Bad as Non-Being, Faith and the Road to Knowing

Orientation #

He opens by saying what is left “for Monday”: the third part of the third part of Book IX, which begins with geometry and treats the before-and-after of act and ability in knowability and in truth and falsity, “not about good and bad.” Today’s first half is a footnote closing the good/bad comparison; the second half (after “So we’ll stop here”) is a separate stretch on the order of the Metaphysics and on human faith, read in part from his handout “The Matter and Order of Wisdom,” p. 9 (verified source; DHB Vol. III p. 458 also verified). The previous class treated act as more perfect than ability and evil as privation; the next continues into Lectio 10–11 on act as more knowable and more true.

The class, in order #

1. What is left for Monday (“leave for Monday. Geometry”) #

The point: the remaining third part of Book IX’s third part is on the knowability and truth/falsity of act and ability, and both this and the good/bad comparison concern the perfection of being.

2. Footnote: Thomas’s threefold division of Book V (“a plethora of words in there”) #

The point: the transcendentals split into names of the subject and names of properties, and good/true/knowable belong to the properties.

1. Thomas follows “the logical rule of two or three” and divides Book V into three, seeing it as the beginning of wisdom as an episteme (also useful for the axioms).
2. Every episteme has a subject, properties of the subject, and causes; so Aristotle gives (a) names of causes first—beginning, cause, element, nature, necessary (already much developed in Books I and II); (b) names of the subject—one, being, substance, then more particular names; (c) names of properties, beginning with perfect and whole.
3. At the beginning of the De Veritate Thomas distinguishes the transcendentals: being and one are among the first, and these are names of the subject. Aristotle, Thomas and Albert often run unum and aliquid together (undivided being and distinct-from-others); thing comes up with substance, one meaning of which is “what it is.”
4. So being, one, thing/substance are the subject of wisdom; perfect and whole begin the properties. In Book IX you see two perfections of being: knowability/being true, and being good.

• Why good is a property of being: act and ability are both good (act more so; ability is good as ability for act). What’s bad is non-being—not absolute non-being but a lack of what a subject is able to have and should have. Against “I know all kinds of bad things”: the root of badness is a lack, and a lack is non-being. Likewise knowable is a property of being, act more than ability, which is why ability is known through act “as he said in the beginning of the before and afters.”
• Theological confirmation: God is “I am who am,” completely good; everything else is like God insofar as it is, so being as such is good. If being as such could be bad you would have “a real contradiction”; with bad as non-being, “all things harmonize.”
• The subject that has the lack is not bad as such: the mind is not bad, the ignorance or mistake is; a mistaken mind is called bad because being mistaken happens to it (Thomas: bad because the lack happens to him).
• Augustine, “sin is nothing, and the man who sins becomes nothing”: not said as precisely as it could be (bad is strictly a lack, not nothing), but Augustine is emphasising the truth that bad is a kind of non-being.

3. Student: how are vice and error “on top of” a lack? (“You err, not knowing the power of God”) #

The point: every mistake involves some ignorance, and the bad contrary is a real thing whose badness is rooted in a lack.

• Matthew 22 (he thinks): one of the chapters Thomas sees as leading to why they want to put Christ to death—compared to why they wanted to kill Socrates, since Christ drives the Pharisees into apparent contradiction (“whose son is Christ”). The Sadducees (no immortality, angels, resurrection) pose the seven brothers’ wife. “You err” (the Greek word), “not knowing the power of God and the Scriptures”: the mistake about the resurrection proceeds from ignorance of God’s power, of the Scriptures, and of the state after the resurrection (“like the angels”). Hence: in every error some ignorance is involved.
• General rule: of two contraries one tends to be bad because it involves a lack. Virtue vs. vice: vice is a real habit, not mere lack, but it lacks the order and measure of reason—that lack is the root of its badness. Student: is it good as habit? Answer: abstracting from the lack, what’s left is; cf. premarital sex—the same act before and after marriage, the act in itself no different if you abstract from “before rather than after.”
• Objection recalled: God infusing a soul into an illegitimate child cooperates with the sinner. Thomas: God cooperates with nature, with a natural act that, as natural, is not defective and is ordered to receiving the understanding soul.

4. Sartre: freedom as non-being (“man is the one by whom none being came”) #

The point: Sartre makes Plato’s mistake, confusing a lack with an ability.

