Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999)
7. Reason as Ability for Large Discourse, Looking Before and After: Defining Reason
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[0:00] it. Yeah, we'll kind of explain the rest of the definition, then we'll start to go through these ones to make sure we know all those questions, right? Okay. Okay.

[0:13] So, Deo gratias. Ready? Let's say our little prayer. Name of the Father, the Son, Holy Spirit. Amen. God, our enlightenment. Guardian angels, strengthen the lights of our minds, order and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. Saint Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor. And help us to understand all that you've written. Name of the Father, the Son, Holy Spirit. Amen.

[0:46] Trying to understand the definitions, that the first word, really, the fundamental word, the fundamental part of a definition that comes before all the rest, is called in logic the genus, and the genus states in a general way what the thing is. So, like in the definition of square, the genus is quadrilateral, right? And that states what a square is, but in a general way, in common with other things.

[1:23] And then you add differences to complete that definition. Okay. Like equilateral and right angle to complete the definition of square. Now, what's the genus here of the definition of reason? What's the fundamental word? Capability. Capability, yeah. Which I take the liberty of shortening to ability, right? Okay. That's the first thing you have to realize, huh? That reason is an ability.

[1:56] Reason is an ability to do something. But the basic idea here is that it's an ability. Now, when you define an ability, after starting with the word ability, you have to complete that definition by telling or saying what it's an ability for, right? Okay.

[2:26] So you have to state for what it is an ability. Okay. Don't know an ability except through what it's an ability for. You don't even know you have an ability unless you do that for which it is an ability. And that's why sometimes people do amazing things in the athletic field. and they say, I didn't know I had it in me, but they had an ability that was undiscovered, right?

[3:01] Or unknown until that point. Now, Shakespeare has a number of words there that are going to say what it's an ability for, right? It's ability for large discourse, and then he'll add later on looking before and after, right? But a second thing you might say is that we define. An ability,

[3:35] not only by what it is ability for. We define ability by the utmost of which it is capable. Okay. Let me illustrate that with two very simple examples I use all the time. Suppose a man is able to lift 300 pounds, right? But he can't lift 301 pounds. That 301 pound would be the, like the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, right? He can lift 300 pounds.

[4:15] Now, if a man can lift 300 pounds, he's also able to lift 200 pounds, right? Or 100 pounds. In fact, he can do them easier than 300 pounds, right? But if you want to define that man's weightlifting ability, what would you define it by? 100 or 200 or 300? 300. Yeah, yeah. Because if you said he has the ability to lift 100 pounds, 200 pounds, that's true.

[4:41] It doesn't tell you the full or complete ability of the man does it? Okay. While the ability to lift 300 pounds, if you think about it, is included the ability to lift 200 or 100 pounds. Do you see that? Okay. If I can run a mile in five minutes, but I can't do it in less than five minutes, right? I'm also able to run it in 10 minutes or 15 minutes, right?

[5:07] It may be easier to do it in 10 or 15 minutes than in five minutes. But if you want to define my capacity, my ability there, you do it by the ability to run a mile in five minutes, not 10 or 15, right? Okay.

[5:24] So the first word that Shakespeare uses, and every other word he uses here. maybe we want to bear in mind these two things, right? Okay. So the first thing he tells us is that reason

[5:39] is an ability for discourse. Okay, it's an ability for discourse. Now we mentioned two meanings of the word discourse. It comes from the Latin word to run, right? Run hither and thither. Okay. So reason is able to go from one thing to another. Okay.

[6:11] But it's also able to what? Know one thing through another. It's able to come to know something it didn't know through things that it does know, as when it reasons, right? It comes to know a statement it didn't know, through other statements that it did know. And you'll see that in Euclid as he goes through one theorem, right? He uses things that he's seen before in order to see something new, right?

