Ethics
5. The Good, the Better and the End of Man: Own Act, Virtue and Proportion
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/5-ethics/005-the-good-the-better-and-the-end-of-man-own-act-virtue-and/

[0:00] we'll come back to that thing. But I got to go. I got to be in back in Worcester at seven o'clock for a meeting, so if I don't go now. and I'll be patient, right? And I'll be patient, right? Yes. Yeah. In the. Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[0:25] God our enlightenment. Guardian angels strengthen the lights of our minds, warm and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. Saint Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor. And help us to understand all that's written. Name of the Father, and the Son, and the, Holy Spirit. Amen.

[0:46] So we talked about what good is, right? Yes. What is good? Yeah, yeah. And do they want it because it is good, or is it good because they want it? Because it's good. How do you know that? Because it's not connected to their desire. Well. Now that we interpolated that. Well, no, only we try to reason it out, right? What kind of an argument did we use to reason it out?

[1:16] Induction. Induction, yeah, yeah. And what objection did we have against saying that there was a something was good because you want it? What was the objection to that? There are many things that we want

[1:31] which are far not good. Yeah. Last break. So everybody has in their life something they wanted that they themselves admit was not good for them, right? Okay.

[1:46] But if something is wanted because it is good, why was the good not always wanted? That's part of it. Yeah. Yeah. And why is it then that the bad is sometimes apparently wanted? Senses, okay. Hmm. The senses or reason can be deceived. Yeah, the senses and the reason they can be deceived by the likeness, right, of the bad to the good and so on. Or they can be what see the good in something and not see the bad, right?

[2:26] So it's because between the good and the bad, and desire comes the senses or reason, and they can be deceived or their knowledge can be incomplete. Okay.

[2:47] And of course, notice, huh? The good is acting upon the heart through the senses or through the reason. So it's twice removed from being a cause of the good, right? Okay, it's going in the opposite direction. The good to the senses to the heart. So the heart is being moved by the good.

[3:10] And so when you're being moved by something that is sometimes good, sometimes by an apparent good, but the apparent good moves only because it resembles what is truly good. And so the

[3:28] good itself is really the first cause. Okay. And then we came to the second thing: what is better? Now, if you wanted to, you could go to the fifth book of wisdom and say that the perfect or the complete is better than the what? Imperfect or the incomplete, right? But Aristotle, in the fifth book of wisdom, he shows that perfect has three basic meanings. That the word "perfect" or "complete."Something is perfect or complete, he says.

[4:12] There, when it has all its parts. Okay. Like when I was a student in Quebec, you'd see in the restaurant repas complet. What does that mean? Complete dinner. Yeah, it means you're going to have an appetizer, the main course, and some kind of a little dessert, right? That's complete. It's got all the parts. And then, like that first sense, something is complete in its kind when it has all the ability of that kind of thing.

[4:48] So we could say that Homer is the complete poet, right? Aristotle says Homer taught all the other Greeks how to make a good plot.

[4:59] And Hegel says how excellent are the characters of Homer, right? He compares the French tragedians and how one-sided their characters are, and kind of narrow, and the characters of Homer, you know, are many-faceted like a diamond, you know, with all these different surfaces. And then the words that Homer uses, tremendous. So Aristotle and Hegel and so on point out how excellent Homer's similes are. Like he compares the generations of men to the leaves on the trees.

[5:37] I haven't raked up leaves today, so I know what that is. One generation is going, and then another generation will come in the spring, right? Yeah. Okay. Beautiful. Beautiful similes. So Homer is a perfect poet, right? The plot, the characters, the diction, right? And he's got everything a poet needs to have, right?

[6:04] Or he wrote tragedy, and he wrote comedy. We've lost the Margites, but Aristotle says the Margites is to comedy, what the Iliad is to tragedy. So he's a complete poet, right? He's not like Aristophanes, who only writes comedies, or like Moliere, who can only write comedies.

[6:27] And then the third meaning Aristotle gives of perfect is what has what reached its end or purpose. Okay. So, kind of simplifying the text of Aristotle, you can say that if the perfect is better than the imperfect, the complete than incomplete, then the whole is better than the part, and the end than what is for the sake of the end. But then we took of those two which seemed a little more fundamental.

[7:08] Yeah, yeah. Because you could say the part is for the sake of the whole. And therefore, the whole, in a way, is the end or purpose of the part. So perhaps that's the most basic general statement about what is better: the end is better than what is for the sake of the end.

