Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005)
Lecture 24: Doubting Well and Discovery in Wisdom

Transcript
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Okay. Now, let's take a little different comparison here. But, you know, Aristotle's gone pretty far in that first comparison, right? Okay. But take another comparison here. In the book on the poetic art, Aristotle says that the plot of a tragedy, you shouldn't expect it to be an aptitude for the characters. Okay. And if you demand this, you're demanding the pleasure proper to what? Comedy, right? In tragedy, right? Okay. So, it's kind of a principle, right? In the fine arts and things that are pleasing, right? To seek the pleasure that is what? Appropriate to each, right? Okay. So, seek the pleasure that is appropriate. Now, let's take the example first of all with food and things of this sort, right? If you have any experience with drinking wine and coming to appreciate wine, most Americans had a, what, soda pop, a sense of taste, right? And so, the wines they were selling most had a kind of, what? Sweet wine. Yeah. And a kind of soda pop taste, right? And so, in a way, the Americans were seeking the pleasure appropriate to soda pop in wine, right? And usually, you know, anybody who has some experience with wine will tell you, people tend to like, say, a sweet wine before a dry wine, right? And they'll regard a dry wine as, what? Sour, bitter. Yeah, sour, bitter, right? And they'll like a white wine before a red wine, huh? But as they get more experience with these things, they'll enjoy the red wine more than the, what? White wine. There's more to taste there, right, huh? Okay. So, in a sense, they're seeking, at first, the pleasure that's not appropriate to wine, huh? And it's more appropriate to soda pop or to something else, right? You see the idea there, huh? Okay. Now, you can take, you know, funny, but some of the exact examples, right? If someone orders a filet mignon, right, and then puts ice cream over the top of it, what would you say? Smoking the ass, right? Maybe it depends on the flame with the ice cream on it, isn't it? You know, regardless of whether the pleasure of a filet mignon or the pleasure of ice cream is great, right? Without making any genus, which is better, the pleasures are different, right? Yeah. And one shouldn't seek from steak, in an eating steak, the pleasure appropriate to what? Ice cream. You know, you know. You see? That's a mistake, right? Okay. There was, in my hometown in St. Paul, Minnesota, for a while there, in the St. Paul newspaper there, there used to be an advice column, right? Right. And advice column for teenagers. Oh. But kind of like the one for adults, if you call it adults. And we used to kind of read it just for the fun of it, you know, for the last, huh? And one time the teenage girl was writing in, right? Right. What's her problem? Her problem is that her boyfriend wants you to wear the candy-flavored lipsticks. You know? Oh, man. Apparently, there are these, you know, for little girls like that, strawberries and so on. And she wants to wear adult lipstick, you know? Right. This is her problem, right? Great problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the column, the advice column responded, buy him a lollipop. But we don't have to recognize that he's seeking the pleasure in a kiss that's a proper to a lollipop. So he wants you to wear a strawberry-flavored lipstick, buy him a strawberry lollipop. But he'll be able to get that flavor. But notice, huh? There's a pleasure proper to a strawberry lollipop or candy, and there's a one proper to a kiss, right? And it's not the same pleasure, right? So he's seeking in the kiss the pleasure that's proper to candy. And that's a what? Mistake, right? Okay. Of course, there's some people, you know, who put kinship or something on everything, you know? And everything tastes the same after a while, right? But they're seeking, you know, they're accustomed to one taste, and they want it everywhere. And therefore, they're missing out, right? And not tasting things as they, in the way they should be tasted, right? It's like those vegetarian recipes that imitate meat all the time. Yeah. The taste is imitating meat. So what's the point? I'll use those. But on a higher level, and once a little closer to what Aristotle's saying here, is what I spoke of before, that the pleasure of, say, tragedy, right, and the pleasure of comedy is not the same, right? And if you look for the pleasure of comedy and tragedy, you're going to miss out on the pleasures appropriate to tragedy. Now, and of course, what Aristotle said here, though, custom has a great, what, influence upon these things, right? And if you take, say, one of the early novelists, like Henry Fielding, right, wrote Tom Jones, the most famous for him. But before Tom Jones, he wrote Joseph Andrews, huh? If you get an edition of Joseph Andrews, the novelist, Henry Fielding, has a little preface before the novel, right? And he's addressed to the reader, right, and that he's attempting in this work a form of fiction to which the reader may not be accustomed, and that the reader may be expecting a pleasure other than that intended by the author, right? And so he's trying to explain what kind of a work he's writing. I think that's very interesting, because it's very similar to what Aristotle's saying here, right? If you have a form of fiction to which you are not accustomed, you