Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 20: Relative Quantities, Descartes, and the Order of Learning

Transcript
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The apparent contradiction, which is the key to something very important. Not a real contradiction, but an apparent contradiction. In what I say? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think in all of my teaching of this framework, there's one student in all the years that saw the apparent contradiction. A lot of people miss it, you know. I tell them, you know, it's among these things, and they look at it, and they can't see the apparent contradiction, you know. But, you know, most students, you know, once in a while, students will see it, huh? It must be kind of a marvelous thing here, what he says about the mind. As I mentioned before, that's what caught the attention of Socrates, huh? You know, you got very enthusiastic when you first heard about this, huh? He thought that Anxagos could have developed the consequences of it better, but Aristotle and Plato admired this very much, too. This game was about five minutes to five, so I don't want to, you know, so you can do this as a whole there, huh? Now, when you get to do with Anxagros, we may look at the last part of this secondary reading here, the part on the mover that we didn't look at, the moderns on the mover. So we'll make a little brief comparison between what Heraclitus has said about the mover and what Empedocles has said about the mover and what Anxagros has said about the mover. Just make a little brief comparison there, so you might look over that part of the moderns on the mover. Okay. 3 p.m. Do you see that the Pope's address, do you get Pope's speaks or what? You're always getting the, you know, six months later, you know, when he made the talk, you know, but in his talk, it's history there, he's talking a little bit about the danger of modern science, you know, and the way it disposes the mind, you know, in a way it's not too favorable to the faith, huh? Kind of interesting remarks he has there. I have to be in the text in, you know. Kind of interesting things he says. Another text in there where he's talking about the difference between man and the other animals. But he's always emphasizing love, but here you see, reason first. Then go to love, right? You know, proper order, huh? Okay. Well, I'm not saying size so much, but when you say large and small, see, you know, you know, we'd say that, you know, if I have a large pea here, right? You know, it's a large pea, right? But it's very small compared to, what, a mountain, right? You know, or a large apple, right? You know, so is that something absolute, huh? The size. Well, a large apple would be a small, what, man. A very small man, right? In relation, choice, in relation. Yeah, yeah. The large and small are relative, huh? They're towards something, huh? Okay. And the way Aristotle brings it out is that the same thing would be called large and small in comparison to different things, huh? So if I had a hundred people at my house, you know, we couldn't find all these people before, you know? How are we going to feed all these people? You know, this would be a large, a large dinner party, I would call a hundred people in my house. But if you had a hundred people for the World Series, that's all that showed up for the World Series. My gosh, I mean, I guess Americans have lots of interest or they're afraid of the terrorists. It's like, they'd be a very small crowd, right? It'd be, in itself, the same number within a hundred people. Does it follow, then, that if the whole universe were shrunk to the size of the dhika, all in proportion, that we would never notice? Well, that's what they say, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's the truth. That seems to be correct, yeah. Okay. Okay, I get pictures of why you guys are talking. Can I get pictures of why you guys are talking? Because I need to fill up the newsletter here. Okay. You can't just keep talking. I'll put the mail out. What? Oh, yeah, keep talking. Okay. Okay, I just want to get that clear that that was the truth. But it didn't have to be true, though, to make these things smaller and smaller. Can I get this glass out of the way, then? Yeah. Right, I can take it out of Photoshop. So, um... So I just thought it was going to be playing out. Great and small are in the category of, what, towards something, not in the category of quantity. Quantity is something absolute, huh, in itself, whether you know it or not, it's something absolute in itself, but large and small is nothing in itself. How much is that? That's in comparison to, what, something else, huh? Mm-hmm. So. That's neat to think about that. Yeah. Now, this Descartes in that I think of who I am, I was always trying to figure out where he went, it seems to be it's not quite right, is that because of what the thing we're talking about, what Plato and Aristotle differed on how they thought, what we, is he, is that in a way of saying that? Well, there's nothing wrong with saying that, in a way, you have to be before you can think, huh? Yeah. So, once you understand that, then you realize that if you think, you must be, huh? Because it's a question of looking before and after and seeing a before and after that's in the thing, huh? But did he also take that to mean that what I think is true in reality, did he bring it up? Well, that would be another thing, but that's not involved in that statement itself. Oh, okay. Good, okay. That's not wrong with that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Is that statement, then, is