Wisdom (Metaphysics 2016)
Lecture 7: Wisdom, Art, and the Knowledge of First Causes

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They're my son, Paul, there, you know, making the popcorn, right? You know, you get little grains at the bottom of the thing. I chew them at the bottom of the thing that went out. And then, you know, I put the lid on, and eventually the lid is coming off, and I was like, you know, I mean, he admired, you know, what I could do, right? Yeah, because they're little tiny things, and then you see the lid being raised by daddy can do, you know. That's something practical, making popcorn, right? And I was at a time colonel there in Baghdad. So it's probable that the first one finding any art beyond the senses common to all was admired by men. Not only because some of the things found were useful, like popcorn, but also as wise and distinguished from others, right? Now, many arts having been found, some being for necessities, right? Like the art of cooking and the medical art and so on. And some for passing the time pleasantly, right? Like the, what, musician, right? And the, what, dramatist, right? Always the findings of the letter were considered wiser because their sciences were not for practical use. Now, let's stop from one here, huh? What does the word poet mean in Greek? Hmm? Maker, yeah. So, why are the poets called poets? Yeah. Carpenter. What is this? A, yeah, what figure of speech is it? Yeah. Antonia Messia, yeah. Yeah. In other words, in Aristotle calling Homer the poet, right? There's a double, what? Yeah. Among all makers, right, the dramatist or the tragedian or the epic, you know, he is the maker, right? Now you've got the maker for the poets, right, as you call them. You'll realize that it wasn't meant in Greek. And then among them, he is the, the maker, you know, okay? So, they're admired more in some ways, right? And everybody thinks that, what, Shakespeare is, what, wise, huh? You know, more than the carpenter or the cook, right? You might enjoy what the cook makes or something, you know? But do we think of him as wise as Shakespeare? No. We'll strive to please you every day, Shakespeare says. At the end of the epilogue of the plays, right, huh? We'll strive to please you every day. Well, the arts for pleasure like that, right? We're glad it's wiser, right, huh? Once all these sciences haven't been built up, those sciences were found that are neither for pleasure nor for necessities, right? So, necessities would be like the art of cooking, the art of, what, making clothes, right? Art of the tailor, whatever it is. The art of the medical art, huh? The art of making wagons and so on, right? Making house builder art. And they had ones for pleasure, like, say, the poetic arts and the musical arts, right, huh? But even painting and so on, huh? Then they're found first in those places where men had leisure. But that's, again, a sign that it's not for, what, practical things, right, huh? Hence the mathematical sciences first began around Egypt, right? For there the priestly class was allowed leisure, right? I mentioned my, my, my, probably my three greatest teachers up there at Levolve were Charles de Connick and Monsignor Dion and Father Boulet, right, huh? But Monsignor Dion and Father Boulet were, what, priests, right, huh? And there was, at that time, before Quebec fell apart, there was a, a, a, a, a, what, surplus, you might say, of priests, like, nowadays. And, uh, so some priests who, who were, you know, in the educational thing, right, would have more, what, leisure, you might say, right, huh? And, uh, pursue the algae and so on at a much deeper level than most men could. It's kind of nice, huh? Yeah? I remember in the parish, Raymond Shrewsbury there, years ago, I was involved in the, in the, uh, CCD and so on, you know, and I remember when I talked to one of the priests in the parish house there, you know, up in his room there, about doing the CCD there, and his phone was ringing the whole time I was there, he was ringing all the time, and I said, I said, I realized, you know, how busy these guys are, you know, and how can you do, you know, just, uh, how can you do theology? The phone would be every five minutes, you know, just, you'll think, some people think they sit at Mass and they, you know, go and loaf the rest of the day, but they don't, they don't. For there the priests of classes allowed leisure, right? That's, well, geometry, that's right. Ernst has a little footnote here, you might say. He's not talking here precisely about the differences between art and science, right, huh? Uh, for art is, what, right reason about making, right, and science is about knowing more, you know, and so on. But these are talked about in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, right? The virtues of reason, prudence, and art, and, what, science, and these are all distinguished there, right, huh? What the difference is between art and science and