may not approach it in the proper, what, manner, and therefore miss the pleasure that is appropriate to that form of fiction, okay? And one very good example of that is what Joseph Andrews, or Henry Fielding, in the preface to Joseph Andrews is trying to point out, right? C.S. Lewis, right? A very good literary critic in many ways. C.S. Lewis, but one of his best books is called The Allegory of Love. I don't know if you've ever seen that. But it's about a form of fiction that was very prevalent in the Middle Ages, huh? A form of fiction that was more popular than the novel, which didn't exist then, right? But a form of fiction that was very popular for a longer time than the novel has been popular, he says, right? But a form of fiction to which we are not, what, accustomed. And so one of his reasons for writing The Allegory of Love was to what? Bring it back. Yeah. And to, in a sense, educate us, right, as to how to approach this form of fiction to which we are not accustomed, right? See? If the author is proceeding the way to which we are accustomed, there's no difficulty in following him or trying to follow him, right? But if the author is proceeding the way to which we are not accustomed, or if the subject matter requires a way of proceeding to which we are not accustomed, then very much do we need, as Aristotle said, to be educated, right, as to how to approach that, huh? See? And so C.S. Lewis saw the need, right, to educate us, right, as to how to approach this form of fiction, which we'd call The Allegory of Love, or want of a better title here, right? Now, C.S. Lewis has another work called A Preface to Paradise Lost, right? And he's doing the same thing, right? How we can't read Paradise Lost the way we read, say, lyric poetry, huh? And if we do, we're going to. you miss out, huh? Okay? Now, it's a little bit like with food. You know how you get accustomed to certain kinds of food? And partly because of your family in which your mother cooked and so on, and maybe your nationality, your ethnic background and so on. And it's sometimes hard to enjoy some other kind of food, right? And I shouldn't pretend to like some food you don't like. I'd say to be polite, maybe. But I think it's also a matter of experience that sometimes food that you didn't like at first, you get, you know. Very well. Yeah. Well, why didn't you like it at first, see? Well, it's partly because of the way you, what, approached that food, huh? When I was first, I first had Chinese food when I was in Quebec, of all places. And I used to go with a couple of these other students, you know, to a little restaurant. And they had American food and Chinese food at that restaurant. They'd always order Chinese food and I'd order American food, see? And that's why I said it was kind of interesting, you know, huh? And I started ordering Chinese food with them, you see? And now I'd rather go to a Chinese restaurant, maybe, than most American restaurants, a little different to food and so on. So, it's a question, in a sense, of getting, what, accustomed to something, right? That you're not accustomed to, right? And even, you know, when I drink soda pop, if I drink, say, root beer or orange soda, like that, you know, it's like slurp, you know? Now, if I tried to pick up a glass of dry red wine and drink that way, I would not enjoy it at all. You know? I'd probably be, you know, regurgitating or sping it up, you know? You see? I gotta, you know, sniff it a little bit and let it roll to the sides of my mouth and so on. So, the way of drinking wine, to enjoy it, and drinking wine the way wine should be drunk, right? Is not the way you would drink a root beer or orange soda or something of that sort, right? Or even water, right? So, you have to find the way of drinking or consuming that's appropriate to the thing, huh? Okay? But anyway, going back to the fine arts, huh? Take an example first of Joseph Andrews, right? And then these two examples from C.S. Lewis, right? I remember the first time I tried to read Homer, and I know Homer was a great poet. My brother Mark had an edition of it, you know, paperback edition. I tried and just couldn't get into it, you know? And then when it came to Assumption there, one of my colleagues there, he put on to some book club, you know? It was a beautiful edition of Homer, you know, the Iliad, the Latimer translation. And, okay, I'll order it through your book club, you know? And so I said, I know what I do. There's 24 books, you know? I'll read a book at night, see, you know? So the first night I read a book, and the second night I read a book, and then I couldn't put the thing down, right? All of a sudden, I had, what, started to read it the way it should be read, right? But I know people, I won't mention who they are, but people close to me, but people can only read, you know, detective stories or misty stories, you know? They can't read Shakespeare, they can't read, you know, whole word, they can't read, you know? You know, they can read a form of fiction to which they are accustomed and that is, you know, customer in our age, right? But they get out of that and they just can't, you know? They can't read poetry, they can't, you know? But there you see very much the force of what? Of custom, right? And regardless of whether, you know, Shaw Holmes is more or less enjoyable than Shakespeare, you can't read Sherlock Holmes and Macbeth or Hamlet in the same way, right? My friend Jim back home, man, he