Prima Pars
Lecture 75: Opposites, Non-Being, and the Analogy of Truth

Transcript
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are posed as what? Lack and having, right? Knowledge and mistake are posed as contraries, right? Because the man is mistaken, thinks something, right? What? He thinks something true that isn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, in both of these, you think something, right? But here, there's just a non-being of knowledge and a subject able to know. Maybe you should know. Okay? So, as you were pointing out there in the first book of the National Hearing, before you come to know, are you necessarily mistaken? You're necessarily ignorant, right? Okay? Now, the man who's mistaken is also ignorant. But is everyone who's ignorant mistaken? What does Augustine say there's something about, I forget what it is, something about judging other people or something, you know? Or who's better? I'm not going to say anything about this. He says, unless I want to be mistaken. He prefers to remain something ignorant of this, right? In other words, maybe some matters where it's presumptuous to judge, right? Where the truth lies, it's better just to remain ignorant, right? Because if you try to judge, you're probably, but you'll often be mistaken. So, they're not the same thing, right? Or we had an example in ethics there, right? Before you acquire a virtue, you necessarily have the vice opposed to that virtue, but you necessarily lack the virtue before you acquire it. But not everyone who lacks the virtue has the vice. But the man who has the vice also lacks the virtue. But it's easier to bring out somebody to be virtuous who's never acquired the vice than to think of them who has the vice and try to make them virtuous. And it's easier to convince somebody of the truth if he's merely ignorant of it than if he's mistaken and is to the contrary. If you're undecided about my candidate, it's easier to convince you to vote for my candidate than if you're of the opinion that you should not vote for my candidate but the other one. So, when Thomas says, none being in privation, it doesn't mean he's acting the same thing, does he? Now, you talk about these opposites here. It's interesting to see this. You take the first one here. Being and none being. Well, they are what? Contradictives, right? If you take something and nothing. Do they have anything in common? So, something and nothing seem to be to be opposed to something like being and none being. But now you come to true and false. Are they opposed? Well, is false simply the none being of true and the subject? No. It seems more like contrary, doesn't it? Right? And certainly, you know, a true statement and a false statement, right? They're both a statement. But now, good and bad. These here are more like contradictories, it seems to me. But good and bad are how they opposed. Lack. Yeah. Now, as Thomas explains, sometimes the first meaning of bad, as Aristotle taught us, is a lack, right? Second meaning of bad, of course, could be something that has a lack, right? And then the third meaning of bad would be something that causes a lack, right? Okay? So it's because blindness is bad that it's bad to be a blind man. And because it's bad to be a blind man, it's bad for me to poke your eye out or something, right? Okay? But the primary meaning of bad, there is blindness, right? And what is blindness? It's really a lack. So it's interesting. When you look at the opposites of these things, maybe they're not opposed in the same way. How are the one and the many opposed? Book of wisdom. Can't believe it's these little things, huh? That's kind of interesting, huh? You see, opposites alongside, so they're more clear, right? That's why we have black and white, huh? Age. Now, that's a little kind of digression there, but in the fourth book of wisdom, when Aristotle shows that wisdom is about being as being, and there's an interesting way of showing this, huh? Because he's shown in the premium of wisdom that wisdom is about the first cause. And then he reasons from that that wisdom is about what? Being as being, right? Okay? Here you have the cause of all. And what do you have here? The being, the set of all, right? The cause of all and the set of all are not the same thing, right? I mentioned how Hegel has this terrible confusion, right? Because Hegel says that the being, the set of all, is the being who said I am who am. So he confuses these two, right? But in a way, Pitta's doing a bit with his forms, too, right? He's making the forms the first causes, right? But the forms are really the, what, universal, given its own existence in a world of its own, huh? But is there a connection here between the fact that wisdom is about the cause of all and therefore it's going to be talking about what's said of all? Is there a reason for that? Could you say that what is a cause of more, right? Is a cause of something, of what something more universal can be said? Here's an example I used to give from, from a simple example from our practical life, right? If you said the king and the general, right? Now, if the king commands a general, right? The king's causeality