Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999)
5. Why Begin from Nature: Beginnings, Order, and Heraclitus on the Common
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[0:00] Okay. Okay. But there's something like that in every kind of education, and what comes before for us is imperfect, and what comes after for us is more perfect. And that's because in any kind of education you're developing something, right? So if you do one of these graduated exercise things, like now is in Canada, kids got the five B X plan from the Royal Canadian Air Force. I still have my copy of the Royal Canadian Air Force, right?

[0:35] Okay. Well, these exercises are graduated, right? So you got to start at your level, right? How many pushups can I do, right? How many this or that, you know, situps can I do, and so on, right? And I start at this level doing so many pushups, so many things, right? And then I gradually what? Build up, right? Now the first exercises I do are productive of less strength than the ones I do later on.

[1:02] Five pushups produces less strength than, let's say, twenty pushups, right, or a hundred, right? But if I tried to do a hundred, maybe I would physically what? Harm myself, right? Okay. So a hundred pushups would not be productive of strength more for me, but a hundred pushups are productive of greater strength than than five. You see? Okay. And the same thing is true in the education to some extent of the heart, right?

[1:34] What is more lovable to us is less lovable. See, we tend to love the sensible good, right? More than the understandable good, right? Because more known to us and so on, right? What's a lesser good, right? So I love candy before I love wisdom, right? Even though wisdom is a greater good than candy.

[2:02] When I was a little boy, I thought my father a foolish man that he didn't fill the refrigerator with soda, soda pop, Grape soda, and root beer, and orange, and all other wonderful things. And with his money, he could afford to fill the refrigerator with this and drink soda all day long and be a happy man, right? And now that I can maybe afford to fill the refrigerator, I don't do this, right?

[2:27] There are greater things I can pursue, right? See, but the soda pop was more lovable to me than wisdom. And the private good is more lovable than what? To us than the common good, but the common good is more lovable. It's a greater good.

[2:50] You know, in the discussions or conversations between Eisenhower and Zhukov, right, in Berlin after the war, right? And Zhukov was a German, you know, Russian general, right? Successful general, and he was in charge there, the Russian sector, and he, would meet with Eisenhower because he was in charge there. And they talk about the American and the communist system, right? And Zhukov would say to Eisenhower, "Oh, in your economic system, people work for profit, right?

[3:20] See, here in Russia, we expect them to work for the economic good of the country. Isn't that much higher than working for your own profit? " Eisenhower was too dumb to know how to answer this. See, because the point is that the economic good of the country, the common good of the country, is a much greater good than my profit. See,

[3:41] but you begin by loving your own what, private good more than the common good, right? What's more lovable to you is what, less lovable? What is more lovable? What is a greater good, in fact, is less what?

[3:58] Oh, yeah. See, so you have to be led from the private good towards the common good, right? And of course, when you go back to the Russian system, you realize that they, you know, do in fact appeal to the private good, right? If you're highly productive, we might give you the Order of Lenin or something, right? Or if you're stealing goods, we put you to death, right?

[4:23] You know, so they do in fact appeal to the private good to get people to work in some way for the common good, right? It's just that we do it more efficiently. See, profit is you know better way of doing it than getting threatened to be shot or you know. Okay. Um. So the answer was not to try to say that the profit, the private good of this man or his company, is greater or better than the common good of the country.

[4:51] No, you can't defend that. The good of the whole is always greater. But it's more lovable to us, right? And so men have to be led from that, right? So sometimes you see a businessman who's got his own company, is interested in making a profit and keeping the business going. And he joins, let's say, the Chamber of Commerce, or he joins some civic organization, right? And this is beneficial to his company because he becomes known, he makes all kinds of contacts, right?

[5:20] But as he starts to do things for the city, you find the man begins to get a certain what, delight in doing things that are for the good of the city, even apart from his own what. Yeah, and now he's been morally educated, right? See.

[5:37] The same way in the Christian life, there you know, we might first be concerned about what, you know, fires of hell, right? Your own private uh laws, right? And then you have to be graduated from that to what, the love of God, right? The love of the common good, huh?

[5:56] So in the beginning, the sensible good is more lovable to us than the reasonable good, right? And the private good than the common good, because the senses know only the sensible good. That's where our knowledge begins. You know only the private good. You have to be gradually let on. The same way in the education, of your taste, right? It? Might be taste in food or taste in the fine arts, right?

[6:25] As a little boy, I was known for always trying to find the marches on the radio. I still love marches, right? But I know now that there is not as much to hear in these marches as there is in a Mozart way, something or a Mozart opera, right? I remember my brother Richard brought home the Magic Flute, and the first time I heard it, you know, I listened to everything attentively.

