Freedom, Equality and the Moderns: Nature as Measure, Self-Rule of the Mind, and Discussion

Orientation #

He announces at the end: “this afternoon we’ll start to approach the proemium to wisdom, beginning of first book of wisdom… it may take us a couple days.” He refers back to having “mentioned before” that scorn is a metonym for pride, and to having “quoted the fragment” of Heraclitus on moderation (prev. lecture). The previous class treated Tocqueville on democratic customs in fiction, religion and modern philosophy; the next begins the proemium of the Metaphysics with Thomas’s commentary.

The class, in order #

1. Democratic customs in the philosophers: equality and freedom (“the love of equality and the love of freedom”) #

Point: the two democratic loves show up in modern thinkers, the love of equality in Locke and Rousseau, the exaggerated love of freedom in Hegel and Sartre.

• Straussian observation: an aristocratic bent in Plato and Aristotle vs. a democratic attitude in the modern political philosophers.
• Locke (his brother Mark’s amusement): since we are all more or less equal, the greater intelligence must go with the greater number: nine minds against one is nine times as much mind. Against this, the Heraclitus fragment he tried to quote in a tribute to Rector Dionne: “One man is to me as ten thousand if he be the best” (the printers did not let him proofread it).
• Hegel: the end of all history is liberty; liberty, not reason, is what makes man man. It “would fall rather flat” and not secure the immortality of his system to say the end of history is equality, so he takes the nobler democratic love, liberty. Still an influence of democratic custom.
• Tocqueville: things are moving toward equality, “almost providential”; we cannot stop it and must learn to live with it and avoid its excesses. His own confirmation from English history: 19th century more democratic than the 18th, the 20th more than the 19th.
• Sartre: freedom is the supreme thing; not what you choose but that you freely choose and do not pretend otherwise; he has trouble getting ethics out of this and “doesn’t really get out of it.”
• Question he puts to students: we call a man a lover of what he loves most. Is Hegel a lover of wisdom or a lover of liberty? If we call him a philosopher, we use the word equivocally.

2. Wealth, power, freedom: good only if used wisely (“power and freedom are good if used wisely”) #

Point: the Greek judgment is that wealth, power and freedom are good if used wisely and harmful if used foolishly, so none can reasonably be loved most of all.

• He will not accuse Marx or Adam Smith of loving wealth: “the wealth of nations,” a common good, is “a little bit of elevation.”
• Wealth used foolishly: money used to support communists, or now terrorists (oil wealth); the wealthier the man, the more harmful. The donor of the land they are on: wealth used wisely.
• Power used foolishly: Hitler, Stalin. Thought-experiment for students: if Hitler had the A-bomb first and New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or London, Birmingham, Manchester were gone (some in England wanted a deal: “you can have the continent, let us keep the Empire”).
• Freedom: “you can do the greatest good and the greatest evil as freely.” So to love power or freedom most of all is not reasonable, let alone wise; but making freedom the end of history makes it the supreme good, and Sartre takes the idea over. He gives students short passages from these men “just to raise the question” whether “philosopher” is used equivocally of them.

3. Why the moderns are slaves of custom: they gave up the Church and nature (“given up nature as a what standard”) #

Point: the two correctives of custom are the Church (Chesterton: it keeps one from being a slave of the customs of one’s age) and nature; the moderns have given up both, the Greeks kept nature, the medievals kept both.

• Hamlet’s advice to the players (Kittredge: always taken as Shakespeare’s own view): “o’erstep not the modesty of nature… to hold the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own face, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” The order is the point: nature first, virtue and scorn second, the age third.
  1. Scorn is a metonym for pride (its effect); pride is “the queen of the vices”; so the pair is virtue and vice, said without pedantry.
  2. Nature is the measure of virtue and vice, since virtue is a habit in harmony with nature, vice opposed to it.
  3. Virtue and vice are the measure of the age, since an age is characterised by the virtues or vices that predominate in it.
• As You Like It: disorder in the city (younger brother usurps the older; another older brother enslaves the younger; each contemplates killing); reconciliation happens in the forest, the place of nature.
• Friar Lawrence (Romeo and Juliet): “nor not so good, but strained from that fair use, revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse”; Shakespeare moves “birth,” like “nature,” from birth to what a thing is.
• Conclusion: without nature or the Church there is no measure, so their reason is “much more a slave of the customs of their time than the Greeks.”

4. Nature wiser than us, or we wiser than nature (“nature is wiser than us”) #

Point: his old division of philosophers: those who think nature wiser than us (the Greeks: nature a teacher) vs. those who think themselves wiser than nature (moderns, always correcting and interfering with nature).

