Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
26. Contradiction and the Progress of Knowledge: Heraclitus, Aristotle and the Untying of Knots
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/3-natural-hearing/026-contradiction-and-the-progress-of-knowledge-heraclitus-aristotle/

[0:00] Now, sometimes I say this is the first major example, not the most difficult one, but it's the first major example in our learning of how we go forward by untying contradictions. This is why I say this is the first one, in a way, is going back to what Shakespeare points out there in *Troilus and Cressida*. Ulysses points out there, called Ulysses there, but Odysseus. Things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs.

[0:36] It's motion or. Change that grabs the attention of our senses, and since the natural rose from the senses into reason, in a way, emotional change is what first absorbs our mind's attention. And but all change seems to be between contraries or opposites, and therefore there seems to be an apparent contradiction in all change, right? Or one opposite is becoming the other. So this, in a way, is the first, right, in the order of learning, of the way in which contradictions lead to the development of our knowledge when we what untie them or break them down.

[1:22] So that's why it's appropriate to stop, as we will look at those secondary readings, talk about the role of contradiction, development of our knowledge, because this is the first major example. And ever since this, right, the great philosophers and the great scientists and the great theologians have gone forward in the same way. And perhaps was Heraclitus who first saw something of this, and therefore I sometimes call Heraclitus the father of the progress of the Human Mind.

[2:00] It's quite a title, right? But it's hard to exaggerate, you know, you know, the greatness of what Heraclitus is at least anticipating, as you'll see in some of the fragments, huh? You see, and there's reason to think, you know, to read the fragments that maybe doesn't really think day and night and sleeping and waking, but he wants to emphasize that apparent contradiction, so you've got to be forced to what think more deeply about this.

[2:26] And we have fragments of Heraclitus in the fragments on method. They remind what a little bit of Socrates, right? Where he says, "Men do not understand the things they meet every day, even though they think they do." He says, and that's in a way what Socrates is saying. But the way you make men aware of the fact they don't understand what they think they understand is by showing that they are in what seems to be a contradiction at least in their thinking.

[2:52] And if they're reading a contradiction, that's even worse, of course. But even the appearance of contradiction in their thinking is a sign that they really haven't what understood fully what they're talking about. You

[3:04] can't solve the contradiction that we had in our apparent contradiction DK 12 there of Anaxagoras, right? You don't really understand what's required for the mind to direct itself to move itself, right? I tell you that I, you know, at all these graduations, I go to Nazianzen graduations, you know, and there's always some, you know, valedictorian or somebody up there, you know, saying, "And the professors taught us to think for ourselves, right?

[3:31] " But that means that you can, in a way, direct your own mind, right? And that's not an easy thing to do, right? Did they really succeed in doing that? Well, you better be sure that the professors succeeded in. Getting you to separate what you really know, what you don't know, separate what is more known, what is less known, and I'm not sure that they've done that at all.

[3:49] Now it's illusion, right? They really haven't learned to think for themselves yet, huh? You know, one of the greatest compliments a Socrates is ever paid me. You know, you know that I'm able to move myself. He says, he doesn't say I like it, you know. But practice is a witness to the fact that it's not easy, right? To move yourself, huh? Yeah, see, because you got to really know what you know, what you don't know, and use what you do know to move yourself to what you don't know, or what's more known to you, to move yourself to what's less known to you.

[4:23] Yeah, but you know, you know, they they carry on a step about the confused and the distinct, right? There's no what's more known, what's less known. So his mind is all out of order.

[4:41] Okay. Now we should stop and look at these a little bit, huh? Because we don't want to lose the, you know, the high point here, right? Okay.

[5:00] But before I do that, one one good example of this, huh? And one reason why I emphasize this as well as this, right? What you see here is that what changes is composed, right? Unless there's a real composition between things that are not identical, change would be what impossible, right? So we take the proposition

[5:36] that we learn here, and we say what changes is composed. Okay, this is from Lectio 11, right? 11th reading. Now, in theology, before we take up whether God changes, in fact, the first thing we take up about God after the existence of God, in Summa Theologiae, is that God is what simple, right? In Summa Theologiae, in the Prima Pars, the first question is on the nature of theology and so on.

[6:14] The second question is on the existence of God, and the third question is on the simplicity of God. But when he goes through the eight articles, there, if you look at the eight articles, what he's proving is God is not composed in this way, he's not composed in that way, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Finally, he's not composed anyway.

[6:36] So God is not. Composed. Now you got a syllogism in the second what figure, right? Where you're affirming something of what changes and denying that of God, right? So you can syllogize then that God is what does not change. God is not changing.

[7:09] What's an example of how the philosophy of nature and this fundamental proposition we learn here is used in theology, right? Now that God is not composed, I mean, you see the philosophy of nature is important to learn that too. But here I'm just showing, you know, how after you learn that you would take this proposition and syllogize that God is unchanging, huh? At least in some theology you do that, huh?

[7:36] In case you show that God is simple before you show or take up whether he can change, huh? That's a very important thing, then, huh? But it's also an example of what we said and talking about the importance of the knowledge of the general, right? In theology, because in theology we know more what God is not than what he is, huh? It's in the beatific vision of St.

