Wisdom (Metaphysics 2006, Colorado)
49. Doubting Well Before Understanding Well: Aristotle's Metaphysics, Anaxagoras's Nous, and Heraclitus's Strife
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/049-doubting-well-before-understanding-well-aristotles-metaphysics/

[0:00] is the second reading. Now we've completed the first part, the two parts of the proemium huh Now it's afternoon at two o'clock, right? We should look at the third reading. huh? Okay. In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. God our enlightenment, guardian angels strengthen the lights of our minds, order and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. Saint Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor.

[0:39] Very nice. And help us to understand all that you have written. In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

[0:50] So, in the first reading, there, as Thomas explains, Aristotle is going to be talking about his intention or aim to consider these problems of wisdom dialectically, and then to give about four reasons why we should do this. And then, beginning in the second reading and the third reading, he will enumerate the main questions he's going to discuss dialectically, and then the rest of the book he will discuss those.

[1:32] But we're going to look just at the first three lexeis, the first reading where he states his intention and the reasons for it, and then the second and the third where he enumerates the questions of wisdom, the main questions, and we'll see the division of those when we get there. So he says it's necessary for the episteme, the reasoned out knowledge, or the reasoned out understanding sought, for us first to go through those things about which one ought to what doubt, aporia.

[2:12] And these are the things, whatever those thinkers before him you might say, have held other positions on, right? Whatever the great philosophers before Aristotle thought differently about, that's already something doubtful, right? Some thought it was this, some was that, and if something else occurs or happens that has been overlooked by them, some other problem. So most of the problems or questions will come from the fact or that his predecessors have given opposed or opposite or different answers to those same questions, right?

[2:54] If there's something doubtful about them, question disputata, as they would say in the Middle Ages, but then there may be some that Aristotle himself adds, right? That they have not explicitly what discussed. And Thomas Aquinas notes how Aristotle uses dialectics more in say natural philosophy or even in ethics than he does say in logic. Because the logic, he's sort of like the father of logic. So it's not if there's been logicians before Aristotle saying contrary and opposite things about the syllogism or whatever it might be.

[3:32] Because you have plenty of moderns, right? Saying opposite and different things, but Aristotle knows nothing about those moderns, huh? Thank God. Okay. Um. Now the Aristotle begins here with a kind of before and after, huh? For those right wishing to find, hē euporia, wishing to find, it's a work beforehand to diaporēsai kalōs huh? And Thomas's text translates that's bene dubitare, right? To doubt well, huh? Okay. It's not enough to doubt, as Descartes does, by a kind of act of will, huh?

[4:25] Where he sets aside everything that he had, but it's necessary to doubt well. That is, as Thomas says, to attain well to those things that are really doubtful. But there's some reason why this is something to be somewhat uncertain about at first, huh? To find it doubtful, so you have to give reasons why it's doubtful.

[4:50] Um, and then he gives a before and after here. For he says, for the hysteron, hē euporia, for the discovery afterwards, huh, of some new truth, is a lusis untying, huh, of the things doubted proteron before, right? Okay. So you doubt well beforehand, and this doubting well beforehand, as he will go on to say, ties your mind into a kind of a knot, and the untying of that knot is in fact the discovery of something that was hidden from you before.

[5:38] So it's not only that you have to untie the knot, as he'll say, to go forward, because you're like a man whose feet have been tied and you can't go forward until he examines the knot and then finds a loose end, as C. S. Lewis would say, and begin to unravel it. Um, but the very untying of it is a discovery of something that was hidden before from the mind.

[6:05] Um, and he says, lyein to untie is not possible for those ignoring the knot, huh? But the doubt of the mind, huh? Shows this about the thing, insofar as it doubts, it is in some way like people who are bound up, or their feet are tied. For it is impossible for both to go forward.

[6:45] Okay, now that's the first reason he gives, and it is kind of a double thing in there. You can't go forward when your mind is tied up by these opposing positions that have some reason for them. But the untying of that is a discovery of something that was what hidden before. Now we had a beautiful example of that in the great fragment about the mind of Anaxagoras.

[7:21] To take a good example, I don't think I've been teaching it too much that fragment before I saw this apparent contradiction in the great fragment about the mind. The first thing he says about the mind is that it's unlimited,

[7:43] and you can consider that already in Heraclitus. He says something like that too. But really, the root of the mind's being unlimited is that its object is something universal. Universal can cover many things, and even some universals an infinity of things. So you see, the mind in some ways unlimited. Then the second thing he says about the mind is that it's self-ruling,

[8:11] and you could, you know, gather a reason for saying this from what is said later on about the mind that the mind orders things or sees order. We've seen that in Shakespeare before, and so on. But also, the mind would have to know itself before it could order itself, and so Anaxagoras lays out that link there. But if the mind is unlimited, and not in size, but unlimited in its object, but it's able to know, well then the mind can not only know other things but itself, and because it's able to know itself, and because it knows how to order, then it can be self-ruling.

