From Experience to Art and Science: Knowing Why, Architectonic Arts, and the Aim of Wisdom (Metaphysics I, 1)

Orientation #

He picks up in the middle of the proemium: Aristotle “doesn’t go to natural understanding,” which is “not really necessary for his purposes,” and moves instead from experience to art or science. He refers back to “the division of world history” and “the customs of the democratic age” as things “we talked about” (prev. lecture context not given for these). He closes: “we’ve done the first half of the first half… the first part of the first part of the proemium”; the “second reading” will establish that wisdom is about first causes. The previous class treated the opening of the proemium (“all men by nature desire to know”) and the road from sensation through memory; the next takes up the six opinions about the wise man.

The class, in order #

1. Art or science arises from experience (“experience makes what art or science”) #

The point: art or science (episteme or techne, used here “kind of interchangeably” for knowledge of the universal, not in the distinct sense of the Nicomachean Ethics, to which Aristotle refers) is about the universal, whereas everything before it (sensing, memory, experience) was about the singular or singulars; and this knowledge of the universal arises from experience.

• The genesis: many singulars of the same sort are seen, remembered, the memories brought together and compared; then one “singles out what they have in common”; that singling out is the beginning of art or science. Greek: katholou, the universal.
• Medical example (Aristotle’s, filled in by him): I give this to you, you feel better; again and again; I separate out what was common in the ailment and the remedy; “aspirin relieves headaches” is now something universal.
• Aristotle first notes something similar between art and experience: one can sometimes do the same thing by either.
• Polus in Plato’s Gorgias, quoted by Aristotle: experience makes art, inexperience luck. Berquist: “well said” — cf. beginner’s luck: the beginner does it right without experience.
• A student asks whether the failure of the theorist and success of the experienced man has to do with a power uniting universal to particular; he defers: “we haven’t discussed yet” — Aristotle is about to compare them.

2. First difference: in doing, experience may succeed better (“one does not cure a man”) #

The point: Aristotle “is more nuanced” — he does not simply say art is an advance beyond experience as memory is beyond sensing; from the first difference he argues that in doing the man of experience may be superior. Aristotle’s argument (from about 981a12, read in Greek: pros men oun to prattein):

1. Toward doing, experience seems not to differ from art; indeed the experienced hit the mark better than those having the logos (the universal, the reason) without experience.
2. The cause (aitia): experience is knowledge of the kath’ hekasta (particulars), art of the universal; but all actions and generations are about the singular.
3. One does not cure “man” except kata sumbebēkos (by accident); one cures Callias or Socrates. So the man with the universal but no knowledge of the singular “many times fails in his therapy.” Examples, each showing the man of experience succeeding where the man of the rule does not, or the reverse:

• Grammar: from long experience of words he catches the I/E misspellings; Rosalie knows the rule (“I before E except after C”) — she has the art, he corrects the papers by experience.
• Conversational English taught by American students in Quebec: a native speaks correctly out of experience but cannot state the rule; a foreigner may know the rule and still not speak as well.
• The Greek professor knows Greek and its rules far better; Berquist sometimes gets the sense of an Aristotle text quicker from long experience of the text.
• Demerol after childbirth: the nurse gives everyone the same dose (something universal); it gave his wife headaches; next time she took half and was better cured by herself than by the universal.
• The psychologist from the mental hospital: too few staff to know patients individually, so a board classifies the ailment and applies the prescribed treatment — “many times makes them worse”; the classification is a going to the universal not adapted to the individual.
• Your friend or spouse “in the dumps”: you know what gets this person out (“a bottle of wine and some Mozart”) better than the psychologist with all the universals in his head; likewise nausea — you know whether ginger ale or popcorn helps you.
• The congressman of twenty years vs. the political scientist: you are not getting legislation through “the legislature in general” but through this Congress with these districts and needs; the experienced man knows “how to push the buttons.” Conclusion he draws: “you can’t simply say that in every way art or science represents an advance over experience”; as far as doing goes “it might very well be the reverse.”