[7:32] Now, how did we show that was true? That statement. How do we do that? So, another induction. Well, first by induction, right? Which is better, medicine or health? Which is better, knowing or studying?

[7:56] My little son, when he's very young, he said, "Why can't we be born knowing everything we have to know? Why do We have to go to school, right?" I said to him, "You want to be born an angel? That's the way the angels created, right? His mind is is filled, right? His mind is full. But that's not the way we're created.

[8:20] So, knowing is better than studying, right? Having money is better than making money, right? Having dinner is better than making dinner, right? So we can see inductively that the end is always better than what is for the sake of the end. But then we also gave a general reason

[8:49] for saying that the end is always better, and that general reason we applied is a very famous one in philosophy. And with the brevity of wisdom, brevity is a soul of wit, Plato or Aristotle and Thomas and so on, Aristotle and. Thomas. Anyway, they always give that general principle, saying that, and account of which more so.

[9:18] Okay, but I like to unfold that general principle, right? And what is that general principle? And you unfold it. What is it? Something is said of two things. Hmm. One of them on account of the other by cause, and it said more of the cause than the other. Yeah, yeah. When the same belongs to two things, right? But to one of them because of the other, it belongs more to the cause.

[9:54] So we start with very simple examples, right? If hot is said of the fire and of the air around the fire, but of the air around the fire because of the fire, which is hotter. Fire. Yeah. Okay. And if wet is said of the cloth instead of the water, but of the cloth because of the water, which is wetter. Water. Yeah. Now we apply this in every part of philosophy.

[10:30] So in logic, for example, right? When you reason by syllogism from the premises to the conclusion, then the conclusion becomes known as well as the premises. Just like in geometry, right? When you reason out a theorem, right? Now the conclusion is known as well as what you reasoned from. But the conclusion is known because of the premises. So which is more known? The premises. Yeah, yeah. And if the premises were not more known, would we use them to prove the conclusion?

[11:12] No. Okay. And if the engine of the train right pulls a car, and that pulls the one behind it, right? Which is more pulling that car? The engine. Yeah. Yeah. Why?

[11:35] Because mover is said of both of these, right? But one is a mover because of the other, right? You take the Pietà there in Rome, right?

[11:47] Maybe I'll see you again next week. Oh. Um. And you say, was the Pietà made by a hammer and chisel or by Michelangelo? Michelangelo. Well, what came in contact with the marble?

[12:05] Yeah, the chisel and the hammer had to hit the chisel, I guess. I don't know if that's what they do. But Michelangelo is more responsible for the Pietà than the hammer and chisel, right? Because they made the thing only because they were being moved by him, right? I put it in my hand, and you wouldn't get something that would remain in the in the Saint Peter's, huh?

[12:32] Um. well then we can apply it to the question of the end and what is for the sake of the end. Like applying it, say, to the end of the means. They're both good, or they can both be good, right? They can both, therefore, be said to be desired or wanted, right? But you desire the means for the sake of the end, right? So good or desirable is being said of the end of the means, but of the means because of the end.

[13:07] Therefore, the end must be more good or more desirable, right? Okay. That's how you might syllogize that God is better than everything else, because everything else is made in some sense for the sake of being like God, right? So God, in a sense, is the end of the whole universe. I am the Alpha and the Omega, right? Beginning the end. So if he is the end, the last end of everything else, he must be better than anything else, right?

[13:47] I'm going to go on further and say how much better he is, but as a starting point, you know he's better than anything else.

[13:57] Okay. Now, having talked about good and better, then. The next thing to talk about is what is better than all the rest, and that's the best, right? And that's going to be the in human life the last end, the end of man, the end of human life.

[14:26] Now, how did we reason out, in a rough way at least, the end of man? Well, we started off with two definitions, right? And one is the definition of end. And what's the definition of end? For the sake of. Yeah, that for the sake of which, right? The end is that for the sake of which something is or is done. So if the chair is for the sake of sitting, then sitting is the end or purpose of the chair, right?

[15:13] If taking medicine is for the sake of health, then health is the end or purpose of taking medicine, right? Okay. And then the other definition was the definition of what. Things own

[15:29] act. Yeah, and this comes, I think, from the first book of Plato's Republic, huh? Now, what's the definition of a things own act? End or purpose. No. What something does

[15:47] exclusively or better than anything. else. Yeah, yeah. A thing's own act is what that thing either alone can do, right? Or at least that it does better than other things, right? So to see is the eye's what own act, right? Because only through the eyes do we see. To hear is the ear's own act. it's only through the ears to be here. To walk is the feet's own act, even though the hands could, if you're very agile, in some sense walk, right?