other things of the same kind, like prudence and so on, has been said in the Ethics, right? In the Nicomachean Ethics, in the sixth book, right, huh? Now, one thing there, in the sixth book, he distinguishes between episteme, which they translate scientia, right, and, uh, sophia, which we translate as sapientia, or wisdom in English, right, huh? Different virtues, right? But in the, the, uh, 14 books of wisdom, right, Aristotle calls wisdom an episteme. Now, is he mixed up, or is the word, uh, episteme equivocal here by reason? Let's say Thomas would stand, because Aristotle was such a great philosopher. Yeah, yeah. Now, um, review a little bit here, I don't know if I've explained this before, but, um, Aristotle, you know, in the book called The Politics, and, he says, the man who considers something from its origin will get the best understanding of it, right? So, when you ask, how does a word become equivocal, not by chance now, which happens many times, but how does a word become equivocal by reason, right? Well, I would distinguish two ways to begin with, right? I guess, do about two or three, you know. Every day I was thinking about it again, and you could say three ways, but I noticed I went, looking back at my old text there in the computer there, that I had the second and third one put together under, second one, right, but they're distinct, right? So, there's two or three ways, right, that a word can become equivocal by reason as opposed to what? By chance, right? The gentleman who comes to my house on Tuesday night for philosophy, his name is Richard, right? And I remarked that my oldest brother was named Richard. Now, why you two guys should be both called Richard, is there a reason for that? I didn't ask him how he got the name Richard, but I think my brother Richard got the name Richard, because my mother's father was named Richard. He was the firstborn. Yeah, yeah, so, she must have persuaded my father to give him the name of her father, which was Richard, right, huh? So, his name is Richard Harlow-Brickquist. Harlow was one of my father's brothers. So, I don't know if this guy Richard's name, but, you know, it's by chance that they both had the name Richard, right? Apparently, there's two Winston Churchill's in print, right? One is my hero there, and the other guy is something that's quite different, but a novelist, and so on, right? There's a funny letter from Churchill to Emmy about how they should distinguish themselves. It's by chance, right, huh? And I remember myself, and I read, you know, Churchill did write a novel, right? I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know, I read, you know And this guy's a novelist, right? So I mean, it's confusing, you know. I mean, I'll confuse the two, you know. So one way that a name becomes equivocal by reason, and it's closest to inevitable, this one, is that when a name is said of, say, two things for more or less the same reason, right, it's sometimes kept by one of the two as its own name, the own private name, right? And the other one is given, what, a new name, right? Now, there are two ways this takes place, right? Sometimes it's because one of the two has nothing noteworthy in addition to what it's commented to. So it keeps the common name. And the other one has something noteworthy, right, that's added to what they have in common, so it gets a new name. Going back to my mother there, right, huh? Sometimes we distinguish man from the animals. And sometimes, without insulting man, we say he's an animal. So animal can be said of the beast and of man with more or less the same reason. And then animal means what? A living body that has senses. Well, you're a living body. You're alive. They have senses, right? And what's his name here? What's his name? Bibi. Huh? Habibi. Habibi? You've got to get a foreign name. You guys. You Maronites. Hey, that's five dollars. Yeah. Argos. He's a living body. He's alive, I can tell. And he has senses, right? So animals said of you and Habibi, whatever his name is, with the same meaning in mind, right? Okay. So it's not equivocal, right? But sometimes we keep the name animal for the beast, right? And we give a new name to man because there's something noteworthy, namely reason, beyond what the other animals have. So now, in one sense, man is an animal, and in another sense, he's not, right? So I used to say to my students, if the biologist says that man is an animal, he's not insulting you, you know? But if your girlfriend says you're an animal, she's insulting you, right? And so my mother, you know, you may call man an animal, right? So sometimes we divide man against animals. Now, sometimes it's the, what, reverse, right? So sometimes, I take the word, say, understanding, right? Understanding can name the act of the mind, but sometimes the mind itself is called the understanding, or the intellect in Latin, right? And so, man has an understanding, and the angel has an understanding, right? But