Metaphysics I Proemium (cont.): Wonder, Chance, and the End of Inquiry; Wonder What and Why, Why God Has No Cause, and the Order of Sense, Memory and Experience

Orientation #

He is finishing the proemium of the Metaphysics begun earlier (prev. lecture), reaching the passage on wonder and its end, then looking forward over the rest of Book One and Books II–V. He also settles the summer break: the class will not meet again until the third Thursday of September, the fifteenth.

The class, in order #

1. Wonder begins from chance events (“things that happen wonderfully by chance”) #

Aristotle’s text: all begin from wondering that things are thus, as about things that happen by chance. He stresses the order of wonder: you wonder first about what is closest to you, and chance events strike people most — but these are not the best things to know. The poet exploits this: Romeo goes to that house for another purpose and meets Juliet.

Chance stories, each showing the same point (wonder aroused by coincidence, good or bad):

• a car accident whose two drivers had to keep going to court, and married — “I don’t recommend, if you see a nice girl in a nice car, that you run into her”;
• two people colliding in a hurry in a parish house;
• his neighbour, whose wife was killed in a crash, meeting his second wife as the young intern treating his son;
• a man stood up for dinner in Quebec who kills time in a used bookstore and finds the book he had been looking for;
• Warren Murray’s story: an inexperienced taxi driver takes a wrong turn, the man misses his flight, and the plane crashes without him.

2. From chance to deeper wonders (“but then about the turns of the sun”) #

The turns of the sun are not by chance — something deeper. And the famous mathematical case: the diagonal and the side of the square are incommensurable; no measure, however small, measures both. “All these things seem wonderful to all who have not seen the cause that something is not measured by the smallest.” Hence it is necessary to finish in the contrary and the better, according to the proverb: the geometer would now wonder at nothing so much as if the diagonal were to become measurable.

3. Two senses of wonder (“the word wonder has kind of two different senses”) #

Distinction, with the boundary carefully drawn:

• Wonder as curiosity — goes with ignorance; the men thought themselves ignorant of why things are so, were fleeing ignorance, and this wonder diminishes when the cause is known. This is the wonder that gives rise to philosophy.
• Wonder as admiration — goes with knowledge, proceeding from seeing the excellence of a thing. When Aristotle in Book XII comes to know God as first cause, he says “it compels our wonder.”

His example of the difference: “I’m going to introduce you tonight to the most beautiful girl in the world” — before, he wants to know who she is; once he sees her, the wonder is admiration.

4. The epilogue of the proemium (“what is the nature of the knowledge sought”) #

Aristotle closes by recalling what he has just done, then the first thing (as in the De Anima proemium, where the recall has three things). Here: what is the nature of this knowledge — it is a looking knowledge, liberal in the sense defined, not a human but a divine possession, therefore the most good and most honourable knowledge, divine in both senses in which knowledge can be divine. And what goal the whole investigation must reach: the knowledge of the first cause or causes, whether one or many. Aristotle concludes it is one, quoting the poet, Homer: “The rule of many is not good. Let there be one.”

5. What a proemium is (“a proemium is something like a prologue”) #

An introduction means a leading-into, and can be a whole course; a proemium is rather a prologue — Aristotle compares it to a prologue, or to the overture of an opera. Examples: Mozart’s overtures (the Magic Flute; his son Paul always played the Marriage of Figaro overture on the piano; Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte) as a composer who achieved exactly what he intended. And the formal prologue of Romeo and Juliet, a Shakespearean sonnet of fourteen lines (“Two households, both alike in dignity… fair Verona, where we lay our scene”), which prepares you for a tragedy and names pity and fear — the emotions purged by tragedy: you pity them for what happened, you fear it could happen to you unexpectedly.

Aside: “Once Ian gave a whole course on what a proemium is” — he took it that seriously.

6. Wonder what and wonder why (“Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder”) #

His own distinction in the philosophy of wonder: wonder what and wonder why. In the Posterior Analytics Aristotle says both what and why are answered by knowing causes — more obviously the why, but asking what a chair is brings out its intrinsic causes plus the extrinsic cause, sitting. Wonder-what is wonder about the universal: what motion, time, place, the soul are. Wonder-why: why the human soul is immortal and the dog’s is not. The young Thomas was known for asking in class, “What is God?”

Aristotle’s four questions: does it exist; if so, what is it; is this that; why is this that. Applied: does God exist, then what is God.