[8:03] John tells us that we will see him as he is, right? We will see him face to face. So when you're knowing something negatively, the more general the thing that you can negate, the closer you are to that thing, as opposed to affirmative knowledge, right? If I say you're a body, I'm not as close to what you are as if I say you're a living body, and that's not as close as say you're an animal, and that's not as close as to say you're a man, right?

[8:34] But if I'm knowing you negatively, which is closer to you, you're not a dog, or you're not a quadruped, four-footed animal, which is closer to you? Neither. Well, you're not a dog. No. You're not a four-footed animal, right? But when I say you're not a dog, I'm separating you from the dogs. Right. But you might be a cat or a horse or an elephant, right? See? When I say you're not a quadruped, you're not four-footed.

[9:04] I separated you from. More. Yeah, yeah. If I say, you know, that seven is a number, I'm not as close to seven as if I say it's what an odd number, right? If I say it's a prime odd number, I'm getting even closer, and so on. But if I say it's not four, I'm not as close to it as if I say it's not even.

[9:30] So, in order to understand the negation of the general, you have to understand distinctly the general. So if you have a distinct knowledge of change in general. Which is what we're getting here, namely that what changes is always composed, right, of the contrary in the strict sense, and the underlying subject. Then you can syllogize after you know that God is not composed. You can syllogize that God does not change.

[10:00] So you don't bother to show in theology God does not walk, he doesn't run, he doesn't crawl, he doesn't grow, he doesn't right, he doesn't change. That's what we show, right? See, because we can negate that through these propositions that are very general about change. Is it okay?

[10:22] That's a very important thing there, and notice this helps you to understand something too about almost all the other things shown about God. That, for example, we demonstrate in theology that God is good. Right, okay. Since God is altogether what simple, is there any distinction, any real distinction in God between God's God and His goodness? No, they're identical, right? Because He's altogether simple. So goodness itself could never be bad.

[11:01] See, and that's why once we show that God is good, or He's just, right, or He's knowing, in no way can He be the opposite of those things—unjust or bad or ignorant or something of that sort, right? But you can understand it from this, right? Because if hardness and butter were the same thing, then butter could never be what soft, right? See,

[11:33] but that also, you know, points out another thing. As Aristotle explains in the third book about the soul, our soul, being in our body, is naturally turned to the what it is is something you can sense or imagine. And in those things, there is a distinction between the form and what has the form.

[11:57] And so our language reflects that, right? So we have, right, through our language, the abstract word and the concrete word we've caught, right? And so when we come to talk about God, no word in a way is adequate to talking about God. Because if we say that God is goodness, we seem to be saying He's that by which something is good, right? Rather than saying God is good, right?

[12:24] But if we say God is good because He is good, very good, then we seem to be saying that He has goodness, right? And therefore, there is a composition of God. See, so as Thomas, following Dionysius and others, says, no name is what adequate to talking about God, right? And we can both affirm and deny these names, right? We can say God is good because He really is good, but the name is inadequate because there is no composition there of God and His goodness.

[12:56] We can say God is goodness itself because of His simplicity, right? But He's not just that by which something is good; He's good Himself. See, but our way of speaking, right, falls short because our way of speaking is adapted to what talking about material things, where matter, and the subject, and the form are two different things. There's

[13:22] an awful lot you can learn from this. That's extremely useful in theology, right? And necessary in theology. It's interesting, you know, if you read the life of Thomas Aquinas, like in Weisheipl's famous biography and so on. Thomas was in the only place in Christian Europe where he could get what we're getting here. At the University of Naples, right? Which is a kind of heterodox place in some ways, but it was the only place in Europe at the time where Aristotle's so-called physics, but we call the Natural Hearing, was available, right, to the in the Christian West.

[13:58] Aristotle's books were just gradually coming back, right? So a kind of interesting example of divine providence, right? Because if Thomas didn't have the physics of Aristotle, the books of Natural Hearing, he would not have been able to do theology the way he did it in the Summa Theologiae.

[14:20] And if we talk later on about time and eternity, right? That when Thomas understands the definition of eternity, which comes from Boethius there in the Consolation of Philosophy, he does so in terms of how the definition negates certain things about time, that in the definition of time that Aristotle brought out, and negates certain things about the now of time which Aristotle brought out, right? So unless you have an understanding of time in natural philosophy, you can't really understand the definition of eternity.

[14:56] One thing that De Koninck did when he when he gave the course on time, which is really you know the second part there of Book Four, you talk about place and you talk about empty too, but place and empty, and then you talk about time. But you know, in graduate school, you have a whole course just on time, right? Is that difficult? But at the end of the course, De Koninck would you know stop and talk a little bit about the definition of eternity, a theological footnote, right, to show how your understanding of time is necessary to understand what eternity is in the via negativa, right, via negationis So we'll see that later on if we get that far.

[15:36] But here you can see how a general understanding of change is more useful in theology than understanding of how fast a ball falls to the ground is the only thing we'd be trying to figure out, right? But that's useless in theology. You're not going to you know go around to getting all those particular things.

