Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 4: Equivocation, General/Particular Distinction, and Theological Knowledge

Transcript
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But then they end up by saying the mathematics is wiser than we are. That's what Heisenberg says, and Max Bohr, and other people. We didn't know what it meant. Okay. But you notice that all the way through the modern mind that, you know, people talk about, you know, metaphor and figures of speech. What is a figure of speech in general? What does it mean to speak figuratively in general? They can't tell you. See? I asked my colleague, you know, what is reasoning? They can't tell me. You can't really define it, right? You don't have a distinct knowledge of what is general to what they're talking about in particular. Now, sometimes I hear them say, you know, well, if we stop to get a distinct knowledge of the general, we'll never get to particular. Maybe some truth to that, right? It takes a long time for the mind. But Christoph did descend to particular after he got through getting a distinct knowledge of general. People say it's fiddling while Roman burns, and he says, well, if somebody wasn't fiddling while Roman burns, we would have never had the theory of hydraulics, and there really wouldn't be a fire truck around. So, with this, you know, I call these kind of secondary readings, you know, I would, you don't want to examine the students on them, you know, but you don't stop and realize, right, huh? You know, the importance of what Aristotle is seeing here, right? And then you see that Descartes is denying that, right? You realize what a basic mistake that is. It's a grand mistake, a great mistake, right? You know? But, you know, a mistake about something that's the beginning, as fundamental as this, right, is going to, what, further you go, the more you'll be off, huh? So they say it's two kinds of mistakes, and one basic mistake, huh? You read Descartes, and you say, I think, therefore I am. I'm sure I'm thinking, therefore I know exactly what thought is. It doesn't follow at all, you see? And he's sure there's a God, so he has a clear and distinct idea of God, right? You know? And Thomas is famous for being in class, you know, always saying, what is God? He was sure there was a God, but he wanted to know more distinctly, so we're as far as we can, what is God, right? You know? What is the Incarnation, right? You know, Professor Syracistics remarked about the way phroangelical, you know, it was a fraternization, I guess, huh? But he represents the very saints there, you know, and facing the cross, right? And most of them, you know, various devotion and sorrow and everything, you know, comes there trying to figure out, what does this mean, you know? Why is God dying for us, and so on, you know? And some do, right? Why is God a man, right? Why did God become a man, right? Trying to understand these things, right? So he can be very sure about something without, what? Knowing exactly what it is, right? But vice versa, then when something is clear and distinct, you've got pictures, you can see everything nice and clear and fits together, then you think it must be, what? It must be true, right? But you find this in the moderns sometimes, huh? Like Descartes and others, huh? That they'll have something very clear, and then they'll say, well, it must be true, right? You know, sometimes I've explained a little bit what this idealization means. I use a little analogy, huh? Suppose you go down to the theater this Friday, and King Lear is playing by Shakespeare, right? And you come home, and someone says, now, what is Shakespeare talking about life? Well, life is tragic. That's what you learn. Next Friday, you go down to the theater, and the Merry Wives of the Week. The Comedy of Errors is played by Shakespeare, right? And what does Shakespeare tell us about life? It's a comedy, right? Was life a tragedy or is it a comedy? Yeah, in other words, tragedy is more precise than life really is. And comedy is more precise than life really is. It's something a little more indeterminate, right? So in a way, tragedy is in a way an idealization of one aspect of life, right? Bringing that aspect of life into such sharp focus, right? Like comedy is an idealization of life, but bringing into focus another aspect of life. But the more you try to say life is, that's exactly what life is, a tragedy. Or that's exactly what life is, a comedy, the more you seem to be departing from the reality, right? And you have some limitation in saying this, right? But if you say it's both a tragedy and a comedy, it seems to be like a contradiction, right? But notice there's a precision there in tragedy and comedy that there isn't in these other kinds of fiction, right? Where life is a little more ambiguous, huh? It's not so clear what life is. But it's probably something of both, right? Those are people who've been in the Army or the Navy or something, they can tell you horrible stories, but they can tell you some very, very funny ones, right? My cousin was in the Navy, you know, and this one guy, he wasn't getting good reception on his radio. So he went out and he breaks into where the ship line was, and then he drilled a hole inside the ship, so he could stick his thing out. Well, the ship had not been loaded fully yet, so he went down where he thought it was above the water level was actually up to imagine. I mean, they're not going to do funny things happen like this, see, you know? And he came back, you know, because he may have been in the Navy too, and see, every time I told him all these funny stories, because he could tap with another story. It's even funnier, you know, about what happened to him in the Navy, see? So, I mean, that's what war is, you know? It's kind of a, you know, comedy, right? There's