Digression on metre, prompted by “Twinkle, twinkle”: De Koninck said one should have read good literature before doing philosophy. His device for remembering the four major feet — the word “it”: two letters, I and T, iamb and trochee, both of two syllables, the accent on the second or the first. Shakespeare’s some 150 sonnets are iambic pentameter, pente = five feet. Trochaic verse often leaves the last foot incomplete because we want to end on the accent. Shakespeare uses trochaic for solemn or tense moments and for unusual creatures — the witches: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair, / Hover through the fog and filthy air.” He once lectured on this at St. Ann’s [ASR uncertain]: two mistakes (the good taken as bad, the bad as good) and their two causes — your mind in fog, or your appetite filthy. Aristotle says iambic is closest to daily speech, and we fall into it without trying. “Twinkle, twinkle little star” is trochaic with four feet, the last incomplete — fitting, since the poem is about wonder. Mozart wrote variations on the melody. And one may ask whether the star really twinkles or it is the atmosphere.

7. Has wonder been neutralized? (“do you think that wonder could be used to evangelize”) #

Student question: with the culture as it is, has the sense of wonder that leads one to seek God been neutralized or short-circuited, and can wonder still serve evangelization? His answer: the schools do not encourage wonder by what they do. His counter-instance is Euclid: he was poor at high-school geometry, but on graduating from college his teacher [name garbled in recording] said only, “Duane, go out and get Euclid’s Elements” — and did not argue, knowing he would see the point on reading it. He still returns to Euclid. What rouses wonder there is the simplicity: the angle inscribed in a semicircle is always right; the square on the side opposite the right angle equals the squares on the others; and the theorem that a line cut into equal and unequal segments — the square on half exceeds the rectangle contained by the unequal segments, and by exactly the square on the line between the points of section.

8. Simplicity and the wonder that never ends (“the nearer one approaches God, the simpler one becomes”) #

Reading from St. Thérèse (a copy given to his granddaughter). Theology is defined as belief seeking understanding, “but this is hope seeking love.” Thérèse’s novice mistress was a saint, but Thérèse’s soul did not expand under her; spiritual direction became “a torture and a real martyrdom”; a former mother told her: “your soul is extremely simple, and when you are perfect, you become still more so. For the nearer one approaches God, the simpler one becomes.” The puzzle he draws out: a fully formed man must have this virtue and that knowledge — many parts — yet God is altogether simple. From Summa contra Gentiles III: the blessed never become bored seeing the same thing, because they never comprehend God, and so are always filled with wonder — part of which is seeing how so perfect a thing can be so simple. Compare the amazement at a very simple proof of a profound truth. “Shakespeare says, ‘Brevity is the soul of wisdom’” [ed.: usually “wit”] — and it is not even a matter of size.

9. The order of the divine attributes (“he alone is unchangeable”) #

Thérèse again: without love the most brilliant deeds count for nothing; God’s gifts made her see “that He alone is unchangeable” — one of the chief attributes. In the Summa contra Gentiles five arguments for God’s existence precede the treatment of his substance, and two of them are from motion, where the Summa Theologiae has one; the shared arguments are far more expanded there. Taking up God’s substance one begins naturally with unchangeableness, then eternity, then perfection and simplicity — three fundamental things. Thomas separates out the unity of God (to be emphasized with a view to the Trinity later) and the infinity of God; but unity pertains to simplicity, and infinity does not mean being spread out but that his perfection is endless. The Compendium of Theology puts unity with simplicity, and infinity with perfection. Thérèse arrives at these without giving reasons.

10. “Why does God exist?” and the fallacy in it (“what’s the fallacy in asking, why does God exist”) #

The eclipse as the model: one who never saw an eclipse first asks whether the sun’s light is ever cut off (the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court uses his almanac’s eclipse to escape execution); once seen, it rouses wonder, and then one asks why the light is cut off. Parallel anecdote: looking through a friend’s home-made telescope, clouds covered the moon, so he turned it on Saturn — the rings seen directly rouse wonder as the pictures never did.

Now: “Does God exist?” — yes; “What is God?” — makes sense. But “Why does God exist?” is in danger, because asking why looks for a cause; then God would have a cause and would not be the first cause. Moses asks who he is and God answers “I am who am” — answering the question what: his nature, his substance, is to be; there is no difference between to be and the substance of God. (He told St. Catherine of Siena the same: “I am who am, you are she who is not.”)

Two clarifying parallels asked of the class:

• statements known through other statements (geometrical theorems) vs. statements known through themselves — which does not mean a statement proves itself, but that it is known not through another;
• the last end is for its own sake — which means not for the sake of anything else, not that it is literally for the sake of something.

Then the reason: to see a before and after you must see a distinction, and one important sense of before and after is cause and effect; so cause and effect require a distinction between them. Hence God cannot strictly be the cause of his own existence. If his substance is to be, we can see that he must be, and be through himself — and, as Thomas always quotes from Plato, “the to-itself is the cause of the to-another,” which is why the angels must be through God.

Applications: Heidegger and those influenced by him want to know why God exists; one may say there is a reason why we think he must exist, but no reason in things why he exists. And Vatican II’s statement that man is the only creature God wills for his own sake needs the same care.