3. Second difference: art knows why (“experience knows merely that it is so”) #

The point: from the second difference Aristotle reasons that the man of art or science is more knowing and wiser. Read from line 24: nevertheless understanding belongs more to art than experience, and the men of art are wiser, “so that to know follows more to be wise.” The reason: art, when perfected, knows the cause, dioti (on account of what, why); experience knows only to hoti (that it is so).

• His test: ask even ordinary students who is wiser, the man who knows that something is so or the man who knows why — “invariably” the latter.
• He flags: “this is going to be a very important point” — to see that wisdom is a knowledge of causes, and that art or science is more like wisdom than experience is, because it knows the why. Aristotle now stops to confirm this “by three kinds of examples, or in three ways.”

4. First confirmation: the architectonic art (“the chief artist… is wiser”) #

The point: the distinction (made even at the start of the Nicomachean Ethics) between the architectonic (“chief artist”) and the subordinate artist: we think the one who commands is wiser, and he is, because he knows why. Read: the chief artists are thought more honorable and more knowing than those who work by their hands, since they know the causes of what is done; the handicraftsmen are like inanimate things that make without knowing what they do, “like the fire that burns” — inanimate things by nature, handicraftsmen by custom; so it is not by being practical that men are wiser but by having a reason and knowing the causes. Examples (all: subordinate does the thing, chief knows why):

• Pharmacist and doctor: the pharmacist as such fills the prescription without needing to know why you need the medicine; everyone thinks the doctor wiser — a reflection of this even in “the common man’s way of thinking.”
• Grand chef and under-cook: “I want the potatoes cut this way tonight.”
• First-grade teacher and assistant: the assistant only knows to see that the child starts the letter C at the top; the teacher knows why — cursive writing later requires starting there or “you’re broken.”
• Napoleon and the head of the cavalry: he leads the charge but does not know why not to charge until the trumpet; Napoleon has the plan. Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade (“not to question why… but to do and die”) — the subordinate artist’s motto, though “apparently there’s been some mistake in this case.”
• His brother Mark in their father’s factory (“I’m just paid to do it”) — Berquist was the subordinate artist.
• The wine man: store bottles on their side; the clerk does so without knowing that a standing bottle dries the cork and lets air in.
• Tea: he knew from experience that ten minutes gives a bad cup and assumed it was “too strong”; a chemist explained that different chemicals release at different times and the undesirable ones come after seven or eight minutes — the chemist seems wiser.
• Dr. Kasurik: “Duane, where’s your Greek?” (“That’s not a reason… you’re going to study philosophy, you take Greek”) and, at graduation, “go get Euclid’s Elements, read them” — he knew why, Berquist did not; “invaluable… given the lousy translations that even have Oxford stamped on them.”
• Any teaching: the professor knows why the first theorems of Elements I must be learned before the Pythagorean theorem; the student cannot yet see it.
• The man in his father’s factory who moved from shop to shop showing how and why — paid more because wiser. Aside: he uses his own flood of examples to show that “under that kind of example, you can multiply forever.”

5. Second confirmation: the ability to teach (“a sign of the one knowing”) #

The point (about line 7 of 981b): a sign of the knower vs. the non-knower is being able to teach; so art is more knowledge than experience, “for these are able to teach, and these are not.”

• Experience cannot really be taught: it takes a long time; the man of experience can only say “when you get to be my age, you’ll see”; believing him “is not being taught in the full sense… it’s just the beginning.”
• Saint Mary’s College: a student with a “disordered life” whom the priests told what not to do but could not explain why; he came to Berquist for the why — so Berquist seemed the wiser; the same among teachers who know from experience how it should be done but cannot say why.
• He notes: “a beautiful understanding of teaching”: the perfection of teaching is to give the cause.

6. Third confirmation: reduction to the absurd (“then sensing would be wisdom”) #

The point: an either-or — does wisdom consist more in knowing the singular and that it is so, or the universal and why? Aristotle eliminates the first.

