Metaphysics Book Three: The Fourteen Questions Around Plato's Position

Orientation #

He refers back to Anaxagoras’s greater mind “as we were talking about earlier today” (prev. lecture). He says the last two questions “are preparing the way for the ninth book of wisdom,” which the class has already studied. The previous session opened the third reading on Book III with the theme of doubting well; the next continues with the two mathematical questions, Book II on truth, and the transition to Book IV.

The class, in order #

1. Fourteen questions arranged around Plato (“the importance of Plato again”) #

The point: Thomas’s enumeration of the questions is built on Plato’s position, everyone else entering by agreement or opposition to it.

• He first says “about twelve questions,” then corrects himself: fourteen.
• Plato is “the first metaphysician… the first first philosopher” (with “a somewhat exception” for Anaxagoras): the first to talk at length about anything besides the sensible world, and so of a wisdom after natural philosophy.
• Two things unique to Plato: (a) universals, forms separated from matter — the first twelve questions; (b) mathematical things separate from sensibles — the last two.
• Within the twelve: the first six are about what the beginnings are; the second six, which Thomas attaches to them, about how they are — as one or many, and as ability and act.
• The first six divide again: two about universals, four about a cause separated from matter (he says the reverse order first, then corrects: “Excuse me, I’m doing the reverse order here”).

2. First question: genera, or that into which a thing is divided (“let’s take the word cat”) #

The point: are the first causes universals like genera (Plato’s forms), or the parts into which a thing is divided and which exist within it (Empedocles’s earth, air, fire, water)?

• Greek phrases he reads: ta genē (the genera) versus ta enhyparchonta (that into which each thing is divided, existing within it).
• Placement of moderns: Hegel, beginning with being, takes the genus side; Marx and the modern natural scientists (atoms, molecules) take “that into which is divided.”
• Example, “cat” on the board: what is it? “C, A and T” — Empedocles’s answer, and there is truth in it (water is H₂O the same way); but “you missed the whole point”: it is a word. “Word” is the genus; C-A-T is what it is divided into.
• Example, “man walks”: it is two words, eight letters — take them away and nothing is left; or “it’s a statement. You missed the boat.” “There’s something to be said for both.”

3. Second question: which universal — most or least? (“two kinds of division”) #

The point: granting the universal is a beginning, is it the lowest species or the highest genus (man or animal “apart from the kath’ hekaston”)?

• Two divisions, per Thomas’s commentary: (a) genus into species — keep going and you reach the infima species (his joke: “the infamous species”); (b) the division a definition is — Aristotle in the proemium of Natural Hearing says the definition breaks up what the name says indistinctly. Divide square into equilateral right-angled quadrilateral, quadrilateral into rectilineal plane figure contained by four lines: each step is more universal.
• Stand back: three positions so far, and Thomas sees what is common — to know a thing you must take it apart (“the analytics are called [from] the Greek word for taking apart”). Three kinds of division: quantitative whole into parts (cat into C-A-T); genus into species; definition into its parts. They end respectively in earth-air-fire-water (or “proton, which means first,” electron, neutron), the most universal (being, Hegel), or the least universal (dog and cat rather than animal, likelier for the forms).
• Why division looks like the way to beginnings: Aristotle, returning to the four causes after the corollaries, says “all parts are like matter, especially composing parts.”

4. The fourth kind of whole left out: matter and form (“uses only three of the four”) #

The point: the three divisions correspond to three of the four senses of part and whole in Book V; the sense left out — whole into matter and form, more generally ability and act — is the true answer, yet is less known to us. “I’m kind of struck by that.”

