Wonder, Curiosity, and the Proemium: Q&A on Providence, Free Will, and the Central Question

Orientation #

He continues from “the next sentence” of the proemium’s wonder passage and reaches its last sentence, the epilogue; the four attributes of wisdom “we mentioned before” are recalled in it (prev. lecture). He announces that “tomorrow morning” the class will take at least the first reading of Book III and perhaps start on the distinction of questions. The verified-source list records a Categories ch. 4 handout matched in this episode’s audio; in the transcript the categories appear only in the discussion (segment 7), not as a text read.

The class, in order #

1. Wonder diminishes as reason understands (“stuff yourself with questions”) #

Point: philosophy begins in wonder (wanting to know what you don’t know), but that kind of wonder disappears once you possess knowledge, so it does not end there.

• Shakespeare’s line “stuff yourself with questions that reason wonder may diminish”: surprise at seeing someone somewhere (“What are you doing here?”) vanishes once you learn why they are there. Aristotle says the same: what began in wonder ends in something better, the possession of knowledge.

2. The order of wonder: chance events and the poet (“wonder about the automata”) #

Point: Aristotle again touches the order in wonder, beginning with things close at hand, and first names the automata [ed.: ta automata], which he reads as things that happen by chance (though the Greek could also mean what moves itself, like a toy).

• Link back to the philomythos as stepping-stone to the philosopher: the poet makes a big deal of luck while hinting at divine providence. Romeo and Juliet: Romeo “fortune’s fool”, yet the Duke at the end says heaven found a way to punish the feuding fathers through their only children; something is moving behind the scenes.
• Aristotle in the book on the poetic art: chance events with great results especially arouse wonder when they seem due to divine influence. His example: an unsolved murder of a famous man, a statue erected in the marketplace, a festival crowd pushes it over, and it kills the very murderer. Berquist adds Caesar assassinated beneath the statue of Pompey.
• Aside: his literary-critic friend Brother Mark said good literature should end in wonder, while philosophy begins in wonder; “some truth to that”.

3. The sun, the diagonal, and wonder at the unexpected (“contrary to what you’d expect”) #

Point: the examples rise from chance, to the turnings of the sun (natural philosophy), to geometry (the diagonal incommensurable with the side), and Thomas explains why the last is chosen: wonder is aroused more by what is contrary to expectation.

• The diagonal is an exception to his earlier remark that in geometry men usually guess the truth before knowing why: here you would guess a small enough measure would measure both, and it cannot.
• Euclid III, tangent theorem: no straight line fits between tangent and circle, though above the point of contact there is space all the way up. His politician friend Roy, who sneered at high-school geometry, was led to it gradually and “filled with wonder”.
• Einstein’s autobiographical sketch (in the two Harper volumes Einstein: Philosopher Scientist): two kinds of wonder; the magnet his father brought home (one body acting on another with nothing between) aroused wonder, whereas a falling stone does not, even though we don’t know why it falls (“familiarity breeds contempt”); a stone going up would.
• Euclid II.5, “that wonderful theorem”: a rectangle with less perimeter can contain more, even much more, area than one with more perimeter; seems impossible.
• Conclusion: what arouses wonder is not merely ignorance of why, but ignorance of why in something contrary to expectation. A friend who suddenly drinks beer instead of wine makes you ask why; his usual behaviour does not, though you don’t know its cause either. Perhaps the sun’s turning is likewise a little unusual.

4. Two senses of wonder: curiosity vs. admiration (“God compels our wonder”) #

Point: knowledge is the contrary of wonder and “the better, according to the proverb”; once the geometer sees why the diagonal cannot be commensurable, that wonder stops, and only its being commensurable would arouse it.