[15:55] The same way, you know, we'll show that God is has no parts in theology. So you got to know what a whole and what parts are. But we don't bother to show that God doesn't have two atoms of hydrogen one of oxygen. So it's good to know that water is H2O if that's what it is. But it's not particularly useful in theology. See, in theology, you're going to show that God has no parts, right?

[16:19] And so he doesn't have the letters C A T. You know that's true. I mean, doesn't have any parts. Why? Why you don't deal with the wall? You know, you know, it doesn't have

[16:31] rye whiskey and sweet vermouth, which Manhattan has, right? It's not composed of those things. You don't have to know what what Manhattan is made out of or what water is made out of, right? You see, because you are going to show that he has no parts. But you got to know what a hole and what parts are, okay? It's more useful to know that a hole has parts than to know that water is H two O in theology.

[16:57] That's one reason why we say you know to know natural things in general. It's a foundation for understanding natural things, right? But you want to go on and try to know them in particular later on. But as far as theology is concerned, that general knowledge is what's really most essential. You don't usually need that particular knowledge in theology. we're actually into moral theology, right? you're saying how this untying this contradiction is the first substantial example.

[17:31] yeah, in order of learning. it's this. As far as I know, it seems like I don't know of anyone else who has even untied that contradiction besides Aristotle and those who. Yeah, now you might say that Plato, to some extent, is untying that in the in the Phaedo, right? Okay. Now, now Plato, you must remember, is a student of what Cratylus, as well as of Socrates, huh?

[18:02] And Cratylus was a student of Heraclitus. And so I don't know if you do know the Phaedo at all, but when he starts to reason out or try to reason out anyway, the immortality of the human soul, the first argument, he makes an induction, right? And then he syllogizes from what he induces, right? But the induction is that changes between contraries. Well, Heraclitus, in a way, begun that in the fragment that we saw, right?

[18:30] But in the Phaedo, there is a little more full, right? Okay. And that's what Aristotle has there, right? So it's a real continuity between these three great minds, huh? And then later on, if you look at the last argument, huh? Socrates,

[18:54] there he's saying there he's denying the one opposite can become the other opposite, right? And then one says, "You were saying just the opposite there in the beginning, right? " And Socrates says, "Well, you see,

[19:17] if one if one of two opposites cannot be the other, right? But a third thing maybe can what? You know, so he's in a sense getting close to the distinction of Aristotle, okay?

[19:31] But he he talks about whether one of the opposites is in the definition of the third thing. You know, we'll come back to that. you know we'll take the Phaedo but I'll give you what I mean. Hard is not in the definition of butter, is it? So if butter is hard, it can become soft. It was going to lose its hardness, right? But it can still remain butter, right?

[20:00] But if you have, let's say, virtue here and vice, which are contraries, which are contraries but virtue can never be vice, right? But if virtue is in the definition, let's say, of courage, right? Or virtue is in the definition of justice, right? Can justice ever be a vice? No. No. See. So he's in a sense making a distinction something that Aristotle is making here. See. At least he says, you know, there's a reason why this can become soft, but this cannot become vicious.

[20:32] You know, because this is the very definition of that, but that's not right. It's not exactly the same distinction, but I mean, there's a certain. Proximity, right? Of course, the more you read Plato, the more you realize how much Aristotle got from Plato, right? Just as how much Mozart got from what? Haydn, right? You know, I was listening last night. There, a little bit to the Vienna quartets of Mozart, right?

[20:58] And there's you're reading kind of notes with it, you know. And these are early quartets of Mozart, the Vienna quartets. But how he's influenced by the, I don't know, Opus 17 and 20 of Haydn, right? And how he's kind of imitating him, but you know, trying to do his own thing to some extent too. But I guess you know the next set of quartets Mozart wrote, right?

[21:21] This absolutely perfect. Oh. And he wrote these later on, you know, starting around 387. The first one is. And the Vienna quartets are down below 200, right, a crucial numbering. But Einstein says that right. It's after Mozart heard the Russian quartets of Haydn, right? That one was the most tremendous influence upon Mozart. And what Haydn had finally achieved in the Russian quartets. Among other things was that each instrument had its own what?

[21:54] Role, you know, they were just accompanying the others, right? I mean, it really, really was a quartet, really a ensemble, you know, of four voices and so on. And tremendous effect upon Mozart, and stimulated him to write the what? These six quartets. And when Haydn heard those, right, that's when he made his famous judgment, right? He came to Mozart and he said, as a honest man before God, I say to you, your son is the greatest composer that I know.

[22:22] You know, not just living, but you know, in the whole history of music, huh? And this, of course, very gratifying to Mozart's father, right? To hear Haydn say that, you know. But then, when Mozart, you know, heard, you know, this from his father, right? He sat down. He dedicated these six quartets to Haydn. Oh. You know, he's got a very beautiful letter where he dedicates them. You know, father sending his sons into the world, right?