11. God is wisdom itself, and providence (“it belongs to the wise man to order things”) #

He has been thinking about the wise man’s office of ordering. God is not merely wise and wiser than we; because he is altogether simple, God and his wisdom cannot be two things — he is wisdom itself. Hence he must be responsible for the order of things, and one sees that providence, by which he orders things, comes from his wisdom. So ordering belongs to wisdom, as Aristotle says and as Shakespeare’s definition of reason shows.

12. Why Book One recalls the predecessors (“if other men have already arrived at wisdom”) #

Question to the class: what does Aristotle do in the rest of Book One? He recalls what his predecessors said about causes and shows something more remains to be investigated. Why?

The parallel from the Politics: before treating the best city — the city “according to a prayer,” since unusual circumstances are needed — Aristotle considers the city Socrates proposed and the cities praised as great, like Sparta, and points out their defects, saying he does this not to put himself forward or seek praise, but because there really were difficulties in them.

The argument in his own words: (1) wisdom exceeds all other knowledge in honour; (2) if other men have already arrived at it, the reasonable thing is to learn from them; (3) only if what they said about causes is insufficient must you undertake your own investigation; (4) so he recalls what each said and why, and shows the insufficiency — and then he has a reasonable reason to continue.

Contrast, which he presses: the moderns say the opposite of what Aristotle said without recalling what he said, still less the reasons he gave, still less showing their insufficiency — “it’s kind of a pride.” He had begun reading John of Avila on the devil and pride, and how the devil encourages us down the same road he went — which seems to describe the modern philosophers. Thomas, by contrast, recalls what men who went astray said and why, then refutes both position and arguments.

13. Is there any utility in contemporary philosophy? (“aside from tenure to certain individuals”) #

Student: in anthropology the prestigious graduate programs were all abstract theory with no application to real human beings, while “applied anthropology” ranked low — is modern philosophy likewise without benefit to the human race? His answer, from the Nicomachean Ethics: Aristotle’s useless hearer of ethics. A man who does not intend to live according to reason is a useless hearer — he will not find what is reasonable; and separately the young are unsuitable through lack of experience of such things. So one can be unfit as a hearer from either defect.

14. The plan of Books II–V (“what’s unique in the metaphysics”) #

• Book II (short; Thomas speaks of it in one place as a second proemium): the way of proceeding must fit the matter; man’s relation to knowing the truth; how one man depends on other men — both those from whom he has some part of the truth and those he disagrees with, since you develop your thinking by arguing against what you thought defective.
• Book III: the reason why one must proceed dialectically before finding the truth, with all the beautiful reasons — and then a universal dialectic about all the problems of wisdom. Thomas points out that those reasons are why Aristotle has some dialectic in all his books; what is unique here is that it is universal, whereas elsewhere he has a particular dialectic, settles part of the truth, and goes on. This fits the wise man’s having to see all things in some way.
• Book IV: the subject of wisdom is being and one.
• Book V: to manifest that, since being and one and the other terms are equivocal, a whole book is devoted to the senses of the words — the words used most of all in the axioms and in wisdom because of its universality. Not a “philosophical dictionary,” “that’s so stupid”: Aristotle distinguishes the central senses and thinks out their order.

15. Testing sensing, memory, experience, universal by the senses of “before” (“which is better, sensing or memory?”) #

He returns to today’s text’s order. Sensing and memory: sensing is before in time; sensing can be without memory, memory not without sensing; and in the third sense, the order in our knowing (reason, discourse).

The fourth sense — which is better — is the one that does not run the same way. A student says memory, as further removed from sense and more universal. His reply by examples: don’t you like to see your friend face to face? (that is how beatitude is expressed — seeing God face to face); he likes pictures of his grandchildren, but it is better to see them face to face; playing a Mozart CD is not as good as remembering? — rather, remembering the music is not as good as hearing it, and even the CD is not the orchestra in the room; the sky in Virginia, red all the way up, never seen like that; the rainbow on the boardwalk at Quebec over the St. Lawrence after rain. So for sensing versus memory the comparison differs from the others.

Prompted by the rainbow: what Socrates says — “it was not a bad genealogy,” the man who said the rainbow was the offspring of Thaumas (wonder); perhaps Hesiod said it. Why a good genealogy? Because the rainbow unites heaven and earth, and wonder leads us to pursue the cause; philosophy, the investigation of causes, unites heaven and earth in a different way. In the Old Testament after the flood the rainbow is the sign of reconciliation between man and God, and it is a fit sign for the same reason. (A student recalls a brilliant rainbow in the Caribbean and running to reach it as it receded; “there’s gold at the end of it too.”)