[16:24] But in no way as well as the the feet can, right? Or if you're desperate to get the cork out of the wine bottle, right? And you don't have a corkscrew, you could use maybe a knife, right? And pick it out, you know. I mean, people can do the desperate sometimes. But is that the knife's own act to uncork a bottle? No, that's the corkscrew's own act, right?

[16:52] Okay. Some corkscrews are better than others, but they do it better than a knife would do that. Now, once we had defined end or purpose, meaning that for the sake of which, and a thing's own act, then we wanted to see a connection between these two, huh? And what connection did we see between these two? A thing's own act is to achieve its end. No.

[17:28] A thing's own act is its end or purpose, right? Okay. Now, how did we arrive at that conclusion? By induction or by syllogism? Induction. Yeah. And actually, we went kind of a two-layered induction, right? Because we begin with the tools of man, right? Like that ballpoint pen's own act is to what? Right. To write. And to write is also the end or purpose of the ballpoint pen.

[18:03] And the knife's own act is to cut. And to cut is the end or purpose of the knife to cut things. You could go through all the tools in your house or in your in here, right? And each tool has its own act. And that act is the end or purpose why that tool is in your house. The hammer is there for one reason, and the saw for another reason, right?

[18:32] And the knife and the fork and the spoon and so on, right? Each of them has its own act, and that's its end or purpose, right? And then we could go to the organs of our body, which comes from the Greek word for tool, and the eye and the ear and the teeth in front and the teeth in back and so on, and the heart and the liver and so on.

[18:57] Each of the organs has its own act, right? And that's the purpose of that organ, right? And then we could go to the occupations of men, right? The cook has his own act, the cook, and the teacher has his own act to teach, right? And why do we hire cooks? Cook. Yeah, and why do we pay teachers? Teacher. To teach. Yeah.

[19:32] So each occupation has its own act, right? And that act is the end or purpose of that occupation in human society. So, if you want to, you could make an even larger induction. If every tool and every organ and every occupation has its own act, right? And each of these its own act is also its end or purpose. Then you could make the grand induction that a thing's own act is its what End or purpose.

[20:11] And, what's that got to do with figuring out or reasoning out the end or purpose of man? We're now going to reason not by induction, but by what? Syllogism. Syllogism, right? We're going to take the proposition that a thing's own act is its end or purpose, right? And apply it to man. If man has his own act, right? Then we could say man's own act is his end or purpose.

[20:44] And does man have an act that either he alone has, or at least that he has better than anything else in the world? Yeah. Since man is an animal that has reason, right? It's the act that involves reason that's man's own act.

[21:05] If we define reason strictly, man alone has that act. But even if you're kind of mixed up like the moderns, right? Yeah. But even the moderns call man Homo sapiens, the wise ape. So he has this act better than anything else, right? So if the act with reason is man's own act, and man's own act must be his end, as induction has shown, right? Then the act with reason must be man's end or goal, right?

[21:42] Now, I could have been a little more precise in my induction from the very beginning, right? I could have said that the end or purpose of the ballpoint pen is not just to write, but to write well. So if you're taking notes and you notice that sometimes the ink comes out. Sometimes it doesn't, and you got blanks and so on, right? Like the old typewriters, you know, used to have a bad key, you know, and you have to go back and then hit again, hit again, and finally it come out so you could see it.

[22:22] At least that's my experience in my old typewriter. And is the purpose of the eye just to see? Why'd they give you those funny looking things in front of your face here, huh?

[22:40] Yeah, yeah. Now the purpose of the eye is not just to see, but to what? See well, right? And you know, if you got a heart that's not functioning properly, right? You know, they might try to fix you up if they can, right? Okay. And you expect the cook not just, you know, burn the meat every night, but to cook well, right? And you expect the pianist to play the piano reasonably well, not make constant mistakes like I would.

[23:16] So you could say that the end of each thing having its own act is to do that act what well, right? So therefore, you could say that man's end or purpose is the act with reason done well, right?

[23:35] Now, perhaps you could add, as Aristotle would do, in the first book, of Nicomachean Ethics, a third part, right? Because do you want to see well just for a day or a week or a month? You want to see well throughout life, right?

