Metaphysics II, Reading 5: The Roads in Our Knowledge and the Natural Road

Orientation #

He picks up “the last argument he gives here” at the end of the fourth reading and finishes it; he says “we’re going to start turning here now to the third part of the second book of wisdom,” the fifth reading, but stops before actually reading it, preferring first to lay out “the division” of the roads in our knowledge. He refers back to “the sixth attribute they were looking at at the beginning of class today,” to the ninth reading (motion to pure act), and to “what we did one day here before” on the natural road. The previous class covered readings 2–4 (end and form cannot regress to infinity); the next continues with the second and third roads.

The class, in order #

1. Form as limit; no infinity of kinds of cause (“form is to matter like limit”) #

The last argument of reading 4 restated, then the brief closing objection about an infinite number of kinds of cause.

• Restatement: it is a commonplace that form is to matter as limit to the unlimited (wood is not limited to one thing you can make of it; water is unlimited in its shapes; Anaximander called the beginning the apeiron, and Anaxagoras has “something infinite about the first matter”). So one should not attribute to form what belongs to matter: form itself is a limit.
• Closing objection: grant a first cause within each genus (mover, matter, end, form) — but suppose an infinity of kinds of cause. Aristotle: then you could not know either. His example: the definition of marriage (“stable union of a man and woman, by mutual choice, for the sake of children”) uses all four kinds of cause; with an infinity of kinds you would never succeed in knowing what marriage is.
• Student: what if there were infinitely many kinds of cause but only finitely many belong to any given thing? — “I suppose you could say that, yeah”; this last part is “simply, for the sake of completeness.”
• Two supports that there are just four kinds: (a) Book I confirms it by narrating the opinions of the Greeks; (b) Thomas in the laying-out of Physics II gives a reason: a cause is what is responsible for the being or becoming of a thing; the form is responsible for being; becoming requires the matter from which, the mover actualizing it, and the end the mover acts for.
• Another way to manifest completeness: divide causes into inside and outside; inside into parts (matter) and the whole or order of the thing (form); outside into before (mover) and after (end).
• Aside: “exposition” — he prefers the English “laying out” as more revealing (exposition “might remind you of a world fair”).

2. Order among forms: intrinsic form vs. unity of order (“is every whole a part”) #

Student question about a “first form, second form, third form.” Reply: form here means something intrinsic to the thing, not the form of the universe as a whole, which belongs to natural philosophy.

• Once one sees that the same thing can be part and whole (as the same thing can be genus and species), two questions arise: is every part a whole (downward forever)? and is every whole a part? Einstein went looking for a whole that is not a part; Heisenberg and Bohr for a part that is not a whole (“Heisenberg said, ‘I never thought this would go on forever’”). Colorado in the United States in North America in the world in the solar system: that is only a unity of order, not an intrinsic form. “Let’s take it up more in natural philosophy.”
• On grades of form: Book VIII develops the connection between definition and form; definitions are like numbers, but there is no multiplication of real forms, since the higher form gives what the lower gives plus more. Man does not have one form by which he is man, another by which animal, another by which he grows, another by which he has length, width and depth (Thomas talks of grades, “but you’re not talking about a real distinction of forms”).

3. Readings 1–4 as reason “looking before and after” (“every time you ask the question why”) #

Point: Aristotle in this book has been using reason in Shakespeare’s sense — looking before and after — and this can be traced through each reading.