[22:44] And he entrusting them to this great man. But in another, you know, letter we have Mozart. He said, "I had to dedicate them to Haydn because he taught me how to write the quartet, huh? " I mean, those is really amazing, huh? I was talking to somebody at the house they were doing some logic last night, and I was talking about you know the difference between the Haydn quartets, which you know evoked that remark of of

[23:10] Haydn, right? And the Vienna quartets, it's you know, stunning, right? You know, you know the greatness of the Haydn quartets compared to those early ones. It's like when Mozart's father was twisting his arm, you know, to write violin concertos. In about a year, that he wrote five violin concertos. And it's fairly around 200, a crucial number. It's fairly early, right? But this is the first two; they're good, you know.

[23:35] But then the third is much better, and the fourth and fifth. I mean, it's incredible the way he he goes forward. I mean, just just unbelievable, you know. It seems like Shakespeare going forward to *Titus Andronicus*. You know, one of my editions of Shakespeare, you know, in the notes in the beginning of *Titus Andronicus. this disgusting play. In many ways, it is disgusting. You know, if we compare that to the great tragedies, Shakespeare, you know, two different worlds, right?

[24:05] I mean, Shakespeare's greatness does not rest on *Titus Andronicus*. But it's amazing to see that the way they progress. You know, all of a sudden, I remember myself going from was it thirty fifth, thirty six symphony to thirty eight symphony. I said, "See what it what it developed." But you know, I said, "What about thirty seven symphony?" It's like, of course, there is no thirty seven symphony.

[24:31] Mozart. It was all a mistake. He wrote a textual introduction to a symphony by Joseph Haydn's brother, Michael Haydn, right? And he thought the whole symphony was by Mozart, so that became known as the thirty seven symphony. But there is, in fact, no thirty seven symphony. So thirty six was followed by thirty eight, right? So the missing link is not there.

[24:53] Okay, so let's. We need just ten copies. You need. Yes, I think there's ten. I think I got ten people on my shoulders. Something that's

[25:19] good to take off and just have one paragraph here, Aristotle, make a kind of excursion because they say it not only illustrates the role of contradiction in the development of our knowledge. Aristotle goes forward from two to three, or from a confused to distinct knowledge, by untying the apparent contradiction or change. But it's also the first kind of major example of how our mind goes forward. Okay.

[25:47] Now, what I've done in these readings here, I took two from philosophers, and you can see who they are: there, Heraclitus and Aristotle, and and then I take some from scientists of the 20th century here on pages two and three and four. A little bit of five, right? And then in the middle, there or a little before the middle of page five, I give you to what's from theology, right?

[26:22] Okay, so I'm going to go through and kind of comment on these. What's kind of remarkable is that, despite all the differences that there are, and they're important differences in the way philosophy proceeds, and the way science proceeds, right, and the way theology proceeds, there are important differences in all of these. In all three of them. Contradiction plays a fundamental role in going forward, huh? And as I say to the students, you know, the old proverb, "you don't get it from the horse's mouth," right?

[26:55] These great discoveries we usually get the second, third, fourth, fifth, and who knows how many hands, and we don't usually aren't aware of the role the contradiction played in the great discoveries. But you go to Einstein himself, or to Niels Bohr in science, for example, and ask them, you know, what was the starting point for this discovery? They'll often point to a what? Contradiction, right? Huh? Okay.

[27:23] Now, Heraclitus is maybe the first man, as they say, to see something of this, huh? And in that way, we could call him the father of the progress of the human mind, huh? Now we saw these fragments here, but now I'm applying them to knowledge rather than actual world. War is the father of all things, right? The king of all things, right? And war, of course, is a what?

[27:50] A conflict, right? Okay. Now, just for a second, look at a paragraph from Einstein on page five. There, we'll be talking about that itself, but just the last sentence from Einstein there. All of the essential ideas in science, right? It's a universal affirmative. All the essential ideas in science were born in a dramatic conflict, right? Between reality and our terms of understanding. Okay. War is the father of all things, right?

[28:28] Everything was born out of a conflict, right? Okay. Now DK8 is saying the same thing, okay? But now DK54, that's saying a beautiful one. The hidden harmony is better than the what? Apparent harmony. Now, harmony is the opposite of what? Contradiction. Harmony is a Greek word meaning they fit together. Where when things contradict each other, they don't fit together, huh? Okay. So he's saying the hidden harmony is better than the apparent harmony.

[29:09] Now, let's talk about that a bit. Take the simplest example that we have from the Meno Socrates asks the slave boy, "How do you double a square? " Right. To double the side, right?

[29:46] Slave boy is in a state of what? Apparent harmony, right? He thinks that this is consistent, right, with other things that he thinks, right? Okay, but Socrates says, okay, he takes an example. Let's say square two by two, and you say if you double the side, you get four by four. You have a square twice as big, right? When you figure this out, you say two by two will be four, and four by four is sixteen.

[30:17] But four is double of two, and you said the square is twice as much space as B, so sixteen is double of four. But even the slave boy knows now he's been let out of the state of apparent harmony. He's been let out of the state of apparent harmony into a contradiction, right?

