Metaphysics Proemium II: The Natural Road of Knowledge — Sensing, Memory, Experience, Art, and the Chief Artist Who Knows the Cause

Orientation #

He picks up the proemium at “the second paragraph,” continuing from the opening lines about the desire to know, and returns repeatedly to Shakespeare’s “large discourse” definition of reason used earlier (prev. lecture). The previous class treated the proemium’s opening argument from the primacy of sight; the next continues into the description of the wise man.

The class, in order #

1. The order of knowings along the natural road (“the natural road in our knowledge”) #

Point: Aristotle now sets out the order of kinds of knowledge along the first, natural road of human knowing.

• The steps: sensing → memory of what was sensed → experience (from many memories of the same sort of thing) → knowledge of the universal, which is the beginning of a knowledge of reason the senses do not attain.
• Why this is the natural road: man is by nature an animal (hence senses) that has reason. Animal is the genus, reason the difference. The road runs from the senses into reason.
• Aside (his mother): he told her man is an animal; she objected; “he’s an animal that has reason” — “Well, that’s better, she said.”

2. The universal shows reason is not a body (“reason is the ability for large discourse”) #

Point: knowledge of the universal is what Shakespeare’s “large discourse” names, and it yields an argument that reason is not bodily.

1. The universal is said of many, often of an infinity — odd and even numbers cover infinitely many things; hence the discourse is “large.”
2. Whatever is received in a continuum is received here or there in it, so always as singular or individual.
3. But the universal is received in reason not as singular.
4. Therefore reason is not a body — not the brain.

• Consequence: the human soul has an operation (understanding the universal) that is not in the body, so its existence is not completely immersed in the body.

3. The order in which things are known: sensible first (“sensible things are known before things that cannot be sensed”) #

Point: a second order along the same road — what is known first, not what kind of knowing comes first.

• Sensible before non-sensible; material before immaterial.
• Illustration and occasion for the holy card he brought: St Francis de Sales — make yourself familiar with the angels and behold them frequently in spirit, for without being seen they are present with you; we neglect our guardian angel and the angels at Mass because they cannot be sensed.
• Evidence from how we name acts of reason from sensible acts: from the eye (“I see”), from the hand (“grasp,” “can’t get my mind around that”; Thomas’s simplex apprehensio, simple grasping), and from the legs — “discourse,” running from effects to causes or causes to effects. “What a materialistic mind we’ve got that we have to go back to the legs to name the act of reason.”

4. “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast” (“the first sense is the legs”) #

Point: Friar Lawrence’s line has three senses, in the order of the natural road — legs, then action, then reason.

1. Legs: literally stumbling on the stairs (old folks fall).
2. Human action: acting in haste — “Act in haste, repent at leisure”; “the course of human events” in the Declaration of Independence; this is what Friar Lawrence chiefly means for Romeo.
3. Reason itself: “Don’t jump to conclusions” — jumping again taken from the legs.

• Chief witness: the Dumb Ox — the greatest mind got that name because he did not answer too quickly.
• Aside: his father, a young manager, told the boss “let me think about it” while the other man answered at once; his father’s advice was the one followed, and he got the promotions.
• He also notes a third kind of order: the order in which even the same thing is known along this road.

5. “Nature” comes from birth (“the word nature comes from what? birth”) #

Point: a word-study before Aristotle’s text on animals being born with sensation.

• English hides this because the word is Latin, but prenatal, postnatal, nativity (Nativity parish; the Nativity = the birthday of our Lord) show it.
• In the fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V] the first meaning of nature is birth, then the source of the baby within the mother, then the source of any motion from within.

6. Memory, prudence, and hearing (“these are more prudent, the ones who have memory”) #

Point: animals are born with sensation; some get memory from it, and these are more prudent and more teachable.

• Cat on the stove: she burned her paws once and never tried again — memory makes her more prudent. Without memory you’d be no better off after burning your fingers.
• Cicero: you have memory of the past to anticipate the future. The English word for prudence is foresight; an objection in Thomas says foresight is only one part of prudence — reply: it is the chief part, and the Latin providentia names the whole from the chief part. Churchill and Burke use “foresight” for prudence (Warren Murray’s remark: you don’t criticize Douglas MacArthur or Winston Churchill).
• Second cat story: the litter box door was shut, so she used the bathtub drain — “That was very prudent.”
• Animals unable to hear sounds are prudent but cannot learn: hearing is in a way the sense of learning, since words are originally sounds. “Fides ex auditu” — faith is from hearing; how shall they believe unless someone preach? Bees do not react to sounds.
• Aside on the power of the voice: Bernardino of Siena preached to thirty thousand without a microphone; the Quebec student trained in opera; Dominicans losing their voices on missions and being trained in unused tongue muscles; Padre Pio never preached because of asthma; Greek orators with stones in their mouths at the ocean.

