Why Dialectic Comes First: Contradiction, Right Questions and Universal Doubt in Aristotle's Wisdom, Book III

Orientation #

He is in the middle of Aristotle’s four reasons for dialectic at the start of Metaphysics III; the recording opens with him already discussing the first reason and moves to the second, third and fourth. He says the enumeration of the questions “will occupy the second and the third readings, which, as far as we shall go this summer,” with the dialectic of each question beginning in the fourth reading. He refers back to the “premium” [ed.: proem] “we studied in the last couple of days” (not resolved by the context block). The previous class treated the philomythos and the philosopher; the next continues the dialectical puzzles of Book III.

The class, in order #

1. The first reason: nature hides (“nature loves to hide”) #

The point: the harmony of nature is hidden from us, and the first reason is that nature is an internal cause whereas what we know is the external.

• He quotes Heraclitus, “the hidden harmony is better than the apparent harmony,” and then “nature loves to hide.”
• Student: if nature loves to hide, even more so God, who is behind nature. He agrees: immaterial, “more inner than the innermost.”

2. Second and third reasons: the contradiction tells where to go and when you have arrived (“hidden underneath the contradiction”) #

The point: the second and third reasons are connected. (2) You do not know where you are going unless you see the contradiction; (3) you do not know when you have arrived unless you saw it first.

1. Seeing the contradiction shows where something is hidden: it is hidden underneath the contradiction, so it tells you the direction to go in untying it. (Student: it also tells you there is something to look for. He: yes, but more, where to look.)
2. When you untie the contradiction, it disappears; that disappearance is a sign you have arrived.

• Matthew 22: Christ asks the Pharisees whose son the Christ is; they say David’s; he quotes the Psalm where David calls him Lord. Apparent contradiction (a father is not inferior to his son) with a profound truth hidden under it: Christ is both God and man, son of David as to the flesh, David’s Lord as God.
• Likewise “the Father is greater than I” against “the Father and I are one”: as man he is less than the Father (and less than himself as God); as God, equal.
• Einstein on special relativity: its strength lies in untying the previous difficulties, its consistency and simplicity, freedom from the contradictions that were there before.
• Bohr applying the quantum to the atom: the contradictions begin to disappear, a sign of progress.
• “Our friend Anaxagoras”: the contradiction in the mind’s self-ruling told us something was hidden; when we saw the distinction between what the mind knows and does not know, the contradiction disappeared, a sign we had arrived.
• He notes that the third reason already touches not just discovery but judging that what you found is the truth, which will come out again in the fourth reason.

3. Meno’s sophistical objection and Aristotle’s answer (“How can we go looking for what we don’t know”) #

The point: Aristotle’s second and third reasons together answer Meno.

• In the Meno, after Socrates shows Meno that neither knows what virtue is and proposes to search together, Meno objects: (a) how can we direct our search to what we don’t know? (b) how would we know when we had found it? His illustration: “Will you go out and get me one” — you could get it only by chance and would not know you had.
• Aristotle’s solution: seeing the contradiction tells you in a way where the unknown is, so the unknown is known in some imperfect way (student: known as the solution to the problem; he: “in a way, yeah”); untying it is witness that you have advanced. The two go together as they did in Meno’s objection.
• The student’s question: if he knows what he wants to know, why ask? if he doesn’t, how can I help him? So the questioner must know in some imperfect way what he does not know. “What’s your name?” — I don’t know it, but in some way I know what I’m looking for.
• The underlying mistake: mixing up what is so simply and what is so not simply but in some way. Hegel attacked Kant: how can you talk about the thing in itself if it is unknown? Kant “wasn’t there to defend himself,” but seems unaware of the distinction; knowing that something is unknown involves knowing it in some way, and there is only an appearance of contradiction if you miss the distinction.

4. Heisenberg: asking the right question is more than halfway (“to ask the right question”) #

The point: a confirmation of the second reason from physics.

• Heisenberg, Gifford lectures (second lecture / second chapter of Physics and Philosophy), summarising the history of quantum theory: at a certain point the physicists began “to ask the right question,” and to ask the right question “is often to go more than halfway to the truth.”
• His blackboard device: a finite straight line (the only kind you can draw on a board), left end ignorance, right end knowledge, a mark halfway; the line represents the time and effort from ignorance to knowledge. The average man would place asking the question near the beginning; Heisenberg places it past the halfway mark. (Student: like a seed, which takes more time and looks like it is doing nothing.)
• His own experience: a problem from undergraduate days, unresolved into graduate school, became relevant to his thesis; while reading Thomas and listening to Monsignor Dionne he asked the right question “and bang there the answer was.” He went to check with Dionne, who said “I know where you’re going”; “well, damn it, can I go there?” — he agreed.
• General principle: every investigation takes the direction of the questions asked, so asking the right question is going in the right direction (the courtroom: you object to a line of questioning because you know where it is going).
• Back to Heisenberg’s text: what were the right questions? “Almost all of them were concerned with the strange apparent contradictions between the experiments.” So seeing contradictions led to the right questions, which took them more than halfway — “a beautiful confirmation of what the philosopher is saying here” and a testimony to Heisenberg’s understanding.
• Bohr said the same: he always started conversations with a paradox and gradually elucidated it; and he told the elementary-particle physicists they were not progressing because they had not yet seen a sufficiently violent contradiction with current ideas to indicate where they had to go.

