Philosophy of Looking and Doing, and the Proemium to Wisdom: Wonder, Natural Desire to Know, and the Road from Sense to Experience

Orientation #

He refers back to “what we said the other day” about the order sensing, memory, experience, and to “the major sources that we spoke of this morning of the customs of modern world” (prev. lecture, resolved from context: the democratic loves of equality and freedom). He mentions having read Thomas’s proemium to the Ethics “a bit” before, and the ninth book of Wisdom where the word praxis appears. The next class continues from experience to art and science in Metaphysics I.1.

The class, in order #

1. Distinction and the two kinds of philosophy (“looking philosophy and the philosophy of doing”) #

Point: reason goes wrong when it misses or misunderstands a distinction; the first distinction of the kinds of philosophy is looking philosophy vs. the philosophy of doing.

• Opening prayer to guardian angel and St Thomas; aside: since higher angels illumine lower ones, Thomas “must have got a lot of help from his guardian angel,” no one on earth could illumine him.
• Distinct = one is not the other.
• He avoids “speculative”/“theoretical” (too many senses in English) and “practical” (from praxis); prefers “looking philosophy” and “philosophy of doing.”
• Boethius: Lady Wisdom’s gown bears theta (Greek for looking at) above pi (praxis), the two kinds, with looking placed above doing.
• First way they are distinguished: by their end. End of looking philosophy: to understand, to see. End of philosophy of doing: not just doing, but to do what is good, “or better,” for yourself, your family, your city.
• Most philosophers he talks to don’t know this first distinction; they talk of “some chimera like epistemology.” “Can’t have order without distinction.”

2. Where the kinds of each philosophy are distinguished (“the complete distinction is made in the sixth book”) #

Point: Aristotle distinguishes the kinds of looking philosophy explicitly; the three kinds of practical philosophy are distinguished explicitly, so far as he knows, only by Thomas.

• Looking philosophy: natural, mathematical, first philosophy or wisdom, distinguished most fully at the beginning of Metaphysics VI; partially in Natural Hearing (Physics) II (natural vs. mathematical). Reason for the delay: you don’t know wisdom is something other than natural philosophy until after natural philosophy, or at least after the Physics and the books on the soul.
• Practical: a student proposes the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics; he replies Aristotle does not there distinguish ethics, domestics, politics. We have the Ethics and Politics; the Oxford “Economics” (household) is from the school, scholars say not by Aristotle.
• Politics I, after the proemium, distinguishes family from city against Plato’s view that ruling family and city differ in degree; Aristotle: they differ in kind, shown by going through the parts of the family. “Something to do with this,” but not the explicit threefold distinction.
• The text he knows: Thomas’s proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics, which first distinguishes knowledge of reason by the order it considers, then divides the order reason makes in acts of will into monastica (about one man, “not in your sense”), domestics, politics. The whole called ethics (from “custom”), though custom matters as much for the city; we are accustomed to call monastica “ethics.”
• Oikos / domus: we use the Latin word, domestics.

3. The proemium to wisdom as proemium to all looking philosophy (“wonder is the beginning of philosophy”) #

Point: because wisdom is the end and goal of all looking philosophy, its proemium is in a way a proemium to the whole of it, more than the proemium to the Physics is.

• Things said here, like “wonder is the beginning of philosophy” and “all men by nature desire to know,” apply to natural philosophy too: no wonder about what time or motion is, no beginning of natural philosophy.
• Euclid arouses wonder: the politician friend who sneered at a college graduate reading Euclid, then went slowly through the Book III theorem (no straight line can be inserted between a tangent and its circle) and was amazed; no more sneering.
• “Theorem” = something to look at. Book II theorem 14 (find the side of a square equal to a given oblong) uses II.5 and the Pythagorean theorem, both beautiful in themselves; like liking a man and a girl and then seeing their baby, “double joy.”
• Parallel: the NE proemium says what the subject is (happiness) and to what science it belongs (political knowledge), so it is in a way a proemium to the whole of practical philosophy. Thomas: the elementa of political knowledge are in the Ethics. Aside: our politicians lack these elements, witness their “crazy votes.”

4. The two proemia with epilogues (“these are the two premiums that have an epilogue”) #

Point: only the proemia to the Ethics and to the Metaphysics end with an epilogue recalling what was done, which marks their preeminence and confirms Thomas’s division.

1. Thomas divides the proemium to wisdom into two (what wisdom aims at: causes, then the first causes; what kind of knowledge wisdom is, including how desirable it is), and the NE proemium into three.
2. Aristotle’s epilogues recall exactly those two and those three things, so the logical division is confirmed (though Thomas could have divided it without the epilogue).
3. Order of recall is reverse: last thing first, back to the first, like recalling yesterday, then the day before. NE epilogue (end of ch. 3): the student, the sort of treatment, the purpose of the inquiry. Greek there is not “preface” but a verb form, “let this be our proemium.”
4. Metaphysics epilogue (end of ch. 2 / lectio 3): “what is the nature of the science we are searching for” (second thing) and “the mark our search must reach” (first thing).
5. Physics proemium does two things (what it aims at, the order of proceeding) but has no epilogue.

