: the better criterion is the better object. Geometry (square equal to a given oblong) vs. knowledge of the soul: the soul is the better object; the square is known more certainly; simply, knowledge of the soul is better — “to know a better thing imperfectly than a lesser thing perfectly” is more essential to knowing. Aristotle’s example: a glimpse of those we love over a leisurely view of those we don’t care about (his version: the boss all day vs. a glimpse of your girlfriend at noon).
• So the best knowledge is of the best thing; since the end is better than what is for the end, the end of our knowledge is knowledge of the best thing.
• If the first cause is the best thing, both arguments harmonize; if matter is first, “you’ve got a split personality,” two last ends — “you can see why Marx says we’ve got to transform matter.” With Aristotle’s account of act it fits together.
• Aside: this is what convinced him that Shakespeare “hit the nail on the head” — reason looks before and after; wisdom, the highest perfection of reason, most of all looks before and after; Aristotle looks before and after with act and ability.

7. Active abilities and the sophistical refutation (“how can one not having the episteme do that”) #

Point: for active abilities (housebuilder, cithara-player) act is before ability in a special way — you learn piano by playing, French by speaking; Aristotle then meets the sophistical objection (line 34, ho sophistikos elenchos).

• Elenchos = refutation; sophistikos = apparent: the sophist wants to get you into a contradiction or the appearance of one; you are not really in it but don’t see the way out. Recalled examples: the young lady who “doesn’t know” his brother Mark; not knowing who is knocking at the door though you know your mother.
• The objection: how can one lacking the knowledge do the thing the knowledge is of? Same difficulty in the Nicomachean Ethics: you become courageous or moderate by doing courageous or moderate acts — but then you already are courageous.
• Reply: you don’t do it the same way before and after. Before moderation, stopping the candy is hard, unstable, you may stuff yourself; after, easier, more pleasant, stable. Before you build houses with mistakes, tearing things out. So you are not affirming and denying the same in the same way — a condition of real contradiction is left out. He tentatively calls this the third kind of mistake, “ignorance of refutation.”
• Student: no knowledge is created completely; it’s all in you, to be perfected. Answer: “now you sound like Socrates”; granted, Thomas speaks of seeds, a natural understanding of the virtues — another thing to be said, but he was addressing the sophist’s objection.
• Protagoras: Socrates says it is difficult to become good, and not difficult to be good — no contradiction, being and becoming differ: hard to get to the top of the mountain, no difficulty standing there. Parents: you depend on them for coming to be, not for being. Descartes: you can’t know from probable opinions; reply: you can come to know from the probable, but not know from it — the tree, then the bush, then “now I see the lost boy”: I came to see him by the tree and bush, I don’t see him through them. Dialectic likewise helps you notice, but is not the cause of your knowing. “It’s very important.”
• Aristotle adds: even in motion there is already some actuality — when you are moving, you have moved.
• Student: isn’t the act by which you acquire the act the act simply in some respect? Answer: “does Berquist speak French?” simply no (his friend Warren Murray would say he doesn’t learn French), but in some imperfect way yes.
• Why virtue is tested by spontaneous acts: one can screw oneself up to an act of virtue; the man who drank too much at weddings, pressed by his wife, sometimes drank moderately, but without the stability of the habit.
• Conclusion of the seventh reading: act is before kata genesin kai chronon — before in generation is sometimes taken as a part of before in time, but in the same process; before in time is broader (he was born before the student, but is not before him in generation).

8. Objection: the one who acquires virtue is simply more in act (“more divine to give than to receive”) #

Point: active abilities are a special case; the important case for the first cause is passive ability, which cannot give itself the act it lacks — it would have to have the act it doesn’t have, a real contradiction.

• Hence “it’s more divine to give than to receive”: act enables giving, passive potency receiving; God, pure act, cannot receive.
• Euthyphro: piety as quid pro quo — but can you give God something? St. Paul touches it too. Parents give the child an allowance and he buys them a Christmas gift out of it — appreciated, but has he given them something? Worse with God: does God get something out of our thanksgiving? Student: He gives us the ability to give thanks; and it is I who suffer if I am ungrateful. He agrees: thanking God is more my good than His. The man “who has everything” at Christmas.

9. Why he teaches Book IX (“arrive at the first cause”) #

• If only one of the books on being (VII-X) can be done, he does IX: it shows most clearly how the consideration of being as being leads to the first cause, and it continues philosophy of nature (which he ends with the definitions of motion and time), so one sees the order of the Metaphysics.
• He tries to add Book VIII (substance, the chief subject of wisdom, approached from natural philosophy, matter and form from Book I of “Natural Hearing”); Book VII, more from logic and abstract, is impossible with undergraduates (“with all of us”).

His words #

• ability; act — his renderings [ed.: potency; actuality]; “passive ability,” “ability to undergo” [ed.: passive potency]
• simply / in some way — secundum quid, “secundum quid loquendo”
• en tois peri tēs ousias logois — “in those reasons about substance,” Aristotle’s back-reference to Books VII-VIII
• the seventh, eighth, ninth reading — Thomas’s lectiones on Metaphysics IX
• Proemium to Wisdom — [ed.: Metaphysics I.1-2]
• sophistikos elenchos — apparent refutation; “ignorance of refutation” for the third kind of mistake
• episteme — knowledge, in the sophist’s objection
• kata genesin kai chronon — before in generation and in time
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• fallacy of the accident — mixing up what is so as such and what is so by happening

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (Thomas’s seventh reading), including the back-reference to the books on substance and the sophistical objection at “line 34”; the concluding phrase kata genesin kai chronon
• Thomas, SCG I.16 (second and sixth arguments, and the contingency argument), summarized in detail

Mentioned

• Thomas, SCG I.13, I.17, I.18; Summa Theologiae, the “third argument” for God’s existence and the question on divine simplicity (inferred: I q. 2 a. 3; q. 3)
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (13 kinds of mistake); Posterior Analytics, beginning; Politics; Nicomachean Ethics (becoming virtuous by virtuous acts); Metaphysics I Proemium; De Anima I; Parts of Animals; Metaphysics VII, VIII, X
• Plato, Meno; Republic I-II; Protagoras; Euthyphro
• Descartes (on probable opinions); Marx; Shakespeare (“reason looks before and after”); St. Paul; Anaximander; Anaxagoras

His questions #

• Is it more clear that act is before ability when teacher and learner are different individuals? Yes; like the Republic blowing the soul up into the city, and father/son vs. reason/emotions.
• Does knowledge of the same thing have to be in act before the ability to know it? Not necessarily; the cause may be in act in the same way or in a higher way.
• If ability came before act simply, what would the first cause be? Matter, most in passive ability; since act is prior simply, the first cause is pure act.
• What kind of mistake do the materialists make? Mixing up what is before in some way with what is before simply — the second mistake outside speech.
• Which knowledge is better, of the square or of the soul? Simply, of the soul, since the better criterion is the better object.
• How can you become courageous by doing courageous things if doing them means you are courageous? You don’t do them the same way before and after having the habit; no contradiction.
• Is it difficult to be good? Do you depend on your parents for being? No: becoming and being differ; you depend on them for coming to be.
• Can God receive something from us when we give thanks? He gives us the ability to thank; thanking is more my good than His — left partly open (“it really is a problem”).
• Why does he teach Book IX when only one book can be done? It shows most clearly how being as being leads to the first cause and continues philosophy of nature.