Metaphysics Proemium II: 'Doing' and Making, Wisdom as Knowledge of First Causes, and the Six Marks of the Wise Man

Orientation #

He is continuing through the proemium of the Metaphysics, finishing the first reading and beginning the second; he refers back to points already made (“as we said before”) about experience and art (prev. lecture). He says what is still ahead: readings two and three will ask what kind of knowledge wisdom is, and the fourth book will show it is about being and the one.

The previous class traced the ascent from sensation through memory and experience toward wisdom in the same proemium.

The class, in order #

1. Form and doing; motion and operation (“between form, right, and doing”) #

The point: whether “doing” can be stretched to cover being acted upon.

• The stone let go of the hand falls; the ice cube on the counter melts; butter in a hot pan melts. These are cases of being acted upon, yet it is not forced to say what the stone “does.”
• Aristotle’s own care: with a heavy thing falling, he will not call the stone the mover; the mover is the agent that gave it its weight.
• A basic distinction (ninth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX]): form vs. doing. We would not say the shape of the clay is the clay’s “doing”; I do the moulding.
• Thomas’s names: motion is the imperfect act, “the act of what is able to be insofar as it is still able to be”; operation is the act of the perfect, the act of the actual. Sometimes, with Plato’s and even Aristotle’s way of speaking, motion can be translated over into operation. Analogy: “cat” and “kitten” — the imperfect has a different name from the perfect.
• Doing vs. making: making passes into something outside and leaves a product (a chair, an apple pie, a glass); sensing and understanding remain in the doer. Listening to Mozart leaves nothing to show for it. Making is nonetheless a kind of doing, so it gets its own name only because it adds something noticeable.
• Teaching/learning: the teacher acts upon the mind of the student; the student undergoes. A man who began teaching philosophy said the students looked up as if to say “Why are you doing this to me?” Yet we say the student does something — he learns — so “doing” covers being moved, though the student is not moved as much as the stone is.

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

Art is more reasoned-out knowledge than experience, because the artist can teach and the merely experienced cannot; he can say why it is so. A teacher who cannot explain why feels he cannot teach fully.

3. The senses are not wisdom (“but only that it is hot”) #

No one of the senses is wisdom, though they are the chief way of knowing singulars (challenge a memory and you must go back to the senses). The senses do not say why about anything: they tell you fire is hot — stick your finger in — not why it is hot.

• He restates the order reached: sensing → memory → many memories → experience → knowledge of the universal and of the why, which he is here calling art. “He’s already started looking before and after here.”

4. Ranking the arts; leisure and Egypt (“some for passing the time pleasantly”) #

The first finder of any art beyond the common senses was admired, not only because his finding was useful but as being wise and distinguished from others (the telephone).

• Arts for necessities vs. arts for pleasant leisure (music, poetry): the latter finders were held wiser, their sciences not being for practical use. Shakespeare or the carpenter — which is wiser? Plato calls Homer the teacher of all the Greeks; no one calls a carpenter that, though the chair is more useful than the Iliad. The Iliad arouses more wonder.
• Third: sciences neither for pleasure nor for necessity, arising first where there was leisure and division of labour — hence mathematics first around Egypt, where the priestly class had leisure.
• Aside on leisure: his own great teachers at Laval were priests (Msgr. Dion, Fr. Boulay) in a Quebec with a surplus of priests; De Koninck (a layman with a dozen children) kept a bed in his office and worked late. Against this, a parish priest whose phone rang every half hour — how can he sit down with the commentary on the Gospel of St John? And the CCD story: a mother asking the pastor to get her own boy to come to class.

5. “Art” here is loose; the conclusion about first causes (“all hold what is called wisdom”) #

He flags that Aristotle uses “art” here in a broad sense — the knowledge of the universal aiming at the cause — not art as distinguished from prudence and science in Ethics VI, where the virtues of reason are natural understanding, episteme, sophia, art, and foresight/prudence. (He sketches the Ethics: end of book I distinguishes moral virtues from virtues of reason; II–V the moral virtues, V justice; VI the virtues of reason.)

