Metaphysics Proemium: The Natural Road and the Six Marks of the Wise Man

Orientation #

He says the second reading was covered “last time,” and refers back to the distinction there between the two kinds of universality. He mentions questions he will put to his Tuesday-night students next time, but says nothing about the next class here. The neighbouring classes treat the proemium of Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

The class, in order #

1. Three orders on the natural road (“Aristotle kills many… birds with one stone”) #

The point: the first reading showed one order on the natural road, but at least three can be distinguished.

• First order — kinds of knowledge: sensing, then memory, then experience, then knowledge of the universal. Each step arises differently: memory arises from sensing by retaining the movement of the sense (the image caused in us); experience arises from memory by gathering many similar memories together; the universal arises from experience by comparing and separating out what they have in common (“he’s got two legs… so man is a two-legged animal”).
• Money example for the second step: you don’t spend it as you get it, you retain some, pile it up, and now you’re wealthy.
• Second order (proemium to the eight books of Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]): the same thing is known confusedly before distinctly, outwardly before inwardly — hence intus legere, to read within, and the English “understand.”
• Third order — different things: sensible before non-sensible, material before immaterial (the negative word), effects before causes. “Every time you ask why, you’re witnessing to the effect being known before the cause.” And if the cause is known after the effect, the cause of the cause comes later still — so wisdom, coming at the end, is knowledge of the very first cause. As he tells Lady Sophia: wisdom is knowledge of God.

2. The second reading’s backtrack and the first mark (“let’s just say the wisdom is about causes”) #

Aristotle backs up, grants wisdom is about causes, and asks what kind of causes; the six-part description of the wise man is meant to help.

• First mark: he knows all things, not in particular but in some general way. Popular witnesses: “a wise guy,” “a know-it-all”; “he’s got it all together” — most of us are shipwrecked, in pieces.
• Homer taught how to tell a story: a course of action needs beginning, middle, end; you can’t string together whatever happens to a person. “I took out the trash today because they come on Thursday” — what has that to do with teaching philosophy? It doesn’t form a story.

3. Difficult things; logic versus natural philosophy for wisdom (“things are difficult for a man to know”) #

Second mark: he knows the things difficult for men to know — and Aristotle notes the most universal are furthest from the senses, which know only singulars.

• Anecdote turned into an argument: Kasurik asked whether natural philosophy isn’t more important than logic for wisdom, since there you learn there is an unmoved mover, hence something immaterial, and that the human soul is immortal. Dionne distinguished:
  • Natural philosophy: yes for causes (it uses all four; the geometer uses only form a little, has no matter in the strict sense and no purpose — “what’s the purpose of a triangle having two right angles?”). Aristotle calls it second philosophy. But it goes from the general down to the particular and toward matter. It also helps with act and ability, present both in the definition of motion, and motion is what is most known.
  • Logic: more like wisdom because more universal and immaterial — the first division of being is according to the figures of predication, and predication is logic’s own. And the logician is like the wise man in directing all the sciences how to proceed (“that’s not a syllogism — you can’t have a conclusion follow necessarily by induction”).
• Induction example: three, five, seven, nine, eleven are odd — however long the list, “all numbers are odd” doesn’t follow. (The little girl: “I can count to a hundred.”)
• Thomas’s distinction, admired for its brevity: natural philosophy proceeds per modum motus, by way of motion (even nature is defined as beginning of motion and rest); logic proceeds by way of predication. Confirmed by names: Isagoge and Categories give us de praedicabilibus and de praedicamentis, from praedicare; the syllogism rests on dici de omni and dici de nullo. By motion you know things are alive — something moves of itself, a thing grows even in the womb. (His bifocals make him think something moved when it hadn’t.)

4. Equivocal words and the moderns’ difficulty (“every respectable word in philosophy is analogous”) #

De Koninck’s saying: every respectable word in philosophy is analogous, equivocal by reason. This is Aristotle’s discovery about the common words, especially in wisdom and in the axioms — hence the whole fifth book distinguishing their senses and their order.

• Marxism = dialectical materialism, but Marx nowhere distinguishes the senses of matter, nor of contradiction (contrariety or another opposition), and calls whatever it is fundamental; Heraclitus is quoted as father of it all.
• Example of Thomas ordering what Aristotle left unordered: the eight senses of in in Physics IV, which Thomas orders by the method taught in the fifth book of Wisdom. (De Koninck, teaching since the 1930s, coming to class on place: “Isn’t this wonderful?” — full of wonder, more famous than Dionne, yet deferring to him.)