• Why left out: it is where Natural Hearing I ends (matter and form) and what Book XII treats (ability and act; “every creature is composed of ability and act”). Its difficulty: C, A, T can be set apart; dog, cat, horse stand apart; even quadrilateral, equilateral, right-angled can be talked of separately; but a rubber ball — “put the rubber here and the shape here. Can’t do that, can you?”
• Parallel he sees: in the proemium of Natural Hearing, showing we know confusedly before distinctly, Aristotle uses the same three wholes — sensible integral whole (Empedocles’s kind), the composed understandable whole (definition), and the more universal sensible (something on the hill → an animal → a mountain lion → the one I shot last week). Matter and form, again, is where he arrives only at the end of Book I.
• The man in the street, asked the parts of “cat,” says C, A, T; “he probably wouldn’t say the letters and the order of them” unless he had been to a philosophy class.
• He recommends going from this to the reading on part in Book V and back, then to Book XII and the end of Natural Hearing I.
• Bridge: the first two questions are about universals, the next four about something separated from matter; “parts are like matter,” so one begins from parts as beginnings and asks whether there is something else, less known.

5. Questions three to five: a cause besides matter (“Is there any cause besides matter?”) #

The point: Aristotle marks this as malista zētētea — most of all to be investigated — whether besides matter there is some cause kath’ hauto; and the three questions are “perfectly ordered, cannot be otherwise” (sapientis est ordinare).

• Why he does not ask whether matter is a cause: all the early Greeks looked for that cause alone, and even the later ones had an opinion on matter; it is not doubtful. “See how intelligent that is.”
• Q3 argued by his example: “cat” depends on C, A, T; but “act” is made of the same letters and is not the same word; so “you’re forced by the truth itself” to say the word depends on something besides its letters — the order.
• Q4: does that other cause exist only in matter (order of the letters; the shape of the table; same wood made into a table and a chair) or also apart from matter? Here the real disagreement: Empedocles admits a cause other than matter but only in matter; Anaxagoras adds the greater mind, distinct from matter and not in matter; Plato likewise.
• Q5: of the causes outside matter, is there one (Anaxagoras’s mind) or many (Plato’s forms, perhaps the mathematicals)?
• Aside: a seminarian at the Assumptionist seminary asked “do angels really exist?” — “they are more real than you are.” Even a Catholic who admits an immaterial God may be puzzled about many immaterial substances; “it’s not an easy question.”

6. Sixth question: the what-it-is apart from the synolon (“I call synolon the whole altogether”) #

The point: a more particular question inserted because it is Plato’s main position: whether there is something para to synolon — the whole together, when something like “man” is said of material man.

• Three alternatives read at line 34: there is; there is not; of these there is and of those there is not (perhaps the infima species are, the others not) — “and how such things are among beings.”
• You and I are what a man is plus something material; Plato thought what we are exists apart from us. Discussed a lot in Book VII; its relevance seen from act and ability — that matter is not the first cause and the first cause is not material — “something we know only after a study of act and ability.”
• Summary of the six: Plato’s universals (Q1–2) and separation from matter (Q3–6), with other opinions entering by opposition at each step.

7. Seventh question: limited in number or in kind (“limited in number or in kind”) #

The point: starting at 996a, the second six ask how the causes are; the first asks whether the beginnings are determined in number (singulars) or in form/kind, assuming they are limited.

• Recall of Natural Hearing I: reading 10 shows the beginnings are contraries; reading 11 asks how many — not one (contraries are two), not infinite (four arguments against an unlimited multitude), so limited; then are two enough? No, a third, the subject; then he argues against more than three.
• Example: the A’s and B’s in the books on the shelf are not limited in number, but limited in kind (26 letters; Greek one or two less). If Perkins typed all day there would be no limit to the number of A’s, but a limit to the kinds. The typist, Berquist, is one in number.
• Student: “You’re one in number, you’re one in kind.” His reply: more than one in kind is possible for typists; “it’s just one typist” — one in number.
• Application: inward causes (matter, form) and outward causes (mover, end) may not get the same answer. Hint at Book XII: the inside causes are not limited in number (new ones always generated) but are limited in kind, act and ability; the outside causes — first mover, end of the whole universe — are one in number. “It’s going to be a diffuse answer.” “So it’s a profundity Aristotle when he asks these questions.”
• Difference from Q1–2 (a student asks): there the universals en tois logois versus the parts in the subject; here number versus species — protons, neutrons, electrons limited in kind, not in number.

