The Classical Mind: What is that?
MIND
— In the OED (first edition) there are 21 different definitions for the noun “mind.” The first definition of 21 is memory illustrated by a quotation from the year A.D. 1000 by Aelfric of Eynsham in which he says, in my rendering into modern English, “that through which man thinks that which he has heard or seen or learned.”
(What are some of the other ways that we use the word “mind?”)
— “Mind” has no corresponding word in French (l’esprit, le cerveau, la tête, l’âme, le souvenir, la memoire are all mere approximations) or in German (in the Cassell’s English-German dictionary, there are eighteen different words under the first definition).
— So what is the mind of which there are, at least, two kinds: classical and modern? Under heading III.the OED gives the definition, “Mental or psychical being or faculty,” and then under definition 17, “The seat of a person’s consciousness, thoughts, volitions, and feelings; . . . .” I think this is the meaning of “mind” in the course title but tinged also with “Weltanschauung” or “worldview.” Mind is “the seat of a person’s consciousness, thoughts, volitions, and feelings” where he holds a particular opinion of how the world is put together.
The trouble with this definition of “mind” is that it was devised in modern times and is a particular idea of a certain kind of English philosophy which began in the sixteenth century with Sir Francis Bacon. So what does it mean to talk about the mind of people who lived in ancient and mediaeval times? It is an anachronism: trying to explain a period of history in terms and concepts which did not exist in those times. (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court) There was a modern mind in a way that there was not a classical mind because the idea of “mind” is itself a modern idea.
CLASSICAL
— What is meant by “classical?” The OED has eleven definitions of this adjective. The first is, “Of the first rank or authority.” The second is “Of the standard Greek and Latin writers; belonging to the literature or art of Greek and Roman antiquity.” The most common use of “classical” is in this second sense, referring to the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome (while implying that that period was especially authoritative). In the course title, however, this use of “classical” is stretched well beyond antiquity to the gothic period of the Middle Ages.
–Even more problematic is that there are seventeen hundred years between the birth of Socrates and the death of St. Thomas Aquinas. What does it mean that they are examples of “the classical mind?” That points to the problem of . . .
THE
— Could there have been only one mind in the classical period? Why not “A Classical Mind?” While we find a synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelian thought in both the works of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, in fact they provide two very different syntheses. The Augustinian synthesis unleashed certain forces in history. The Thomistic synthesis unleashed other forces. In what sense did St. Augustine and St. Thomas share one classical mind?
AND YET
There is something to the distinction as we shall see through the semester.
Part of what I am trying to say here is, don’t take anything for granted. Test what is said with analysis.
What is Philosophy?
“love of wisdom”
Metaphysics: “the study of being as (qua) being.
One answer by the Socrates of The Republic, 376a-c
Another from Aristotle:
“For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth (φιλόμυθος) is in a sense a lover of wisdom (φιλόσοφός), for myth is composed of wonders); therefore since they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.”[1]
Why my grandmother is right
Too often the image of philosophy is that it is a very deep subject, perhaps arcane and esoteric. As Allan Bloom puts it on p. vii of his edition of The Republic, people often think that philosophy is “nonsense” or even outrageous nonsense. Sad to say, there is much that passes as philosophy which justifies this judgement, but not all. There is also a wide river in the history of philosophy which has respect for everyday life and for the insights and character of ordinary people. By way of full disclosure, I aim to be part of that wide river. While philosophy should help to observe, read and listen carefully, while it should give us the tools to analyze what we perceive as well as the claims which are made to us and, perhaps, most of all, our own unthought presuppositions, at the same time, philosophy should increase and strengthen our respect for ordinary life, ordinary people and the truths by which they live. This person I call “Grandma.” In my case, it was my grandmother, but it could have been a parent, a scoutmaster, a priest, the janitor at school.
Three passages from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics help us to understand this person of natural virtue:
1113a29-33: the good agent judges everything aright
1143b11-14: “The opinions of experienced, old and prudent people are as good demonstrations because experience has given them the ability see rightly.”
1145ab3-7: the task of philosophy is to prove the truth of ordinary wisdom, not without testing and sifting them; in the end the ordinary wisdom is what lasts.
Plato’s Republic
Justice and the City
The Greek for “The Republic.” “the political form of government”
Republic as the account of the philosopher-hero: Socrates as Odysseus
Look at where this dialogue goes: the Myth of Er: 10.614b3-621b7
In short, a warrior by the name of Er died in battle. He lay on the battlefield for ten days, and then his body was gathered for his funeral by cremation on the twelfth day. Just before his body was to be cremated, Er came back to life. He had been to the land of the dead and he had a story to tell. What that story is we shall come to in good time.
Now, let us look at the first word of the Republic: “Katabēn,” “I went down.”
From my dissertation, I.ii:
Professor Planinc thus opens his book, Plato through Homer:
From its first word—katebēn, “I went down”—Plato’s Republic remains unfamiliar to us. . . . It cannot be a minor detail that Plato has Socrates recollect the entirety of the previous night’s discussions and narrate it, in his own voice, to an unidentified auditor. And it cannot be an insignificant literary ornament that Plato has Socrates begin by alluding to the scene in the Odyssey in which Odysseus, finally reunited with Penelope, tells her of his long travels and the hardships yet to come, as he heard them from Teiresias,
on that day
when I went down (katebēn) inside the house of Hades, seeking
to learn about homecoming, for myself and my companions.
(Odyssey 23.251-53)[2]
That reading of the Republic, in effect, makes everything in the dialogue until 614b a narrative frame for Er’s account of his visit to the world of the dead. If Socrates is Odysseus, then the listener or reader is Penelope, and the Republic is all pillow talk
Book I (327a-354c)
Now, let us look at the first principle encounter of Book 1. Socrates talks with Cephalus (1.328b8-d10). Cephalus is represented as standing just on this side of death’s boundary, “the threshold of age,” in other words as someone who is about to make the journey to the house of Hades (See Bloom, 441, n.12). Cephalus represents the old order. He quotes the poet, Pindar (520-440 B.C.) and is a contemporary of Sophocles who at the time of the events in the Republic was eighty-five years old.
The default settings of eros are sex, money, fame, status, and power. If we allow our default settings to prevail, then we shall be like those characterized by Cephalus: “Most of the members of our group lament, longing for the pleasures of youth and reminiscing about sex, about drinking bouts and feasts and all that goes with things of that sort; they take it hard as if they were deprived of something very important and had then lived well but are now not even alive” (1.329a-b).
If, however, we reorient our eros to the virtues (justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom), then these goods will increase in life, rather than decrease. Cephalus concludes that the one thing that matters is “the character of human beings. If they are orderly and content with themselves, even old age is only moderately troublesome; if they are not, then both age . . . and youth alike turn out to be hard for that sort” (1.329d).
Discussion question: What would the world look like if everyone were oriented to virtue (justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom), rather than sex, money, fame, status, and power.
It is then in relation to questions of what happens after a person dies (that is from the conversation between Socrates and Cephalus at the beginning and the Myth of Er at the end) that the dialogue proceeds. The question with which Socrates and his interlocutors occupy themselves for the remainder of Book 1 is what constitutes justice.
Thales (active in 585 B.C.) is the first person to whom tradition has given the name, “philosopher.” If he wrote anything, nothing of it has survived. He seems to have had gifts as a civil engineer and astronomer which suggests that the birth of philosophy is closely associated with the discovery of rudimentary mathematics. Thales is a kind of icon for the beginning of philosophy. Aristotle tells us that for Thales the first principle of the world is water (Aristotle, Metaph. 1.983b6-8 and 1.983b19-984a2; Barnes 2.1555-56. = Thales A.12 D.-K.). Plato makes one reference to Thales in The Republic (10.600a3).
About the second Greek philosopher, Anaximander, we know a little more and that little pertains to the theme of justice. His life is assigned the approximate dates of 611-546 B.C. He is the author of the first line of Greek philosophy which has come down to us, the only line explicitly attributed to him. Translated into English it runs something like this: “According to necessity, for they give justice to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of time” (KRS, pp. 117-18, modified by me). This isolated fragment is extremely important in the history of philosophy for two reasons beyond the fact that it is the first line of philosophy ever written. The first is that the quotation is only seventeen words long in the Greek, it includes four key terms for the history of philosophy: “necessity,” “justice,” injustice,” and “time.” Not only Anaximander does give us four key words in the vocabulary of philosophy, but also one or more philosophical principles, namely that of opposite and negation (which may or may not be the same thing)s in the two words “justice” and “injustice.”
The second reason that this line is important is that philosophers have been commenting upon it ever since Anaximander wrote it. Although Plato does not quote or mention Anaximander in The Republic, it is not unreasonable to read the extensive discussion of justice throughout The Republic against the background of Anaximander’s fragment.One hundred and twenty years separate the death of Anaximander and the birth of Plato. There are fewer years between Anaximander’s death and the birth of Socrates, but probably at least forty more between the death of Anaximander and Plato’s writing of The Republic. During that latter interval the idea of “justice” had developed, partly as a function of the development of Greek cities and society.
One meaning of the Greek word we translate as “justice” is “custom.” It is likely that “custom” lay near the original meaning of the word. That is to say, “justice had to be concrete and not abstract, as we discussed in the context of Homeric background. What was customary was just. That which violated custom violated justice. One of the developments we shall note in The Republic is that Socrates seeks to sever that necessary relation between custom and justice. The word for “justice” grows so that one has both the older, shorter word and the newer expanded word for making distinctions.
In the Anaximander fragment, “justice” and “injustice” seems to mean something else. What it means for sure, we cannot say because we have the fragment in the context of someone else’s writing. We do not know if that author was using the quotation in the spirit of Anaximander. The necessity spoken of seems to be like that of the pendulum, which as an expression of time swings from one extreme to the other. Night pays its justice to day. Winter pays its justice to summer. The world overreaches itself; it goes too far, and it must swing back just as far in the opposite direction. That other extreme in the opposite direction also requires justice, and so the world swings from one extreme to each other in unending necessity. This is a kind of justice built into the way the world is put together.
We can easily transfer that kind of physical necessity into a moral law: “he who overreaches, loses.” When someone goes too far, then there move against him a force that is both opposite and inexorable.
Many of us wish for a kind of mechanical moral universe in which not only when someone went too far, but whenever someone did anything wrong, that person would be caught and punished. Even though that would mean we too would be punished regularly, still it would be a system which we could understand and live within. Many of our ideals about justice are based upon that kind of wish. In this way, the fragment of Anaximander is still at work today even in the post-modern imagination.
The Delphic Oracle
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates tells the story of his friend, Chaerephon, who asked the Delphic Oracle if anyone was wiser than Socrates. The Oracle said that no one was wiser than Socrates. Socrates was puzzled by this because he had always insisted that he was the one person in Athens who did know anything. Then he figured out the puzzle: it is the person who knows that he does not know (good ignorance) who is wisest of all.
The two most basic principles of Greek life were inscribed on the temple of Delphi: “Know thyself!” and “All things in moderation!”
To learn more about the Delphic Oracle, follow this link:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00txj8d .
Justice in The Republic
What is Justice?
Is Justice doing good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies? The distinction of friend-enemy is one that Socrates will seek to transcend.
Does justice pay or is injustice more profitable?
Thrasymachus: Injustice pays (1.343b1-344c5). Socrates disagrees (1.345b3-e3).
What does justice have to do with being?
The question of being introduced (1.340d-341a3: Have someone read this passage.). When the surgeon is operating on someone, and makes a terrible mistake causing the patient to die, does the surgeon make that mistake as a surgeon? Is she a surgeon at the moment of the mistake? (Question to Odysseus: Not only “Who are you?” but also “Are you who you are?”) Is the surgeon a surgeon at the moment that he sends out the bill for the surgery (341c3-4, 342d1-3)?
“This above all: to thine own self be true,/ And it must follow, as the night the day,/ Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.iii.75.
The question of virtue (335b3-d3). Is justice a virtue(348c1-2)? What is the relation between function and being (353b1-c-354a3)? Justice is a virtue of the soul (353e-3).
Injustice is a kind of civil war (351e4)
“For the sake of” causality: 342e2-5, 345b3-e1, 346a2-4.
Passages from the Republic which are important for PHIL 201, Sections-3
taught by Pastor Wilson. Quotations are taken from John M. Cooper. Plato.Complete Works. Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett, 1997.
Book I
1.327a-333d1: Sex in the city—at what should we aim our erotic desire?
The moral neutrality of acts: every act must be examined in its context.
340d-341a2: speech of Thrasymachus in relation to function and being.
This is also important as an example of how in the so-called middle dialogues Plato places important philosophical points in the mouths of Socrates’ interlocutors.
342e2-5
345b3-e1 : “for-the-sake-of” causality.
346a2-4
352:injustice as civil war and as war against the gods.
352b6-354c3; Virtue and happiness
352-353: reprise of “for-the-sake-of”
A knife is for cutting, etc.
causality function and being— what is virtue?
353e3:justice is the soul’s virtue
Book II
The philosophical theme of “being and seeming” is prominent in Book II.
357a: seeming and being (just).
361b3-5: “a just man, who is simple and noble and who, . . ., doesn’t want to be believed to be good but to be so.”
357b-c: three kinds of goods—which is justice?
359: The Myth of Gyges. If I could get away with doing wicked things, would I? AM I good (to the degree that I am), OR do I merely SEEM to be good?
369e-385c: justice and the city (the problem with the poets (377)
372: Socratic Idyll
The desire for luxury makes war inevitable, and war makes philosophy necessary. The only alternative to coercion is rational discourse.
374e theme of the guardians
375 spiritedness
378b8-c3 stories that won’t be allowed: art has something to do with justice
382a: and so does right belief about the gods (what is truly a lie)
The Noble Lie is literally false, but in meaning true.
Book III (Lots in this book against Homer)
386a-387b The ten expurgations
390d Odysseus commanding his spiritedness. This passage from Homer is also quoted again in 4.441b-c.
401b1-402d3: necessary criteria for education; kinship with reason; seeming and being; Forms; Beauty.
410c3: for the sake of the soul.
413a3: to hold the things that are is to possess the truth.
Example of the noble lie:
415a-c: Myth of Metals
Everyone is shaped from the earth and is born either with a golden soul (reason), a silver soul (spiritedness) or bronze soul (appetites). (As shall be seen later in the Republic, iron is also added.)
Gold soul-guardians (philosopher-kings)
Silver soul-warriors (Bloom’s term is auxilliaries because they help the guardians)
Bronze soul-farmers, merchants, tradesmen
Book IV
420b1-c2: goal is the happiness of the whole city not merely of some of the citizens.
423d3: city a one and not a many.
423e3-425c3: how to ensure truly human being through education and good laws.
Note that while the Socrates of the Republic is against Homer and Hesiod and the poets in general, at the same time he is against innovation. See 424c1-2. Never forget that for all of the revolutionary character of the Platonic corpus there runs through it a core of conservatism.
425c4-426c5: the relationship of virtue and legislation.
427e4-429e3: the four virtues necessary for the city—wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice.
429e3-430b2: dangerous detergents.
Outline of Virtues:
(A great passage, on courage, to diagram: 429c3-d2)
(A great passage, on moderation, to diagram: 431c2-4)
433a-b: Justice “is minding one’s own business.”
433a1-3: Justice must come first. Why?
433b3-c2: Because it grows the other virtues.
435b4-5: three parts of the soul and the city—
435d5-436a2: love of learning (philosophers);
spiritedness (warriors);
love of money (tradesmen and merchants).
436b4-7 The Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) (which Professor Bloom says is enunciated here for the first time in any extant manuscript or in any of which we have a report. Bloom, 457, n. 25, but one finds it stated in the Gorgias as well which is at least contemporary with the Republic and perhaps earlier, i.e., Gorgias 496a.): A and ~A cannot both be true at the same time and in the same way.
439d2-4: soul has two parts, rational and appetitive, and a spirited part too (that makes three).
440a3: spiritedness will wage war against appetite (e.g. Achilles), but never against reason (e.g. Odysseus). The text does not name Achilles, but surely it is of him that
Socrates is thinking. While he does not mention Odysseus here, he does shortly (441b2-
5) in an amazing use of Homer as depicting that about which Socrates philosophizes. This is a very important passage for my view (in agreement with Vico) that what Homer depicts becomes the themes of Greek philosophy.
Book V
449c2-450a1: women and children in common.
454c3-455a1: “Nature” for Socrates of the Republic is not biological, rather what a thing is at its highest and best. This seems to be consistent of Socrates throughout the Platonic corpus. There is no biological teleology. Remember part of the project for Plato’s Socrates is the elimination of the household. There are to be citizens and the city and no household to intervene between city and citizens. See 457c4-d1.
462b2-c3 and 464b3-c1: private sphere dissolves the city.
472b3-d1: participation and bringing the city into being.
473c4-e3: philosopher-king.
474b1-c1: some are fit to do philosophy and to rule, and others need to leave philosophy alone and to follow the rulers.