something, you know, comical about it, right? But, I mean, there's obviously another aspect, you know? And you can, you know, emphasize one rather than the other, but you're not, you seem to be kind of, what, departing a bit from reality when you make it just a tragedy or just a comedy, huh? It's both, huh? And, you know, sometimes, you know, in the midst of something that bothers us, we see the funny side of them, we start laughing, you know? Which is it, you know? It's not exactly one or the other, right? It's like, you know, our friends trouble suddenly strike us as funny sometimes. You know, it's kind of, you know, you don't have to be serious about what's happened to them, you know? But, uh, but it gives you no idea what you mean by idealization there, right? We see the laws of boil fit the idealized gas right now, the real gas. But idealization is necessary for the precision. That's kind of a special reason to what you're doing in science, right? Why the precision doesn't have, what? Certitude, right? Because the precision is by an idealization, and that's something in the imagination. You smooth things out more than they really are. Something with that, behind, at least, another theory, that that fellow, I forget his name, that was the talk on Darwin's Black Box. Michael B, yeah. Then he said that's what, so many of the biologists just have an imaginary, they can picture how easy these changes are from one species to another, because there's only a few little changes, they can picture how easy, but they don't understand the complicated mechanics of the biochemistry, because it's immense complexity. Heisenberg, you know, we'll come back to it when we look at the second page here, but Heisenberg was talking about, it's very interesting, I think, and it's kind of a sign at the bottom of page four again. Keeping in mind the intrinsic stability of the concepts of natural language in the process of scientific development, one sees that athletes... It's about in physics, right, towards concepts like mind or human soul or life or God would be different, right? From that of the 9th century, huh? But, you know, part of this is, now, when you study God, and we'll come back to this next time, but when you study God, you often know Him by the via negativa, right? By way of negation, God is the unmoved mover, right? God is simple, that is not composed, right? He's unchanging, huh? Now, when you know something negatively, is it better if you can negate the general or the particular? Let's take a simple example, right? If I'm knowing the number 7, let's say, I know the number 7 affirmatively. When I say it's a number, am I as close to 7 as when I say it's an odd number? Or if I say it's a prime, odd number? The more particular I get, the closer I get to 7, right? Number separates 7 from everything that is not a number, right? But it could be an even number for all we know, right? Odd number starts narrowing down, right? Prime odd number, even more so, right? But suppose I was knowing 7 negatively, right? It's not 4, it's not even. Which is closer to 7? Not 4 or not even? Yeah. Not 4 separates 7 from 4, but not from anything else, right? Not even separates 7 from 2, 4, 6, 8, and all that even numbers, right? So notice the difference here, right? I'm getting closer to 7 when I negate the general. I'm getting closer to 7 when I can affirm the particular. Okay? So we're closer to God, for example, when we say that God does not walk. God does not grow. When we say God is unchanging, which is closer to God. Unchanging, yeah. Which is closer to God, to say God is, doesn't have two atoms of hydrogen, one of oxygen, or God has no parts. No. Yeah. So we can negate the general, we're closer to God, if we're knowing him by way of negation. That's the way we know him in theology. It's in the big division that we know him as he is, huh? Now, you can't understand negation if you don't know what you're negating. So which is more useful in theology, to know what a whole and parts are, or to know that an atom, a molecule of water, is H2O? It's more important. Yeah. Because you're not going to bother to say that God doesn't have two atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, right? Or C6H2O6, or whatever it is. He doesn't have six of these and 12 of those and six of those, right? No, we're going to say he has no parts. I'm going to hear a reason why he has no parts, right? So, a knowledge of the general is more useful in theology, for the most part, than a knowledge of the particular, see? It's useless in theology, really, to know that why there's H2O. But it's very useful in theology to know what a whole and parts are. It's more useful in theology to know what change is than to know what chemical change is of some particular kind, right? Because you're going to be negating change in general of God, right? But if those general things were replaced by the particular, then you'd have no way of knowing God in theology. But if the general is more certain, more sure, then you have, what, things you can use in knowing God. And why do the moderns jump into particulars so soon? Well, part of this is for practical reasons, right? We saw back in Aristotle's Premium to Wisdom that knowledge of the particular is closer to action, right? Than knowledge of the general. But theology is not primarily possible. All right. Theology is primarily about God, and He's unchanging. You can't make anything of God. You can't do anything to God. You don't want. But you can't understand some things about God, right? But in this life, we have to understand the creatures, and therefore it always involves some kind of negation, right? But we know better we can negate the general than the particular. But we can't really negate the general without understanding it distinctly. And the modernists, you