• Asking why is looking before, because the cause is before the effect in “that crowning sense of before” in Categories ch. 12; looking to consequences is looking after. The virtue of foresight — the English name for prudence, from providentia — is named from before and after (the man who can foresee the results of going into Iraq, or of drinking that much). Art, as Thomas defines it broadly in the proemium to the Posterior Analytics, is an ordering by reason: one, two, three, as in a recipe — knowing an order of steps.
• Readings 2–4: first cause, defined by before and after.
• Showing that consideration of truth belongs most to the wise man: seeing that the order in being and the order in truth are the same (“as a thing is in being, so is it in truth”).
• Reading 1: begins with a distinction (truth easy in one way, difficult in another), then goes into each. Easiness: the truth everyone sees, in the axioms, at least confusedly, is the cornerstone; beyond it one man discovers one part, another another, and even one man sees a part before the whole — “a lot of befores and afters.” Difficulty: asking why it is difficult is looking before; the cause is either in the thing (not very actual) or in us.
• Example for “in the thing or in us”: why does Bertram not love Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well (he retells the plot: the commoner daughter of a dead doctor cures the king, chooses Bertram as reward, he marries but flees, unconsummated)? Is she unlovable, or is the defect in his pride? “Shakespeare is saying the defect is in his heart, but you could probably argue a little bit about it.”
• Aside on one man helped by another: this extends “man is by nature a political animal” (Politics) to the life of the mind, though that life is more solitary than most; we are indebted even to those we disagree with and to their mistakes — hence Augustine: heresy is necessary for the development of theology; refuting the heretic gives greater understanding of the article. Vatican II on the formation of priests: the Fathers contribute to understanding individual mysteries, but to see them in an orderly way take Thomas as guide; the Fathers and councils have an “ad hoc character,” reacting to the heresy of the time. The nuns in choir: man is a social animal.

4. The fifth reading: the road in our knowledge (“knowledge over a road”) #

Point: reason can look before and after not only in things but in its own discourse; that before-and-after in our knowledge is called a road.

• Parmenides, Empedocles, Heraclitus, and especially Plato and Aristotle speak of a road in our knowledge; philosophy is often called methodos, “literally over a road,” knowledge that follows a road.
• The fifth reading (third part of Book II) is about how the road to follow in any reasoned-out knowledge should be determined — and, since it is the same knowledge of opposites, how it should not.
• Vocabulary: Aristotle’s fuller phrase is tropos of going forward (tropos = turning, or more broadly, way; the Physics proemium uses the whole phrase); Thomas: modus procedendi, sometimes contracted to the modus of the science, as Aristotle sometimes says just the tropos of the science. In English these must be “way of going forward,” not “road”; but “way” often means road, and Aristotle in the proemium also speaks of the road.
• Why he treats way and road together (Physics VI): the before and after in a road, in the motion over it, and in the time it takes correspond. Worcester–Framingham–Boston: the road, the journey, and the time are proportionally ordered. This is why in Categories (first sense of before) time, motion and magnitude are led back to one sense; and why in Metaphysics V the first sense of beginning is of a magnitude, to which beginning of motion and of time are led back — as the first sense of in is in place, to which in time is led back “because of the similarity of being in an extrinsic measure.”
• Thomas’s distinction in the laying-out of this reading: the proprius modus procedendi (private to geometry, natural philosophy, wisdom) vs. the communis modus procedendi of any reasoned-out knowledge. The common way is studied in logic (Posterior Analytics); the private way is learned at the beginning of each science.
• Dion [ed.: Charles De Koninck’s circle at Laval; name as he says it] took Thomas’s two ways, added the natural way of going forward from the Physics proemium, and arrived at three ways — “I don’t know any text in Aristotle or Thomas where they say explicitly that there are three.” He himself, from the Physics connection, speaks of three roads, “very concrete.”
• Socrates: “remember the man who forgets which way the road goes.” Descartes and Spinoza want knowledge to go from cause to effect; for the most part ours goes effect to cause. Image: you are at the Worcester station wanting Boston, and Descartes or Spinoza behind the counter sells you a ticket from Boston to Worcester — fine for an angel or God, no good for us.

5. Why this belongs to the wise man (“the road to follow in any reasoned out knowledge”) #

• The wise man could have made the three-road distinction; in the proemium he treated the natural road (sensing before memory before experience before the universal) not as subject but to bring out something about wisdom: since students “invariably” say wisdom comes at the end of our knowledge, seeing the direction of the natural road helps see what the end might be.
• In Book II he must find the road within wisdom; the fifth reading treats what is presupposed: how to determine the road in any reasoned-out knowledge. This more general consideration is the wise man’s, because whoever considers it “is in a way directing all of them” — from the sixth attribute seen at the beginning of class.
• He should also have distinguished the private and common roads (Thomas does, in the exposition, under the other phrase) and the natural road; “we don’t have a text where he does it, huh? But that’s what Dion did” — “one thing he did, but a very great thing.”