[9:04] Sometimes I take those simply as a sign that the mind is self-ruling, the existence of this art called logic that Socrates is asking for in the Phaedo, the art about arguments. So the existence of logic is a sign that the mind can rule itself.

[9:25] And vice versa. That the mind is able to rule itself is why there could ever be an art of logic. We're giving the existence of the art of logic as a sign of the truth of that.

[9:40] Incidentally, if you want to, you can look before and after the fragment. The mind is self-ruling, and you can see that before that, the mind must be self-knowing, as we were saying. If you look after, you can see that the mind is also alone self-knowing. Then the mind alone is self-ruling, and therefore the mind alone is fit to rule others. Because you're not fit to rule others, you can't rule yourself.

[10:09] So you can bring in natural philosophy, where by the mind knows itself, and ethics, where the mind is ruling other things, around that particular beautiful fragment. Then he goes on to the third thing, and he says the mind is not mixed with things, huh? It's separated from matter. And in the fragment, then he gives a reason why it is separated. It wouldn't be able to rule over them as it does in this orderly way that we see.

[10:44] If it was part of them, and so we stop. We've kind of developed the proposition that the ruler must be separated from those that he rules over. And you take the judge who says that must be, or we say the judge should be impartial, not a part of the disputants in the case, huh? Or we say that the in the army, we have to separate those who command from those who obey, huh?

[11:13] Not mix them up. Or sometimes you see in a big company, the separation between those who command or direct and those who are directed. Someone from Minnesota mining was saying, you can tell, yeah, just a man's a man's position in the company, the height of his position from the degree of separation. Some guy might have in a big office. He might have around his desk kind of a partition, you know, an L-like thing.

[11:41] That's a little bit of separation there, right? The next step up is to have actually a separate office from where the other hoi polloi are laboring? And with the door and so on. And the next step up is not only to have a private office, but to have before you get to the private office, a entry office there with a secretary there who screens people, right? So the you have to be separated from

[12:09] those you command, huh? And I was giving example too. You see, in the family, I know when I was a child, there we get a little bit out of hand, me and my brothers, and my father came home and. Discipline would be without question restored. But my mother's mixed up with us all during the day, and therefore has less ability to command than your father coming home.

[12:31] You know, wait till your father comes home and. Oh my gosh! So, I guess in Minnesota mining, my friend was telling me that when someone is promoted to a higher echelon, he was expected to associate with people at the higher echelon and not his buddies that was with in the lower echelon, and be frowned upon if he tried to go and eat in the lunchroom, say with his his buddies.

[12:58] I guess there were things that in the lower echelon they played tennis and and poker, and higher one they played bridge and golf. You know, I mean, the activities are are segregated, so you don't go out with the big boss there playing golf.

[13:14] Well, now you see, you've got some reason to think that the mind is self-ruling, because it's infinite and therefore can know itself and it orders things, and you've got the witness there of logic, right, that the mind is self-ruling, and yet you have this reason here why the mind must be separated from what it ruled, that the ruler must be separated from the ruled, and that seems very reasonable, huh?

[13:39] I guess after the Bolshevik Revolution, there everybody's calling everybody comrade, and the discipline of the army started breaking down. So of course you had to go back to whatever army does, you know, where you make a real distinction in various ways between those who command and those who obey. Well, the mind is tied into a knot, right? It seems that the mind is self-ruling on the one hand for the reasons we gave, and then it can't be self-ruling for the reasons that we gave that the ruler must be separated from the ruled.

[14:12] Now the untying of that apparent contradiction. is the discovery of how the mind, in fact, does rule itself. It's a discovery of the distinction and the separation that there must be in the mind before it can rule itself.

[14:36] And Socrates, of course, with his great life there, gives us the clue. So the mind is ruled in what it does not know by what it does know,

[14:49] and so when you come to a new theorem, say in Euclid, unknown to you, you are ruled by what you know already from the earlier parts of geometry. So the separation necessary for the mind to rule itself is the separation of what you truly know from what you don't know,

[15:14] and then you can speak, as we do in Aristotle's works, there, also of a separation of what is more known from what is less known, because the mind should be ruled as regards the less known by what is more known, and ultimately you could say you're being ruled by the most known. So if you can't separate what you truly know from what you don't know, and most people have a difficulty doing that, as Socrates' life witnesses, his life of examining people, where he found that they had mixed them up, then they don't have even yet what is presupposed to the mind ruling itself, and maybe you have to learn how you can what know the unknown through the known, which is Albert the Great tells

[16:06] us is really the purpose of logic to learn how to use what you know to know what you don't know. But you got to separate what you know from what you don't know, and the same thing about the more known and the less known, and maybe even the most known.