know, as I say, they jump from the general right down to the particular. So they never know the general distinctly, and therefore they can't understand distinctly the negations we're making. And why are we making these negations? So there are consequences for theology. We're not knowing these things, right? But even you'll find the great physicists, you know, they want to go back to the Greeks, and this is in Heisenberg especially, because they want to see in some perspective, right, the particular thing that they did, right? As a younger man. And so in some sense, if you read, you know, I have a whole bunch of, you know, Heisenberg books in my office, but as you go and read them from the earliest things to the later ones, right, he sees more and more clearly what he accomplishes as a young man, the older he gets, right? Because he sees it more in this, in terms of things more general, right? So, I've got to do one page. That's pretty good, huh? Okay. Now, when you study this next page in common and private experience, as I often tell the students when I teach this, we're taking up these things, you know, primarily for natural philosophy, but you'll find these things extremely useful for understanding all kinds of other things. So, the distinction I make of the next page between common and private experience, it's very important to understand what we mean by the philosophy of nature, but it's very important for understanding experimental science. It's very important for theology. You see the passage there from Paul VI, huh? So, we'll stop today, huh, 10 minutes to 5, huh? Okay. Yeah. And we'll start with the second page. But now, what is the connection between the first page and the second page? Yeah. The knowledge is more known. Yeah. You might expect that a knowledge based on common experience is more general than a knowledge based on private experience, right? Okay. So, if the general, or a knowledge of general is before a knowledge of the particular, right? Then a knowledge based on common experience, or which common experience is efficient experience, right? It is before a knowledge based on, what, private experience, right? Okay. But the distinction between general and particular is more general. The distinction between knowledge based on common experience and private experience. I think that's like even an objection. I'll see if you can solve this, okay? Aristotle agrees, huh, that the basic road is from the senses into reason, right? Okay? So the basic road is from the senses into reason. Aristotle talking from the tenets. But the senses know what? Particulars, right? You don't see man in general. You see a particular man like this man or this man, right? Okay? And reason knows the general, right? So, if the senses come before reason, then the particular is before the general. So Aristotle contradicts himself, right? Right? Right? See? So I've now overthrown Aristotle, right? You see how great I am? See? That's what the sophist does, right? He tries to, you know, refute the greatest mind around he can find. And if he does so, he's above that mind, right? And therefore, he should be honored and admired for his apparent wisdom. Now, I give this to students in class, right, sometimes, huh? And, oh yeah, Aristotle's contradicted himself, yeah. There's a contradiction between his saying that the senses come before reason, right? And what he's saying in this chapter here. This is four. Four. No. They apparently contradicts where he says here, general before the particular, right? He says the particular before the general. Aristotle himself, you can find, you can find a text in Aristotle where he says the particular is before the general. It's going to be start with that census, right? So how can he say here, the general is before the particular? Okay, it's all mixed up, right? The particular generality and the general particular error is what it is. It's not easy if it's going to be deceived, huh? By the fallacy of equivocation, huh? I mean, everybody, I think it's because they all think he's coming to himself. Well, notice, huh? They can't distinguish the two senses are particular. Here, the word particular means what? It means a singular, an individual, nothing universal at all, okay? It means a singular or individual. And general here means what? Universal, universal. Common to many, right? But now, when you say, in the reading we just had, that the general is before the particular, particular means the less universal, okay? General means the what? More universal, okay? Now, notice, we do use that in both ways. We could say Socrates is a particular man, right? Meaning it is an individual man, right? We could also say that the dog is a particular kind of animal. But a dog is nevertheless not a singular. It's something universal instead of many, right? Okay? You see that? So, what we're saying is that singulars, right? Singulars come before any universals, just as the, what? Census come before reason, huh? But among universals, the more universal comes before the, what? Less universal, okay? Equivocation comes in because we call this particular, right? And we call this particular, right? Okay? And we call this general, and we call all this general, right? Okay? So, Aristotle says we go from the general to the particular, he means from the more universal to the less universal. But when he says we go from the particulars to the general, he means from singulars to universal. You see that? Okay? Now, the sophists, of course, he comes back with his second objection, all right? Okay? Okay, he got it that way, he says. But, which is closer to the singulars, the more universal or the less universal, which is closer? Yeah. So, if you start with the singular, wouldn't you come to the less universal next, not the more universal? But notice, he's forgetting the