• Objection: in Book XII Aristotle says God compels our wonder. Reply: not the same sense. That is admiration proceeding from seeing God’s excellence, not wonder proceeding from ignorance (though he knows he does not fully understand God).
• English uses “wonder” for both; “curiosity” sometimes names the one from ignorance (though it often has a bad sense), “admiration” the other. Sylvia’s song in Two Gentlemen of Verona (“heaven lent her such graces that she might admired be”) vs. “stuff your minds with questions.”
• Daily life: inexperienced, you wonder why people do things; later you expect corruption in society and are no longer stupefied by it.

5. The epilogue recalls the proemium in reverse (“What then is the nature of this episteme”) #

Point: the last sentence is an epilogue recalling what was done, in the contrary order.

1. “What the nature of this knowledge is” was said: the third reading (second part of the proemium): speculative, most liberal, not a human possession, best and most honourable because most divine.
2. “What aim (scopus) the investigation and the whole road must hit”: the first two readings: causes, and the very first causes.

• Same at the end of the proemium of the Nicomachean Ethics, but there three things are recalled, third, second, first; the order of recollection (yesterday, then the day before).
• Only these two proemia have epilogues, to his recollection: perhaps a sign of special importance, one paving the way to speculative philosophy and wisdom, the other to practical philosophy.
• He knows no other philosopher who has a proemium to wisdom, or approaches this one.

6. Student questions: enslaved nature, providence, free will (“liber est causa sui”) #

• Does Aristotle wonder about human nature’s enslavement? People point to it as awareness of the effects of original sin; Thomas in SCG IV speaks of the probability, estimable by reason, of something like original sin. Poets get it (golden age; the gods and men). Plato in the Phaedo treats the soul as imprisoned in the body, which seems a punishment, and the body’s affliction of the soul is in part a punishment; but he knows of no explicit guess at a fall in Aristotle or the Phaedo. The first state of man included things befitting but not altogether natural, e.g. immortality of the body (student: “if you eat the right foods”).
• Does Aristotle think all happens by the first cause’s providence? Physics II, three opinions on luck/chance: (i) no such thing, a name for ignorance, rejected; (ii) chance is responsible for the origin of the universe, rejected; (iii) there is something divine about it (the poets’ hint), to which he does not reply. Thomas notes he does not reply; it transcends the natural philosopher, but he is open to providence reaching down to chance. The Ethics also has the divine extending to contingent things.
• SCG: in books I-III Thomas argues from reason first, then confirms by Scripture and Fathers; in book III on God’s causality over our will he reverses the order, a sign of the difficulty (even Origen found it hard). His last reason is from Aristotle in the Ethics: God is the cause of the acts of will. To Warren Murray: “what a testimony to Aristotle”; he also touches it in Nicomachean Ethics I.
• Liber est causa sui: does it mean final or efficient causality? Be careful; some quote it to deny God causes our will’s acts. God’s causality extends not only to what happens but to its happening the way God wants: by necessity, by chance, or freely. It would diminish God’s power if he could not cause something to happen freely, or by chance. Student: some read it as final causality (man is for his own sake, unlike a slave); he: more than final cause; the will moves naturally to the good and is free among means, not free to choose a non-end, so freedom involves efficient causality too.

7. What to do next; the categories in logic and in wisdom (“the ways of being are proportional”) #

Point: options for the remaining time: enumerate the questions of Book III and their order (and see how modern positions enter them), Book VI, or readings in Book V.

• Student: the categories met first in logic, then here; is the difference that first it is how we speak, later how things are? Reply: Thomas has no exposition of the Categories (Ammonius is pretty good); supplement with Thomas’s scattered texts. The basis and distinction of the ten is given twice: Physics III (motion the same as acting-upon and undergoing, and problems raised there) and Metaphysics V (being according to the figures of predication), each explaining the basis and then going through the ten “following the rule of two or three”, almost identical, with one or two differences of some importance. Add Albert the Great and Ammonius Hermiae; his own commentary on the categories gathers these; “that’s another course.”
• Aristotle in Book V says being is divided according to the schemata (figures) of predication; Thomas: the ways of being are proportional to the ways of being said, so the latter are a stepping-stone to the former, showing the affinity and usefulness of logic, even the Categories, for the study of being as being.
• Plan: tomorrow morning at least the first reading of Book III (why III comes before IV-XIV), then perhaps the distinction of questions, “absolutely incredible” how Thomas understood what Aristotle is doing there.