• Form: like Euclid’s sixth theorem (base angles equal, therefore opposite sides equal), which shows not directly that they are equal but that they cannot be unequal; the compound, “disjunctive syllogism” (“a big word to impress your friends”), plus reduction to the absurd (if this, then that; that is obviously wrong; so not this).
• Argument: if wisdom were chiefly authoritative knowledge of the singular and that it is so, sensing would be wisdom, since nothing is more authoritative about the singular than sensing — seeing Matt/Max sitting is more authoritative than remembering him sitting (he might have moved), and experience presupposes memory; but nobody thinks sensing is wisdom — it is the beginning of knowledge, not the end.
• He stresses the care of the construction: no ambiguity that experience is beyond memory; but from experience to art he is “very nuanced.” Note: Aristotle does not argue art’s superiority in knowing from its being about the universal (one might argue the universal is “more comprehensive,” but that is not obvious); he argues it only from knowing the cause — “very important for what comes later.” And one begins to see that wisdom consists more in knowing than in doing.

7. Differences among the arts (“those found for diagoge… were thought wiser”) #

The point (line 13): first the finder of any art beyond common sensation was admired, not only as useful but as wiser and different; then, among many arts, some for necessities, some for diagoge (leisure activity); the latter always thought wiser, being not for use; then a third kind, sciences sought for their own sake, first where men had leisure — in Egypt, where the priestly class had leisure, the mathematical arts were first constituted.

• Is it so? The Greeks would think Homer wiser than the great cook or carpenter; the poetic art pleases and is for its own sake — a hint that wisdom is more like the poetic art than the arts of the carpenter, cook, metalworker.
• World history: civilization begins in the Euphrates valley and spreads to Egypt; irrigation required complexity of society and raised productivity, freeing some men “from the daily rat race” to pursue knowledge for its own sake.
• The warriors’ evening: Demodocus plucks the harp and sings the fall of Troy, Aphrodite and Hephaestus — arts for pleasure after the necessities are secured; only when both are assured does knowledge for its own sake develop.
• Caution: in the democratic, scientific-technological age it is less clear than in the Greek context. Yet: Time magazine’s Einstein as man of the century — honored not for making (he “didn’t make the atom bomb”) but for understanding the universe (Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein); Nobel prizes go more to theoretical than empirical physicists; Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen institute (supported by Carlsberg), Bohr clumsy in the lab, the “Bohr Festival” of lectures in Germany, the young Heisenberg’s question and their long walk that “influenced all his subsequent thinking” — admiration for understanding the atom, “even in this very practical age.”
• Homer as “teacher of all the Greeks” (Plato/Socrates): if the teacher is wiser than the taught, Homer is wise; poetry is “something to look at,” more speculative. Shakespeare seems wiser than any carpenter — his dramas are called plays; Thomas’s proemium to Boethius’s De Hebdomadibus quotes the sapiential books, “run into your house and play with your thoughts,” and says philosophizing is like play in two ways: pleasant and for its own sake.

8. What the discourse was for: wisdom is about causes (“the so-called wisdom is about first causes”) #

The point: line 25 refers the art/science difference to the Ethics; at line 27, hou heneka: that for the sake of which this discourse was made is that so-called wisdom is about first causes and beginnings, “and all would think this” — “going a little ahead of the game.”