• The argument to the conclusion: if the man who knows the cause is wiser than the man who knows only that it is so, then the man who knows the cause of the cause is wiser, and most of all the man who knows the first cause — the cause that is not the effect of anything. As with genus and species in logic, the same thing can be cause and effect but not of the same thing; there is an effect that is not a cause, and a cause that is not an effect.
• Names: Aristotle calls this book first philosophy, but also wisdom. “Wisdom” can be said of God — we would not call God the first philosopher — so “first philosopher” is in one way more accurate, “wisdom” more common to our way of speaking.

6. Beginning, cause, element (“I am the Alpha and the Omega”) #

The meanings of these words are distinguished in the fifth book of wisdom, which takes up the words used in wisdom and in the axioms, starting with beginning, then cause.

• Beginning is broader than cause: every cause is a beginning, not every beginning a cause; and cause is broader than element.
• Appropriation: element to the material cause; beginning most of all to the mover or maker (and in another way to matter); cause to form and to the end, “the cause of the causes.” One would not call the end a “beginning.”
• Apocalypse: “the beginning and the end” — God as mover/maker, and God as that for the sake of which. Matching this, Summa contra Gentiles I is God in Himself, II God as beginning/creator, III God as end and His providence.
• The psalm read the same way: “Know that the Lord is God” — what He is in Himself; “He made us as we are” — the beginning; “His people, the flock He tends” — the end. He jokes that he pretends it is Augustine telling us to read the Contra Gentiles.
• The earlier verses: “Serve the Lord with gladness” is obeying, the moral order; “Come before Him with joyful song” follows, because the moral virtues dispose us. Thomas’s two reasons why Aristotle treats the moral virtues first: they are more known to us than the virtues of reason (people know courage better than natural understanding), and by them we are disposed to the virtues of reason. “Enter His gates with thanksgiving, His courts with praise” — thanksgiving is more proportioned to us, so we ascend from thanking God for what we receive to praising Him for all that He is.
• Why a musical setting? Shakespeare: “If music be the food of love, play on.” Charity is a kind of love and music is the most perfect expression of love, hence its place in church. Asides: Thomas says there will be music in heaven; his Mozart collection and the two bicentennials (a concert Così fan tutte and the first and last symphonies; The Magic Flute at West Point by the New York City Opera); John Paul II — “the Church cannot fail to do homage to Mozart.”

7. Closing the first reading; theoretical as “looking” (“the looking sciences more than the making”) #

Summary of the ascent: the experienced is wiser than those having sensation only; the artist wiser than the experienced; the chief artist wiser than the handicraftsman, because he has a more ultimate end — the chef who makes the final dish fit for a king, while another merely prepares an ingredient and does not know what the whole will be.

• The looking sciences are more wisdom than the making. He renders theoretical as “looking” (speculative in Latin), because looking is for the sake of seeing, not for doing.
• The epilogue at the end of the proemium names first what was done first: the goal the whole road must reach is to know the first cause, which turns out to be God. We now know the goal; readings two and three ask what kind of knowledge wisdom is.

8. The six thoughts about the wise man (“if one took the thoughts we have about the wise man”) #

1. He knows all things, so far as possible, without knowing each in particular — i.e. in general. (The pejorative “wise guy, know-it-all”; “he’s got it all together”; to pan, “all”.) That wisdom is about being and the one comes only in the fourth book.
2. He knows things difficult to know. To sense is common to all, hence easy and nothing wise: no one admires you for counting the chairs in the room. The “we” here is not the editorial “we” but men in general.
3. He is more certain in every science. You go to a wise man when you are not sure — an uncertain doctor calls a specialist; generals go to Napoleon.
4. He can teach the causes.
5. The science for itself and for the sake of knowing is more wisdom than the one for the sake of its results.
6. The ruling is more wisdom than the obeying: even in the practical arts the chief artist commands and the others obey. “The wise man ought not to receive orders but to give orders, and ought not to be persuaded by another, but the less wise by him.”