[30:37] And then Socrates. turns To Meno and he says haven't we, done a good turn, right? Before he go out and tell the whole world, the way to double he squares double the side. But now he knows that isn't so, right? Now he he knows that he was mistaken, right? So a mistake and error is removed from his mind. And furthermore, what he wants to know now, see, he's not going to desire to know how to do this if he thinks he knows already, right?

[31:07] Now he'll want to know because he knows. Now, hidden under that contradiction is the way you actually do it, right? Which is to take the what diagonal, right? Okay. But that is hidden, right? That's the hidden harmony. But that's the true harmony.

[31:30] Okay. So the hidden harmony is better than the what apparent harmony. But one is separated from the other by a what contradiction, right? Just take a quote here from from Niels Bohr on page four there, the the last one there for me. Difficulties, and you'll see in the context, the difficulties referred to contradictions, right? Difficulties were for him Bohr merely the external appearance of new knowledge. As hidden under these contradictions was the what, what?

[32:22] And in an apparently hopeless contradiction, right? He conceived the germ, the seed of wider and more comprehensive order and harmony, right? That's the hidden harmony, right? But it's hidden under an apparently hopeless contradiction, right? Okay. But one that he sees, right? In which underneath he's going to find this better, more comprehensive order and harmony. That's a hidden harmony, obviously. While these other physicists are going around in a state of apparent harmony, they don't realize the contradictions in their own thinking.

[33:05] Okay. Now you could apply that in particular to nature, right? Nature loves to hide. So the harmony of nature, the true harmony, is usually what hidden, right? And on the surface, right, there is contradiction. Nature, as we saw in the definition of nature, is defined by motion or change. Nature is the beginning and cause of motion and of rest, right? In that which it is first as such and not by happening.

[33:43] But in motion of change itself is an apparent contradiction, right? And something of nature is hidden underneath that. Okay. The next one is extremely important, and you are going to see this repeated in slightly different words, right? And perhaps independently of Heraclitus.

[34:07] But notice: if you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it. For it is hard to be found and difficult. See, now here you are talking about a really tremendous discovery, aren't you? See, one that is unexpected, right? But someone might say that sounds like a contradiction itself. See, he always liked to make this appearance. How can you expect the unexpected?

[34:35] What's when you run into one of these fundamental contradictions that you are led to expect the what? Unexpected, right? You see. And just take another quote there from the great Bohr, which we'll look in context when we get there. But just let's compare it so you can see a little bit of the connection here.

[35:03] This long one at the bottom of page three, right? Once you look at the whole one in context, but he'd been talking about how his own great discovery, right, arose from the sharpness of the contradiction, right, on page three, towards the fifth or sixth line from the bottom. Just the sharpness of the contradiction made me absolutely confident of the truth of the quantum postulate. He was still remembering this lesson when, in one of his last conversations, he observed that the reason why no progress is being made in the theory of the transformations of matter that's the study of elementary particles occurring at very high energy is that we have not so far found among these processes any one exhibiting a sufficiently violent contradiction, right?

[35:47] With what could be expected from current ideas, huh? Notice that word expected, there, right? To give us a clear and unambiguous indication of how we have to modify these ideas, right?

[36:02] But that contradiction, if you run into that sufficiently strong contradiction, then you start to expect something, right? Unexpected, right? Something quite different from the current ideas, huh? So

[36:18] the last little fragment is dispute, right? Of course, you are probably aware of how the Middle Ages is dominated by the questiones disputatae, right? And the greatest ones have come down to us of the questiones disputatae of Thomas, right? And in the Marianne tradition, there. are, you know the questiones disputate de veritate and a bonitate too. You know, there's 21 questions, but each question has you know many, many articles, right?

[36:55] But all of them, you have what arguments on one side, arguments on the side. So you have a disputed question, right? And then the master what unties the contradiction, right? And if the truth is on one side, he answers all the arguments on the side. If the truth involves something on both sides, he answers all of them on both sides, right? So you know all kinds of questiones disputate of Thomas.

[37:18] huh? The questiones disputate de potencia, right? Questiones disputate de anima, right? Questiones disputate de, you know de caritate, right? De spei, right? And so on, right? Actions from the question this disputate de spei, that uh, Orin Murray first pointed out to me a good text there where Thomas is very clear that hope is a greater virtue than what faith. You know, and Saint Paul is very clear that charity is the greatest of the three, right?

[37:51] But then I raise the question, which is greater, faith or what hope, right? And Thomas is clear that hope is greater. And interesting, the text. Now, if you look at the Summa Theologiae, right? That's for beginners, he says. And that's you know many sense of beginners, right? There's a there's kind of an abbreviation in a way. The question is just disputati, right? They usually have maybe just three on one side, and then a sed contra, one sed contra, and three um, a few or four at most usually opposed to what is going to be the truth, right?

[38:31] So instead of you know 20 or 15 on both sides, right? You have just some of the more essential ones, right? But it's still basically the same dispute, right? The whole Middle Ages is kind of based upon that, huh? So it's disputate. Now, we could go forward from Heraclitus and and and Plato. You'd see the same thing in Plato, right? And we see that you know like in the even the Mino, right?

