Metaphysics Proemium I: All Men Desire to Know — Sense, Memory, Experience and Art

Orientation #

He opens on the title and proemium of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and reads through the first paragraphs of Book I, following a handout page (“Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument”, p. 5) from which he reads for some ten minutes. He refers back to “the logic” for Aristotle’s four questions (prev. treatment). The next class continues through the proemium via Aquinas’s commentary to the six marks of the wise man.

The class, in order #

1. The title and the name of the science (“Meta ta physika”) #

Aristotle never calls this book the Metaphysics; his editor did, from meta ta physika, because the editor saw it comes after the books in natural philosophy in the order of learning — and being the editor, the title stuck. Aristotle calls it First Philosophy, first in the fourth sense of first [ed.: as he has enumerated the senses]; it is most of all the character of wisdom among the parts of philosophy. He also calls it wisdom sometimes — but since he will say God is wiser than we are, “wisdom” does not name it as well as “First Philosophy.”

2. What a proemium is (“paving the way”) #

Proemium is not simply “preface”: it is paving the way, showing what you are aiming at and perhaps why it is desirable. Almost every book of Aristotle has one; Thomas divides a book into the proemium and the tractatus, the drawing-out, the proemium being very short by comparison.

• Example: Romeo and Juliet divides into prologue and play, the prologue fourteen lines with the rhyming structure of a Shakespearean sonnet, three quatrains. (A kid down the block was in a Romeo and Juliet play, so he recited the prologue as best he could remember.)
• Important proemia get an epilogue recalling what was done. He points to the last sentence of p. 5: what the nature of the knowledge sought is, and what the goal of the investigation is, “the whole knowledge over a road” (his very literal rendering). Aristotle names the goal first, then the nature of the knowledge — recalling the last thing done, then the first.

3. “All men by nature desire to know” (“the actual Greek word there is eidenai”) #

Point: the opening line establishes that knowing is a real, natural good.

• The Greek eidenai means to see; applied to the mind it has the sense of to understand. We borrow “see” for understanding — hence the beatific vision, to see God face to face as in the Psalms.
• Argument: the good is what all desire; all men desire to know; therefore knowing is a good. Adding by nature shows it is a truly good, a natural good for man — he did not say “all men by custom desire to know.”

4. The sign from the senses (“apart from their usefulness, they are loved for themselves”) #

A sign is (Augustine) a sensible thing that strikes the senses and brings to mind something other than itself — a stop sign strikes the eye and says “stop.” To be sensible belongs to the first meaning of sign; any non-sensible sign is an extension (the old definition of a sacrament, “an outward sign,” means a sensible sign).

• Aristotle’s sign: the senses are loved apart from their usefulness. Ron MacArthur and his wife bought a house with a beautiful view — “let’s look at that view”: not a stop sign, not directions, just to see.
• Sight is loved most, for it makes us know most and shows many differences. Without eyes, sun, moon and stars would be wholly hidden — you cannot hear, taste, smell or feel them.
• Student exchange: would you rather be blind or deaf? One young lady, a musician, said she’d rather be blind — she now plays organ in a parish church and impressed Fr. Lamont by learning more Bach than anyone he knew. He calls her an exception, not the rule. (Beethoven’s going deaf: the orchestra planned just to play along and pretend to follow him.)
• What sight knows beyond color: shape — how you know this is a chair, this a man, this a cup. Touch knows shape too but not as clearly or quickly; De Koninck used to say the basic thoughts are tied to touch.
• Further instances of seeing and hearing for their own sake: sunsets (in Virginia the sky in folds of red, and the waitress looked at him as if he were crazy); a huge rainbow after rain on the boardwalk in Quebec — not to find gold at its end; Mozart, listened to just to hear how it sounds. Benedict spent his birthday listening to three of the six Mozart quartets dedicated to Haydn, the greatest of the twenty-three. Smelling the rose, queen of flowers — Pius XII’s address to the rose growers of Rome, the roses given to the Blessed Virgin; and Shakespeare’s “From fairest creatures we desire increase…”

5. Sense, memory, and the animals (“from this memory does not arise in some”) #

Purpose: he must look before and after in our knowledge to see its order, since wisdom will name the highest thing in it — so he begins with what we share with animals.

