Custom and Method: Aristotle on Fitting the Way of Proceeding to the Matter, and Modern Certitude

Orientation #

He opens: this is the “fifth and last reading in the third part of the second book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics II]. He closes by announcing that he will now go through “a number of manuductions, likenesses and things” to illustrate Aristotle’s principle. The previous class treated the three roads of speculative knowledge, and the next develops the principle that method and certitude must fit the matter.

The class, in order #

1. Two kinds of force of custom (“the force of custom upon the way”) #

Point: Aristotle here treats custom’s force on how we think, whereas Thomas in the Summa Contra Gentiles treats custom’s force on what we think.

• Custom on what we think: “all men are created equal” is held self-evident by us but would have been a joke in slave-owning Athens; custom can make the not-obvious seem obvious, the false seem true, and what needs proof seem not to need it. The physicist’s law that a body without external force moves uniformly in a straight line seems obvious to him — but why a straight line and not a circle?
• Aristotle’s subject is the other one: the way of thinking.

2. The text: hearings according to customs (“our akroasis, hearings, right, happen”) #

Point: reading of the opening lines — our hearings (akroasis) happen according to customs (ethē); as we are accustomed, so we think one ought to speak; what is unfamiliar seems less known and strange, “for the customary seems to be what known.”

• Aristotle’s sign of the force (ischyn) of the customary: laws that are mythic and childish have great force because they have been around so long.
• Quebec Sunday law forbidding newspaper sales before noon (so people go to mass): silly, but “that’s the law.”
• Woman defending Latin after the vernacular mass: not a question of which is better, but to one who only heard Latin it seems essential — though the mass was probably said in Aramaic or Greek before Latin.
• Language: the adjective after the noun in Latin/Greek seems impossible; the classmate’s “how did the French kids ever learn this?”; his children’s “the greatest accomplishment of the Romans — they spoke Latin.” One’s native language seems the natural way of talking.

3. Three examples of customary ways demanded (“if one does not speak what mathematically”) #

Point: Aristotle applies this to the sciences with three examples of people who will not receive what is said unless it comes in the way they are used to.

1. Those who demand everything said mathematically — he notes it is “kind of important” this is the first example. Ancients: Pythagoreans (soul a self-moving number; numbers for the virtues — his joke that justice must be an even number, “we’re going to get even”; “I get your number”). Moderns: Descartes, Spinoza, the rationalists; Lord Kelvin, “if it’s not mathematical, it’s not scientific”; mathematical/symbolic logic wanting to make everything, even philosophy, mathematical. Thomas adds this can also come from an innate ability for mathematics, but custom has a great role.
2. Weaker-minded people who want everything made sensible with examples they can sense — like the rhetoricians.
3. Those who want a poet brought in as witness — seen in the Protagoras and elsewhere in the dialogues.

4. Poets as authority; the Middle Ages; the poetic temper (“the argument from authority is the weakest”) #

Point: the third example rests on authority, since the poets were thought inspired by the gods; there is a medieval analogue and a modern variant.

• Middle Ages: the Bible has authority as the word of God, and the customary theological method of referring to it tempted people to look for a Bible for other sciences (Galen for medicine). Albert the Great reporting the objection that Porphyry’s book cannot be logic because Aristotle wrote no such book — Albert dismisses it (maybe it was lost, maybe “being a man” he never got to it), but “who would object that way today?”
• A different case from Aristotle’s: the Romantics (Novalis: the more poetic, the more true) — not authority now but being accustomed to think poetically; it must move the imagination or it is not accepted. Existentialists presenting ideas through fiction; the Da Vinci Code, which no one took seriously philosophically but seems true in poetic form. Keats’ “beauty is truth, truth beauty” — “you have to know a little bit more.”
• Student: is this only a problem before Shakespeare? Answer: before and after. His comparison: Plato a philosopher with poetic gifts (characterization), Shakespeare a playwright with philosophical gifts — unique individuals, not what one would expect; no one knows where Shakespeare’s wisdom comes from.

