Likenesses for Method: Tools, Senses, Food and Fiction; Learning One Word at a Time

Orientation #

He continues “that the way of proceeding should fit the matter” with further likenesses; he says “we had come to the end of book two of wisdom” and asks what to do next (proemium to wisdom, book five, or “the customs”). At the close he announces that they wanted him to talk about “the three major sources of the modern world and its customs.” The previous class worked through Aristotle’s Physics II on custom and the way of proceeding; the next opens the three formative sources of the modern world.

The class, in order #

1. Tools fit the matter; certitude fits the matter (“the way of proceeding should fit the matter”) #

Point: Aristotle’s likeness in Nicomachean Ethics I compares the matter of a rational knowledge to the matter of the practical arts, which cannot be worked in the same way.

• Brother-in-law the carpenter (hammer, saw) vs. his wife making a dress (scissors, needle, thread): neither works the other’s matter with his tools; the glassblower with hammer and saw “just doesn’t work”; his father’s forge shop, where you heat metal and bend it, vs. trying that in the wood shop. Shows: different matters need different tools and ways of working.
• The tropos, the way of proceeding, is a tool for knowing the subject and must likewise fit the matter considered.
• Same likeness applied to certitude: you cannot have the same precision cutting wood as cutting paper with scissors; a fortiori blasting or chipping stone for the presidents’ busts in South Dakota vs. cutting a paper silhouette. Shows: no same certitude in different subjects, as no same precision in different matter.
• Aside: Shakespeare talks about it somewhere; he does not have the passage.

2. The senses as ways of knowing (“the senses are ways of knowing”) #

Point: the senses, like the ways of proceeding in the sciences, are ways of knowing, and the way of knowing must fit what is to be known.

• Paintings of Titian: the eye, not the ear; music of Mozart: the ear; Barbera or Chianti: taste and smell, a little sight. You do not taste a painting or listen to the wine going into the glass (“could be kind of nice sometimes, but not the way you know a wine for what it is”).

3. Custom: food and fiction (“seek the pleasure appropriate to that one”) #

Point: a different likeness, not a way of knowing but “in terms of custom,” which he calls more intellectual and revealing the force of custom even more than eye and ear.

• Food: people accustomed to certain foods cannot appreciate food of another nationality; wine vs. soda pop, you must be taught how to drink wine (sniff it, etc.) or you’ll be spitting it up; custom can be overcome and you come to like the food.
• Fiction, the better likeness: one must be educated, taught, to appreciate an unfamiliar form. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: medieval forms enjoyed longer than the novel has been enjoyed by us, which we must be taught to read; Preface to Paradise Lost: you cannot read Paradise Lost as lyric poetry or you miss the sweep.
• Aristotle, Poetics: one should not expect from tragedy the pleasure proper to comedy (people want the tragedy to have a happy ending); the pleasure proper to tragedy is from the catharsis of pity and fear, and whether greater or lesser than comedy’s, it is the pleasure appropriate to that work.
• His friend Jim teaching Macbeth in high school: told them it was a detective story, i.e. gave up making them appreciate it as that kind of play. People in “this prosaic age” go numb at poetry, whereas grandparents read poetry in the evening and an 18th-century poet got a pension from the king. People who read only whodunits are seeking the wrong pleasure in other fiction.
• Advice column: girl’s boyfriend wants candy-flavored lipstick; “buy him a lollipop”, he seeks in a kiss the pleasure proper to a lollipop. Shows: exactly Aristotle’s mistake.
• Henry Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews: an early novelist explaining, using distinctions from the Poetics, the form he attempts (“comic epic in prose”) so the reader does not seek a pleasure the author did not intend.
• No ice cream on the steak tonight: that would seek from steak the pleasure proper to ice cream; not a question of which pleasure is greater. Student: colorblind father-in-law spat out pea soup he expected to be tomato soup; “that’s pretty important, what you expect.”
• Wine tasting commonplace: the uneducated prefer white before red, sweet before dry, still holding on to the pleasure of soda pop; with experience one gets more pleasure from red and dry. Conclusion: as you should not proceed the same way in every science, so you should not seek the same pleasure from every form of fiction, food, or drink; if it is not customary, you must be educated, working against the force of custom.

4. Student question: subject and method in Metaphysics; the De Trinitate (“the way you define”) #

Q: In wisdom does he get the subject after determining the method?