was teaching high school, right? And he had to teach Macbeth, right? And he was getting frustrated trying to get them to appreciate it. So finally he told them one day, you know, well, it's a mystery story, you know? Well, in essence he was giving up the attempt, right, to overcome this barrier that there was, huh? Let me see. So you see something like what Airstyle is saying here but in a different matter, right? There are many forms of fiction, right? You know? There's the epic, right? And there's the drama and there's differences between tragedy and comedy. But even Shakespeare, you know, there's at least four different types of play, right? And you can't look for the same pleasure, right? And I know people have read Homer, right? It's you know, Bill T. Achilles, the way he builds up these guys and so on. And then they read Shakespeare's Taurus and Cressida. They're dumbfounded, right? You see? But Shakespeare's Taurus and Cressida is not an epic, you know? It's a, what? Black satire. You see? So the way Shakespeare teaches Achilles there is quite different than Homer does, right? And he does so in a way that's appropriate to a black satire. But Homer treats them in a way that's appropriate to epic, you know, the grandeur of epic, huh? And so there are many forms of fiction, some of which we are accustomed to, right? And some of which we are individually inclined to, right? You see? But when you get to a form of fiction to which we are neither accustomed nor individually inclined, we have a hard time getting the pleasure we should get out of that work, right? Which may be greater or lesser than the ones to which we are accustomed, but we have to be kind of what? Educated in this respect, huh? And perhaps we need C.S. Lewis or somebody of this sort to teach us a bit how to approach this, right? Just like when you introduce somebody to wine, you have to teach them how to, in a sense, drink wine and drink it differently than they drink Coke or something else like that, right? Do you see? Yeah. So that's another likeness there, right, huh? With all these forms, huh? But you'd also say that with something like that with food, right? That's the different kinds of food, right? And each kind of food has its own pleasure, right? And some of these pleasures you may appreciate right away, and some not, and some because you're accustomed to them, and other ones because you're not, right? And you have to be kind of educated to taste these things, right? And to seek the pleasure that's, what, appropriate to them, huh? Okay? But it's a similar thing to what Aristotle is saying here, right? So I hope those likenesses are helpful to understand what he's saying here, huh? Now when you get to the sixth book of wisdom, Aristotle will begin to distinguish between the way of proceeding in natural philosophy and in mathematics and wisdom and so on, right? And maybe there we can go into some of those differences, huh? Kind of the classical text in Thomas's, his commentary on Boethius is De Trinitate, where Boethius takes off Aristotle but kind of expands somewhat on it, right? And maybe you can bring some of those things in at that time, you know? Okay? But now we're going to turn, is it time for our little break yet or not? We take a little break now and then we'll be turning here to the third book, okay? Now, we've got to situate ourselves again here. Unfortunately, we can go back to my likeness of... Book of Methods? To the... No, to Roman and Juliet. Oh, that would be lovely. Remember I was saying the first division of Shakespeare's Roman and Juliet is into what, two parts? Two parts of God and the rest of the play. Yeah, the prologue, not the rest of the play, the play, right? The play, okay. The prologue and the play, right? Okay. Now, the prologue is very short, but it prepares the way for the, what? Play, right? It situates you with respect. Now, like that, in every work of Aristotle's, just about, you have a premium, as it's called, right? And then the main part of the work, right? Okay, the treatise, as they call it, the drawing out, huh? Mm-hmm. I mentioned how the verb has a premium, right? If you look at the Latin, which they mistranslate sometimes introduction. It's not introduction, it's a premium. Then you have, I guess, the chapters there, you know, which are the, the, the treatise itself, right? Mm-hmm. Okay? Do you see that? Yeah. Okay. Now, in the rest of book one, right, and in book two that we just kind of finished looking at, I didn't make any comparison to Roman and Juliet, did I? Okay. But now, we can use something that we used before, where Aristotle says that the philomuthos is something of a philosopher. And the comparison he made between the philomuthos and the philosopher in the premium, right, was that the philomuthos is filled with, what? Wonder, right? He wonders about the myths, right? And, um, uh, that the child's white eyes, listening to daddy reading the story, what's going to happen to the red-riding hood? And, um, uh, in that respect, he's like the philosopher, huh? Because the philosopher wonders, but in a more universal way and deeper way. But now, muthos, as you mentioned, I think, before, means originally myth and then, in general, story. And then it takes on the precise meaning of plot. Mm-hmm. And it seems to me, you could say, the lover of plots is, in a way, a philosopher, huh? Okay? Now, Aristotle divides plot sometimes into two, sometimes into three. He