Act Before Ability: Knowability, Truth and the End of Book IX

Orientation #

He opens: “now we’re going to do the third part of the third part” of Book Nine, recapping the first two parts (before and after; act better than ability, with the three senses of bad “we brought in” from Thomas) (prev. lecture); the Sartre example is recalled “as we mentioned the other day” (prev. lecture). Looking forward he says Thomas’s “as things are in being, so they are in truth” is something “we’ll see if we do the second book”, and the closing excursion sketches Books XI–XII. A verified handout, “An Introduction to the First Road in Our Knowledge”, p. 8, is read for about thirteen minutes in the segment on “more known to us” (segment 5). The previous class treated act and ability with regard to the good and bad and the nature of belief; the next takes up the chain from the Metaphysics to Thomas’s Summa Contra Gentiles on God as first being and first cause.

The class, in order #

1. Recap: before and after, act better, three senses of bad (“the third part of the third part”) #

Point: to place today’s reading (knowability and truth) after the two earlier comparisons of act and ability.

• First part: act before ability (a) in definition and knowledge, (b) in time (“you might maybe add in being, causality”), (c) in substance, which Thomas explains as perfection — eighth reading from the same thing, ninth reading from eternal/incorruptible things being to corruptible as act to ability.
• Second part: act better than ability, touching on the bad. Thomas’s three senses of bad (following Aristotle): (1) the lack, non-being of something one is able to have, should have, and when one should have it; (2) what has such a lack; (3) what causes such a lack. Blindness = sense 1; a blind dog = sense 2 (“it’s bad to be a blind dog because you have this lack”); what causes the dog’s blindness = sense 3.
• The name is equivocal by reason, carried from first to second by the ratio of the second to the first, second to third likewise — compared to “political”: first the polis, then government (rules the polis), then revolution (change or overthrow of government).
• Applied to human act: bad in sense 1 is the disorder, lack of measure and order of reason; the act having the lack is bad in sense 2; what leads to such acts is bad in sense 3. Aristotle’s text is brief; the fuller treatment is the critique of Plato in Natural Hearing Book I.
• Consequences: bad is not simply non-being but non-being in a subject able to have something; hence “bad is after ability”. So if God is pure act there is no lack, therefore nothing bad in God. Fifth book of Wisdom: senses of “perfect” in creatures vs. the sense in which God is perfect — Homer is a perfect poet (lacks nothing a poet should have, though he may lack what Mozart or Aristotle has), but God is perfect “lacking in nothing”.
• Method: to understand any badness, find the lack that is the first sense, then read the other senses back to it.

2. Lectio ten, second half: geometry shows act is more knowable (“something becomes knowable when it’s made in act”) #

Point: from about line 21 Aristotle compares act and ability as to knowability (anticipated by “before in definition, therefore in knowledge”). Example 1, interior angles of a triangle = two right angles: in the bare drawing one cannot know it; draw through a vertex a line parallel to the base, use alternate angles, and “right away now, now I know it”. Euclid’s version: extend a side, exterior angle equals the two interior and opposite, then the straight line. Either way “it’s not until you make actual the lines that you see”. Only in ability, “it’s not really knowable”.

• Two likenesses: watching a building go up, and Eddington’s comparison of physics to watching a painter’s first swipes — what he is painting is not knowable until it becomes actual.

3. Thales’s semicircle theorem, two proofs (“that angle will always be a right angle”) #

Point: the second example: any angle in a semicircle is right — again the line must be drawn.

• Thomas’s proof (“a little more complicated”): line from the vertex to the centre; two isosceles triangles by equal radii; each exterior angle at the base is double the corresponding angle at the top; the two at the base are two right angles, so the top is one right angle.
• His own: draw the same line; the two triangles contain four right angles; two of them are at the centre; the rest equal two right angles, and the two equal top parts are each half, “which is one”.
• Aside: Thales is also credited with the rigorous isosceles-triangle theorem, which fits since it is used in this proof. Conclusion: act is more knowable than ability.

4. Footnote on Kant and Marx: “we know only what we make” (“the success of geometry is due to our making”) #

Point: the same observation (you must make the lines actual) is taken by Kant, in the later preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, to a different point: geometry succeeds because we make what we know, which led to modern physical science. Marx then: we know only what we make, and we are beginning and end of what we make, so we must see ourselves as beginning and end of all things. Weizsäcker: only what is of our making could be knowable to us.

• His diagnosis: the ancients called geometry a liberal art because it involves a mental making; the “tyrant custom” is to be accustomed only to that kind of knowing.

5. Thomas on the Physics proemium: more known to us vs. more known by nature (“what is more known to us is not more known simply”) #

Point: Thomas returns to this passage of Theta when explaining the natural road in our knowledge at the start of Natural Hearing Book I.