6. The division of the roads (“a massive failure to use reason”) #

• A road in our knowledge is, roughly, an order, a before and after in our knowledge; each road involves many, and there is before and after among the roads themselves (first, second, third).
• That people don’t talk about the roads is “a sign of a massive failure to use reason”: reason should look before and after not only in things (act and ability in Book IX; causes) but in our knowledge.
• Division into two or three: two = the natural road vs. the road(s) made by reason (nature and reason being the two sources of order we know). The natural road is first, because the nature of a thing is first in it: “you’ve got to be what you are before you can be anything else.”
• The natural road rests on man’s nature: an animal (defined by senses) that has reason; the generic develops before the specific, so the natural road is from the senses into reason.

7. The natural road (i): order of kinds of knowing (“sensing, memory, experience”) #

First distinction: the order of different kinds of knowing along this road vs. the order in which things are known along it — they correspond, but “you don’t bring out exactly the same.”

• Kinds of knowing (from the proemium, completed from Book II): sensing; memory of what was sensed; experience, the collection of memories of the same — all still singular; then knowledge of the universal: natural understanding (the axioms and their parts) first, then reasoned-out understanding, last wisdom, the perfection of both. So knowledge of the singular comes before the universal. Many forms of reasoned-out understanding are ordered before wisdom; not detailed today.
• Sensing is the beginning, wisdom the end: the road to wisdom, which is why it belongs to the wise man; distinguished from the road within wisdom, the private road (what “the great turnaround” was about).

8. The natural road (ii): order in which different things are known (“the composed is known before the simple”) #

Sub-distinction: the order among different things vs. the order in knowing one and the same thing (the latter “most difficult,” saved for last). Ascending in universality: sensible things before insensible (most obvious); material before immaterial (the former sensible); effect before cause for the most part — not only because immaterial things cause material ones, but within material things the effect is usually more sensible (the one exception: geometry and arithmetic, dealing with an accident, quantity, taken abstractly); the composed before the simple — not only because cause is simpler than effect, but as in geometry: body, surface (length and width, no depth), line, point (none), knowing the simpler by negating the composed, though the simple is not here the cause. “Aristotle and Thomas say here or there… I’ve never seen them put them all together.”

9. The natural road (iii): order in knowing the same thing (“singular when sensed, universal when understood”) #

1. Boethius, commentary on Porphyry: a thing is singular when sensed, universal when understood. Hence examples come before definitions, and induction before syllogism (induction goes from singulars to the universal; syllogism begins from the universal).
2. Outward before inward. Student: does “outward” differ from “sensed”? — that “outward” is almost a synonym for sensible shows the connection; but it is more general than singular-to-universal, since even definitions are first outward. Ethics: Aristotle’s first definition of happiness is a perigraphe, “drawing a line around.” Virtue first defined as a praiseworthy quality — praise is outside; the child knows good and bad outwardly by what mommy and daddy approve. One reasons inward: praised quality → what is praised is the mean → virtue is the mean. His own opening: wisdom is the best knowledge (says nothing of what it knows); better knowledge is of a better thing; so the best knowledge is of the best thing; if that is God, wisdom is knowledge of God — “now I’m getting inside”; then, how do we know him. Comedy: a play that makes you laugh — the laughing is in the audience.
3. Confused before distinct (Physics proemium): knowing by name is to knowing by definition as confused to distinct.

• Common to both orders, from the proemium: it is inborn to go from what is more known to us to what is more known by nature — applied there to confused/distinct, and in the Ethics to effect/cause (effect by itself → effect in light of the cause). “That’s the culmination. That’s the most profound… most difficult to see.” Supreme example (ninth reading): from motion, most known to us, to pure act, God, most known by nature and least to us.
• Thomas’s reason for confused-before-distinct: both sense and reason can know before they actually know, and going from ability to act, confused knowing lies between not knowing and knowing distinctly.

10. Which part of philosophy follows the natural road most? (“that’s the one that least follows the natural road”) #

The natural road underlies all knowledge, but: natural philosophy follows it most — which is why it proceeds rationabiliter in Boethius’s sense; students answer “mathematics next, then wisdom,” but he corrects: mathematics is the exception, going cause to effect, least natural. Wisdom follows it more: Book IX goes from act and ability in sensible, mobile things toward the immaterial; the words start from their sensible meaning; substance is begun in VII–VIII from material substance and not concluded until XII.

