Before and After in the Acts of Reason: Guessing, Thinking Out, and Discourse

Orientation #

He opens by recalling “three things: the order, and acts, and the acts of reason” already treated, and returns to the first two befores before adding a third. He says Aristotle will show “tomorrow, I guess” that act is before ability in substance, i.e. in perfection, and that Aristotle in “the third reading” gave four arguments against those who deny the distinction between act and ability. The previous class treated act as prior to potency in Metaphysics IX; the next continues with priority in perfection. Text-matching finds three of his handouts read in this class: “The First Definition of Reason” (p. 112), “The Matter and Order of Wisdom” (p. 4), “Note for Word Beginning” (p. 2).

The class, in order #

1. Reason guesses before it knows (“reason what guesses before it knows”) #

Point: after the Thomistic order (understanding what a thing is, before composing/dividing in statements, before putting statements together in reasoning), the first added before-and-after is guessing before knowing.

• A guess can be reasonable in one of two ways: because you have a good reason for it, or because reason is naturally inclined that way (his dichotomy when presenting the early Greek natural philosophers as making reasonable guesses).
• Often reason gets no further than a guess. Socrates in the Phaedo, pressed by Simmias on the immortality of the soul: get a necessary argument if you can; if only a probable one, get the most probable and “go through life on this probability.” Looks back to the Meno: knowledge directs to the good, but sometimes right opinion, even a hunch, does.
• MacArthur at Inchon (the chiefs against him, “you’re on your own,” then success): if he did not know, he certainly made a very good guess. Einstein: in experimental science you can’t really know, but you can make a better guess than someone else.

2. Thinking about before thinking out, and the eight senses of “in” (“going back to the eight senses in and out”) #

Point: you think about something before you understand it, and pass from one to the other by thinking it out; the senses of “in/out” distinguish kinds of thinking out.

• Thinking out the definition of quadrilateral (third sense of in) vs. thinking out its kinds (fourth sense): different kinds of thinking out, all necessary.
• What struck him: the order of the senses of “in” corresponds to the order in which things must be thought out. Aristotle thinks out that a statement is composed of noun and verb (second sense: parts in a whole), then its definition (third), then its species (fourth); last of all a conclusion is thought out, which is the seventh sense (“I’ve got you in my power”: the conclusion is in the power of the premises). Socrates bringing the slave boy to double the square is thinking out in this seventh sense.
• Mistakes from mixing the senses: Anaxagoras’ “nothing comes from nothing” puts what comes out of matter in it actually, as part in whole, whereas it is in it only in ability (fifth sense). Locke’s general idea of triangle (scalene, equilateral, right, obtuse, “all of these and none of these”) imagines the species in the genus in act, rubbed together into a fuzzy ball.
• The first three senses of “in” are of what is actually in; from the fourth on (species in genus, form in matter, in my power) what is in is not actually in at first, and one falls back on the earlier senses as more known.
• Empedocles and Anaxagoras can understand no change but change of place because they can’t understand ability; so teaching would be my knowledge changing place to you, and I would know less the more I teach (joke: teachers should be paid on a diminishing scale like an insurance policy). Moderns rearranging atoms in the head are holding on to act with no ability.

3. Student: what does “thinking about” mean as against “thinking out”? (“outward is almost a synonym for”) #

Point: “about” is going around a thing without penetrating it; “out” brings out what is within, which is hidden.

• We know things outwardly first because the senses do; in English “outward” is nearly a synonym for sensible (the old catechism: a sacrament is “an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace”).
• His definition of definition: “speech bringing out what a thing is.” Nature in all its meanings is within (following De Koninck): first meaning birth (the apple pie is made from outside, the baby comes from within); second, the source within the mother; third, the general sense defined in Natural Hearing II, beginning and cause of motion and rest in that in which it is, as such and not by happening. Heraclitus, “nature loves to hide”: because it is within, and what is within is hidden. Thomas’s etymology of intelligere from intus legere, to read within.
• Species are in the genus in ability; dividing a genus (as Euclid does) brings them out. Sometimes “we’ve been thinking about it” is as far as you get.

4. Student: examples of thinking about that are not thinking out; what wisdom is “about” (“what is wisdom about”) #

Point: wisdom is “about” three things, but not in the same way.

1. First causes (proemium of the Metaphysics): about them as its end, as ethics is about happiness.
2. Being as being, the one and the many (book IV): about them as its subject.
3. The axioms (later in book IV): neither end nor subject.