• Sartre locates man’s dignity in freedom and freedom in non-being. His plausibility: in a restaurant, before choosing steak or chicken your will is not determined to steak—so what makes you free is that lack of determination. His existentialism is atheistic not by exhausting itself proving God is not, but by saying “it makes no difference to us whether he is or is not”—which seems “very arbitrary.”
• Diagnosis: he confuses the lack of choice before you choose with the ability to choose, as Plato confused the lack of form before matter receives form with matter’s ability to receive form. Proportional argument: the ability to choose wants the choice; the lack of choice wants its own destruction.
• Parallel he uses with students: “I can’t teach you what you already know, so it’s your ignorance that makes you teachable”—no; this is the fallacy of the accidental, confusing the ability to know with ignorance. Knowing is godlike and desirable, so the ability to know desires it, while ignorance desires its own destruction; if knowing is good, ignorance is bad, but the ability to know is good because oriented to knowing.
• Aristotle in De Sensu et Sensato: even the wise are deceived by the accidental.
• Aside: it is telling that those who revolt against God make non-being, “what we have from ourselves,” the source of the revolt. “So we’ll stop here.”

5. Resumed: the lines of the Metaphysics from “wisdom is of the first causes” (“proceeding now along another line”) #

The point: from the one centre established in the Proemium, the Metaphysics reasons along a primary line and secondary lines.

• Book IV reasons from first causes to being as being, to one and many, to the axioms; “then you have the great turnaround.” These three—axioms, being as being, first causes—are what wisdom is about primarily.
• Book II reasons from the same beginning to a secondary matter: it belongs to wisdom to consider how man is toward knowing truth. Likewise “to whom does it belong to consider what wisdom is” is something the wise man takes up, but not what wisdom is primarily about. He also mentions a third line without developing it.
• Book II first considers how man is toward truth, then gives the reason it belongs to wisdom; in that reason is the “subplot” of the nine books: showing there are first causes in each kind. The reason rests on the first causes being most true, which assumes there are first causes; Book I (“the second bird killed with this stone”) only confirmed there are four kinds of cause.
• Guessing before knowing: reasonable guesses, like probable opinions, hit part of the truth. “Sexual pleasure is the best thing in life” is false but the best thing is something pleasant, only higher; as a child he thought candy was the best thing—“I haven’t completely missed the boat.” So the advance is gradual: wisdom is of causes; of the first causes; there are only four kinds; the first cause must be in one or more of them; Book II, there are first causes.
• Logic point: if there are no first causes there is no knowledge of them; the converse (if there are first causes, we know them) does not follow. So showing there are first causes is part, not the whole, of showing wisdom is about them; there must also be a way for our mind to reach them—by looking before and after (cause before effect, first cause before other causes). Only around Book IX do you see that the mind looks before everything else and sees the first cause as pure act; all five attributes of the divine substance (simple, perfect, unchanging, and so on) can be shown from pure act, though other ways are multiplied “to feed our mind more.”

6. Human faith and the road (“the road to the Pythagorean theorem”) #

The point: believing a teacher is reasonable because it is a faster way to knowing and is replaced by knowing.

• A student who wants to know the Pythagorean theorem: Berquist knows the road (from Euclid); the student may believe him and go down it, or demand to know it is the road before going—but “you won’t know that this is the road until you go down it.” Arriving, he says “now I know; I don’t believe you,” having believed up to that point.
• The fork to Boston: refusing to go down any road until you know it leads to Boston means trying every road and reaching it only by chance; believing “Dwayne Berquist” and finding Boston at the end turns belief into knowing. Belief is not a substitute for knowing but a faster way of coming to know—yet “you got to have a little savvy about whom to believe.”

7. Whom to believe: the Protagoras (“what do you know about this Protagoras?”) #

The point: Plato’s Protagoras teaches criteria, of increasing strength, for judging whom to believe.

1. Fame or position: all the young man has is Protagoras’s fame. Distinction: fame in your own time vs. fame over a thousand years—Samuel Johnson’s circle said it takes a hundred years to tell whether a poet is worth reading; Aristotle and Plato are still read (the Apology probably the most read text in introductory philosophy).
2. Road or method: Protagoras wants speeches, Socrates short question and answer, which can examine and pin a man down—a better criterion. His own doctoral thesis compared Descartes and Aristotle on the three roads in our knowledge: Descartes does not know the roads, so he believes Aristotle more.
3. Whether the man contradicts himself (comes later in the dialogue). A further sign: Protagoras says had he always “fought with the weapons of my opponent” his name would never have spread through Greece—the sophist’s “beat him one way or another.”