[6:45] I didn't hear anything, but I continued to hear these things from mind, you know? So Mozart's music is more hearable than the march, but the march is more hearable by me as a child. Everybody loves a parade, as they say, right? They're stirring? huh? I noticed the child is going, his imagination is going to be struck more by Little Red Riding Hood than by King Lear. But as you continue to read Little Red Riding Hood, you kind of exhaust the story after a while, right?

[7:14] I have been, but King Lear can still come back to King Lear, It was more for the imagination. I used to notice at Christmas time, my mother put the Christmas cards up over the mantel or the fireplace, and you tend to go down those cards and to stop on the ones a reproduction of a famous painting, you know, and you keep on seeing more and more in that painting.

[7:40] Or the child will see his own childlike drawing quickly first, right? He won't appreciate the painting, maybe the famous painting, right? But there is really more to be seen there, but it's less seen by us in the beginning. But it's because in all of these, education, you are going from the imperfect towards the perfect, right? You are developing something. So what comes first for us is always, objectively speaking, imperfect.

[8:05] So Plato compares us to men who are born in a cave, who has hardly any light in the cave, and someone gets out of the cave out into the sunlight where things are more knowable, right? But he's blinded at first when he gets out there, right? What I can say is in the Bible, God dwells in light, inaccessible. It's too understandable, right? Okay.

[8:32] So now, as far as the axioms are concerned, no one has ever tried to enumerate all the axioms, right? Euclid enumerates some that are especially important. Geometry, right? And Aristotle talks about the most basic ones that something cannot both be and not be, right? It must either be or not be, right? But there are many other axioms, like the whole is more than the part. We talked about the word before, didn't we?

[9:06] In here a little bit. The word before. Oh, we did, though. Okay. but. Nothing is what before itself. That's an axiom. Nothing is before or after itself. Today is before tomorrow and after yesterday, but can today be before today? or after today?

[9:32] So there is many axioms. Nothing is the beginning of itself. As I say, no one has ever tried to enumerate all of them. Aristotle says, by nature, the most fundamental ones are: you can't both be and not be, right? You must either be or not be. To be or not to be—that is the question, right? It's a question because you can't both be and not be, right?

[10:04] You must either be or not be. So, as you read the demonstrations in Euclid, you'll see it using these axioms. Even the postulates, in a sense, presuppose the axioms. Take a simple example here. You take the postulate that all right angles are equal, right? Okay.

[10:32] Now, when a straight line meets a straight line and makes equal angles, we call them what right angles? That's the definition. And this straight line makes equal angles. Now, how do you know that these angles are what equal?

[10:50] Definition doesn't tell you these two are equal. Tell you these two are equal, Tells you these two are equal right? It? Doesn't tell you this is equal to that one, and so on for every pair, right? How do you know it isn't like like a straight line? You see, divide a line into equal parts. I've done that, but this is not equal to that, is it? So, how do you know that this angle is equal to that angle?

[11:13] Well, you can imagine this line laid on that line, right? At that point, right? Now, this line here coincides with this line, obviously, very equal, right? If it doesn't, it falls to one side, right? Okay. Now,

[11:37] this angle and this angle here are equal, right? Okay. But now, if you take this angle here, this whole angle here is greater than just this part right down here, isn't it? Why? Because the whole is more than a what part? That's an axiom, right? Okay.

[12:00] So, if this is equal to this, and this is greater than this, and this is greater than that, right? Okay. Therefore, this—if you add to the greater one, right—the here is greater than this. If you add this. And this is much greater than that, right? The same status the one was over there, right? This is also equal to that. So what's what what is much greater is also equal.

[12:30] So both is it is not. That's impossible, right? So you're using the axiom that the whole is more than the part, and something cannot both be and not be, right? Okay. Or take another example here from geometry, how the

[12:47] axiom fits in. Euclid defines what circle, right? You've seen the definition I guess, huh? And then he defines diameter, right? Okay. And then he states what really is a postulate that the diameter bisects a circle, that is to say, divides it into two parts, right? I ask the students, how do you know that the diameter bisects? it? They said, well, just by definition? I said, no, no, that's not the definition. of. diameter You see you define a circle, right?

[13:14] Plain figure contained by one line, every point which is equally distant from a point in the interior called the center, okay? And then you say, if you take any point on the circumference, right, and you draw a straight line to the center and through to the opposite, that's what we call a diameter, right? Now, how do you know the diameter divides the circle into equal parts? If it just says, and it divides into two equal parts, right?

[13:44] Well, again, you can imagine this as we're flipped over and top to the other side, right? Okay. Now the base is the same, first. Now, when we flip it over, if this coincides with that, then it's obvious that they're equal, right? If it doesn't coincide, it's going to fall either above or what below the other. In which case, all the radii are not what equal. Yeah. That's already the definition of circle, right?