[39:04] The introduction to logic, right? For Socrates, reasons that virtue can be taught, virtue cannot be taught, right? You see this in a lot of the dialogues. But in the beginning of the third book of wisdom, here the third book of the metaphysics, that third book of the metaphysics is all dialectical disputation. What Aristotle does in the third book is he he raises the main questions of wisdom, and he reasons you know for opposites, okay?

[39:40] And then in the later books, you know, starting with book four, he starts to untie these, right? Okay. So, but at the beginning of Book Three, he gives the reasons why he's going to what do this, right? Okay.

[39:59] And he gives about four reasons, four or five. To raise difficulties well is useful for those who wish to resolve them, for the latter solution, later solution, is a loosening of the previous difficulties. And I give you a little different translation there. To doubt well before is necessary for those wishing to discover. That's maybe a more accurate translation. For the discovery afterwards is an untying of the difficulties before.

[40:32] Okay. And it is impossible for those ignorant of a knot to loosen it. But the doubt of the mind shows us about the thing. Insofar as the mind doubts, it undergoes something about the same as those tied. In both cases, it is impossible to go forward, right? So Aristotle is using this kind of a almost metaphor, you might say, that the mind is tied up, right, by arguments on both sides, and just as when the feet are tied together, right, you can't go forward until you examine the ropes and find the loose end, and you begin to unravel it, right?

[41:16] Like C. S. Lewis says in one of his essays, there, you know, it's find the loose end, and there it is, and it's unraveling. But Aristotle is saying, not only can you not go forward, right, unless you can untie that knot, the mind is stopped because the mind can't accept the contradiction, right? But the very untying of that contradiction is a discovery of something that was hidden hidden before.

[41:44] Okay. Now, in the second paragraph, he gives two more reasons, but I put them together in one paragraph because the two are connected, right? Hence, he says, one ought to have looked at all the difficulties before on account of these reasons, because you can't go forward if your feet are tied, right? Your mind is tied up, and that's how we borrow the word "tied up" for other things, you know.

[42:16] You know, somebody's very busy at his desk. You know, I'm all tied up now. You know, or we apply it to a baseball game or a football game. You know, it's tied up, right? So and so gets up in the bottom of the ninth and hits the home run, right? He's untied the game, right? You see? Okay.

[42:41] Another place where Aristotle uses the terms "tied up" and "untied" is when he's describing the plot in a good play. Sometimes he describes the plot as having a beginning middle, and end, but another place in the Poetics he describes the plot as consisting of tying the knot and untying the knot.

[43:01] Of course, sometimes you know in Shakespeare's plays there's many knots that are tied, and I could bring in the the Arden, you know, one of the more complete editions of Shakespeare, the Arden edition of Cymbeline, right? And the dispute, you know, as to how many knots Shakespeare is untying in one scene at the end. You know, some people are counting fifteen, twenty knots. You know, but I mean, it's really you know three to four.

[43:31] You know, Shakespeare, right? You see, but. Notice the difference here, right? You know, with the metaphysics and fiction. Usually, in a in a great tragedy, the tying of the knot takes more time than the what, untying of it, right? Okay. Of course, the poet unties the knot for you,

[43:57] but in the metaphysics, they say Book Three ties all the knots, and then Books Four through Fourteen he unties them one by one. You know, so it takes longer to untie them, right? But there's another likeness too. When Aristotle is describing the poets in writing their plots, he says that many poets succeed in tying an interesting knot, but they fail to untie it in a way that's interesting, right?

[44:28] I think people, you know, have often, you know, read a story or even seen a movie, right, where they got engrossed in the tying of the knot, but the poet didn't know how to untie it in a satisfactory way. And I think that same thing is true in philosophy, even more so, that the inexperienced or young or untrained philosopher is better at seeing difficulties than he is at what, untying, right?

[44:54] And most of them, some of them have got out, you know, the knot with eating, right? I mean, they're tied and they drown, intellectually speaking because they can't untie the knots that they've tied, right? So I mean, there are many knots that are, you know, really very hard to untie, and some of you say, I don't think about it, but Aristotle or Thomas could, in fact, untie these knots, huh?

[45:17] And the Nicolas is a very interesting article there in French in the Laval Théologique et Philosophique It's called "Du paradoxe du devenir par contradiction The Paradox of Becoming by Contradiction, " and it's an apparent contradiction in becoming that's much more difficult to resolve than this one that we were doing today, right? And it's not until Book Six that Aristotle actually unties it, but Hegel sees this contradiction, but he thinks it's real.

[45:52] And for him, you know, change is a contradiction, right? He's, you know, that's where Marx gets his this idea of dialectics from Hegel, right? Where Engels or where, what's his name, where Lenin said, you know, dialectics is the study of contradictions in the essence of things. That goes back to Hegel's dialectical method, right? But Aristotle solves that, right? And but that same problem arose in the Middle Ages in theology in the understanding of the Eucharist, huh?

[46:22] And it was called a trait to a problem, and Thomas, with the help of Aristotle, unties it, you know, but only Aristotle and Thomas alone, I think, could really untie those. We ever get to do the book six, we'll see that right. But it's a much more difficult one. See, so I mean, these guys are better at at seeing a knot or or tying it than untying it, right?