• His sketch of the step: if the man who knows the cause is wiser, the man who knows the cause of the cause is wiser still (why did my wife hit me? because she’s angry; why is she angry? — wiser if I know, and might do something about it); so the man who knows the first cause is wisest, and wisdom is knowledge of first causes.
• But Aristotle “backtracks” at the end of the first reading: he says only that the wise man knows causes, and returns in the second reading to establish first causes.
• Aristotle’s summary, as he reads it: the man of experience is wiser (sophōteros) than those with sensation only; the man of art, because he knows why, wiser than the man of experience; the chief artist wiser than the manual worker; the theoretical sciences more like wisdom than the making arts (poet vs. carpenter, Einstein vs. inventors). So it is clear wisdom is an episteme about some beginnings and causes.
• Skopos: at the end of the third lectio’s epilogue Aristotle recalls “kai tis ho skopos”; skopos is the target the archer aims at (cf. the beginning of the Ethics: knowing the end of life gives a skopos to aim at); Latin intentio libri, more abstract than the concrete Greek. Monsignor Dion: the skopos is the most essential part of a proemium (Greek, “paving the way”), since first one must tell the student what is aimed at; modern philosophers give no skopos — “maybe they don’t know themselves… they wander because they have no skopos.” Here the skopos is given only in general.
• Wisdom is also about causes in general: it belongs to the wise man most of all to teach that there are four kinds of causes (Book 5, and Book 1 after the proemium), to confirm it, and the corollaries — many causes of the same thing, and two things causes of each other in different ways (exercise a cause of health, health the reason for exercise). His ultimate goal remains the first cause.

9. Student question on the Greek at 981a24 (“Are there two words about knowing?”) #

A student asks about two words for knowing at 981a24 where the Latin has obviare, translated simply “understand.” Berquist would have to look up epaiein again; he suggests obviare sometimes means answering objections or putting out errors, and that both belong to the wise man: Thomas opens the Summa Contra Gentiles proemium with scripture (“my throat meditates wisdom and truth and detests the impious,” the impious being what is opposed to the truth about God) — the wise man teaches truth and refutes error, as Aristotle does in Book 9 on act and ability. Left as a suggestion, not settled.

His words #

• episteme or techne, “art or science”: used interchangeably here for knowledge of the universal that extends to knowing why.
• katholou: the universal.
• kath’ hekasta: the particulars, the individuals.
• kata sumbebēkos: by accident.
• logos: “the universal, the reason.”
• to hoti / dioti: that it is so / on account of what, why.
• architectonic art, “the chief artist”: the artist who commands others; “like the Indian chief.”
• disjunctive (compound) syllogism, reduction to the absurd: the either-or plus “if this, then that; that is wrong.”
• diagoge: leisure activity.
• hou heneka: “that for the sake of which.”
• sophōteros: wiser.
• skopos: target, aim; Latin intentio, “intentio libri.”
• proemium: “paving the way.”
• ability [ed.: potency] (in “act and ability”).

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I.1, from about 981a1 to 981b30 (line references he gives: 12, 24, “line seven,” 13, 25, 27) (inferred), read in Greek with Thomas’s first reading. Mentioned
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (art/science distinction; architectonic art; the skopos at the beginning).
• Plato, Gorgias (Polus).
• Euclid, Elements, “the sixth theorem” (Book I) (inferred); Elements I generally.
• Tennyson, Charge of the Light Brigade.
• Homer (Demodocus; Homer as teacher of the Greeks, in Plato).
• Thomas Aquinas, proemium to the commentary on Boethius, De Hebdomadibus.
• Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, proemium.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics, third lectio epilogue; Book 5 (four causes); Book 9 (act and ability).

His questions #

• Is the man of art or science superior to the man of experience? In doing, the man of experience may succeed better; in knowing and wisdom, the man of art, because he knows why.
• Who is wiser, the man who knows that it is so or the man who knows why? Invariably, the man who knows why.
• Does the pharmacist as such have to know why you need this medicine? No; the doctor knows why, so we think him wiser.
• Why is a bad cup of tea produced by steeping too long? Not “too strong” but other chemicals released later — the chemist knows the why.
• Does wisdom consist more in knowing the singular and that it is so, or the universal and why? The first is eliminated: sensing would then be wisdom, and nobody thinks that.
• Whom would the Greeks consider wiser, Homer or the great cook or carpenter? Homer; the poetic art is for its own sake.
• Was Einstein honored for what he did or for what he understood? For understanding the universe, not for making.
• What are the two words about knowing at 981a24, and what is obviare? Left open; he suggests refuting error, as belongs to the wise man.