[6:39] And when you define, you come to know what something is through other things that you know, right? So he came to know what blank verse was through I am and through yeah, and through unrhymed, right? And? If you didn't know what I am was, we came to know that through knowing what syllables are and two syllables are and the accent on the second syllable, right? Okay. And calculating, adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing is coming to know one through the other, right?

[7:13] Coming to know a number you didn't know through at least two numbers that you did know. Now included, you could say, in the ability to know, come to know one thing through other things, is included the ability to go from one thing to another. Okay, but we define reason more by the ability to know one thing through other things, because that shows you the what utmost of its ability.

[7:42] You see that, okay? Now, why does Shakespeare define it by discourse? Why doesn't he say something about what we talked about before—that there are some things that reason, as it were naturally understands?

[8:03] Why does he not say that? Because other things besides reason can do that. So let's see. So doesn't something with the sense do that? It can recognize something. Perhaps part of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You see something coming right at you. You don't think about it. Just get out of it. Yeah.

[8:35] Yeah. You react to it. But there really is so much using your reason in that case, maybe, yeah. If you can use those things that it already has a natural understanding of, to come to things that it doesn't. Yeah.

[8:48] If there weren't some things we knew without discourse, we wouldn't be able to discourse at all. Like I was saying before with reasoning, if you understood nothing before reasoning, you'd have nothing to reason from, right? If you didn't know what anything was before you define, you have nothing with which to define. See. So in a way that there are some things that you know without discourse is before discourse, right?

[9:18] But what reason naturally understands without discourse is rather general and rather what? Natural. Yeah, and not very precise, right? And so reason can go beyond that, right? Through discourse, it can come to know things more particularly and more expansively, right? Okay. Okay. Yeah. You could also say that, though, even in those things that we naturally understand, like a whole is larger than one of its parts, to some extent we arrive at that by a discourse, because experience comes before any universals.

[10:02] So from experience we get, in a way, the universal. So even the things we naturally understand is something of a spontaneous, you might say, right? Discourse, huh? Okay. From experience of whole and part, we get the idea of whole and part, and then we see that a whole must be more than a part, and so on. Okay. So there's various ways you can see why you would say discourse rather than anything else here as a starting point.

[10:28] Okay. But a sign of that too is that the act which is most characteristic of reason that gets its name from reason, namely reasoning, right, is a discourse, right? Okay. So we see that as most characteristic of reason now, reasoning. Just what's most characteristic of the sense of taste is tasting, right? Okay. But discourse is a little bit broader in meaning than reasoning. It includes defining and counting and calculating and

[11:06] so on. Okay. So that's the first word he uses to say what's an ability for. It's an ability for discourse, right? And reason is able to come to know something unknown through discourse, huh?

[11:20] Okay. In a way, that's the way Albert the Great talks about logic, right? The logic is the art of what? Using what you know to come to what you don't know. And defining is one way, reasoning is the other way. He divides logic into defining and reasoning, right? Okay. But now Shakespeare adds an adjective here, and he says that reason is the ability for large discourse.

[11:59] Now, what does this word "large" mean? Well, I think it has about six meanings here. Okay. Okay. And but to begin with, you can say that a discourse a reason can be called large in three ways.

[12:19] It could be said to be about the large, okay? Or because it's. Limit is large, or and this is stretching the word a little bit more, but in Shakespeare's time, you could move this right away. Because the discourse itself is large, meaning that it's long, right? Okay.

[13:01] Now, each of these is going to have two under it. Now, there's two ways you can understand large here when you say the discourse is about the large. One is that it's about the universal,

[13:25] what is common to many, but is said of many right. We quoted Boethius before that a thing is singular when sensed, but universal when understood.

[13:38] Now you could say that universal in a way covers a large area if you wanted to, right? It's said as many things. So if I have a discourse about odd numbers, let's say, and even numbers, how many things does odd number cover? Infinity, yeah. And when I make a statement like "no odd number is even," I have a way of making a statement about an infinity of things, right?

