Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 30: Contradiction, Harmony, and the Discovery of Truth

Transcript
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right okay since god is all together like simple is there any distinction any real distinction in god between god's god and his goodness well identical right because he's all together simple so goodness itself would never be bad and that's why once we show that god is good or he's just right or he's knowing in no way can he be the opposite of those things unjust or bad or ignorant or something that's all right but you can understand it from this right because if hardness and butter were the same thing then butter could never be what soft right but that also you know points out another thing as there are style explains in the third book about the soul um our soul being in our body is naturally turned to the what it is is something you can sense or imagine and in those things there's a distinction between the form and what has the form and so our language reflects that right so we have run into our language the abstract word and the concrete word we've caught right and so when we come to talk about god no word in a way is adequate to talking about god because if we say that god is goodness we seem to be saying he's that by which something is good right rather than saying god is good right but if we say god is good because he is good very good um then we seem to be saying that he has goodness right and therefore there's a composition god god see so as thomas following dionysius and others says no name is what adequate to talking about god right and we can both affirm and deny these names right we can say god is good because he really is good but the name is inadequate because there's no composition there of god and his goodness we can say god is goodness itself because of his simplicity right but he's not just that by which something is good he's good himself but our way of speaking right falls short because our way of speaking is adapted to uh talking about material things or matter in the subject and the form are two different things there's an awful lot you can learn from this that's extremely useful in theology right and necessary in theology it's interesting you know if you read the life of thomas aquinas like in white sample's biography and so on thomas was in the only place in christian europe where he could get what we're getting here at the university of naples right which is a kind of heterodox place in some ways but it was the only place in europe at the time where aristotle's uh so-called physics but we called the natural hearing was available right to the in the christian west now aristotle's books are just gradually coming back right um so a kind of interesting example of divine providence right because if thomas didn't have the physics of aristotle the books of natural hearing he would not have been able to do theology the way he did it in the summa theologiae and if we talk later on about time and eternity right that um when thomas understands the definition of eternity which comes from guethius there in the constellation of philosophy he does so in terms of how the definition negates certain things about time that in the definition of time that aristotle brought out and negates certain things about the now of time which aristotle brought out right so unless you have an understanding of time and natural philosophy you can't understand the definition of eternity what one thing the conic did when he when he gave the course on time which is really you know the second part there of book four you take about place and you talk about the empty too but place and empty and then you talk about time but you know in graduate school you have a whole course just on time right this is that difficult but at the end of the course the conic would you know stop and talk a little bit about the definition of eternity of theological footnote right to show how your understanding of time is necessary to understand what eternity is in the via negativa right you've been negationis we'll see that later on when you get that far but here you can see how a general understanding of change is more useful in theology than understanding of how fast a ball falls to the ground as the ld would be trying to figure out right that's useless in theology you're not going to you know you're going to go around to getting all those particular things so the same way you know what we show that god is has no parts in theology so you got to know what a hole and what parts are but we don't bother to show that god doesn't have two atoms of hydrogen one of oxygen so it's good to know that water is h2o if that's what it is uh but it's not particularly useful in theology you see in theology you're going to show that god has no parts right and so he doesn't have the letter c-a-t you know that's true i mean it doesn't have any parts why why you don't you don't go to all you know you know it doesn't have uh rye whiskey and sweet vermouth which manhattan has right not composed of those things what what you don't