Metaphysics I, Reading 2: The Six-Part Description of the Wise Man — Universality, Certitude, Causes, Knowledge for Its Own Sake, and the Origin of 'Philosopher' (Part 2 of 3)

Orientation #

He opens by referring back to “that interlude” of the previous class and turns at once to Aristotle’s six-part description of the wise man, noting that the order of the six parts is likely from the more known to the less known. The previous class treated the road of knowledge from sense to wisdom in Metaphysics I.

The class, in order #

1. First mark: the wise man knows all things (“knows all things so far as possible”) #

Not all things in particular — impossible for a man — but through the universal, so that in some way he knows an infinity.

• Example: “No odd number is even” — one proposition taking in two infinities of things.
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason as “the ability for large discourse”: the first sense of large is that it covers a large area. Plato’s young Socrates (in the dialogue with Parmenides) imagines the universal as a big sail covering a large area.
• Hence if the wise man is at the end of reason, his discourse is the largest, the most universal. In Metaphysics IV wisdom is about being; and being extends to everything that is in any way whatsoever.
• Aside on “nothing”: nothing is before God — but nothing is only a being of reason. Kasurik’s line that philosophy is the only subject where you get paid for talking about nothing; Cardinal Pell grinning at Dawkins “because you’re spending all this time talking about nothing,” Dawkins not being clear that nothing is actually nothing. Some scientists now say you get something out of nothing; even the early Greeks could not do that.

2. Second mark: knowing what is difficult (“difficult and not easy for man to know”) #

Sensing is common to all, hence easy and nothing wise — “I saw a dog today, no big deal.” We in general admire a man for knowing what is hard to know (Einstein understanding the whole universe in some way). This is what Aristotle’s “we think” means.

3. Third mark: greater certitude, and the tension with the second (“wiser in every science the man who is more certain”) #

• We go to the man we consider wiser when we are not sure. Laval: Charles De Koninck and Monsignor Dion were the wisest there, and De Koninck deferred to Dion — he made it “crystal clear” to Warren Murray (who came with a chemistry degree to study philosophy of nature under De Koninck) that Dion is the greatest mind there. When Berquist, writing his thesis under Dion, asked De Koninck about a difficulty, De Koninck said, “Why ask me when you’ve got Dion for your director?” Later, teaching at Assumption, he drove to Quebec each vacation with a package of questions for Dion.
• The tension: if the wise man knows the most difficult things, is he most certain? Berquist can be surer of the number of chairs in the room than anyone is about the first cause.
• Parallel tension in the proem to the three books On the Soul: all knowledge is good, but one knowledge is better either because about a better thing or because known more certainly — and Aristotle says the knowledge of the soul excels in both, though he later says it is one of the most difficult things to know what the soul is.
• Resolution: not in the same way. What we know in the three books on the soul comes from our inward experience of being alive — not from cutting open frogs or electrifying frogs’ legs — and inwardness gives great certitude; even modern philosophers who deny matter know the inward experience of man. The nobility belongs to the soul itself, known eventually. So what is most certain and what is most noble are not exactly the same thing.
• Asides: the college English professor who dropped a big book to wake the half-asleep class; Kasurik’s definition of the poet as “a man with his brains kicked out,” which Colwell, head of English, called the first definition of a poet she agreed with. Shakespeare is unique in having two excellences — some words admired for wisdom, others for poetic excellence.

4. The axioms and the sophism about whole and part (“the whole is more than the part”) #

The wise man’s certitude shown from Metaphysics IV: the axioms are known through themselves by all men, hence most certain — but the wise man knows them best, because he knows the words in them are all equivocal (by reason), and in Book V Aristotle sets out the central senses of such words and their order. So the wise man can defend the axioms.

• His sophism: animal is a part of what man is, yet animal includes besides man dog, cat, horse, elephant — so sometimes the part includes more than the whole. (He credits his mother, who never went to college, for “man is an animal that has reason — that’s better.”) He says no student in his class can answer it.
• Aristotle’s reply, if he came up through the floor: “You sophist, Berquist” — the fallacy of equivocation, the most common kind, mixing the senses of whole and part. Animal is a composing part of the composed whole which is the definition of man (and the whole definition is bigger than animal alone); animal is also a universal whole, said of more than man is said of. A composed whole is always put together from more than one part; a universal whole is always said of more than one of its parts. Do not mix the two.
• Thomas learned this way of distinguishing senses from Aristotle — “imitator Aristotle,” and man is the most imitative of the animals.