[14:04] Okay. So the coverage—it's a very large discourse, right? Okay. Now the other sense of large is large as opposed to small, as in small talk. Small talk means what? Talk about little things, unimportant things, right? Okay. And the opposite of large then would be, in that sense, would be great things, right? Okay. So it can discourse about great things. Okay.

[14:51] Now, notice, reason can also discourse about the singular, right? It Can also discourse about little things, right? Mm-hmm. But Shakespeare doesn't define reason as the ability for small discourse, even though reason is more capable of a small discourse than a large one, in this sense. But you wouldn't understand the full ability of reason, right? Okay. I can not only talk about the little things that happened today, but I can talk about what the soul, immortality of the soul, the order of the universe.

[15:26] I can talk about God Himself, right? See. So reason is capable of a discourse about great things, and it can talk not only about the singular, but it can talk about the universal. And in wisdom, we talk about the what most universal. Now, generally speaking, the discourse of the philosopher will be larger than other men in both of these senses. Okay. With the possible exception of the theologian, right?

[15:56] Okay. But let me set aside the theologian for a moment. You can see this in wisdom itself, right? We saw that inscription there, the sixth part, inscription of the wise man. But he he talks about what is said of all things. So his discourse is most large. It's the largest of all, in this sense here. And he talks about the first cause. The first cause is God.

[16:18] So he talks about the greatest thing. So the discourse of the wise men is the largest discourse there is for an actual reason. Okay.

[16:32] Now, you could also say that or call the discourse a reason large, because its limit is large. Now, limit is said both of the what beginning

[16:47] and the what end. Now you find very often that reason arises at one a universal and simple truth by a large induction, right? Okay, So it makes an induction from many singulars to one universal thing. Okay, so that I see an expression sometimes in other authors even a large induction, right? See, that means you took it from many things, right? But you went from many, that was your your beginning, right?

[17:23] To one simple truth, right? Okay. But likewise, reason sometimes sees one simple but very basic truth, something very universal, and then it sees many what consequences of this, right? Or it makes many applications of this, right? Okay, I can see that also in the equations of the physicist, right? From one equation, how many things can he deduce? Force equals mass times acceleration. By plugging in different forces or masses, you can what calculate an infinity of different accelerations, right?

[18:02] Okay. The axioms, right, are used in almost every theorem of Euclid, right? So from one axiom, there are many, many, many different things that are what seen, right? Okay. And again, perhaps the the wise man, his discourse is the largest in both of these senses, huh? Because he has the most universal what he has the largest in sense induction, huh? And as we've seen beyond finality, he needs an experience not just of many singulars, but experience of all the particular parts of philosophy before he can see this thing universally, huh?

[18:44] And he sees principles right that can be applied everywhere. Okay. So reason is capable of a large discourse in these two senses too. Now the third way we speak of a discourse as being large is because in some way it's long, and again there's two ways we speak of a discourse as long. One would be if it goes through many what steps, right?

[19:23] Now, if you start to go through, say, Book One of Euclid. You see, you have to go through many steps to arrive at the Pythagorean theorem. So, if someone comes to me and says, "Berquist, show me the Pythagorean theorem," and I say, "Well, the only proof I know is Proposition 47 of book one of Euclid," so you have to go through forty-six things. That's when the king is supposed to have protested, right?

[19:52] You know, and he wanted a short road, right? And and uh Euclid's supposed to have said, "You know, there is no royal road to geometry, right? " You know, anybody who is a king or or a commoner, right, a slave, if he's going to know the Pythagorean theorem, he's got to go through all these steps, right? Now, notice again when we say that reason is capable of doing that, it's certainly Euclid is capable of doing that, right?

[20:17] We don't mean that it's easy for reason to go through a many-step argument than it is one that has just a couple of steps, right? In fact, when it's a couple of steps, he's more capable, right? But you don't fully understand the ability of reason unless you realize it can go through these many steps, and perhaps in the sense of geometry, arithmetic, or the other part of philosophy, you have a long discourse in the sense of many steps.