have to know what manhattan is made out of or what water is made out of right you see because you're going to show that he has no parts but you got to know what a hole and what parts are okay so it's more useful to know that a hole has parts than to know the water is h2o in theology that's one reason why we say you know to know natural things in general it's a foundation for understanding natural things right but you want to go on and try to know them in particular later on as far as theology is concerned that general knowledge is what's really most essential you don't usually need that particular knowledge in theology we're actually into moral theology right you're saying how this untying this contradiction is the first substantial example yeah in order of learning it's this as far as i know it seems like i don't know of anyone else who has even untyed that contradiction besides aristotle and those who yeah now you might say that plato to some extent is on tying that in the in the fatal right huh okay now now plato you must remember is a student of what cratulis as well as socrates and cratulis was a student of heraclitus and so i don't know if you do know the fatal at all but when he starts to uh reason out or try to reason out anyway the immortality of the human soul the first argument he makes an induction right and then he syllogizes from what he induces right but the induction is the changes between contraries see well heraclitus in a way begun that in a fragment that we saw right but uh in the fatal there's a little more full right okay and that's what aristotle has over right so it's a real continuity between these three great minds and then um later on if you look at the last argument uh of socrates um there he's saying um there is denying the one opposite can become the other opposite right and then uh when he says you were saying just the opposite there in the beginning right right and socrates says well you see um if one of one of two opposites cannot be the other right but a third thing maybe can what you know so he's in a sense getting close to the distinction of aristotle okay um but he um he talks about whether one of the opposites is in the definition of the third thing we'll come back to that you know we'll take the fatal but i'll give you what i mean um hard is not in the definition of butter so if butter is hard it can become soft it was going to lose its hardness right but it can still remain butter right but if you have let's say uh virtue here and vice which are countries which are countries but virtue can never be vice right but if virtues in the definition let's say of courage right or virtues in the definition of justice right can justice ever be a vice no no see so he's in a sense making a significant something i wonder what style is making here uh it basically says you know there's a reason why this can become soft but this cannot become vicious you know because this is the very definition of that but that's not right it's not exactly the same distinction but i mean there's a student Proximity, right? Of course, the more you read Plato, the more you realize how much Aristotle got from Plato, right? Just as how much Mozart got from, what, Haydn, right? I was listening last night there a little bit to the Vienna Quartets of Mozart, right? And you're reading kind of notes with it, you know, and these are early quartets of Mozart, the Vienna Quartets. But how he's influenced by the, I don't know, Opus 17 and 20 of Handel, right? And how he's kind of imitating him, but, you know, trying to do his own thing to some extent, too. But I guess, you know, the next set of quartets, Mozart wrote, I guess, absolutely perfect. And he wrote these, later on, you know, starting around 387, the first one is, and the Vienna Quartets are down below 200, right? A crucial numbering. But Einstein says that, right, it's after Mozart heard the Russian Quartets of Haydn, right? That one was the most tremendous influence upon Mozart. And what Haydn had finally achieved in the Russian Quartets, among other things, was that each instrument had its own, what, role, you know, which is the company of the other ones, right? I mean, it really was a quartet, really an ensemble, you know, of four voices and so on. And tremendous effect upon Mozart, and stimulated him to write the, what, the six quartets. And when Haydn heard those, right, that's when he made his famous judgment, right? He came to Mozart and he said, as an honest man before God, I say to you, your son is the greatest composer that I know. Not just living, but, you know, in the whole history of music, huh? And this, of course, is very gratifying to Mozart's father, right, to hear Haydn say that, you know? But then when Mozart, you know, heard, you know, this from his father, right, he sat down and he dedicated these six quartets to Haydn. You know, it's got a very beautiful letter where he dedicates them. You know, a father sending his sons into the world, right, and he entrusted them to this great man. But in another, you know, there we have Mozart, he said, I had to dedicate