[23:56] Aristotle says one swallow does not make a what? Summer, right? Yeah, one bird. At least I was joking. I said a cocktail party, right? One swallow does not make a summer yeah. But Aristotle, it must have been a Greek proverb about the birds, right? So Aristotle then draws this line around the end of man. It's man's own act, the act with reason, right? Done well throughout life, right?

[24:33] Okay. Now, at this point, it would be hard for a Greek to, instead of say, done well, right? To say according to human virtue, right?

[24:57] Man's own act, or the act with reason, to be more precise. You say done well throughout life, but then for the phrase done well, the Greeks would substitute sometimes according to or by human virtue. Okay. Or the Greek word for virtue is what arete, huh? We use the Latin word. But now,

[25:43] the reason why we can substitute that phrase for done well is because we understand in general what is meant by virtue, and we're very narrow-minded in the modern world, and we start off with too narrow an understanding of what virtue is.

[26:11] But in the broad meaning of virtue, virtue is as general as a thing's own act. Okay. That anything that has its own act has its own virtue or vice, for that matter, right? Okay.

[26:37] Now, what's the connection here between a thing's own act and a thing's own virtue, or for that matter, a device? Not the same thing, a thing's own act and a thing's own virtue. But there's a connection between them, right? And you have to know what a thing's own act is before you can know what its own virtue is. And for that matter, you have to know what a thing's own act is before you know what a thing's own vice is.

[27:25] Okay. Now, what's the connection between these two? Well, the way Aristotle defines virtue there in the Nicomachean Ethics, in the broad sense, is what makes a thing good and its own act good. Okay.

[27:48] So virtue is the quality or disposition of the thing, right, that enables it to do its own act well. And vice is the opposite of that, right? Vice is what makes the thing bad and its own act bad, right? So the vice of a thing is the quality or disposition of that thing which makes its own act be done badly, right? Not well. Do you see that?

[28:27] Okay. Now, I take a simple example. What is a knife's own act Say a knife's own act. Well, we all know it's to cut, right? Okay.

[28:49] Now, what would be the virtue of the knife? What would make it a good knife and make it cut well? Sharpness. Yeah. So sharpness would be the main virtue of a knife. Okay. And notice, sharpness is not the same thing as cutting, right? It's not the same thing even as cutting well. But sharpness is the disposition, the quality of a knife that enables it to do its own act, which is cutting well, right?

[29:30] And what would be the knife's own vice? No dullness, right? Sometimes you find this to the point dull, right? It was a different sense of the mean, right?

[29:50] Now, first, being a practical, now this year, I was eventually going to ask a third question, that is, how do you sharpen a knife, right? Okay. So even for something as lowly as a knife, we can talk about its virtue or its vice, right?

[30:15] And so you might say that the purpose of a knife is not just to cut, but to cut well, right? Or you could say the purpose of a knife is to cut

[30:29] by the virtue of a knife, which is sharpness, right? Okay. So at the end of the first book of Nicomachean Ethics, after Aristotle has given this definition of the purpose of man, then he sees the need to consider human virtue. And at the end of the first book of Nicomachean Ethics, he will divide human virtue into two kinds,

[31:06] one of which we call moral virtue, and the other we call the virtue of reason itself, intellectual virtues. But notice this phrase: "act with reason." It's a little bit broader than what?

[31:31] Yeah. Say. So the acts of reason are acts with reason, but also the acts of our heart, even our acts of our will, right? And the and our emotions even, they can partake of reason, right? They can be directed by reason, measured by reason, and so on. And then there would be an act with reason, and even our exterior acts like walking and eating and so on, right?

[32:04] They can be with reason, right? So there are some virtues that are reason itself. And they call those sometimes intellectual virtues. I just call them the virtues of reason. But the moral virtues are the virtues of what partakes of reason, and they will be primarily in either the will or in the emotions. Okay. And Aristotle in books two through five, mainly, also six in a way, but yeah, two through five rather.

[32:43] In books two through five, he considers the moral virtues, and then book six, he considers the virtues of reason. Now, in Shakespeare, refers to this in the *Taming of the Shrew* as a character there, beginning who's studying that part of philosophy, right? It treats of what happiness a virtue especially to be achieved. A very good description of what the *Nicomachean Ethics* is about, right? And so about human happiness, the purpose of man, what that is, and human virtue, whereby this end or purpose is especially achieved.

[33:30] Aristotle also talks about how how the virtues are what acquired, right? Okay. So that question is raised already in the dialogue called *The Meno*, because Meno begins a dialogue called after him by asking Socrates, "Well, how is virtue acquired? Is it inborn, or is it acquired by practice, or is it taught, or you know?" And Socrates says, "Well, I don't know. Furthermore, I don't know what virtue is," he says.