[20:43] Okay. Now, the other way you can speak of a discourse as being long is that it goes between things that are very what far apart, right?

[21:00] Between things very far apart. You probably heard of the first proof of the existence of God, right? Which goes from motion all the way to to God, right? When you study motion, you find out that it's hardly actual, right? It's hardly there. See, when I am moving here, right, part of my motion has gone by, and part of my motion is to come, right? And the part that's gone by doesn't exist.

[21:36] Part that's to come doesn't exist yet. And how much motion is ever actual? No part of motion is ever fully actual, you know. So you go from motion, which is the least actual of acts, right, all the way to God, and you find out that God is pure act. Everything in the universe is perfect. That's going as far almost as you can go, right?

[22:06] And sometimes Thomas reasons from matter, which, but the furthest even further away away from God, he speaks of matter having in some way the ability to be infinitely different things, right? And he goes from that to God's infinite ability, right? You know, that's a tremendous what distance, right?

[22:29] We see that too in in Scripture when you speak of God metaphorically, right? The Lord is my rock. Well, quite a distance, in between you know, a rock in God, right? You know, even further apart than the soul in God, right? The rock in God, right? But we're in a sense going from the rock to God, right? That's that's that's going a awful long way. Do you see that?

[23:00] So again, that's difficult reason to do, but it's capable of that. Of course, the wise man especially goes this way. You look at the books in wisdom there, the eleventh through the fourteenth, especially eleven and twelve, where Aristotle arrives at the first cause. He starts in the most imperfect of all things, most imperfect beings. He goes up towards more perfect beings, and he finally arrives at God.

[23:28] You know. That's the longest discourse that your mind will make in this sense down here. So, but maybe in mathematics we make a longer discourse in this sense here, right? But at least in five of these six senses, the discourse of the wise man is the largest of all, right? But even in other parts of philosophy, when we get into natural philosophy, the discourse is much more universal than is for the experimental scientist.

[24:02] We get into ethics, and ethics we talk about all the goods of man. That's what Socrates and the Athenians were disagreeing about—the order of all the goods of man. So, I mean, it's very universal compared to, to, you know, cooking, the medical art, these arts that deal with one particular good, right? And you know, ethics talks about the purpose of man, right? Of course, in natural philosophy, we talk about the soul.

[24:33] That's a very great thing, right? It's not as great as God, but it's. So, you can see in general the discourse of the philosopher is larger than other men. But what does that mean? In almost all these senses, his discourse is larger.

[24:54] Okay. So Shakespeare was saying an awful lot, right? When he says the reason is the ability for large what? Of discourse. he doesn't stop there.

[25:13] Now, the next word that Shakespeare adds is the word "looking," up. and let's look at that word by itself before we look at what he adds to that, before and after, right? Let's just take the word "looking." Now, if we try to define looking, how would you define it?

[25:42] Trying to see. Yeah, trying to see, right? Okay. Okay. Now, to see has two meanings. The first meaning, of course, is the act of the eye, right? That's really the only name for that act. The second meaning of to see is to imagine, right?

[26:15] So, first meaning, the act of the eye. Second meaning is to imagine. You see this in beginning of Hamlet there, huh? The friends of Hamlet. Have seen the ghost of his what, father walking the ramparts there at Elsinore, castle, and they see it with their eyes, okay, and they're going to tell Hamlet about this, and before they have a chance to tell him, Hamlet says, "I can see my father now."

[26:53] They're looking around. I said, "You see the ghost, right?" And he says, "In my mind's eye, right?" Okay, but then he means what? He can picture his father in his imagination. Later on, he sees him with his eyes. Now, the third meaning of the see would seem to be to understand.

[27:20] Notice there is an order there. The word to see is an example of what the philosopher calls a word equivocal by reason. Equivocal means it has more than one meaning. Now, sometimes a word has more than one meaning by chance, but other times it has more than one meaning by reason, and then there is going to be some kind of before and after, an order of meanings, huh?

