Custom, the Modern World, and the Mercantile City, Mathematical Science and Democracy as Its Sources

Orientation #

He opens by recalling that “we saw in the fifth reading from the second book of wisdom” Aristotle on the force of custom, and that he had mentioned Thomas on custom in Summa Contra Gentiles I (prev. lecture). He says the modern philosophers themselves will be discussed “later on, after we go through these things,” and closes by turning to “the first part of the second volume” of Tocqueville, “relevant for our purposes here.” The previous class ended by announcing an upcoming discussion of the sources of the modern world; the next takes up Tocqueville on democratic customs and fiction, religion, and the modern philosophers.

The class, in order #

1. Custom makes what is not obvious seem obvious (“the great force of custom”) #

Point: custom, especially from youth, can make what is not per se known appear per se known, and even make the false seem true.

• Aristotle (Metaphysics II, “fifth reading”) on the force of custom: it influences many things (what we want to eat), but there he treats its influence on the mind, on how we think.
• Thomas, SCG I: what is not obvious, “not known to itself,” can appear known to itself because of custom, imbibed “with your mother’s milk.”
• Socrates found men think they know what they do not know; there may be several causes, but a very common one is custom: “when you’re accustomed to something, you think you know it.”
• Warren Murray’s story at Wisconsin: an English professor mocked the ancients for holding the sun goes round the earth, “when we all know” the reverse—“we don’t all know that, we are accustomed to think that.” Warren replied that on Newtonian physics no more does the earth go round the sun than the sun round the earth; they go round a common center of gravity. A student objects the center is inside the sun; he answers with the child swung by an adult: both go round a common center, which is closer to the adult. Shows: the accustomed is taken as known, and one may be accustomed even to something false.

2. Greeks vs. moderns before the tyranny of custom (“nature as the measure of what is good or bad in custom”) #

Point: modern philosophers are more influenced by custom than the Greek philosophers were.

1. Every man is influenced by the customs of his age; the Greeks were no exception.
2. But as philosophers the Greeks always tried to go back to nature, took nature as the measure of good and bad in custom, and tried to distinguish nature from custom.
3. The moderns are more apt to deny there is anything natural, so they do not seek that distinction; and they have an anti-religious trend besides.
4. Chesterton (book on conversion): the Catholic Church is the only thing that keeps one from being a slave of his own age. Having given up both the Church and nature as a standard, the modern has nothing to go back to with which to resist custom.

• Example: the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws proposes a law against homosexuality, a customary vice in the Greek cities (governments sometimes encouraged it against overpopulation), because it is contra physin, against nature. Shows the Greek philosopher rising above the custom of his age by appeal to nature.
• Thomas Aquinas goes back to nature and also has the Church, so is little subject to custom.
• Conclusion for method: to understand modern thinkers one must know the customs of the modern world and their major sources; in his philosophy class he treats these before looking at the modern philosophers, where their influence shows.
• Aside: “tyranny of custom” is Shakespeare’s phrase.

3. Three major sources, not reduced to one another (“three major sources of the modern world and its customs”) #

Point: three sources made the modern world differ from the Greek world and even the Middle Ages.

• He does not reduce any one to another or call one the cause of the others; one reinforces or prepares for another.
• Ordered by the time at which each becomes manifest, not by importance, nor by influence on the modern philosophers (some sources influence them more, and some philosophers more than others).

4. First source: the mercantile origin of the modern city, and McNeill’s division of history (“the fictitious sharpness of these historical dates”) #

Point: the modern city was founded in the late Middle Ages by merchants, giving it from the start a commercial stamp the Greek city lacked.