• Why the preeminence: one is nearest to a proemium to looking philosophy as a whole and its culmination, the other to practical philosophy as a whole and its end, political philosophy. A student says he is unclear; he restates the whole argument.
• Aside: Shakespeare’s birthday is April 23, “but one day” off from today.

5. Editorial vs. logical division of the proemium (“editorial and reference division”) #

Point: the fourteen books are the editorial division; the logical division is proemium and tractatus, and Thomas’s lectio division fits the logical one better than the chapter division.

• Thomas: proemium = first three lectios; lectios 1-2 = first part, lectio 3 = second part. English: two chapters, first part running through ch. 1 and part of ch. 2, so the chapters don’t correspond. Who made the lectio division he doesn’t know.
• Lectios 1 and 2 subdivide the first part: lectio 1 shows wisdom aims at causes (one could almost see “first causes,” but Aristotle “draws back,” slow to develop the great truth); lectio 2 gives a six-part description of the wise man and reasons that wisdom is about what is said of all and a cause of all (not the same thing; “we’ll see that”), i.e. the very first causes.
• Aside: “we hate formality in democratic times… Custom is a tyrant.”

6. “All men by nature desire to know”: what it means (“all men by nature desire to know”) #

Point: eidenai may be rendered “to know” or, more properly, “to understand/see.”

• Pantes anthropoi, physei, oregontai, eidenai. Dictionary: eidenai has the sense of to see, to understand (related to idea/seeing). Moderns say “know”; commentaries often “understand”; Moerbeke perhaps has scire, which he thinks not correct either (scire is the effect of demonstration), but certainly not “know” in the broad sense.
• The sign from the eyes works either way: if “know,” seeing is a particular kind of knowing; if “understand,” an analogy: as we use eyes sometimes just to see (falling stars last night, a sunset), we use the eye of the soul, reason, sometimes just to understand. Greek words lean to the second.
• His three pedantic questions: what does it mean, is it true, why begin there.
• Anthropoi: men in general, not vs. women, not vs. boys. By nature: born with it, inborn.

7. Is it true? Signs (“the love of the senses”) #

Point: Aristotle takes what is most common to men, using the senses just to see, not philosophy or research.

• Beasts have eyes but don’t look at the beautiful; they look for food or enemies.
• Second witness (if “know”): everyone enjoys stories, wants to know how it turns out with no doing in view: Little Red Riding Hood; the adult sitting up late for a movie or novel, losing sleep for the job, out of the wonder aroused by the first part of the plot (Aristotle in the Poetic Art). His cousin’s very practical wife couldn’t put down the Russian spy novel either and was mad at her husband for leaving it around: even she has the natural desire to know apart from doing.
• Third: a lopsided ball game empties in the ninth (practical: beat the parking-lot jam); a tied game does not. “Tied up”/“untied” matches Aristotle’s account of plot as tying and untying knots; Viola at the end of Twelfth Night Act II: too hard a knot for me to untie.
• The philosopher’s desire is not essentially different from every man’s desire to know apart from doing, but more developed, stronger, able to pursue difficult things.

8. Why Aristotle begins there (“nature doesn’t give natural desires for what is impossible”) #

Point: two reasons.

1. To show the goodness of knowing apart from making or doing. First definition of good: what all want. Being wanted is a sign of a true or apparent good; being wanted naturally is a sign of a truly good. Contrary to the practical modern world, whose customs (all three sources of this morning, especially the second and third, as Heisenberg and de Tocqueville note) oppose knowing for its own sake.
2. (Thomas’s suggestion) A natural desire is a sign the thing is in some way possible: hunger and thirst don’t guarantee food or water, but show they are not in principle impossible; nature does nothing in vain. The philosopher’s desire is to the common man’s as man to boy, fully grown. So wisdom is not vain to pursue, though very difficult.

• A student answers “because the goal of the book is to satisfy that desire”; he: it is much more the beginning than the end.
• Text: apart from their use the senses are loved for themselves (agapontes, related to agape, but not Paul’s or C. S. Lewis’s Four Loves sense), especially through the eyes. Most would rather be deaf than blind; the pious organist who preferred blindness was “finished off” with “I’ll guide you as the apple of my eye.” Causes given: sight most makes us know and shows many differences; it knows at a distance and clearly.
• Student example: sunglasses on a bright day make fall foliage more beautiful, a natural delight. His: even working-class people hang a landscape on the wall, not weights and measures or the bus schedule, a sign of what Aristotle says.