extends to everybody who is a citizen of his kingdom, right? The general's causeality extends to everybody who is a, well, soldier. Now, keeping my example simple, every soldier is a citizen, but not every citizen is a soldier, right? Mm-hmm. So when you talk about the king, you talk about the citizen. When you talk about the general, you talk about the what? Soldier, right? Okay. President Bush is the commander-in-chief by the Constitution, right? And considering him as commander-in-chief, his causality extends to whom? Yeah, he's not commanding me as president, he might, but not as commander-in-chief, right? You see? So you see a proportion there. Right between, right? Just as the king is a cause of more than the general, so the king's causality extends to something that is, of which, something more universal is said. And the general's causality extends to something of which, something less universal is said. Well then, the science that considers the cause of all, the one whose causality is most universal, it extends to the most, is going to be about what is said of all. And remember that same thing in ethics, right? Ethics, the first thing we show in ethics is that ethics is about the end of man, right? The end of human life. And then we show that ethics talks about all the goods of man, in general. But why should the science that talks about the end of man, and the cause of all that he does in a way, right? Talk about all his goods. Rather than the medical art, or the art of carpentry, we shouldn't talk about all the goods of man. But because the end of human life extends to the whole of human life, right? The carpentry's iron extends to certain things, right? Okay, that's that. A pull-up there. But then there was still a problem there in the fourth book of wisdom. And he says, how can there be one reasoned out of knowledge about being as being? Because being doesn't mean one thing. It doesn't have one meaning. And then he goes on to point out, although it doesn't have one meaning, the meanings are all what? Connected. With a fundamental meaning, which is that of substance, right? Okay? Now, sometimes to give people something easier to understand, I take the example of political philosophy, right? What is political philosophy about? Political things. Okay? But the word political comes from the Greek word polis, right? Which some people translate the city-state for a lot of a better translation, right? So the fundamental meaning of political is the polis. But we talk also in political philosophy about the government. Now, is the government a polis? No. So when political is said of the polis instead of the government, it doesn't have the same meaning, does it? But is there a reason why we talk about government in the science of the polis? Yeah. Because there's a connection between them, right? The government rules the polis, right? And after we talk about government, we talk about revolution. Now, is revolution a government? No. Is revolution a polis? No. So why talk about it in the same reason of knowledge? Well, because it's connected, right? Because it's a change of government, right? Okay? So notice there's an order, polis, government, revolution, right? Okay? Well, something like that with the being, right? The fundamental meaning of being is substance, huh? That's what we're chiefly concerned with in business, about substance. But we also talk about accidents, right? Now, is an accident a substance? Come on. So why do you talk about accident when you talk about substance? Why do you talk about health when you talk about the body? See? Are they connected in some way, health and the body? Yeah. What's connection? Is health and the body, or what? Yeah. Yeah. Okay? Then, suppose we talk about becoming, right? It might seem almost a condition to say becoming is being. It's not being, is it? It's coming to be. But do you mean that becoming doesn't exist in this world? What do you mean? Yeah. If it exists, that means that to be belongs to it, right? So becoming is a being. Sounds kind of strange, right? Yeah. You get a much less sense of being than accident, right? Accident is being less than substance, right? Now, what comes last? As Thomas says here. Privation and being, right? Blindness, right? You know, like that, right? Lack. That problem in Europe there, right? Finding birth rate, right? People aren't there that shouldn't be there. You can talk about that, can't you? Talking about what is not. But does that really have any being at all? Nothing, right? It's not being, right? Now, you can use the word something for all this, too. Now, I guess it's the same way, right? Is becoming something? Is blindness something? Then you're really stretching the word, right? Yeah. Because blindness is really the lack of something, right? The not being of something, right? Is nothing really something? See? That's what Thomas is saying, yeah? None ends, none being, and privation do not have exibs. He's very taught to him, right? But only from the grasping of the understanding, right? So does the understanding understand something by the word nothing? There's a famous statement of the Greek philosophers. You can't get