the angel understands all kinds of things right away. So man has to go through a discourse, has to run hither thither, many times, until he begins to understand things, right? It's hard to understand them. So, the angel has understanding in a full way, right? So sometimes he keeps the name understanding for his own, and man is given a new name, reason. And reason is divided now against what? Understanding, right? So in one sense, understanding is divided against reason. In other sense, you see reason is one kind of understanding, right? So, this is what you could say about episteme and Sophia, right? Or if you said in English, knowledge and wisdom, right? Sometimes we divide wisdom against knowledge, right? Although, in the broad sense of knowledge, wisdom is knowledge too, right? It's the highest knowledge, right? Because there's a great excellence in knowledge, right? It gets its own name, wisdom, right? And knowledge is kept for the geometry and natural philosophy in the lesser ones, right? So, two ways that, now, there's another way wisdom, words become equivocal by reason, huh? And that is, by, what? Being carried over, right? Okay? After carried over, there's two ways they're carried over. Sometimes they're carried over by dropping part of their meaning or being generalized, you might say, right? Other times they're carried over by, what? Heratio or ratios, huh? So, when you have the word before there, right, huh? The word before first means, what? In time, right? And that was carried over to before in being and then to before in knowledge and then before in goodness, right? But it's carried over by a likeness of what? Ratio is there, right, huh? Sometimes they say philosophy is carried over to logic. logic is not philosophy. That's just the tool philosophy. Okay? The tool philosophy can be called philosophy in some sense, right? So that's by ratio, right, huh? Okay? Or being is carried over, what Thomas says, from substance to what? Quantity and to quality and to quality by the ratio of quantity to substance. It's the size of a substance, right? Quality is the, what? Disposition of a substance, huh? So, those are different ways, right? But when you carry, say, before in the sense of being, right, or to before in knowing, well, if this can be without that but not that without this, then you say, if this can be known without that but that without this, you can never know without this. Like there's a ratio there, right? Like four is to six plus two is to three, right? So there are different ways the names are carried over, right? Okay? So in the ethics, he distinguishes epistame and Sophia, but he'll call Sophia sometimes an epistame, right? A contradiction, right? See, we sometimes distinguish between reason and understanding, right? And then other times we say that reason is a form of understanding, right? Okay? He's giving that second definition of reason, right? The ability to understand reason, direct yourself and others. And what's all this discourse for, right? There's what I'll say, I don't. I know it's been going from what? One thing to another, right? I've been running from sensing to memory to experience to analogy to the universal, right? And then from the, what, practical arts to the, what, more speculative arts, right? The arts for pleasure and so on. And we say that the man of art is wiser than the man of experience because he knows the cause, right? Wisdom is going to be knowing what? The farthest in knowing the cause because sometimes a cause, what, has a cause, right? So the man who knows the cause of the cause is wiser than the man when he knows the cause, right? Because he's getting up to the idea that wisdom is going to be a knowledge of causes, but ultimately about the very first causes. Or first causes is just one, right? But that for the sake of which we have now made a discourse is this, that all, whole, meaning all the philosophers, what is called wisdom to be about the first causes and beginnings, huh? I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. So as has been said before, the experienced man seems to be wiser than any of those having, right, sensation. The man of art than the man of experience because he knows why, right? The chief artist than the, what, handicrafts men, right? The looking sciences more than the, what, making, huh? Thus it is clear, now he backtracks, you know, I've gone too fast, you guys, I know. Thus it is clear that wisdom is about beginnings and causes, right? Right? Right? You can kind of anticipate it's going to be not just about any beginnings and causes, but about the very what? First ones, right? Let's let you guys digest this a little bit more, right? Let's slow down a little bit, wisely and slow, they stumble and run fast, right? Let's say the wisdom is about beginnings and causes, right? That's just enough for today, right? Now, get some more time now, right? Okay, now let's ask more formally the question about beginnings or