• Authority: William McNeill (Chicago), The Rise of the West, “perhaps the best world history in the 20th century,” written from a secular view (does not see the importance of the Incarnation) but knowing how to divide world history.
• Ancient / medieval / modern makes some sense for European history, not for world history. McNeill’s three periods: (i) Middle Eastern dominance to c. 500 BC (Sumeria, irrigation, spreading to Egypt); (ii) c. 500 BC–1500 AD, “the Eurasian cultural balance,” four major centers developing somewhat independently—Greece then Rome, India, China, the old Middle East (later with Muhammad)—none dominating, plus lesser civilizations; (iii) 1500 AD to the present, the rise of the West, named by synecdoche for the whole book (subtitle: a history of the human community) in contrast to Spengler’s Decline of the West: colonial division of the world, then Western technology dominating even after colonialism—adopt it (India, China) or go under.
• “Fictitious sharpness” of dates: an idealization, “said beautifully.”
• His own division of the history of philosophy (in the West):
  • Ancient/medieval/modern can only be made sense of by something outside philosophy, revealed theology: philosophy before it, subordinated to it, in revolt from it. This illuminates something: the moderns in revolt do things the Greeks would never do (Marx’s “essence of Christianity” could not appear among Greeks), and try to do in philosophy what was done in theology, or find a substitute for what they revolted against—which the Greeks never sought, having never had or revolted against it. So it is wrong to think the moderns simply go back to philosophizing without theology: the Greeks philosophize without revealed theology, the moderns in revolt from it, often in “attack mode” (Hegel).
  • The more intrinsic division is into two: the Greek philosophical tradition (Boethius, Albert, Thomas, Avicenna, Averroes continue and build on Greek philosophy, without the break the moderns make), roughly 500 BC–1500 AD, “more precisely” 600 BC (Thales) to 1300 AD (end of Thomas), then modern philosophy from the 17th century. The 14th–16th centuries are “muddy”: anticipations of modern philosophy, Greek philosophy living on in decadent form.
  • This two-part division corresponds to McNeill’s second and third periods; in his first there is no developed philosophy, only proverbial wisdom (Proverbs and the like in other cultures).
• Aside: 500 BC is the time of the Persian War; Herodotus saw something significant in the Greeks stopping the Persians, so it is as good a date as any for the end of Middle Eastern dominance—“the great Herodotus, … that modernist historian” (said with a laugh).

5. McNeill on the aristocratic Greek city and the commercial modern one (“civilization … is chiefly a result of the cities”) #

Point: since civilization comes chiefly from cities, the diverse origins of Greek and modern city colored the whole civilization.

• Greek city: landed aristocracy settling around the seat of government; this aristocratic stamp never entirely lost, even in the most commercially active ancient cities.
• Civilization, as the word suggests (civis, civitas, citizen), in its higher aspects—science, philosophy, theology (University of Paris), music, painting—is a result of cities.
• Examples of the commercial stamp: our country and the modern world dominated by the commercial far more than ancient cities; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides performed in religious festivals vs. our movies made commercial; merchants in ancient China almost slaves of the aristocrats, against their dominant role in the modern city.
• First in time because it starts already in the late Middle Ages and grows stronger.

6. Second source: the union of natural science and the mechanical arts, by way of rhetoric as offshoot (“an offshoot of two of these four”) #

Point: as rhetoric is an offshoot of logic and politics, modern science is an offshoot of natural philosophy and the mechanical arts.

• Thomas, proemium to the Ethics: reason’s knowledge divided by the order it considers—(1) the order reason does not make but only considers: natural philosophy, with wisdom its continuation; (2) the order reason makes in its own acts: logic; (3) the order reason makes in acts of the will and consequent actions: ethics, domestics, political philosophy; (4) the order reason makes in exterior things, “like in a box”: the mechanical arts, also called servile arts (a book of Shakespeare’s time surveying the liberal and servile arts; the two phrases near-synonyms).
• Aristotle, Rhetoric: rhetoric is an offshoot (paraphues, “which I think we translate fairly well by ‘offshoot’”) of political studies and logic; not purely logic, since one learns to move emotions to influence judgment in courtroom or assembly, and to speak in harmony with the kind of government.
  • Demosthenes (paired with Cicero in Plutarch’s parallel lives) mocks an opponent for having scrubbed benches as a boy; it struck him as “lousy rhetoric” until he reflected that for a Greek this means low birth, whereas in America we admire the self-made man. Shows: persuasion must accord with the form of government.
  • An offshoot has no unity of principles as logic or political philosophy has, yet had tremendous influence: Jerome (“you are a Ciceronian, not a Christian”), Augustine a teacher of rhetoric. Aristotle’s history: rhetoric arose in the Greek cities of Sicily when the tyrants were cast out and it became important to persuade the crowd or jury.
  • The offshoot is a new animal, like a child of husband and wife resembling both but neither. Aristotle: distinguish political rhetoric from political philosophy; men confuse them out of boastfulness or lack of education (perhaps Cicero a little)—persuading the crowd is not the same as being politically wise.
• Applied: the union of mechanical arts and natural philosophy, which “really got going in the 17th century,” is likewise something really different from either, with resemblance to both.