something from nothing, right? So he understood something by the word nothing, right? So is nothing something, then? Yeah. Only for the apprehension of the understanding. So if being or something requires what? If truth requires some kind of being, right? There'd be something there to know. As we, there's nothing there. This can only be known if reason makes it out to be something. And Aristotle, of course, gives us a rather strange sense of being, but it is one of the senses of being, right? But you're approaching it with becoming, right? And with motion, right? Because becoming or motion doesn't fully exist, does it? Can you be in two places at the same time? No. So if you're in the same place at any one time, there's no time but you're in motion, right? You're only in motion in time, and time doesn't exist together, does it? Before and after can't exist before, past and future together, right? So this heart exists, right? But here you really got to talk about things, you know? This is, it has, it has a little bit of presence. Yeah, yeah. So evil has what? Being only in the mind, right? Outside the mind is non-being. And from the being that it has in the mind, therefore it has the truth in the mind, right? But you're... You're taking the fallacy of happening, of the accidental, if you say that God, therefore, is the cause of what? The fornication in itself. Now this fallacy of the accident, Aristotle says, is to seize even the wise. It's a very strong way of speaking. You can go through the history of modern philosophy and see this fundamental mistake of the accidental. It's going to happen again and again. You only know what's in my mind. That's true. You only know what's in your mind. Everything you know is in your mind, right? You definitely only know what's in your mind, right? It's the fallacy of the accident there, right? Otherwise, in the definition of square, my definition of square would be an equilateral and right-angled quadrilateral in the mind of my purpose. And your definition would be an equilateral and right-angled quadrilateral in your mind, right? So we wouldn't have the same definition. We wouldn't be knowing the same thing, would we? You see? But it's accidental to the definition of square that's in my mind or your mind, right? Even though I can't know it unless it's in my mind. So it's very hard and very easy, that fallacy of the accidental, huh? And that's a fallacy that, in a sense, Plato's making when he identifies matter with lack of form. Or Jean-Paul Sartre's when he identifies our freedom with non-being. Notice the example there, the one I take from Marx there a lot, where Marx tries to see man's highest perfection to be in his making, right? You can say that's kind of a modern idea, right? Because it's all our technology and so on. We're making things that the ancients and medieval men would have thought be impossible, right? Then we could make something to take us to the moon. I mean, who would have thought of that idea? You know? But even things like the telephone, right? You know, I think people are walking around all the time now, you know? You know, amazing things. But Marx is saying, I mean, Karl Marx is maintaining that in making things around him, the maker also transforms himself. And so man is being perfected by his making, not just the things outside of him, right? Well, is that so? Is making a perfecting of the maker? Marx, in a sense, knows that the end of man must be something that perfects man, right? So if man was not perfected by his making, then you couldn't see man's goal in making, right? Well, is the maker perfected by his making? Well, I've heard carpenters say, you know, they're working on a job where they're doing something interesting, right? I'm learning a lot of it. They'll tell me that, right? I've heard them say that, right? It's like the job they're on, because they're not just doing the same thing over and over again, right? But they're developing, right? And, you know, when they do these studies of the painters, you know, and maybe they paint a certain way for a couple of years, and they start discovering things, and they paint, you know, in a different style, in a different way, and maybe in better in some cases, right? Okay, and so on. So, in a sense, Marx's position is based upon saying the maker is perfected by his making. Well, is that true or not? Or is it true for actually dance? You see, the Greeks and medievals thought that man is perfected by understanding and loving God, right? Okay? But understanding and loving God is not making God or in any way God is unchangeable. He can't be made. That's like Thomas Seaman says, you've got to be careful not to speak perfect, Son of God. But he's already an act, right? So, an activity like understanding and loving is an activity which essentially perfects not the thing being understood or loved, but the one who understands and loves, right? Now, if you understand something great, like understanding God, right, or loves God, then he's perfected by understanding and loving God, but it's accidental to the maker and that he himself is being perfected by the making. Because that's, in a sense, he doesn't