them to Haydn because he taught me how to write the quartet. But it was really amazing, huh? I was talking to somebody at the house, they were doing some logic last night, and I was talking about, you know, the difference between the Haydn quartets, which, you know, evoked that remark of Haydn, right, and the piano quartets, you know, astounding, right? You know, the greatness of the Haydn quartets compared to those other ones. It's like when Mozart's father was twisting his arm, you know, to write violin concertos. In about a year, he wrote five violin concertos. And it's fairly, around 200, the Kershaw number is fairly early, right? I mean, this is the first two, they're good, you know, but then the third is much better, and the fourth and fifth, I mean, it's incredible the way he goes forward. I mean, just, it's just unbelievable, you know? It's like Shakespeare going forward to the Deuteronicus, you know? One of my auditions of Shakespeare, you know, in the notes in the beginning of Titus Deuteronicus, this disgusting play, in many ways it is disgusting, you know? But you compare that to the great tragedy of Shakespeare, you know, two different worlds, right? I mean, Shakespeare's greatness does not rest on Titus Deuteronicus. But it's amazing to see that, the way they progress, you know, all of a sudden. I remember myself going from, was it, the 35th, 36th symphony to the 38th symphony, and I said, gee, what a development, you know? He says, what are the 37th symphonies like? Well, of course, there is no 37th symphony in Mozart. It was all a mistake. He wrote a textual introduction to a symphony by Joseph Haydn's brother, Michael Haydn, right? And he thought the whole symphony was by Mozart. So that became known as the 37th symphony, but there's, in fact, no 37th symphony. So 36th is followed by 38, right? So the missing link is not there. Okay. So let's, um, there's ten copies you need, Father? Yes. Okay, I think there's ten. I think I got to keep one of my songs. Well, some of it's good to take off and, you know, just have one paragraph to Aristotle and make a kind of excursion because they say it not only illustrates the role of contradiction and development of our knowledge. Aristotle goes forward from two to three or from a confused or distinct knowledge by untying the apparent contradiction or change, huh? But it's also the first kind of major example of how our mind goes forward, huh? Okay. Now what I've done in these readings here, I took two from philosophers, and you can see who they are there, Heraclitus and Aristotle, and then I take some from scientists of the 20th century here, on pages two and three and four, a little bit of five, right? Okay, and then in the middle there or a little before the middle of page five, I give you to what's from theology, right? Okay, so I'm going to go through and kind of comment on these. What's kind of remarkable is that despite all the differences that there are, and there are important differences in the way philosophy proceeds and the way science proceeds, right? And the way theology proceeds, there are important differences in all of these. In all three of them, contradiction plays a fundamental role in going forward, huh? And as I say to the students, you know, the old proverb, I'm getting it from the horse's mouth, right? These great discoveries, we usually get to the second, third, fourth, fifth hand, who knows how many hands, and we don't usually, aren't aware of the role that contradiction plays in the great discoveries. But you go to Einstein himself or to Niels Bohr in science, for example, and ask them, you know, what was the starting point for this discovery? They'll often point to a, what? Contradiction, right, huh? Okay. Now Heraclitus is maybe the first man, as they say, to see something of this, huh? And in that way, we could call him the father of the progress of the human mind, huh? Now we saw these fragments here, but now I'm applying them to knowledge rather than the actual world. War is the father of all things, right? The king of all things, right? And war, of course, is a, what? A conflict, right, huh? Okay. Now just for a second, look at a paragraph from Einstein, on page five there. We'll be talking about that by itself, but just the last sentence from Einstein there. All of the essential ideas in science, right? It's a universal affirmative. All of the essential ideas in science were born in a dramatic conflict, right? Between reality and our tins of understanding. War is the father of all things, right? Everything was born out of a conflict, right? Okay. Now DK8 is saying the same thing, huh? Okay. But now DK54, that's saying a beautiful one. The hidden harmony is better than the, what? Apparent harmony. Now harmony is the opposite of what? Contradiction. Harmony is a Greek word meaning they fit together, huh? Or when things contradict each other, they don't fit together, huh? Okay. So he's saying the hidden harmony is better than the apparent harmony. Now, let's talk about that a bit. Take the simplest example there that we have from the middle. Socrates