• Subject: beginning of book four, he shows wisdom is about being as being and the one and the many, reasoning from its goal (the first causes) to its subject (being as being).
• Method: no. The first thing in “the private road” [ed.: proper way] is the way you define, not brought out until the first reading of book six, where he distinguishes wisdom from the other sciences and the other parts of looking philosophy [ed.: theoretical/speculative philosophy]; so the method comes only after the subject is known and considered, even after the clarification of the words.
• Monsignor Dionne at Laval taught the “private roads” from the De Trinitate: Boethius, following Aristotle, distinguishes the three parts of looking philosophy by the way they define, then attributes to natural philosophy that it proceeds rationabiliter, mathematics disciplinabiliter, wisdom intellectualiter; Thomas has whole articles with objections on each. A classical text for seeing that you cannot proceed the same way in mathematics, natural philosophy and wisdom.
• Thomas distinguishes three senses of rationabiliter: (1) the sense in which natural philosophy proceeds; (2) the sense in which logic especially, but wisdom to some extent, proceeds (most people overlook this; Dionne understood it); (3) the sense in which ethics and political philosophy proceed. The word “by reason” is equivocal. “A couple lectures in itself”; what sense wisdom is intellectualiter left for another time.
• Linked to “large discourse,” the one from the many and the many from the one: the wise man sees something simple but of universal importance, beginnings from which all kinds of conclusions follow (the ninth book on act and ability has almost infinite consequences). That is “brevity is the soul of wisdom”; Max Planck: the more universal a theory in physics, the simpler it is.
• Aside: Dionne’s later courses (logic, natural world, dispositions of will necessary in philosophy) went from the more general to the particular.

5. What next: book five, one word at a time (“chew something basic and chew it well”) #

Point: rather than every word of book five (a whole semester at Laval; “indigestion”), pick one word of interest and understand it, then see its uses everywhere.

• “Part” shows up not just in wisdom but everywhere.
• Physics IV, the eight senses of in and out, which Thomas orders. Teaching logic at Assumption he suspected “thinking out / reasoning out” had more than one meaning; found at least one sense of thinking out for almost every sense of in and out, and that we think things out in the same order as the senses: thinking out a definition (third sense) before thinking out a conclusion (seventh sense). Teaching Anaxagoras (“you can’t get something out of nothing,” so it must be in there): in what sense in? maybe in there the wrong way; back to the senses of in and out. So one word helps in natural philosophy beyond book four and in logic.
• Senses of before and after: needed for the ninth book, for good and better in ethics, the goods of man.

6. De Koninck and Dionne: the higher mind gives less that is more (“learned more from Dion”) #

Point: Kassarik [name uncertain] as a student thought he learned more from De Koninck than from Dionne, but after teaching some years realized the reverse. How can that be?

• De Koninck himself regarded Dionne as the greatest mind there (Mrs. De Koninck told Mary Shea so; when Berquist brought a thesis question to De Koninck he said, why ask me when you have Dionne; De Koninck had Dionne look over his articles before publishing: “true humility, not false humility”).
• The higher the mind, the truer Shakespeare’s “brevity is the soul of wit”: he gives something that seems smaller in size but is greater in power, so once out teaching you see the applications and get more out. Chinese saying: give a fish vs. teach to fish; a load of fish looks nicer than a rod, yet the rod leads to more.
• Consequence: evaluate a professor a couple of years after college; the immediate impression is superficial, so picking a professor wisely is hard. The expansive professor gives a finished product; the narrow one something more powerful.
• Aristotle, Rhetoric: early rhetoricians gave samples of speeches to imitate, not the principles of persuasion, so one who goes to the principles goes further in the long run. Student adds: [unclear name in recording] said the same of books on the spiritual life, and that it was a problem to get nuns to pick the ones with principles.
• Plato and Aristotle quote the Greek proverb “the beginning is half of all,” and Plato says it is more than half.

7. Student objection: shouldn’t wisdom be the soul of brevity? (“Brevity is the soul of wit”) #

Q: since soul is the inner principle, wouldn’t it make more sense to say wisdom is the soul of brevity?

• Answer: what unifies wisdom is something very small, as all the points of the circumference are united in the centre, which is more the soul of the circle than the circumference. Albert the Great and Thomas, following Plato and Aristotle, compare the beginning to a seed: the acorn small in size, great in power. So “brevity” means something brief but powerful.
• He used to stress it so much students yelled “Brevity is the soul” from the dormitory window.
• Poetics: epic is considered as attached to tragedy; asked which is superior, Aristotle argues tragedy, because it gets the same effect with fewer words. Shakespeare’s exhortation to use reason: in fewer words than most men would take it says what reason is, what it is to use it, why, and reduces it to the end of man.
• Shakespeare puts “brevity is the soul of wit” in the mouth of Polonius, whom Hamlet calls “tedious old fool”: fool is the opposite of wit, tedious of brevity; partly for amusement, partly to avoid seeming pedantic, a great truth in one who exemplifies its opposite.

8. Student question: how to show students the power of principles (“which is better, philosophizing or breathing”) #

Q: when teaching principles whose power is not evident, how manifest it?