• Frog’s heart, for slow students: professor says four chambers, student says three; at first you believe the position. But the student examined frogs one after another, while the professor drew a deck of cards—now you believe the student, because he knows how to proceed to find out. We are never told whether the young man saw it would be better to follow Socrates.
• Aside: Warren (Marie) would warn students when a famous professor came to town—“Protagoras will be in town.”

8. The ninth book as the road (“this road leads where I want to go”) #

The point: having gone through Book IX you see that act and ability are a road to knowing the first cause is pure act and not matter—which you could not know without going down it. Kant, Descartes, Locke each have a road that “is not going anywhere.”

• What is beautiful: from the Proemium, the goal of knowledge is to know the cause and ultimately the first cause; and the knowledge of the best thing is the best knowledge, so the first cause should be the best thing. Everything fitting together is a sign of truth; if the first cause were not the best thing, man would have two last ends and be torn. Book IX confirms it: act before ability in time simply, and more perfect than ability, so you head toward the first cause and the best thing at once—“Now you see it. This is the road.”

9. Closing asides (“At least you read Thomas”) #

• Student: did God give Solomon something like the ability to judge a lack? Berquist: the question about Solomon is that he fell away in old age over women; Albert’s text on women ends, “if I told everything about woman, the whole world would be stupefied.”
• Mortimer Adler became Catholic at the end of his life, held back by some irregularity; he said, while still a Jew, that he learned more from Aristotle and Thomas than from the rest, to the disbelief of Catholic philosophers.
• The blow-up at St. John’s University in New York; Smith, formerly of Columbia, found it freer to teach Aristotle and Thomas there than at the Catholic college. His cousin Dale’s story (University of Kansas, he thinks): a Catholic studying Arabic philosophy, stuck on the Metaphysics, is told by his non-Catholic teacher to read Thomas’s commentary.
• Many Catholics set Thomas aside so as not to be thought unthinking or “out of it,” like scripture scholars following the guild. The mechanical man courting until his roll of words runs out: “my roll of words run out.”

His words #

• ability — his rendering throughout for potency [ed.: potency].
• episteme — a science, with subject, properties and causes.
• the logical rule of two or three — Thomas’s habit of dividing a text into two or three parts.
• transcendentals — being, one, thing/substance as names of the subject; perfect, whole, good, true as properties.
• unum / aliquid — one and “something”; often run together as undivided and distinct.
• lack — his word for privation; bad is non-being as lack, not absolute non-being [ed.: privation].
• fallacy of the accidental — confusing a lack (ignorance, lack of choice, lack of form) with the ability it accompanies.
• primary / secondary things wisdom is about — axioms, being as being, first causes vs. how man is toward knowing truth, what wisdom is.
• the subplot of the nine books — showing there are first causes in each kind of cause.
• the road — the way from belief in a teacher to knowing.
• human faith — believing a teacher’s word about the road, replaced by knowing at the end.

Texts #

Read in class

• Berquist, handout “The Matter and Order of Wisdom,” p. 9 (verified; the stretch on the lines of the Metaphysics).
• Matthew 22, the Sadducees and the seven brothers (paraphrased).
• Plato, Protagoras, opening scene (retold).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, the remaining third part (geometry; knowability, truth and falsity of act and ability).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V, Thomas’s threefold division.
• Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, beginning (the transcendentals).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I (Proemium; four causes), II, IV.
• Aristotle, De Sensu et Sensato (“even the wise are deceived by the accidental”).
• Augustine (“sin is nothing”); Albert the Great on women; Samuel Johnson’s circle; Plato, Apology; Sartre on freedom; Kant, Descartes, Locke; Euclid; Thomas on God cooperating with nature in the illegitimate child (locus not given).
• DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 458 (verified).

His questions #

• Does Thomas divide the fifth book into two or three? Three: names of causes, of the subject, of the properties.
• What’s bad? Non-being—the lack of something a subject is able to have and should have.
• Is it really ignorance that makes you teachable? No; that confuses the ability to know with ignorance (fallacy of the accidental).
• What is Sartre confusing? The lack of choice before you choose with the ability to choose, as Plato confused lack of form with matter.
• Can guessing lead to knowing? Reasonable guesses can, since they hit part of the truth; wild guesses lead to error.
• If there are first causes, does it follow that there is knowledge of them? No; only the converse (no first causes, no knowledge) holds.
• What dialogue most explicitly teaches whom to believe? The Protagoras.
• Whom do you believe about the frog’s heart, the student or the PhD? At first the professor by position; once you hear how each proceeded, the student.
• Did the young man see it would be better to follow Socrates? Left open—the dialogue never tells us.