[27:45] But as Thomas points out, we name things as we know them, as we become aware of them. So the order of naming follows the order of knowing, and of course the basic order of knowing is the road from the senses into reason that we talked about. So obviously, you name what is closest to the senses, right? And that's the act of the eye itself, right? But imagining is more like seeing with the eyes than understanding is, and the sign of that is that in a dream we think we're seeing with the eyes, and we're actually imagining in a dream.

[28:20] It's not until we wake up and have the use of our eyes and recognize that we're imagining rather than seeing, right? But even in a dream, we don't confuse understanding with what seeing, right, with the eye

[28:33] doing. But sometimes people mix up imagining and what thinking. I imagine that's so. I think that's so, right? And you see, English philosophers like Locke and so on, Berkeley, use the word "idea." Sometimes they mean an image. Sometimes they mean a thought, and they can't tell the two apart. Okay, but the image is always something what

[28:55] singular, right? Okay, but the thought is basically something universal. Okay, but notice how in the imagination we try to imitate a little bit something that what reason does. We can take you know two images and kind of form a what a new image, right? So I remember one of the fairy tales when I was a child, where there was a glass mountain. You remember that one? How can the prince get up there with his horse in the glass mountain?

[29:27] Right. See, notice we've seen with our senses a mountain or a hill, right? And we've seen with our senses and felt glass and so on, right? And then we imagine, what? Glass mountain? Or you imagine a golden mountain or something, right? It's a little bit like what you do with the discourse of reason, the sense of getting a new image by putting together, right? Two images. It's not really coming to know one thing through another, but it resembles more of that.

[29:58] Okay. So when Shakespeare says looking, trying to see, what sense is he using the word to see? The Third sense. The third sense, right? Okay. Now, why is he adding this, right? Why is he adding this? Why is he not satisfied with saying reason is the ability for large discourse?

[30:31] That's one thing that you can go through all the steps, but unless you come to a conclusion, you don't understand it yet. Yeah. Unless you, if you think about something but never come to understand it, there's something incomplete, right? Okay. And when reason is thinking and reasoning, it's trying to what? Understand, right? Because this motion of reason is not for the sake of motion, but it's for the sake of understanding, right?

[31:01] You're thinking and reasoning. Your mind is in motion, but it's still coming to rest in the sense of understanding. Okay. So he wouldn't really be telling us complete what reason is if he says its ability for large discourse, because you might think the discourse is the ultimate thing that reason is is aiming at. No, it's trying to through its discourse to come to what? Understand, right? Okay.

[31:30] Do you see where he adds that? That word, right? Yeah. Sometimes Aristotle calls philosophy a theoria, which is a Greek word for looking, right? You're looking at things and you're trying to understand them, right? Okay. But in the end, philosophy, as we said before, will be a reasoned out understanding of things.

[32:02] Now, he adds to the word looking now the words what? Before and after. Before and after, yeah. It's interesting how, if you look at at most prepositions, if not almost all of them, their first meaning usually is tied up with place in some way. Oh yeah. So the first meaning of in is we're in this room. Second meaning part of the whole. The other meanings are further removed.

[32:35] The first sense of before it's I'm before you now, right? Okay. The first sense of under right is spatial, right? Okay. What's interesting here is that the word understand is taken from under.

[33:00] But Shakespeare doesn't say, you know, ability for large discourse, looking under. Although he could say that, right? But he says looking what before and after, right? Now, okay, that's very interesting, huh? Interesting, huh? That that we have two different, you know, spatial images but leading to the same thing, right? To give an example, what I mean here, we think of the cause. Cause as being before the effect, right?

[33:32] Okay, and that's not the original sense of before, which would be like before the table, right? I'm not the cause of the table, right? Okay, or yesterday is before today because I'm not the cause of today, right? But we do speak of the cause as being before the effect, don't we? But we also speak of the underlying cause, right? Okay, so we use two different words, right, with a different spatial image originally, right?