• All animals are born having sensing by nature (he prefers “sensing” to “sensation”); this distinguishes animal from plant, which feeds, grows and reproduces but does not sense — you do not feel about cutting a limb off a tree as about cutting a leg off a dog.
• From sensing, memory arises in some and not in others. Those without memory act only with regard to the present. Memory is retaining in some way what you have sensed; those with it are more prudent (Cicero: first you must remember the past) and are more easily taught. Those unable to hear sounds are prudent but without learning — the bees — since hearing is the sense of learning; whatever has hearing in addition to memory is able to learn.
• Example of memory in animals: the cat and dog that go straight to where their bowl is, and know trouble by the tone of your voice. His own cat, discouraged from catching birds, ran into the bushes with a piece of leftover chicken as if it were forbidden food — “like Eve at the tree.” Aside: the bird shot for his comparative-anatomy project (frog skeleton from the lab, Warren Murray’s bat skeleton), boiled on the stove to get the skin off the bones, just as the bird-loving neighbor came to visit and asked what was cooking.

6. Experience out of memory (“many memories of the same thing perfect the power of one experience”) #

The other animals live by images and memories and share little in experience; the race of men lives by art and reasonings. Art vs. reasoning: art is the name of a habit (even the art of logic is a habit); reasoning is the discourse most characteristic of reason, and takes its name from reason itself.

• Experience comes from memory: many memories of the same thing (or same kind of thing) make one experience. Examples: one date with one girl you would remember, but you are a man of experience with women only from many dates with many women; one glass of wine remembered is not experience of wine — you must have drunk, sniffed, tasted, swallowed and remembered many.
• Experience vs. art/science: experience is a collection of many remembered singulars; art and science are of what is common to many — the mind separates out what is common, and that is the beginning of knowledge of the universal. “Experience makes art, as Polus says” (a character in one of Plato’s dialogues) — “but inexperience, chance”: beginner’s luck.
• His own case: cooking steaks to get them pink without losing the flavor, cutting into one to see.
• The medical example, and why Aristotle uses it: his father was an excellent doctor for those days and became court physician, which is how the family became known to Philip and how Aristotle became Alexander’s teacher. (Alexander kept Homer — “the poet” by antonomasia — at his bedside; Aristotle wrote a special work on Homer for him, a lost dialogue on poets, and the Poetics, whose detailed part on comedy is lost.) In the Ethics the useless hearer of ethics is compared to the useless hearer of medical advice — the man who hears the doctor say stop eating candy and does not act.
• The text’s own example: that this benefited Callias suffering this disease, and Socrates, and Plato, belongs to experience — aspirin relieved your headache, and his, and his. That it benefits all marked by one condition suffering this disease — the phlegmatic or choleric with burning fever — belongs to art. His own experience-knowledge: ginger ale (or candy ginger) for nausea or carsickness.
• Forming the universal from singulars: a soldier decorated in battle, a fireman who ran into a collapsing burning building for a child, a girl who dragged her boyfriend from a shark and baptized him on the shore — what have they in common? Going against danger, when it is reasonable to do so, for a good reason: that is courage, something universal. Likewise: he drinks wine, you beer, he whiskey, none too much — “nothing too much,” the saying of the wise man of Greece.
• Aside (digression from the medical example): Thomas divides John 13–17 into three — chapter 13, Christ gives example; 14–16, he instructs with words; 17, he prays — which is exactly what a father or parent must do: give good example, instruct by words, pray that they profit from both. Chapter 17 divides in three again: he prays for himself, for the apostles, and for all who will be converted by them. Also antonomasia in John: infidelity called “sin” by antonomasia, because it destroys everything.

7. Why the experienced often do better (“as far as doing is concerned”) #

Point: in doing, experience does not seem to differ from art, and the experienced often succeed more than those having reason without experience.