praises Homer for teaching the Greeks that a plot should have a beginning and middle and end. But sometimes Aristotle divides a plot into two, the tying of the knot or the tying of the knots, and then the, what? Untying. Untying, right? And it's that comparison I want to make to that likeness, huh? That just as a plot has two parts, huh? The tying of the knot or knots and the untying of the knot or knots. So, books 3 through 14, all the remaining books now, are like a plot, in that in book 3, he ties all the main knots of wisdom, and then in books 3 through 14, he unties those knots. Okay? Okay? So, books 3 through 14, he is to raise the main questions of wisdom, pertaining to wisdom, of which there are about 23. There are questions that are disputed questions, you might say, that thinkers think differently or give different answers to, and there's reason to think this and to think something else, right? So, they're all kind of problems, right? And so, you hear reasons on one side, reasons on the other side, your mind is kind of tied into a knot, as he says. And then, as I say, starting in book 3, he'll start to, what? Untie the knots, huh? Okay? Now, usually in the play, of course, you spend more time tying the knots than untying them. Here, you spend maybe less time untying them. I mean, tying them, you do untying them, huh? Okay? But an interesting comparison, I think, too, in this regard. Aristotle's talking about the poet, the makers of plots. He says that the young poet or the imperfect poet, they're better at tying the knots than untying them. And that's even more true in philosophy. Most philosophers can tie themselves into a knot and maybe other people into a knot, but they can't untie them. And that's what we admire in Aristotle, especially, and Thomas, too, that they can untie these knots, huh? It's another beautiful comparison between the two. Now, just kind of as a footnote, some might say, well, in your comparison to Roman Juliet, you've left out the rest of book 1 and book 2. And if you want to make a certain comparison, when you read one of these thorough editions of Shakespeare, like the art in Shakespeare or something like that, it has a lot of notes, you know. Most don't try to have too much value, but they pick up a lot of odd little things. And one thing they notice about Shakespeare's plays and so on is that usually there's some antecedent for the plot by somebody else. And Shakespeare will take the plot over and then he'll maybe change a few things and improve the characters and so on and make a masterpiece out of what was kind of dull or unexciting. And if you go back and read the original one, you see how Shakespeare's improved it. That, in a sense, the other guy has kind of marred the plot or not the characters. That's kind of interesting from a practical point of view of writing stories. My brother Richard was an actor. He was a leading actor in high school. He was in a number of performances and so on, interest in the stage. And he tried to write some stories and so on. And he had some of these books like, you know, 101 Plots Used and Abused are one of the books he had in his cell. So, well, there's something like that, right? That Shakespeare had read these earlier stories where the rudiments of the plot are there, right? But you'll see how Shakespeare has improved it. He's done the right thing, you know? And how a character suddenly blossomed. It was kind of, you know, folded in. They had no particular piquancy to them. How they suddenly unfolded Shakespeare, you know? Well, in a sense, Aristotle was doing that in book, what? One, after the premium, because he criticizes the, what? Thinking of the thinkers beforehand. He's not the first guy to have looked for the first causes. But these other guys have kind of marred the job or they haven't quite arrived, right? And the other thing that would be analogous to, in Shakespeare, to this, to the second book now, right? Someone might say, you know, well, if people who have written these plots before have marred them, how do you write a good plot, you know? What really is fiction all about? And you find Shakespeare, you know, like in Habib, especially, where he gives his views about what fiction should be. He really understands what it should be and how it should proceed. And so that's a little bit like he does in book two, right? So anyway, books three through fourteen, which are the remaining books of wisdom, they are proportional, the division of them is proportional to the division now of the play, from which we get into the tying of the knots in book three, and the untying of the knots in books three, or four, rather, through fourteen. You see anything? The person there? Okay, that's one thing, just to give a kind of a bird's eye view of what's going to come up. Now, a second thing here, that's kind of leading into the first reading here. The first reading is most of all about how discoveries are made. Okay? And how discoveries are made, you know, something with difficulty in geometry. Okay? And how discoveries are made where men are apt to disagree. And that way it ties up with the... End of book one. Remember how we said book one after the premium? You get to the premium, you know what wisdom is aiming at. You know it's the most divine knowledge, right? It's therefore the best knowledge, the most desirable knowledge, and so on. Now you really want this knowledge, right? Then we said there's two ways of getting