COMPARE HOMER DIAGRAM WITH P-S DIAGRAM
Homer: Plato-Socrates:
gods gods
divine nature I immortality divine nature I immortality
——————-______________ ——————____________
Heroes Philosophers
(share divine nature with gods and (share divine nature with gods and
mortality with ordinary people) mortality with ordinary people)
___________———————– ——————-____________
ordinary people ordinary people
476e5-477b1: there is being and non-being and something in between; Parmenides is in the background here.
E.g.: 476c3-e2: beauty/ things more or less beautiful/ non-existence; metaphysics of participation. Beauty really is. Things more or less beautiful have only a relative existence as they participate in beauty. Those who study that which is real (e.g. beauty) are philosophers and possess truth or knowledge. Philosophers have erotic love for that which really is. People who do not recognize the existence of that which really is are lovers of opinion and are incapable of philosophy. They have erotic love for those things which only have relative existence.
In philosophical terms, the view of Socrates here is called “realism.” He holds that truths such as beauty, nobility, justice are what are really real, and only those Forms are truly real.
Book VI
484: Philosophers are to be guardians of the city and of the laws (c3) because they have a clear model in their souls.
485a2-4: and therefore it is necessary to understand the nature of the philosopher.
a5-c4: pederasty as a model of the philosopher’s inclination to learning and (d2) to every kind of truth. This is a standard trope throughout Plato’s dialogues. What Socrates seems to propose here (and elsewhere) is a shift from the physical relationship to the soulful relationship between the teacher and student. Also, Socrates seems to propose that the love of learning should be like “falling in love.”
This is the aspect of Plato-Socrates’(P-S) teaching which I find fundamentally repugnant. Even though he subsequently says that the philosopher abandons the pleasures of the body for those of the soul (d3-5), nevertheless the philosopher’s soulful erotic inclination is analogically understood in relation to pederasty. To those who would defend P-S by saying that he doesn’t advocate pederasty rather that it is only a metaphor, I ask, would we find it acceptable to use serial murder as a philosophical metaphor?
486a1: “there’s also this to consider when you are judging whether a nature is philosophic or not.”
A major problem is implicit here but not discussed: who gets to do the judging? Are we back to the question of epistemology or merely to power?
a4-b1: “And will a thinker high-minded enough to study all time and all being consider human life to be something important?
“He couldn’t possibly.
“Then will he consider death to be a terrible thing?
“He least of all.”
2006: The significance of those lines can hardly be over-rated for twentieth century philosophy since Martin Heidegger thought himself to be such a high-minded thinker. His entitled his most famous work Being and Time. Death become the goal of life in his philosophy. Not surprisingly, he found the Nazis appealing and joined their ranks. Though he gave up his university post in the Nazi regime he never repudiated National Socialism. In fact, in 1966 he gave an interview to the German magazine Der Spiegel designed to be published after his death in which he said that the National Socialists were on the right track in finding the appropriate relationship to technology; it was just the stupid politicians who messed up things.
What are we to say to the denigration of human life on the lips of the Socrates’ of the Republic?
2010: At the same time, however, how does this relate to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas?
486b2-4: signs of the philosophic soul.
496b4-497d3: the few with a philosophic nature.
497d4-500: How can the city undertake philosophy without destroying the city?
501b: the answer— “And I suppose that, as they work, they’d look often in each direction, towards the natures of justice, beauty, moderation, and the like, on the one hand, and towards those they’re trying to put into human beings, on the other. And in this way they’d mix and blend the various ways of life in the city until they produced a human image based on what Homer too called “the divine form and image” when it occurred among human beings.”
Socrates is citing the Iliad i.131.
Is this not amazing that P-S cites Homer as an authority for one of P-S’s most singular innovations?
504-505: The Form of the Good is above and beyond the forms of the four virtues.
505e: “Every soul pursues the good and does whatever it does for its sake. It divines that the good is something but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is or acquire the sort of stable beliefs it has about other things, and so it misses the benefit, if any, that even those other things may give.”
From this book to the end of Book VI P-S tries to say what the Good is without ever quite succeeding.
Analogy of the Good: 6.506a-509d
One-to-another analogy has four terms:
A is to B
a
C is to D
Symbolized as
A : B
::
C : D
For example,
Den is to fox as nest is to bird,
Coach is to team as instructor is to class.
Each part of the Analogy of the Good has six terms
The sun is to the eye and to the tree
as
the Good is to the soul and to the Form of the tree.
507b4: “And we say that the many beautiful things and the rest are visible but not intelligible, while the forms are intelligible but not visible.”
sensible I intelligible
_________________________________
Forms I no I yes
_________________________________
things I yes I no
507c-509c: discussion of perception and knowledge in an attempt to come to an analogical understanding of truth.
509d-511e: the Divided Line.
Intelligible:
Understanding (noesis) Forms (eide)
“unhypothetical first principle of everything”
known through dialectic,
“from forms, to forms, and ending in forms.” 511b5-c5
________________
Thought (dianoia) geometry and calculation (ta mathematica)
________________________________________________________________________
Visible:
Belief (pistis) things
natural objects and human artifacts
_________________
Imagination (eikasia) images of things (eikones)
* * * * * * * * * * * *
There is no positive evil in the thought of our Classical Mind authors, only negative evil. Evil is the privation of the good, but absolute evil is non-existence because insofar as anything exists (has being), it is good. So, the evil we experience in life is partial evil, and that is a corruption of the good. In other words, evil is an absence of the good. The Form of Goodness itself is Plato’s highest order reality, the ultimate Being.
Book VII
514-518c1: the allegory of the Cave—a thought experiment.
A major problem in Plato scholarship is whether Plato’s Socrates believed that everything had a form (e.g. horse form for horse, rock form for rock) or only the great ideas like love, justice and the Good. Aristotle thought Plato believed everything had a form, and Aristotle was Plato’s student and, later, his colleague. On the other hand, Aristotle is notorious for misrepresenting the people with whom he disagrees, and he disagrees completely with Plato on the forms.
It isn’t clear to me if P-S believed that every thing had its form, but it does seem to me to be the necessary implication of the Cave allegory. If what we experience are like the shadows of images which in turn are images of that which is real, then it seems of necessity that every perceptible thing must have a form. This is the point of view of half the Plato scholars
517b1-c3 gives the explanation in terms of the journey of the soul from the visible to the intelligible. There emerges from the thought experiment one of the great principles of the classic metaphysics (the science of being), namely that that which is most evident to our senses is the least knowable (intelligible) to the soul and that which is most knowable to the soul is the least evident to our senses.
518b5-d1: “Education isn’t what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes.” “[T]he power to learn is present in everyone’s soul . . . .”Education is “turning the whole soul until it is able to study that which is and the brightest thing that is, namely, the one we call the good.”
In Book V, P-S argued extensively that not everybody is capable of doing philosophy and that those people should just follow the few who have the philosophic nature. What does it mean here that P-S says that “the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul?”
Soul Earthly Life After Life
Homer shadowy remnant the real life miserable half-existence
upon death
Plato First principle the Cave possibility of Isles of the Blest
of life
519a3-4: P-S seeks to free the young from “kinship to becoming.”
Becoming takes place in the realm of things. Things change; triangles do not change. Forms are eternal. See also 521d2-4.
519-520: P-S continues the metaphor of the cave.
519d3-4: the best natures refuse to go down to the cave.
520c4-5: nowadays people fight over shadows.
521a1-3: riches of the rational life
522: the disciplines which help train the better natures.
523: getting beyond the unreliability of sense perception.
524a-c: the idea of separability—that which is separable from the sensible is intelligible (e.g. the idea of big is separable from the big dog).
524d-527c: Numbers are obviously separable. P-S holds that numbers and, with them, calculation and geometry are important for exercising the soul away from the realm of becoming to that which is.
528-533: a detailed plan of implementation.
533d4-534a4: reprise and fine-tuning of the Divided Line.
534b-e3 : dialectic the means of seeking that which is and the Good.
535-541: summary of educational program.
e2-4: send everyone over ten years into the country; rear children independent of parents.
Those who have watched the film Killing Fields should recognize this program; it was implemented by the Khmer Rouge Cambodia.
Book VIII
There is a marked shift in Books 8 and 9 of the Republic. In this book P-S turns attention to the kinds of constitution, the politeia which is the Greek word translated as “republic.” Throughout this discussion P-S finds inspiration in Homer. In this book some of the basic conservatism of P-S is revealed. See 547b3 where Socrates advocates the constitution that moves “towards virtue and the old order.”
Implicit to Books 8 and 9 is the awareness that the best kind of constitution is not possible, and therefore it is part of the duty of philosophers to consider what the best possible constitution might be. In the language of the Republic itself, Plato the author realizes that the vast majority of ordinary people will go on living in the cave. That being the case, the question is how those who have been outside the cave and who have beheld that-which-is, the realm of intelligibility, how they can best order life in the cave given their discovery of the truest reality. How can life in the cave be so ordered best to prepare people for life in the Isles of the Blest?
There is a sense in which Plato dedicates the Republic to his brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus, who are not philosophers and therefore who must deal daily with the world of becoming, the world of appearances, rather than with that-which-is. Plato is a philosopher; his brothers, politicians. So it is—and here is one of the loveliest discoveries in reading the Republic—that this work of pre-eminent philosophical importance is written, at the end of the day, not for philosophers, rather for non-philosophers. Thus, the Republic is most appropriate as required reading for the undergraduate curriculum seeking to shape the lives of non-philosophers, people who must deal with the world of becoming, the world of appearances. The bold if also implicit claim here is that those who must find their way in the realm of change and motion will do so as best possible because they have spent some time seeking knowledge, namely the apprehension of that which is.
A hint of where all this is meant to go is given in Book VI.501: we our rulers to be able to look both to the eternal, unchangeable realities and to the matters at hand. (So, perhaps not the perfect philosopher who is only concerned with the eternal truth?)
544c: four basic kinds of constitution: Cretan, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny.
There follows a long discussion of the types of city and types of soul; remember the two are analogously related.
R.I.C.: 545b-c kinds of constitution
R.I.C.: 547b-d
Four kinds of constitution:
Here we see the theme of justice reprised, and yet not with respect to justice itself, rather with justice implemented institutionally. This is ground-breaking material. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics we shall see these themes resolved into a tidy system, but here the ideas are inchoate and emergent.
547c2-3: the ideal constitution is between aristocracy and oligarchy.
Note how the idea of mixing and blending continues a means for achieving the right balance in the city. Refer back to 501b3. The mean of mixture
The balance of this book investigates the nuances of the various constitutions, their advantages and disadvantages.
556a-b: Laws can promote virtue.
Book IX
In this book, P-S works through the practical implications of his philosophy of being. He continues to discuss the various constitutions of both men and cities. There begins to come into focus the correspondence of good and bad polities: monarchy-tyranny, aristocracy-oligarchy, timocracy-democracy.
576d: Socrates here allows that kingship is the best rule, though monarchy does not make it onto any of his lists.
576d-579e: The tyrant is the most wretched person and the city ruled by the tyrant is most wretched.
580b: Five constuitutional forms,; kingly is added.
580d-e: Just as there are three parts to the soul, so there are three parts of the city—appetitive, spirited, and rational.
582a2-3: three criteria for judging—experience, reason, argument.
We noted before that there is a problem of who gets to judge in this city. Here, at least, P-S gives three criteria for judging, although the question of who does the judging remains open. The movement in the thought of Plato seems to be toward what we find in the Laws, his last dialogue, namely that the best constitution is, as President John Adams famously observed, “a government of laws and not of men.”
582d4: Argument is the premier instrument of the philosopher
585b3-d1: Being, knowledge and truth are co-extensive.
591c5-d1: Perhaps this line sums up the character of Book IX. P-S seeks the cultivation of the body “for the sake of the consonance in his soul.” The body should resonate with the soul. The soul is the for-the-sake-of cause of the body.
* * *592b: Socrates acknowledges that his city exists nowhere on earth. “But perhaps,” he says, “there is a model of it in heaven.” A person who seeks that city will be unwilling to participate “in the practical affairs” of any other city.
What are the implications of this statement? Does it mean that the true philosopher will be unwilling to play a role in the politics of actually-existing cities? Remember that these lines are placed in the mouth of Socrates by an author whose three political works (Republic, Statesman and Laws) constitute forty percent of his entire corpus.
INFORMAL NOTES
Passages from the Republic which are important for PHIL 201, Section 19
taught by Pastor Wilson. Quotations are taken from John M. Cooper. Plato.Complete Works (Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett, 1997).
October 3, A.D. 2005
Book X
595a: Imitative poetry should be excluded from the city.
595b: a choice has to be made between Homer and the truth; as much as it hurts to do so, the truth must be preferred even to Homer.
596a5-b4: With regard to the question of whether P-S held there to be forms to which physical things corresponded, it seems that 1) there is the form of bed and the form of chair and 2) the forms of bed and chair are eternal.
See 596e5-597a1: The forms are eternal. The form of the bed is the real being of a bed. (For this reason we call Plato a “Realist” because he believed that the forms have a real existence external to the human mind and which the mind, after strenuous effort, can apprehend.) From those forms, craftsmen make things (e.g. tables and chairs). Things, therefore, are two steps removed from reality. (Mathematical objects intervene between forms and things.)
596c-e: With a mirror it is possible to create an image of anything and everything. The painter’s skill is like a mirror.
597b: There are, then, three kinds of bed: 1) that which is in nature a bed (i.e. the form of the bed), 2) the physical bed made by a carpenter, and 3) the picture of a bed made by a painter.
Socrates seems to shift his ground slightly. In 596b2-4, he says that no craftsman
can make a form. Here he says that a god can make a form. Once can reconcile the difference by saying that the craftsman in the earlier passage refers to human craftsmen. The problem with this interpretation is that the gods are presumably the craftsmen who made natural objects, thus divine artifacts in contrast to human artifacts. In short, these points are not clear in the text.
597b5-598d: There follows a discussion of forms as “that which is in nature.” Thus the nature of a thing is the form of a thing. “Nature” has a very different meaning here than in our modern or post-modern understanding (even allowing for the scientific efforts to erase the distinction between natural object and human artifact).
The following citation may help in thinking about some of the different meanings that “nature” (physis in Greek) in the ages of mythology and early philosophy. The opening reference is to the recognition scene between Odysseus and Penelope. Remember that Aristotle rejects Plato’s theory that forms really exist.
“Odysseus asks, “Who dared to move my bed?” The short answer to this question is, “Aristotle did,” although the moving of the bed lay well in the future both from the putative date of the events in the Homeric epics and the composition of them. In PhysicsB.1 Aristotle discusses the problem of natural object and human artifact. Aristotle takes his cue from Antiphon of Athens, a rival of Socrates, who pointed out that if a man planted a bed, and the thing sprouted, it would produce wood the matter from which the bed was made and not another bed.(Physics 193a13-18, Diels-Kranz, ii, 342, Antiphon B.15). It is safe to assume that Aristotle is thinking here of Odysseus’s bed fashioned, as was his entire house, from the olive tree. Later in the same chapter Aristotle distinguishes between the generation of a natural being and the creation of an artifact:
The form indeed is nature rather than matter; for a thing is more properly said to be what it is when it exists in actuality than when it exists potentially. Again is born from man but not bed from bed. That is why people say that the shape is not the nature of a bed, but the wood is—if the bed sprouted, not a bed but wood would come up. But even it the shape is art, then on the same principle the shape of man is his nature. For man is born from man.
Physics 193b. 8-14. Jonathan Barnes, The Complete Work of Aristotle (Princeton: University Press, 1995).
The care with which Aristotle makes the distinction between a natural being and an artifact supports the position of this thesis that in the Homeric worldview being was one, whole and fluid. The being of “bed” and the being of “tree” commingled, and flowed in and out of each other. Antiphon of Athens made an observation which Aristotle elaborated into a formal distinction.
It is interesting to note that the unity of natural object and artifact was a sign
(me<gash?ma) (23.188) between Odysseus and Penelope, and the distinction of natural object and artifact was, for Antiphon and Aristotle, a sign of nature (shmei?on de<fusin) (Physics 193a13). In a sense, nature is born when being is divided, and natural object is separated from artifact. The sign of one paradigm yields to that of another.
Modern philosophy threw out substance and ontology; post-modern philosophy dispenses with the Principle of Non-contradiction. Though they leave only phenomena, Dasein and even more ephemeral notions, this distinction of Antiphon and Aristotle between natural object and artifact still holds.
While fu<w (“phyo”the verb for “to sprout”)recurs, there is only one use of the actual word fu<sij (physis) in Homer. That one, however, is fascinating: kai<moifu<sin au]tou? e@deice. This is when Hermes gives Odysseus the magic plant which is the antidote to Circe’s poison (10.302-06). The passage is extraordinary otherwise as well. Here Homer makes reference to the “language of the gods.” Vico makes much of this (New ScienceII.iv (437),143): “we return now to the three languages of the Egyptians. The first of these, that of the gods, is attested for the Greeks by Homer, . . . .” It is the name of the magic plant, mw?lu(moly), which Odysseus eats which is from the divine language.