[46:43] It takes a really good mind to untie this. Hence, he says, we're not to have looked at all the difficulties before on account of these reasons in a way. There's two reasons in that first paragraph. You can't go forward if you're tied. but more importantly, right? The untying of it is how you go forward, right? Again, it's one reason you want to call it or two. And because those investigating without having first considered difficulties are like those who do not know where they ought to go.

[47:18] Okay. Because where you're going is in the direction of untying the knot. So if you haven't seen the knot, you don't know where you're going to go. And then the other side of the coin, and in addition, do not know if the thing sought has been found or not. For the goal is not clear to this one, but it is to the one who has brought the difficulties.

[47:42] So you know you've arrived, and you can what untie the difficulties, huh? I'm going to see that repeated in other words by Niels Bohr and by Einstein, right? That the contradictions, right, which he calls difficulties here, but it means contradictions, they pointed us in the right direction. And we know we had arrived. We could what untie those, huh?

[48:10] And sometimes, just to make a temporary comparison here, since I compare that to what this little passage from Heisenberg on page four from the history of quantum theory, one of the lectures there, and the, the Gifford lectures, right, that are published now under the title Physics and Philosophy.

[48:38] Interesting aspect of what Aristotle is saying. Bohr's theory had opened up a new line of research. The great amount of experimental material collected by spectroscopy through several decades was now available for information about the strange quantum laws governing the motion of electrons in the atom. The many experiments of chemistry could be used for the same purpose, huh? Now he says it was from this time on that the physicists learned to ask the right questions.

[49:08] And now a very subtle observation is part. And asking the right question is frequently more than halfway to the solution of the problem. Now that's a very profound, I think, observation of Heisenberg's part. And sometimes to kind of emphasize the point he's making there, right?

[49:31] I say, if you represent by straight lines, to make it kind of concrete. and effort required, right, to go from something called ignorance to knowledge, right, Okay? If you represent by a line. like that, And this, let's say, is the halfway point in the time and effort, right? He says Heisenberg says that frequently asking the right question

[50:15] is to go more than halfway, right? That's contrary to what we would think at first, right? We would think that you could answer the question, ask the question, pretty soon in the beginning, and then it take a long time to answer them, right? You know, but Heisenberg is pointing out something called the right question, and if you ask the right question. You're more than halfway to the answer.

[50:43] See, as if there's more difficulty, more effort, and time before you answer, you ask the right question, than to get to the knowledge, the answer, after you've asked the right question. There's a lot of truth to that. Now, I'll point to one example of something like this that you're familiar with. You go back to the great dialogue, the Meno, right, which has so many things in it we can learn from.

[51:16] When Socrates has the second conversation with the boy, right, even his first conversation, but especially the second conversation, he's trying to show that the slave boy is recalling how to double a square, right? Okay. And he makes a plausible enough case that Meno doesn't object to it, right? Okay. Now,

[51:42] how can Socrates claim that? Well, all Socrates does is to ask questions, and the way to double a square comes out of the slave boy's answers. So it might seem to most people that what is coming out of the slave boy's knowledge, right?

[52:03] And all Socrates is doing is asking questions, right? But Socrates is asking the what? The questions. The right questions, right? And then the slave boy can answer them almost automatically, right? So Socrates is actually doing most of the work. Although we might think that person is doing the answering, is doing most of the work, but actually Socrates is doing most of the work. And if you have a you know one to one thing like you know that with Socrates and the slave boy, and even the slave boy's not the you know the best trained mind in the world, right?

[52:37] But you ask some of the right questions, they will seem to teach themselves, right? That's really kind of the perfection of teaching, huh? So

[52:50] there you see a little bit of the truth also what Heisenberg is saying, huh? And I found in my own experience, right, that in things that I've come to know in philosophy, right, I spent more time, you know,

[53:10] wandering around until I asked the right question, than I did what once I asked the right question, I you know to get to the answer, right? And I remember one one thing in graduate school that

[53:25] I had a question that I'd had in a way with Caserik, you know, an undergraduate, and I'd had when I had taught out at St. Mary's and so on. Wasn't a question I was thinking about constantly, but I you know thought from time to time about this question, right? And then the question became, in a way, relevant to part of my thesis. See, I suddenly have the answer for it.

[53:47] You know, it was after ten years. See, and I was going to a class of Monsignor, and I was reading Thomas, and I suddenly put two and three together, right, and asked the right question, and bang, I was there after ten years, right? I was kind of excited, so I'm going to go down and check this with Dion. And I just, you know, make sure, because it came so suddenly, you know.

[54:08] And so I came down, and I asked him, you know, the question. He says, "Is I know where you're going Dwayne He knows right away," because I was asking the right question, right? You know, the right do it, huh? See, I just happened to be a few minutes in the office, with him today or yesterday? Yesterday it was, and I was picking up Heisenberg's Physics and Beyond, which is a kind of a account of the famous conversations of his life, and there's a very interesting conversation he has with Einstein at one point, and Einstein talks about something and so on, and

[54:50] then in later chapter he's dealing around 1926 there when he and Bohr trying to understand quantum theory, and they talk all day long, and they can't figure it out, right? And they're getting on each other's nerves, and Heisenberg would go for walks in the park, you know, nature be as absurd, as, it seems to us these experiments and so on, and finally they can't stand each other, so Bohr goes off skiing, right?