[14:15] So they're both equal and not equal. Impossible, right? To going back to the fundamental axiom, something cannot both be and not be, right? Or if I say in arithmetic, something kind of obvious here: no odd number is even, right? This is a statement known to itself. We say it's known to knowing, but odd numbers are not even numbers, right? When we define even number, we say it's a number divisible into two equal parts, right?

[14:47] An odd number is a number not divisible into two equal parts. So if an odd number were to become an even number, right, or to be an even number, that number would both be and not be divisible into two equal parts, right? And that's impossible, right? So everything rests upon those axioms of being and non-being, right? Now, sometimes you have someone who denies these because it's sometimes for fun of it, but sometimes because he runs into some difficulty he can't solve.

[15:22] But notice when they deny for a reason the axiom of contradiction, there something cannot both be and not be. They do so because something seems contradicted. So they're saying it isn't so because it is so. They're holding on to it when they say something contradicts it. It's not contradicts it. You can't hold on to it. So they accept the principle of contradiction, right? They do that.

[15:50] But some just denies it for fun. You say, well, you jump off the edge of the cliff, and say it's the same thing to step forward, and that's step forward. Same thing: we pull the trigger, not pull the trigger, right? And he quickly admits that they're not the same. In fact. So that's the first of the four questions here. Under the fourth question, what are the natural beginnings of philosophy?

[16:17] Right. What two desires? The natural desire to know the cause, what's on say, right? And the natural desire to live well, right? And two in our knowledge, the natural road, the road from the senses into reason, and we unfolded a bit the before and after along that road, and then the what natural understanding of the what axioms, right? Okay. Now the next question was why do you you want to come into philosophy from the natural beginnings, right?

[16:56] And let's give some of these reasons here. About ten reasons if we can here. Can you get more reasons, But I'll give you about ten today. Now the first four reasons I'm going to give are based on the fact that the natural beginnings are beginnings, and in fact the very first beginnings, right? Okay.

[17:25] So first reason, we talked about this I think today already a little bit. The man who considers something from its beginning, will understand it the best. Okay.

[17:46] The man who considers something from its beginning, will get the best understanding. I took the simple example there. If I want to understand a man, I'm writing a biography of Winston Churchill, let's say, or some other famous man. I'm going to go back to his what beginning, right? His origin, right? I'm going to follow him up from his origin, right? And that will understand him the best, won't I?

[18:36] Okay. If I'm writing the history of a country, I'm going to go back to its what. And I mentioned how de Tocqueville said that what

[18:54] you're in a better position to understand America than France because you can see its beginning, right? How it began, huh? Well, when de Tocqueville began the famous profound research, I guess, reading, into the French Revolution, right? You know, that first volume he completed, right? You know, leads right up to the French Revolution, right? And the French Revolution seems like a foregone conclusion, you know, very thing he brings out in that volume, right?

[19:20] But he's seeing it from its what beginning, right? So you're going to understand philosophy best if you follow it up from its what beginning, and the natural beginnings are the very what first beginnings of it. Makes sense? Okay.

[19:56] Can you read that famous book of C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love? It's been a kind of masterpiece in fiction, right? And he says, you know, compared to this, the Renaissance was a ripple on the literary history. certainly. It goes back to the origin, right?

[20:16] Eventually to Shakespeare and Spencer, right? All the way back to the Middle Ages, right? And you see this thing from its beginning, you have much better understanding of what it is. The medieval romance, what it was. That's another example of the same thing, right? A man who can see something from its beginning will understand it the best. You read a masterpiece, they know it very well. Now the second, the second, now

[20:46] what Shakespeare's the ones they call romances are the last plays. They go back to the Hellenic romance, huh? Oh. But the romantic comedies, the romances in that sense, they go back to the medieval romance. So you followed up to make it, you know, better understanding what these two different forms of plays are. They're different from tragedy and comedy, right? One has its origin in the Hellenic period, and the other has its origin in the medieval.

[21:16] Um. Now the second thing, there's a connection between beginning and order, okay? And the connection is that order is based on some beginning. When we order events historically, we take some event. To begin with, don't we? We take, for example, the birth of Christ, right? And we order all events by what?

[21:56] They're distance from that event, right? So this is two thousand one, right? Okay, but the French Revolution began in seventeen eighty nine. The American Revolution began in seventeen seventy six, maybe, right? Okay. England was conquered by the Normans in ten sixty six, right? We're ordering all these events, but by some what beginning, right? You want to understand the the order of an army, or in fact, now the order of the federal government.

[22:24] If there is any order, you go back to the one who's at the beginning of things, right? You go back to the general, let's say, right, and then say in the general. there are maybe let's say the colonels, and the colonels, are captains, right? Or you go to the president, and under the president, the different department heads, and then all the way down the line, right? So you order things from the what?