[34:04] But anyway, me and De Mino sometimes. But, eventually the philosopher. does. ask that question, right? Now, I mentioned how a friend has in his kitchen, right, the thing that says, "Much virtue in herbs, little in men," right? But there you see that broad meaning of the word virtue, right? Where the salt or the pepper or the sage or whatever the herb is, right,

[34:45] it can have what its own virtue or vice, right? And so, a fresh herb, right, from the garden, right, will probably be more virtuous, right, than one that's been in a jar for a year or two on the shelf, right? And the herb could lose its what virtue, right? And not season the food, right? So well, huh? And our Lord there in the Sermon on the Mount, in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Saint Matthew, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount there, He says, "You are the salt of the earth," right?

[35:32] And the salt loses its what? Yeah, you could have said, if the salt loses its virtue, you know, cast it out and walk on it, right? So if a man loses his virtue, right,

[35:49] cast him out, right? But there you see that broad meaning of virtue. I mentioned how in the rhetoric, Aristotle speaks of wealth as the virtue of money, not the virtue of the man.

[36:08] But if money's own act is to buy, right? If you're wealthy, you can buy wealth. Poverty would be the vice of money, huh? Now it may require, you know, more study than it does with the knife to discover what a thing's virtue is. So what is the virtue of the eye, right? And why do I see you better with my left eye than my right eye, right?

[36:38] This is my virtuous eye, right? But you're not talking about moral virtue, are you Not because the girls at this eye, are in front of you, no, no. I see better, at least at a distance, with this eye than that eye, right? Now.

[37:09] There's another way we can syllogize to the purpose of man. So what we did in this case, let's put the syllogism on the board. Let me see there. We say man's own act is man's end,

[37:35] man's purpose. The act with reason is man's own act. Therefore, this is a regular syllogism, right? Now the major premise here is there is a very important thing And simply a result of applying that general statement we learned by induction. You learned by induction from the tools of man, the organs of man, the occupations of man, right? That a thing's own act is its end, right? So therefore, man's own act will be his end.

[38:27] And then, if you know that man is an animal that has reason, then you can see that the act with reason is man's own act. Therefore, we syllogize that the act with reason is man's end.

[38:45] That's one way. The first way you see, I reason out what man's end is. You, by a long induction, establish a statement. But you add another statement to syllogize. to man's end, right? Now there's another way. We can Reason using the same things we learned, a little bit shorter, right?

[39:19] And using the if-then syllogism, hypothetical or conditional syllogism. And this syllogism is approached through seeing a what proportion, right? And a proportion, now in the sense in which Euclid defines proportion.

[39:45] Sometimes we use the word proportion for ratio today, right? But Euclid uses the word proportion there, or analogy Greek for a likeness of ratios. So in a

[40:07] proportion, you are going to have four terms, while in a ratio you have two terms, right? Now, what do you mean by ratio here? Well, you mean the order or relation of one thing to another, right?

[40:26] Now, sometimes they give you an IQ test. They'll have a part of the exam seeing if you can see a proportion, and maybe they'll say A is to B as X is to, and then you have to choose the right one.

[40:46] And your ability to supply the fourth term is a sign that you see the what? Yeah, that you see the likeness the ratios, right?

[41:01] My I is to R as ... Okay. How important is it the ability to see a proportion in our thinking? How important is that?

[41:20] Very important, huh? If you study Euclid, huh? You get to Book Five, which is really about proportions. When you apply the theory of proportions back to plane geometry in Book Six, huh? Tremendous power you see. It's actually amazing.

[41:47] In the first book, Euclid ends up with the Pythagorean theorem, right? But in the sixth book, he'll show that any, you know, regular figure on the hypotenuse of the right angle triangle will be equal to the ones on the sides. But he does this through seeing these proportions, right? So it's extremely important in mathematics, right? If you go to mathematical science, natural science. Physics, huh? Pierre Duhem who was the physicist who did so much in the history of science.

[42:20] He speaks of how proportions are the most what? Common way that things are found in physics by seeing proportion. And Einstein, in his book *The Evolution of Physics*, talks about this. How common this is, right? And gives example there, the discovery of wave mechanics by Louis de Broglie. How did they discover the inverse square law?