[55:15] And Heisenberg stays there, right? They've been working on this for months, you know, even physically getting sick, you know, and so on, and because it's persisting in this thing, and one night Heisenberg suddenly recalls something in a conversation he had with Einstein. He asked the right question, and bang, he's there. You know, he's so excited, you know, he comes back and he starts calculating, and and he's got to calm down at first, you know, he's so excited, but then everything's coming out perfectly, just, you know, it's like that, but just because he asked the right question, I mean, see, so I think you see that, right?

[55:48] See, there's a lot of truth to what Heisenberg says, huh? So to ask, now, as I say to students sometimes, in general, every investigation takes the direction of the questions asked. So to ask the right question is to go in the right direction. So what Aristotle was saying, in a way, in that first argument, right? The man who's seen the difficulties, the contradiction, right? He knows where he's going, right?

[56:24] But now come back to the wonderful text here from Heisenberg. He says in the second paragraph, "It was from this time on that the physicists learned to ask the right question, and asking the right question is frequently more than halfway to the solution of the problem. Well, what were these questions? Practically all of them had to do with the strange apparent contradictions between results of different experiments.

[56:57] So it's these strange apparent contradictions that led them eventually to ask the right questions, and that was to go more than halfway to the truth, right? To go in the right direction. Okay. Again and again, one found that the attempt to describe atomic events in traditional terms of Newtonian physics, he's referring to, right, led to contradictions, right?

[57:21] I think it's a beautiful, you know, way of complementing what Aristotle says, right? The man who sees the contradictions, right, knows where he's going. He's going in the direction of untimely contradictions, right? As Heisenberg points out, these contradictions enable men to ask the right question, that takes them more than halfway to the solution. And as I say again, every investigation takes the directions of the questions asked.

[57:48] I sometimes take the example, you know, of a guy getting on the witness stand and he's got, you know, perturbation of somebody asking questions. He doesn't like the direction which the questions are going, right? You know, they're embarrassed saying a lot of other things, you know. But I mean, it illustrates the fact that an investigation takes the direction of the questions asked, right? See. But these right questions involve seeing the contradictions, huh?

[58:14] Okay. And since we were asking the right questions about how does the mind rule itself, right? When we saw that apparent contradiction, right? Because we realized there had to be some distinction in the mind in order for the mind to rule itself. At first sight, there doesn't seem to be two minds, nor does the mind have two parts. It's the the thinnest of things, as the great Anaxagoras said, right?

[58:40] But there is a distinction between what the mind knows and what it doesn't know, and what is more known to it and what is less known to it. You know. See, but we had to ask the right questions, huh? Because we

[58:55] saw the contradictions. But then the other half of the coin Aristotle says is that you know you've arrived when those contradictions start to disappear, right? And you'll see this repeated now, you know. I think independently of Aristotle, in in Bohr and Einstein, who are kind of the leaders. Einstein's probably you know the greatest scientist the 20th century, certainly the most famous, right? And Bohr, in some ways, was even more influential because Einstein was kind of a loner, you know.

[59:25] But Bohr was you know a very outgoing man, but he set up his you know institute for the Study of theoretical physics in Copenhagen. And men came all over the world to study under him, right? And they went on to get the Nobel Prize, like like Heisenberg did, and Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli, and so on, right? So he was very influential. So those two men are particularly important.

[59:50] Now the last reason Aristotle gives involves a comparison here to what takes place in the courtroom. Moreover, the one who has heard all the reasons of those disagreeing, like that of two parties in a lawsuit, is necessarily better prepared to judge. Right? Here he's talking about judging and not just discovery, huh? So we think that the jury is in a better position to judge whether so and so is guilty or not if they've heard the prosecutor trying to prove he's guilty and the defending lawyer trying to prove he's not guilty.

[1:00:21] Right? If they just heard one of both sides, It, might have more convictions or less convictions if you just heard one side, right? Huh? But we think you're more apt to be able to judge what's true if you've heard what both sides, right? Huh? So these are the reasons Aristotle gives, huh? Now, if you read Thomas's commentary on these reasons, apart from you know explaining them, he says for these reasons Aristotle uses dialectic in almost all his works, right?

[1:00:50] For the reason that he gives here. What's unique about about the third book of metaphysics is he gives kind of universal dialectic there. Well, in the other parts of philosophy, it's always a more particular dialectic. But there's a certain affinity between dialectic and wisdom. There are other reasons why he does that too, but Thomas gives three reasons there. But okay, so that's some witnesses here to the role of contradiction from two great philosophers, right?

[1:01:22] Aristotle, the philosopher, and Heraclitus, the central thinker in human thought. And one reason why I call him central thinker in human thought is he sees something of this, huh? And that makes him so central. Now, let's