5. Fourth mark: more able to teach the causes (“more able to teach what? the causes”) #

Is this less known to us than certitude? The man in the street thinks of the wise chef as one who “has it all together,” more sure of what to do; he would not think of cause first. A student suggests the wise man is wise because he can teach. But the two go together: the man who knows the reason why a thing must be so is more sure — hence the definition of the greatest syllogism, demonstration propter quid: a syllogism making us know the cause, and that of which it is the cause, and that it cannot be otherwise.

• Why is the whole more than one of its parts? Because every whole is parts in the plural — a thing with no parts he would not call a whole. (Joke: “H-O-L,” donuts.)
• Student: Thomas says the perfection of a power makes something like itself — so a power perfected by knowing can make another like yourself.
• Aside on reason’s reflexivity: the eye does not know what an eye is, but reason can know what reason is; Shakespeare’s definition of reason is an instance, and logic even has a definition of definition. Student recalls Chesterton’s Manalive, the rain and rivers at the university making it a place of reflection — “water is the perfect medium for university”; Berquist: “they’re all wet.”
• Aside: the license plate DRFUNK seen while driving in — “I don’t want to be Dr. Funk today.”

6. Fifth mark: the science for its own sake (“for itself and for the sake of knowing”) #

This is less known, more hesitantly admitted, since people ask what good it does. But it fits what was said in the first reading, that the arts for pleasure seem more perfect than those for necessity: we think Shakespeare wiser than the carpenter, cook or auto mechanic. A fortiori the Greeks, who called the poets the makers by antonomasia; Plato’s Socrates calls Homer the teacher of all the Greeks — yet his work is for pleasure. Shakespeare: “will strive to please you every day”; Mozart: music must never be displeasing to the ear, or it ceases to be music.

• Aside on Peter Cariani, at his house Tuesday night, and his brother Marcus’s claim that there is no philosophy without music: truth is the harmony of reason with things, moral virtue the harmony of sense appetite with reason — harmony is first appreciated in good music. Then the cello, the viola, and the young Mozart taking over a violinist’s part in a string quartet at his father’s house, almost self-taught.

7. God is wisdom; the origin of the word “philosopher” (“call me a lover of wisdom”) #

• Student: Scripture says God is wisdom. Better to say God is wisdom than that he has wisdom — God is whatever he has; his love is not added to his substance but is his substance.
• Pythagoras was the first to call himself a philosopher: when men called him wise for discovering the Pythagorean theorem and other things, he said, “Don’t call me wise; God alone is wise” — either God alone is wise, or man’s wisdom is very imperfect compared with God’s. Asked what to call him, he said, call me a lover of wisdom. So in the origin of the name “philosopher” there is not only etymology (philo + sophia) but humility, placing oneself under God as the fully wise one.
• Other philo- words: philologist (lover of words — Benedict XVI on John Paul II starting as a philologist), philanthropist.
• Joke with his granddaughter Sophia — “Lady Wisdom” — that the philosopher is a lover of Sophia; and since God is wisdom itself, the philosopher is in some way a lover of God.

8. Amphiboly: “the knowledge of God” (“this is amphiboly”) #

Equivocation is one word with many meanings; amphiboly is a phrase with more than one meaning (“two ways”).

• Word of God: the Scripture (Vatican II’s Verbum Dei — [ed.: Dei Verbum]), the written word of God; and the Son of God. The two harmonize: the Bible is chiefly about the Son.
• Shakespeare’s “the wisdom of nature” [ed.: he attributes the phrase to Shakespeare] — the wisdom that is about nature, and the wisdom nature shows in what it does; as when Aristotle studying the parts of animals gives us insight into the mind that made them, so the wisdom of nature is in a way the wisdom of God. Thomas in some cases uses wisdom as a synonym for philosophy — though philosophy, by its origin, is human wisdom; we would not say God has philosophy.
• Knowledge of God: the knowledge God most of all has, and the knowledge which is about God. And God’s knowledge is primarily knowledge of himself, by which he knows all other things — he does not derive it from them, nor wait for me to act to know what I will do.

9. Sixth mark: the ruling science, and the dialectical argument that logic is wisdom (“the one ruling is more wisdom than the one obeying”) #

This follows the earlier steps: the man of art is wiser than the man of experience, and the chief artist wiser than the handicraftsman — so it belongs to the wise man to direct others. In Hugh’s definition of reason as the ability to understand, and to direct itself and others, you see the connection: logic is the art by which reason directs itself; if wisdom is the highest perfection of reason, wisdom should especially direct others.