what you don't know. One is to learn it from somebody who already knows it. The other is to discover it yourself, right? And if there's someone who already knows it, it's more convenient to learn it from him than try to discover it all by your lonesome self. Now, in the rest of book one after the premium, Aristotle recalled what his predecessors had said and then examined its efficiency. And what you see by the end of book one is that they have not arrived adequately, let alone fully at the knowledge of the first cause or first causes. They haven't even got an adequate knowledge of what the kinds of causes are. And therefore, you must to some extent discover these things yourself, right? And what does he talk about in the first reading here of book three? How discovery... How to do that. Yeah, how discoveries are made, right? Okay? And he says some very interesting things about how discoveries are made. And what he says about how discoveries are made was taken over by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages and by some of the great physicists in the 20th century. So some people thought that book two was just, what, intertwined by chance, you know, or by somebody else between book one and book three. Because, you see. But as Thomas explains, when he gets into the questions of book three, the order of the questions is determined by what he said at the end of the second book. In other words, there'll be some questions concerning what is wisdom about? Which is necessary to understanding how you should perceive wisdom. Other questions are about the things themselves. You see? And that the first group of questions that I mentioned is before the second one shows that same order, right? So the fifth reading of book two explains the division of the questions of book three and the order of them, right? But the first reading of book two, which talked about the difficulty of knowing, right? Due to the thing or due to the weakness of our mind, right? And that's the reason why natural philosophy is more difficult than geometry because of the things you're trying to know and wisdom is more difficult than geometry because of the weakness of our mind. Well, what he's going to say here about discovery in this first reading is not so much about discovery in geometry but in wisdom or for that matter natural philosophy. You see? But there's a difficulty of discovery there that there isn't in geometry, unless it's difficult in the way. But you see, in geometry, before we discover the proofs of these wonderful theorems, for the most part, there's some famous exceptions, but for the most part, we would all guess the same thing. Now, let me give you a simple example of that. Take theorem five here in book one. It says in a triangle that these two sides equal, then the angles at the base here will be equal, right? Now, before you see the rigorous proof of that, before you find or discover the risk of that, what would you guess? You would guess that. Yeah, wouldn't you? Yeah. And even, you use that theorem to prove, you know, that it is equilateral triangle over all three sides equal, That's the three angles equal, right? But even before you use that, which you have to prove first, to prove this, right? With all these three angles equal, wouldn't you guess that? You would have some people guess they'd be equal, some that they're not, would you? See? So for the most part, in geometry, men would not guess differently before they know. You see? There are a few exceptions, they're very interested in geometry, but I mean, for the most part, right? But in natural philosophy and in wisdom, and in fact, in ethics and biblical philosophy, men regularly guess differently before they know. And some days they don't get any further than their different guesses, right? So that's because, the reason why men guess differently is because of the difficulty. What is it? Because of the difficulty, right? That natural philosophy has that geometry doesn't have. And the difficulty that wisdom has that geometry doesn't have. Although the cause of those difficulties we saw in book two are different, right? Okay? But this is kind of, Laura Stahl doesn't say it. He's talking about something that's necessary for discovery in wisdom and in natural philosophy but not in geometry, right? And that's connected with the greater difficulty of knowing and the greater difficulty of discovery then in wisdom and natural philosophy over geometry. You see? So that's another way this ties in and presupposes, I should say, book two as well as what? Book one, right? Okay? Although someone, you know, not seeing it because there are Stahl and Seeds, right? Might think, you know, at the end of book one, how do you discover? And go to that, right? But there might be something about discovery in those more difficult sciences that you don't have to observe in geometry, right? Mm-hmm. Now, another thing about that too. As Mancidiyan taught me, imagination is very important in discovery, right? And which science is the closest to the imagination of these three? It would be math. Yeah, yeah. And that's kind of a sign of that, right? Is the fact that we tend to all guess the same thing about those, right? It's very close to our imagination. Why these natural things, as Heraclitus, the great Heraclitus said, take your nose to hide, right? And we say God, he's the hidden God, right? A derote devotee locked in state to us. But he's truly hidden, right? Mm-hmm. And