• Asides attached to these: on knowing all things, the historian William McNeil, for whom world history is the goal, lecturing on the potato — armies in the Thirty Years’ War could not take what was under the ground, so the potato built up the German peasant stock behind the Prussian soldier, “the foremost soldier of the modern world” (old West Point museum). On going to the wiser: he took a question to Dion after ten years and Dion said “I know where you’re going” before he could finish; De Koninck, asked about his thesis, said “Why do you ask me, when you’ve got Dion?” On certainty and authority: Heisenberg at the Bohr Festival, Bohr taking him for the walk that decided his whole way of thinking about the atom; and Bohr’s sleepless night after Einstein’s thought experiment against the Copenhagen interpretation, finding next day that Einstein had failed to apply his own theory — Einstein never challenged him publicly again. On ruling: MacArthur too tired to eat, up and gone to the front two hours before dawn; the Inchon landing, opposed by the navy and by the chief of staff sent to dissuade him, carried by his speaking, Washington then washing its hands.
• On (5): Einstein seems wiser than the man who makes things, since he understands the universe — the whole is more than the part — though nothing can be done with that knowledge; and God is unchangeable, so nothing can be done with God either.

9. Sapientis est ordinare (“it belongs to the wise men to order”) #

The sixth mark is the famous sapientis est ordinare. Thomas’s proemium to the Ethics divides the knowledges of reason by the order each considers — not by the general senses of before and after, which would be too general, but by order in comparison to reason:

• order reason does not make but considers = natural philosophy;
• order reason makes in its own acts = logic;
• order reason makes in the acts of will and the emotions = ethics, practical philosophy;
• order reason makes in exterior matter (this chair) = the mechanical arts, carpentry and the rest. The argument he reports from Thomas: wisdom is the highest perfection of reason; it is proper to reason to know order; therefore most of all it belongs to the wise man to order. This harmonises with the definition of reason in Shakespeare, whose culminating part is “looking before and after.” Hence the wise man directs all the other arts and sciences — and hence logic is in a way close to wisdom, since it directs the reason by which we acquire all the arts and sciences.
• Note on form: each of the six may be said of the wise man or of wisdom, transferring either way.

10. The reasons for each mark (“following the same order”) #

1. Knowing all things belongs most to the man having knowledge of the universal, for the universal is said of many, and some universals of an infinity of things — “no odd number is even” covers infinitely many numbers. So wisdom will be knowledge of the most universal: being and the one, shown equally universal in the fourth book. (Aside: the “one” comes up much in the Gospel of John — “that they all may be one as we are one.”)
2. “Perhaps the most universal are the most difficult for men to know,” since they are furthest from the senses, and the senses know the singular and are our starting point. He stresses the perhaps: because the knowledge of the first causes may be still more difficult. Note also that this follows from the first mark without yet going to causes. Illustration: no modern philosopher seems to know about substance, quantity, quality, act and ability; it is very hard to distinguish the one that is the beginning of number from the one convertible with being.
3. Most certain are the sciences most about what comes first, because fewer things must be considered. Whole and part is easier and more certain than hydrogen, proton, neutron. Arithmetic is more certain than geometry: the simplest in arithmetic is the one, in geometry the point — both indivisible, but the point has position. Three ones need not be in a line or a triangle; points must be somewhere. Hence Euclid’s theorems sometimes need several cases (Heath’s edition gives Proclus on them); Euclid takes the hardest case and leaves the easier “to the dunces” [ed.: pons asinorum allusion uncertain]; Aristotle does the same. Then body adds to length and width all kinds of other things, so natural science is less certain than geometry; ethics and politics have too many things to consider. (Aside: at the county jail on Monday nights there is a prisoner named Euclid, a Filipino, whom he would like to meet.)
4. The science that considers causes is more fit for teaching, for those teach who give the causes of each thing.
5. Knowledge for its own sake belongs especially to knowledge of the most knowable; and most knowable are the first things and the causes, for other things are known through them and not they through what comes under them. This is the distinction from the beginning of the Physics: what is more known to us is less knowable. In the ninth book, act is more knowable than ability, so the more a thing is in act the more knowable; but things in motion catch the eye, so motion is most known to us and yet hardly knowable, because it hardly exists. Where is my walking home? Part is past and gone, part is future and not yet, and in the now there is none of it. The cause explains the effect and not the reverse, yet we know the effect first.
6. Left almost for last: the chief and most ruling science is the one that knows that for the sake of which each thing is to be done — the end, the good of each, and as a whole the best in all nature. The name sought therefore falls to this same science, since one of the causes is the good and that for the sake of which.