• A dialectical argument (he calls it that): logic is wisdom, since the logician directs us in all the sciences in defining, reasoning and syllogizing — so the natural philosopher is less wise than Monsignor Dion’s logician.
• Thomas, in the commentary on the fourteen books of the Metaphysics, quotes Averroes with approval on the affinity of logic and wisdom. Three ways they are alike:
  1. Universality — the Categories gives the highest genera, so the logician knows about everything in general, as the wise man does.
  2. Immateriality — logic is about immaterial things, and wisdom about things that have no matter or need not have matter.
  3. Directing — the logician directs everyone else, even in their mistakes: fallacies in language and outside language, thirteen kinds in all.
• Joke: that is how thirteen became unlucky, and why some buildings have no thirteenth floor. His in-laws lived on Thirteen Gauge Lane and kept the number when the town hall assumed they would want it changed. A student offers the Irish view that thirteen is lucky (twelve apostles plus Christ); he counters that Judas was the thirteenth — but then a replacement apostle makes twelve again.
• Confirmation from Metaphysics III: the whole third book is dialectical, and Aristotle gives at its beginning a beautiful explanation of why we need dialectic — the very thing he criticizes Descartes for not seeing — and Thomas goes through those reasons. Difference: in the other parts of philosophy dialectic is particular (in the eight books of natural hearing [ed.: Physics], a dialectic on place then the determination of the truth about place, later a dialectic on time and its determination), but in Book III there is a dialectic of the whole. So this dialectical book seems a chief part of wisdom — logica utens as well as docens.
• Aristotle compares wisdom to dialectic in universality: Plato’s dialogues, being mainly dialectical, can be about just about anything; and to sophistry, which has the appearance of wisdom but the same universality. Hence even the pejorative “wise guy,” “know-it-all,” carries the idea of knowing all things.
• But the wise man in the first reading was explaining the natural road, which is more basic than the road of logic: logic teaches the common road of reasoned-out knowledge, while the wise man treats the natural road — so he directs us even more.

His words #

• “large discourse” — Shakespeare’s definition of reason; first sense of large: covering a large area, i.e. the most universal.
• “the fourth book of wisdom” — [ed.: Metaphysics IV]; likewise “the fourteen books of wisdom.”
• “being of reason” — what nothing is, since nothing is before God.
• “the three books on the soul” — [ed.: De Anima].
• “equivocal by reason” — words like whole and part with ordered central senses, distinguished in Book V.
• “composed whole” vs. “universal whole” — the whole put together from parts (the definition) vs. the whole said of its parts (the genus).
• “demonstration propter quid” — a syllogism making us know the cause, and that of which it is the cause, and that it cannot be otherwise.
• “antonomasia” — as the Greeks called the poets “the makers.”
• “amphiboly” — a phrase with more than one meaning; distinguished from equivocation, one word with many meanings.
• “natural hearing” — [ed.: Physics], the eight books.
• “logica utens / docens” — logic in use vs. logic taught.
• “the natural road” vs. “the road of logic” — the order of coming to know vs. the common road of reasoned-out knowledge.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I — the six marks of the wise man, read and commented phrase by phrase.
• Handout, “The Matter and Order of Wisdom,” p. 11 (verified source; about ten minutes read from it).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (wisdom about being; defence of the axioms), V (senses of words), III (the dialectical book).
• Aristotle, On the Soul, proem.
• Aristotle, Categories; Sophistical Refutations (thirteen fallacies) (inferred for the title); Physics (dialectic on place and time); works on animals and the parts of animals.
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics, citing Averroes.
• Plato, Parmenides (the sail) (inferred); the dialogues generally; Socrates on Homer as teacher of the Greeks.
• Vatican II, Verbum Dei [ed.: Dei Verbum].
• Chesterton, Manalive (raised by a student).
• Shakespeare; Mozart’s letters (inferred); Benedict XVI on John Paul II.

His questions #

• Is the order of the six parts from the more known to the less known? — He proposes it as likely and tests each mark against what “we think.”
• How can a man know an infinity of things? — Not in particular, but through the universal: “no odd number is even.”
• Is there not a tension between knowing the most difficult things and being the most certain? — Yes; resolved by their not being said in the same way, as in the proem to On the Soul.
• How does the wise man know the axioms better than anybody else? — By knowing the words in them are equivocal by reason, and distinguishing their central senses and order.
• Is animal, a part of man, greater than the whole? — No: it is a composing part of one whole and a universal whole in another sense; the sophism equivocates on whole and part.
• Which is more known to us, that the wise man is more certain or that he can teach the causes? — Certitude; but the two go together, since knowing the cause makes one sure.
• Does God have wisdom, or is he wisdom? — He is wisdom; God is whatever he has.
• Who first called himself a philosopher, and why? — Pythagoras, out of humility: God alone is wise.
• In what senses is “the knowledge of God” said? — The knowledge God has, and the knowledge about God; and God’s knowledge is chiefly of himself.
• Is logic wisdom? — Given only as a dialectical argument; but three affinities stand — universality, immateriality, and directing — while the wise man’s natural road is more basic than logic’s road.