causes, is it right? Since we seek such knowledge, and this is the premium to the 14 books of wisdom. Since we seek such knowledge is thought to be considered about what sort of causes, right? And about what sort of beginnings is wisdom the knowledge. He's using cause and beginning is kind of what? The synonyms here, right? But in the fifth book of wisdom, he's going to show that beginning is more generally, right? The cause, right? We tend to use beginnings, you know, a lot for matter and for the maker, right? But there are other kinds of causes besides that. And then there are beginnings that are not really causes, right? You know, when Thomas talks about the father, God the father, he says he's the beginning, right? Because the son proceeds from him, right? But he's not really the cause of him, right? So, about what sort of causes or beginnings is wisdom the knowledge? Perhaps, he says, huh? See, that's one of his philosophical modesty, Thomas says. Perhaps it would become clearer if one took the thoughts we have about the wise man, right? He's going to work out here. He's going to think out. A six-part description of the wise man, right? And there's an order in which he thinks them out. We think first, he says. It's order, right? That the wise man knows all things so far as possible. Not having a knowledge of these in particular. Now, notice that going back to the definition of reason, right? In Shakespeare. Reason is the ability for a larger discourse, right? To be able to make a discourse about what? Universal, right? And you might suspect then that the wise man can make a discourse about the most universal things, right? He sees everything in some way, right? Not in particular, but in general, right? That the discourse of the wise man is the largest of all, right? Other senses too, but in this sense, huh? Now, this seems to be kind of most known, right? And, you know, when my friend here, Boswell, thinks that he really admires Johnson, he seems to know everything, right? Yeah, so you can say about everything, right? But I used to say in class too, even the pejorative sense, huh? Of the wise guy, huh? Wise man. What are you? Wise guy, know it all? Right? You know? He's thinking some way that the wise man knows everything, right? But not in this pejorative sense, right? You know? Even that's a witness or a sign, you know, that this is kind of most known about the wise man. Okay? Wise guy. That's a know-it-all. Then we think wise, the one who is able to know things difficult and not easy for a man to know. But don't we admire the wise man, right? We admire Einstein as being wise, right? Well, the general theory of relativity, right? That took kind of an explosion of that part of physical science called what? Cosmology, right? The cosmos in Greek is named from the word cosmos, right? Which means order, right? But Einstein seems to understand the whole universe. He understands everything, right? He seems to be wise, right? Kind of hard to understand the universe as a whole, isn't it? Yeah. But we admire the wise man because he knows things that are easy to know that everybody knows. Two plus two is four. Then we think wise, the one who is able to know things difficult and not easy for a man to know. That's kind of common opinion, right? We call somebody wise because he knows things that everybody knows, right? Two senses common to all, right? Hence it is easy and nothing wise, huh? I like the taste of candy, huh? Especially when I was a little boy. Further we think wiser in every science, right? The man, what? More certain, huh? This is the third thing, huh? Now, is that a common opinion about the wise man that he's more sure of what he's saying? If you're not too sure about something, don't you go to somebody you think is wiser in this matter than you are, right? Because you're not so sure, right? Even a medical doctor, right, might go to a specialist, right? If he thinks, you know? It's kind of funny. The way up here I was listening to Rush Limbaugh, right? They're always talking about Hillary's health now, you've heard that, you know? And apparently, you know, the doctor said she had bacterial pneumonia. But apparently in the big book that they use, you know, in Obama's medical plan, right? It's such a thing. Help, help, help, help, help, help, help, help, help, help, help. So how do you recommend treatment for something that has no name? It's funny. It's funny. Yeah, it's funny. So the third thing is that he's more certain, right? More sure, huh? I know it's a little paradox there, right? That he, what? He knows things difficult and not easier a man to know. And yet he's more, what? He's the wise man knowing the same thing when he knows what is most certain. And when he knows something that is most difficult to know. There's a kind of paradox there in what he's saying here. It reminds me of the paradox in the premium to the three books on the soul, right? Herstal begins at premium to the three