we say, well, the triangle is not hidden in that way. You know? Plain geometry means superficial, right? It's on the surface of things, right? You know? You see? Proportion to our mind. Yeah, yeah. So, we guess by our imagination, and imagination is much more adequate to this, huh? In geometry, in a sense, you have to see in your imagination, you know? And imagination is quite insufficient and actually deficient, right? Especially in wisdom, but also, to some extent, in natural philosophy. So, there are ways, then, that book two illuminates book three, right? Mm-hmm. And the fifth reading illuminates the division of the questions, right? The difference between the questions in reading two and reading three in our other kind of division. And, but the first reading of book two on the difficulty of knowing, right? And other things illuminates this first reading here. You see that? Okay. So, let's look at the first reading, huh? He says it is necessary. No. It's a strong word, right? Necessary to achieve this goal, right? For the reasoned out of knowledge sought, huh? He's not saying for all reasoned out of knowledge, is he? Because geometry is a reasoned out of knowledge, right? Mm-hmm. And geometry is the clearest example for us of reasoned out of knowledge, of syllogistic knowledge, and so on. But it is necessary for the reasoned out of knowledge sought, which in this book is wisdom, right? That we go over first those things about which one should first raise questions. Now, what things are those? These are both questions of which some have taken up different positions. So, if there's some question to which the great thinkers before Aristotle have given opposite and different answers, right? there clearly there clearly You have a question to be discussed, right? A disputed question is the Middle Ages of the clock, huh? Now, you look at Thomas' works, so many of them are questionis disputate, right? And you look at the famous Summa Theologiae, and it's kind of a contraction of, each article is a contraction of a question disputate, right? You know, maybe three or four objections, you know, as opposed to 15 or 20, you know, but it's basically the same method, right? And also whatever else has been overlooked. So our Stalin may raise some questions that his predecessors have not explicitly disagreed about, right? About which he has seen, right? But notice he mentions first those that they have given a different answer to, right? Now, he's going to give four reasons here, right? In the next four paragraphs. To doubt well, he says, bene dubitare, it says in Latin, to doubt well beforehand is necessary for those who wish to discover. Now, he's emphasizing the importance of this for discovery. Now, notice the expression there, to doubt well, right? Thomas says in the commentary, to attain well to those things which are truly doubtful. Okay? Now, you see, a good reason for thinking it's this way, and a good reason for thinking it's that way, then you are doubting what well, right? Now, we had a good example of that in our discussion of the great fragment on the mind. Do you remember that? The second thing that the Anaxagoras said was that the mind is self-ruling, right? And I give a good reason to think that that's so, a good sign, at least, that it's being true, that there is a science whereby the mind directs itself. You need logic, right? Which I've taught most of my life. So, the mind is self-ruling, right? There's a heart to our science whereby it directs itself, right? But then we learned that the greater mind can't be mixed up with the material world because the ruler must be separated from the ruled. Yes, sir. And we see that separation in the army, right? That those who command and those who obey must be separated, huh? And we saw, you know, how he'd obey my father like that when he came home, right? And I was getting a little bit out of hand with my mother, right? But she was mixed up with us kids, right? With us all day long, right? My father comes home, it's a different story, right? You sit in that chair and you don't move until I take... And my mother would be amazed at this command. But I imagine if the father stayed home all day with the kids and the mother went out to work, it would be a little bit of the reverse. There seems good reason that the ruler must be separated and distinct from the ruler. How can the mind rule itself then? It's not separated from itself, right? You see? Well, now I'm what? Doubting well, right? See, I have good reasons for thinking that the mind can rule itself and a good reason to think it can rule itself, right? Okay? And I'm doubting well. Now, I oppose that to say what Descartes does, huh? Descartes says, Oh, I've been deceived sometimes, right, huh? So I'm going to doubt everything. Well, is he doubting well, right? See? It's more an act of the will, right? Mm-hmm. Than it is an act of reason, huh? Seeing reasons to say it is so and is not so, right? Mm-hmm. So these are very, you know, important to see what he means by to doubt well, huh? But he's saying to doubt well is necessary for those who wish to discover, to uncover something. For the discovery afterwards is an untying of the difficulty seen before. Mm-hmm. And as I tried to show you in that great fragment of Anaxagoras, that the untying of that difficulty that we had because of those opposing arguments was the discovery of how the mind does direct itself. Remember the solution to