[22:46] Beginning, yeah. You know, often times you try to remember something. If you go back to the beginning, then you can, right? Yeah, yeah, remember things in order, right? Okay.

[23:00] So since order is based on the beginning, an ordered, as opposed to a disordered, approach to philosophy must be from its beginning. Therefore, an ordered approach to philosophy

[23:20] must start from its beginnings, and these being the first beginnings, the natural beginnings, and the first beginnings. If you don't come into philosophy from these natural beginnings, you're going to have a disordered approach to philosophy. Okay, and of course that's inappropriate if philosophy is what now it's over a road, right? That you approach it in a disordered way, right? And if the end of philosophy is wisdom and the wise men, especially in those order, right?

[23:58] It's obviously most inappropriate to approach philosophy in a disordered way. Okay. Now the third way suggested by the famous Greek proverb, "arche hemisu pantos, " the beginning is half of all. It's a proverb that Plato and Aristotle and the other great Greek philosophers often quote. The beginning is half of all.

[24:33] And Plato says, you know, he quotes the proverb, "The beginning is half of all, " but he says it seems to me to be more than half. Okay, and that's because the beginning is like a what a seed, right? It contains everything else is in a seed. So although it's small in size, it's great in all that it what it strives to.

[24:58] So the beginning is like a what seed, huh? Small in size, but great in power. You can say everything else is contained in the beginning. It's in a seed, right? It's in the the the power of the beginning.

[25:31] That's why the philosophers say that even a little mistake in the beginning is a great one in the end. You know, he's compared to a fork in the road, right? Take the wrong turn there, the fork in the road. You're not far from where you should be, but further you go, that's where you'll be from where you should be.

[25:57] So if you you begin well in philosophy, you're going to be helped throughout the whole philosophy by this. If you begin badly, you're going to be what impeded all the way through philosophy by

[26:13] this. Now a fourth reason, huh? When you study knowledge, you'll find out that knowledge involves two things, huh? Knowledge involves grasping and judging. So even when you read, say, a philosopher, you have to grasp what the man is saying. You have to understand what he's saying, right? But that's only the beginning. The culmination is to be able to judge whether what he says is true or false, right?

[27:11] To separate the true from the what false, right? Okay. Now that's one of my complaints about some of the modern philosophers, right? They write so obscurely that it takes you a long time to figure out what they are saying. And you have little time left for to judge, right? When the bulk of your time and effort should be taken up finding out whether what they say is true or false, right?

[27:43] What do they mean? Now I was teaching at Saint Mary's College. I taught there three years. When I came out there, Joe there in the department, trying to figure out what Heidegger meant by being right. Three years later, I left,

[28:00] So the the proportions all the way. Now what is judging, huh? Well judging is separating the true from the false. I ran out of space here. Let me just hit it. Judging is separating the true from the false by some beginning. Okay.

[28:24] So Euclid will be separating the true from the false by going back to the beginnings of geometry, to the definitions and to the axioms and the postulates, right? Okay. But ultimately, your judgments go all the way back to the natural beginnings, because those are the very first beginnings. Okay. So am I sitting or standing?

[28:47] Sitting. Now, how did you separate the true from the false, there? I am sitting is true, you would say, and I am not sitting is false. We don't know that yet, because

[28:58] if we go back, we could be standing. Okay, okay. Because he's going back to his senses to to separate the true from the false, right? Okay. Okay.

[29:12] It's a beginning, right? Okay. When we were talking about those simple even those postulates in geometry, right? All the right angles have to be equal, right? We went back to the axioms, right? The whole is more than the part, right? Something cannot be both greater than and equal to. It's then both be and not be equal, right? Both be greater than and not greater than. So you go back to some beginning, and ultimately to the natural beginnings.

[29:42] So if you don't come into philosophy from the natural beginnings, you're unable to what? Judge. To judge, right? And you have to separate the true from the false by the beginning. Okay.

[30:03] Now the next group of of reasons emphasize the fact that these are the natural beginnings, right? The emphasis here is upon nature, right? And following nature, huh? Okay. The emphasis was there special emphasis on the first four. On beginning. Beginning, yeah. Importance of the beginning, right? And these are the very first beginnings, right?

[30:33] So you have four reasons there. Now, I gave a whole talk that came out there at Thomas Davis College on the royal fragment of Heraclitus, right? But in the royal fragment, there Heraclitus says that wisdom is to speak the truth and to act in accord with nature, giving ear thereto huh? So quote the royal fragment as part of it here. Wisdom is to speak the truth

[31:14] and to act in accord with nature, giving ear there too, huh? The idea that nature is what wiser than we are, right? And that's why Aristotle often says that human art

[31:46] imitates nature. Nature is something of the divine art in things, put into things, right? So, listening to nature in a way, you are listening to God, right? You are learning from the works of God,

[32:07] and only a fool would think he's wiser than nature. Even the greatest scientists, right? You know, they speak of nature being wiser than we are.