5. The tension between difficulty and certitude (“more certain, more certain”) #

Third mark: he is more certain. Question: is he most certain about what is most difficult, or are there easier things he is most certain about? Answer from the axioms: Aristotle is most certain about the axiom that something cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same way — and part of his certitude is that he can defend it, which Hegel and Marx cannot, since dialectics is the study of contradiction within the essence of things.

• Hegel’s becoming: coming into your house, I both am and am not in your house. (Berquist’s own mischief: trying to convince students the part is sometimes greater than the whole.)
• This is why Aristotle says “perhaps” about the most difficult: the most universal things are difficult enough, but the first cause is more difficult still.
• Shakespeare on the principle of contradiction: “To be or not to be, that is the question” — it is a question because you can’t both be and not be. “To eat or to sleep” is no question; you can and should do both. In dialectic the problem is always a pair of contradictories (the human soul is immortal or it is not).

6. Digression: the senses of “before” (“In what sense of before does one sense of before come before another”) #

His “fiendish question” for the Tuesday students, left as posed.

• A second, easier question: in what sense of before is the per se before the per aliud (the through-itself before the through-another)? He finds it in the second, third, fourth and so-called fifth senses, perhaps not the first (“I’m too dumb to see it in the first”).
• Principle cited from Thomas on the fifth book: we name things as we know them — so naming follows the order of knowing.
• Applications of per se before per aliud:
  1. Moving: a moved mover does not move itself, so there is another mover before it; you must come to a mover per se.
  2. Causing: a caused cause causes through another; there must be a cause through itself before it.
  3. Being: the contingent can be and not be, so depends on what must be; some necessary things are necessary through another (like a demonstrated conclusion), so one must come to a being through itself — whence Thomas argues God is being itself.
  4. Knowing: if every statement were known through another, then A through B, B through C, and so on to infinity — you could never begin, so no statement would be known. (Less obvious than “every statement is false,” which falsifies itself.)
  5. Defining: if every part of every definition needed defining, nothing could be defined — so some things are known what they are without definition. (His own case: defining reason forced him to define discourse — coming to know the unknown through the known.)

7. Per se known to all and per se known to the wise (“some are known to themselves by the wise”) #

Boethius’s distinction, which he calls marvelous.

• Known through itself to all: the whole is greater than the part — everyone knows a whole has parts.
• Known through itself to the wise: every perfect number is a composite number. A perfect number equals the sum of what measures it — six, measured by 1, 2, 3, and 1+2+3=6. A prime is measured only by one; a composite by at least one other number. So a perfect number must be composite, since otherwise only one would measure it, and one won’t add up to it. (Augustine and Thomas on the six days as sign of perfection; Mozart’s six “Haydn” quartets, and sets of twelve as twice six.)
• Other examples for the wise: no odd number is even (a little kid might not see it); no tragedy is a comedy — Shakespeare mocks “a very lamentable comedy.”
• Boundary case he raises and answers: is a line longer than a point? No — a point has no length, and more and less are relatives, so the point would have to have less length. Yet points exist: some lines do not go on forever, and the end of a line is a point.

8. The fourth, fifth and sixth marks (“he’s more able to teach the causes”) #

• Fourth: he teaches, because he knows the causes — recalling the comparison of the man of experience with the man of art: the experienced man may do better (action is of singulars), but the man of art is wiser because he knows why. If he knows the more difficult things, he knows the cause of the cause, and furthest along, the first cause. Certitude and cause are connected: the cause tells you why something must be so.
• Fifth: his knowledge is more desirable for its own sake — as the arts of pleasure seem wiser than the arts of the necessities of life (the cook, the carpenter). Painting examples: Canaletto’s Venice canals, where from either side of the room you look straight down the canal; portraits whose eyes follow you around — Washington Irving making fun of the English servants unsettled by it.
• Sixth: the chief artist seems wiser than those he commands, so the wise man commands others. MacArthur anecdotes: told the front was a dangerous place after a sniper was killed, “that’s what you’re supposed to do”; his headquarters strafed, an officer running in, MacArthur alive — “he was a little bit of an actor, but you have to be.”
• The closing paragraph of the second reading (p. 4 of the handout): the sought name falls in the same episteme, which must look at the first beginnings and causes, “for one of the causes is the good and that for the sake of which” — touching the last two marks at once: the end makes the knowledge better, and knowing the end lets you direct others. He notes Aristotle does not deduce these as explicitly as he might in a public lecture; this is a summary.
• The end as cause of the causes: wood is cause of the table because the carpenter shaped it, the shape is there because of the carpenter, and he acts for the sake of dinner or books on it; the chair’s obtuse angle is for the sake of sitting. Aside: learn Greek if you want to be a philosopher — it also helps you read the Gospel of St. John.