books to the soul by saying, you know, that we say that all knowledge and such is good, right? I used to go talk about that to students sometimes and I compare knowledge and love, right? I'd say, he's saying that all knowledge is good, right? Well, if I'm a terrorist, is it good that I know how to make a bomb? The knowledge as such is not bad, right? I might misuse my knowledge, right? It's like saying, you know, is it good to have a body that is strong? No, no. No. No. No. No. No. No. A man might abuse his, what, strength, he might beat people up, you know, for no good reason, right? Is it good to be beautiful? A woman might, you know, misuse her beauty, right? Lead people astray and so on. Why, it should be beautiful. It's good to know better. So, but not all love is good, huh? If I love to torture people, good, right? If I love to steal, if I like to seduce other men's wives, it's a challenge, you know? So, if you love something good, that's good, right? Your love. If you love something bad, that's bad, right? But if I know something bad, is that bad? In fact, you know, there's the same knowledge of opposites, right? So, ethics is a knowledge both of virtue and of vice, right? And so, if it was bad to know the bad, then all knowledge would be bad. But in fact, all knowledge is good, right? But by accident, right? It can be bad for someone, right? To know something, right? It's good to know how to open a safe. It's good to know how to shoot a gun. Secretary, when the secretary down in my father's office would show me how to open the safe, you know, in the office there. Nearest Donald says, after saying that all knowledge is good, he says, but some knowledge is better than others, right? And he gives two reasons for saying that this knowledge is better than that knowledge. One is that you know a, what, better thing. And the other is that you know better what you know. You know more with certitude, right? And now he says, this is the prement of the three books on the soul. In both of these ways, the knowledge of the soul would seem to be better than most other knowledge. It's better than most other knowledge because the soul is the best thing in this whole material world. Living things are better than non-living things, and that's because they have a soul, right? So you know the best thing you can know in this material world, right? The next thing is better than my friend here is saying. The effort is very good, right? But the soul is certainly a very great thing. And it's also, in one sense analogy, the soul is very certain because we have, what, great certitude that we're alive. I'm sure I'm alive. But Aristotle says, you know, in the three books on the soul, that to know what the soul is is one of the most difficult things in the world. So is he most certain in his knowledge of the soul as regards knowing what it is? He's most certain that he does have a soul because he's most certain that he's alive, right? He has his internal knowledge, right? Even those crazy modern philosophers, you know, who deny, you know, the relative matter sometimes. Like Barclay, you know. You know, the famous thing, you know, Johnson kicked a stone and said, I refute him thus. Common sense, isn't it? My experience. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even everyone, but, you know, that they're alive, right? I think they're far young and so on. But maybe it's not exactly in the same way that the knowledge of the soul is the knowledge of the best thing. And the knowledge that is, what, very certain, right? But you can hardly deny your inward experience of life, huh? So it may be that there's some answer to why Aristotle can say that the wise man is both, what, knowing things difficult for us to know. And he's most certain, right? There's something in our common experience about that, right? We go to the wise man because we think he's more sure of what he's saying than other men, right? And we admire him because we think he knows things that are really difficult to know. But we don't maybe stop and think there's a little paradox there, right? But in the, you know, 12th book of Wisdom, Aristotle, knowing the first cause is very difficult to know. Well, in the fourth book, he's knowing, among other things, that something can't both be and not be. To be or not to be, that is the question. You can't both be and not be, right? That's going to be very certain, right? The axioms, right? The wise man knows the axioms better than anybody else. And one reason is because the axioms are all stated by words, what, equivocal by reason. The wise man knows these, right? The whole fifth book is about that, right? I told you an example I used to use in class, right? To show the importance of knowing this, huh? I'd quote my mother again. I'd say, my mother didn't like it when I said that man is an animal. And I said, well, mother, he's not just an animal. He's an animal that has reason. That's better, Dwayne. And I said, so