[32:24] So, if you don't come into philosophy from its natural beginning, you are not listening to nature, right? You are not following nature, right? That's a very important reason.

[32:42] Now, think of another thing here. Nature is before what is not by nature, right? It's before being in time, right? In man, let's say.

[33:24] And furthermore, we acquire what is not natural through what is natural. Um, pretty obvious in our experience that nature is before artificial things in time, right? There are natural things before artificial things. They could be without these artificial things, right? But artificial things could not be without the natural things. But in the second proposition, there we acquire what is not natural through what is natural. Well, take the ballpoint pin in your hand, or take the hammer or the saw, or any of these artificial tools we have.

[34:20] Right? How do we acquire those? Well, basically through our hands, right, and our reason too, right? But our hands and our reason are something we have by what nature, right? And you know, it began with a man just taking a rock; they've been using it like a hammer or using it like a, you know. Yeah, yeah, and then gradually perfecting the tools, right? But all of them through the use of his what hands.

[34:50] So we acquire what is not natural through what is natural, right? So you have to acquire the rest of philosophy through what is natural, right? And I was pointing out there even the postulates are acquired by what in some way through the axioms. Okay, and all of our knowledge, in some ways, acquired by following the natural what road, right? And all the philosophizing comes out of wonder and desire to live well and so on, huh?

[35:22] Aristotle, in the book about the poetic art, he points out some interesting things about man and imitation, and he says that man is by nature the most imitative of all the animals. There's no animal that imitates as much as man does, huh? Notice how we imitate. You know, I've been there for the grandchildren, the grandchildren imitate the cat and the sound the cat makes. Have a very good meow, by the way.

[35:48] I mean it's Very convincing, right? And and people who don't know before. And you had the bird sound, the dog sound, and all the other sounds, and you know the old farm animals. And

[36:05] he also points out that you know we naturally delight in imitations, right? But also that at first we learn by imitation. But emphasize the idea that man is by nature the most imitative of animals. So how do we acquire our native language? By imitating our mother and our father and uncles and older brothers and right teachers, right? Take things like custom, right, and fashion. These are not natural things, right?

[36:37] Things are by custom by fashion. But how does custom and fashion arise? Yeah, yeah. Both custom and fashion arise because man is an imitative animal, right? You know, the cat doesn't imitate these things, right?

[37:02] So all these things that are not natural, they presuppose the natural, and they're acquired through the natural. So that's another reason why we have to come in from what is natural into philosophy. Okay.

[37:19] Take another thing, huh? We should come in to philosophy from the more known to us, right? This is naturally coming from what is more known to us. In. From what is more known to us, what is naturally known is what more known, right? Okay.

[38:07] Naturally known is what is most known. We're most sure about the things we naturally know, right? Now, you might have seen in that. little passage he gave you from Thomas there, from the commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics. He speaks of the order of things among themselves, and then the order of them to their end, and he sees a certain order among those two orders, which is more fundamental: the order of many things to their end, or their order among themselves, which is more fundamental.

[39:16] To the end. Yeah, yeah. You take an example of a chair, right? You might have a seat and legs and a back and so on, right? There's an order among these, right? But all of these parts are ordered to one end, which is sitting, okay? And the reason why the, I'd say, the back of the chair comes in to the seat at the angle it does, is because of what?

[39:48] Our body. A sitting, right? Right. I mean, why doesn't it come in at a cute angle? You know, we have more back problems than they do, right? Okay. And even why does it come in maybe at a slightly obtuse angle, right? Rather than a right angle, well, you can see, yeah. There's a little more to pose in a chair, right? It's a little bit obtuse, right? Um there's too much obtuse, I mean you didn't fall asleep, you know, this arching, which is, you know, it's like that.

[40:19] But so the order of them among themselves is an account of what? The order of all of them to their end. The same way in a basketball team or even in an army, right? The order of the parts to each other is an account of the order of the basketball team to winning the game, right? Or the order of the army to victory over the enemy, right?

[40:44] Okay. Okay. So the order to the end is what's most important. All the other orders depend upon that, right? Okay. Now, the end of philosophy is by what? By nature.

[41:07] Okay. So, say the end of philosophy is by nature. Now, when I say by nature, I don't mean that nature is enough to get to the end, because you have to what use your reason, right? And think out all these things, right? Okay. But what is the end, in fact, right? Is determined by nature. And you saw that especially when you say that wonder is the beginning of philosophy, right?