7. From memories to experience to art (“experience comes to be from memory in men”) #

Point: the other animals live by images and memories and share little in experience; men live by art and reasonings.

• Experience is a bringing together of many memories of the same kind of thing — already a partaking of reason, though of individuals rather than universals.
• One date with one girl does not make a man of experience; many dates with many women does.
• Polus (in Plato): “experience makes art… but inexperience chance” — chance is beginner’s luck.
• Art comes to be when one universal understanding about like things arises from the many things kept in mind by experience. This is the fourth step.

8. Digression: Aristotle, the Protrepticus, and the necessary (“either you ought to philosophize or you ought not”) #

Point: biographical and methodological asides prompted by Aristotle’s medical examples.

• Aristotle was son of a physician at the Macedonian court, later Alexander’s teacher; besides the Poetics he wrote a book on Homer for Alexander, who kept a copy of Homer by him. We have Plato’s dialogues but not his lectures; Aristotle’s lectures but not his dialogues.
• The famous fragment of the Protrepticus: if you ought to philosophize, philosophize; if you ought not, you must philosophize to show why not; either way you must philosophize. His own imitation: is it necessary to understand the word “necessary”? Either way, yes.
• Metaphysics V on “necessary” ends with the first cause as most necessary and therefore most simple — which struck him, since Thomas argues God exists from necessity and then takes up simplicity first: if God were put together he would need someone to put him together, so he would not be necessary through himself.
• Thomas’s rule when Aristotle seems strange: so great a philosopher on so great a subject would not say nothing — so we must try to understand it.
• From the Ethics: a man who does not want to live by reason is a useless hearer of ethics, since the end is to do; like a man who listens to medical advice and does not act on it. Jim the smoker, whose lung collapsed and who would not stop. (The other useless hearer is the too-young, who lack the experience to understand.)

9. Experience and art in the medical example (“that this benefited Callias… belongs to experience”) #

Point: the text’s own example marks the line between singular and universal.

• To have in mind that this benefited Callias with this disease, and Socrates, and so in many cases — experience, a collection of memories.
• That it benefits all marked by one condition, e.g. the phlegmatic or choleric in burning fever — art, a knowledge of the universal.
• Popcorn: the first man to make it probably by chance, then “let’s try that again” — the beginning of an art. French fries: he became the best French fry maker by experience (his mother approved; McDonald’s are better than expensive restaurants’).

10. In doing, experience may beat art (“everything done and made is something singular”) #

Point: as far as doing goes, experience does not differ from art and may even succeed better.

1. Experience is knowledge of singulars, art of universals.
2. But everything done and made is singular — the doctor does not cure man in general except accidentally, but Callias or Socrates.
3. Therefore the experienced often succeed more than those having reason without experience; and one with reason but no knowledge of the singular often errs in treatment.

• The senator: LBJ, twenty years in the Senate, knows what to promise whom and where to put a finger on a man; he will get a bill through better than a professor of political science who knows the kinds of government.
• The psychologist and the depressed friend: you know your own child, spouse or friend, and you are not curing “man” but this one — you may know that wine and Mozart will distract him. “I think that’s a good example.”

11. In knowing, art excels: it knows the why (“they know the cause, while the others do not”) #

Point: knowing and understanding belong more to art; the artist is wiser, so wisdom follows knowledge, being more concerned with knowing than doing — the wise man is the thinker, not the doer or maker.

• Reason: the experienced know that it is so, the artist knows why it is so, and the cause.
• Student: “You seem to be saying that you can have art without experience.” Answer: no — you must have some experience; the point is that the man of much experience of this individual may help him better, while the man of art seeks why the man is sick.
• Student: his father’s woodworking — drawing the plan is one thing, working the wood another; it doesn’t work the way lines do on paper. He accepts this.
• Student: art presumes experience, experience does not presume art. Answer: yes, experience in some degree; but the man of art tries to see why the universal is so.
• Geometry: the geometer wants to know why a triangle in general has its interior angles equal to two right angles; the Greeks are wiser than the Egyptians, who knew theorems from experience but not why they are so.
• Tea: he knows by experience that leaving the leaves in ten minutes gives bad tea, and would say it got “too strong”; the chemist knows different chemicals are released at different times, so the later ones differ — not mere strength, which dilution would fix. “How much wiser is the knight [ed.: likelier ’night’/’this’ — sense: the one who knows].”
• A student testifies he has never had so good a cup of tea as Dr. Berquist’s.
• He notes where this is heading: the wise man comes at the end of our knowing, not of our doing; wisdom will be a knowledge of the universal and of why things are so — a knowledge of causes, ultimately of the very first cause.

12. The chief artist and the handicraftsman (“they know the causes of the things made”) #

Point: among artists the chief artist is more honorable, knows more, and is wiser, because he knows the causes.