an animal is only part of what a man is, right? But animal includes besides man, dog, cat, horse, and elephant. So sometimes what is only a part contains more than the whole. Hey, I said something. So a whole is not always more than a part. See? You just untied the knob of the universe right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is the most common type of mistake. You know, I used to pretend you're there talking up to the floor, right? You know, you sophist. Deceiving these poor students, you know. But the most common fallacy, which I said was the most common fallacy, right? The fallacy of equivocation, right? The fallacy of equivocation is maybe even more apt to be done with words equivocal by reason than by chance, because there you can see more of the meaning, right? Well, you're confusing the two main senses of whole, right? The composed whole is put together from its parts, right? And universal whole, which is set of its parts, right? Now, the whole that is put together from parts is always more than one of those parts. And universal whole, which is set of many particular kinds of things, right? Like many particular animals, is always set of more than any one of those particulars is set of, right? So when you say that animal is a part of man, you mean a part of the definition of man. And the definition of man is, my mother was happy to find out, is more than animal. It's an animal that has reason, right? So animal is only a part of the definition of man, and the definition of man is a composed whole, and it's put together from more than just animal, from reason as well, as I formed my mother. I'm just happy to know. But when I say that, what, animal includes more than man, I'm talking about animal as a universal whole, instead of man and any other thing besides man, right? So you're mixing up the two different, what, holes, right, no? Animal as a universal whole, and animal as a composing part of the definition of man. So you can't distinguish those senses, right? And so they're caught by the sophist, Perquist, and tourist all comes up to the floor, right? It's a shame when you're misusing logic, right, huh? Logic is good, but you are misusing it to deceive your students, right? I usually have to show them the need, you know, for the fifth book, among other things, right, huh? And how the wise man knows the actions in a way that nobody else does, and he can defend them, right? But the actions are what are most, what? Certain. But it's the first cause, that's the most difficult to know, right, huh? You know? It's hard to be certain about that. And they're more able to teach the causes. Okay, that's kind of clear from what went before, right? I can explain why, right? You know, theology is wisdom, as Thomas explains in the first question of the Summa. But, you know, we as Christians believe that God became man, right? Well, then our friend was Anselm, cura deus homo, right? Why did God become a man, right? And Thomas talks about that. Why did God become a man, right? And that's what, to manically explain that, it seems to be wiser about these things, huh? Or Thomas will ask, you know, why did the second person of the Blessed Trinity become man, rather? You know? He goes back to the fact, you know, that the second person is also called the, what, Logos, right? And points to the fact that Logos in Greek can also mean reason, right? Well, Therestalus says in the 10th book of the Nicomache Ethics, reason more than anything else is man, right? There's an appropriateness in the Word of God becoming man, right? Also in the Son of God becoming man, because we're sons by partaking, you know, the Sonship of Christ, right? So he seems to be wiser to explain why God became a man, or why the second person in particular became a man, and so on. You know, these two great minds here, St. Augustine and St. Thomas, they say that this is not the only way God could have saved us by becoming man, but it's the best way he could, right? And you say, ah, yes, this is something, right? And then he's actually explaining why this is the best way, right? And how you keep on discovering other reasons why it's good that he saved us in this way. And, of course, there's a connection between being certain and knowing the causes, because, you know, if you know the definition of demonstration, Silogism makes us know the cause, and that of which it is the cause, and cannot be otherwise. So when you know the cause, you kind of know why it must be so, right? It's like geometry you can see. Now the fifth thing about the, am I running over time here? I better let you go. Yeah, we'll start the second reading from the beginning, but he's working out a six-part thing. He's got a couple more to give here, right? And he's going to, you know, many things you learn from that, but he's particularly interested in seeing that, therefore, it must be about the first causes, right? Very thorough guy, St. Augustine, you know? Easy guy.