[42:50] that um force of gravity diminishes what? Inversely as a square. If you double the distance, the thing is only one fourth of what it was before. If you triple the distance, it's one nine, right? It's the inverse one over x squared, right? But how did they discover that? See, if you go back to Newton and the discovery of it, it's by analogy to the way light diminishes with distance.

[43:20] Same, same rule. Diminishes one over x squared, huh? So if I, you know, I'm shining light in your face, I go back, double the distance. How much less light are you going to be receiving? One fourth. one half. Same, same. And

[43:42] so, if gravity is like light, it's kind of spreading out like it does evenly, right? Then this suggests it would have that same what? Actually, goes back to Newton too, before that. But anyway, so it's very important in mathematical physics.

[43:59] If you go through the books of philosophy, you'll see that proportions are running all through the books of philosophy. One time in the senior seminar, I had this. You know, each student had to do a different. Book in philosophy, but just pick out the proportions being used. Everybody's heard of Plato's Republic, right? The whole Republic, the huge middle part there, is generated from a proportion, a likeness of ratios between the parts of the soul and the parts of the what?

[44:29] City. Yeah. Okay. Um. So philosophy is just filled with proportions, huh? And in the fourth book of dialectic, Aristotle talks about this, those two simple proportions.

[44:52] Now, in in poetry, right? The most beautiful metaphors and similes are based upon proportions. I always give the example from Romeo and Juliet. You know, when Juliet is found apparently dead on her wedding day, right? And the simile used there is, "Death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field." Perfect, huh? Beautiful.

[45:25] Of course, if you look at our Lord's parables, right? They're filled with what? Proportions, huh? You see, the Lord is my shepherd, right? The Lord is to us as a shepherd is to his flock, right? That's based on proportion, right? Now, sometimes you have a proportion, you know, using one term twice, right? Like I said, that eight is to four as four is to two.

[45:56] So the Our Father is based upon proportion there, right? When you say, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." so, "God will be to us as we are to our neighbor." Okay, that's a proportion, right? So

[46:16] now going back to things that we made our induction from, right? You can see many proportions there, right? Like if I said that seeing is to the eye as what is to the ear? Hearing. Yeah, yeah. The fact that you can supply the missing term here, right, is a sign that you see a likeness, right? Not that seeing and hearing are the same thing. Not that the eye and the ear are the same thing.

[46:48] But the ratio, the relation, or the order of seeing to the eye is like that of. Here. Okay. Now in mathematics, we say four is to what like two is to three.

[47:14] Was five or is it six? Six. Because some people they say there's a difference of one between two and three, right? And between four and five, there's a distance. We're not saying is the distance the same, but what is four two like? Two is to three. It's six, yeah. So it's really not five here, but six, right? Just as two is two of the three parts of three, so if you look at six as being three twos, this is two of the threes, right?

[47:51] So it's four is to six is two to three. So you have to you know understand the proportion. Now, suppose we ask this question here: What is to man as let's say seeing is to the eye?

[48:16] We have to see what is the ratio of seeing to the eye, right? Seeing is an act, and how is the act seeing to that thing called the eye there? huh It's its own act? It's its own act, right? Yeah, that's the act that characterizes the eye, right? Now, is there some act which is to man? It characterizes man, right? As seeing is to the eye. Reason.

[48:44] With reason. The act with reason, right? yeah let's act with reason. that's a little broader than act of reason. Act of reason is the reason. Okay, we're going to talk about reason now about the man, the animal that has reason. So if you see that proportion, the act with reason. Is to man the seeing is to the eye, right? Okay. Now we can make an if-then statement. Then, if seeing is the end of the eye,

[49:28] okay, then the act with reason is the end of man. notice this is not a statement of fact now again. because an if-then statement doesn't say that something is or is not so. It says that if this is so, then that could be so, right? Okay. So you need a statement that something is or is not so before you can show that something is or is not so.

[50:16] But now it's more known to us that seeing is the end of the eye, right? But seeing is the end, the purpose of the eye.

[50:30] So if that, in fact, is so, then I can syllogize that the act with reason is the end of man, right? Now notice, huh?

[50:56] You can reason in this way because one ratio is more known than the other. If I came down town, that's my example. I say, go down town and grab the first guy walking along the street there, and presume, and hopefully a guy who's never gone to school, right, or college, anyway, right? And I pull out a ballpoint pen. They say, "What's the purpose of this?" What would he say?