know how to make. He's learning how to make, right? By making and learning from his mistakes and so on. So, but what's making as such is the perfecting of the thing made. So, if I make McDonald's hamburgers all day long for my life, I'm maybe not learning anything about them. I make a hamburger, right? I make them pretty good, you know, fast and quick and so on. The same way, you know, could man's, the other example I use is the one of teaching, right? It is, can man's end or purpose be to teach? See? I have a teacher, right? Once in India, I'll say, c'est ma vie, you know? Let's teach. What am I going to do? You know, I don't teach. But, is teaching a perfecting of the teacher, see? Well, if you're teaching something profound like this, every time you teach it, you learn it better and you see it better, right? Okay? Um, so, it might be true that always or most of the time if you're teaching something profound like this, um, you're always perfecting yourself, right? You see? Because you're always understanding these things better, right? Okay? But it's the understanding of these things better that is the perfecting of you, right? It's not you're teaching them that is the perfecting of you, right? In a sense, it's accidental to my teaching that I come to understand the subject better, you know? Because I'm not a teacher insofar as I don't know what I'm teaching. You see? And so, it's really accidental to the teacher, right? And you can see that in The Teacher by Antoinette Messiah, huh? Did Christ learn anything by teaching us? No, he didn't learn anything at all. Well, and yet he is the teacher by Antoinette Messiah, right? So, if it belonged to teaching as such to perfect the teacher, then our Lord should have been, what? Being perfected by this teaching. He's perfecting our mind, right? It belongs to teaching as such to perfect the student, but not the teacher. It belongs to the maker to perfect the chair or whatever he's making, not to perfect the maker himself. But because, because it happens most of the time, that the maker, if he's doing, you know, if he's a nice job of making, right? Where he's, you know, got some independence. He's not just a guy that, you know, turned a screw on the production line at Ford Company or something like that. He's a self-artist, so to speak, right? He's always learning, right? The teacher, if he can teach his stuff and not something very rudimentary, he's always learning. It can seem to not be accidental, right? I bet if you went and talked to college professors, they'd probably think, you know, that it's not accidental to a teacher that he'd be learning what he's teaching, right? Oh, it's always part of it. He's one of the students, too. He's always a student. But they have a hard time seeing or making the distinction between the accidental and the as such, right? And if something happens all the time or most of the time, it doesn't seem to be accidental. So to be a teacher, I've got to be a learner, right? And you probably, people would say that sort of thing, right? You know? If you're not learning, you're not teaching, you know? You can see why people will say that, right? But it's still accidental, because I'm learning what I'm teaching. See this? So, I've got to be very careful of that kind of a mistake, yeah? Got a little breakdown? Got a little breakdown? Got a little breakdown? Got a little breakdown? Yeah. Yeah. We're going to look at Article 6 here, right? The sixth one proceeds. It seems that there's only one truth by which all things are true, right? Because, according to Augustine, nothing is greater than the human mind except God. But truth is greater than the human mind. Otherwise, the mind would judge about truth. But now it judges all things by the truth. And not by itself, huh? Therefore, only God is truth. Therefore, there is no other truth but God. Moreover, Anselm says in the book about truth, that as time is to temporal things, so truth is to true things. But there's one time for all temporal things, huh? Therefore, there's one truth by which all things are true, huh? But against this is what is said in Psalm 11. Thomas often quotes this psalm, huh? Truths are diminished, huh? From or by the sons of men, right, huh? Okay. They often take the example, you know, the mirror broken, you know, and all these little truths, huh? You know, the creatures. But Thomas, you know, he's going to distinguish, huh? I answer it should be said that in one way there is one truth, right? But which all things are true. In another way, there is not just one truth. To the evidence of this, it should be known that when something is said univocally, that means of one meaning, right? With the same exact meaning of many things, that is found according to its proper definition, each one of them. Just as animal in each species of what? Animal. So an animal is said of dog and cat and horse. Even though there are different kinds of animals, animal is saying something that's common to all of them, and it has exactly the same meaning, said of dog and cat and horse. But when something is said analogously, huh? Equivocally by reason, that is found in its proper definition in one of them