5. The same point in terms of certitude: akribōs (“some want all things said”) #

Point: Aristotle restates the matter: some want everything said akribōs; others are pained by it, either because they cannot follow or because it seems stingy.

• Distinction on the word: akribōs / akribes can mean certain or precise/exact; Thomas takes it as certitude, but the sense holds both ways.
• Two contrasting tempers in philosophy: the very precise (mathematical logic) vs. the poetic and loose (“don’t stop the flow of thought with your roadblocks”).
• Text: the accurate has something illiberal about it, as in commercial dealings, “to pound things down.” Bachelor professors’ dinner: all throw in money roughly, the old professor pays exactly his meal — stingy.
• Shakespeare’s sonnet on “niggard truth” (a student asked him to repeat the point): in human affairs we flatter the meal and the friend, and the plain truth seems stingy. The Notre Dame priest’s “you can’t mean that” when told one learns more from Aristotle and Thomas than from all the rest put together: the truth seems stingy, liberality seems to say each has contributed — omnivorous readers, eaters, absorbers of music.
• Student: “micrology,” also translated quibbling, splitting hairs — accepted.
• People dislike having an argument examined; teaching Thomas requires stopping to analyze. It takes a wise man to know when to be accurate and when not; partly a matter of taste. His brother Mark opposed perpetual seminars that never conclude, but not a perpetual seminar on Cabernet Sauvignon.
• Student: Kant’s categorical imperative — demanding mathematical certainty in ethics. Yes: seeking a formula deciding every case demands more precision than the matter has.
• Fiction: one cannot demand strict rigor — Restoration comedy where the undesirable bride is substituted under the veil (“heaven has seen fit to substitute purgatory”); holes in science-fiction physics; Shakespeare changing ages in the history plays for poetic purposes.

6. Custom is not how to decide the way; paideia vs episteme (“one ought to be what, pepaideumenon”) #

Point: that people accustomed to different ways proceed differently in the same matter shows, by their disagreement, that custom is not the way to decide how to proceed.

• Exaggerated likeness: using the eyes to know Mozart’s music, or the ear to hear a painting — obviously absurd, but something like it happens.
• Text: one ought to be pepaideumenon (educated) in how each thing ought to be received. Paideia in Aristotle’s accurate sense is knowledge of how to proceed; one must be taught how to consider each matter — as Thomas, in the first question of the Summa, treats how one proceeds in theology.
• It is atopon (unsuitable) to seek at the same time episteme and the way of episteme.
• Beginning of Parts of Animals: every methodos (a road; each part of philosophy called a methodos) admits of two ways of being had: paideia, knowing the road to follow, and episteme, what you have when you have gone down the road to the end. Sometimes Aristotle uses the two words synonymously; here he distinguishes them. You cannot do both well at once; you must know the road first. Aristotle adds neither is easy to get.

7. Why mathematics seems best, and the scale of certitude (“the science that has to take into account more things”) #

Point: mathematics knows its subject best (Boethius: it proceeds disciplinabiliter, learnably), which is why a Descartes wants to proceed that way everywhere — but it is not the best way in natural philosophy, which involves matter and potency.

• We know more what God is not; we know motion and place but not clearly; the geometer knows his subject best.
• Posterior Analytics rule: the science that must take into account more things to know its subject is less certain. Arithmetic is more certain than geometry: the one and the point are both indivisible, but the point adds position (“the one having position”), so three points may or may not lie on a line while three ones are nowhere. His own experience of Euclid, with Heath’s and Proclus’ notes on the cases to be distinguished — arising because lines can be drawn here or there.
• Natural philosophy adds matter: the earth a sphere but perhaps flattened at the poles; the tire round but flattened on the parking lot; a dog with four legs unless injured — “you don’t have to worry about the squares getting injured.”
• Political philosophy adds custom and choice: American man, Athenian man, Roman citizen are more than man by nature.
• Conclusion: demand neither more nor less certitude than the matter admits; so examine the matter. He flags this as again the mistake of mixing up what is so simply and what is not so simply — Thomas uses simplicitas: the way that is simply best is not best for every science.