[41:39] Because wonder is the beginning of philosophy, the end of philosophy had to be what? A knowledge of the first cause, right? In other words, this connection between philosophy beginning in this natural desire to know the cause and the end of philosophy being a knowledge of the first cause.

[42:09] And that's why Plato or Socrates, in that meeting we had from the Theaetetus, right? He says, in a way to make you wonder, thing rather, it wasn't a bad genealogy. But Hesiod said, right, when he said that Iris was the offspring of wonder, and Iris. what's the meaning of that that we saw? Iris is the rainbow, and rainbow connects heaven and earth like a messenger. Yeah, Iris is both of those.

[42:44] Iris is both the messenger of the gods, right? Okay, and therefore unites man with God, right? As best man does, the name is all right. And Iris is also the rainbow personified, which joins heaven and earth, place of God and man, right? I mean, even in the Old Testament, you bring the symbol, right, of you the man God in the missionary, right? So he's saying that it wasn't a bad genealogy to say that Wonder unites man with God, right?

[43:14] But how does Wonder unite man? Makes us look for the cause, right? And the cause has a cause, and the cause of the cause, right? And so on, take it to the first cause, and the first cause turns out to be God. Therefore, Wonder unites us ultimately with God on the side of our of our reasoning, right?

[43:36] Um. So, or again, from the natural road, right? The natural road, as we say, goes from the effect towards the cause, as we saw. a few months ago right. So the natural road is moving in the direction of wisdom. We saw that too when we when we saw that you went from sensing to memory to experience to art or science. You're moving in the direction of wisdom.

[44:03] So you see that the the end here of philosophy is something that is by nature, and that the natural desire there, wonder, especially the natural road, are both going in the direction of the first cause. Yeah. So why do we have conflicting philosophies? Because we don't start from the natural beginnings. That's why. In fact, I've come to that reason. You know. Okay.

[44:33] Heraclitus talks about that a lot. Okay. I'll come back to that. So the end of philosophy is by nature, and the order of things to their end is the reason for all the other order in them, right? So if you don't start from the natural beginnings of philosophy, you don't know what the end of philosophy is, and that's the basis for all of your modern philosophy. So the whole thing is cast into what chaos, right?

[45:00] Because you didn't, you weren't wise enough to begin from the natural beginnings, you know? Okay. Now, Heraclitus, huh? He has a marvelous fragment here, which I'll give you a copy of.

[45:26] But the natural is what is common, right? Okay. Heraclitus has some marvelous fragments there dealing with this. The first one is this. He says, "We should not act and speak like those asleep."

[45:59] Now, when I quote this fragment, huh, Heraclitus, we should not act and speak like those asleep. Most people say, "Yeah, that seems to make sense, right?" But not exactly sure of all that it means, though, right? You know, we often say, "Just going to wake up, you know." Okay, we should not act and speak like those asleep, right?

[46:24] Now, there's an obvious sense here that the man who is asleep is cut off from his senses, right? And if he's following anything, it's not his senses but his imagination, right? So he's kind of cut off from the real world, right? Okay. But Heraclitus goes on another fragment to bring out something else. He says, "For the waking, he says, there's one world, and it's common, right? But when men fall asleep, each enters into his own what private world, right?

[46:58] His own dreams, right? Okay. So he's saying something else, right? That those who follow what is private are like those who are what asleep, right? Okay. See, we're all awake now let's say at this table, right? We all know around this table, right? Okay. If we all fell asleep, we might dream or in chapel or we're at home or wherever, right? You know, and these many private views we have in our dreams, right, could all be false, right?

[47:37] See, okay. Now this is going to with truth and falsity, huh? Because Two plus two is is four. There's one true answer, right? But how many false answers? Two, then, right? Okay. Then Heraclitus goes on. He says, "Therefore, we ought to follow what is common, right?

[48:04] But the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own, a private wisdom, huh? Okay. Now, if you stop and think about this, huh? This is the only way for the human mind really to go forward, is to follow what is common, huh? Okay. Now, let me show the you know inductively here how this is. Sometimes we go forward in our knowledge with the teacher and the students, right?

[48:35] Okay. And sometimes we go forward more like equals. When we're discussing something, right? Okay. Now, is it possible for the teacher to lead the students forward without following the common?

[48:59] What the teacher does, if he's a good teacher, is he takes things that the student already knows, right? And he helps the student to put those things together and see something new that he hadn't seen before. Okay.

[49:21] And of course, you know Socrates in the famous dialogue Domino, when he does this with the slave boy, and Socrates says afterwards the slave boy knew it all along. And actually, the slave boy didn't know how to double a square. In fact, he was mistaken, right? But the way to double a square comes out of the slave boy's answer. Okay. But now, if the teacher doesn't know those same things, can he lead the student?