• Heraclitus fragment: moderation is the greatest virtue; wisdom is to speak the truth and act in accord with nature, “giving ear to it.”
• Student: Protestantism? Reply: Tocqueville, beginning of vol. 2, compares Luther with Descartes: think for yourself, believe nobody, though you do not escape belief because you end up believing the crowd; a democratic tendency that keeps increasing. Protestantism is “everybody for himself,” hence keeps subdividing; “everybody’s his own theologian.”
• Valedictorian speeches at “these horrible events known as graduations”: “they taught us to think for ourselves”; “my idea is as good as yours.” Democratic custom, “autonomy” over and over.

5. Anaxagoras: the mind self-ruling yet unmixed (“the ruler must be separated from the ruled”) #

Point: where he “stabs at” the slogan in class, via the three things Anaxagoras says of Mind.

1. Mind is unlimited (treated before).
2. Mind is self-ruling. Sign of its truth: logic (a student sometimes gets it); conversely, mind’s self-rule is why there can be an art of logic.
3. Mind is mixed with nothing (the material world). Only here does the text give a reason: if mixed with things it could not rule them. Developed: the ruler must be separate from the ruled.
   • Judge: the first thing expected is impartiality, literally “not a part of”; a brother-in-law or a man with an interest in your company cannot decide your dispute.
   • Army: those who salute first vs. those saluted, command vs. obey; the officers’ club excludes non-coms because even social mixing interferes with command.

• Apparent contradiction (he stops and asks): ruler and ruled must be distinct, yet mind rules itself and is not separated from itself. Both sides have good grounds.

6. Untying the contradiction: known vs. unknown (“blow it up, so you can see it”) #

Point: imitate Socrates in the Republic and enlarge the case.

1. A country gaining independence enjoys self-rule: not the whole ruling the whole, but one part ruling another.
2. A man with self-control: reason ruling the emotions; two parts, harder to see since within one individual.
3. The mind: cannot have parts strictly, since Anaxagoras says it is the thinnest of all things (parts would be thinner than it). Yet some distinction of ruler and ruled is required or there is no self-rule.

• Key from Socrates (students have read the Apology): the Delphic oracle, his puzzlement, the reputed wise who did not know what they claimed; they had mixed up what they knew and what they did not, and Socrates, by seeing contradictions in what they said, got them to separate the two.
• Solution: reason is ruled, or should be, in what it does not know by what it knows; this requires first separating known from unknown, “very difficult,” as the dialogues show. Table example: not knowing the area, knowing length, width and how to multiply, I am ruled in what I say about the area by what I know.
• Later, subtler distinctions, as Aristotle: more known vs. less known; ruled in the less by the more known, ultimately by the most known, the axioms of being and non-being.
• Return to the slogan: to think for yourself means your mind is capable of self-rule, which presupposes separating known from unknown and more from less known; most men have done neither, so most are incapable of self-rule: “You haven’t even been taught to separate the known from the unknown.”
• Student: it seems the nature of reason rules; you cannot just think anything, you must think by the rules of logic. Reply: what reason cannot avoid thinking is the most known, the axioms. De Koninck: one could write the history of modern philosophy as the denial of the more known by the less known, i.e. men mixing up more and less known.

7. “I have as much right to my opinion as you” (“opinion without a reason is an ugly thing”) #

Point: the democratic equality of opinions ignores the difference between opinion with a reason and without.

• Socrates: opinion without a reason is an ugly thing; in democratic times my reasonless opinion claims equal right with your carefully thought out one.
• Champagne: he has no reason to think they will be showered with champagne in a minute; does he have a right to think it, “because we’re equal”?
• “Right to my body” (which is also the right to the body of my child, “but they don’t say that”).
• Warren [Murray? unclear in recording] on a student who took criticism of what he said as an attack on himself: one should not identify oneself with what one thinks.
• Two plus two is five; the moon is green cheese; letters to newspapers. Student: “you have a right to think that, but you’d be wrong”; “I’ll defend your right.” Reply: he is not sure he wants to defend everybody’s right to think what they think; it may mean only a political right, since human law cannot correct every wrong. Students: the Supreme Court defines a right to think what one wants about the universe and the meaning of life; science, “supposedly objective,” sets the limit (“the study’s been done… just the facts”).
• Announcement: this afternoon they begin the proemium to wisdom; a couple of days.

8. A student reports Jaki; determinism and the Greeks (“why attack the Greeks for determinism”) #

Point: a student reports Jaki’s claim that the union of mathematical natural science with technical science, and man’s imposing himself on nature, were made possible only by the Incarnation, classical civilisation being defective (eternity of the world, determinism, eternal recurrence, man trapped by nature) until grace freed philosophy to flower into practical science.