• The end as cause of the causes: sitting is why the carpenter makes the chair, and why he gives the back an obtuse rather than an acute angle to the seat; because he makes a chair the wood becomes the wood of a chair and the shape enters it. “Because God is good, we are,” as Augustine says — Aristotle will be saying the same.
• He closes: this still emphasises most that wisdom is knowledge of causes and of first causes, while hinting that it is also knowledge of the most universal.

His words #

• “wisdom” — his standing name for the Metaphysics (“the fifth book of wisdom”, “the ninth book of wisdom”).
• “form” vs. “doing” — the fundamental distinction between acts; shape is the form best known to us.
• “motion” — the imperfect act, act of what is able to be insofar as it is still able to be; “operation” — act of the perfect.
• “doing” vs. “making” — making has a product outside; doing (sensing, understanding) remains in the doer.
• “looking” [ed.: theoretical/speculative]; “looking before and after” — his tag for reason’s grasp of order (from Shakespeare).
• “beginning”, “cause”, “element” [ed.: principium, causa, elementum] — in decreasing generality.
• “ability” [ed.: potency], paired with act.
• “foresight”/prudence — his rendering of the Greek in Ethics VI, alongside episteme and sophia.
• sapientis est ordinare — “it belongs to the wise man to order.”
• to pan — “all”; the Greek behind “he knows all things.”
• “arche” and “telos” — beginning and end.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I, proemium: end of reading one (signs of art, senses, ranking of the arts, Egypt, conclusion about first causes and beginnings, epilogue) and reading two (six marks of the wise man and their reasons).
• Thomas Aquinas, proemium to the commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics (the four orders).
• Apocalypse: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
• Psalm: “Sing joyfully to the Lord all your land… Enter his gates with thanksgiving, his courts with praise.”

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (being and the one), V (beginning, cause), IX (act and ability).
• Aristotle, Physics, beginning (more known to us vs. more knowable; beginnings, causes, elements).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I–VI.
• Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles I–III; commentary on the Gospel of St John.
• Homer, Iliad and Odyssey; Plato on Homer as teacher of the Greeks.
• Shakespeare: “If music be the food of love, play on”; his definition of reason.
• Euclid, Elements (Heath’s edition, Proclus on cases).

His questions #

• What does the stone do when you let go of it? — It falls; but it is really being moved, the mover being what gave it its weight.
• Why is “doing” kept for activity without an exterior product? — Because making adds a noticeable product and so gets its own name; making is still a kind of doing.
• Would you think Shakespeare or the carpenter wiser? — Shakespeare: the chair is more useful, but the Iliad arouses more wonder.
• Where is the difference between cause and beginning given? — In the fifth book of wisdom; beginning is broader than cause, cause broader than element.
• Why is it put in a musical context? — Because charity is a kind of love and music is the most perfect expression of love.
• In what way is it possible for a man to know all things? — In general, by knowing the most universal; some universals are said of infinitely many things.
• Why does Aristotle say “perhaps” the most universal are most difficult? — Because the knowledge of the first causes may be more difficult still.
• Why are sciences of what comes first more certain? — Because fewer things must be considered (the one has no position, the point does).
• When does my walking home exist? — Part is past, part future, none in the now: motion is most known to us but hardly knowable.
• What is the best thing in all nature? — Left open here; it is the end, treated as the good and that for the sake of which.