that, right? The mind directs itself in what it does not know, but what it does not know. And it directs itself in what is less known to it but what is more known to it, huh? And unless you separate what you know from what you don't know and also what is more known from what is less known, you can't use what you know to know what you don't know. Mm-hmm. And use what is more known to you to know what is less known, huh? And then, as we learned from the life of Socrates, right, most men have mixed up what they don't know and what they do know. And therefore, they don't have the separation of the ruler and the ruler, right? Mm-hmm. So, there is a separation of the ruler and the ruler. That's a little different than two different men, right? Or two different parts of something, huh? Mm-hmm. But the mind is ruled of what it doesn't know by what it does know, okay? If I'm going to buy each of you guys a Coke, well, you've got to count how many guys who are here, right? And multiply that by the cost of a Coke, right? So, I'm using the numbers I know to come to know a number I don't know, right? Mm-hmm. And when, you know, if you add up the things that you're buying in the store, you come to know what you didn't know by numbers you didn't know, right? Mm-hmm, okay? So, this is a very key thing in the history of human thought. For the discovery afterwards is an untie of the difficulties seen before. Einstein, in his book, The Evolution of Physics, I don't know if you've ever seen that book. But it's the nearest thing to a little kind of history of the main ideas of physics, huh? Oh, of course. From Galileo down to his own ideas. But Einstein says that every, you know, essential idea in science was born in this way. It was a time, right? Okay. But the difficulty here is a contradiction, right? Like an example it's giving, right? Now, Max, I mean, Niels Bohr was in some sense even more influential than Einstein in terms of the men he influenced individually as a teacher. Niels Bohr says the same thing, huh? Heisenberg says the same thing, you know? So many good scientists say these things. And, of course, the Middle Ages, the question of disputata was kind of the main way there in theology. many of the fathers that's how they explain the scripture, too. Yeah. It's interesting the way Augustine, you know, the way Thomas takes over Augustine's reasons for the incarnation, right? You know? Look at some of the ones there. Kind of like a little disputatio almost. And assuming, you know, Thomas gives ten reasons for the God-becoming man. He's saying, well, God can make infant reparation, right? But he didn't sin. Man has sinned, but he can't make sufficient reparation. Get a problem there, right? Well, how do you solve it? God became man, right? Okay. Or he says, God should be followed, but he can't be seen. Man can be seen, but he's not a perfect model to follow. No solution, right? Well, there is a solution to it, but an unusual one. God became man, right? And therefore, we'd have a perfect model to follow, but we'd have to see, right? So a little bit of that, he said, the way Augustine's mind works, huh? But Augustine says, you know, heretics are necessary for the development of theology. They contradict some article of the faith, and if they give some reason for, you know, doubting it, either drawn from philosophy or drawn from scripture sometimes, right? And the untying of that knot is where you make a discovery of something in theology that did not end before. Yeah, yeah. Now he says, it's impossible to untie without considering the knot. Okay? Now notice he's making a comparison, right? He's saying that contrary reasons or reasons leading to contradictory statements kind of tie the mind into a knot. Just... Just... Just... Just... It's like when the feet are tied together and they can't go forward, right? If I want to go forward, I've got to examine the knot and find the loose end and then unravel it, right? So he makes that comparison. The doubt of the mind shows this about the thing. For insofar as it doubts, it undergoes something like those tied up. In both cases, it is impossible to go forward, right? Hence, for these reasons, one should have considered before all the difficulties. So you have to examine these knots in Book 3 before we can untie them in Books 4 through, what, 14, right? And if we're stopped, we can't go forward until we untie these knots. But at the same time, the untieing these knots would be the discovery of something that was hidden to us, or hidden from us to begin with, huh? Okay? So that's the first reason he gives, right? There's kind of a double reason, but do consider it as one reason. Now Einstein uses a little different metaphor. He speaks of the wall of contradiction that blocks the scientific progress, right? But you have to, what, break down that wall of contradiction before the mind can go forward. Well, it's the same idea that Aristotle has here, right? And he says every essential idea in science is born in this conflict, huh? Einstein says. In dramatic conflict, right? And this is a comparison to the Mufas I was talking about before, right? Because that involves that, huh? I put a quote here from Twelfth Night here, from Shakespeare's, right? I don't know if you know that play at all. But a viola is shipwrecked, right? And she disguises herself like a man. And she goes into service of the duke there, huh? And she falls in love with the duke, right? She had to