9. Two senses of universal, and the conclusion (“universale in causando and the universale in praedicando”) #

The point: how knowing the most universal yields knowing the first causes.

• The word general has two senses: said of many (in predicando), and general as in Douglas MacArthur (in causando). They are not the same sense — Hegel’s error is trying to deduce the whole universe from the most universal in predicando; the universe comes from the most universal in causando.
• The proof of correspondence: in a kingdom the king is the more fundamental cause and the general commands under him. The general’s causality reaches all soldiers; the king’s reaches all citizens. Citizen is said of more than soldier (every soldier is a citizen, not every citizen a soldier). So the more universal predicate corresponds to the more universal cause.
• Confirmations: political philosophy asks who is a citizen and also treats government, in one knowledge, because the government governs all citizens; a father’s causality reaches his three children, not the state or country; the governor of Iowa reaches every Iowan but does not tell Nebraska what to do, while the president’s causality is as wide as citizenship of the United States; captain to company, sergeant to squad.
• Conclusion: the wise man knows all things in general — what is said of all, being and one (as learned in the fourth book) — therefore he must consider the cause of all.
• The other marks re-derived: the first cause is most difficult, since we know effect before cause and cause before cause of the cause, so it is known last — further off even than the most universal in predication (hence “perhaps”). He is most certain, because the cause shows why a thing must be so. He teaches, since the man who knows first causes most of all knows why. His knowledge is most desirable, because the first cause is the end of everything else and the first end is best. And he directs, because one orders things to the end.
• Closing aside: Lenin — had there been ten thousand men who knew what they wanted, “we never would have come to power.” [unclear in recording]

His words #

• natural road — sense and reason; “the whole name of the road.”
• intus legere — to read within; matched by English “understand.”
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics].
• Wisdom — his name for the Metaphysics (“the fifth book of Wisdom”).
• second philosophy — Aristotle’s title for natural philosophy.
• universale in causando / in praedicando — universal in causing / in predicating; in English, the two senses of “general.”
• per modum motus — by way of motion; how natural philosophy proceeds, against logic’s way of predication.
• dici de omni / dici de nullo — said of all / said of none [ed.: dictum de omni].
• act and ability [ed.: act and potency] — both present in the definition of motion.
• equivocal by reason — his gloss on “analogous.”
• per se / per aliud — the through-itself / the through-another.
• per se known — known through itself; divided by Boethius into known to all and known to the wise.
• perfect number — a number equal to the sum of everything that measures it; composite number — measured by some number besides one.
• chief artist — the architect-figure who knows the end and commands the others.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aquinas, commentary on the proemium of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, second reading, final paragraph (“from all the foresaid, the name sought… falls in the same episteme”) — handout p. 4.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics, proemium (order of confused to distinct) and Book IV (eight senses of “in,” ordered by Thomas).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (wisdom is about being and one) and V (senses of common words; “we name things as we know them”).
• Aristotle, Categories (the senses of “before”); Porphyry, Isagoge.
• Boethius, on statements per se known to all and to the wise.
• Homer (beginning, middle, end of a story); Shakespeare (“to be or not to be”; mockery of “lamentable comedy”); Washington Irving.
• Hegel and Marx (dialectical materialism, contradiction in becoming); Heraclitus; Lenin; Plato and Socrates (source of per se before per aliud).

His questions #

• How does memory arise from sensing, and experience from memory? — By retaining what was sensed; then by gathering many similar memories together.
• How does knowledge of the universal arise from experience — in one of those ways or another? — By comparing and separating out what the many have in common.
• What are the six things Aristotle says about the wise man? — He knows all things in general; knows difficult things; is more certain; teaches the causes; has knowledge most desirable for its own sake; and directs others.
• Is natural philosophy more important than logic for wisdom? — Distinguish: natural philosophy for the causes and for act and ability; logic is more like wisdom in universality and immateriality, and directs the sciences.
• Is the wise man most certain about what is most difficult for us to know? — There is a tension; his greatest certitude is about the axioms, which he can defend — hence Aristotle says “perhaps” of the most difficult.
• In what sense of before does one sense of before come before another? — Left open (his fiendish question for the Tuesday class).
• In what sense of before is the per se before the per aliud? — In the second, third and fourth senses, and the so-called fifth; perhaps not the first.
• If every statement had to be known through another statement, could anything be known? — No: there would be an infinity behind every statement and you could never begin.
• Is a line longer than a point? — No; a point has no length, and more and less are relatives — yet points exist, as the end of a finite line.
• Which is said of more, citizen or soldier — and which causality is wider, the king’s or the general’s? — Citizen, and the king’s; so the more universal in predicating corresponds to the more universal in causing, and the wise man who knows what is said of all knows the cause of all.