• Geometry cannot wholly escape the natural road: Euclid defines the point as that which has no parts — the composed is more known, the simple defined by negation. Yet Euclid rightly gives point first, because geometry must be imagined: you must get down to the point to imagine the line correctly (“you imagine a point by the motion of a line” [ed.: as spoken; likely “a line by the motion of a point,” since he adds “the point doesn’t have any width, so that’s why the line has no width”]), the circle by rotating a line, the sphere by rotating a circle around its diameter — line before triangle, circle before sphere. So geometry follows the natural road least.
• Hence the great mistake of Descartes and Spinoza: proceeding everywhere as in geometry goes against the natural road (and against the private roads, as Aristotle points out here). Descartes’s cogito is still effect to cause, but then he jumps to God and proceeds from the cause of everything. Spinoza: “the order in thoughts and the order in things is the same” — but it is for the most part the reverse: I know the effect before the cause, the cause before its cause, and that before the first cause. “The whole of human thought is disarranged.”

His words #

• apeiron: Anaximander’s name for the beginning, the unlimited, the infinite.
• “laying out”: his English for expositio, Thomas’s commentary.
• “wisdom”: his name for the Metaphysics; “natural hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• “reason”: “the ability for large discourse, looking before and after” (Shakespeare’s definition).
• “crowning sense of before”: cause before effect, Categories ch. 12.
• foresight: the English name for prudence, from providentia.
• “road in our knowledge”: an order, a before and after, in our knowledge; methodos, “over a road.”
• tropos (of going forward): turning, or way; Thomas’s modus procedendi, “way of going forward”; contracted, the modus of the science.
• proprius / communis modus procedendi: private vs. common way of going forward; “private road” [ed.: proper].
• “reasoned out knowledge” [ed.: science].
• “the natural road”: from the senses into reason; “road to wisdom” vs. “road within wisdom.”
• “natural understanding” (of the axioms), “reasoned-out understanding,” wisdom.
• perigraphe: drawing a line around; Aristotle’s first, outward definition of happiness.
• rationabiliter: Boethius’s term for how natural philosophy proceeds.
• “ability” [ed.: potency], “act.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics II, end of reading 4 (form as limit; infinity of kinds of cause), in Thomas’s exposition
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II, reading 5 (third part of the book) — introduced, not yet read
• handout, “An Introduction to the First Road in Our Knowledge,” p. 4 (verified)
• handout, “The First Definition of Reason,” p. 90 (verified)

Mentioned

• Metaphysics I (four causes confirmed from the Greeks); V (beginning; in); VII–VIII (substance from material substance; definition and form); IX (act and ability); XII
• Thomas, exposition of Physics II (why four causes) (inferred locus); Physics I proemium (natural road; confused before distinct; more known to us / by nature); Physics VI (road, motion, time proportional)
• Categories ch. 12 (before and after)
• Posterior Analytics, Thomas’s proemium (art as ordering by reason)
• Nicomachean Ethics (perigraphe; virtue as praiseworthy quality; effect to cause); Politics (political animal)
• Boethius, commentary on Porphyry; Boethius on rationabiliter
• Euclid, Elements, definitions of point, circle, sphere
• Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well; “looking before and after”
• Augustine on heresy; Vatican II on theological formation; Descartes (cogito); Spinoza; Dion on the three ways of going forward

His questions #

• What if there were an infinite number of kinds of cause but only a finite number belonged to any given thing? “I suppose you could say that”; the closing objection is only for completeness.
• Was Aristotle looking before and after in readings 2–4, and in showing that truth belongs to the wise man? Yes: first cause is defined by before and after; the order in being and in truth is the same.
• Is there a before and after in the first reading, on truth’s easiness and difficulty? Yes: axioms everyone sees before what individuals discover; parts before the whole; asking why difficulty exists looks to the cause, in the thing or in us.
• Why does Bertram not love Helena — is the defect in her or in him? Shakespeare says in his heart; “you could probably argue a little bit about it.”
• Does wisdom come at the beginning, middle or end of our knowledge? Students invariably say the end.
• Is every part a whole, and every whole a part? Left open — “let’s take it up more in natural philosophy.”
• Does “outward” mean anything different from “sensed”? It is almost a synonym, which shows the connection; but outward-before-inward is more general, holding even of definitions.
• Which of the three parts of philosophy follows the natural road most, next, least? Natural philosophy most; wisdom next; mathematics least (it goes from cause to effect, simple to composed).