asks the slave boy, how do you double the square, right? Do you double the side, right? Slave boy is in a state of what? Apparent harmony, right? He thinks that this is consistent, right? With other things that he thinks, right? Okay. But, Socrates says, okay, he takes an example. Let's say the square of 2 by 2. And you say if you double the side and get it 4 by 4, you have a square twice as big, right? Well, when you figure this out, you say 2 by 2 will be 4, and 4 by 4 is 16, but 4 is a double of 2, and you said the square of the side is the longest place as big. So 16 is a double of 4, but even the slave boy knows. Now he's been let out of the state of the current harmony. He's been let out of the state of the current harmony into a contradiction, right? And then Socrates turns to me know what he says, haven't we done a good turn, right? Before he'd go out and tell the whole world, the way to double, he squares to double the side. But now he knows, as in so, right? Now he knows that he was mistaken, right? So a mistake and error is removed from his mind. And furthermore, what do you want to know now, see? He's not going to desire to know how to do this if he thinks he knows already, right? Now he'll want to know because he knows. Now, hidden under that contradiction is the way you actually do it, right? Which is to take the what? Diagonal, right? But that is hidden, right? That's the hidden harmony. But that's the true harmony, okay? So the hidden harmony is better than the what? Apparent harmony. But one is separated from the other by a what? Contradiction, right? Just take a quote here from Niels Bohr on page four there, the last one there for me. Difficulties, and you'll see in the context of difficulties referred to contradictions, right? Difficulties were for him, Bohr, merely the external appearance of new knowledge. As hidden under these contradictions was the what? You know what? And in an apparently hopeless contradiction, right? He conceived the germ, the seed, of wider and more comprehensive order and harmony, right? That's the hidden harmony, right? But it's hidden under an apparently hopeless contradiction, right? Okay? But one that he sees, right? In which underneath he's going to find this better, more comprehensive order and harmony. That's a hidden harmony, obviously. Why these other physicists are going around in a state of apparent harmony. They don't realize the contradictions in their own thinking. Now, you could apply that in particular to nature, right? Nature loves to hide, huh? So the harmony of nature, the true harmony, is usually what? That hidden, right? And on the surface, right, there is contradiction. Nature, as we saw in the definition of nature, is defined by motion or change, huh? Nature is a beginning and cause of motion and of rest, right? In that which it is, first as such and not by happening. But in motion or change itself, there's a current contradiction, right? See? And something of nature is hidden underneath that, huh? Now, the next one is extremely important. And you're going to see this repeated in slightly different words, right? And perhaps independently of Heraclitus. But notice, if you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it. For it's hard to be found and difficult, huh? See? Now, here you're talking about a really tremendous discovery, aren't you? See? One that is unexpected, right? But someone might say, that sounds like a contradiction itself. See, you always like to make this appearance. How can you expect the unexpected? Well, it's when you run into one of these fundamental contradictions that you are led to expect the, what? Unexpected, right? You see? And just take another quote there from the Great Boer, which we'll look in context when you get there, but just instead of comparing it so you can see a little bit of the connection here. This long one at the bottom of page three, right? Why don't you look at the whole one in context? But he'd been talking about how his own great discovery, right? Arose from the sharpness of the contradiction, right? On page three towards the fifth or sixth line to the bottom. Just the sharpness of the contradiction made me absolutely confident in the truth of the quantum postulant. He was still remembering this lesson when in one of his last conversations he observed that the reason why no progress was being made in the theory of the transformations of matter, that's a study of how many particles occurring in very high energy, is that we have not so far found among these processes anyone exhibiting a sufficiently violent contradiction, right? With what could be expected from current ideas, huh? Notice that word expected there, right? To give us a clear and unambiguous indication of how we have to modify these ideas, right? See? But that contradiction, if you run into that sufficiently strong contradiction, then you start to expect something, right? Unexpected, right? Something quite different from the current ideas, huh? So, the last little fragment is dispute, right? Of course, you're probably aware of how the Middle Ages is dominated