fact that we know things in a confused way before distinctly. So, when we begin to know the universal, right, we know it in a confused way first, and therefore in a more general way than particular. Now, I usually show that with two simple examples, huh? I say, suppose we're going to classify, you're going to classify the vegetation on campus, right? All the plant life, right? Not taking anybody's word for it. Well, all your knowledge would start with your senses, right? The individual trees and bushes and grass and so on that you saw, right? So, singulars would come before any universals, right? But now, among universals, would you first see the difference between two kinds of grass or two kinds of bushes or two kinds of trees or would you see the difference between grass and tree? Grass and tree. Yeah, see? You'd see the more universal before the what? Less universal, right? Okay. And another reason for that is that the difference between two kinds of grass is not as great as between the tree and the grass, right? So you're more apt to see the difference between the tree and the grass than between different kinds of grass, right? When I get a grass and they have the composition of different kinds of grass, I don't know what the hell he's talking about, right? But even with trees, right? When I was in college one time, we had gone and bought a class there and classified the trees, right? We got a little charter in there to identify the trees. Well, the broadleaf and the needle tree, you never confuse those two, but the Norway pine and the other kind of pines, I still don't know the difference between them. You see? But the broader differences I know, right? Another example was you're going to classify alcoholic beverages as a popular example, right? But take nobody's word for it, right? Well, all your knowledge would start with individual glasses of beer and wine and whiskey and so on, right? So singulars would come before any universals, right? But not on universals. Would you recognize the difference between, let's say, Budweiser and Miller beer first or between beer and wine? Yeah. Or beer and whiskey, right? You see? And then between scotch and rye whiskey and all the rest of them, right? You see? So, although singular glasses would come before any other ones, you'd first recognize the difference between beer and wine before carboné sauvignon and pinot noir. You see what I mean? That's because you know things that confuse way before distinctly. You see how easy it is to be deceived, don't you? So it's nice in the very first reading here to be able to give a statistical argument from mixing up two senses of the word particular and two senses of the word general, right? And teach everybody in class, right? You know? It's not a lot of fun, you know? You know? But you've got to solve it with how these other ways they all go away thinking Aristotle's been refuted, right? I remember one time I was teaching Hegel, you know, and I was funny about showing how Hegel's method is so much superior to Aristotle's syllogism, right? And I thought it was a big joke, you know? Went out of the class and this guy was coming along and said, Gee, that was some lecture today, he says, you know, finding someone that's improved in Aristotle. So I'm like, God, I'm going to go back in there and take these guys out. I think they're thinking it's seriously, you know? So they're about a mark, so you can go in there and tell them about anything, you know, and they believe me, you know? But, you know, they have a hard time. They can't separate those different meanings in particular, and that's not the most difficult example of a biblical word, right? The knowledge of reason is a knowledge of reason. What are the two senses of knowledge of reason in that statement? The knowledge of reason is a knowledge of reason. Two different meanings of knowledge of reason, to believe. The knowledge of reason is a knowledge of reason. About reason. What? The knowledge about reason. A knowledge that belongs to reason, right? But it's not the only knowledge of reason, right? The knowledge of reason is not the only knowledge of reason, right? It's not the only knowledge of reason. It's not the only knowledge of reason. It's not the only knowledge of reason. It's not the only knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason, right? It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason, right? It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. It's not the knowledge of reason. I've got to give a lecture on who's denying the existence of God because of evil, right? The Holocaust and so on, right? So, I said in the discussion for that, it seems to me that you're basing yourself upon this statement I said. If you don't see a reason why God would allow these evils, right, then there's no reason why God could have allowed these evils. We don't want to admit that thing. That's what everybody's basing itself off, right? I mean, you know, why did God allow the Holocaust, right? And he didn't see a reason why God would allow the Holocaust, right? Therefore, there's no reason why God. But, I mean, you know, you go back to human things, you see. I give an example, you know, for a certain force, you take Greek, right? You know? If you're Greek, I told you that story, right? And it seems to be Greek. Okay, so there are things that other men know the reason why, but I don't see a reason why you should do this, right? But they see a reason why you should do this, right? And wait for it to see, all right, God, you know, give an infinite distance of our mind, right? The reason why God would allow things could escape us if you could be the reason why, you know, you know, so I'm going to see a reason why some of the things should be done as well to see what happened. Yeah, yeah. There's one