there anything wrong with that statement? No, no, no. Okay. Some people will sometimes say, you know, it's not really reasoning in the full sense, it's kind of, the mind goes so quickly from one to the other, huh? It sees that one involves the other. Okay. That always seemed true, but for some reason I had the impression, maybe because of some day clock. Well, I know, you should be suspicious about the modernists. Okay. You know, they're guilty of how proven this is, you know. You start reading the modernists, you know, you read them with somebody who, you know, there's some insight into their eras, you know, you kind of get the habit of, you know, I wonder what this guy's eras are going to be if you pick up a modern philosopher, because they all have their own mistakes, huh? I think what's interesting is that the Greeks, they kind of build on each other, and I was using a phrase there that Cajetian uses about Thomas in the Summa Theologiae, which I think these are the thirteenth quotes in the encyclical, that Thomas seems to have inherited the mind of all the Church Fathers because he so reverts them, and he learned so much from them. So when you read Thomas, you're not reading, as it were, I think it was starting from scratch, huh? In a way you're reading what's good in Gregory, and what's good in Augustine, and what's good in Chrysostom, and so on, right? Which Thomas has brought together and unified and ordered in a way that may be new, but he's drawing things from all these people out of them. In the same way in Aristotle, you could say, I think, that Aristotle read so carefully Plato and those who went before him, they seem to have inherited the mind of all of them. And you can see it even already, to sort of extent in Pedocles, huh, that he's, you know, taking thoughts about matter from these different thinkers before him, and combining that with the idea of numerical ratio, and he's seeing something more, right, and he's adding the mover and so on. And Aristotle's interesting way of speaking there, and I think it's in the politics there, where he says, we should try to say some things better than our predecessors said them, huh? There are other things we should try to say as well as they said it. There's some things that they did say very well, huh? And one should try to be as good as they were, but not better than they in that respect, huh? You see? And then, once you try to add some things, and one sees and maybe correct some things, you may think it's mistaken, right? Mm-hmm. That's the way to go forward, see? You know? To absorb whatever you can that's good in your predecessors, and then try to, you know, correctly have a reason for correcting, anything you might think is deficient, right? And to add what you can add to it, that's the way the mind goes forward. But, you don't see that, really, in the modern philosophers. You know, I find... You know, if you compare them with the Greeks, that they'll often say the opposite of what the Greeks say, but without noting that the Greeks had said something opposite, and without recalling why they said it, and without giving reasons to say that what they said was wrong, or probably not a defect, right? Aristotle will take, he'll suddenly disagree with his predecessors, even with Plato himself, but he will note what they said, first of all, right, that they said something, and he will give an account of why they said it, right, and then he will give reasons why he thinks what they said was wrong, and reasons why he thinks their arguments are defective, or you try to show why they think. I mean, you know, the thing I gave there from Descartes there about the confused and the distinct, he's saying exactly the opposite in the way of Aristotle, he's saying the distinct is more certain than the confused, and then he's, but he's not noticing, you know, noting that Aristotle said the opposite, really, nor is he recalling the arguments that Aristotle gave, which is kind of starting out on his own, you know, and so you kind of repeat the mistakes of the past, no? Do they teach that at like Harvard and Stanford, too? Well, they're all over the place, you know, you see, because, you know, you get, as I was saying to students today, and I'll say it to you when you get to that point there, but we're going through Aristotle's distinction there of the four kinds of cause, and so I went through, you know, the name of each of the four kinds of cause, and explained the definition that Aristotle gives of each, and the examples he gives, and the significance of the examples, then I said, now, what is the order in which Aristotle distributes the four kinds of causes? And I pointed out, first of all, that it's the historic order in which these causes came to be talked about, and, you know, came to light, you might say, with the Greek philosophers, and I showed that a bit. And then, I went on to show, though, but more important, it's the order in which we can best learn that there are four kinds of causes. It's the order in which we can force reason, right, to admit that there are these four kinds of causes. But then I was remarking as to how the historical order and the order of learning, to some extent, correspond with the Greeks. Why is that so, see? Well, it's because the Greeks are the first philosophers, so they naturally begin with what is more known to us, and proceed gradually to what is less known to us. And that's the proper order in the order of learning, see? But now, once you have philosophers, and books of philosophy, and the printing press, and so on, right, then you could begin by whatever book happens to