[16:24] If you wanted to take that fragment of the angelic mind or divine mind, would it just be a negation to say self-ruling? Just it would for them it would mean. Well, if you if you said God's mind is self-ruling, you couldn't understand this affirmatively, right? Would have to be understood negatively, right? Okay. Just like sometimes people will say, you know, accidents exist in substance, and they'll say substance exists in itself.

[16:57] Well, that can't be understood affirmatively, right? But only negatively, meaning it doesn't exist in another. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like you got to be careful when we say there are some statements that are known through other statements, but there must be some statements that are known through themselves. But, it doesn't mean that you use the statement itself to prove itself. It's not to be understood affirmative in that way.

[17:27] It could be understood negatively. As a statement that is known, but not through other statements, huh? Those are another sense where you could perhaps say that it's a statement known through its parts, right? And and there you can speak maybe affirmatively, right? But you can't say it's known through itself as a statement, huh? It is so because it is so. A woman's reason, as Shakespeare says. Um.

[17:55] So I just give you a little example there, in my own thinking there, of how I discovered what seems to be a contradiction, proceeding from what probable premises, huh? The ones I indicated just a minute ago, and that stops my mind, and ties it into a kind of knot, and I can't go forward until I untie that knot. But the very untying of it is a discover, discovery, of great truth about how indeed the mind rules itself, huh?

[18:36] And what indeed it means to say the mind rules itself, huh? It doesn't mean that the whole mind is ruling the whole mind. It doesn't mean that a part of the mind is ruling another part of the mind. But it means that the mind is being ruled at what it doesn't know, by what it does know. So there is a distinction and separation between the rule and the ruled, but it's very subtle and and hard to see at first.

[19:04] And you probably would not discover that unless you saw the apparent contradiction in the great fragment DK12 of Anaxagoras. I suspect you know Anaxagoras is saying the mind is self-ruling too, gave the hint to the need for what logica? The art whereby the mind rules itself or directs itself, huh? So Socrates in many ways is indebted to Anaxagoras as we all are, to some minds in history.

[19:44] Um. Now something of this was anticipated by the central thinker in human thought, Heraclitus. And Heraclitus says, "War is the father of all things," huh? Well, Aristotle saying something like that. Now, apart from whether that's true universally, the war is the father of all things. Um, if you apply that in particular to knowing, this opposition, huh? This contradiction is a kind of what war, right? And so, in saying war is the father of all things, you apply that to knowing.

[20:26] Then Anaxagoras is saying, I mean, excuse me, Heraclitus is saying that this is the way you go forward, is the way you make your great discoveries, huh?

[20:38] And there are other fragments of Heraclitus that connect with this. One of the most beautiful ones is that the hidden harmony is better than the apparent harmony. Now, harmony is of course the opposite of what contradiction.

[20:58] And most men are in a state of apparent harmony. They think many things, and they think they can think these many things, but these many things they think, as Socrates will show them, are not really in harmony. If they don't contradict each other immediately,

[21:25] putting together some of the things they think lead to a contradiction of something else they think. So they are in a state of apparent harmony. And Socrates, you could say, is going around examining men and finding out that this is true almost all the time. And he leads them out of the state of apparent harmony into that of a what contradiction. And then beyond that contradiction, or hidden underneath it, is the hidden harmony, and that's a true harmony and a much better harmony than they start off with, huh?

[22:02] So you know the simplest example in Socrates is when he asks the slave boy in the Meno, "How do you double a square? " And the slave boy says, "Well, you double the side. " Now, the slave boy is in a state of apparent harmony. He thinks his thoughts about squares are all able to be held by him. And if Socrates didn't examine him, as he says later, the slave boy would tell the whole world if they asked him the way to double squares, to double the side.

[22:37] But then Socrates takes a simple example, and he takes maybe say a square whose side is two, and the slave boy can kind of see that two, two by two would give you four, right? And then if you double the side, make it four by four, what do you have? You get sixteen, right? Sixteen double four, but the slave boy can see that isn't so, right? But four is double of two.