example. Let's say Bobby Fishman, when he played chess, he could see like 60 moves ahead. Yeah, yeah. And he would think, you know, if he did that, but you wouldn't know why he's doing that, because you couldn't see it, but it might seem like a dumb move, but... I used to be pretty good at the checkers, you know, when I was a kid, you know, and finally one of my oldest cousins came there, and she'd be a good player. She beat me in checkers, right, you know? I said, you know, soccer player, but I was pretty good, and I lost, too, though, you know? He'd take a double player, too, you know? He's not actually the longest man to win, you know, but that might be good for the kid, right, to realize that he's not the real greatest soccer player, you know? Someone said that, you know, when the planes crashed in the towers, they said, God must have had a sleep. Yeah, yeah. Why would he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't know. I have the innocent suffering, so, and you know what I mean? But in a sense, I was thinking down by saying, you know, you're saying that if you don't see a reason why, then if you're not a good reason why. I mean, you don't want to get that feeling because it's a little bit of difficulty saying that, you know? But, I mean, to him, you know, the Holocaust is so horrible that, you know, it's per se no to him, you know? There couldn't be any reason why this would be allowed by any legal person. With the private and the common, one thing I've wondered about is the sacred scripture that seems to be using a lot of private experience. Yeah. Because it's using this experience of one people and their, you know, their experience. Yeah. It's kind of used private experience. Yeah. A number of things to understand them. You have to study. Yeah. But the scripture, I mean, even in its metaphors, you know, it used things like, the Lord is my rock, you know? It used something that's common, too. Everybody says some experience of a rock, right? The Lord is my shepherd, right? I'm experiencing these things, you know? So, yeah. Yeah. But some of the metaphors, though, seem to be private. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them we probably need more, you know? Help with, you know? But for the most part, I mean, the things that they're taken from. The higher minds, the running water, you know? The other ones about this parched earth, you know? It's there in God. You know, the Psalms of Thursday. These are more common than you have in scripture. Mm-hmm. I'm not saying you don't have some need for private experience, yeah. I mean, but you need something different here, right? I mean, the prophet that says, you know, God uses human intermediaries for us in Revelation, right? He reveals, he doesn't reveal everything directly to everybody, right? He reveals something to Moses or the prophet, right? And the prophet to us, right? Christ taught the apostles and apostles. Taught their successors and down through the line, right? Tradition. When you come to define an article of the faith, then you use thoughts that are tied to see, Pope says there, right? I don't know if you had a chance to read that yet, but, yeah. But he speaks of universal and necessary experience, right? So, you're using thoughts that are tied to universal and necessary experience to express the articles of faith, like God has no parts, or whatever it is, there are three persons in God, so that you don't have to, you know, change these as private experience grows, right? You know? You don't have to be using quarks or molecules to talk about God, you know? Quarks and so on. Quantum gems. Talk about God, right? So, there's these, you know, concepts in science change, that you're not really going to affect theology. I think that the main reason in theology, as I say, why common experience or universal and necessary experience is more useful is that you know God by the via negativa. And to negate the general is more useful than to negate the particular. So, we show in theology that God is unchanging, we don't show that God doesn't walk, doesn't run, doesn't jump, doesn't fly, doesn't swim, doesn't grow, doesn't, isn't changing in general, right? So, that sense of knowledge in general is more useful in theology than knowledge in particular. What a part is, what a whole is. There's another thing about H2O. H2O is useless knowledge in theology, seems for the most part, right? But a whole part is very important in theology. That's why it's providential that God had Thomas be in the place where he could get this on. He could never have this in the theology about that. When you explain the definition of eternity, you negate many things that are found in the definition of time and in our understanding of the now of time. Maybe around this course if we take up time, you know, then we'll talk a little bit about eternity, right? We'll take up change when the first book was to show you how theology uses this. I wonder if Tom shows it in the 11th reading here. I haven't given you yet, I mean. So being also part of the providence of the church and the fathers and being educated in St. Thomas and finally in the Greek philosophy. I think it's not by chance that there's, well, I mean, there's nothing opposed to being chance, but I mean, why is the New Testament written in Greek, you know? See, divine progress extends down to those things, right? I mean, you can give all kinds of historical reasons by written in Greek, Greek, right? You know, like that of the great comfort of the wisdom. But I mean, God wanted the future and that has to do maybe with the sociology, right? The Greek language is a better language for theology than the Hebrew is, you know? They need to bring together Greek philosophy too, right? The revelation. It's facilitated by the fact that there's Greek theory. Yeah. Thank you.