[49:47] See, so there's no way that the teacher can fully, you know, lead the student forward in his knowledge, and not just say, "Believe me, because I'm the teacher." The only way he can do so is by helping the student to use what the student knows already, right? To see something that maybe the teacher sees and the student doesn't yet see, right? But the teacher obviously has to know those very things that he's going to what lead the student from, right?

[50:14] They have to be common to him and the what student. Okay. And so, you go through, say, geometry, right? Um, you come to a new theorem, and Euclid knows that new theorem. You don't, but he leads you to see that new theorem through things that you've learned already, right? You know already, like the axioms and the postulates and the definitions and the theorems you've done already, right?

[50:44] But he helps you to put together what you know already to see the new theorem. Okay, just like I was putting things together to help you see that the diameter had to bisect the circle, right? Okay. You see that? So there's no way the teacher can really lead the student forward in knowing, and not just in believing, right? Without, on the basis of what is common to the student and the teacher.

[51:14] That's why he had problems with Parmenides Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He wasn't saying what was common to. him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the teacher, right, to things that both he and the student sees, right, he leads the student to see something the student at first didn't see, right? Okay, because he has to maybe put things together and see what follows from them.

[51:35] Now. The other way of proceeding is where two people are more or less equal, right? And it's not clear that one knows like the teacher knows, and the student doesn't know, right? Okay. And we're trying to put our two heads together in order to go further, right? Now, when we think about it, neither one of us really, you know, fully knows what we're talking about, right? We're kind of, you know, two are better, two heads are better than one.

[52:01] We're putting our heads together. We're going to be guessing and so on, right? And there's going to be some what disagreement, right? Okay. Now I can say, you know, well, you're mistaken because I'm right. And you can return the compliment and say, no, you're mistaken because I'm right. But is this going to bring us forward? No. The only way we can really go forward is for us to find something, right, that we both know and agree about, right, from which we can what separate.

[52:37] My opinion or your opinion is one is being true and one is being false, right? See. In other words, I can't if I say you're mistaken on the basis of what is private to my thinking, right? And you say that I'm mistaken based on what is private you're thinking. In no way can we go forward in our thinking, can we? Okay. But if we can come back to something that we both have in common, right?

[53:03] And use that to decide where we disagree, right? Then we can go forward, right? See. Now you'll see in the first book of Aristotle's Physics, right, that when he disagrees at one point with Plato, right, he goes back to a common understanding that he and Plato share. And from that he reasons, right, that in this place where they disagree, he's right and Plato's wrong, right? Okay. But.

[53:32] That's the only way to what go forward in. Okay. So whether you're going forward as a teacher tries to lead the students forward, right, or going forward in the discussion more between equals, right, in both cases you must base yourself on the common, right. Okay. Now,

[53:55] it's best if there's something actually common to the two of you, right? Okay. And in the conversation between Socrates and the slave boy, right, the slave boy is at first mistaken as to how to double a square. He thinks you double the what side, right? And actually, if you double the side, you get a square four times as big. And Socrates knows the truth; it should take the diagonal, right?

[54:22] Okay. But both in showing the slave boy that he's mistaken in his first thinking, right, and later on in bringing the slave boy to see that the diagonal would be the side of a square twice as big, right? In both, Socrates proceeds. From the answers of the slave boy, from things that the slave boy does, in fact, know, which Socrates also knows. See, the only way of going forward.

[54:50] See, unless he's going to demand your belief, you know, blind belief. So, in that case, that from which Socrates can show the slave boy that he's mistaken, Socrates is right. Is actually common to him, the slave boy, right? And in general, this is true in philosophy. At the beginning, right? You start from what is actually common. That's the only way to go forward. Now, when you get into what we call experimental science, which is not as certain,

[55:23] there you can't proceed from something that is actually common because even the experiments are never common, even to scientists. But they try to follow Heraclitus so far as possible, right? And Schrödinger, for example the author of the Schrödinger equation in modern physics, right? But the man who perfected the mathematics of wave mechanics, famous physicist. But he says the first and indispensable condition we demand of an experiment is that it be repeatable with the same results.

[55:59] If an experiment cannot be repeated with the same results, we don't consider that experiment worthy of scientific consideration. So, if Professor Berkwist in his lab, you know, conducts an experiment and he announces to the world the results of it, right? But no one can duplicate that experiment and get the same results as Berquist. We will not give any what.

[56:24] And the fact that the experiment can be repeated with the same results, right, is a sign that it's able to be common, right? Which is the best we can do in science.