Professor Benardete comments on this passage (Bow, 86):
What Hermes does with the moly is to show Odysseus its nature (phusis): “It was black in its root, and its flower like milk; the gods call it moly, but it is hard for mortal men to dig up, but the gods can do everything.” If the decisive action is the showing forth of its nature and not the revelation of the divine name, as if it were a magical charm, then the moly in itself is irrelevant. What is important is that it has a nature, and the gods’ power arises from the knowledge of its nature and of all other things.
First, one notes that Professor Benardete’s interpretation is at odds with that of Vico. For Vico, the significance is not “the revelation of the divine name, as if it were a magical charm,” rather that there is a memory of a language prior to the language of Homer or even of Odysseus, and that primordial language was understood to be the language of the gods. For Vico, there have been gods, heroes, and men with ages and languages corresponding to each. In the word moly and in words from four other Homeric passages, said to be from the language of the gods he finds evidence for his theory.
Second, while Professor Benardete’s analysis is philosophically interesting, it seems to be historically impossible. To make the claim successfully that “What is important is that it has a nature,” requires evidence that fu<sij can mean “nature” in Homer. More likely is that fu<sijheresimply means“growth.” Hermes showed Odysseus its growth (i.e. where it was growing). To say more than that without evidence is only anachronistic projection. If that point is accepted, then Professor Benardete’s philosophical point can still stand as analysis from his point of view as interpreter. His reading of The Odyssey is no longer platonic, however, but Aristotelian since the distinction of nature and artifact was Aristotle’s and not based upon an insight by Socrates, rather by Antiphon, a contemporary and rival of Socrates.
In this same respect, the translation of Heraclitus D-K Fragment B123,fu<sijkru<ptesqaifilei?, as “Nature loves to hide,” also seems anachronistic, projecting the observation of Antiphon and Aristotle’s further distinction back onto the Heraclitean text. Perhaps we should translate it something like “The newly sprung likes to hide,” or “Growth likes to hide,” or “What is produced likes to hide.” It is hard to see how fu<sijcould mean “nature” for Heraclitus let alone for Homer.”
Jeffrey Dirk Wilson, “Homer’s Paradigm of Being: A Philosophical Reading of The Iliad and The Odyssey” (Ph.L thesis, CUA, 2004), 88-89 (altered for these notes).
In this passage of the Republic we should be asking how Socrates is defining the word “nature” rather than imposing upon the word some other meaning which we are tempted to bring to the text. This is a good example of the necessity to shed our cultural clothes in an attempt to go naked to the text.
597e: An imitation is a third remove from reality.
Here then is a tremendous problem: imitative poetry is three steps removed from reality or truth. There are the forms, then mathematical objects, then things, then finally images of things of which poetry must, presumably, be even a poor sort since they are not even visual images.
Perhaps we get a hint here as well of why Plato rejected the use of poetry. Verse is by definition the repetition of certain patterns (such as the dactyls and spondees of the Homeric epics). The structure of verse is itself imitation. Thus it is not merely the content of poetry which three steps removed from reality, but the actual construction of verse as well. Later Socrates will say that Homer must defend himself, but when he does so, it must be in prose (607d3-5).
Consider an historical footnote. When Dante wrote his great poems, he daringly wrote in Italian verse. When he defended his Divine Comedy, he wrote in Latin prose.
* * * 599c-d: the test of politics. What cities did Homer found? Again, what is the relationship of philosophy to politics..
We have asked before who gets to judge and how? Here is a test: the test of politics: “what ways of life make people better in private or in public, then tell us which cities are better governed because of you . . . ?” This we can ask of Homer, and of Plato, of Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Calvin and Hobbes J, Madison and Hamilton, Marx, Lenin and Mao.
602c1: In case you missed it before, imitation is the third remove from truth.
602c3-d1: poetry is a kind of conjuring trick, the work of a phony magician.
603a-604a: poetry encourages us to give into those emotions which we resist showing in our own experience.
In this discussion, we see a transformation in psychology from the epic vision in which showing grief is consistent with manliness. Few scenes in literature are more moving than when old Priam, King of Troy, crosses enemy lines to beg the body of his son, Hector, from his son’s killer, Achilles, an encounter told in lines laden with the sense of doom for both men (Iliad xxiv). In Socrates’ account and, indeed, in his facing of death we see a different cultural ethos, one we would call “stoic.” (On this point see also 605d-606c: the part of our soul which should be ruled, Homer encourages to rule.) Thus, part of what we see here is one cultural icon, Socrates, judging by the standards of his own era, the cultural icons of another—and by then—archaic age. One of the persistent contradictions in the Republic is the longing for the old order which is implicitly repudiated in the rejection of Homer.
604b-e: The troubles of everyday life are not worth engaging. It is the rational part of the soul which follows the law wherever it leads which matters. Notice that the part of the soul which responds all too easily to life’s vicissitudes is “much and varied imitation” (Bloom).
In order to understand what Socrates is saying here it is important to examine the discussion of democracy in 557b-c3. Democracy is called “many-colored” (Bloom) similar to language here. Democracy looks attractive. It begets freedom, and freedom begets variety. What could be better than that?
To the mind of Socrates almost any other constitution would be better. Freedom quickly becomes license. It is the criminals (558a) and those who want destroy all that is noble (558b) who benefit from this permissiveness to variety. Democracy corresponds to the excitable part of the human soul; democracy is, thus, an expression of human instability, albeit superficially attractive. It is that lower character of the soul which the poet re-enforces (605a2). (See also 611a5-b1.)
Remember the Athens which condemned Socrates was a democracy. The Socrates of the Republic seeks a return to “virtue and the old order” (8.547b3).
* * *605c-d1: Even the best souls can be seduced by Homer.
Here is the real indictment of Homer and the expression of Plato’s problem. Homer’s work is so beautiful: who can resist it? Imagine the problem this poses for Plato. Homer’s work represents the lowest form of reality, three degrees removed from truth. How is it possible that work with so little reality can seduce even the noblest souls?
Homer would not be so dangerous if his work were not so sublime.
606: we let down our guard, and reason is defeated.
607a5-c: the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy.
Socrates says this as if it were a longstanding matter.
607d2: sending Homer into exile.
608a4-5: guarding against poetry
As Odysseus guarded himself against the song of the Sirens?
608c: a lifetime versus all of time.
608d-611a1: immortality of the soul.
611e1-2: The soul through philosophy is akin to the divine [and even] the immortal.
So, our paradigm apparently breaks down that the philosopher participates in the divine nature and not in the immortality of the gods. The soul, Socrates says, is immortal, but is the soul of ordinary people too or only of philosophers?
614b-621d: not “a tale of Alcinous” rather the philosopher’s myth of Er.
See Professor Bloom’s note on this point.
Socrates has repudiated the myths recounted by Homer, but now he introduces his own philosophical myth.
Transmigration of souls (reincarnation) plays into this myth. The souls of the dead get to choose a new incarnation. Most souls choose poorly, foolishly and rashly. After the soul has chosen its next incarnation, it must begin its journey.
616c1-2: “the spindle of Necessity, by means of which all the revolutions are turned.”
Here we have returned to the fragment of Anaximander. This is justice in its most mechanical form.
619a2-3: “how to avoid either of the extremes.”
The theme of mechanistic justice is continued. The avoidance of the extremes becomes a new model of justice, a point which Aristotle will refine in his “mean.”
c1-3: Those who choose badly choose anything and everybody for their poor choose, excusing only themselves.
* * *c-d: “He [the one who had chosen to become a tyrant without prior reflection] was one of those who had come from heaven, having lived in an orderly regime in his former life, participating in virtue by habit, without philosophy.” So, even the ordinary citizen needs to be informed by philosophy, e.g., like Glaucon and Adeimeantus. Here is a point where Plato and Aristotle are in radical disagreement.
620c: “The soul of Odysseus” comes along last and makes a wise choice, the life of Socrates. See 4.433a5, “Justice is the minding of one’s own business and not being a busybody, this we have heard from many others and have often said ourselves.” Odysseus had been the ultimate timocratic man (8.545b-c) who now has “recovered from the love of honor” (620c).
Is this not extraordinary? After railing against Homer for the entirety of the Republic, Socrates says that of all the souls of Greek heroes it is that of Odysseus who makes a wise choice. There may be no more impenetrable riddle in all of Plato’s writing than this choice of Odysseus who is given the final commendatory billing in the Republic. What does it mean? Can we identify the sending of Homer into exile (607d2) with this focusing on Odysseus as he begins his journey in a new incarnation?
I believe the role of Odysseus is a key to understanding much of Plato’s later work especially the Sophist, the Statesman and the Laws.
A Few Final Thoughts:
Plato wrote the Republic with a view to replacing the Iliad and the Odyssey as the basic texts for the Greeks. There were two problems with the Homeric poems. First, they were works of imitation, and thus in the realm of images, three steps removed from reality or truth. This quality of imitation is characteristic both of the content and form of Homer’s epics. That would be enough condemn them, but not enough to make them dangerous. What requires Plato to write whole books of the Republic against Homer is that the two poems are so bewitchingly beautiful. Plato was not immune to Homer’s magic, perhaps even Socrates was not.
So bewitching is Homer that Plato’s Socrates gives Homer’s greatest hero, Odysseus, a new introduction in his philosophical myth of Er. A new Odysseus is born, no longer the bearer of myths. The new Odysseus will be the wanderer seeking truth and bearing the rational truth of philosophy.
Introduction to Aristotle
John Henry Newman. The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1927.
Discourse 5, Section 5
“While the world lasts, will Aristotle’s doctrine on these matters last, for he is the oracle of nature and of truth. While we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being Aristotelians, for the great Master does but analyze the thoughts, feelings, views, and opinions of human kind. He has told us the meaning of our own words and ideas, before we were born. In many subject-matters, to think correctly, is to think like Aristotle; and we are his disciples whether we will or not, though we may not know it.”
384-322 B.C. Greek, from Stagira. His father was court physician to the king of Macedon
Biography: relationship to Plato: 366 B.C. went to Athens to study in Plato’s Academy (founded in 387 B.C) and where he remained for about twenty years first as a student and then as a teacher, which is to say until the death of Plato. Plato did not ask Aristotle to succeed him as head of the Academy. (The Academy continued in some form until A.D. 529, when it was closed by the Christian emperor, Justinian I.)
Alexander the Great: Philip II of Macedon invited Aristotle to become tutor to his son, Alexander, 343 B.C.
335 B.C. Aristotle returns to Athens and establishes his own school, the Lyceum which closes in 269 B.C.
Works that survive:
Exoteric— What was intended by the author for public consumption.
In Aristotle’s case, these are dialogues of which only fragments have survived
Esoteric— What the author intended for presentation to a small private circle, usually students.
In Aristotle’s case, lectures, some of which may have been edited by him, but much of it was probably edited posthumously.
— Discuss the way “exoteric” and “esoteric” have come into use in philosophy in general.
The situation with the works of Plato and Aristotle is inverse. We have all the exoteric works of Plato and none of the esoteric works, except perhaps for some letters. We have none of Aristotle’s exoteric works, and all that we have are his esoteric works, and they are often reworked by someone other than him.
Text history: who invented Aristotle?
I—A’s Empiricism
Biology (Teleology)
Four Causes
II A’s Logic (Barnes, 27-36)
Syllogism
Analogy
“Aristotle’s system is interconnected but not interdependent.” Mr. Wescott, a former student.
Categories (Smith in Barnes, p. 55)
Aristotle wrote a work called the Categories. We do not have all of this work, but the early chapters represent some of his most influential and original—since the modern era, most controversial—work.
The categories seek to exhaust in a comprehensive way and yet also at the highest level all the meanings of “is”
Ten categories or better one plus nine:
Substance (the category, what it is)
Of which nine categories can be predicated as accidents:
Example: The four-layered, chocolate cake—twice the usual size— with caramel frosting sitting on the kitchen table to the right of the toaster at nine o’clock this morning was being eaten.
–Substance is that which cannot be predicated of another.
–An accident is that which cannot exist without being predicated of another.
Act-potency
Four Causes
End- means
Correspondence:
Act Final Cause End
Potency Material, formal, efficient causes Means
Essence and the relation of matter (potency principle) and form (act principle)
Prime Matter
Universal and particular (and form)
Also what Aristotle rejects: Platonic Forms and participation
The Nicomachean Ethics
Before turning to the Nicomachean Ethics, it is important to say a few words about how I read Aristotle. As the last word in a series of lectures on Aristotle’s Categories, and with all the oracular quality of Heraclitus or even the Delphic oracle, Professor Jonathan Barnes said, “It may be difficult to understand what Aristotle says, but it is more difficult and far more important to understand what Aristotle does not say.”[3] He disappeared from the room before anyone could ask him what he meant which left me, at least, pondering the pronouncement. Whatever else Professor Barnes might have meant, I think to understand what Aristotle does say, we have to be thinking of what he does not say. That is, all the background principles, running in his mind, all need to be running in our minds as well. In other words, as readers, we have to supply and apply what Aristotle is thinking to what Aristotle is saying. Thus, it is imperative to have drilled Aristotle’s metaphysical principles to the point that they become implicit in our own thinking before we can in some adequate way understand his texts. The second principle comes from Father Joseph Owens, what I call “the principle of compositional thrift.” Father Owens observes that Aristotle rarely presents a fully systematic treatment. He tells us only enough to solve the problem at hand.[4] This may, at least partly, be due to character of our Aristotelian texts, as we think, arising from his lectures. The implication of compositional thrift is that any truly systematic treatment of Aristotelian thought is necessarily synthetic. The Barnes’ and Owens’ principles are complementary. They are essential to my own reading of Aristotle, in general, and to my account of the problem, in specific, of Aristotle’s best constitution.
“In 1831 Immanuel Bekker edited the Greek text of Aristotle’s surviving works. ‘Bekker’s Aristotle’ no longer provides the most authoritative and up-to-date text of Aristotle’s writings . . . ; but it remains the standard edition, inasmuch as scholars continue to refer to Aristotle by way of Bekker.”
Barnes, xxi.
Thus Bekker pages in Aristotle correspond to Stephanus numbers in Plato.
“It is not known why these collections have the titles they have. . . . the Nicomachean Ethics was either dedicated to Nicomachus, Aristotle’s father (who . . . died young), or else dedicated to or edited by Nicomachus, Aristotle’s son.”
Hutchinson in Barnes, 197, note 3.
Clue in 1102b28-1103a3
Rationality is like listening to your father, provided that one’s father was wise and morally virtuous (1103a3).
My view: Nicomachus (Aristotle’s father)-Aristotle-Nicomachus (Aristotle’s son), thus the basic education is the tradition which is handed down from one generation to another.
1098b27-30: Most of the views of ancient times and of distinguished men are probably correct.
Three passages more passages help us on our way. (These are our old friends from “Why My Grandmother is Right?”)
1113a29-33 (III.iv): the good agent judges everything aright
1143b11-14 (VI.xi): the opinions of experienced, old and prudent people are as good demonstrations because experience has given them the ability see rightly
1145b3-7 (VII.i): the task of philosophy is to prove the truth of ordinary wisdom, not without testing and sifting them; in the end the ordinary wisdom is what lasts.
Book One
“Politics as the master science of the good”
the first page of the Ethics where Aristotle reminds his reader that “every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim” (1094a1-3).[5] He immediately observes that there are not only diverse ends, but diverse kinds of ends (activities and products), and for each of the ends there are a variety of means (1094a3-6). A discovery is then made, that there are ends subsidiary to other ends. For example, he says that bridle-making is subsidiary to the art of riding horses, and that—in turn—is subsidiary to “military action under strategy” (1094a11-12). Elsewhere, Aristotle tells us that “war is for the sake of peace” (1333a35).[6] The architectonic end—such as peace—is preferable to the ends subordinate to it (1094a15-16). There are these multiple architectonic ends, but, Aristotle continues, these architectonic ends are themselves subordinate to other ends, and there must be some end because of which all the architectonic ends and their respectively subordinate ends must be undertaken. For without that supreme end, life would be “empty and vain” (1094a18-22). That supreme end is, of course, happiness (1095a18-19).
In metaphysical terms, Aristotle says that every human action and product has a final cause, that for the sake of which the action or product is undertaken. The proximate final cause, once actualized, is itself subsidiary to another final cause. That is to say, the first action or product—itself first of all an end—becomes a means to the second action or product for the sake of which the first end was undertaken. The second end then becomes a means to a third end, etc., but this causal relation of ends and means cannot continue infinitely, for if infinite regress were true life would be in the most literal sense pointless. Therefore, some supreme end must exist. In fact, what appears to be a very simple argument has a very sophisticated metaphysical structure. He utilizes seamlessly the principles of final causality, ends and means, infinite regress, and—of first importance here—universals and particulars. Aristotle’s discussion follows the order of human discovery in time, but metaphysically, of course, in the order of reality the sequence is reversed. The desire for peace comes first and causes the desire for good strategy which drives the desire for good horsemanship which drives the desire for good bridles. In the order of reality, the most universal and least particular drives the desire for the next most universal and more than least particular, which drives the desire for the next to the next most universal and the even more than least particular, until one arrives at this thing here and now, the most particular and least universal. In relation to peace, Wellington had a particular strategy. In the next step, however, what had been a particular in relation to the driving universal, now becomes a universal in relation to the particular in relation to it. In relation to the universal of Wellington’s strategy, there was particular horsemanship. And in relation to the universal of horsemanship, there was particular bridle-making. Even bridle-making is a universal in relation to the particulars of leather, scissors, rivets, hammer and anvil. The universal of peace can only be achieved if those particulars possess their necessary virtue. Thus, there is the proverb, “For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost” etc. There is a chain of necessity from the architectonic universal to the ultimate particular if the universal as end is to be actualized in the temporal, material world. If at any point in the chain, the virtue of the particular fails, then the architectonic universal will either be only partially actualized or not actualized at all.