by the questiones disputate, right? And the greatest ones that have come down to us are the questiones disputate of Thomas, right? And in the Marianne tradition, there are, you know, the questiones disputate de veritate, and a bonitate, too. You know, there's 21 questions, but each question has, you know, many, many articles, right? But in all of them, you have, what, arguments on one side and on the other side? So you have a disputed question, right? And then the Master, what, unties the, what, contradiction, right? And if the truth is on one side, he answers all the arguments on the other side. If the truth involves something on both sides, he answers all of them on both sides, right? So you have, you know, all kinds of questiones disputate of Thomas, huh? The questiones disputate de potencia, right? Questiones disputate de anima, right? Questiones disputate de, you know, de caritate, right? De spei, right? And so on, right? Actions from the question, this disputate de spei, that, uh, Orin Murray first pointed out to me a good text there, where Thomas is very clear that hope is a greater virtue than, what, faith, huh? You know? And St. Paul is very clear that charity is the greatest of the three, right? But then I raise the question, which is greater, faith or, what, hope, right? And Thomas is clear that hope is greater. Very interesting in that text, Okay? Now, if you look at the summa theologiae, right? Um, that's for beginners, as he says. Uh, that's, you know, in many senses, beginners, right? Uh, there's a, um, it's kind of an abbreviation in a way that the question is just disputate, right? They usually have maybe just three on one side, and then a sed contra, one sed contra, and three, um, a few or four at most, usually, um, opposed to what is going to be the truth, right? So instead of, you know, 20 or 15 on both sides, right? You have just some of the more essential ones, right? But, uh, it's still basically the same dispute, right? The whole Middle Ages is kind of based upon that, huh? So it's disputate. Now, um, we could go forward from Heraclitus and, and, and, and Plato, you'd see the same thing in Plato, right? Okay? And we see that, you know, like in the, in the, uh, in the Mino, right? The introduction to logic, right? For Socrates reasons that virtue can be taught, virtue cannot be taught, right? Uh, you see this in a lot of the dialogues, huh? But, um, in the beginning of the third book of wisdom here, the third book of the metaphysics, that third book of the metaphysics is all dialectical disputation. Okay? What Aristotle does in the third book is he, he raises the main questions of wisdom and he reasons, you know, for opposites, huh? Okay? And then in the later books, you know, starting with book four, he starts to untie these, right? Okay? So, but at the beginning of book three, he gives the reasons why he's going to, what, do this, right? Okay? And he gives about four reasons, huh? Four or five. To raise difficulties well is useful for those who wish to resolve them. For the latter solution, later solution, is a loosening of the previous difficulties. And I give you a little different translation there. To doubt well before is necessary for those wishing to discover it. Let's give you a little more accurate translation. For the discovery afterwards is an untying of the difficulties before. Okay? And it is impossible for those ignorant of a knot to loosen it. So, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. But the doubt of the mind shows us about the thing. Insofar as the mind doubts, it undergoes something about the same as those tied. In both cases, it is impossible to, what, go forward, right? So Aristotle is using this kind of a, almost metaphor, you might say, that the mind is tied up, right, by arguments on both sides, and just as when the feet are tied together, right, you can't go forward, until you examine the ropes and find the loose end, and you begin to unravel it, right? Like C.S. Lewis says in one of his essays there, you know, it's find the loose end, and there it is, and it's unraveling. But Aristotle is saying not only can you not go forward, right, unless you can untie that knot, the mind is stopped because the mind can't accept the contradiction, right? But the very untying of that contradiction is, say, what? The discovery is something that was, what, hidden before, okay? Now, in the second paragraph, he gives two more reasons, but I put them together in one paragraph because the two are connected, right? Hence, he says, we're not to have looked at all the difficulties before on account of these reasons, because you can't go forward if your feet are tied, right? Your mind is tied up, and that's how we borrow that word tied up for other things, you know. You know, somebody's very busy at his desk, you know. I'm all tied up now, you know. Or we apply it to a baseball game or a football game, you know, it's tied up, right? When so-and-so gets up in the bottom of the ninth and hits the home run, right? He's untied the game, right? You see? Okay? Another place where Astao uses the terms