5. The fourth reason: hearing both sides helps judgment (“more able to judge”) #

The point: dialectic helps not only discovery but judgment, by a likeness to rhetoric, which is more known to us.

• The jury judges better if it hears the lawyer for guilty and the lawyer for not guilty, each giving reasons; with only one side it is in a worse position. Likewise in philosophy, about a universal question rather than an individual man, hearing arguments for and against makes you better able to judge where the truth lies.
• Aristotle’s words: “beltion” (better) had towards “krinein” (to judge), with the comparison to those listening in a trial.
• Order: discovery comes before judgment, grasping before judging, “just like guessing before knowing.” He notes the third reason was in a way judgment too: untying the contradiction is judging that you have arrived.

6. Why a whole book of dialectic here, unlike the other books (“a kind of universal doubt”) #

The point: Thomas says Aristotle uses dialectic for these four reasons in other books too, but here differently.

• Elsewhere the dialectic is piecemeal: in Book Four of Natural Hearing there is a dialectic about place before the definition, another about time; in the eight books it is a little dialectic, then untying, then resolution, again and again. Here a whole book is a universal doubt, and Books Four through Fourteen untie all the knots raised in Book Three.
• Three reasons for the difference:
  1. It belongs to the wise man to have a universal, not piecemeal, consideration of truth.
     • Contrast Descartes’ universal doubt: (a) not a result of doubting well but of an act of will, setting aside the obvious with the unobvious; (b) placed at the very beginning of philosophy (how he arrives at the cogito), whereas Aristotle’s universal doubt comes in the last part of philosophy. A universal doubt at the beginning gets nowhere because the mind simply breaks down — the result in the modern philosophers. Aside: the unsolicited introductions to philosophy he receives in the mail, universal doubt about everything from God to morality; the mind is not ready; you need a little dialectic, untie it, then another. (Student: you can’t even doubt till you know something. He agrees; student adds, that’s why children have to believe everything you say.)
  2. The predecessors got into these doubts by proceeding in wildly different ways: Plato jumps up to the world of forms and sinks back to the sensible; Aristotle wants to go from the sensible to what cannot be sensed. So he goes through the doubts arising from their ways and then determines the truth in the order it must be determined.
  3. From Averroes: the likeness between dialectic and wisdom (Plato in the Republic makes dialectic the highest, the same as wisdom). Dialectic in its universality is like wisdom in its universality, so dialectic becomes like a principal part of wisdom, with a whole book, a likeness it has to no other part of philosophy.
• He extends the same reason to Book Five: a whole book distinguishing the senses of words (Natural Hearing IV distinguishes “in,” the Categories “before” and “after,” but only a word or two), which is like the second tool of dialectic, distinguishing the senses of a word, most appropriate to the dialectician. “A very interesting reason that Averroes gives there, and Thomas thinks it’s worthwhile communicating to us.”
• Aristotle later (Book Four, he guesses) points out the likeness of wisdom to dialectic and even to sophistry, since the sophist wants to appear wise. Dialectic and sophistic are two sides of the same thing: the sophist deals with mistakes that can be made everywhere, dialectic applies to every subject; and the tool of distinguishing senses helps avoid equivocation, the sophists’ most common fallacy.

7. Enumeration of the questions: what wisdom is about comes first (“about 23 questions”) #

The point: the first nine questions (reading two) mostly concern what wisdom is about; the remaining fourteen (reading three) concern the causes, which wisdom is mainly about.

• About 23 questions, as Thomas divides them, some subdividable; the editorial division into readings two and three matches the logical division and order “for the most part.”
• Thomas recalls the end of Book Two: it is one thing to acquire an episteme, another to know the road to follow in acquiring it, and neither is easy; you must know the road before acquiring the knowledge well; and to determine the road you must know what the knowledge is about. Hence: what wisdom is about, first.
• Two exceptions “stuck in” among the first nine: questions about substance in itself — are there only material substances or also immaterial? and if immaterial, one (like the greater mind of Anaxagoras) or many (like Plato’s forms and mathematical substances)? They follow three questions about what substances wisdom is about, because those are complicated by them: if there are immaterial substances, can the same reasoned-out knowledge treat material substances (known through sense) and immaterial ones (known some other way) — angels, and dogs, cats and trees? If not, and there are two knowledges, which is wisdom, and what becomes of wisdom as knowledge of all things? Or are they two generic wisdoms, like geometry and arithmetic under mathematical philosophy? In the later dialectic, the questions about substance itself are pulled out as a separate part.
• Student: why does Thomas say the first part is about the mode? He: the mode must fit the matter of the science; he is not determining the mode here but what is necessary to determine it, namely what wisdom is about. So reading two precedes reading three, as relevant to the road.
• Student: isn’t what wisdom is about the subject of wisdom? He: one thing to ask what the soul is, another to say the three books of De Anima are about the soul; the stuck-in questions are about the things themselves in reality, the others about whether wisdom is about them.
• Further: wisdom is in some way about all things, and all things are substances or accidents, so five questions about substance and three about accidents. He then says the first question (about what kinds of causes wisdom treats) can be distinguished from the other eight, which go back to the first attribute of the wise man, knowing all things in some way.