• Aristotle’s difficult statement: the natural road is from what is more known to us to what is more known simply / by nature. Distinction: more known simply vs. more known not simply but in some way (to us).
• Manuductio from confused before distinct: a dry red wine is more known to me than that it is a Cabernet Sauvignon, but what is known to be a Cabernet is more known than what is known only as dry red.
• Nicomachean Ethics: we know the effect by itself first (“when we ask why”), but the effect is fully known only in the light of the cause; so we go from effect by itself (more known to us) to effect in the light of the cause (more known simply).
• Thomas’s use of Theta: something is knowable to the extent it is in act; our mind starts empty, “like a tablet upon which nothing has been written”, going from ability to act; so what comes later for us is the more knowable. “That’s kind of a very subtle thing.”
• Descartes’s mistake (“one of the greatest mistakes in history”): identifying certitude with clarity and distinction, i.e. more known to us with more known by nature; two consequent mistakes: (a) being sure of the cogito, he thinks he knows clearly and distinctly what thinking is — “does that follow? No”; (b) in his mathematical physics, “this is so clear and distinct, it must be true”.
• The materialists make the same kind of mistake: passive ability is before act in some way, so they take matter, the most potential, as before simply and the beginning of all things.

6. The four distinctions behind the first two mistakes in and outside speech (“six common kinds of mistake that come from words”) #

Point: Sophistical Refutations gives six mistakes from words and seven outside speech; he singles out the first two of each because they correspond to four distinctions used “again and again” in the life of the mind.

• First from words: mixing up the senses of a word (“fallacy of equivocation”), easiest with a word equivocal by reason, since the meanings are already connected.
• Second from words: mixing up senses of the same speech (amphiboly). Example: the Bible is the word of God; the word of God is the Son of God; therefore the Bible is the Son of God. He likes to put Aristotle’s Proemium point into speech: wisdom is the knowledge of God in both senses — about God (wisdom is about the first cause, and the first cause is God, though he does not prove that there) and the knowledge God has (God alone wise, or most of all). The word of God as Bible is chiefly about the word of God as Son. Shakespeare in King Lear calls philosophy of nature “the wisdom of nature”: wisdom about nature, and the wisdom nature shows. The De Anima is knowledge of the soul in both senses (the soul’s knowledge about itself); geometry is knowledge of the soul in one sense only.
• Speech defined: vocal sound having parts that signify by themselves.
• First outside speech: mixing up the through-itself (as such) and the through-happening (accidental). Marx: man’s ultimate perfection by making; but making perfects the thing made, not the maker; that the carpenter learns while making is accidental, and to that extent he is not yet a maker. Aristotle says this mistake “deceives even the wise”: Plato at the end of Natural Hearing I confuses lack of form with matter; Sartre confuses the ability to choose with the lack of choice before choosing. The accidental especially deceives “when it’s always there”: you are always ignorant before you learn, “but is it through your ignorance that you learn?”
• Second outside speech: mixing up what is so simply and what is so in some way — the materialists’ error, and Descartes’s about what is more known.

7. God most knowable, least known to us; light and darkness (“motion is the least actual of acts”) #

Point: the same distinction runs from the beginning of our knowledge to its goal, the first cause.

• What is most actual is most knowable; God is pure act and therefore most knowable, but not to us (Metaphysics Book II). The act most known to us, as in the first part of Theta, is motion — yet in Natural Hearing III motion is the act of what is able to be insofar as it is still able to be, always incomplete, the least actual of acts; it seems most known because our knowledge starts from the senses and “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs”.
• So the great proof of God’s existence goes from the act most known to us to the act most knowable but least known to us — the ultimate example of the natural road. Aristotle Book II: hence the difficulty of knowing is more in us than in things.
• Plato’s cave: coming out to the sunlight we are at first blinded. Aristotle’s bat: it flies at night perhaps because daylight is too bright — the bat is analogous to us. Scripture: God dwells in light inaccessible; “He’s too knowable.”

8. Lectio eleven: act more true than ability, in composed things (“the disposition of the thing is the cause of the truth”) #

Point: the eleventh reading compares act and ability as to truth; Aristotle is less explicit and Thomas spells it out, like Euclid doing the hard case of a theorem and leaving the easy cases (Heath).

• The announcement: being and non-being are said according to the figures of the categories, and according to ability and act, and “this” is most chiefly true or false; Thomas says “this” means act. First in composed (material) things, then in simple ones.
• Truth: to say that what is, is, and what is not, is not — what is together is together; falsity the contrary.
• Tie to being: it is not because we think truly you are white that you are white, but because you are white our saying so is true; “are you sitting?” — it is true because you are sitting. So the thing’s disposition causes the statement’s truth. If you are only able to sit, is it true you are sitting? “Not yet”; when actually sitting, “really true, actually true”.
• Three cases: always together (man is an animal), always divided (man is an ass), sometimes and sometimes not (you are sitting). “Man is an animal” is always true because man has no ability not to be an animal; “you are sitting” is sometimes true because of your ability. Therefore act is more true than ability.

9. Simple things (asyntheta): truth without composition (“your mind either knows them or it doesn’t”) #

Point: from about line 17, truth in simple things.