[23:04] So these things aren't compatible, are they? He's got to either give up that four is double of two, or that sixteen is not double of two, of four rather, or else that what the square whose side is twice as long is twice as big. Well, it's more known to him, of course, that four is double of two and sixteen is not double four. Therefore, he's forced to deny that the

[23:32] square whose side is twice as long is twice as big. But then Socrates goes on to find the hidden harmony there, and it's very beautiful. It's actually the diagonal of the original square, which is the what side of a square twice as big, and he shows that to the slave boy. So that's beautiful, huh? That little theorem. But it's not so beautiful if you just double the side.

[23:58] It's a big deal, you know. But that the diagonal, the original square would be the side. Hey, I never thought of that. See, so the hidden harmony is better than the apparent harmony. And Niels Bohr, the great physicist, there often talk about this, huh? And how his own theory arose, his own application of the quantum to the atom arose from the contradictions that there were between the stability say of the atom and the kind of solar system view of the atom and the discrete emissions of energies, the jump-like emissions of energy, which kind of contradicted the electromagnetic theories, which would be a kind of a continuous emission of energy when electrons change their orbits.

[24:55] And so, what have we said about Bohr? Physicists worked with him in apparently hopeless contradiction. He saw the what germ of future discovery, huh? The seed there of a wider, more comprehensive harmony, huh? So that's the hidden harmony that's underneath. And Bohr was saying, you know, before he died, you know, they were making substantial progress in the study of almost particles because they had not run into a startling enough contradiction that would give them an idea where to modify their ideas and so on.

[25:36] Now, I always say, you know, get it from the horse's mouth, huh? And Bohr will tell you that, that it began from a contradiction. Now you go to Einstein's book, The Evolution of Physics, and he'll say the relativity theory arose from serious and deep contradictions from which there seemed to be no what escape. And he makes the very strong statement there, a universal affirmative statement. He says all the essential ideas in science were born of a conflict, huh?

[26:11] The exact idea of Heraclitus there: War is the father of all. And so, I sometimes playfully call Heraclitus the father of the progress of human mind, because he's the first man to has some inkling of the role of contradiction here, in a discovery and in our mind going forward. And the men who make the great discoveries, who talk about the contradiction on which they begin their great discovery, and the people like Bohr and Einstein, who should know something about how discoveries are made, you know, from his wonderful year there, three three papers in one year that all were worthy of the Nobel Prize, the relativity and the photoelectric effect and the Brownian movement papers.

[27:07] But he says all essential ideas are born in this way, and he speaks of their their aim is to knock down the wall of contradictions. It's a little different, you know, metaphor than Aristotle's, you know, being tied by your feet when you run into a contradiction, but wall contradiction, a wall stops you from going forward. So you have to untie the contradiction or break down the wall, and that's the way the mind goes forward.

[27:37] Augustine talks in theology about the necessity of heresy for the development of theology. Well, the heretic contradicts an article of the faith, and he gives often some kind of reason, either drawn from philosophy or even drawn from scripture, sometimes. And so the church fathers were forced to untie this contradiction, and that very untie the contradiction was a deeper understanding of that particular article of faith. And then Thomas Aquinas and the medievals do this in even more formal way with the quaestiones disputatae, where you could say every article in the Summa, which is a kind of contraction of the method of the quaestiones disputatae, begins from a contradiction, and then the body of the article unties that contradiction and so on, and that's the way you

[28:34] go forward. But that's the way theology developed. So it's interesting to see that the great philosophers like Heraclitus and Aristotle and so on, and then the great scientists like Einstein or Bohr and so on, and the great theologians like Augustine and Thomas, despite all the differences that there are in the way that philosophy and science and theology go forward, what's interesting in all of them, contradiction, plays a fundamental role, tying up the mind with contradictions, and then going forward by breaking down or untying those contradictions.

[29:12] So that's. What would be the. If there is a basic reason, the basic reason for that is it because of our senses, or because we know parts first. Well, in a sense, it arises without, or perhaps, knowing exactly why, because you find that that different men write with some probability for reason to opposite conclusions, or reach opposite conclusions, and even the devil can quote scriptures. They say, "Right, huh?"

[29:46] And our Lord Himself in the twenty-second chapter, I think. The way he proceeds is by giving the effects of God. So we see those, like the water made wine, stuff like that. So he's treating us the way we have to approach nature. That's the way Thomas divides it, right? He gives the first miracles in nature, and then he gives miracles that are more spiritual, right? But even at the Last Supper, there, where he's talking, and Philip says, "You know, show us the Father is enough for something, " and maybe it's this long.

[30:22] you don't