tied up and untied is when he's describing the plot in a good play. And sometimes he describes the plot as everything you're beginning, building, and end. But another place in the poetics he describes the plot as consisting of tying the knot and untying the knot up. And, of course, sometimes, you know, in Shakespeare's plays, there's many knots that are tied, huh? And I could bring in the art in, you know, one of the more complete editions of Shakespeare, the art in the edition of Symboline, right? And the dispute, you know, as to how many knots Shakespeare's untying in one scene at the end. You know, some people are counting 15, 20 knots, you know. But, I mean, it's really, you know, three to four, you know, in Shakespeare, right? Right. You see? But notice the difference here, right? You know, with the metaphysics and fiction, right? Usually in a great tragedy, the tying of the knot takes more time than the, what? Untying of it, right? Okay. And, of course, the poet unties a knot for you, huh? But in the metaphysics, they say, book three ties all the knots. And then books four through fourteen, he unties them one by one, huh? You know, so it takes longer to untie them, right? But there's another likeness, too. When Aristotle is describing the poets in writing their plots, he says that many poets succeed in tying an interesting knot, but they fail to untie it in a way that's interesting, right? And I think people, you know, have often, you know, read a story or even seen a movie, right, where they've got engrossed in the tying of the knot, but the poet didn't know how to untie it in a satisfactory way. And I think that same thing is true in philosophy, even more so, that the inexperienced or young or untrained philosopher is better at seeing difficulties than he is at, what, untying them, right? And most of them, some of them have got out, you know, the knot with eating, right? I mean, they're tied and they drown, intellectually speaking, because they can't untie the knots that they've tied, right? So, I mean, there are many knots that are, you know, really very hard to untie. And some of you say, I don't think about it, but Aristotle or Thomas could, in fact, untie these knots, huh? And the iconic is a very interesting article there, it's in French, in the Laval Théologique et Philosophique. It's called, From Paradox to Devenir Par la Contradiccioma, The Paradox of Becoming by Contradiction. And it's the apparent contradiction in becoming that's much more difficult to resolve than this one that we were doing today, right? And it's not until Book 6 that Aristotle actually unties it up. But Hegel sees this contradiction, but he thinks it's real. And for him, you know, change is a contradiction, right? He's, you know, that's where Marx gets his idea of dialectics from Hegel, right? Or Engels, or what's his name, or Lenin said, you know, dialectics is a study of the contradictions and the essence of things. And that goes back to Hegel's dialectical method, right? But Aristotle solves that, right? And, but that same problem arose in the Middle Ages in theology, in the understanding of the Eucharist now. And it was calling a trait to a problem, and Thomas, with the help of Aristotle, ties it. You know? But only Aristotle and Thomas Holland, I think, could really untie those. If we ever get to do the Book 6, we'll see that, right? But it's a much more difficult one. See? So, I mean, these guys are better at seeing a knot or tying it than untying it, right? It takes a really good mind to untie this. Hence, he says, we're not to have looked at all the difficulties before on account of these reasons. In a way, there's two reasons in that first paragraph. You can't go forward if you're tied. But more importantly, right? The untying of it is how you go forward, right? Like, yes, one reason you don't want to call it or two. And because those investigating without having first considered the difficulties are like those who do not know where they ought to go. Okay? Because where you're going is in the direction of untying the knot. So if you haven't seen the knot, you don't know where you're going to go. And then the other side of the coin. And in addition, do not know if the thing sought has been found or not. For the goal is not clear to this one, but it is to the one who has brought the difficulties. So you know you've arrived and you can, what? Untie the difficulties, huh? Now you're going to see that repeated in other words by Niels Bohr and by Einstein, right? That the contradictions, right? Which he calls difficulties here, but he means contradictions. They pointed us in the right direction. And we know we had arrived and we could, what? Untie. Those, huh? Okay? And sometimes, just to make a temporary comparison here, sometimes I compare that to what, this little passage from Heisenberg on page 4 from the History of Quantum Theory, one of the lectures there, the Gifford lectures, right, that are published now under the title of Physics and Philosophy. I'm trying to address an aspect of what Aristotle is saying. Bohr's theory had opened up a