8. The last two books: the beautiful, comedy, and Plato (“three main forms of beautiful”) #

Point: he knows no good commentary on Books XIII-XIV, and one is rare who reaches them, but he uses one text.

• Book XIII (he thinks) on the three main forms of the beautiful, used in his article on comedy: comedy is the likeness of the laughable; in the Poetics the laughable is a form of the ugly; the three forms of the ugly he found in the English comic muse are opposed to the three forms of the beautiful, “same knowledge of opposites”; “a very beautiful text”.
• His own view, “without Thomas to back me up”: Aristotle’s final consideration of the central question of philosophy is in the last books, since there he takes up Plato and those who make the forms or mathematicals the first causes, and Plato’s mistake is largely due to a wrong answer to the central question.

9. The central question of philosophy (“does truth require that the way we know be the way things are”) #

Point: asked whether this is his discovery or Thomas’s teaching, he says Thomas speaks of Plato’s mistake as thinking the way we know should be the way things are, but he coined the name and made the question explicit.

• Why “central”: like a centre it joins the end of philosophy (to know the truth) with the two things the philosopher talks about, the way we know (logic’s chief concern) and the way things are (natural, political philosophy, wisdom). Its answer influences everything, attainment of truth or failure; one can err in either direction if one misses the distinction.
• Aristotle already draws it: Physics I, what is more known to us is less known by nature; Physics II, after distinguishing natural philosophy and mathematics, mathematics considers things in separation and this does not make it false; then he criticises Plato: things can be known in distinction or separation truly though they do not exist so. Since distinction comes before order, next: things can be known in a different order than they are.
• Examples: “I know you before I know your parents”, so must you come before your parents? I know you truly (a boy, a girl, a good student) though not fully. Sherlock Holmes to Watson: “reason backwards”, from effect to cause, backwards as far as reality goes. Spinoza: “the order in thoughts and the order in things is the same”, just the contrary, with terrible confusions. Hegel: makes being, the most confused notion in our mind, the beginning of all reality. “Horrible confusion.”
• Student: it would be true if we were the makers of reality. Reply: God has no order in his knowledge (all at once), but by knowing himself knows all else; if there were order it would go cause to effect, a much better way. The philosophers are influenced by the custom of mathematics, where, considering an accident abstractly, you know the lines are straight before you see why the angles are equal, and we are makers there; universalising geometry’s procedure “fouls things up”.
• Aside: “you know why your wife is angry before you know she’s angry: in my experience of married life.”

10. What a proemium is (“premium means paving the way”) #

Point: Dion (in a short course) saw more clearly than others the importance of Aristotle’s proemia; a proemium is not a loose foreword or preface.

• Proemium vs. introduction: an introduction leads someone into something and a whole course could be one; a proemium is always short, at the beginning, with a definite purpose. The English Vatican II edition of Dei Verbum said “introduction”; the Latin says prooemium. A student: like John the Baptist.
• Plato: the Timaeus (more treatise than dialogue) has a proemium so named, a pause after it, and Socrates praises Timaeus for it; Aristotle perhaps indebted here. Timaeus says you cannot talk about all things in the same way, which reminds him of Aristotle’s strictures at the start of the Nicomachean Ethics about certitude in changeable matters. A different sense in Republic I-II: after “do you want to seem to have convinced us, or really convince us?”, book I turns out to be “just a proemium”, concise, blown up large in II-IX by comparing soul to city. The Timaeus sense, paving the way, is the stricter.
• Read Plato or Aristotle? Knowing Aristotle you read Plato carefully and see how much he took over and how much he developed by criticism; Plato’s supreme importance appears in the second group of questions of Book III (“delicious tidbit” deferred).
• Student: does it prepare the hearer with an ability? No: it paves the way, like the prologue of Romeo and Juliet preparing you for a tragedy and something of its order. Dion: the most essential thing in a proemium is the scope aimed at, next its desirability. If the road to follow can be elaborated it may be included, as in the proemium of Natural Hearing (general before particular); not here, since he has enough on his hands and the road within wisdom is very difficult (brought out later). Some proemia are cut and dried, like the Peri Hermeneias (noun, verb, statement, affirmation, negation), a much easier work than the Categories, which is “a kind of problem”.
• Dion: once in a while the proemium is not at the very beginning, an exception; the Categories is one case, and he referred Berquist to Dionysius for the other. Berquist did not fully understand this part of the master’s teaching: “if Dionysius is above Thomas, and Thomas is above me…”