come into your hands, get interested in philosophy, go down to the library, whatever book you happen to run across, you start to look at that. And wherever the author begins, that's where you begin, right? Whatever is fashionable, or at your time, yeah, see? Or you go to Professor X's class, whenever he's talking about, that's what you start to think about. If you went to Professor Y, you would have started thinking about something else, because he's talking about something else, right? And so there's an element of chance there, right, as to where you might begin. And the monoflosses are often, they begin where the last monoflosses were left off, right? Yeah. And so, whatever happened to be, you know, making a big hullabaloo, or it was fashionable, right? That's where they start, huh? And so they never get back to what is more known to us, huh? Wow. And become strong in that, and go forward, huh? So there's four causes, material, efficient, and form? Yeah, matter, form, mover, and end, yeah. That's the order in which he gives them, but that's both the historic order, we'll see, they get through, but it's also the order in which we can best see that there are these four kinds of causes. Okay. See? Okay, can I ask you a question, just about learning in general? Yeah. Now, this has been a big discovery for me, this, I used to read hundreds of books, and I didn't get anything out, I didn't remember anything. Yeah. I might do this for years. You're all living it. No, I mean, I was terrible. You could ask me what, I could, okay, well, I started this breaking down in the text, and I don't, sure, I don't do it perfectly, but whatever I do, I'm trying to understand why it helps me so much, and I think it is something to do with... I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Writing it down and thinking it out, it forces me to understand it. Divide and conquer, yeah. So Thomas does the text of Aristotle, so if you look at Thomas' commentary, he would be dividing the text of Aristotle and then seeing the order of the text. Now you can do that with a manic Aristotle, because he's very orderly, right? You know, a modern philosopher, he might be all over the place, he jumps from topic to topic, you know? But in Aristotle, there's really a reason, see? I seem to have to write it down, like I tried it without it, like I read it over five or six times and tried to think it through. But then I went through and I wrote down what it was saying, and I got a lot more out of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know myself, you know, when I'm thinking something out, I'm always kind of, you know, teaching an imaginary person. That's a good way to do it. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, even though I don't have in mind, you know, any class I'm going to be teaching this material too, but I'm just kind of, you know, it's always an imaginary person I'm explaining it to and kind of forces you to spell it out. I've been doing that, so it's just a good thing just to try to explain it to someone in your mind and think it through. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's just the opposite, I used to never do that. I read it once while I had a long reading. These things are so basic, you know, I mean, you can get to the 15th reading, which you'll see later on there, in the Aristotle's Critique of Plato, but it's kind of the key there to understand what bad is. So, and the first meaning of bad, the second meaning of bad, and the third meaning of bad, what are they saying? Well, that's something very basic, right? But the Irish person doesn't know where to begin, you know? And you get to the 15th reading. In fact, I had one of the questions on the exam there that I gave them, you know? What's the first, second, and third meaning of bad? And once you understand what the first meaning of bad is, which the second meaning depends upon, and the third meaning depends upon the second meaning, then you can see, you know, why there can't be anything bad in God. Well, I don't know what the first meaning of bad is. I see, you see, well, you see, you're in bad shape there. You've got to follow this course, then we'll find out, see? Yeah, but we're going to see it when they go back to Aristotle, eventually, huh? And then we'll know what Augustine, why Augustine says, you know, that sin is nothing, and the man who sins becomes nothing, right? Very strange statement at first sight, huh? Mm-hmm. Why actually Augustine say that? I see Thomas quoting him a lot, too. Sin is nothing, and the man who sins becomes nothing. What does that mean, right? It's kind of a way of emphasizing what the bad really is. What the bad really is, basically, is what? It's a lack, huh? Oh. It's a non-being, therefore, a something you are able to have, and should have, but don't have, huh? That's the first meaning of bad. Yeah. It's always a lack, huh? See? Now, the second meaning of bad is to have a lack. It could be said to have a lack, huh? And the third meaning of bad is what causes lack in something, huh? So, for example, blindness is something bad, huh? Right? Blindness is a non-being of the power of sight in something that is able to have sight and should have sight. Mm-hmm. Okay? Now, because blindness is something bad, then it's bad for you or for a dog, for that matter, or a cat, to be blind, huh? Okay? I have that condition called blindness. And then if it's bad for you to be blind, then it's bad for me to, let's say, poke your eye or something and cause you to be blind, huh? That's the third? That's the call? Yeah. Yeah. See? What's the second one, blindness or