• The cause Aristotle gives: experience is knowledge of singulars, art of universals, but all doings and makings are about singulars — the doctor does not cure man except accidentally, but this man, Callias or Socrates, who happens to be a man. He who has reason without experience and knows the universal but not the singular often errs in treatment, “for it is more the singular that is treated.”
• Note: he is using art in a broad sense here, for knowledge of the universal, not just the ability to make.
• Examples: you may pull your own depressed child or friend out of a mood better than a psychologist who knows the universal kinds of affliction, because you know this little person (student’s aside: put Mozart on). His daughter and daughter-in-law homeschooling nine and ten children know each child’s particular difficulty in learning better than a teacher with thirty students and state-university courses. A student’s example: a newly graduated eye doctor could not get the prescription right; the man who had made glasses for thirty years knew what was needed. Getting a bill through the House or Senate: ten years’ experience — knowing how to push, encourage, flatter or bribe this man — beats the professor of political science who knows American, British and Brazilian forms of government; LBJ knew how to run the thing. (His friend Raymond Early as a page boy learned how things are done in the Minnesota House and Senate.) His grandmother in hospital with a broken fragile bone: the anesthetist would have given the regular anesthesia, but she was so confused they gave only a local — otherwise she’d be “put under the ground.” In his father’s factory, the men who had made many wagons made the best ones, the Green King wagons.

8. Why the artist is nevertheless wiser (“they know the cause, while the others do not”) #

Point: in knowing, the universal is superior — we think knowing and understanding belong more to art than to experience, and hold the artists wiser; so wisdom follows knowledge, not doing. Wisdom is not primarily about doing something but about knowing; it is knowledge for its own sake.

• The reason: the experienced know that it is so but not why; the artist knows why, and the cause. From the logic: the four questions — does it exist, what is it, is this that, why is this that — and to know that a thing is so is less advanced than to know why it is so; the man who knows why also knows that.
• Examples: he is a man of experience in tea and knows not to steep beyond three or four minutes; a chemist explained why — different chemicals are released at different times, the good-tasting ones before the bad — so ten minutes is not merely stronger (which dilution would fix) but actually bad. Laying a wine bottle on its side: he can tell Joe Blow in the store “just lay them down,” but the man who knows why — cork upright dries out, air gets in and affects the quality; on its side the wine swells the cork airtight — seems wiser.
• Husbands know that you don’t do certain things without knowing why (“Would you be annoyed if I forgot your birthday?” “Of course not”). His old lecture on the differences between men and women, from experience: who is more apt to disown a child, or to force the offspring into his own line of work? The father — because he sees the offspring as a continuation of himself (Henry VIII wanting a son; the nervous first-time father in the hospital: “You got what you wanted”). The woman wants first a healthy baby and sees the child as the fulfillment and perfection of herself as a woman, so to disown it would be to deny her own perfection. That is giving the reason why — and it made him nervous when girls from high schools began sitting in on the all-boys class.

9. Second sign: the chief artist (“wiser not by doing, but by having a reason”) #

The chief artists are more honorable, know more and are wiser than the handicraftsmen, because they know the causes of the things made. The handicraftsmen are like inanimate things, which make but do not know what they make, as fire burns: inanimate things act by a certain nature, handicraftsmen by custom.

• Chef and potato-peeler: cut them this way tonight, that way tomorrow — the chef knows why, he is making French fries, he sees the ultimate thing, and so commands. The general sees the whole picture and knows why these men go here; the soldier’s is “not the question why.”
• Student’s case: the builder Pat Riley and Mike, a carpenter of thirty-plus years who knows how to make things but not always why, challenges Pat, is corrected, and eventually does it Pat’s way.
• His own case: his advisor Kasurik demanded “Where’s your Greek? If you’re going to be a philosopher, you take Greek” — and later, “go out and get a copy of Euclid.” He obeyed like a firebrand not knowing why; Kasurik was the chief artist, wiser not by doing but by having a reason and knowing the causes.

10. Third sign: teaching (“the sign of knowing is the ability to teach”) #

On the whole the sign of knowing is the ability to teach; the artists can teach, the merely experienced cannot, because asked why they cannot answer — hence art is more reasoned-out knowledge than experience.

• Digression on why Greek is needed: because the translations are so lousy. Parodying Plato: “until philosophers are kings, or kings philosophers, you’ll have bad government” — until translators are philosophers or philosophers translators, you will have bad translations. In the Loeb volumes he has seen translators give exactly the opposite sense. Know Greek to protect yourself. Fr. Peter Phelan on Scripture: it is not enough to know how to use a Greek or Hebrew dictionary; to translate Scripture you must understand Scripture and Revelation.

11. Digression: motion, operation, and “doing” (“motion is the act of the imperfect”) #

Prompted by a strange text he met in the Summa Contra Gentiles.