Another metaphysical aspect of these first two chapters of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is the way it illustrates his account the one and the many. One of the aspects of Aristotle’s system that makes it so durable is the dynamic relationship between the universal, his absolute principle, and the particular, his relative principle. Without the absolute principle of the universal, the particular would have no structure. Without the relative principle of particular, the universal would be too brittle. There is the absolute universal of peace which is a one, but alone it is elusive and unattainable. A political community must have a strategy in war in order to preserve or restore peace. Strategies, however, are diverse; they are many. Wellington had one; Napoleon another. There were others still. A given strategy is relative in relation to the absolute of peace, but once a strategy is chosen, then it becomes the universal absolute. In relation to the universal of strategy, now a one, there is a diversity of horsemanship. In this relationship, it is possible to have a simultaneous plurality of horsemanship, several particulars of horsemanship in relation to the one strategy. In turn, each variety of horsemanship is a universal in relation to the particular of bridles. Again, a simultaneous plurality is possible. Bridles of different design and construction can be ordered to each variety of horsemanship as a universal.
Finally, all the subordinate ends are ordered to the architectonic end as secondary analogates to the primary analogate. Thus, bridle-making, horsemanship, and strategy are all secondary analogates contingent upon the primary analogate of peace, but the secondary analogates are contingent upon peace is different ways.
1094a18-1094b12:
Analyze 1094b7-12.
“The psychological foundations of the virtues”
1102a5-1103a10
“The Good and Being Good”
Jonathan Barnes: “It may be difficult to understand what Aristotle says, but it is more difficult and far more important to understand what Aristotle does not say.”
— Genus (kind) and species (and then in relation to universals)
And then the universal of Virtue, the kinds of virtue (moral and intellectual),
Then the species of moral virtue: courage, temperance, liberality etc.
–The bad news; there is no Scrooge (Msgr. Sokolowski): there are no instantaneous conversions
We become what we do: habituation
READ ALOUD: I.i
Note final cause (act-potency, means-end) and analogy.
1094a18-1094b12:
Analyze 1094b7-12.
( 1096a11-28: occasion to teach the categories )
What is happiness, “eudaimonia?”
Aristotle talks about function1097b30-33 The eye has a proper function (What did Socrates of the Republic call this? –Virtue). Shouldn’t man as a whole have a proper function as well? 1097a7-8: “The proper function of a man, then, consists in an activity of the soul in conformity with a rational principle or, at least, not without it.”
1098a12-17 READ ALOUD
Thus we arrive at the definition: “act according to virtue” (1098b31-32)
We become what we do. Being = function + virtue?
relate this to The Republic I
1097b12: “Man is by nature political.”
1098a12-17: best and complete activity of the soul performed in conjunction with the rational element
1099b25-33: Summary and convergence of 2-4: politics is the means to accomplishing virtue and therefore happiness for the entire community
1101a14-21: human bliss
1102a8-10: Politics is the study of how to make people good and thus necessarily (1102a24-28) must understand the working of the soul.
For Aristotle there is nothing more political than the soul and nothing more spiritual—at least, in the human realm—than politics. He is clearly developing a different paradigm of politics than the one we know in the democratic republic of the U.S.A. in the early twenty-first century.
And thus there must be—
1102a5-1103a10: “The psychological foundations of the virtues” That is psychological as in “that which pertains to the soul”
1102b28-1103a3:
The Soul—
by it.
itself, intellectual reason which relates to pure wisdom (sophia) or in the application of pure wisdom which is practical wisdom or prudence (phronesis).
At the end of Book VI Aristotle will re-unite what he divides here in that it is not possible to be truly a person of either pure wisdom or practical wisdom without also being a person of moral virtue, nor morally virtuous without also possessing practical wisdom (1145b30-33).
Aristotle’s Philosophy of Knowledge
The Soul
Aristotle’s philosophy of knowledge begins with the human soul, discussed in Nicomachean Ethics 1.13. He understands the human soul as tripartite embracing 1) the kind of soul possessed by plants, nutritive or vegetative soul, 2) appetitive soul, possessed by animals, and 3) rational soul, possessed by humans alone. This is a hierarchy of souls from vegetative to rational. The higher has the lower, but the lower does not have the higher. In short, plants have vegetative soul only; animals have vegetative and appetitive soul; humans have all three. For example, plants synthesize nutrients from the sun as do animals and humans; humans can fulfill the vitamin D requirement from sunlight alone. Plants to not have the power of locomotion to seek those nutrients. Sunflowers turn their heads with the sun, but they cannot move from one location in a garden or field to another. Appetitive power entails exactly this ability to move from place to place. If the cat’s water bowl is empty, or even if it is not, the cat will jump onto the kitchen counter to drink out of the sink. Herds of animals, having exhausted the grass upon which they have been grazing, will move elsewhere. This power the human too shares. Only the human, however, can engage its environment rationally, thereby transforming the environment into a world. Though the three kinds of soul can be distinguished in plants and animals, the human has only one unified soul with three powers, vegetative, appetitive, and rational.
Those beings with only vegetative and/or appetitive souls are non-rational. Many translators render Aristotle’s alogon as irrational. That must be regarded as either a mistranslation or a mistake in understanding. Logos is rationality in general. In the context of plants and animals, to be alogon is to not possess rationality at all, thus to be non-rational.
In the human, the nutritive and appetitive powers are also non-rational. That my skin processes sunlight into vitamin D is not a rational act, nor is the process subject to rationality. That I am hungry is also not subject to rationality: I feel hungry or not independent of any rational basis for hunger. There is this difference between the vegetative and appetitive powers, my rationality has no ability to respond to my vegetative power. That simply goes on working as a biological process. My rationality can, by contrast, respond to my hunger either rationally or irrationally. The word “irrationally” means contrary to reason. For example, if I am hungry (a non-rational state), I can either respond to the hunger rationally, say, by eating a piece of cheese and an apple, or irrationally by eating a candy bar and a bag of potato chips. Thus, “non-rational” is merely not possessing rationality, while “irrational” is acting contrary to the dictates of reason.
Aristotle claims that there are two kinds of virtue, moral and intellectual, and that moral virtue (and its opposite, vice) arises from the rational power’s response to the non-rational appetites. He says that virtue is striking the mean between “too much” and “too little.” To continue the example of the choices in response to hunger, while it is clear that eating candy bars and potato chips would not be rational (i.e., healthy) for anyone. For someone whose weight, blood pressure, and blood sugar are at healthy levels, it would be healthy to have the candy bar or potato chips as an occasional treat. To deny one’s self such small pleasures in a strict and Spartan kind of way would be, for Aristotle, a kind of vice. The moral mean is found by finding that Goldilocks virtue of not “too hot,” and not “too cold,” but “just right.”
Two kinds:
Intellectual which we acquire by learning
Moral which we acquire by doing, through habituation
How is the potency led to act: through habit (1103a17-18), thus the title of the collection of Flannery O’Connor’s letters by Sally Fitzgerald, The Habit of Being. We become what we do. Disposition as nature.
VOLUNTARY ACTION
Moral Vice & Virtue Chart
MATTER
(EMOTIONS) |
DEFICIENCY | VIRTUE
(MEAN) |
EXCESS |
Human relations | Injustice (unequal distribution to one’s advantage) | Justice (enables men to perform voluntary just actions toward both himself and the other) | Injustice (overcompensation in distribution and rectification) |
Confidence | Cowardice | Courage | Recklessness |
Bodily
pleasures |
Insensibility | Self-control (temperance) | Self-indulgence |
Material goods whose value is measured in money; on a small scale | Stinginess (exceed in taking; deficient in giving) | Generosity (giving and taking correctly) | Extravagance (exceed in giving; deficient in taking) |
Material goods whose value is measured in money; on a large scale | Miserliness (fall short in every aspect of spending) | Magnificence (spending large sums suited to the occasion) | Gaudiness (exceed in spending money; show off) |
Honor (in great scale) | Small-mindedness (pusillanimity) | High-mindedness (magnanimity) | Vanity (pride) |
Honor (in small/moderate scale) | Lack of ambition (lacking in a proper desire for honor) | No name (close to high-mindedness; to desire honor in the right degree) | Ambition (exceeding in the desire for honor) |
Anger | Apathy (not showing anger at things that ought to arouse anger) | Gentleness (term closer to deficiency; to be rightly angry in all aspects) | Short temper (quick to anger; show anger wrongly in all aspects) |
Human relations (in terms of truth in speech, action, and pretense) | Self-deprecation (understatement of actual qualities) | Truthfulness (admittance of actual qualities) | Boastfulness (pretense of non-actual qualities) |
Human relations (in terms of pleasantness in daily life) | Grouchiness (to object at everything giving pain to the fellow men) | Friendliness (to put up or not with right things in the right manner) | Obsequiousness (give pleasure; flattery if it looks for material advantage) |
Human relations (in terms of pleasantness in amusement) | Boorishness (inability to say anything funny; take offense at everything) | Wittiness (fun = good taste/versatile/tactful; to listen to things that benefit) | Buffoonery (exceed in being funny) |
Human relations (involving objects worthy of affection between two people) | Friendship of utility or pleasure (between “bad” men”) | Perfect friendship (between virtuous men) | ? (being too much attached to each other obsessively) |
Fear of disrepute (mostly regarding emotions of the youth) | Shamelessness (acting basely and remaining not ashamed of it) | Shame (not properly: shame is more an emotion rather than a characteristic) | Shamefulness (being ashamed and terror-stricken at everything) |
Fortunes of our neighbor (in terms of pain or pleasure we feel) | Spite (feeling pleasure when someone suffers undeservedly) | Righteous indignation (feeling pain when someone prosper undeservedly) | Envy (feeling exceeding pain when someone prospers) |
(Book III)
— NE 3.1: six elements of causal culpability—
1.agent;
4.instrument;
–NE 3.2: choice = voluntary act + deliberation.
— NE 4.3 the Great-souled man
,
(Book IV)
iii. generosity, mean of extravagance and stinginess (1119b22-1122a18);
vii. gentleness, mean of quick temper and apathy (1125b26-1126b10);
viii. amiability, mean of obsequiousness and grouchiness (1126b11-1127a12);
(1128b10-1136).
Book Five: The Moral Virtue of Justice
Justice is the only virtue, moral or intellectual, to which Aristotle dedicates an entire book.
5.1 “Figuring Out What is Fair”
Aristotle provides several definitions of justice. At 1129a34-35, he states, “The just, then, is the lawful and fair, the unjust the unlawful and the unfair.” The Greek word translated here as “just” is isos, a word used in isosceles. It literally means “equal,” but—as we shall see—Aristotle does not mean literally equally, rather proportionately equal. In Book Two, in defining the Golden Mean of moral virtue, Aristotle pointed out that what is moderate for Milo the wrestler would be excessive for a philosopher (1106b1-7). Thus, “fair” is a better translation than “equal” here.
The just is also “lawful.” Implicit here is an important principle that laws are presumptively valid (1129b11-13), and the burden on showing them to be invalid is on those who hold them to be unjust. At the same time, if a legislative act can be shown to be inherently unjust, then that legislative act is, in the strictest sense of the word, not a law. Here we see the role of pros hen analogy again. It is in relation to law that a legislative act is not-a-law, just as non-being can only be spoken of in relation to being. Aristotle shall take this up in chapter 10.
Of course, justice plays a special role in the political community. “Justice,” he says, “promotes and preserves happiness” (1129b18-20). In other words, when all in a political community believe they are treated fairly, then people are happy—if they are virtuous.
Justice—and here Aristotle largely agrees with Plato, but adds his own special distinction—is the whole of virtue, but not absolutely, not without qualification (1129b26-1130a1), rather in relation to another. It is possible to have other virtues by one’s self. I can be moderate all by myself. To be just, however, there have to be at least two people involved. Someone may be moderate and also unjust. Now, Aristotle gives a second definition of justice: “Justice, alone of the virtues, is thought to be ‘another’s good’” (1130a3-5). In his treatise, Politics, Aristotle observes that everyone understands justice for him- or herself; it is justice for someone else that is difficult. Here, we see the point where Aristotle, in Books Eight and Nine, will connect justice and friendship. Friendship is pre-eminently the relation with another. Justice is seeking the good of the other. There will be more to say about this when considering friendship.
Two definitions of justice:
5.2: “Two parts of justice: distributive and corrective”
Sir David uses the term “rectificatory, and perhaps that is a better word than “corrective,” but “corrective” is the word I shall use. Distributive justice is the distribution of goods and evils in a fair way. Corrective justice is to correct injustices that occur. In the simplest kindergarten scenario, if the teacher gives every child a cookie except for one, the cry will arise, “That isn’t fair.” This is a nice example of natural law. Regardless of generation, nationality, sex, religion, nation, cultural bias, everyone sees that that would not be fair. There may be some who in theory would say otherwise, but when it is their cookie, they will be as quick as anyone to see the injustice.
If the kindergarten teacher distributes the cookies fairly, and Johnny takes Tommy’s cookie, then the teacher will exercise corrective justice, restoring Tommy’s cookie and, perhaps, depriving Johnny of having a cookie for a day or two.
5.3 “Proportionate Equality”
Aristotle observes that everyone agrees that people should get what they deserve (“merit”), but they disagree about what they deserve. Here, he notes that need defines a person’s deserts (what they deserve) as much some status or accomplishment (1131a24-28). Aristotle explains all this mathematically, but the basic point is that goods and evils need to be distributed according to need and ability. “The proportionate mean,” he says, “is the just mean” (1131b12-13). What violates the proportion violates justice.
For example, if everyone were to receive $10,000 worth of health care each year, then the very healthy person would hardly use any, but the person with cancer would not have enough. Similarly, if taxes were strictly equal, then the rich would pay too little, and the poor would pay too much. Remember, Aristotle is not merely pontificating about what he believes to right, but what will produce happiness in the political community when considered as an organism.
5.4 “Corrective Justice”
While distributive justice must consider a variety of circumstances in order to establish what a person deserves, and thus requires proportionality, corrective justice is arithmetical. Aristotle reckons that when injustice is done, the life of the community is thrown out of balance. It may be helpful to thinking of the statue of blindfolded justice, holding an old-fashioned scale. Corrective justice is meant to bring the life of the community back into balance, thus a “justice restores equality” (1132a25). Corrective justice restores what the person who suffered injustice has lost and assigns to the doer of injustice some actions to restore that person to the healthy state of justice. Justice is not merely a political condition of outward actions, rather a metaphysical state of being. It is always helpful to remember that Aristotle’s father was a physician and that Aristotle had life-long interest in biology. This is one of the places where we note that Aristotle has no interest in punishment qua punishment whatsoever—a commitment he shares with Plato. If one’s liver is not functioning properly, one does not punish the liver, rather one does what is necessary to restore the liver, and therefore also the entire person, to health.
5.5 “Mutuality”
Sir David here uses the term “reciprocity. I think “mutuality” the more accurate translation. I distinguish the two thus: in reciprocity, I give with the expectation to receive; in mutuality, I expect to give because I have received. If a political community is founded on reciprocity, then citizens’ normative condition is one of entitlement. They expect to receive all the time. If a political community is founded on mutuality, then citizens’ normative state is one of giving, because they have received. It is clear from the context of 5.5, that it is mutuality which Aristotle means. This mutuality is “in accordance with a proportion and not on the basis of precisely equal return” (1132b32-33). Think about the parent-child relationship. The child can never do for the parent what the parent has done for the child. Parents give us life, a gift that we can pass along to the next generation, but which we can never repay in kind to our parents. We can, however, live lives of gratitude to our parents and to the political community for giving us what we could not have given ourselves. It is possible to have bad parents and a bad political community, and in those circumstances what we owe differs from the circumstance of good parents and a good political community, but it does not change the underlying calculus of living a life of gratitude. Thus, it is mutuality “that holds the city together” (1133a3 and 25-30). Aristotle notes that even in the marketplace there is a temple dedicated to the Graces. “Grace” is a gift one has not deserved. These goddesses remind us that no matter how hard we may have worked, we always depend on some good in the world that we did not create or deserve (1133a1-5). Here Aristotle says something that is, at least very close, to the definition of mutuality I have already given, “For this is the characteristic of grace—we should serve in return one who has shown grace to us, and should another time take the initiative in showing it” (1133a4-5).