Memory and experience: memory is before in time; experience cannot be without memory, memory can be without experience; the same order holds in our knowing; and in the fourth sense experience is better, an advantage in knowledge. Experience can be without knowledge of the universal and comes before it; with the universal you begin to know the why, and so have a superiority of knowledge. All this shows the natural road is from the senses into reason, because man is an animal that has reason.

Last point, closing the class: one knowledge is better than another either because it is about a better thing or because it is more certain — and the senses are more certain. Hence after an accident, statements taken right away are best; two weeks later they grow more and more divergent, because memory is not as certain as sensation.

His words #

• “the order of wonder” — you wonder about what is closer to you; people wonder especially about chance events.
• “finish in the contrary and the better, according to the proverb” — knowing the cause ends the wonder that began the search.
• wonder as curiosity vs. wonder as admiration — the first goes with ignorance and diminishes; the second follows on knowing an excellence.
• “looking knowledge” [ed.: speculative/contemplative knowledge] — the nature of wisdom in the epilogue.
• “liberal… not a human possession, but a divine possession.”
• “proemium” — a prologue or overture, as against “introduction,” a leading-into that may be a whole course.
• “wonder what” and “wonder why” — his own division in the philosophy of wonder.
• the word “it” — his device: two letters, two two-syllable feet, iamb and trochee.
• “Brevity is the soul of wisdom” [ed.: Shakespeare has “wit”] — used for simplicity, not size.
• “statements known to themselves” — known not through another, not self-proving.
• “the to-itself is the cause of the to-another” — Plato, quoted by Thomas.
• “the useless hearer” — one who does not intend to live according to reason.
• “a city according to a prayer” — the best city, needing unusual circumstances.
• “universal dialectic” — what is unique to Book III of the Metaphysics.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I, end of the proemium (wonder, chance, the turns of the sun, incommensurability; the epilogue on the nature and goal of this knowledge).
• Thérèse of Lisieux, autobiography — two passages (the novice mistress and “the nearer one approaches God, the simpler one becomes”; love versus brilliant deeds, “He alone is unchangeable”).
• Handout, “Shakespeare on Error,” p. 3 (verified source; about ten minutes read from it).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics XII (God as first cause, “compels our wonder”); Books II, III, IV, V (plan).
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics — what and why answered by causes; the four questions (II.1, inferred).
• Aristotle, De Anima, proemium (three things recalled).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics — the useless hearer; Politics — the best city, Socrates’ city, Sparta.
• Homer, Iliad — “the rule of many is not good; let there be one.”
• Euclid, Elements — angle in a semicircle; Pythagoras; line cut into equal and unequal segments.
• Shakespeare — Romeo and Juliet prologue; Macbeth, the witches; the sonnets; “brevity is the soul of wisdom.”
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles III (the blessed never comprehend God); the five arguments in SCG vs. ST; Compendium of Theology.
• Exodus, “I am who am”; God to St. Catherine of Siena; Genesis, the rainbow after the flood.
• Plato/Socrates on the rainbow as offspring of Thaumas (perhaps Hesiod); Plato on the to-itself.
• Vatican II — man the only creature God wills for his own sake.
• John of Avila on the devil and pride; Heidegger; Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee; Mozart.
• DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 1030 (verified source).

His questions #

• What happens to wonder when a man comes to know the cause? It ends in the contrary and the better: the geometer would now wonder only if the diagonal were commensurable.
• What is the goal the whole investigation of this knowledge must reach? The knowledge of the first cause or causes — and Aristotle concludes it is one, quoting Homer.
• What meter is “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” in? Trochaic, four feet with the last incomplete — fitting, since the poem is about wonder.
• Has the culture neutralized wonder, and can wonder still serve evangelization? The schools do not encourage wonder; but simple things like Euclid still rouse it — the evangelical use is left open.
• What is the fallacy in asking “Why does God exist?” Asking why looks for a cause; God would then have a cause and not be first — and since cause and effect require a distinction, he cannot cause his own existence.
• What does “I am who am” mean? It answers the question what: his nature or substance is to be; there is no difference between to be and the substance of God.
• What does Aristotle do in the rest of Book One, and why? He recalls the predecessors’ opinions on causes and shows their insufficiency — otherwise the reasonable course would be to learn from them rather than investigate.
• Is there any utility in most contemporary philosophy? He answers obliquely with Aristotle’s useless hearer: one unfit either through lack of experience or through not intending to live by reason.
• Which is better, sensing or memory? Sensing — because the senses are more certain, as the face-to-face, the live orchestra, and post-accident testimony show; only here does the comparison run against the other orders.
• Why is it “not a bad genealogy” to call the rainbow the offspring of Thaumas? Because the rainbow unites heaven and earth, and wonder, leading us to pursue causes, unites them too.