[34:02] To signify the same thing in a way, the effect follows upon the cause, right? It's a result of the cause, right? So we think of the effect as coming after the cause, huh? Okay, but we also speak of the cause as if it were what supporting the effect, huh? And that's what we use the expression the underlying cause, huh? And I think I mentioned how in English the English word for cause is what

[34:31] ground, huh? Did I mention that before? Yeah. You don't. We don't use it so much because we borrowed the Latin word cause, right? You still see it, you know, in the more conservative things like the law, right? Where they speak of what? Oh, grounds. Grounds for divorce or something, right? Yeah. Meaning cause for divorce, right? Okay. And Shakespeare, they say, is a master of English language, huh?

[35:00] And some people think it was a bad custom, but the Elizabethans were always punning on words, okay? And Shakespeare, he's always punning on the word understand, huh? You know, and like the servant, one servant says to the other servant, "You know, you don't understand me. I don't understand you. " and says right? well my cane understands me understands me, right? Yeah. I don't. I know we're going to, you know, put that on the scale of humor, but I mean, it doesn't make you stop and think of the fact that what, the word to stand under and the word understand have the same etymology, right?

[35:38] Okay. And it's not simply by chance that they do, right? Okay. Okay. Um. But um. The connection between the etymology of the word understanding and the meaning of the word, right, can be seen in this way: to say that to understand something means to know what stands under it or what is said to stand under it, right? Um, or it's to know something through what is said to stand under it, huh?

[36:14] Okay. So to understand an effect means to know what the underlying causes of it, right? Okay. Now the English word for cause there is ground, right? Which stands under other things, huh? In Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet, there he puns. On the two meanings of ground, ground meaning what? The earth Yeah, the earth, and ground meaning the cause, right? You know that scene at the end there, where after Romeo has arrived at the thing and he gets, he finds the Count de Paris there.

[36:51] Remember that? And again, to a little fight, as the Count de Paris thinks he's come there to desecrate the grave, right? He Doesn't realize the truth, and Romeo kills the Count de Paris, right? And then he goes in there and he drinks the poison that the apothecary is giving him, right? And then he dies, and Romeo. Then Juliet wakes up from the potion that Friar Lawrence gave her, right?

[37:15] And she sees Romeo dead, so she okay. So, finally, night guard watchman come on the scene, right? And what the hell is going on here, right? Juliet's supposed to be dead and buried, and she's laying there freshly bleeding, you know. And Romeo, who's an exile, is laying there dead, and the Count de Paris is dead. What's going on? And so the watchman said, "We see the ground where all these woes do lie, but the true ground we cannot without further circumstance describe, right?

[37:48] Okay, we see the ground which abides our life, but the true ground, the cause of all these unexpected deaths, right? We don't know, right, until Friar Lawrence, you know, illuminates us. Okay.

[38:08] So we do speak of the cause as underlying the effect. We do speak of the cause in English as the ground, right? Okay. In Latin, they they use the other spatial image. They spoke of the what of the of the effect is depending upon the cause, right? Oh yeah. Not depending means it hangs from, right? Okay, like a woman's pendment, you know, it hangs from the, you know, down from the other part, right?

[38:36] Okay. But no, she's using a different image, right? One thing you think of the causes were supporting something in existence, right? Another thing is holding it up into existence, right? See, so you have three different images there, right? You know, spatially above and below, right? Aristotle, you know, will speak of the cause. The first cause as being the highest causes. Oh my.

[39:03] Okay, because you're thinking of the cause as being above the effect, right? In English, we think of the cause as being the ground, right? And therefore, being the lower thing, right? And but even Latin and Greek, there's only speak of the underlying cause, right?

[39:23] And then we also speak of the cause as being before the effect. Oh yeah. Okay. So you shouldn't understand it in in any of these. You know, you shouldn't be tied to the spatial image, right? But you shouldn't recognize.