It is in this context, that Aristotle discusses money’s function in life (. Though there had long since been coinage, Aristotle lived at the moment in the history of the west when the barter economy was shifting to a primitive market economy. This passage is very important for the development of economic theory in western antiquity. If someone who has an olive grove wants a pair of shoes, and the olive grower trades olives for shoes, then the shoemaker will probably have more olives than his family can use, so he must then trade the excess olives for some other commodity or service. If there is a market, however, then the olive grower can sell his olives for money, some of which he can then use to buy shoes. Money is a placeholder. Even when money is coined in gold and silver, or has gold and silver backing it, there is always a fiat quality to money. We cannot eat gold or build houses with it. Lovely jewelry can be made from gold, but we can easily live without it. Gold and silver are valuable because we attribute value to them, unlike food, clothing, and shelter which are valuable intrinsically because we need them to live. To repeat, money is a placeholder. It is no primary existence, only a derivative existence.
This leads to another point, “need,” Aristotle affirms, “holds everything together” (1133a27-28). Aristotle recognizes a basically selfish tendency in human beings. We have to strive for virtue; selfishness comes to us without any help. We form families and political communities because we need each other.
In view of our inherent selfishness, Aristotle gives us a third definition of justice: justice is the mean of assigning proportionate goods and evils (“evil” here means things like paying taxes and working on public projects) to one’s self and to others. If I assign to myself too much of the good and too little of the evils, then I have committed injustice. If I assign to myself too little good and too much of evils, then I have allowed someone else to do an injustice to me (1133b29-1134a14). On this latter point, Aristotle has more to say in chapter 9.
Third definition of justice: justice is the mean of assigning proportionate goods and evils (“evil” here means things like paying taxes and working on public projects) to one’s self and to others.
5.6 “The Rule of Law”
5.6 summarizes what has been said in 5.5 and then goes on to explain that while what was said in 5.5 had to do with justice considered absolutely, i.e., without qualification, now Aristotle explains those principles in political terms (1134a25-26). Aristotle now establishes the rule of law as prerequisite for political justice. Law is justice expressed in concrete terms. The rule of law, however, is only truly possible when mutuality is foundational in the political community. Now, Sir David uses the term “mutuality” rather than “reciprocity.” Aristotle states: “This is found among men who mutual relations are governed by law with a view to self-[i.e., community] sufficiency, men who are free and . . . equal. . . . For justice exists only between men whose mutual relations are governed by law” (1134a30-31). For reasons I cannot even imagine, Sir David translates “nomos,” the Greek word for “law,” as rational principle, so I amend his translation. Aristotl again refers to the inherent selfishness of human beings which leads them to take too much of the life’s goods and too little of life’s evils and explains, “This is why we do not allow a man [Sir David’s emphasis] to rule, but law, because a man behaves thus in his own interests and becomes a tyrant” (1134a35-1134b2). Public officials are not rulers, because law rules. Public officials are guardians of the laws (1134b2-3). It is easy to see how Aristotle is influenced by Plato’s Republic and also how he carries the principle of guardianship a step forward toward practicality.
Aristotle makes clear that different principles govern a household than a political community (1134b8-17). In the midst of making these distinctions, he observes that in the political community—because of equality—people “have an equal share in ruling and being ruled” (1134b15-16). This is surely a remarkable claim of the ideal circumstances for a political community, but it is also simply true on an empirical basis. Even in the worst case of a tyrant, to some degree the tyrant too is ruled, for without submission to law at some level, the tyranny dissolves and chaos ensues.
5.7 “Natural Justice and Legal Justice”
Justice by nature is justice absolutely, without qualification, at its highest and best. This is justice universal, accepted by all, everywhere, in all eras. Earlier we saw that all humans have this knowledge of universal justice when considering the case of cookies in the kindergarten class. Legal justice is how this universal justice by nature is embodied in the particular laws of a political community (1134b18-1135a6).
As an example, traffic safety is a universal value. No one claims that the roads are not dangerous enough. The universal value of traffic safety must be embodied in particular laws. One aspect of that is setting different speed limits on different roads depending on a variety of conditions. It is customary, at least in the United States of America, to set those limits in five-mile an hour increments, e.g., 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55 etc. There is no absolute reason why they should not be set in three-mile per hour increments, or even in different increments for each gradation, e.g., 22, 29, 33, 41, 45, etc. The speed limit increments are entirely conventional. They are an example of particular legal justice which embodies the universal principle of traffic safety. I have used the example of speed limits; Aristotle uses the example of standard measures that vary in different political communities (1134b35-1135a3). We can think about the convention of pints, quarts, and gallons, as opposed to the convention of liters. Both are particulars in relation to the universal of having a uniform standard of measure throughout a political community.
Aristotle says something intriguing about the relationship about the relationship between natural and legal justice in terms of universals and particulars:
The things which are just not by nature but by human enactment are not everywhere the same, since constitutions also are not the same, though there is but one which is everywhere by nature the best. Of things just and lawful each is related as the universal to its particulars; for the things that are done are many, but each type is one, since it is universal (1135a3-8).
Here is a case where the reader needs to load into this passage the analysis of 1.1, where Aristotle sets forth a chain of relationships between universals and particulars. Justice is the absolute universal. I suggest that he has set forth the criteria for that absolute universal of justice in 5.5. That absolute universal must be embodied in a particular constitution for a particular political community. Once that particular constitution is established, however, it becomes, as we say, “the universal law of the land.” Any constitution is a particular in relation to the universal of justice, but once established that constitution is the universal to any particular law. That law, once enacted, becomes universal to any particular act of enforcement. In any universal to particular relationship, the universal is absolute and the particular is relative. In the political context, this dynamic permits variety amongst particulars, as long as those various particulars are equally consistent with the controlling universal. The political form of government “everywhere by nature the best” is then the one in which the catena of universal to particular relationships are most consistently established and preserved.
For example, the U. S. Constitution prescribes a president and a congress. The British Constitution prescribes a monarch and a parliament with a prime minister. The French Constitution prescribes a President and a parliament with a prime minster. Is one more or less just than the others? Certainly not in any obvious ways. Each constitution reflects the particular history and culture of the country while endeavoring to embody the universal principle of justice.
What is key is that justice is preserved in each relationship from universal to particular, from new universal to new particular, etc. until one comes to the agent on the ground enforcing the law, e.g., police officer, zoning inspector, dog catcher etc. So, in the U.S. Constitution as adopted in A.D. 1787, there was an inherent injustice in relation to those held as slaves. Aristotle’s point is that kind of gross injustice is a structural flaw. Thinking biologically, we could think of it as a congenital defect. At some point, it will bring about sever disorder. That was the case in the United States which plunged into decades long political conflict resulting finally in the Civil War. Part of Aristotle’s argument, implicit though it is, is that injustice is empirically dangerous to a political community.
5.8 “Determining Culpability”
In this chapter, Aristotle applies the principles in sets forth in 3.1-2, voluntary action, involuntary action, and choice (voluntary action+deliberation).
I have given negative examples where blame is assigned to various degrees (or not as in 2), but positive examples could as easily be proposed where credit is assigned to various degrees (or not).
At the end of the chapter, Aristotle points out that some involuntary actions are excusable and others not. Ignorance is no defense when the agent should have known (1136a5-9).
All of these distinctions come into modern law, largely intact.
5.9 “Is it possible to be treated unjustly voluntarily?”
Aristotle’s short answer to this is that he cannot. On closer reading, however, he gives a more nuanced answer. On one level, if one permits an injustice to be done it is because one sees some advantage to it, and, therefore, the action is not in that respect unjust. For example, if one suffered injustices (e.g., unkind words, unreasonable demands) from a rich and very elderly relative knowing that one is the relative’s heir. One smiles through every insult, thinking of the good times to come.
At another level, however, Aristotle sees that such calculated conduct allows the other person, in this case the rich relative to persist in a state of injustice. That injustice is bad for the other person. Remember, justice is good for another. Justice obliges the agent to consider whether a particular transaction is good for the other person, not merely whether it is good for one’s self. If one allows someone else to commit injustices, then one is acting unjustly towards that person. One’s moral obligation is to help another person out of moral ditch just as much as out of a physical ditch. If the other person refuses the offer of help, than that is on the other person. If one persists in permitting that injustice, and all the more hoping to benefit from it, then one acts unjustly.
This has profound implications for human relationships. If one is being abused in a relationship, one has a moral duty not only to one’s self but also to the abuser to get out of that relationship. To allow the abuse to continue is to do an injustice to another. Put in Christian terms, the most loving action an abused person can perform for the abuser is to leave the relationship.
It follows from the second definition of justice, seeking the good of another, that a person has a moral duty to seek his own best interest rightly understood. It is impossible to put too much emphasis on this “rightly understood.” It is not that selfishness that leads me to take too much of life’s goods and not enough of life’s evils, rather considering my optimal metaphysical state of justice in relation to that same optimal metaphysical state of justice of another person.
Aristotle again shows the reader that he conceives all this in terms of organism when he says that getting this right, namely seeking my own best interest because I am concerned about the soul of another “is a greater achievement than knowing what is good for health” that is “no less an achievement than that of being a physician” (1127a13 and 17).
5.10 “Equity Trumps Conventional Laws”
In the first definition of justice as what is “lawful and fair,” it was noted that there could be contradiction between what is lawful and what is fair. Again, to avert to the American experience, slavery was lawful from A.D. 1787 to 1865, but it was never fair.
This chapter is also an elaboration of what Aristotle says in 5.7 about the relationship of absolute justice to some particular constitution and my advancement of what he says to an entire chain of relationships from absolute justice to the enforcing agent. Here, Aristotle discusses the universal character of a particular law. Once the law is properly promulgated, then it is universal in force with respect to its domain (1137b20). When such a law, universal in its scope, is found to be unjust in some particular case, then equity trumps the law. The Greek word translated here as “equity,” can also be translated as decency. When the law itself is unjust, then the decent, the equitable, thing to do is to set aside the law. Thus, he says, “This is the nature of the equitable, a correction of law where it is defective owing to its universality” (1137b27-28).
5.11 “Can People Treat Themselves Unjustly?”
In a word, no, he cannot, at least not speaking absolutely. Again, Aristotle explains this in terms of organism. That would be like one organ of a person’s body attacking another organ.1138b4-6). It would be a civil war amongst a person’s parts in which, for example, one’s non-rational passions were set against one’s rationality (1138b10-13).
Book Six: The Intellectual Virtues
6.1 What is the Mean for Intellectual Virtue?
For Aristotle, virtue is always a mean, but the mean for intellectual virtues is not the same as the mean for moral virtues. Think about it! Courage is the mean between an excess, foolhardiness, and a deficiency, cowardice. That does not work for intellectual virtues. As a simplistic example, being smart in the right way is not between being too smart and being too dumb. There must be some other mean. Part of the mean is simple excellence at the intellectual virtue, but Aristotle says that that alone will only explain natural virtue which no matter how well-honed is not teleologically complete (i.e., perfected with respect to an end). He says the mean for intellectual virtues is, as Sir David Ross translates it, “correct reason.” Another translate the Greek as “right rule.” The Greek is fairly easy for non-Greek speakers to understand, orthos logos. What is orthos logos: orthology (as far as I know, this is my term; I have not found it elsewhere). Logos is the word for “rational order,” but can be translated with enormous flexibility. St. John’s Gospel begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It can also simply mean “rationality.” Orthos has to do with what is right or straight. Just as orthodontia is getting one’s teeth straight and orthodoxy is getting one’s beliefs straight, so orthology is getting one’s thinking straight, e.g. the saying, “I can’t think straight.” Aristotle is somewhat elusive about what exactly orthology is. Only in the final chapters of Book Six does he give the reader enough clues to figure it out.
“That principle by which universals are applied to particulars.
UNIVERSALS AND PARTICULARS
There are two kinds of virtue: moral and intellectual. Moral virtues have to do with doing; intellectual with knowing. Bks. II-IV deal with moral virtues; Bk. VI with intellectual virtues.
Scientific knowledge:
Aristotle says that scientific knowledge is of “that which cannot be other than it is” (1139b20-21), thus “the thing known exists of necessity” and is, therefore, “eternal” (1139b23-25).
Some, in my opinion, over-read this passage, being misled by the terms “of necessity” and “eternal.” They think Aristotle is talking of the loftiest of truths. It seems to me, however, that he is speaking more of the simplest truths, that which can be apprehended most easily and which can hardly be missed. That I am where I am is of this order of truth. I cannot be anywhere other than where I am. I cannot be where I am and not where I am (PNC). It is of necessity the case that I am where I am, and it shall be the case forever.
Aristotle then goes on to discuss the two ways that scientific knowledge can be known, either by deduction, which is argument from first principles, or induction, which is argument to first principles (1139b25-33).
Technical Knowledge:
Knowing how to make.
Practical Wisdom (Prudence):
Intuitive Reason (Intelligence)
(Philosophic) Wisdom
1139b15-17 (Ross, 140) Five intellectual virtues: techne, episteme, phronesis, sophia, nous
Practical Wisdom VI.v (1140a24-28)
Practical wisdom is the faculty by which one deliberates well toward the goal of living the good life.
1140b19 How pleasure, pain, and vice can destroy principle
1141b23-28 Practical wisdom is to private life as politics is to public life.
Practical wisdom is concerned with the ultimate particular, not knowledge: 1142a23-28, 1142a-1142b2
TELL THEM TO READ CAREFULLY VI.xi
Observe in this chapter the relationship of practical wisdom and intelligence
–Intelligence works from particulars to form universals
–Practical wisdom applies universals to particulars, in doing.
VI.xii
See also 1145a7-11: Sophia commands phronesis.
virtue orders ends; practical wisdom, means.
VI.xiii Moral virtue and practical wisdom (phronesis) co-extensive, the role of orthos logos (right reason). This, of course, only applies to doing (action). When making, the art and moral virtue are co-extensive. When knowing, then scientific knowledge and moral virtue are co-extensive. In other words, orthos logos is when intellectual virtue is the well-ordered means to moral virtue as the end.
Book Seven: How Does Phronesis Work (or not) When We Make Moral Choices?
1145a15-28
Godlike virtue
_____________
Virtue Doing right without wanting to do wrong
Moral Strength (continence) Doing right while wanting to do wrong
———————
Moral Weakness (incontinence) Doing wrong while wanting to do right
Vice Doing wrong without wanting to do right
_____________
Brutishness
–Review logical syllogism
— the practical aspect of the practical syllogism is that it results in an action.
Aristotle reviews opinions on virtue and vice: 1145b2-1146b13 with an excellent statement on method 1145b3-7
Starting point of Aristotle’s own teaching 1146b13
Two kinds of knowledge: passive and active knowledge 1147a10-23:
When I am asleep, in one sense I know what I know when I am awake, but in another sense not. While asleep, I know the thing passively, but when awake, actively. Even when I am awake, if I know something, but it is “sitting” somewhere in the recesses of my intellect, that is passive knowledge. I really only know something when I know that I know it, i.e., not only am I in possession of the object of knowledge, but I am in possession of knowledge that I am in possession of it.
PRACTICAL SYLLOGISM: 1147a1-10, 23-1147b19
We spend our lives—most of us—bouncing back and forth between continence (moral strength) and incontinence (moral weakness). Metaphysically, how does that happen? Aristotle gives us the paradigm of the dueling practical syllogisms. A logical syllogism has as its conclusion knowledge. For example:
All desserts are fattening. (A universal principle and the major premise)
Lemon meringue pie is a dessert. (A particular principle and the minor premise)
Therefore, lemon meringue pie is fattening. (Conclusion)
We have learned something about lemon meringue pie.
In the practical syllogism, the conclusion is an action.
Practical Syllogism A Practical Syllogism B
Desserts are delicious Desserts are fattening
and good to eat. and bad to eat.
Lemon meringue pie is a dessert. Lemon meringue pie is a dessert.
Therefore, I eat it. Therefore, I do not eat it.
The universal principles of each syllogism are always true, but they are often in conflict with each other. We can only act on one or other of the two truths. When I refrain from the pie, I am showing moral strength. When I give in and eat the pie, I am showing moral weakness. This is somewhat oversimplified precisely because of the point Aristotle is making here, namely that we have the ability to entertain more than one universal truth at a time. Prudence (practical wisdom) is the ability to choose the right principle for any given particular situation because—a second point—what is universally good is not always a particular good. For example, if I am diabetic, eating a sugary dessert is never good for me though it be universally good.