something? So, what has the blindness? So, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the What has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness. What has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness, what has the blindness. What has the lack, huh? What is lacking? Yeah. So is it good to be a blind man? No. I don't mean it's bad in a moral sense, but it's bad to be blind, huh? But it's bad to be blind because blindness is bad, huh? Just like it's good to be wise because wisdom is good, so it's bad to be blind because blindness is something bad. That's the second. Yeah, to have a lack, because you said to have a lack. Right? Okay? And the third meaning is what causes lack in something, huh? So for me to poke your eye with a stick or something is bad, right? It could cause you to be blind, right? And that's bad because blindness is bad, right? See? Take another example here of bad, something bad. Ignorance is bad, right? Okay? And then an ignorant mind is bad. That's the second meaning of bad, right? An ignorant mind is bad because ignorance is bad. And then what causes the mind to be ignorant or keeps the mind ignorant, huh? Things cause that, huh? There's something bad, right? That's the third meaning of bad, huh? So reasonable, huh? And you say, you talk about a bad human act, right? A bad human act is bad in what sense of bad? Yeah, yeah. It's not simply a lack, right? But a bad human act is an unreasonable human act, huh? It's an act that lacks the order and the ordering and the measuring of reason. So, when I eat too much or drink too much, right? My eating and drinking is disordered, huh? Unmeasured, right? It lacks the ordering and the measuring of reason. So, the original meaning, then, of bad, fundamental meaning, is always a lack. That's why Augustine says, you know, since a lack is such a non-being, huh? A nothingness. That's why Augustine emphasizing that fundamental thing, he says, sin is nothing, right? A little bit of an exaggeration, because sin may be an act that lacks, what, the order it should have, huh? So, that lack of order is the fundamental meaning of badness, huh? Mm-hmm. But then, an act that lacks that order is bad because of that non-being, right? It's lackiness. Can I ask you a quick spiritual question? Well, you can ask him, yeah. Okay, this is, I was reading in St. Thomas, this has been confusing me all along, you know, about eating in moderation, that eat what you need to be healthy and stuff, kind of. Yeah, yeah. And the Summa, and a lot of the saints, St. Thomas says, he compares the natural virtue of temperance to eating just what we need, but he said, the supernatural virtue, we chastise our body by depriving it. Yeah. Now, what are we supposed to do? Well, even that, you see, the mean for that, right, might not be the same, right? So, what would be excessive, from a purely human point of view, right, might not be for a spiritual reason, huh? When Thomas takes up the virtue of chastity, you know, the vow of chastity, right, huh? Yeah. Some might say, well, isn't that excessive, right, huh? I mean, excessive in the sense of seeking these things less than, right, how one should do, right, huh? Uh-huh. You know? Well, but maybe one is being ordered to a higher, what, supernatural good, right? And in view of that end, this is not excessive, right, huh, you see? Okay. To go without the joys of marriage, is what we say, right, is not excessive, right, with a view to, what, seeing God face to face, let's say, huh, right? Even these saints damaging their bodies through fasting, I mean, it seems... Well, no, no, you've got to be careful, you've got to be careful there, because we have even the words of Bernard Clairvaux, right, where he engaged in some tendencies that he thought were excessive, right? Yeah. Okay, okay. Well, they usually... Yeah, yeah, so I mean, it's always a question of... Prudence. For sense, yeah, prudence, yeah, as to what's what, you know, but, you know, when people are entering into the dark night of the soul, see, any attraction to material things there prevents the soul from turning maybe completely towards God, right? Uh-huh. And, you know, the famous example there is, you know, when St. Paul was carried up to the third heaven, he talks about it a little bit there, and it came around about away there, in one of the epistles, and he says, within the body or not, I know not, right? When his soul was drawn out of his body, right? But, you know, when his soul was any more in his body, right? He was that, you know, drawn up to a direct knowledge of God, huh? Well, that was worth, right? You know, a kind of complete ignoring of the body, right? Mm-hmm. You know? So, you know, what's a mean, huh, with respect to one end is not with respect to another end, huh? Mm-hmm. See? Because the end is always what measures what is for the sake of the end, huh? Right. One shot. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. God, our enlightenment, guardian angels, through the lights of our minds, order them our images, and rouse us to consider it more correctly. St. Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor. Amen. Help us to understand how it's written. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. We're on page 8 now of the fragments. And we're going to start the book here on the mind. The Great Fragment on the Mind. And he's going to exclude the greater mind from this mixture of all things and all things. So he says, other things have a part of everything, but mind is unlimited. Let's stop there. We saw that anticipated by Heraclitus. Now when you say the mind is unlimited, do you mean in a quantitative sense, or in some other sense? Yeah, yeah. It doesn't mean it's an infinite multitude, obviously. But he doesn't mean it's unlimited in the way that a body would be unlimited if it went on forever, and lengthened with the depth. In fact, he's going to say later on that the mind is the thinnest of all things, so it's not infinite in that sense. So in what sense is the mind unlimited? Yeah. In its ability to know. Now how do we know that the mind is unlimited in its ability to know? That the things to be known are unlimited, not the mind? That wouldn't show that our mind is unlimited, though, unless you've stated it, it's able to know all things. Yeah. Go back to large discourse. Remember the first explanation of large that, because our reason is able to know the universal? Yeah. The universal covers many things? And so the universal, like, odd number, covers how many things? Yeah. Yeah. And you know, we can go from the general to the particular. So, in the object of our mind, our reason, the universal, you can see that the mind is, in fact, what? Unlimited. Now, there are outward signs of this, too, the fact that man is always inventing something new and different. Or else he's, what, taking an old thing and doing it in a new way. And human beings seem to be always able to learn something more, right? And the fact that we use language and not just these, what, natural sounds like screams and groans and grunts and so on, is a sign that we have an infinity of things that we are open to expressing. But the basic reason is to see that the mind knows the, what, universal. In fact, we even understand the statement, you can't get something from nothing, and something is completely universal. It covers everything, right? So our mind is open to everything. So that's the first thing that he says, the mind is unlimited. So sometimes I put in a little plug for liberal education there, as opposed to a highly specialized education. Because, in a way, a highly specialized education doesn't respect the unlimited character of the mind. Now, what's the second thing he says about the mind? It's what? Self-ruling. Now, what part of philosophy is a sign of the truth of that second statement? Yeah, yeah. Logic is the art by which reason directs itself. So the existence of logic is a sign of the truth of the statement. But the truth of the statement is the reason why logic is possible. Now, let's think using Shakespeare's definition of reason, right? Let's look before and after the statement, self-ruling. Okay? Get a little space here. Let me say, mind is self-ruling. Could the mind rule itself if it didn't know itself? So, before mind is self-ruling, is mind is what? Self-knowing. Okay? I'll put it in brackets because it doesn't say it explicitly. Now, do you see a connection between saying the mind is self-knowing and the mind is unlimited? If it weren't self-knowing, it would be limited. Yeah. But vice versa, if the mind is unlimited, it can know, it's ability to know, it can know only other things, but also know what? Know. Itself. Right. Well, the eye, which knows color, doesn't know all things, just color, and since the eye itself is not a color, the eye doesn't really know what the eye is. But the mind, you know, universal, is completely, what? Unlimited, huh? In fact, if you know things more universal than odd and even number, to know being and unbeing and something and nothing and so on, so that it's able to know not only other things, but itself. He doesn't say that, but he can say that in a way it follows from being unlimited, but you can also see that it comes before the mind being, what? Self-ruled. Now, as you mentioned here already, logic, that part of philosophy, is a sign of the truth of the statement, mind is self-ruled. But what part of philosophy corresponds to the statement, mind is self-knowing? And what part of philosophy does mind know itself? Well, sometimes I say to the students, what are we doing right now? What's taking place now as you read this fragment? Yeah, the mind is knowing itself, right? Okay? So the philosophy of the soul, of course, is part of philosophy of nature. So you can say the philosophy of nature and the soul, huh? How are we going to get the third part of philosophy in there? Well, you look after it now, right? We looked before, we looked at the statement self and we saw logic, right? We looked before and we saw philosophy of nature and the soul. So, well, now you look after this, huh? Okay? Now, are you fit to rule others if you can't rule yourself? If I'm your commanding officer, and I'm going to lead you into battle, well, I can't control my own fear, well, then I'm not fit to, what, command you people, am I? Now, if the father, say, can't, what, control his own anger, he's not really fit to rule the children, that he might whack them and harm them. You see that? Okay? A friend of mine used to work in the state legislature, and he's a page boy in high school, kind of interesting job, and he said the guys would come into the, what, sessions drunk some of the legislators, some of the evenings. So here's a guy who's been drinking, right? Got to vote on the laws whereby you live. So, he's not really fit to rule on this, huh? He can't rule himself. Now, you could, you know, make a little more precise statement. Not only is mind self-knowing, but the mind alone is self-knowing. Does any other part of man know itself? No. You could add, mind alone is self-knowing. So the hand doesn't know what a hand is. The hand doesn't ask what a hand is. And even the eye doesn't ask what an eye is, does it?