hear about his good question, so. But the duke is in love with some woman in the town, right? Who's not giving him the time of day, right? So he uses viola as a messenger to this woman. Well, viola is disguised like a man, right? And so the woman falls in love with viola, thinking she's a man. So you can see the knot that you're in, right? Viola loves the duke that doesn't even know she's a woman. She's disguised. The woman that the duke loves, loves viola, thinking she's a man. And viola loves the duke, right? We tie a knot. So she says at the end, I think, the second act about, O time, thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me to untie. Okay, but the ten syllables do it that way to untie. Okay? Now Aristotle, in the Nicomagin ethics, you may recall saying that, you know, that time is a good, what, helper, you know, untying these knots. And it sometimes takes a long time before the knots can be untyed. So that's the likeness of the plot, right? The lover of plots, in a way, is the lover of wisdom, right? Because, in a sense, wisdom consists in, what, seeing a knot and then untying it. Okay? Now the second and third reasons kind of go together because they are two sides of a coin, huh? Aristotle is saying, if you don't see in some way the difficulty, you don't know where to go. And then the third reason, you don't know when you've arrived. When you can untie the knot, you know you've arrived, huh? So seeing the knot, in a way, tells you in what direction you have to go. It tells you you have to go in the direction of untying that knot, right? But when you succeed in untying the knot, now you know you've, to some extent, arrived at what was unknown before, right? And because those investigating without having first considered the difficulties are like those who do not know where they ought to go. And in addition, they 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 out the difficulties before. It reminds you a little bit of the, of Mina's objection there in the dialogue, right? Where Socrates says he doesn't know what virtue is, and Mina doesn't know what it is, as we know from the conversation about it. And Socrates says, let's put our heads together and try to find what virtue is. And Mina says, well, how can you investigate what you don't know? You know what you're looking for. How would you know if you had found it, right? It's like if I should say, you know, will you go and get me one? Well, you know, by chance you're going to get it, you don't know what you're going to get, right? Now how would you know you had found what I wanted? You know what you're looking for, right? Okay. Well, you can, in a way, know what you're looking for. You're looking for the solution to this problem, right? To this knot. And when you untie that knot, you kind of know that you arrived. Which you didn't do before, right? Okay. So you just think back to the example there with the problem there in Exeggerus, huh? Now, let me make a little comparison here again to Heisenberg, right? Heisenberg in the Kifford Lecture and some. Heisenberg, my scientific friends said probably Heisenberg is the greatest assignment, at least after Einstein. Heisenberg is the man who formulated the greatest change in modern physics, huh? He's responsible for many things, huh? He's the first guy to say that a nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons, huh? He's the first guy to say that. It was after, you know, experimental discovery, the neutron, right? That he said, in fact, that there's neutrons in the very nucleus of the atom. He's responsible for many things, huh? But he's most famous for the principle of indeterminism, as I mentioned before. Anyway, the Gifford Lectures. In the lecture on the history of quantum theory, right? He's giving the history, right? And when they begin to make progress, right? And begin to make progress when they ask the, what? Right question. Right question, right? Okay? And Heisenberg makes the interesting statement that to ask the right question is often to go more than half way to the, what? The truth. Now, I've got to emphasize this point to my students, so I say, let's represent by a straight line here. The distance between, what? Ignorance and knowledge or something, right? And by the straight line, I'm representing the time, right? And the effort necessary to get from ignorance and knowledge, right? Now, most people, if you ask them, where does asking the question, right, come along here, right? First percent. Yeah, I've got to get it down here. There's a question right here, right? Now, if I draw a little line here in the middle of this thing, it's halfway down, right? Where would the right question be? Part of the people put it on this app over here somewhere, right? Heisenberg saying, no. To ask the right question is often to go more than what? Halfway. So let's put it down here somewhere. The right question. This is Heisenberg, right? That's a very interesting thing, right? Now, it's been my experience as a philosopher that I spend more time, right, and effort before I ask the right question than after I ask the right question to get to the truth, right? I think I mentioned that time I picked up my doctoral thesis, and I had a problem that came up. Actually, a problem I had thought about when I was an undergraduate, you know, but I couldn't answer it, and the cert couldn't answer it, and so on, right? 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