• Handicraftsmen are like inanimate things which act each by a certain nature — as fire burns — and make without knowing what they make. Hence chief artists are wiser not by doing but by having reason and knowing the causes. “Architect” comes from chief artist.
• Peeling and cutting potatoes: “just cut them that way.” His brother Mark in the family factory: “Why, Mark?” — “Just do what he says.” MacArthur knows why it should be done this way and why now is the time to attack; the man below need not know.
• The factory starter-man, paid much more, who set up each new procedure and showed the men what to do, then moved on; after that they were like inanimate things, repetition.
• The first-grade sister: the helper mothers must make sure the children make a C from the top, not from the bottom — the assistant doesn’t know why, the sister does: because they will go on to cursive writing. “She’s the chief artist, and the other one is the subordinate artist.” He adds he wouldn’t have the patience to teach children to write.
• Thomas imitates Aristotle here in the proemium to the Summa Contra Gentiles — what wisdom is, what the office of the wise man is.

13. The sign of knowing is being able to teach (“art is more reasoned-out knowledge than experience”) #

Point: teaching is the sign of knowledge, and the senses, though chief in knowing singulars, are not wisdom.

• “Reasoned-out knowledge” is how he sometimes translates epistēmē. Artists can teach, the merely experienced cannot: if you cannot answer why this is done this way, you are not fully able to teach.
• Teaching English as a second language on the strength of speaking it; a little French course where “the French say it this way — just take it”; in Latin the adjective goes after the noun and he knows no reason for it.
• Asides: the linguist at Laval held the English language the greatest invention of the human mind; Monsignor Dionne and Father Boulay said English is better than French for philosophy and poetry, and Greek better than Latin — a sign of Thomas’s excellence that he thought so well in an inferior language, while Aristotle had Greek.
• Finally: no one of the senses is wisdom, though they are the chief ways of knowing singulars, for they do not say why anything is so — only that fire is hot, not why. This tastes good — why better than last night? Because last night you cooked the flavor out of the steak.

His words #

• the natural road — the road of human knowing from the senses into reason.
• large discourse [Shakespeare] — reason’s ability to discourse about the universal, said of many, often infinitely many.
• discourse — named from the act of the legs; reason running from effects to causes.
• simplex apprehensio — Thomas’s name for the first act of reason: simple grasping, named from the hand.
• foresight — his English for prudence; providentia, an integral part naming the whole from its chief part.
• fides ex auditu — faith is from hearing.
• experience — many memories of the same kind of thing brought together; knowledge of singulars.
• art — one universal understanding about like things arising from the many things kept in mind by experience; knowledge of the why.
• chief artist — the one who knows the causes of the things made; source of “architect.”
• reasoned-out knowledge [ed.: epistēmē, science] — his occasional rendering.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I.1, proemium, second paragraph through the bottom of page one and beyond: animals born with sensation; memory and prudence; men live by art and reasonings; the Callias/Socrates example; experience vs. art in doing and in knowing; chief artist vs. handicraftsman; the sign of knowing is teaching; no sense is wisdom.
• St Francis de Sales, on familiarity with the angels (quoted from a card).
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast.”

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (on “nature”; on “necessary” ending in the first cause as most simple).
• Aristotle, Protrepticus (the fragment on philosophizing); Poetics; his lost book on Homer for Alexander.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, the useless hearer.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, proemium; his treatment of prudence; his argument from necessity and his first question on simplicity (inferred); his remark that so great a philosopher would not say nothing.
• Plato, a dialogue in which Polus speaks.
• Shakespeare, Hamlet (“large discourse”); Cicero on memory and prudence; the Declaration of Independence.

His questions #

• What order does Aristotle take up in the second paragraph? — The order in which kinds of knowledge come along the natural road: sensing, memory, experience, knowledge of the universal.
• Why is reason not a body? — Because what is received in the continuous is received as singular, but the universal is not received as singular.
• Why do we name acts of reason from seeing, grasping, discoursing? — Because sensible and material things are known before immaterial ones.
• What are the three senses of “wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast”? — The legs, human action, and the reason jumping to conclusions.
• Where does the word “nature” come from? — Birth (prenatal, postnatal, nativity).
• What is the English word for prudence? — Foresight; the chief part naming the whole, as providentia.
• Who will get a bill through the Senate, the old senator or the political scientist? — The senator, because what is done is singular.
• Who will better lift a friend out of depression, you or the psychologist? — You, because you know this individual.
• Can you have art without experience? — No; you must have some experience, but the man of art seeks the why.
• Why is the chief artist wiser than the handicraftsman? — Because he knows the causes of the things made; the handicraftsman works like fire, by a certain nature, without knowing.
• What is the sign of knowing? — Being able to teach, i.e. to say why it is so.