Metaphysics Proemium I: Reason as Looking Before and After — Anaxagoras, Homer, Boswell, and 'All Men by Nature Desire to Know'

Orientation #

He opens by wanting to “connect this proemium of Aristotle on wisdom with the definition of reason,” referring back to a text of Thomas he says “we’ve looked at,” the proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics, on the wise man ordering things (prev. lecture). The neighbouring classes treat the opening of Metaphysics Book I — wonder as the origin of philosophy, and the road from sense through memory and experience to wisdom.

The class, in order #

1. Wisdom and the definition of reason (“it’s proper to reason to know order”) #

Point: what characterizes reason should illuminate wisdom, since wisdom is reason’s highest perfection.

• Thomas (proemium to the Ethics): it belongs to the wise man to order things, because it is proper to reason to know order.
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason — “the ability for a large discourse, looking before and after” — is itself a definition of order.
• Rule he states: what is most magnificent in the knowledge of reason is characterized by what is characteristic of reason itself; and conversely, what characterizes wisdom sends us reflecting back on the nature of reason.
• Example of the rule: which woman stands out most? Mary — and the prayer calls her “Mother of Mercy,” not Mother of Justice, because woman by antonomasia is characterized more by mercy than by justice (men more by justice, less merciful).

2. Anaxagoras on mind: separating and ordering (“this greater mind began to separate things”) #

Point: the first philosopher to speak of something like a divine mind confirms Shakespeare’s definition.

• The first among the pre-Socratics to talk of such a mind: Anaxagoras, who comes fairly late among the early philosophers.
• Matter was all a mix-up; mind began (1) to separate things, then (2) to order them. He checked the Greek: the word for order there is of the same root as cosmos, which means order.
• So reason is characterized by distinguishing, and then by seeing (or making) the order of what is distinguished — a good confirmation of Shakespeare.

3. Theobald’s note: “looking before and after” is Homeric (“an expression purely Homeric”) #

Point: an editor’s note ties Shakespeare’s phrase to Homer, and both to order.

• His used-bookshop copy: Rolfe’s edition of Hamlet, once owned by a Mr. Woodward, “Shakespeare class, February nineteenth, eighteen ninety-six.”
• Note 36 on “such large discourse” quotes (a) Samuel Johnson: “such latitude of comprehension, such power of reviewing the past and anticipating the future” — which touches the first sense of looking before and after; (b) Theobald, whom he finds more interesting: the expression is “purely Homeric,” citing Iliad III.109 (and 18, 250).
• Homer’s phrase: “look before and behind yourself”; in the Iliad it is the wisest men who look before and behind. Medieval image of prudence: a man with an eye before and an eye behind.
• Example: Achilles returns to the battle’s edge at nightfall and roars; the one Trojan “who alone could look before and behind” advises retreating inside the walls before tomorrow; the great warriors call him a coward — and next day Achilles mows them down.
• Aside: Theobald is famous for the happiest, universally adopted emendation of a line of Shakespeare; he will bring it in someday but it is not necessary today.

4. Antonomasia (“the name that is common to many is given to one in particular”) #

Point: a figure of speech from the Greek rhetoricians, explaining “the poet,” “the philosopher.”

• Definition as above; examples: the Bible = the book, among all books, because God said it; the Gospels = good news, by antonomasia the good news of our salvation, God becoming man; Christ = the anointed one, though kings, priests and prophets are all anointed.
• Thomas says “the Philosopher” for Aristotle; Aristotle himself calls Homer “the Poet” (Sophocles is pretty good too).
• The Federalist Papers, arguing for union, quote “the poet” — “a long farewell to all my greatness” — without naming him, because for us the poet is Shakespeare. Ancient poet and modern poet share a similar phrase.

5. Plot, and before and after (“a course of action that has a beginning, a middle and an end”) #

Point: Aristotle’s praise of Homer is itself framed in before and after.

• Aristotle: plot is the soul of tragedy — not, as the moderns think, there to reveal character; rather characters are for the sake of the action, and this holds for epic too.
• His highest praise of Homer: Homer taught all the Greek poets that a good plot is not about what happens to the main hero but a course of action with beginning, middle and end.
• Aristotle’s definitions: a beginning is before something but not after something; an end is after something but not before; a middle is both. No part is neither before nor after anything, since it wouldn’t fit in.
• So Aristotle’s praise is in terms of before and after, like the Homeric phrase; “so it satisfies reason.”

6. Boswell on “the great source of all order” (“a veneration for the great source of all order”) #

Point: a further witness that order points to a divine mind, and that reason’s looking before and after is Godlike.