7. Why the union is possible, and what it did to natural science (“from a contemplative attitude towards nature to a pragmatic one”) #

Point: the union is mathematical, helped by a likeness in the mode of judging, and it turned natural science into something like a technical science.

1. Mathematics abstracts from the difference between nature and art (Natural Hearing II): the dog’s four legs are by nature, the table’s by art, but “four” abstracts from the difference; four minus two applies to both losing two legs; so an equation for a planet round the sun may serve to put a rocket in orbit.
2. Aristotle, On the Universe III (referred to in a previous lecture): in the later parts of natural science we judge as in art—the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the hypothesis proved by its (ultimately sensible) consequences; as in industry a plane is built to the plan, defects found in use, then redesigned. This likeness facilitates the union.

• The names betray it: the oldest part of modern science is physics (from the Greek for nature), and its oldest part mechanics (from the mechanical arts).
• Heisenberg (Gifford lectures) calls it the union of natural science with technical science (he prefers this to “technology,” “kind of a bad word”): it changed our attitude toward nature from contemplative to pragmatic—not understanding nature as it is but seeing what you can do with it—and “sort of turned natural science into a technical science.”
• Offshoot arts subordinate the higher art to the lower: opera (drama + music)—Mozart: in opera the words must be the obedient servant of the music; plot and words only set up the music, so complaining of silly plots (as he and Warren Murray have discussed) mistakes the point; everything “by magic” transposed into music. Ballet (music + dance): music subordinated to the dance, which cannot represent emotion as subtly—love in a Tchaikovsky ballet is “puppy love” beside a Mozart love aria. Shows: in the offshoot, natural science (higher) is subordinated to the technical.
• But it is not simply technical science: it has a power from mathematics and from nature that pure technical science never had—as rhetoric had a power to persuade that the mere logician or philosopher lacks (Churchill’s wartime speeches holding England together, apart from whatever political wisdom he had).
• Heisenberg on the 17th and 18th centuries as when the union became well established. This is “probably a much greater influence” and “more proximate” on the modern philosophers than the mercantile city.

8. Whether the first source disposes to the second (“I don’t want to reduce the second one to the first one”) #

Point: a mercantile city is more disposed to the union of natural and technical science than an aristocratic one, but he refuses to call this cause and effect.

• Modern industry and government fund scientific research heavily; his friend at Minnesota Mining: the chemist’s ideas belong to the company, the scientist “kind of a servant,” employers interested in what technical things you can make.
• The mercantile stamp reaches far beyond science: fiction and plays as money-making; baseball—Boston vs. the Yankees, the recent series (Yankees three up, Boston back four), a top pitcher as free agent offered a large salary by New York, Babe Ruth’s sale as the greatest mistake in baseball history—“I don’t think the Olympics back in Greece were that commercial.”
• An aristocratic society has slaves for necessities and can pursue knowledge for its own sake; hence less disposed to the union.

9. Third source: democratic revolutions and equality; Tocqueville (“the desire for equality is stronger”) #

Point: the democratic revolutions and the social condition of relative equality, against hereditary inequality, come to light last, “really getting going” with the French Revolution.

• Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1830s). Vol. I: American institutions, city to state to federal government, ending with the prediction that the United States (freedom) and Russia (slavery) would dominate the world—great foresight in the Cold War. Vol. II, somewhat larger and more general: democratic vs. aristocratic customs in every aspect of life. Four parts: influence on the mind (science to fiction, even religious ideas—“magnificent”); on desires; on manners; on government and political life. The single best book for understanding democratic customs.
• Part II of vol. II: the desires for freedom and equality characterize democratic customs (Aristotle already noted the tendency in Greek democracies, but democracy there was relative, not universal). Tocqueville: the common people’s desire for equality is stronger than for freedom, and they will interfere with freedom to secure equality—hence books like Talmon’s on the origin of totalitarian democracy, and Kojève and others following Tocqueville, on how excess equality against freedom leads to tyranny.
• Aristotle on equality and tyranny: the tyrant asked for advice, and the other tyrant’s servant went into the field and plucked the grains standing above the rest; so the communists on taking over plucked out professors and leaders, “level down”; at the guillotining of Lavoisier, to the plea that he was a savant: “la révolution n’a pas besoin de savants.”
• He turns back to the first part of vol. II as what is relevant here (continued next time).