9. The natural road: sensing, memory, experience (“you’re moving in the direction of wisdom”) #

Point: Aristotle follows the natural road of knowledge from the senses toward wisdom not for its own sake but to discover what wisdom aims at; wisdom is the end of our knowledge both as last learned and as goal.

• Students always say wisdom comes at the end, not the beginning or middle.
• Step 1: animals come to be having sense; the more general (animal) develops before the specifically human. Even sensation makes an animal seem wiser than a tree, which doesn’t know its limb is cut off.
• Step 2: memory in some animals, not in those acting only from the here and now. The family cat singed on the electric stove never jumped up again: wiser. Without memory you’d be no wiser than the baby born yesterday (“I wasn’t born yesterday,” his mother to salesmen). Aristotle: these are phronimoterai, more prudent.
• Aside in Aristotle (around line 25): hearing and learning from others, bees. Student asks in what sense hearing is the sense of learning: in the natural order, spoken word before written, learning from parents; the written word often comes alive only when heard expounded; fides ex auditu (Paul); Thomas’s adoro te devote: sight, touch, taste fail, only hearing is safely believed.
• Step 3: experience = a collection of many memories of the same thing; other animals partake little of it because it already shows the influence of reason bringing similar things together (“that reminds me…”). Aristotle jumps: the race of men live by art and reasoning (Thomas recalls this in the proemium to logic).
• Warning: “that was quite an experience” (car accident) is one noteworthy sensation or memory, not experience in this sense. Student: is it something resulting from the collection? He: it is the collection.
• Advance over one memory: one date vs. many dates; first campaign vs. many; one cat once vs. many cats many times; one glass of wine vs. the man of many wines judging a new one. Student objection: doesn’t the advance come from slight differences among the memories, since identical memories would be like one? “Perhaps, perhaps”; left there.
• Head nurse who predicted his firstborn Paul was a boy from the heartbeat: wiser than the doctor, having heard many; not possible on her first hearing.
• He notes he borrows from this text for his own before-and-after among kinds of knowing; Aristotle is not ex professo treating the natural road. Text: the many memories of the same thing (tōn pragmatōn) make the power (dynamei) of one experience. Recording ends as he begins the next step.

His words #

• distinct: one is not the other.
• looking philosophy [ed.: speculative/theoretical]; philosophy of doing [ed.: practical]; praxis.
• wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics]; the fourteen books of wisdom; first philosophy.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• monastica, domestics, politics; ethics from “custom.”
• proemium / “premium”; epilogue; tractatus.
• editorial and reference division vs. logical and understandable division; lectio (reading).
• eidenai: to see, to understand; scire: the effect of demonstration.
• inborn = by nature.
• good: what all want; true vs. apparent good.
• agapontes: loved for themselves.
• natural road: from the senses to wisdom.
• phronimoterai: more prudent.
• experience (empiria): a collection of many memories of the same thing.
• theorem: something to look at.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I.1, opening through the memory/experience passage (Thomas lectio 1).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I, end of ch. 3 (epilogue sentence).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I, end of ch. 2 (epilogue sentence; Thomas lectio 3).
• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, end of Act II (Viola’s knot).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI (beginning); Physics II; Politics I; Poetic Art (plot as knots); De anima books.
• Thomas Aquinas, Proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics; proemium to logic; Adoro te devote.
• Boethius, Consolation (theta and pi).
• Euclid, Elements II.5, II.14, III (tangent theorem).
• Pseudo-Aristotelian Economics (Oxford Aristotle).
• Moerbeke’s Latin (scire); St Paul (fides ex auditu); scripture “apple of my eye”; C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves; Heisenberg; de Tocqueville; Anaxagoras not mentioned.

His questions #

• What does it mean to say two things are distinct? One is not the other.
• What is the first distinction of the kinds of philosophy, and how are they distinguished? Looking philosophy vs. philosophy of doing, by their ends: to understand vs. to do what is good.
• Where does Aristotle distinguish the kinds of looking philosophy? of practical philosophy? Metaphysics VI (partly Physics II); for practical, only Thomas’s proemium to the Ethics does it explicitly.
• What’s really new in Euclid’s fourteenth theorem? Finding the side of a square equal to a given oblong.
• Does he mean men as opposed to women, or boys? What does “by nature” mean? Men in general; inborn.
• Is it true that all men by nature desire to know? Yes: signs are using the senses just to see, following stories, the tied ball game.
• Why does Aristotle begin with this statement? To show knowing for its own sake is naturally good, and (Thomas) therefore possible.
• Would you rather be deaf or blind? Deaf, most say; sight is loved most.
• If you had sensing but not memory, would you be wiser than the baby born yesterday? No; memory makes the cat and us wiser.
• Doesn’t the advance in experience come from slight differences among the memories? “Perhaps, perhaps”; left open.