8. The “premium” and Book Two (“a premium in a way”) #

The point: Aristotle’s “there is a doubt first about those things we have doubted a little already” recalls the idea of a “premium” [ed.: proem], and Thomas in the commentary calls Book Two a premium in a way.

• This is a different sense from the premium “we studied in the last couple of days,” more like Plato’s Republic, where Book One turns out to be a premium because they were not really convinced and Socrates is going to “blow it up big.” Perhaps halfway between the two senses in Plato; not exactly Dionne’s first sense, where every book of Aristotle has a short premium giving the scopus and paving the way; nor simply the first part of the treatise, which must have a certain completeness (not just the first ten theorems of Euclid). It is more like an introduction leading into — the recording ends mid-sentence.

His words #

• “the hidden harmony is better than the apparent harmony”; “nature loves to hide”: Heraclitus, as he quotes him.
• “untying the contradiction”: his phrase for resolving an aporia; its disappearance is the “sign” you have arrived.
• “what is so simply and what is not so simply, but in some way”: the distinction that dissolves Meno’s and Hegel’s objections.
• “to ask the right question is often to go more than halfway to the truth”: Heisenberg, as he renders him.
• “beltion” / “krinein”: better had towards judging (Aristotle’s Greek for the fourth reason).
• “grasping before judging, just like guessing before knowing”: order of discovery and judgment.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• “universal doubt”: Aristotle’s in Book III vs. Descartes'.
• “second tool of dialectic”: distinguishing the senses of a word.
• “reasoned-out knowledge” [ed.: episteme, science].
• “the road” / “way of going forward” [ed.: method, mode] to be determined before acquiring the science.
• “in rerum natura”: in reality, of the questions about substances themselves.
• “premium” [ed.: proem, prooemium].
• “scopus”: what the first sense of proem gives.
• “Peri ton aporon” [ed.: Peri ton aporion, the book of puzzles].

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics III, the four reasons for dialectic (second, third, fourth) and the beginning of the enumeration of questions (“there is a doubt first”).
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on Metaphysics III, on why this book differs from the piecemeal dialectic of other books (three reasons, the third from Averroes), and the division of the 23 questions into readings two and three (inferred locus).
• Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, ch. 2 (Gifford lectures), quoted on asking the right question and on the strange apparent contradictions between experiments.
• Matthew 22, Christ’s question about David’s son and Lord.

Mentioned

• Plato, Meno (the sophistical objection).
• Hegel against Kant on the thing in itself.
• Einstein on special relativity; Bohr on the quantum and on paradox.
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing (Physics) IV, dialectic on place and time, senses of “in”; Categories, “before” and “after”.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II end (Thomas’s reading five), on knowing the road; Metaphysics IV (likeness of wisdom, dialectic, sophistry, as he guesses); Metaphysics V (senses of words); Metaphysics IV–XIV (untying the doubts).
• Descartes, universal doubt and the cogito.
• Plato, Republic (dialectic as highest; Book One as a proem).
• Aristotle, De Anima (three books, “about the soul”).
• Euclid, first ten theorems.
• Anaxagoras on mind (earlier discussion).

His questions #

• If nature loves to hide, even more so God? Yes: he is behind nature, immaterial, “more inner than the innermost.”
• How can Christ be David’s son if David calls him Lord? As man he descends from David; as God he is David’s Lord — the hidden truth that he is both.
• When a student asks a question, does he know what he wants to know? He must know in some imperfect way what he does not know, or he could neither ask nor be helped.
• Where along the line from ignorance to knowledge does asking the right question come? Past the halfway mark, per Heisenberg and his own experience.
• Why a whole book of dialectic here, when elsewhere it is piecemeal? Because the wise man’s consideration is universal; because the predecessors proceeded in wildly different ways; because of the likeness of dialectic to wisdom (Averroes).
• Is the mind ready for a universal doubt at the beginning of philosophy? No; it breaks down; you can’t doubt till you know something.
• Why does Thomas say the first nine questions are about the mode? Because the mode must fit the matter; knowing what wisdom is about is what is needed to determine the road.
• If there are immaterial substances, is there one wisdom about both material and immaterial, or two, and which is wisdom? Left open (raised as the difficulty that motivates inserting the two questions about substance itself).