This immediately follows his account of the intellectual virtues where, in conclusion, he claims that intellectual virtue is only teleologically complete when ordered to moral virtues as means to ends (1145a2-6). Aristotle has completed his theoretical presentation of moral and intellectual virtue. The problem that Aristotle is addressing here is the practical one of achieving virtue. His next step is to explain the practical syllogism that results in actions, by contrast with logical syllogism that results in knowledge. In the practical syllogism, there is major premise (the universal principle), say that desserts are delicious, followed by the minor premise (the particular principle), say that lemon meringue pie is a dessert. In the logical syllogism, the conclusion is that lemon meringue pie is delicious. In the practical syllogism, the conclusion is that I eat the lemon meringue pie. But how do right and wrong choices come about? Aristotle sees that we can entertain more than one universal at a time, say that desserts are fattening. The practical conclusion to the syllogism, beginning with the second universal is that I do not eat the dessert. The two syllogisms are in competition. Sometimes, I eat the pie because it is delicious; other times, I refrain because it is fattening. Phronesis (prudence or practical wisdom) is the ability to judge between the two syllogisms and to choose well. This is a binary example, but, in fact, humans often have multiple universal principles in play. The prudent person sifts and sorts amongst the universals that bear upon any particular choice, and then makes virtuous choices (1145b22-1146b5). This is one of Aristotle’s richest insights for his psychology, epistemology, ethics, and politics and is a point where one can see the superiority of his thought over those systems that conceive moral choices only in relation to one universal principle.
Aristotle sees that the average mortal wanders through life, staggering back and forth between continence and incontinence. The human is rarely of one mind about his or her actions. While eating lemon meringue pie, we feel guilty, and while not eating it, we feel desirous. The normative human circumstance, and therefore the one that the political art must account for, is easy and regular transition between continence and incontinence.
Let us leave that for a moment, and consider Aristotle’s “Forms of Constitution” which he presents in the heart of Book 8 on friendship (1160a31-1161a8).
Monarchy—the good rule of one
_____________
Aristocracy—the good rule of the few
Timocracy—the good rule of the many
———————
Democracy—the bad rule of the many
Oligarchy—the bad rule of the few
_______________
Tyranny—the bad rule of one
The first three forms are positive, monarchy the best rule of one, aristocracy the next best rule of a few, timocracy the least good rule of the many. The second set of forms are “deviations” or “perversions” of the first three. Unlike Plato’s descent from best to worst (citation), Aristotle says that if monarchy, the best, becomes perverted, it yields to the worst, tyranny. If aristocracy, the second best, becomes perverted, then it yields to the second worst, oligarchy. If timocracy, the least good, becomes perverted, then it yields to the least bad. While timocracy is the least good, it also carries the least risk. All of this is uncontroversial.
Now we apply the two interpretive principles set forth at the outset and align the “Paradigm of Virtue and Vice” with the “Forms of Constitution” and make some inferences.[7] Monarchy is simply and without qualification the best form of constitution, but it is also the least stable. It is only safe to attempt it with a person of heroic virtue which, Aristotle has told us, is rare (1145a28). Aristocracy is the second best form, but only safe in the hands of people who are virtuous. Timocracy, the third positive form, is safe in the hands of continent human beings, and when the continent become incontinent, government does not have far to fall. As we have seen, the general run of humanity shifts back and forth between continence and incontinence, and thus timocracy is the form of constitution best suited to the normative human condition.
So, monarchy is simply and without qualification the best form of constitution, but all but impossible. Timocracy is the best form of constitution in that it is the form best suited to the normative human condition. The two are “best” in different ways, but “best” with reference to the same “Paradigm of Virtue and Vice.” The best constitution of 5.7 with regard to natural justice—as I have argued—to a catena of rightly ordered universals and particulars is best in a substantively different way, because it is best in in a way that is adaptable to the culture and history of any given people and yet, at the same time, held absolutely accountable in relation to the absolute principle of justice.
1147a36-1147b5:Something essential about HUMAN nature as opposed to mere animal nature
It is rather ironic that the defeat of reason by appetite is proof of human nature, because animals have no reason to be defeated: human beings are RATIONAL animals.
1147b9-17:Completing the practical syllogism—the final premise is determinative
Final Section of Book VII (xi-xiv) (Ross, 183-91): Is pleasure a good thing?
1152b36-1153a2: Hint of where this is going– theorein
1153b1-5: The logic of pleasure as a good
1153b7-12: how pleasure can be the highest good
1154a1-6: Right kind of pleasure essential to the happy life
1154a12-21: even bodily pleasures are good; it is the excess of them which is evil
Book Eight
Plato’s word for love is eros. Aristotle implicitly corrects his teacher by substituting philia, the love of friendship. This is the phil- in philosophy, the love of wisdom.
8.1
“Friendship seems to hold states together, and lawgivers to care more for it than for justice; for concord (homonoia) seems to be something like friendship, and this they aim at most of all, and expel faction as their worst enemy; and when men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the trues form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality” (1155a)
“
8.2
Criteria for friendship:
8.3
Three kinds of friendship:
Pleasure
Utility
Virtue
8.4
Friendships founded upon virtue and a high degree of commonality: friendships proper, simple and complete (1157b1-6).
8.5
Life together
8.7
Proportionality
8.9
As Aristotle has already said (8.1.1155a), if there is friendship, then there will necessarily be justice, but if there is only justice, then a citizen still needs friendship. Are we more likely to treat a friend fairly or a stranger? A friend. Aristotle works through a hierarchy of relationship in which injustice becomes ever more despicable. To cheat a family member or friend is most despicable of all (1160a1-9). So, if we can found the political community on friendship, then we increase the likelihood of fairness, of justice 1160a10-30.
Friendship and justice are co-extensive.
A Politics of Friendship
1.7
1097b12“Man is by nature political.”
5.5
1132b34-35 (Ross ,118) “The city remains together because of proportionate reciprocity.” What I call—and I am confident what Aristotle means—proportionate mutuality.
Aristotle on Friendship and Political Friendship
There are three kinds of philia: 1) utility (e.g. the relationships of daily commerce), 2) pleasure (i.e. the people who are fun to be with), and 3) the relationship of soulful intimacy between good human beings (1156a6-1156b32).[i][8] Aristotle says that what all three of these types of friendship have in common is goodwill, eunoia, which is 1) mutual, 2) conscious, and 3) arising from utility, pleasure or goodness (1156a1-5). Friendship at any level is living life obedient to nous (1169a17-19) which is the presence of the divine in human life (1177b30-1178a2). It seems that Cistercian friendship in general is an intentional community of eunoia.
Aristotle makes clear at the beginning of Book 8 that he is undertaking a politics of friendship. He calls friendship the glue of the city, that which holds it together (1155a23-24 ff.). Later he qualifies this statement with further precision. He says that this quality of political friendship is concord, homonoia (1167b3). Concord is the general agreement of the community in some fundamentally implicit way but without explicit and conscious mutuality which characterizes and differentiates goodwill.
At this point, one can see that there are three kinds of circle of friendship. The type of friendship which makes the politics of a community possible is concord (homonoia). Within that broad community of friendship there are smaller communities of friendship based upon relationships of utility and pleasure which include associations as disparate as mercantile relationships, a chess club and a choir. There are, finally, those friendships founded upon virtue and a high degree of commonality: friendships proper, simple and complete (1157b1-6). Nous is important to all three circles of friendship. Books have been written what Aristotle meant exactly by nous. The word is commonly translated as “reason,” “spirit,” “intellectual perception” and other such approximations.
In Aristotle’s politics of friendship, the community of concord (homonoia) embraces all other forms of friendship. The more concord, and the larger the community of concord, the more possible are the friendships of utility, pleasure and goodness (the three types of friendship characterized by eunoia). At the same time, the more that there are friendships of utility, pleasure and goodness, then the more likely is concord in the entire community and the larger that community of concord can be.
8.10 Thus, it is in the context of friendship that Aristotle outlines his political paradigm that we have already compared with the paradigm of virtue and vice.
Political Constitutions
Monarchy
_____________
Aristocracy
Timocracy
———————
Democracy
Oligarachy
_______________
Tyranny
8.12.1162a16-29
The Friendship of Marriage: One of the most lyrical passages in the entire Aristotelian corpus
When Aristotle says that humans are “by nature coupling,” that is to say “marrying,” we have to remind ourselves that when Aristotle says, “by nature,” he means what a human being is at his “highest and best.” In other words, for Aristotle heterosexual marriage is the fulfillment of human nature. Marriage is more foundational to being human than cities, i.e., political communities. Think how different this is from Plato for whom the city should supersede the family as the building block of human community. Aristotle outlines the division of labor (often attributed to Marx) and establishes the twin ends of marriage as procreation and union. A husband and wife can be friends to each other in mutual utility, mutual pleasure, and mutual virtue. Thus, a good marriage embodies all three kinds of friendship.
8.14
Friendship between unequals: Finding the right proportions.
Book Nine
9.2-3
These are two of the saddest chapters ever written by Aristotle because he recognizes that friendships can and do end because there is a clash of first principles (universals).
9.4-8
True self-love
Here is one of the great paradoxes in Aristotle’s work. Friendship of virtue, which is friendship pure and perfected, is founded on the right kind of self-love. I can only love myself in the right way, however, if I am a constantly virtuous person. This self-love leads me to see the good of my friend is above my own good (remember: justice is the good of the other) because what I see is that the more my friend is, the greater value my friend has to me as a friend. So, the more I advance my friend, the more I am advanced. If I privilege myself over my friend, then I am diminished because my friend is diminished. Of course, this only works if my friend is also a person of virtue.
This consideration leads me to one of the most important questions of human life: am I friend-worthy? Am I a person of such constant virtue that I am worthy of having a virtuous person as a friend?
9.6
It is in this context that Aristotle reverts to the question of political friendship again. “Concord (homonoia) seems, then to be political friendship, as indeed it is commonly said to be; for it is concerned with things that are to our interest and have an influence on our life” (1167a-b).
9.8
Friendship at any level is living life obedient to nous (1169a17-19) Ross, 237 which is the presence of the divine in human life (1177b30-1178a2) X.vii (Ross, 265).
The highest good (summum bonum) is happiness (human flourishing). In order to be happy, a person has to have virtuous friends. Of course, to have virtuous friends, one must be friendworthy, to be a virtuous person.
9.12
For Aristotle, the perfect friendship of virtue is lived out in life together. One can see why marriage is such an excellent relationship for perfected friendship: marriage has at its essence life together.
Book Ten
Chapter One
Character is built by learning to love what is right and to hate what is wrong.
We are interested in life, not just knowledge.
1172a18-26
Chapters Two-Three: Is pleasure good or bad?
Chapter Four: Read as much as possible of this in class
1174a15-1174b8: Pleasure is teleologically complete, and therefore it is not movement.
Review:
Potency —- becoming (movement) —— Act
There is no becoming of pleasure, only the being of pleasure.
sense —- object of sensation
sensation at its best when both the sense and the object are the best.
1174b32-34: Pleasure is a supervening perfection.
Humans incapable of continuous activity
Pleasure completes life.
1175b-24-1176a2: 4) The pleasures of the intellect are higher order than the pleasures of the senses because intelligible pleasures are durable (eternal) and inexhaustible while sensible pleasures are temporary (temporal) and exhaustible.
*Pleasure is always in act—teleologically complete, a perfected state—because it is metaphysical. Pleasure supervenes on the physical occurrences we associate with pleasure. Think how one can repeat the same action (eating anchovy pizza, for example) and one time gives pleasure and on another occasion we say, “It just isn’t the same,” but the pizza is the same, it is the absence of supervening pleasure which is different. In fact, think of eating one piece of pizza after another. At some point, if one keeps going, the pleasure of eating pizza turns into pain. The same physical act can have either pleasure or pain supervene upon it.
Chapter Five
Pleasures are of different kinds
Thought dianoia
The answered question: how does pleasure through thought differ from pleasure in thought? One can exhaust the pleasure in sensation, but the pleasure in thought is inexhaustible.
(hard not to think of the divided line here)
Thinking as action
picking up the point about loving and hating
“pleasure proper to worthy activity is good and that proper to an unworthy activity is bad.”
Chapter Six
Happiness is not amusement
Pleasure is both for the sake of something else and for itself. Pleasure for itself is better.
Happiness is the end of ends.
Chapter Seven
Read first and last paragraphs
Highest happiness is the contemplative life
See pp. 263, 265.
Chapter Eight
1178b6-32
Fast forward from death of Aristotle in 322 B.C.
–Roman Empire and Christianity
It is sometimes aid that the story of western philosophy has been written by dead, white European men. In the case of St. Augustine, that is not the case, he was an African.
Film: Gladiator
St. Augustine’s Life
A.D. 354—born in Thagaste in (modern-day Tunisia) Northern Africa
372—father dies; takes second-class wife
373—birth of son, Adeodatus
383—goes to Rome
384—Professor of Rhetoric in Milan
385—His mom, Monica, arrives in Milan
386—Conversion to Christianity
388—goes to Rome where he writes Book I of On Free Choice of the Will.
390—dead of Adeodatus
391—Arrives in Hippo in North Africa to found monastery, ordained priest, writes Books II and III of On Free Choice of the Will.
395—Ordained Bishop of Hippo
430—death, Brown, 430.
Plotinus A.D. 204-270
Greek philosopher in the school of Plato who lived in Egypt and Rome where he died. He was the founder and greatest exponent of neo-Platonism. Porphyry (A.D. 233-305) was his greatest pupil.
Mani (A.D. 215-277)
Free Choice of the Will is an early work by St. Augustine when the world still seemed whole and entire. As would be the case for St. Thomas Aquinas eight centuries later in his On Being and Essence, St. Augustine writes a more purely philosophical work in his Free Choice of the Will than the later explicitly theological and Biblical works. There is theology enough in this work, but it is an easy work to read as philosophy rather than theology which is rarely the case with his later works. For example, one finds in The Confessions one of the most sublime essays on the nature of time ever written, but it is written as a prayer and in discussing prayer. In short, his discussion of time, however brilliant philosophically, has an explicit theological cast. There are long sections of this work where one can forget God, when St. Augustine writes about the character of sensation in relation to reason in Book II, for example.
Pelagius (354?-418) was probably from the British Isles, and there is evidence that he was Irish. He may have been a monk but was not a priest. He was an attractive figure. Like the Manicheans he was wan from his asceticism but his doctrine was much more welcome in the drawing rooms of Roman society. His doctrines are in fact welcome in American living rooms today. When we hear a politician say, “Americans are good people,” they are spouting the theological heresy of semi-Pelagianism. Methodist doctrine is founded upon the 15th-16th century Dutch theologian Arminius who gave a modern recasting to the easy to swallow teachings of Pelagius.
The Pelagian controversy came to a head in the decade following the sack of Rome by Alaric, but continued in some shape or form until A.D. 529. in relation to St. Augustine the Pelagian controversy occupied him on and off until the end of his life.
From the Catholic Encyclopaedia CD-ROM as found online at the New Advent site, diagrammed by JDW:
“Pelagius denied
1) the primitive state in paradise and
2) original sin (cf. P. L., XXX, 678, “Insaniunt, qui de Adam per traducemasserunt ad nos venirepeccatum”),
3) insisted on the naturalness of concupiscence and the death of the body,
4) ascribed the actual existence and universality of sin to the bad example which Adam set by his first sin.
As all his ideas were chiefly rooted in the old, pagan philosophy, especially in the popular system of the Stoics, rather than in Christianity,
5) he regarded the moral strength of man’s will [free choice or decision] (liberumarbitrium), when steeled by asceticism, as sufficient in itself to desire and to attain the loftiest ideal of virtue.
6) The value of Christ’s redemption was, in his opinion, limited mainly to instruction (doctrina) and example (exemplum), which the Saviour threw into the balance as a counterweight against Adam’s wicked example, so that nature retains the ability to conquer sin and to gain eternal life even without the aid of grace. By justification we are indeed cleansed of our personal sins through faith alone (loc. cit., 663, “per solamfidemjustificat Deus impiumconvertendum”),
7) but this pardon (gratia remissionis) implies no interior renovation of sanctification of the soul.”
JDW comments:
Pelagius combined three themes well know to 21st century Americans. First, people are basically good, and they are free to choose to do good or to do evil. Second, since life is natural and death is the logical consequence of natural processes, death is natural too. Third, desire is good.
Pelagius read St. Augustine’s Free Choice of the Will and liked what he read. He cited St. Augustine both for the substance of his thought and the authority of his name in order to advance his teaching. There is no reason to think that this use of his contemporary was anything but genuine belief that they were in agreement. To my knowledge, no writer contemporary with Pelagius disputed his integrity or the authentic character of his authority. His asceticism and piety were real and true. That was, in fact, part of the danger he posed. He completely exemplified his teachings. The other factor which made him danger was that he had Christianized the old Roman stoicism and thus seemed to be—and perhaps truly was—a more legitimate heir to the Roman pagan tradition than the orthodox Christianity of his opponents.
However sincere Pelagius may have been in his use of St. Augustine’s work, in fairness to St. Augustine, only one of these major themes can even incorrectly be attributed to him, namely the first that people are basically good, and they are free to choose to do good or to do evil. St. Augustine would never say that death is good; in fact, it is the privation or negation of a good, namely existence and life. He also would never have said that concupiscence was good. In fact, it is libido, inordinate desire which is, for St. Augustine, the root of all evil.