8. The text’s conclusion and Boethius’ addition (“ought not to be sought at all”) #

Point: akribologia, the mathematical way, is to be sought only in things without matter; hence it is not the natural way, since all nature probably has matter.

• Aristotle’s last lines — first investigate what nature is, then what natural philosophy is about and which causes it pursues — are, as Thomas notes, exactly what he does in the second book of Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• Boethius in the De Trinitate repeats this clearly and adds “how our reason is towards that matter,” which still goes back to the matter: we are related to theology’s matter by faith, geometry’s by imagination, cats and dogs by the senses, logic’s by reason.

9. The moderns: a certitude beyond human nature, and privation (“some kind of a substitute for it”) #

Point: student raises modern rejection of the senses as starting point; he distinguishes this from Aristotle’s case and adds a diagnosis.

• Distinction: Aristotle’s case is seeking a certitude the matter does not admit; the moderns seek the certitude of an angel, which human nature does not admit, since we depend on the senses.
• Privation: Thomas in the Summa Theologiae holds theology more certain than philosophy because of revelation. The Greeks simply never had it; the moderns, revolting against theology in the Christian era, lack what they should have, and look in philosophy for a substitute — “a psychological rule.”
• Weizsäcker, The World View of Physics: the modern taste for an infinite universe came when they gave up the infinite God and needed a substitute — “a very, very subtle essay,” much truth in it. Likewise they seek in philosophy the more-than-human certitude they gave up in theology.
• He ends: next, manuductions and likenesses to illustrate the principle.

His words #

• force of custom: on what we think (Thomas, SCG) vs. on the way we think (Aristotle here)
• akroasis: “hearings”; ethē: customs; ischyn: force
• akribōs / akribes: certain, also precise/exact; Thomas takes it as certitude
• “niggard truth”: Shakespeare’s phrase; truth as stingy
• micrology: quibbling, splitting hairs (student’s rendering, accepted)
• pepaideumenon: educated; paideia: knowledge of how to proceed
• atopon: unsuitable, “stupid”
• episteme: reasoned-out knowledge, the road gone to its end
• methodos: a road; each part of philosophy
• disciplinabiliter: Boethius’ word, proceeding learnably
• simplicitas: Thomas’ word; what is best simply vs. best for this science
• akribologia: the very certain/precise mathematical way of reasoning
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• privation: lacking what one should have, vs. simply not having
• manuductions: likenesses leading by the hand (to come)

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics II, third part, fifth reading (with Thomas’s exposition, inferred: Commentary on the Metaphysics)
• Aristotle, Parts of Animals I, beginning (paideia and episteme)

Mentioned

• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (force of custom on what we think)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I q.1 (how one proceeds in theology; theology more certain than philosophy)
• Plato, Protagoras and other dialogues (poets as witness)
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (more things to consider, less certitude)
• Aristotle, Physics II (what nature is)
• Boethius, De Trinitate
• Euclid, Elements, with Heath and Proclus
• Shakespeare, a sonnet (“niggard truth”); Keats; Novalis; Albert the Great on Porphyry
• Weizsäcker, The World View of Physics

His questions #

• Is the law of uniform motion in a straight line really obvious, or does custom make it seem so? Left open; used to show custom can make what needs proof seem obvious.
• Do you think justice is an even or odd number? Even — “we’re going to get even” (his Pythagorean joke).
• Who would object today that a book cannot be logic because Aristotle did not write it? No one; the Middle Ages might, because of authority.
• Is this only a problem before the birth of Shakespeare? (student) Before and after; Plato and Shakespeare are unique individuals, not the rule.
• Why call truth stingy? Because in human affairs we flatter, and the plain truth seems illiberal.
• Is knowing when to be accurate a matter of taste? (student) To some extent; it takes a wise man to know.
• Why is arithmetic more certain than geometry? The point adds position to the one, so more must be taken into account.
• Is the modern rejection of the senses the same mistake? (student) Analogous but different: a certitude human nature, not the matter, does not admit.