• No composition or separation, so the mind either grasps them (a kind of truth, knowing the thing as it is) or does not (not falsity but ignorance) — a student offers “like knowing red”; he accepts it as illustration.
• Simple things cannot be other than they are, are more actual and incorruptible, hence “even more true” than material things: act more true than ability again. Thomas refers to Book II: as things are in being, so they are in truth.
• Student: is this a different sense of truth, since truth and falsity are first in statements? He: yes, Thomas admits it is not univocal, and that is not surprising because being causes being true, and these things have being differently; they have truth “more purely”.
• One is not deceived in grasping what a thing is, except accidentally when some composition is involved.
• Corollary at the end: no deception according to time in unchanging immaterial things — I may sit now and not later, but two is not half of four at one time and not at another; things involving time involve ability. “That brings us to the end of Book Theta.”

10. Excursion: the order of Books XI–XII, from what hardly is to God (“the longest discourse of the human mind”) #

Point: a student asks whether an accident like red is a simple thing; he: Aristotle means a subsistent simple thing, a substance.

• The four last books (XI–XIV) are on the first causes, after being (VI–IX) and one and many (X). Book XI and the first half of XII prepare for the first cause; the second half of XII determines the truth about God.
• Book XI begins from imperfect being, even accidental being “which hardly is”: a Christian geometer — Christianity and geometry do not make one thing, there is no Christian geometry, no way to become one, so how could one be one? Then a summary of the eight books of Natural Hearing: matter, motion, time. First half of XII: substance, much more perfect; then the most perfect being. Why? Because one must go from more known to us to more known simply.
• Thomas: I study the body to study the soul, the soul for the angels, the angels for God; “I don’t study God so I can study anything else.”
• In one of the two senses of “long discourse”, this is the longest discourse of the human mind, going between things as it were infinitely distant.
• Opening aside: “the chief gift of the artist is knowing when to stop.”

His words #

• ability: his rendering throughout [ed.: potency]
• Natural Hearing: the Physics [ed.: Physics]
• Wisdom, fifth book of: Metaphysics V [ed.: Metaphysics]
• bad, three senses: the lack (of what one is able to and should have, when one should); what has the lack; what causes the lack
• equivocal by reason: name carried over by the ratio of the second to the first [ed.: analogical]
• more known to us vs. more known by nature / simply: the distinction of the natural road
• manuductio: leading by the hand from less universal examples
• through itself / as such vs. through happening / by happening: [ed.: per se / per accidens]
• mistake for mixing up the senses of a word: “fallacy of equivocation”; of the same speech: amphiboly
• speech: vocal sound having parts that signify by themselves
• tyrant custom: being accustomed only to knowing that involves making
• liberal art: geometry, “because it has a making”
• motion: the act of what is able to be insofar as it is still able to be; always incomplete
• asyntheta: simple things, not composed
• longest discourse: the discourse between things infinitely far apart

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (Theta), lectio 10 second half (from about line 21) and lectio 11 (simple things from about line 17), with Thomas’s commentary
• Handout: “An Introduction to the First Road in Our Knowledge”, p. 8 (verified; segment on more known to us / by nature)

Mentioned

• Thomas, text on the three senses of bad (prev. lecture; locus not stated)
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing I, critique of Plato (end of Book I) and the proemium on the natural road; Natural Hearing III on motion; Natural Hearing VIII books summarised in Metaphysics XI
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (senses of perfect), I Proemium (wisdom, knowledge of God), II (difficulty in us), XI–XIV
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (effect before cause); Sophistical Refutations (six / seven kinds of mistake)
• Euclid; Heath on the geometers’ custom; Thales
• Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, later preface; Marx; Weizsäcker; Eddington; Descartes, cogito; Sartre
• Plato, Republic (cave); Shakespeare, King Lear; Aristotle’s De Anima; Scripture, “light inaccessible”
• Thomas, “I study the body so I can study the soul…” (locus not stated)
• DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle (printed volume, verified source)

His questions #

• “Does that follow?” — from being sure I am thinking, to knowing clearly and distinctly what thinking is No.
• “Is that your ability to choose?” — the lack of choice before choosing No; the lack always accompanies the ability but is not that through which one chooses.
• “Is it through your ignorance that you learn?” No.
• “Is the effect fully knowable by itself?” No; only in the light of the cause.
• “If you’re able to sit, is it true that you are sitting?” Not yet; true when actually sitting.
• “Which is more true: that man is an animal, or you are sitting?” Man is an animal — always actually so; “you are sitting” only sometimes, because of ability.
• “Is there a different sense of truth?” (student, on simple things) Yes, not univocal; being is the cause of being true, and simple things have being differently.
• “Is two at one time half of four, and at another time not?” No; things not subject to time have no deception according to time.
• “How could I be a Christian geometer?” There is no way to become one; accidental being “hardly is”.
• “Why does he do that?” — start Book XI from the most imperfect beings Because one must go from what is more known to us to what is more known simply.