Having said all that, St. Augustine had a problem, namely, that Pelagius had brought St. Augustine’s teaching into question. Thus we have in the Retractiones, St. Augustine’s evaluation of the problem. There we discover something that is implicit in Free Choice of the Will, but certainly not explicit. One of the tricks of every genius is that he or she supposes that the reader has all the ancillary but necessary ideas in his head that the genius has in his as he writes. Perhaps in the genius’ head those ideas are only subliminal. This factor is always in play in Aristotle’s works. Most translations of Aristotle, unfortunately, try to supply those unwritten thoughts or sub-thoughts, usually guiding the read away from what Professor Barnes calls Aristotle’s “sinewy” Greek. St. Augustine often provides those unstated thoughts or pre-thoughts in his Retractiones, and he does in fact do so here.
Mani and Manichaeanism
Mani: 216-276 Babylonia (more or less in modern day Iraq)
–taught that he was God’s prophet and that his teaching was the true religion which succeeded and replaced all previous religions.
–taught that there are two fundamental principles: good and evil.
–gnostic religion: salvation through knowledge
St. Augustine was an adherent of Manichaeanism for most of a decade before his conversion to Christianity and, therefore, was an ideal person to refute Manichaaeanism.
Review of Aristotle’s Four Causes and Act-Potency principle.
Will was only free at creation. There is the original state of human nature according to the order of creation, i.e., free, and then the second state of human nature according to the disorder of the Fall.
Read from Retractiones 4, 127: “. . . it is indeed by the will that we sin or live rightly. But unless the will is liberated by grace from its bondage to sin and is helped to overcome its vices, mortals cannot lead pious and righteous lives. And unless the divine grace by which the will is freed preceded the act of the will, it would not be grace at all. It would be given in accordance with the will’s merits, whereas grace is given freely.”
Retr. 6, 129: “. . . the grace of God frees us from the misery that was then justly imposed upon sinners. For humans cannot pick themselves up voluntarily—that is, by their own free choice—as they fell voluntarily. . . . And no one is freed from that evil except by the grace of God.”
JDW’s Comment:
What is under discussion is the freedom of the will after the Fall, after Adam and Eve committed the Original Sin which is communicated to every human being. Whatever may have been the case in relation to freedom prior to the Fall, after the Fall free choice of the will is possible only through the preceding divine act of grace. To put it another way, free choice of the will is in potency to the divine act of grace.
How is this different from determinism? The “Introduction” by Thomas Williams is, on the whole, sound and very helpful. He takes the example of gravity (xix) and compares the difference between its effects on an apple hanging on an apple tree and a human being. For the apple on the apple tree gravity is deterministic. At some point, barring some externally intervening event (e.g. being plucked by human being or a deer), the fall will fall. That is determined and can be no other way. It will not rise in the air; it will not hover disconnected from the tree. Because of gravity, the apple will fall. For the human being taken purely as natural objects, there is also a certainty physical necessity. For example, gravity prevents us from exploding into particles dispersed randomly over space. As deer, dogs and human beings as beings with the potential for physical freedom, however, gravity makes that freedom possible. Because of gravity, I can walk, sit, run, jump, skip, lie down as well as engaging in numerous other voluntary physical activities.
Thomas Williams distinguishes among 1) physical freedom, 2) metaphysical freedom, 3) autonomous freedom and 4) genuine freedom. We can understand metaphysically free acts as analogous to the physically free acts. God’s grace makes possible the human free choice of the will.
What is the will?
St. Augustine invents the will. There are predecessor ideas to the concept of will, such as Aristotle’s distinction of choice and wish and his thorough discussion of deliberation. There is also much in St. Paul’s writing which is clearly antecedent to and influential upon St. Augustine’s concept of will (e.g. Romans 7) but in this work we actually see him constructing or describing the human will.
Question: Constructing what had not existed before or describing what had always existed but had simply not been fully recognized? (This same question pertains to the concept of individual as well.)
St. Augustine gives shape to the modern psychology as distinguished from ancient psychology while depending heavily upon Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus and other neo-Platonists. St. Augustine says that mind is comprised of reason, will and memory. This is an extraordinary innovation. The name of this course is “The Classical Mind,” and next semester’s course “The Modern Mind.” There is an important sense in which there is no classical mind, that mind as we understand it only began to come into existence with St. Augustine. In fact, I would argue that even in the modern era the concept of “mind” is fairly restricted. There is no good translation into French, for example, of the English word “mind.” For Plato and Aristotle there is intellect or reason, nous, but no concept of mind. St. Augustine’s Free Choice of the Will not only shapes how the modern world (modern including the Middle Ages) thinks, but even more significantly how the modern world thinks about thinking. Remember that for Aristotle, and this remains true for St. Augustine, that awareness is essential for a thing to be the most that it can be. Knowing is not fully knowing unless the knower knows that he knows. Friendship is not fully friendship until the friends are mutually aware of their friendship. So it is here, that freedom is not free without awareness of freedom, and thus St. Augustine explores how this awareness happens. It does happen through the interaction of reason, memory and will, and thereby we come to the basis for the modern understanding not only of freedom but of thinking, willing and remembering as well and, most of all, how those latter three contribute to what we, in the English-speaking world, call “mind.”
Thursday, April 15, A.D. 2010
Book I: Whence comes evil?
Evil is the privation of good. No one can learn evil. Evil is a kind of unlearning.
Libido: inordinate desire I.3, I.4 (5-6, 8)
I.5 One of the attractive and most durable features of St. Augustine’s thought is his ability and willingness to consider carefully hard cases (e.g. killing in self defense, when is war just, what someone is trying to say when he commits suicide).
1.6 (11) Natural law and positive law. Again, see Eternal law and temporal law I.15, 24-25)
1.8 (14) negative (autonomous) will (perhaps will in the modern sense, re: Nietzsche) seems to arise from inordinate desire
I.9 (15)Wisdom: “placing all inordinate desire under the control of the mind”
Wisdom and Virtue I.12 (19-20)
1.13 (20-21)Virtues:
Fortitude
Temperance
Prudence
Justice
1.14 (23) two criteria for the will: wanting and exercise to accomplishment
Origin of sin I.16, 27
Book II: Why did God give free choice?
–There is not a free exercise of the will when certain actions are coerced.
2.3 hierarchy: review Divided Line and discuss hierarchy in Neo-Platonism, especially Ps.D.
Existing — living — Understanding
–It is better to be a damned rational being than a rock that is not damned..
2.13 “Ode to truth” read carefully
–discuss hierarchy in relation to this
–discuss analogy of contradiction, e.g. “silent eloquence of truth”
–reprise of Aristotle’s theme of happiness as the highest good
–freedom: union of the human soul with God (relate to Plato’s “the Good” and “the One” of Plotinus. “This is our freedom, when we are subject to the truth; and the truth is God himself, who frees us from death, that is, from the state of sin.
–relate to the class prayer
2.14 (p. 58) “sing a beautiful song that never came to an end”
2.16 (p. 62) “Woe to those who turn away from your light and gladly embrace a darkness of their own.” Genuuine freedom versus autonomy.
2.17 (63) return of the forms.
2.19 on hierarchy of goods
–(p. 68) Happiness defined: “The happy life [is] . . . the disposition of a soul that cleaves to the unchangeable good, is the proper and principal good for a human being. It contains all the virtues, which no one can use wrongly. Now the virtues, although they are great and indeed the foremost things in human beings, are not sufficiently common, since they belong exclusively to the individual human being who possesses them. But truth and wisdom are common to all, and all who are wise and happy become so by cleaving to truth and wisdom. No one becomes happy by someone else’s happiness; even if you pattern yourself after someone else in order to become happy, your desire is to attain happiness from the same source as the other person, that is, from the unchangeable truth that is common to you both.”
–Followed by an exposition of the pros hen relationship of all people to truth and wisdom.
–Followed by a discussion of good and evil in the human realm: “When the will cleaves to the common and unchangeable good, it attains the great and foremost goods for human beings. . . . When the will turns away from the unchangeable and common good towards its own private good, or toward external or inferior things, it sins. It turns toward its own private good when it wants to be under its own control. . . . But even that life is governed by divine providence, which places all things in their proper order and gives everyone what he deserves.”
Book Three
3.1 (72) the nature of the rock and of the human soul. Augustine begins here the argument which will conclude on pp. 81-82 that it is better to be a damned rational soul than a rock.
–Augustine discusses the relationship of human willing to divine providence. Implicit here is dual causality.
–3.4 (76)
Evodius; “His will is my necessity.”
Augustine: “We grow old by necessity” but we do not choose good or ill by necessity. Choice implies precisely possibility.
–(79) Bad as our souls are, they are still wonderful: “Even though our souls are decayed with sin, they are better and more sublime than they would be if they were transformed into visible light. . . . Even souls that are addicted to the bodily senses give God great praise for the grandeur of light.”
–80 “looking for love in all the wrong places”
–3.5 (81-82) Better a damned soul than a rock. (98) a damned soul is still good in a qualified way—insofar as it exists.
–3.6 (83) Unhappy existence better than non-existence.
–(84) “I would rather be unhappy than be nothing.” So great is the good of existence!
–(90) Even hell adds “beauty to the order of things.”
— (114) damnable is our refusal to accept help, i.e., God’s grace.
–(116) Nothing is superfluous.
Emphasize the convertibility of being, the beauty of the whole, the availability of grace, the inescapability of God’s providence and, thereby, a share in God’s being and work.
St. Thomas Aquina
We fast forward once again through the pages of history.
St. Augustine died in A.D. 430 as the Vandals were sitting in the harbor of his episcopal seat in North Africa. in A.D. 476 the Western Roman Empire collapsed. During the following centuries the Roman Emperors of Byzantium sought to re-establish a hegemony over the West. At the same time, various kings attempted to make themselves successors to the glory of old Rome. The vision of Rome is still alive in Europe today in European Union and, now more concretely, in the unified currency. What is today Turkey was the heartland of the Eastern Roman Empire fifteen hundred years ago. That fact of history may partially explain the longing of both Turks and Europeans to include Turkey in the vision of Europe. Sometimes history and geography trump or, at least, want to trump ethnicity and religion. Of course, the Roman Empire was precisely a political entity which did trump both ethnicity and religion. The Western Empire was dead, but long live Rome!
Less than fifty years after St. Augustine’s death St. Benedict of Nursia was born. There had been monks in the West prior to St. Benedict. St. Augustine was both a product of the Western monastic tradition and one of those who furthered it and refined it. St. Benedict, however, wrote a monastic constitution, called simply The Rule, which remains today the most durable constitutional instrument in the West. During the same period the papacy became the institution which gave the most constant expression of the old Roman vision. One of my professors in Paris, Remi Brague, wrote a book entitled, L’Europe: la voie romaine. That translates literally, “Europe: the Roman path.” He argues, convincingly in my opinion, that what is characteristically Roman, and European, is that it functions as a conduit. Like the old Roman aqueducts, Europe carries water from the past to the future. That is a lovely image of what the Roman Church calls “tradition.” Rome intends to carry life-giving water from the past to the future. Benedictine monasticism and the papacy play no small roles in the drama of St. Thomas’ life.
The Middle Ages are “middle” in the sense of being in the middle of the Ancient World which is reckoned as having ended with the fall of the Western Empire in A.D. 476 and the Modern World inaugurated by the fall of the Eastern Empire in A.D. 1453. Sometimes the Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages which is at best a misnomer. One can divide the Middle Ages in two. The early Middle Ages run from 476 until the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. That era, almost six centuries long, was characterized by waves of invasions. There was much destruction, but there was also much that was new and illuminating. Professor W. P. Ker reckoned that the seventh century was a dark age; perhaps more accurately one might say 625-725. The rest of that period was very mixed, certainly tumultuous, but never dark.
One of the great and durable institutions of this period was the Holy Roman Empire when Pope St. Leo (III) the Great crowned Charlemagne as the first Holy Roman Empire on Christmas Day of A.D. 800. One can fairly say that Pope Leo was reluctant to give what Charlemagne was loath to receive; one of the great mediaeval institutions was nearly an accident, but an extraordinarily potent accident. When you read about the Nazi era that Hitler proclaimed a thousand year Reich—the German word for “empire”—he was declaring himself to be the heir of Charlemagne and his empire, the successor entity to the first Reich or empire, the Holy Roman Empire which lasted until 1806. Again, we see the continual hearkening back to the claims of Rome.
The period from the Norman Invasion to the Fall of Constantinople, however, was an era of light; the Gothic Cathedral is the most obvious emblem of that period as an age of light. To this theme we shall return.
About A.D. 570, Mohammed was born. Until his death in 632 he raised a standard which still commands about a fifth of the world population today. During his life, Mohammed consolidated Arabia under the Islamic banner. During the two centuries following his death, through conversion and military conquest the religion of Mohammed spread from the Arabian desert across North Africa, much of which had until then continued to be controlled by the Eastern Roman Empire. By the time of St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1275), Islam had a strong foothold in Spain.
Our course up til now has focused on continuity. There was Socrates who taught Plato and Plato who taught Aristotle. There was St. Augustine who, following Plotinus, read Arsitotle through a Platonic lens. While there are gaps aplenty from Socrates to St. Augustine, those gaps occur within a continuous history. After St. Augustine, Plato and Aristotle were known in the west for another century. After that, they disappear. When we began our conversation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics we observed that none of his most polished works have survived and that the which works which have survived have often been edited or are perhaps merely the class notes of some student. We tend to forget how important a conduit—the Roman aqueduct—is. Even today, books have to be preserved somehow. Imagine—and I take a page from Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz—that all the wisdom of the world were encoded on CD-ROM but the world lost all computer technology. In theory all the wisdom of the past would be contained on a series of discs, but they would be inaccessible. Now think of those books hand-copied on papyrus and vellum, organic materials decaying day by day. Imagine great libraries periodically burned by invaders who saw value only in gold and silver. Imagine an age when there was not enough animal or plant protein produced to support easily an active life. Now you have imagined much of the span from the collapse of the Western Empire until the Norman Conquest.
In the tenth century Aristotle’s Categories became not only known but fairly widely known, at least in France. There was an early victory for Aristotelianism in a controversy over how Christ is really present in the Eucharist. That was between Berengar and Lafranc in the eleventh century. St. Anselm (1033-1109), student of Lanfranc, writes his De Grammatico as a kind of commentary on the later chapters of the Categories. St. Anselm refers to Aristotle’s De Interpretatione in his Cur Deus Homo which is thought to be the first reference to Aristotle in any theological work written after the loss of Platonic and Aristotelian texts in the West. The acceptance of Aristotle in Christian theology was slow going after that. (Southern, Saint Anselm. A Portrait in a Landscape, pp. 44-48, 61-65). The effect, however, was clear, as Sir Richard Southern puts it, the employment of Aristotelian thought was meant “to push back the frontiers of mystery and enlarge the areas of intelligibility” (Southern, 45).
One major problem was that the primary rediscovery of Aristotle was by Arabic writers. Avicenna (980-1037) established a pattern which will come to full flower with St. Thomas, namely a basically Aristotelian philosophy with neo-Platonic influences. There were numerous other great mediaeval Islamic philosophers but the most important for our story is Averroes (1126-1198). There were both general and specific problems for Christians who wanted to work with Aristotelian texts. Aristotle was as suspect as Karl Marx might be at CUA today. Then there were the specific problems, namely that Aristotle did teach certain things completely contrary to Christian doctrine, like the eternity of the world. There were other points where the interpretation of Averroes was contrary to Christian doctrine like the unity of the human intellect, a doctrine that denied the particular character of the human soul. One might argue that it was by contrast with that unicity of the human intellect that St. Thomas develops the concept of individuality. The philosophy of Averroes won a strong following in the schools of Paris—the University of Paris as we would call it. Again a parallel with Marxism is helpful. For in those same schools today Marxism, even Stalinism has its advocates out of step with mainstream French opinion. So Averroism was out of step with main-stream Christian thought in the thirteenth century.
We need to add two more important details to our background. St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) and St. Dominic (1171-1221) established new orders or religious life based on a new vision of Christian poverty. By then the monks following St. Benedict’s Rule had gotten rich and had become powerful. Francis and Dominic were inspired my the original monastic vision, but saw that it had gone wrong. The new mendicant orders became important organizations for transforming Christian culture.
St. Thomas Aquinas was born about the time that the mendicant founders died. That is to say that already there was a second generation which had assumed the reins of authority. In a word, religious movements committed to poverty were rapidly becoming institutions. It is also important to observe that during the high Middle Ages something of the old Roman vision had been restored. St. Thomas, for example, was born in southern Italy, but he is most famous for his teaching in the schools of Paris. The Latin culture of the Middle Ages was the culture of Western Europe. Someone could begin life in one corner of mediaeval Europe and end up in another corner, be it as a success or failure. St. Bonaventure, another Italian, was almost an exact contemporary of St. Thomas. The two model much of the best that thirteenth century scholasticism had to offer, St. Bonaventure as a Franciscan, St. Thomas as a Dominican. G.K. Chesterton.
The work which we have before us, Summa Contra Gentiles, is most likely as the Introduction suggests, intended as a manual for training missionaries who were headed to Spain to convert Moslems.
Method
Remember that in the first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle speaks of method as a point of importance. St. Thomas did not originate, but he surely did perfect the dialectical method which today is regarded as “scholastic.” (What does “scholastic” and “scholasticism” mean?) The film Eight Mile.