• Hence wisdom is more than an episteme (which is always about a subject and its causes): it is the head (kephalaion) of both natural and reasoned-out understanding, reducible to neither. It knows causes better than reasoned-out understanding because it knows the cause of the cause; it knows the axioms more distinctly than natural understanding because it distinguishes the senses of their words and defends them against sophistical attacks (De Koninck resolving Russell’s attack on the axiom of whole and part).
• Worked example, the axiom of “beginning” (first word of book V), used in Natural Hearing I: if all is one (Parmenides, Melissus) there is no beginning, since nothing is a beginning of itself. Objection: the foundation is the beginning of the house yet part of it. Reply by the six meanings of beginning: first sense (point of the line, edge of the table) is in the thing; third sense (keel, foundation) is a fundamental part, inside, closer to the first; fourth sense (the carpenter of the table) is wholly outside. In each there is a distinction between beginning and what it begins, but not the same distinction: part vs. whole in the third, whole vs. something outside in the fourth. “Nothing is a beginning of itself” holds in every sense with the distinction appropriate to that sense.

5. Two student suggestions set aside (“knowing the subject and knowing the road”) #

• Knowing the way (road) of a science before the science: that is a distinction in what is known, not a different act of reason, as guessing is really different from knowing and thinking about from understanding.
• Natural understanding before reasoning: he would rather place that with the natural road, the first road; the before-and-after he seeks is within the acts of reason as reason.

6. The third before: discourse before seeing the before and after (“looking before and after”) #

Point: Shakespeare’s definition of reason, “ability for large discourse, looking before and after,” gives the end of discourse; the discourse comes before seeing the before and after.

• Why “looking” and not “seeing”? Seeing would imply you are at the end; discourse is like a motion seeking knowledge; looking means trying to see. He does not want to separate looking and discourse too much: looking gives what discourse is trying to accomplish.
• Example from his ethics course. Socrates with an American boy: what’s good? Candy, pizza, baseball: examples, no definition (as in the Meno, Euthyphro, Theaetetus). What they have in common: what a normal healthy boy wants (his son Paul: if you like it, it’s good). First definition: the good is what all want.
• Then the Euthyphro question (Heisenberg: the Greeks taught us to ask questions of principle, which go more than halfway to the truth): is it pious because the gods approve it, or approved because pious? A question of before and after in the crowning sense, cause before effect. Augustine (De Vera Religione, as he recalls) on “the beautiful is what pleases when seen”: “I have no doubt that it pleases us because it is beautiful.”
• So: good because wanted, or wanted because good? Can you see which is cause without a discourse? He argues both sides first (dialectic): against “good because wanted,” the last drink you wanted that made you sick, the boy who wanted to drive 100 mph and ended in traction; against “wanted because good,” contrary causes have contrary effects, so bad should cause aversion, yet people want bad things. Whichever side you take, you’re not sure until you answer the other side’s objections.
• Then induction (the argument most appropriate to beginners) over natural desires: hunger/food, thirst/water, sleep, reproduction (the great good of the species’ continuing, visible apart from desire), the desire to know (is knowing the way home good because you want to know it?). Confirming cases: parents sending you to bed; being told to eat when sick and appetite is gone. Result: nature gave the desire because the thing is good, not the reverse.
• Applied to the text: Aristotle must go through a discourse, reasoned out in a number of ways, before he sees that act is before ability, especially (tomorrow) in substance, i.e. perfection.

7. Second example: which goods are better (“goods of the soul are before”) #

Point: seeing which is better (the fourth sense of before) also needs a long discourse.

• First, “what is better?”: by induction (health or medicine? knowing or studying?) the end is better than what is for its sake. Harder route: the principle that when the same belongs to two things, but to one because of the other, it belongs more to the cause; good is said of end and means, of the means because of the end.
• Socrates in the Symposium, examining Athenians for preferring goods of the body and outside goods to goods of the soul; the Americans side with the Athenians. Aristotle, Politics VII: all agree there are three kinds of goods and that we need some of each, but disagree which are better; most men with the Athenians, some philosophers the reverse.
• Discourse: by induction outside goods are for the sake of inside goods (book for the mind, food for the body, shoes for the feet); add “the end is better”: outside goods get the bronze. Gold vs. silver between soul and body argued many ways: closer to the end of man; goods of the soul more divine, goods of the body more bestial.
• “The ninth book of wisdom was to me kind of the most striking witness” to the truth of Shakespeare’s definition: “incredible how universally important this is.”
• Aside: a student last semester amused that he should teach such uncommon opinions, since everybody knows booze, food, sex and drugs are the good things in life.

8. Is discourse the cause of looking? God before creatures (“causes of each other if they’re different kinds”) #

Point: looking before and after is the end of discourse; discourse is the mover/maker cause of actually seeing it; both can be causes of each other in different kinds, per Aristotle’s corollary on the four causes (exercise makes health, health is that for the sake of which one exercises). “I go through these discourses not for the fun of it, but so that one or two students at least will see.”