only, from which the others are, what? Denominated, right? And now the example of the health is the example where Aristotle uses in the metaphysics, in the fourth book of wisdom. Just as healthy is said of the animal and of the urine and of the medicine, not that health is what? The animal, yeah. But from the health of the animal is denominated medicine healthy insofar as it produces or causes, affects that health in the body. And urine is said to be healthy, or your complexion is said to be healthy, right? Insofar as it is a sign, huh? It's significant. It signifies that health, right? And although health is not in the medicine or in the urine, nevertheless, in each of them, there's something to which this makes health in the animal and that signifies the health of the animal, right? You might say your diet is healthy, right? Now, it has been said that truth is before in the understanding and afterwards in what things, according as they are ordered to the divine understanding, huh? Well, with us, it's kind of the reverse, huh? If, therefore, we speak of truth insofar as it exists in the understanding, according to its proper reason or definition, thus, in the many created understandings, right, there are many, what, truths, huh? Even in one and the same understanding, right? Like the whole is more than the part. Nothing is before or after itself. And the other things that I have, truths in my head, according to the many things known. Whence the gloss, huh? And in my footnote here, it says from Augustine, huh? In that place. Whence the gloss upon that text of Psalm 11 that was quoted before, that truths are diminished from the sons of man, that says, just as from the one face of man results many likenesses in the mirror, right? So from the one divine truth results many, what, truths in the created minds. If, however, we speak of the truth according as it is in things, thus all things are true by one first truth, huh? To which each thing is assimilated according to its, what, being, right? And thus, although there are many essences or natures of things, or forms of things, nevertheless, there is one truth of divine understanding of which all things are, what? Denominated true, huh? So one sentence he admits, another sentence he will, what, deny it. And I think there's another text when he talks about the same question. Now, the first thing about our judging all things by the truth. To the first, therefore, it should be said that the soul does not judge about all things according to just any truth, right? But according as the first truth, but according to the first truth, insofar as it results in it as in a mirror, right? But like Paul speaks of us seeing in a mirror darkly, huh? According to the first things that are understandable by us. Whence it follows that the first truth is greater than our soul, right? But nevertheless, also the created truth, which is in our understanding, is greater than the soul, not simply, but secundum quid, that distinction again, right? Insofar as it is the perfection of it, huh? Just as in some way, knowledge can be said to be greater than the soul, huh? But it is true that nothing subsisting is greater than the human reason, except what? God, huh? Augustine has kind of a strange way to speak to me sometimes where he says that if you and I decipher between ourselves by the truth, right? We're not seeing it in your mind or in my mind, but in the first truth like in God, right? Well, in a way you are and in a way you're not, right? Because you're kind of seeing it in the impress of that first truth in our mind, right? In the things that we naturally understand, right? So I'm not seeing, you know, in geometry I judge something by the statement that the whole was more than a part. I'm not seeing this in God's mind. I'm not seeing this in a vision, right? But this truth in my mind that I see that the whole is more than a part is a result of what? The divine mind, right? And so St. John says in the Gennady's Gospel, this is a light that lightens every man that comes into this world. But then he's talking about partaking, you might say, the divine light in the natural light of reason, right? So in a way you're seeing it through the divine light but maybe you can be more precise and say you're seeing it through a light that you that is a partaking of the divine light, huh? That is a result of the divine light, huh? Okay? That's an effect of the divine light, huh? But you're not seeing it in God, like human beauty vision, huh? The expression that St. Bonaventure uses is not the intuition, huh? But it's like the sense that it's not numerically one in us, right? And the second thing about Augustine, I mean, the text of St. Anselm, that's the truth that he sees, huh? The second, why don't you say this can be true, that the saying of Anselm has truth according as things are said to be true in comparison to the divine understanding, right? That all things are true by one truth, which is the divine truth itself, right? Just one and simple, right? But if you're talking about truth as it is in minds, there's many minds, there's many truths, but these many truths are, what, diminishing the divine.