His words #

• wonder: wanting to know what you don’t know; disappears once you have knowledge.
• automata: things that happen by chance (or, possibly, what moves itself).
• philomythos: lover of myth, whose wonder is a stepping-stone to the philosopher’s.
• curiosity vs. admiration: wonder from ignorance vs. wonder from seeing excellence.
• scopus: the aim, the goal the investigation must hit.
• episteme: the knowledge being sought.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• books of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics].
• figures (schemata, figurae) of predication: the basis on which being is divided into the ten categories.
• rule of two or three: how Thomas goes through the distinction of the ten.
• liber est causa sui: the free is the cause of itself.
• central question of philosophy (his coinage): does truth require that the way we know be the way things are?
• proemium: paving the way; short, at the beginning, with a definite purpose, as against introduction (leading into).

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I, proemium: the wonder passage (automata, turnings of the sun, the diagonal), its ending in the contrary, and the epilogue.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Poetics (statue story; the laughable as a form of the ugly)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics XII (God compels wonder); XIII (three forms of the beautiful); V (being according to the figures of predication); III (first reading, distinction of questions)
• Aristotle, Physics I, II (luck and chance; critique of Plato), III (motion and the categories); proemium of the Physics
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (epilogue of proemium; God cause of acts of will; strictures on certitude)
• Aristotle, Peri Hermeneias and Categories (their proemia)
• Euclid, Elements III (tangent) and II.5
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III (God’s causality over the will) and IV (original sin); Thomas on wonder at the unexpected, “not in the commentary here, but elsewhere”
• Ammonius Hermiae and Albert the Great on the Categories; Berquist’s own commentary on the Categories and article on comedy
• Plato, Timaeus, Republic I-II, Phaedo
• Einstein, autobiographical sketch in Einstein: Philosopher Scientist
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Two Gentlemen of Verona; the “stuff yourself with questions” line
• Sherlock Holmes (“reason backwards”); Spinoza; Hegel
• Vatican II, Dei Verbum (Latin prooemium)

His questions #

• If philosophy begins in wonder, will it end in wonder? No; that wonder disappears once knowledge is possessed, which is the better.
• Why does Aristotle take the incommensurable diagonal as his example? Because wonder is aroused more by what is contrary to expectation (Thomas).
• Is God compelling our wonder in Book XII the same wonder? No; that is admiration from seeing his excellence, not wonder from ignorance.
• In what order does the epilogue recall the proemium? The contrary order: the nature of the knowledge (third reading), then its aim (first two).
• Does Aristotle think providence extends to chance events? He leaves the “something divine” opinion unanswered but is open to it; left open by Aristotle.
• Does liber est causa sui deny that God causes acts of our will? No; God causes things to happen the way he wants, including freely; freedom involves efficient causality too.
• Is the difference between categories in logic and in wisdom that of how we speak vs. how things are? The ways of being are proportional to the ways of being said, so logic is the stepping-stone.
• Is “the central question” his discovery or Thomas’s teaching? Thomas names Plato’s mistake; he coined the term and made the question explicit.
• Does a proemium prepare an ability in the hearer? No; it paves the way, chiefly by giving the scope and its desirability.