• Student: it belongs to reason to order, so seeing the order is the end. He agrees: you want to see what is first, and in what way God is before all. First seen: God before as cause. Then in Summa Contra Gentiles II (“my favorite book”), against the neo-Platonists who make creation necessary, Thomas shows at length God is before creatures in the second sense: He can be without them, they cannot be without Him, which differs from being their cause (one might say cause and effect cannot be without each other). Also before as better, shown by “the end is better,” God being the end of the universe. Each before needs a different discourse; none is seen without one.
• Student: most men, like the Athenians, use sensation, which is immediate, so they expect no discourse. He agrees: sensing cannot show before and after. Pet peeve: students call any distinction “confusing,” which he calls the sin against the Holy Spirit, since the distinction is the way out of confusion: “It’s not confusing. You’re confused.”

9. Summary and a fourth: distinguishing before ordering (“distinguishes before it finds order”) #

Point: the list now runs: Thomas’s order from the proemium to logic, plus three—reason guesses before it knows, thinks about before it understands, discourses before it sees the before and after—and in each it may fail to reach the second term.

• Student proposes: reason distinguishes before it finds order. He first hesitates (two different things seen, distinction and order, rather than two acts of reason; and reason is defined by its utmost, hence “looking before and after,” not “looking for distinctions”), then accepts it as a footnote or near-corollary of the third: a discourse from scratch will not reach a before and after unless it first sees a distinction.
• Aristotle in the third reading gives four arguments against those denying the distinction of act and ability, so distinguishing them before, here, seeing their before and after. Wine: you can’t say this wine is better unless you can distinguish two wines.
• Class ends with an electrical storm, dinner about 5:50, and his “better half.”

His words #

• reasonable guess: reasonable either from a good reason or from reason’s natural inclination
• thinking about vs. thinking out: going around a thing from outside vs. bringing out what is within
• the eight senses of in and out: second, part in whole; third, definition; fourth, species in genus; fifth, in ability; seventh, “in my power” (conclusion in premises)
• outward: as the senses know things; nearly a synonym for sensible
• definition: “speech bringing out what a thing is”
• nature: birth; source within the mother; beginning and cause of motion and arrest in that in which it is, as such (Natural Hearing II) [ed.: Physics II]; what a thing is
• intelligere: from intus legere, to read within (Thomas)
• episteme: reasoned-out knowledge, always of a subject and its causes; wisdom is not reducible to it
• kephalaion: wisdom as head of natural and reasoned-out understanding
• beginning, six meanings: first (point of line, edge of table), third (keel, foundation: fundamental part), fourth (carpenter: outside the thing)
• natural understanding vs. reasoned-out understanding [ed.: intellectus vs. scientia]
• ability [ed.: potency]; act
• looking before and after: trying to see, not yet seeing
• the good: what all want (first definition)
• the crowning sense of before and after: cause before effect; the fourth sense: which is better
• second sense of before: can be without the other, not vice versa (God and creatures)

Texts #

Read in class (per verified text-matching): handout “The First Definition of Reason”, p. 112; handout “The Matter and Order of Wisdom”, p. 4; handout “Note for Word Beginning”, p. 2. Mentioned: Thomas, proemium to logic; Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (third reading; act before ability in substance), I (proemium), IV (being as being, one and many, axioms), V (beginning); Natural Hearing I (opinions on beginnings, Parmenides and Melissus) and II (nature); Politics VII (three kinds of goods); Plato, Phaedo, Meno, Euthyphro, Theaetetus, Symposium; Augustine, De Vera Religione; Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles II; Shakespeare’s definition of reason; De Koninck on nature and on Russell and the axiom of whole and part; Heisenberg on the Greeks; Locke on the general idea of triangle; Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus.

His questions #

• Is there another very important order in the acts of reason? Reason discourses before it sees the before and after (Shakespeare).
• In what senses of “in” is thinking out different for the definition and the kinds of quadrilateral? Third sense and fourth sense.
• Why does Heraclitus say nature loves to hide? Because it is within, and what is within is hidden.
• Is wisdom about the first causes, being as being, and the axioms in the same way? No: as end, as subject, and as head of natural understanding, respectively.
• Why does Shakespeare say “looking” before and after, not “seeing”? Seeing would imply you are at the end; looking is trying to see.
• Is something good because we want it, or do we want it because it is good? Nature gives desire because the thing is good; shown by induction on natural desires.
• Who gets the gold, the silver and the bronze among goods of soul, body and outside? Soul, body, outside; outside goods are for the sake of inside ones and the end is better.
• Is the discourse of reason the cause of looking before and after? Looking is the end-cause of discourse; discourse is the maker-cause of seeing.
• Does reason distinguish before it finds order? (student) Yes, as a footnote to the third before: no discourse reaches before-and-after without first seeing a distinction.