• The Life of Johnson, the most famous biography in English (some claim the greatest ever), vivid because it gives actual conversations; it is in the Great Books.
• Its closing character of Johnson: he was steady and inflexible in maintaining the obligations of religion and morality — “both from a regard for the order of society, and from a veneration for the great source of all order” (Great and Source capitalized). Referring to the divine mind, as with Anaxagoras.
• The same phrase recurs in the character at the beginning of the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Student exchange: Boswell “was quite the live wire” — and he became a better man; in the Hebrides storm he resolves to be much better if he gets out of it.
• The argument: Shakespeare calls reason “godlike.” If God is the source of all order, and order means before and after, and reason looks before and after, there is something Godlike about reason — one way of seeing it.
• Thomas’s constant quotation, he thinks from Romans: Quae a Deo sunt, ordinata sunt — “the things which are from God are ordered.” A nice little witness even from Boswell, “not that great a guy.”

7. What a proemium is (“the way we used to translate proemium is paving the way”) #

Point: Thomas’s first division of any work of Aristotle is proemium and tractatus.

• Exposition means a laying out; tractatus means the drawing out; proemium = paving the way.
• Main business of a proemium: to say what you are aiming at, and the desirability of what you are aiming at.
• Division of this proemium: first two readings, what wisdom is about; third reading, the kind of knowledge wisdom is.
• Analogy: dividing Romeo and Juliet — first division is prologue and play, the prologue very short by comparison. (Most Shakespeare plays have no prologue; some an epilogue; there is a sort of prologue to Henry VIII.)
• The Prologue is a sonnet: 14 lines, three quatrains and a couplet, iambic pentameter.
  • Quatrain 1 (“Two households, both alike in dignity…civil blood makes civil hands unclean”): tragedy is about people above most of us in social state — nobility — and these two noble families are feuding.
  • Quatrain 2 (“a pair of star-crossed lovers…misadventured piteous overthrows”): you are prepared for something pitiful — Aristotle says tragedy moves us to pity and fear. Example of the misadventure: the message does not reach Romeo that she is not really dead.
  • Quatrain 3 (“the fearful passage of their death-marked love…”): the other emotion, fear; and “the two hours’ traffic of our stage.”
  • Closing couplet: “if you with patient ear attend, what here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend” — pay attention, and we’ll do even better.
• Aristotle compares a proemium to a prologue and even to an overture: the overtures of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte prepare you for entirely different things.
• Aside on teachers: Monsignor Dionne was the greatest teacher he had; his friend Warren Marie went to Laval to study with Charles De Koninck, who was more famous, but De Koninck made clear that the greatest mind there was Dionne. When he consulted De Koninck on his doctoral thesis, De Koninck asked, “Why are you asking me when you’ve got Dionne?” — humility; “why bother asking Berquist? You can ask Thomas Aquinas.” Dionne gave a whole course on what a proemium is; so expect a great deal from an Aristotelian or Thomistic proemium, not what you expect from a modern preface.

8. Cheating by reading the epilogue (“Aristotle has an epilogue here”) #

Point: the end of the proemium confirms Thomas’s division.

• Last paragraph on page five: “what is the nature of the knowledge sought” — that is the third reading, done second; “and what is the goal of the investigation, and the whole knowledge our road must reach” — that is the first two readings, done first.
• So the epilogue recalls the two parts in reverse order, the last thing first. He does the same in the great proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics, which has three parts recalled in reverse order.

9. “All men by nature desire to know” (“it’s by nature that they desire to know”) #

Point: the first line already tells us what kind of good knowledge is.

• He notes the Greek is eidenai, not the common word for knowledge, usually rendered intelligere, “to understand” — hence his bracketed “to understand”; either way makes sense.
• Argument: the good is what all desire; if all men desire to know, and by nature, then this good is universal, natural, a real good — it is the very nature of man to want to know.
• Aristotle kills many birds with one stone here.

10. The sign from the senses, especially sight (“a sign that men by nature desire to know is the love of the senses”) #

Point: we love the senses apart from use, which shows a desire to know for its own sake — as wisdom will be sought for its own sake.