• Do not give too many principles, or there is no time to show their power. Example from introduction to philosophy, where he teaches the senses of before and after (and the categories) before interpreting Shakespeare, then, on goods of the soul vs. body:
  1. “Which is better, philosophizing or breathing?” They say breathing, because without breathing you do nothing else. That shows breathing is before philosophizing in the second sense of before (can breathe without philosophizing, not the reverse), not the fourth sense (better). Chaucer before Shakespeare in time does not make him better: equivocation.
  2. He improves their argument: if the opposite of a thing is worse, that thing is better. Blind worse than deaf, so sight better than hearing; killing a man worse than killing a dog, so man better than dog; stopping breathing worse than stopping philosophizing, so breathing better.
  3. The exception: when one thing is before another in being, losing it loses everything; breathing is before philosophizing in being, so the rule and the argument break down. Live vs. live well: living well is better, yet stopping living is worse. Man vs. water: man better, no water worse. Bricks vs. brick wall: we pay more for the wall (“a monetary age”), yet no bricks is worse, because before in being.
• Note: the senses of before and after used twice, first to expose the equivocation, then to locate the exception. Something hard to explain but a beginning used throughout the course.

9. The missing sense of whole and part (“three of the four senses”) #

Point: after the four senses of part in book five of wisdom, he noticed Aristotle’s use of whole and part elsewhere.

• Physics proemium: Aristotle uses more than one kind of whole and part to show we know confusedly before distinctly; three of four senses appear, one left out.
• Metaphysics book three, the dialectic of probable opinions about getting to the beginnings: again three senses, the same one left out.
• Why: the missing sense becomes the essential sense developed at the end of Physics I (the whole truth about the parts of mobile being) and, for wisdom, the one book twelve shows to be the intrinsic principles of being as being.
• Logic as the art of defining and dividing involves different senses of whole and part, so it helps there too. “One word at a time. Don’t be too wordy.”

10. Close: what next, and Gregory’s road (“taxis kai akolouthia”) #

• What next (proemium to wisdom, or “the customs” for comic relief) to be settled over the carne asada; Kierkegaard’s symposium, subtitled In vino veritas, where no one speaks until he feels the wine.
• After the break, a passage on Gregory (writing in Greek): everything through taxis kai akolouthia (order and succession/following) comes to partake of the divine nature; in another place the same thought is expressed by hodos kai akolouthia, road and following, first the illumination of prophecy in the law, then the full glory of light. Point: road is a concrete, sensible way of saying order, i.e. a before and after, in our knowledge.
• He then begins the requested topic, the three major sources of the modern world and its customs.

His words #

• tropos: the way of proceeding, a tool for knowing the subject
• looking philosophy: [ed.: theoretical/speculative philosophy]
• private road: the way proper to a science, first of all its way of defining [ed.: modus proprius]
• rationabiliter, disciplinabiliter, intellectualiter: Boethius’s ways of proceeding for natural philosophy, mathematics, wisdom; rationabiliter has three senses in Thomas
• wisdom: [ed.: metaphysics]; natural hearing: [ed.: Physics]
• act and ability: [ed.: act and potency], the ninth book
• large discourse: the one from the many and the many from the one
• brevity is the soul of wit/wisdom: something brief, small in size but great in power
• beginning: compared to a seed, the acorn to the tree
• thinking out / reasoning out: senses corresponding to the senses of in and out
• taxis kai akolouthia, hodos kai akolouthia: order/road and succession (Gregory)

Texts #

Read in class:

• Gregory (of Nyssa, inferred), English passage on taxis kai akolouthia and hodos kai akolouthia (source unstated) Mentioned:
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (matter and certitude); Poetics (tragedy vs. comedy; tragedy vs. epic); Rhetoric (early rhetoricians); Metaphysics IV (being as being), VI first reading (way of defining), V (part; a semester at Laval), III (probable opinions), IX (act and ability), XII (intrinsic principles); Physics IV (eight senses of in and out, ordered by Thomas), I proemium and end of book I
• Thomas Aquinas, on Boethius’s De Trinitate (ways of defining; senses of rationabiliter)
• C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love; A Preface to Paradise Lost
• Henry Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
• Shakespeare, Macbeth; Hamlet (Polonius); an exhortation to use reason (play unnamed)
• Kierkegaard, In vino veritas
• Max Planck (universality and simplicity); Anaxagoras; Albert the Great; Plato

His questions #

• Why do you use your eye rather than your ear for Titian? Because you are trying to know a painting; the way of knowing must fit what is known.
• Does Aristotle get the subject of wisdom after he determines the method? No; the subject in book four, the way of defining only in book six.
• How can Kassarik have learned more from Dionne than from De Koninck? The higher mind gives something smaller in size but greater in power, seen only later in teaching.
• Wouldn’t it make more sense to say wisdom is the soul of brevity? No: what unifies wisdom is something small, like the centre of a circle or a seed.
• How do you manifest to students the power of a principle? Teach few principles and show their use, e.g. the senses of before and after.
• Which is better, philosophizing or breathing? Breathing is before philosophizing in being, not in goodness; the argument equivocates.
• Which is worse, to stop philosophizing or to stop breathing? Stopping breathing, but the “opposite of the worse is better” rule fails where one thing is before another in being.
• Which sense of whole and part is left out in the Physics proemium and in Metaphysics III, and why? The same one; it becomes the essential sense (end of Physics I; book twelve).
• What shall we do next? Left open, to be settled over dinner; the three sources of the modern world begin.