new line of research. The great amount of experimental material collected by spectroscopy through several decades was now available for information about the strange quantum laws covering the motions of electrons in the atom. That many experiments of chemistry could be used for the same purpose, huh? Now, he says, it was from this time on that the physicists learned to ask the right questions. And now, a very subtle observation is part. And asking the right question is frequently more than halfway to the solution of the problem. Now, that's a very profound, I think, observation of Heisenberg's heart. And sometimes to kind of emphasize the point he's making there, right? I say, if you represent by straight lines, to make it kind of concrete, the time and effort required, right, to go from something called ignorance to knowledge, right? Okay? If you represent by a line like that, and this, let's say, is the halfway point in the time and effort, right? Heisenberg says that frequently asking the right question is to go more than halfway, right? That's contrary to what we would think at first, right? We would think that you could answer the question, ask the question pretty soon in the beginning, and then it would take a long time to answer them, right? You know? But Heisenberg is pointing out something called the right question. And if you ask the right question... You're more than halfway to the answer. As if there's more difficulty, more effort and time before you ask the right question than to get to the knowledge, the answer, after you've asked the right question. I think there's a lot of truth to that. Now, I'll point to one example of something like this that you're familiar with. You go back to the great dialogue, the Mino, right? Which has so many things in it that you can learn from. When Socrates has a second conversation with the boy, right? Or even his first conversation, but especially the second conversation, he's trying to show that the slave boy is recalling how to double a square, right? And he makes a plausible enough case that Mino doesn't object to it, right? Now, how can Socrates claim that? Well, all Socrates does is to ask questions. And the way to double a square comes out of the slave boy's answers. So it might seem to most people that, what? It's coming out of the slave boy's knowledge, right? And all Socrates is doing is asking questions, right? But Socrates is asking the right questions, right? And then the slave boy can answer them almost automatically, right? So Socrates is actually doing most of the work. Although you might think that the person who's doing the answering is doing most of the work, but actually Socrates is doing most of the work. And if you have a one-to-one thing like that with Socrates and the slave boy, and even the slave boy's not the best trained mind in the world, right? But you ask them with the right questions, they will seem to teach themselves, right? And that's really kind of the perfection of teaching. So there you see a little bit of the truth also of what Heisenberg is saying. And I found that in my own experience, right? That in things that I've come to know in philosophy, right, I spent more time, you know, wandering around until I asked the right question than I did, what? Once I asked the right question, you know, to get to the answer, right? And I remember one thing in graduate school that I had a question that I'd had, in a way, with Kasurik, you know, an undergraduate, and I'd had when I had taught out at St. Mary's and so on. It wasn't a question I was thinking about constantly, but I, you know, thought from time to time about this question, right? And then the question became, in a way, relevant to part of my thesis, say. And I still didn't have the answer for it, you know, except for ten years, say. And I was going to a class of Monsignor, and I was reading Thomas, and I suddenly put two and three together, right? And I asked the right question, and bang, I was there. I said, ten years, right? I was kind of excited, so I'm going to go down and check this with Dion. And I just, you know, make sure, because it came so suddenly, you know? And so I came down, and I asked him, you know, the question is, I know where you're going, Dwayne. You see? He did the wrong way. Because I was asking the right question, right? You know, go right and do it, huh? See? I just happened to be a few minutes in the office with him today, or yesterday? Yesterday it was. And I was picking up Heisenberg's Physics and Beyond, which is kind of an account of the famous conversations of his life. And there's a very interesting conversation he has with Einstein at one point. And Einstein talks about something and so on. And then, in a later chapter, he's dealing around 1926 there, when he and Bohr are trying to understand quantum theory. And they talk all day long, and they can't figure it out, right? And they're getting on each other's nerves, and Heisenberg would go for walks in the park, you know, with nature being observed, it seems to us, these experiments and so on. And finally they can't stand each