8. Eighth question: corruptible and incorruptible things (“the same or other beginnings”) #

The point: do corruptibles and incorruptibles have the same beginnings, and either way a problem follows.

1. If the same: why do the same beginnings produce sometimes corruptible, sometimes incorruptible things?
2. If different: causes of incorruptibles must be incorruptible; if the causes of corruptibles were corruptible they would corrupt and there would be no corruptible things — yet men, dogs, cats, trees go on forever. So both have incorruptible causes; then why do these cause incorruptibles and those corruptibles? And then you do not have the same causes of all things.

• He counts this as “almost a per se division of being,” like necessary and contingent — “a division of being as being.”
• Aside: Origen and perhaps Gregory of Nyssa divide being into visible and invisible, almost material and immaterial.

9. Ninth question: is the one (and being) the very substance of things? (“the most difficult of all”) #

The point: Aristotle calls it pantōn chalepōtaton, having the greatest aporia: whether being and one, as the Pythagoreans and Plato said, are not something other but the very substance of things; or whether something else is subject (hypokeimenon) to them — love (philia) for Empedocles, fire, water or air for the natural philosophers, Heraclitus’s “all things are one.”

• Why the Platonists say it: their mathematics. Euclid’s definition of one in Elements VII confuses the one that is the beginning of number with the one convertible with being; that one is “just one,” not one dog or one triangle; so all there is, is the one and the numbers.
• Where it touches: “I am who am” — is there something that is just what it is to be, or is being always being a dog, a body? Thomas thinks Aristotle arrives at God as to hen, for whom to be is his substance.
• Why one is named before being: it comes in through the mathematical.
• He stretches his own “one and many” heading here; the third question is still about the one in some sense.

10. Tenth question: beginnings as universals or as singulars (“universale in causando”) #

The point: the hard thing is a universale in causando, which our mind cannot easily form; it fluctuates between the universale in praedicando (man himself, said of all but not evidently a cause) and the individual (Berquist, a real cause whose causality “doesn’t extend very far”).

• Anecdote: at the parish church with grandchildren, a man from the package store says “you’re responsible for this” — real causality, but limited; he would not say man himself caused them. Yet if a child is a man by partaking of man himself, “what do you need your parents for then?”
• Argue both sides: Berquist is a cause, so not man himself; Berquist cannot be cause of being as being or man as man, so man himself looks better. The truth is between: an individual, a quite unique one, universal in causality.
• Why one goes to the sun: an individual whose causality extends to the whole earth; Ron MacArthur, traveling with another philosopher, at a sunrise: “look at that gorgeous universale in causando.”
• The four one-and-many questions: the first two clearly so; the third about the one; the fourth involves the individual (one) and the universal (one over many).

11. Questions eleven and twelve: ability and act; motion or otherwise (“kai dunamei ē energeia”) #

The point: two brief but “extremely important” questions — are the beginnings ability or act, and do things come to be otherwise than by motion — preparing for Book IX and touching creation.

• If the first causes are in ability they are like matter — or like Hegel’s being, the most confused and indistinct, hence potential, from which everything “evolves.” Marx’s “setting Hegel on his feet” (Hegel thinks thought comes first, Marx matter) hides a likeness: from Porphyry, genus is to difference as matter is to form, being is more general still, so most potential and most in need of determination. Aristotle in Book IX: act is before ability simply speaking; Plato, with forms as act before other things, was partly saying this.
• Second question: if matter is the beginning, everything comes to be by motion and matter is eternal. But if the human soul does not depend on matter for its existence (from the study of the soul), or there is an unmoved mover that is not a body, then: what comes to be by transforming matter would depend on matter; so the soul cannot come to be by motion. In Generation of Animals the understanding soul does not come from the parents [ASR gives “from the love”; unclear in recording] — yet as form of the body it does not exist before the body and is not eternal like Plato’s forms. So it comes to be “by what some people call creation in the strict sense,” and so would the separate substances. Does the first cause give rise to things first by motion or by creation? “Aristotle is touching upon that.”
• The first of the two was answered in Book IX; the second is harder. He closes reading the transition: all these things pull much upward, much doubting.