[51:23] Right. Yeah. And I put on a knife and I'm asking the guy, "What's the purpose of this? That's what you cut your steak with, right? You know? Okay. And what's the purpose of an eye? What to see, right? And what's the what's the ears for? To hear. And if you said, "What's the purpose of man? " You come out. No. It ends there, right? See that the purpose of man is either unknown to him or certainly much less known to him than the purpose of the ballpoint pen or the purpose of the eye, right?

[51:59] Okay. So once you see that this is to man is seeing is to the eye, you can then construct, right, and see the truth of the if-then statement. And since this is known to him, then you can syllogize from the known ratio to the what? Unknown or less known, right? You see that? Now I can make as many of these as those things we started off with in our induction, right?

[52:32] I might say, what is to man as writing is to the pen? See? Well, how is writing to the pen? That's the pen's own act, right? Was there something that is to man in that same way? Yeah. The act with reason, right? And that constructs the if-then statement. If writing is the end or purpose of the ballpoint pen, then the act with reason is the end or purpose of man.

[53:01] But everybody knows, every adult anyway, that the purpose of the ballpoint pen is to write. Therefore, the end or purpose of man must be the act with writing with reason. You see it?

[53:17] Now, like I did before, I can be a little more precise, right? Suppose I say that. Suppose I add to my ratio over here. Seeing well is to the eye, right? Well, then, is it the act with reason? Period. That is to man exactly like seeing wells to the eye.

[53:42] Now, if I had taken the right example there, seeing is to the eye, as hearing is to the ear, right? And suppose I changed and I said, seeing well is to the eye, as hearing is to the ear, as walking is to the ear, as hearing well is to the ear. I'd be kind of stupid if I said walking to the ear. But if you said hearing is to the ear, that would not be correct.

[54:06] You gotta have to add now. Hearing well is to the ear, right? Do you? See that? So if I add seeing well here, I'm forced to add well done over here, right? Okay.

[54:22] And then I can construct and say, if seeing well is the end of the eye, then the act with reason done well is the end of man, right? And then syllogize that the act with reason done well, right? You have to develop first because someone sees the basic structure of the argument, right?

[54:46] And seeing well throughout life is the purpose of the eye, right? If I add seeing well throughout life, then I can add over here the act with reason done well throughout life, right? And then syllogize even more completely, right? If seeing well throughout life is the end of the eye, then the act with reason done well throughout life is the end of man. But that is the end of the eye, we all know.

[55:14] Therefore, this must be the end of what? The end of man, right? Now, there's a third kind of syllogism, you know, which is the what? Got

[55:49] the categorical syllogism, the simple syllogism, which we used in the first argument, right? Using a statement we got from induction, right? This is the regular syllogism. We have the hypothetical syllogism, conditional syllogism, I call the if-then syllogism. And the third kind is the what? Disjunctive, yeah, the either-or syllogism, right? Okay. Now, if you go through Euclid there in the first book of the Elements, he uses all three kinds of syllogisms, right?

[56:27] And I think it's in theorem six there in book one. In one theorem, he uses all three. Okay. He's proving that if the angles are equal to base, the sides will be equal. Uses all three. He examined the reasoning carefully, right? So it must be, you know, three is the first number about which we say all. Let's see,

[56:59] it goes back to Trinity. I don't know. Maybe it does, huh? A beautiful example of that in Vatican II there in the Dei Verbum there. You know we're talking about sacred Scripture, sacred tradition, the magisterium of the Church. These three, no one can stand alone. Need all three. Beautiful, beautiful example there.

[57:30] Now another way we approach this is by starting off with kind of the common thought that everybody has about what the goal of life is, right? Everybody wants to live well, right? Live well, do well. Okay. So we start off with this idea here that the end of life,

[58:03] the end of man, is to live well. Everybody aiming at to live well, right? People say to me sometimes, "Berquist, what have you been doing?" I say, "Why have you been living it up? Hey! what have you been doing? I've been reading the treatise on the Trinity, huh? Yeah, yeah, that's really living it up. That's really alive.

[58:40] What now? When's a man living well? Is living the life of a plant? No, that's when you're in your deathbed, maybe there, right? And you're like, "Yeah, Seraph, I guess he's coming out. Yeah, they say he's on the way out. I don't know. Anyway, you know, is a man living well just in the life of a plant?

[59:14] No, no. How about he's living the life of a beast? Is that for a man to live well? Is it? Aristotle says it'd be strange if man would choose a life of something other than himself, right? So you come down to the third possibility: the life of a man, or the life of what? Reason, right? So if you see that to live well, but for a man to live well, it can't be simply this life or this life, right?