• Understanding belongs to reason, yet the sign is taken from the eyes. Why is “see” used for understanding rather than hear, smell or taste? Because sight is the more spiritual, more perfect sense.
• Text: “apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves, and especially among the others that through the eyes; for we choose to see before all the others, not only in order that we may do something, but also when not aiming to do anything.”
• Christian parallel: our goal is to see God as He is (St. John: “when He appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is”). Why see God? Not to make something of Him or make money — just to know. Making and doing are over; “Mary has chosen the better part.” (A student once objected that you must be practical in this life “because you don’t want anything from the next life.”)
• Examples of seeing for its own sake: a beautiful sunset; a friend’s house bought for its view; the internet list of most expensive houses, ending at a $150 million house in California, magnificent for the views; the Virginia sunset with “folds and folds of red” that astonished him (student: skies are broader and deeper at the equator, as in the Caribbean); looking at slide pictures of the Hebrides though he will probably never go there; the Quebec ferry across the St. Lawrence, crossed on a Sunday afternoon just to see the hills. Mozart heard every day — it doesn’t help him make or do anything (“better tea,” someone jokes).
• Counter-case he reports honestly: a young lady in a class said she would rather be blind than deaf, loving music and playing Bach on the organ — “she was the exception,” the rule being that people would rather be deaf than blind.
• Text continued: the cause is that this sense especially makes us know and shows many differences.
• Illustration: in sixth grade he took astronomy books from the school library and got very interested — but he had no telescope, only hearing, and “I can’t hear the stars or the planets or Orion.” Later his father, who had learned from him the names of the three stars of Orion’s belt, named them at lunch to a businessman’s son who was a pilot (they still use the stars for navigation). At an observatory whose stand his father’s company had made, clouds covered the moon, so they turned the telescope to Saturn: he had seen the rings in books but never “in the flesh,” and it was so impressive. All of that would be lost without sight, as would the sunset and paintings.
• Closing aside (student-led): a report that Proxima Centauri may have a planet in the habitable zone; a new propulsion system needing no boost mass might make the trip four or five years — “pretty short.”

His words #

• antonomasia — a figure of speech, from the Greek rhetoricians, where the name common to many is given to one in particular (“he is the ___”).
• cosmos — the Greek word for order; the word Anaxagoras uses for mind’s ordering is of the same root.
• proemium — “paving the way”; the part that states what you aim at and its desirability. [ed.: prooemium]
• tractatus — “the drawing out”; the body of the work, against the proemium.
• exposition — “a laying out”; what Thomas’s commentaries are called.
• eidenai — the word in the first line, not the common word for knowledge; usually intelligere, “to understand.”
• large discourse, looking before and after — Shakespeare’s definition of reason, which he treats as a definition of order.
• reading — his unit of the text/commentary (first two readings on what wisdom is about, third on what kind of knowledge it is). [ed.: lectio]

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I.1, opening lines and the epilogue of the proemium (page five of his text).
• Shakespeare, Hamlet IV.iv, “such large discourse,” with Rolfe’s note 36 (Johnson and Theobald).
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Prologue, all three quatrains and the couplet.
• Boswell, Life of Johnson, closing character of Johnson; Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, opening character.

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, proemium to the commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics; his division of the Metaphysics proemium.
• Homer, Iliad III.109 (and 18, 250, per Theobald); Achilles’ return to battle.
• Aristotle, Poetics: plot the soul of tragedy; beginning, middle, end; pity and fear; praise of Homer.
• St. Paul, Quae a Deo sunt, ordinata sunt — “if I remember rightly, the Epistle to the Romans.”
• 1 John, “we shall see Him as He is” (inferred); Luke, “Mary has chosen the better part” (inferred).
• The Federalist Papers, quoting “the poet.”
• Mozart, overtures to Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte.

His questions #

• Who is the first in the history of philosophy to talk about something like a divine mind? Anaxagoras — mind separates the mix-up of matter, then orders it.
• What does Anaxagoras’ account of mind confirm? Shakespeare’s definition: reason distinguishes, then sees or makes the order of what is distinguished.
• Why is Mary called Mother of Mercy and not Mother of Justice? Because she is the woman, and woman is characterized more by mercy than by justice.
• What would be the first division of Romeo and Juliet? Prologue and play — like Thomas’s division into proemium and tractatus.
• What does Boswell’s “great source of all order” refer to? The divine mind, as in Anaxagoras.
• What is Godlike about reason? If God is the source of all order, and order is before and after, then reason, which looks before and after, is Godlike in that way.
• Why does Aristotle begin by saying men desire to know by nature? Because the good is what all desire; a natural, universal desire shows this is a real good, belonging to man’s very nature.
• Do we ever use our senses just to know and not to do anything? Yes — sunsets, views, Saturn through a telescope, Mozart: loved for themselves, which is how wisdom is sought.
• Why do we say “see” for understanding rather than hear, smell or taste? Because sight is the more spiritual and more perfect sense, and shows many differences.
• Would you rather be deaf or blind? Most would rather be deaf; the music student who chose blindness was the exception.