His words #

• “second book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics II]; “fifth reading” — the passage on the force of custom.
• “known to itself” / “per se known” — Thomas: what is not per se known can appear so through custom.
• “tyranny of custom” — Shakespeare’s phrase for custom’s hold.
• contra physin — against nature (the Athenian Stranger’s ground).
• “fictitious sharpness” — McNeill’s phrase for the idealization in period dates.
• “Eurasian cultural balance” — McNeill’s second period, 500 BC–1500 AD.
• “Greek philosophical tradition” — his own name for philosophy 600 BC–1300 AD, including Boethius, Albert, Thomas, Avicenna, Averroes.
• “mechanical arts” / “servile arts” — Thomas’s name for the order reason makes in exterior things; near-synonyms.
• paraphues — “offshoot,” a science or art born of two others without unity of principles.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• “On the Universe” [ed.: On the Heavens / De Caelo], book III.
• “technical science” — Heisenberg’s term, which he prefers to “technology”; another name for the mechanical arts.
• “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” — judging an hypothesis or an artifact by consequences.
• “social condition of relative equality” — the third source, as opposed to hereditary inequality.

Texts #

Read in class (commented, not quoted at length):

• Thomas Aquinas, proemium to the commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics (the four orders).
• William McNeill, The Rise of the West (division of world history; Greek vs. modern city).
• Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II (structure of its four parts; part II on freedom and equality).
• Heisenberg, Gifford lectures (contemplative to pragmatic attitude).

Mentioned:

• Aristotle, Metaphysics II (“fifth reading”) on custom; Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles I on custom.
• Plato, Laws (Athenian Stranger).
• Chesterton, book on conversion.
• Spengler, Decline of the West.
• Aristotle, Rhetoric (offshoot of logic and politics; origin in Sicily; political rhetoric vs. political philosophy).
• Demosthenes’ speeches; Plutarch’s parallel lives (Demosthenes and Cicero).
• Aristotle, Physics II (mathematics abstracts from nature/art); On the Heavens III (judging by consequences).
• Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (inferred title); Kojève.
• Aristotle on the tyrant’s advice (grain-plucking) (Politics, inferred).
• Churchill’s wartime speeches; Marx, “essence of Christianity”; Hegel.

His questions #

• Do “we all know” the earth goes round the sun? No: we are accustomed to think it; on Newtonian physics both go round a common center of gravity.
• Why were the Greek philosophers less subject to custom than the moderns? They measured custom by nature and tried to distinguish nature from custom; the moderns deny the natural and have given up the Church too.
• What is the best division of world history? McNeill’s three: Middle Eastern dominance to 500 BC, Eurasian cultural balance to 1500, rise of the West.
• What is the intrinsic division of the history of philosophy? Two parts: the Greek philosophical tradition (600 BC–1300 AD) and modern philosophy (17th century on); ancient/medieval/modern divides by revealed theology, something outside philosophy.
• Of which two of the four orders is rhetoric an offshoot? Political studies and logic.
• Why is a union of natural science and mechanical arts possible? Because it is mathematical (mathematics abstracts from nature and art) and because the later parts of natural science judge by consequences as art does.
• In an offshoot art, which art is subordinated to which? The higher to the lower: words to music in opera, music to dance in ballet, natural science to technical science.
• Is the mercantile city the cause of the union of natural and technical science? Not cause and effect; the mercantile city disposes for it, more than an aristocratic society with slaves would.
• Which desire is stronger in democratic peoples, freedom or equality? Equality (Tocqueville); they will sacrifice freedom to secure it, which can lead to tyranny.