[59:57] Therefore, it must be this, right? Then you're back to the idea that it's the life according to reason, right? And done well, right? Okay. It's another way of approaching it, kind of, by an either-or argument, right? But starting from this idea that people have in general that happiness is to live well, to do well, right? Okay. And then say, okay, but now, what do you mean? Life of a plant, you know?

[1:00:30] I'm just growing. Is that living well, right? Or I'm just sensing and emoting? Is is that living well for a man? If either one of those is sufficient answer, you're going to have to go to this, right? So it's the life according to reason, huh?

[1:01:10] Now, let's come back again to this division of all the goods of man, right? And we mentioned how in the Apology of Socrates, right, where

[1:01:30] Apology is not really a translation of the Greek word apologia. Apologia is a term in the courtroom, right? And then what you have in the courtroom is categoria, which is accusation, right? And then apologia, which is your legal defense in the courtroom, huh? But anyway, in the Apology of Socrates, which is probably the most read work of all works, huh, in philosophy, introductions to. Philosophy, especially Socrates, has a defense of his life, right?

[1:02:13] His life, where he goes around and examines men, right? But then he goes on further to say that he's been examining his fellow Athenians, especially about the good things in life, right? And as we mentioned before,

[1:02:38] Socrates, at that point, touches upon the distinction of all the goods of man, right? And the Greeks usually divided all human goods into three. Okay, and three is all there is. Now, the Greeks usually called these the goods of the soul,

[1:03:13] which could also be called the goods of reason, involving reason, right? Goods of reason, or what involves reason? People today might call the spiritual goods, right? Using the word "spirit" instead of the word "soul," right? But that's one kind of good. The goods of the body,

[1:03:47] like health and strength, and the beauty of the body, and so on, and then the exterior goods, or the outside goods, right? So all your possessions, your clothing, your house, you know, your books, food, and so on. Okay.

[1:04:14] Now, Aristotle, in the most explicitly, I think, in the seventh book of Politics, touches upon the same division, right? And Aristotle points out in the seventh book of the Politics that everybody knows to some extent that there are these three kinds of goods,

[1:04:39] and secondly, everybody agrees that we need some of all them. Okay, but the disagreement between the philosophers, like Socrates, and the Athenians, men in general, is which goods are what better. And Socrates says in the Apology,

[1:05:06] he's trying to convince the Athenians, right, that the goods of the soul are much better than these other goods, right? While the Athenians are living as if the goods of the body and the exterior goods are the greatest goods in life, huh? And so, when I teach this, I often ask the students, "Now, do the Americans agree with Socrates or with the Athenians? What do you think?"

[1:05:32] And suddenly, they act as if they agree with the what? Athenians, right? Okay. Now, this is no little disagreement. It's a disagreement now about which goods are better, but among all the goods in the life, right, it's going to influence the whole of life. Which goods you think are better?

[1:06:00] Now, as we pointed out before, everybody knows you need some of all these, right? But if you think the goods of the body and the exterior goods are the better goods, then your life will be one of trying to get as much as possible of the better things of life, right? And be satisfied with the minimum necessary, right, to acquire these things or to preserve these things down here.

[1:06:39] On the other hand, if you think the goods of the soul are much better than the goods of the body, exterior goods, then your life will be one of trying to get as much as possible the goods of the soul, and being satisfied with the minimum necessary of the goods of the body and the exterior outside goods. Okay. So Your whole life is going to be weighed differently.

[1:07:08] Okay. So this is no little disagreement, is it? And secondly, you could say that as regards the very end and purpose and meaning there for human life, since the end is always better than what is for the sake of the end, if you think the goods of the body and exterior goods are better than the goods of the soul, then your end or goal in life will be somewhere down here to be the wealthiest man, or to be the most beautiful woman, or something, right?

[1:07:43] Okay. You'll look for the end or purpose of life somewhere among the better goods, right? Because the end is always better than what is for the sake of the end. But if you think the goods of the soul are much better than the goods of body exterior goods, then you will try to what? You'll look for the end or purpose of life somewhere among the goods of the soul, right?

[1:08:12] And that's why Aristotle, who agrees with Socrates, right, the goods of the soul are much better. After he goes through all the goods of the soul, as to all the moral virtues, right, and the virtues of reason, then in the tenth and last book, Nicomachean Ethics, he asks which of these virtues is the greatest, right? And then he's going to determine more fully exactly what the end and goal of man is.

[1:08:41] Okay.