other, so Bohr goes off skiing, right? And Heisenberg stays there, right? They've been working on this for months, you know, even physically getting sick, you know, and so on. And he's persisting in this thing. And one night, Heisenberg suddenly recalls something in a conversation he had with Einstein. He asked the right question, and bang, he's there. You know? And he's so excited, you know, he comes back, and he starts calculating, and he's got to calm down at first, you know, and he's so excited, but then everything's coming out perfectly, you know, just, you know, it's like that. But just because he asked the right question, you see? So I think you see that, right? See? There's a lot of truth to what Heisenberg says, huh? So, to ask, now, as I say to the students sometimes, in general, every investigation takes the direction of the questions asked. So to ask the right question is to go in the right direction. That's what Aristotle was saying, in a way, in that first argument, right? The man who's seen the difficulties, the contradiction, right? He knows where he's going, right? But now come back to the wonderful text here from Heisenberg. He says in the second paragraph, It was from this time on that the physicists learned to ask the right questions. And asking the right question is frequently more than halfway to the solution of the problem. But what were these questions? Practically all of them had to do with the strange apparent contradictions between the results of different experiments. So it's these strange apparent contradictions that led them eventually to ask the right questions, and that was to go more than halfway to the truth, right? To go in the right direction, huh? Okay? Again and again, one found that the attempt to describe atomic events in the traditional terms of Newtonian physics, he's referring to, right? Led to contradictions, right? Okay? I think it's a beautiful, you know, way of complimenting what Aristotle says, right? The man who's seen the contradictions, right? Knows where he's going. He's going in the direction of untimed contradictions, right? But as Heisenberg points out, these contradictions enable men to ask the right question, and that takes them more than halfway to the solution. And as I say, again, every investigation takes the directions of the questions asked. I sometimes take the example, you know, of a guy getting on the witness stand, and he's got, you know, perivation of somebody asking questions. He doesn't like the direction in which the questions are going, right? You know? They're embarrassing thinking a lot of other things, you know? But, I mean, it illustrates the fact that an investigation takes the direction of the questions asked, right? See? But these right questions involve, what seem, the contradictions, huh? Okay? And since we're asking the right questions about how does the mind rule itself, right, when we saw that apparent contradiction, right? Because you realize there had to be some distinction in the mind in order for the mind to rule itself. But at first sight, there doesn't seem to be two minds, nor does the mind have two parts. It's the thinnest of things, as the great Anaxagra said, right? But there is a distinction between what the mind knows and what it doesn't know, and what is more known to and what is less known to it. You know? But we start to ask the right questions, huh? Because we saw those contradictions. But then the other half of the coin, Aristotle says, is that you know you've arrived when those contradictions start to, what, disappear, right? And you'll see this repeated now, you know, but I think independently of Aristotle, in Bohr and Einstein, who are kind of the leaders. Einstein's probably, you know, the greatest scientist in the 20th century, so even the most famous, right? And Bohr, in some ways, was even more influential because Einstein was kind of a loner, you know? But Bohr was, you know, a very outgoing man, but he set up his, you know, Institute for the Study of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, and men came over the world to study under him, right? And they went on to get the Nobel Prize, like Heisenberg did, and Gamow, and Wolfgang Pauli, and so on, right? So he was very influential. So those two men are particularly important. Now the last reason Aristotle gives involves a comparison here to what takes place in the courtroom. Moreover, the one who has heard all the reasons of those disagreeing, like that of two parties in a lawsuit, is necessarily better prepared to judge, right? And here he's talking about judging and not just discovery, so we think that the jury is in a better position to judge whether so-and-so is guilty or not if they've heard the prosecutor trying to prove he's guilty and the defending lawyer trying to prove he's not guilty, right? If they just heard one of both sides. It might have more convictions or less convictions if you just heard one side, right? But we think you're more apt to be able to judge what's true if you've heard both sides, right? So these are the reasons Aristotle gives. some.