• Under act, the most general distinction is between form and motion: a ball rolls and a cube does not because their forms differ, yet the rolling is not the form.
• Motion vs. operation: motion is the act of the imperfect, the act of what is able to be as such — walking home, you have not walked home yet. But seeing, hearing, understanding, loving: when I am understanding I have understood; when I am seeing you I have seen you; “have I loved you yet? — oh yes.” This is the act of the perfect. Discourse is more like a motion, but understanding, as the name “standing” indicates, is not. Thomas sometimes names it operatio instead of motion.
• The SCG text: three operations — being moved by another; moving another; and an act that is actual, not imperfect like motion and not tending toward something else. Things become like God by moving (becoming actual in themselves), or by moving others (being like God, a cause), or both, being moved movers. He was struck that Thomas calls all three operatio.
• He notes Thomas’s remark that Plato and sometimes Aristotle extend “motion” beyond its strict sense: Plato’s “the through-itself is before the through-another,” so what moves itself is before what is moved by another, and God moves other things because he moves himself — i.e. he knows and loves himself, and knowing himself as exemplar of all things and loving himself, he wills to communicate himself so far as possible. Aristotle in the De Anima speaks of understanding and sensing as a kind of motion.
• The translation problem: he asked Warren Murray on the phone how to render operatio here, since “operation” in English does not fit a thing being moved. Warren said activity; he suggested doing — making an apple pie, making a chair, listening to Mozart, even understanding all answer “What are you doing?” without force.

His words #

• Meta ta physika — the editor’s title, “after the books in natural philosophy in the order of learning.”
• First Philosophy — Aristotle’s own name for the science; “first” in the fourth sense of first.
• Proemium — “paving the way,” showing what you are aiming at and why it is desirable; paired with the tractatus.
• Epilogue — the recall at the end of a proemium of what was done in it.
• eidenai — “to see,” and so applied to the mind, to understand.
• Sign — “that which strikes the senses and brings to mind something other than itself” (Augustine); first meaning is a sensible sign.
• Sensing — his preferred rendering over “sensation.”
• Memory — “retaining what you’ve sensed in some way.”
• Experience — many memories of the same kind of thing brought together; knowledge of singulars.
• Art (broad sense here) — knowledge of the universal, not just the ability to make; also the name of a habit.
• Reasoning — “the discourse which is most characteristic of reason,” named from reason itself.
• Antonomasia — Homer called “the poet”; infidelity called “sin” in John.
• Chief artist vs. handicraftsman — wiser “not by doing, but by having a reason and knowing the causes.”
• Motion — “the act of the imperfect, the act of what is able to be as such.”
• Operatio — Thomas’s word where “motion” will not do; his rendering: doing [ed.: operation/activity].

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I.1, the proemium, through the comparison of experience, art, and the chief artist, and the sign of teaching.
• Handout, “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument,” p. 5 (its closing sentence on the nature of the knowledge sought and the goal of the investigation).

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, the text on three operations (locus not stated).
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on John 13–17 (division into example, words, prayer).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, proemium and the useless hearer; De Anima, understanding and sensing as a kind of motion; Poetics; the lost dialogue on poets; the work on Homer for Alexander.
• Plato: Polus in a dialogue; philosopher-kings; the “through-itself before the through-another.”
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet prologue; the sonnet “From fairest creatures we desire increase.”
• Pius XII’s address to the rose growers of Rome.

His questions #

• Why does Aristotle begin “all men by nature desire to know”? — To show knowing is a good, and by “nature,” a real and natural good for man.
• Why does he add the sign from the senses, and from sight above all? — Because a sign is first of all sensible, and sight makes us know most and shows many differences, so we love it even when aiming to do nothing.
• Would you rather be blind or deaf? — Most would rather be deaf; one musician student preferred blindness — an exception.
• What is the difference between art and reasoning? — Art is the name of a habit; reasoning is the discourse most characteristic of reason.
• How does experience differ from art and science? — Experience is a collection of remembered singulars; art and science are of what is common to many, the universal.
• In doing, is the man of art better than the man of experience? — No; the experienced often succeed more, since doings and makings are about singulars.
• Then why do we hold the artist wiser? — Because he knows the cause, the why, and not merely that it is so.
• What is the sign of knowing? — The ability to teach, which the merely experienced lack.
• Would you translate operatio as “operation” in that SCG text? — No: Warren Murray suggested “activity,” he suggested “doing,” which fits making, listening, and understanding without force.