His words #

• “first metaphysician… first first philosopher”: Plato, with an exception for Anaxagoras.
• “third reading”: Thomas’s lectio on the enumeration of questions (Metaphysics III).
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics]; “proemium to Natural Hearing”.
• “wisdom” (fifth, seventh, ninth, twelfth book of): [ed.: Metaphysics].
• “ability and act” [ed.: potency and act].
• “analytics”: from the Greek for taking apart.
• “infima species”, “the infamous species” (joke): lowest species.
• “synolon”: the whole altogether, e.g. man said of material man.
• “malista zētētea”: most of all to be investigated (Q3).
• “kath’ hauto”: as such; “kath’ hekaston”: the individual.
• “sapientis est ordinare”: the questions perfectly ordered.
• “inward/inside causes” (matter, form) vs. “outward/outside causes” (mover, end) [ed.: intrinsic/extrinsic].
• “en tois logois”: the universals, in reasons, vs. in the subject.
• “pantōn chalepōtaton… megistēn aporian echon”: most difficult, having the greatest doubt (Q9).
• “philia”: love, Empedocles’s subject of unity; “hypokeimenon”: subject.
• “to hen”: the one, which Thomas takes Aristotle to reach as God.
• “universale in causando” vs. “universale in praedicando”: universal in causing vs. said of many.
• “kai dunamei ē energeia”: and whether in ability or in act.
• “creation in the strict sense”: coming to be not by transformation of matter.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics III, the fourteen questions (Greek phrases at line 34 of 995b (inferred) and 996a, lines 10–11), with Thomas’s division of them (reading 3).
• Handout, “Note on the Eight Books of Natural Hearing,” p. 2 (verified source; the proemium’s account of definition and the three kinds of whole).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Natural Hearing I: proemium; readings 10 and 11 (contraries; how many beginnings); end of Book I (matter and form).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V, on part and whole (four senses).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VII (Plato’s separated what-it-is); IX (act before ability); XII (intrinsic beginnings, number of causes).
• Euclid, Elements VII, definition of one.
• Aristotle, Generation of Animals (the understanding soul not from the parents).
• Porphyry (genus to difference as matter to form).
• Aristotle on the four causes and their corollaries (“all parts are like matter”) (locus not stated).
• Exodus, “I am who am” (locus not stated).
• Printed volume: DHB Vol III, The School of Aristotle, p. 399 (verified source).

His questions #

• What is that on the board — “C A T,” or a word? Both have something to be said for them; the genus answer (“a word”) is the one you miss.
• If you divide a genus into species, what do you end up with? The lowest species; dividing by definition ends in the most universal.
• Why does Aristotle leave out the fourth kind of whole, matter and form? It is less known to us, though closer to the truth — a rubber ball’s rubber and shape cannot be set apart.
• Does the order of the letters exist apart from the matter, or only in it? Only in the matter, like the shape of the table.
• Are the letters in the English language limited in number? In kind? Not in number; in kind, 26.
• Is the typist limited in number or in kind? One in number (student: “one in number, one in kind”; he: just one typist).
• Why should the same beginnings produce sometimes corruptible, sometimes incorruptible things? Left open; a problem either way.
• Is there something that is just what it is to be, or is being always something else? Thomas thinks Aristotle arrives at God as to hen, whose being is his substance; the question itself is left as the most difficult.
• If your child is a man by partaking of man himself, what do you need your parents for? Left open; shows the mind fluctuating between universal and individual cause.
• Can the human soul come into existence by the transformation of matter? No; it would then depend on matter, so it comes by creation in the strict sense.