• His reply: first inclination is to reject it, if reported correctly; he has not read Jaki much; Warren does not have a high opinion of him.
• Argument: (1) Aristotle was not a determinist; he rejects Leucippus in the sixth book of wisdom and in the second book of the “actual hearing” [ed.: Physics; probably his “Natural Hearing”], and, as Thomas suggests, the Megarians, defending ability [ed.: potency] against them. So determinism belongs to Leucippus and perhaps the Megarians, not the greatest Greeks. (2) Determinism was stronger in modern science, its “absolute” and “sacred” principle until quantum theory: Claude Bernard and Freud, wanting their disciplines scientific, could not question it; Heisenberg opens the Gifford lectures saying quantum theory (Copenhagen interpretation) was a greater change than relativity, since relativity and Einstein did not question determinism; string theorists now take for granted that Copenhagen won. (3) Aristotle held man free with good reasons; free will is more characteristic of the moderns, who then have the problem of reconciling it with their determinism: “men that protest too much.”

9. The moderns’ substitute for theology: theoretical and practical united (“looking philosophy… the philosophy of doing”) #

Point (from a student’s remark that the moderns see the turn to practical as an elevation): Thomas in Summa I q.1 (ten articles) asks whether theology is theoretical or practical.

• Two points from Thomas: the distinction theoretical/practical belongs to philosophy; theology, like faith and like God’s knowledge, is one knowledge both theoretical and practical; yet primarily theoretical, being about God, upholding the dignity of the theoretical.
• The moderns, uniting natural science (originally theoretical philosophy) with the practical sciences, seek a knowledge both theoretical and practical: a substitute for theology. The Greeks never tried this. Boethius: Lady Wisdom with theta and pi on her robe, the theoretical above the practical.

His words #

• Lover of liberty vs. lover of wisdom: we name a man from what he loves most; “philosopher” of Hegel or Sartre is equivocal.
• Scorn: a metonym for pride, its effect; pride “the queen of the vices.”
• Virtue: a habit in accordance with nature; vice opposed to nature.
• Birth (Shakespeare): moved from birth to what a thing is, like “nature.”
• Self-ruling (Anaxagoras): mind rules itself; logic its sign.
• Impartial: “literally, not a part of.”
• Thinnest of all things: Anaxagoras on mind; hence no parts strictly.
• Known and unknown; more known and less known: the distinctions in reason that ground ruler and ruled.
• Axioms of being and non-being: the most known, by which we are ultimately ruled.
• “Actual hearing” [ed.: Physics]; “books of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics]; “ability” [ed.: potency, against the Megarians].
• Proemium to wisdom: the opening of Metaphysics I.
• Looking philosophy vs. philosophy of doing [ed.: theoretical vs. practical].

Texts #

Read in class

• Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet’s advice to the players (“hold the mirror up to nature”), with Kittredge’s remark.
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence (“revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse”).
• Heraclitus, fragment “one man is to me as ten thousand”; fragment on moderation and acting in accord with nature.
• Anaxagoras, fragment on Mind: unlimited, self-ruling, unmixed, thinnest of all things.

Mentioned

• Locke, Rousseau (equality); Hegel, philosophy of history; Sartre.
• Tocqueville, Democracy in America (equality as providential; vol. 2 beginning, Luther and Descartes).
• Chesterton on the Church and the customs of one’s age.
• Shakespeare, As You Like It.
• Plato, Apology (Delphic oracle); Republic (Socrates enlarging the letters).
• De Koninck on the history of modern philosophy.
• Jaki; Aristotle, “sixth book of wisdom” and “second book of the actual hearing” (Leucippus); Thomas on the Megarians.
• Heisenberg, Gifford Lectures; Einstein; Copenhagen interpretation; Claude Bernard; Freud; string theory.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I q.1 (theology theoretical or practical).
• Boethius, Lady Wisdom with theta and pi (Consolation, inferred).

His questions #

• Should we call Hegel a lover of wisdom or a lover of liberty? A lover of liberty; “philosopher” is used equivocally of him.
• What part of philosophy is a sign that mind is self-ruling? Logic; conversely, self-rule is why there can be an art of logic.
• What does “impartial” mean? Literally “not a part of”; the ruler must be separated from the ruled.
• What two things seem to contradict each other here? Mind is self-ruling, yet ruler must be separate from ruled and mind is not separate from itself.
• When a country gains self-rule, does the whole rule the whole? No, one part rules the other; likewise reason rules the emotions in the self-controlled man.
• What distinction was Socrates trying to get men to see? The known and the unknown (a student: knowledge and opinion).
• What is the distinction in reason that grounds ruler and ruled? The known and unknown; later, more known and less known, up to the axioms.
• Are most men able to think for themselves? No: self-rule presupposes separating known from unknown, which most have not done.
• Do I have a right to think we are about to get champagne? No reason for it; the “equal right to my opinion” is false, or at most a political right. Left partly open with students.
• Was Aristotle a determinist (against Jaki)? No; he rejects Leucippus and the Megarians; determinism is stronger in the moderns until quantum theory.