[56:37] So when Louis de Broglie, you know, proposed the idea of wave mechanics, and this was so unusual and contrary to the customary ideas that they were making a joke out of it, right? I mean here's a Frenchman, they're calling it the Comédie Française you know, the, French national comedy. But fortunately, Einstein at the time had great prestige, and he said, "Just a minute now, there might be something what Louis Louis says, right?

[57:02] " And so they conduct an experiment where Louis's theory predicted what would take place, right? And the experiments were performed in the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, right? And exactly predicted, came out. And then they repeated the experiments in Europe, the same results, right? You know, as the beginning, accepting but Louis Louis's theory, right?

[57:26] But notice if two scientists disagree, and I have I have one hypothesis, and you have another hypothesis, and I say you are wrong because my hypothesis is correct, and you return the compliment and say you are wrong. The only way to go forward is for you and I, you know. To find an experiment we can both perform or both observe, right? An experiment in which my hypothesis would predict something differently than your hypothesis, right?

[57:53] And then we can decide, right? So whether you're in philosophy or in science, the only way to go forward is to follow what is common. Now nothing is more common than the what natural, right? The customary or the fashionable or the chance event or the even choice, right? They're very different, right? So if you're going to follow what is common, you've got to follow what is natural.

[58:22] That's the only way to go forward. Otherwise, you're going to have a private philosophy, an idiotic. You know the Greek word, private, huh? is idios Forget the word idiot. An idiot lives in his own world, right? His own private world, right? It's not the true world, right? You? end up with a with a with a private philosophy.

[58:47] So those philosophers who do not follow what is common, right? Who do not follow what is natural, they're like men who are asleep. Each was were imagining his own what starting point.

[59:03] So you go to say you know the modern philosophers in a general way, and if you read each modern philosophy, you might get the impression that philosophy could begin anywhere and go anywhere and end up anywhere, right? In other words, you can't say anything about it. It's nothing, right?

[59:22] So this is another reason, right? Huh? Could you repeat the the quote of Heraclitus, especially the second part? Yeah, well, I've got it in here.

[59:44] These are their quotes right here. and then I've got the Greek down below there. you know? We should not act and speak like those asleep. For the waking, there is one world, and it is common. But when men sleep, each one turns aside into a private world. Therefore, we ought to follow what is common. Although reason is common to all, the many live as if having a private wisdom.

[1:00:14] And he goes on to say, those who speak with understanding must be strong in what is common to all. And that makes a very interesting comparison. As much as the city is strong in its law, okay. So just as life together in the city is impossible without a common law, right? So the life of the mind, whether it be between teacher and student or between equals in conversation, is impossible without some common basis, some common understanding.

[1:00:45] But notice he goes on. As much as the city is strong in its law, and even more so, for all human laws, meaning the laws of the city, are fed by one divine law, the natural law, which governs as far as it wishes, and is more than sufficient for all, right? So the divine law, the natural law, like you know, don't murder, right? Huh? Don't kill innocent life, and so on.

[1:01:10] That feeds the law about you know the speed limit in the city, right? On the highway, right? And it feeds the law about actually your gun off, right? And every time you invent something, you know, it threatens life, right? It? It gives birth to other laws, right? So eventually, go back to the natural, right?

[1:01:34] Okay. So this is another reason, right? We ought to follow what is common. That's the only way we can move forward. And because men don't understand that, follow the common, that you have more disagreement, right? Then is what inevitable, right? There is always going to be some disagreement, right? But as you come back, you can only resolve the disagreement by going back to the common, right? And it's by departing from the common that you start to get something private, right?

[1:02:07] The fall imagination. Um. Just give one one more here. Um. In coming into philosophy from its natural beginnings, you are introduced into a consideration of everything that is necessary to be a good philosopher.

[1:02:34] What do I mean by that? Well, when you talk about these natural desires, right, you see that the disposition of a man's will, right,

[1:02:49] a good disposition of his will and even of his emotions, is necessary for philosophy, right? And are there other dispositions of will or emotion that are necessary besides wonder and desire to live well?

[1:03:08] Yeah, and one of them, of course, is the love of wisdom. The love of wisdom is not the same thing as wonder. I gave a talk one time about the difference between those two. Okay. Or humility, right? Is humility necessary in the philosopher?

[1:03:27] Um, the great philosopher there, Empedocles, right? He says, you know, men don't live very long, and they seem a part of life, but they boast of having seen the whole. Boasting is one of the species of pride that Gregory talks about, and this is part of where the disagreement among men come, right? That it's natural for a man to see a part of the truth before he sees the whole, right?

[1:03:56] But out of pride, he boasts that he's seen the whole, and you can see that in the thinkers, right? I mean, like in the 19th century, take an example of that. Um, along comes a man named Karl Marx, and he says everything can be explained by the economic production, society.