Summa—what it means
The importance of Peter Lombard and his Sentences.
Outline of St. Thomas’ method:
Question
Statement of Question
Statement of Objections
Sed contra statement—this is the statement of St. Thomas’ view but through the selection of an authoritative quotation either from the Bible or some recognized teacher of the church.
Responsio (response)—Here St. Thomas argues for the position he has taken up. It usually runs to one or two paragraphs.
Replies to Objections—Here St. Thomas shows how the initial objections are not valid or, at least, how they are not applicable in this case.
During St. Thomas’ lifetime his method was under construction. We see it arrive at a final and definite form in his Summa Theologica which he never finished.
There were many world-transforming changes between the death of St. Augustine in A.D. 430 and the birth of St. Thomas in A.D. 1225. The following is a list of some of them:
–loss of firsthand knowledge of Plato and Aristotle
— waves of invasions and migrations until 1066
— conflict between successor political entities in the West with the Eastern Roman Empire seated in Constantinople
–Avicenna (980-1037), Averroes (1126-1198) and others.
–St. Anselm uses Aristotle’s On Interpretation in his Why the God-Man?
The effect was clear, as Sir Richard Southern puts it, the employment of Aristotelian thought was meant “to push back the frontiers of mystery and enlarge the areas of intelligibility” (R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm.A Portrait in a Landscape, 45).
— Distinctly Franciscan and Dominican schools of theology develop of which, respectively, St. Bonaventure (1221-1274) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) were the most famous exponents.
Outline of St. Thomas’ method:
Question
Statement of Question
Statement of Objections
Sed contra statement—this is the statement of St. Thomas’ view but through the selection of an authoritative quotation either from the Bible or some recognized teacher of the church.
Responsio (response)—Here St. Thomas argues for the position he has taken up. It usually runs to one or two paragraphs.
Replies to Objections—Here St. Thomas shows how the initial objections are not valid or, at least, how they are not applicable in this case.
During St. Thomas’ lifetime his method was under construction. We see it arrive at a final and definite form in his Summa Theologica which he never finished.
“The Christian Philosopher in the House That Love Built”
November 15, A.D. 2007
Neo-Platonism through the writings of St. Augustine and Boethius (A.D. 480-525), author of The Consolation of Philosophy. Because of those writings, western Christianity was largely Neo-Platonic. The works of both Plato and Aristotle were lost in western Christianity and only began to be re-discovered in the eleventh century from Arabic texts. The texts attributed to Aristotle himself came into main-stream western Christianity, but it was the neo-Platonic texts, rather than those of Plato himself, which entered the mainstream. As we have already seen, Neo-Platonism owed a large debt to Aristotle as well to Plato: Plotinus gives us the first synthesis of the two systems. In addition to the Platonic-Aristotelian synthesis, Neo-Platonic writers could be Christian as well as pagan, so that in the workers of writers such as Pseudo-Dionysius, we find Christian Neo-Platonism with a strong mystical element. There is in those works equally strong the relational knowledge of God and the cognitive knowledge about God. We have already seen in the work of St. Augustine the ladder of ascent which is described first in terms of positive analogy, then of negative analogy and then finally in the analogy of contradiction. What gives such works—and this certainly counts for the works of Augustine as well as of Pseudo-Dionysius—is that the ascent to God relationally is built upon the structure of rigorous intellectual argument. Our opening prayer is an outstanding example of this fusion intense devotion to God and intellectual rigor.
Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, Pseudo-Dionysius and Gothic architecture
Romans 1:20 For the invisible things of him from the Creation of the world, are clearely seene, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternall Power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”
November 27, A.D. 2007
St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy
John F. Wippel. The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas. Washington, D.C.: The CatholicUniversity of America Press, 2000.
(pp. 74-93)
“Thus in predicating one thing of another we are really saying that the one thing is the other.”
There are three kinds of predication which can be understood in terms of unity and diversity:
e.g. “Fido is a dog.” “Fifi is a dog.”
e.g. “Fido is a dog.” “The movie I saw last night is a dog.”
e.g. “Orange juice is healthy.” (Orange juice is a cause of health.)
“My blood count is healthy.” (The blood count is a sign of health.)
“I am healthy.” (Health resides in me.)
There is something the same and something different in each use of “healthy.”
Two kinds of analogy:
e.g. “As a father is to a family, so a priest is a father to his parish.”
e.g. “Orange juice, my blood and I myself are all healthy.”
“The library is of the university.”
“The professors are of the university.”
“The students are of the university.”
“The basketball team is of the university.”
There is something both the same and different in each use of “university.” Library, professors, students, and the basketball team are all related to the university analogically.
The one thing, “university” is the primary analogate. “Library,” “professors,” “students,” and the “basketball team” are secondary analogates. The secondary analogates are contingent or dependent upon the primary analogate. Take away the primary analogate, and the secondary analogates no longer exist in what ever capacity they relate to the primary analogate.
Summa theologica I, q. 13, a. 5.
–Only one-to-another analogical predication in regard to predication of divine names.
— Subject is the cause of accidents p. 83. Accidents participate in subject. p. 86
–NE I.1 Aristotle answers Plato, re: the Good, p. 85
–“Thomas’s doctrine of analogy is metaphysical.” p. 87, note 79.
— “It is this ontological dependency which in turn justifies analogical predication of being oth of a subject and of its accidents.” p. 90
— More or less perfect participation in existence.
St. Thomas Aquinas’s Proofs for the existence of God
Q.2, art. 1 God is evident in himself, though he is not self-evident to us.
Since reading Aristotle, we have discussed the distinction of thing being evident in itself and evident to us. E.g., the vacuum sweeper in the middle of the living room floor is really there, even if I do not see it. As we ascend the hierarchy of being, entities are increasingly evident in themselves, and decreasingly evident to us. We saw this already in the Divided Line: as we ascend, there is greater clarity. The problem is to exercise the rational soul sufficiently to see those beings which have greater and greater clarity.
In this article, we find one of the Bible verses which mediaeval philosophers took as empirical observations: Ps. 14:1
Review essence-existence distinction.
Art. 2 , The existence of God can be demonstrated.
The problem created by art. 1 is that if the existence of God is not self-evident to us, then is it possible through the natural light of reason to know that God does, in fact, exist. Aquinas says that it is possible to demonstrate that God exists, but he does so by making a distinction: propter quid, quia.
Romans 1:20.
FIRST WAY: Motion (Wippel, 444-59)
–The argument begins in physical fact, but moves beyond the physical and becomes metaphysical.
Logical principles:
SECOND WAY: Efficient Cause(Wippel, 459-62)
Review Aristotle’s four Causes
To which of those causes does efficient correspond? Agent.
Logical principles:
THIRD WAY: possibility and necessity (Wippel, 462-69)
The first two ways are based on ideas which are common to every day experience. We understand motion and efficient causation. Possible and necessary beings are not much in common parlance. By “possible being,” St. Thomas means a being that does not have to exist, a being which can not-exist. Not only can I not-exist, but the whole of the human race can not-exist. In fact, any being in the universe can not-exist. The universe itself can not-exist. This is the state of affairs as we know it: the tomato plants which were flourishing in my garden back in August and even in September and most of October are now dead and gone. Things come into being (generation) and go out of being (corruption).
The modern scientist would say that matter is not created or destroyed, it only changes form. The tomato that I ate on my sandwich, however, having changed form, is no longer a tomato. It was a possible being. It did not have to exist, and indeed, it does not exist any longer. Further, it did not have to exist in the first place. It was possible that it could exist, but had I not planted a garden, the particular tomatoes which I did raise, would never have existed.
Now this idea of a possible being, though not at first obvious, becomes obvious once explained.
A necessary being is one that not only must exist at some time, but must exist all the time, forever backwards and forwards. A necessary being cannot not-exist.
St. Thomas argues that while one possible being can cause another possible being, that because all those possible beings CAN not-exist at some point all of them WILL not-exist. If there were some moment when all possible beings DID not-exist, then there would be nothing. If there were absolutely nothing, then no possible being could ever come into existence again since nothing cannot produce something. This, says St. Thomas, is absurd, since it is obvious that things do exist and therefore they must have been created by some necessary being, a being which must always exist
This first part of the argument is a long reductio ad absurdum. The problem is that the absurdity is not entirely obvious. Here is the problem: the preceding non-existence of one thing does not imply the simultaneous non-existence of all things. It is possible to imagine a relay of possible beings, handing off from one to another the baton of being in a long and unending chain of causation.
My teacher at CatholicUniversity, Msgr. John F. Wippel, whom I regard as the greatest living interpreter of St. Thomas, says this, “Why Thomas himself did not regard this as a serious flaw in his argument is something I have been unable to determine” (467). This is a puzzlement. What St. Thomas—who was one of the great philosophical geniuses in the history of the world—saw as patently absurd is not so obviously absurd to us. Did he fail to see the weakness of his own argument or are we just not quite bright enough to see how obvious it is? Or to put the puzzle in terms of which both Aristotle and St. Thomas would approve, Is it that it is not evident in itself, or that it is just not evident to me?
MY SOLUTION BUT I MIGHT BE WRONG:
If St. Thomas holds pros hen analogy implicitly, and often explicitly, in each of the Five Ways, then it may be helpful to think of possible and necessary beings in those terms. The at-least one necessary being would be the primary analogate. The possible beings would be secondary analogates. If secondary analogates are caused by the primary analogate insofar as they participate in the primary analogate, then if there were no primary analogate, secondary analogates could not exist. Possible beings, therefore, cannot exist without a necessary being. To the argument that a possible being could be the primary analogate to other possible beings, as in fact we experience them in everyday reality, St. Thomas says but there still has to be a first because otherwise something would have to come from nothing which is “absurd,” and that first could not be a possible being because there is no possibility (i.e. potentiality) without a prior actuality. Only a necessary being could be prior to the first possible being.
Once St. Thomas has established, to his satisfaction that at least one necessary being exists, he allows for the possibility that there is more than one necessary being, but even if one necessary being has caused another, then there can be no infinite regress, and so there must be an ultimate necessary being.
Logical principles:
FOURTH WAY: Gradation (Wippel, 469-79)
If there is more and less, there must be a most. That is the nub of the argument in the Fourth Way. This proof cannot properly be understood without understanding that implicit in it is the Neo-Platonic metaphysics that we have been studying during the second half of our course. (On this point, I am following Professor Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy, 156.) First, the principle of hierarchy is implied: there is a hierarchy of the things that are “good, true, noble, and the like.” Not only IS there a hierarchy of things, for example, that are noble, more noble and, ultimately, most noble, but also implicit is that we can KNOW the grades of nobility, goodness, truth and the rest in things.
We have seen, for example, that insofar as a thing exists, it is good, and insofar as a thing is good, it exists. It follows then, that insofar as a thing exists it is true, and insofar as a things is true, it exists.
We have also seen, that we commonly make these distinctions about sensibles. We can distinguish between something that is excellent of its kind, but is simply not to one’s taste and something which is faulty or defective of its kind. In music, for example, one may prefer rap or opera, but in each category one can recognize the good, the better and the best.
In the things that pertain to God, we load into this framework that verse which we have already seen St. Thomas loved, Romans 1:20, “The invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” From the traces found in the sensible world, one can infer analogically something about God.
St. Thomas tells us, Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things, . . . . Therefore there must also be something which to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.” Through a hierarchy of pros hen analogies in which the primary analogate causes the secondary analogates, St. Thomas arrives at the analogy which is the most pros hen of all in which God as the primary analogate is the cause of all other things.
The doctrine of participation is then also implicit here, since it is through participation that secondary analogates are created by the primary analogate and, further, it is through participation in the primary analogate that secondary analogates continue in existence. I suspect that the implicit character of the doctrine of participation not only helps us to understand the Fourth Way, but may also provide the necessary clue to solving the puzzle of the Third Way. For St. Thomas, it was unthinkable that possible beings should exist without participating in the one ultimate necessary being.
In the Five Ways, St. Thomas promises to prove THAT God exists, and to some extent he tells us something of WHAT God DOES: God is the first mover and the first maker. In the Fourth Way, however, he goes beyond a proof THAT God exists or even describing the activity of God, to saying something ABOUT the NATURE of God. In the Fourth Way, St. Thomas tells us that because God is maximal in being, he is also maximal in goodness, truth and nobility.
Logical Principles:
FIFTH WAY: governance (Wippel, 479-85)
Which of Aristotle’s Four Causes is in play in this argument? Final. All things “act for an end,” and, indeed, that end is always “some good:” “this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always . . . as to obtain the best result.”
As in the Fourth Way, St. Thomas says something, at least implicitly, about the nature of God, namely that God is provident. Not only is God the first mover and the first efficient cause of the all that is, but God is also governing and guiding the world toward a good end.
There are natural beings (without a properly formed will) and rational beings (with a properly formed will). God governs beings according to their natures, thus natural beings are governed according to the laws of physics or in accordance with instinct while rational beings are governed in a way that is in accordance with their rationality. That is to say, God governs rational beings in a fashion consistent with their metaphysical freedom. (Think of a farmer who governs his crops and equipment one way, his livestock another way and his employees a third way.)
Logical Principles:
GOD
What does St. Thomas mean by “God”? Let us note what he says at the end of each of the Five Ways:
This is the philosopher’s “God,” the being who can be known by the light of natural reason alone. It is the being who is equally accessible to the villager living in an African mud hut, the secularist, the Moslem Imam, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew, the Buddhist, the Hindu, in fact, this is the “God” who is knowable to all, in all times, and places. This is God who is “the ultimate explanatory principle.” This is the being in which all people believe without exception. The chaos theorist has chaos as the ultimate explanatory principle. The materialist has the sum of all matter and energy as the ultimate explanatory principle. Such people may be chary about using the word “God,” but it is this ultimate explanatory principle that Aquinas means when he says, “this we call God.” The beauty, elegance, and truth of his proofs are all the more clear when one sees that for the first three Ways, the logic works as well for the chaos theory or hardcore materialism as for the God revealed in the Bible. In the fourth and fifths Ways, however, Aquinas goes beyond that universal principle to say something about God’s nature, i.e., that God is the best being and that God governs with intentionality. Still, St. Thomas takes a minimalist approach, and it is startling how much he is able to say about God on the basis of reason alone, i.e., without recourse to revelation.
That still leaves another question, however: what is the relationship between “this being” which “all men” call “God?” and the God of the Bible”
It is a one-to-another analogical relationship.
Readings for Summa contra gentiles
I have claimed that Classical Mind philosophy is the house that love built. In these final brief readings from Aquinas we see that he intends and does, in fact, synthesize both Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic philosophy.
Bk 3, ch. 2
–Pegis, 429: The argument which we have seen in the Fifth Way is the point of departure here: everything acts for an end, e.g., use of the archer analogy
–431: everything “acts either by nature for by intellect.”
–431-32: Aquinas anticipates modern materialism by responding to ancient materialism. Even those things done sub-intellectually by human agents are done toward some end and not due to material necessity.
Ch 3
–432: back to the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics: all human activity is directed to some good. Aquinas works from this insight through various elaborations until he arrives at a political conclusion: ch. 17, 436: “The particular good is directed to the common good as its end.”
–434: in ch. 3, Aquinas show that his conclusions are supported by both Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius, thus the synthesizing of Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic insights.
Ch. 37
–453-454: reprise of NE 10.1177b26-1178a8 Aquinas follows Aristotle’s line and elaborates it that as pursuit of the common political good transcends the particular good, so the good of rational contemplation transcends the common political good. Of course, for Aquinas, instead of theoretical wisdom, it is God who is contemplated, the move of Christian Neo-Platonism.
Ch. 48
–463-67: Such contemplation cannot be complete in this life and, therefore, ultimate happiness comes not in this life but in the next when that contemplation can be immediate and not mediated through the material world as it now is.
The Arc of This Course
At the end of our reading of Plato’s Apology, we took up the theme, “Living unto Death.” Socrates’ last words in the Apology challenge those who condemned him, but through those words, Plato challenges all of his readers: “Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god” (42a3-4).
In our final reading from St. Thomas, we find these words about the relationship of life and death: “Man naturally shuns death, and is sad about it, not only shunning it at the moment when he feels its presence, but also when he thinks about it. But man, in this life, cannot obtain not to die. Therefore it is not possible for man to be happy in this life” (SCG 48, Pegis, 465.)
[1]Aristotle Metaphysics 1.982b11-22, Barnes 2.1554.
[2]Planinc, Plato, 1-2.
[3] Jonathan Barnes, Lecture, Sorbonne IV, 2005.
[4] Joseph Owens, The Aristotelian Metaphysics.
[5] Barnes,; 1729.
[6] Barnes, Politics,7.14; 2115.
[7] In 2004-05, I attended the lectures of Pierre Manent on the Nicomachean Ethics at the L’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. In the discussion following M. Manent’s lecture on 7.1, a French graduate student, whose name is lost to me, proposed reading 7.1 with 8.10 as I have outlined here.
1Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Library vol. XIX/73 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999). Bekker page references are made in the text.
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