Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005)
Lecture 53: Rational Ability, Natural Ability, and the Role of Desire

Transcript
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Without revelation, it's a little different sentence, huh? So, but, you know, when you're in philosophy and you say, is logic necessary? A lot of people don't like logic, right? You say, well, is logic necessary for a philosopher? What would you say? It's an important question, right? Definitely. What would you say? But in what sense is it necessary? The sense of it might be well. Yeah. Well, breathing might be necessary in the sense that you can't live without breathing, right? Okay? But could a man be a philosopher without being a logician? There seems to be absolute in it, I find. In a way, it seems. It's very close, but it's not the absolute. Because he couldn't be a good philosopher, certainly. Well, you see, both Plato and Aristotle say at the beginning of philosophy is wonder, right? And you see this wonder in the first philosophers, huh? And you have the beautiful fragment there of Democritus, is, I would rather discover one cause than be master of the kingdom of the Persians. So I think he's a philosopher, right? Mm-hmm. But logic is not discovered until really Aristotle. And I was just, you know, teaching the Phaedo there. And it's in the Phaedo, which, as far as I know, is the first place where someone has said, we need an art about arguments, right? Which is really what logic is, most of all. So Socrates is represented by Plato there, right? Whether it's Socrates or Plato himself are saying this. But he says, we need an art about arguments, an art that would help us distinguish between a good argument and a bad argument. And among good arguments, between one that's necessary and one that's only, what, probable, right? And this is, you know, what you find in the works of the Father of Logic, right? Because the prior and posterior analytics are about arguments that are necessarily true, the conclusion. And then the books of the topics or places is about arguments that are, what, good but not necessary, right? And this is a reputation, what arguments that are simply bad, right? Okay? So Socrates is kind of anticipating the three parts of the art about arguments, huh? The analytics and the dialectical part and the statistical part, right? That the father of logic Aristotle built, right? And, you know, Albert de Graden, his logical works, sometimes say, you know, the problems for the early Greeks, you know, but they didn't have logic, right, huh? Okay? But would you say that these men before the father of logic were not philosophers? No. You can be a philosopher and you can philosophize as they did, right? And they wondered about things and philosophized about things. But maybe you can't philosophize well or entirely well without, what, logic, right? So maybe logic is necessary for the, what, the well-being. Yeah. Okay? But now if we say, is it necessary to love your neighbor as yourself? In what sense is that necessary? Like logic is necessary for philosophizing or like breathing is necessary for living? Well, this would be necessary, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, if you want to get to heaven, right, you must love your neighbor as yourself, huh? It's not that you'll get there better if you do. You won't get there at all. You don't, right? You see? So, no, it's all these things, huh? But want to still be well-being there because there is, you're making it really a conditional argument. Well, when I say it's necessary to love your neighbor as yourself, I'm thinking if you want to get to heaven, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay? And you won't get to heaven if you don't love your neighbor as yourself. Okay? So, in that sense, it's absolutely necessary, right? Okay? Necessary for the being, right? Sometimes when they talk about the family and the city, right, and they say the family is necessary for being, okay? But the family is not sufficient for the well-being, unless you have Mozart as your brother and Shakespeare as your another brother and Euclid as another brother, right? You need the city for the well-being, right? And so, that's one decision they make, that the city and the family are both necessary, but the family for being, and the city for the well-being, okay? So, when you ask whether loving your neighbor as yourself is necessary, what sense of necessity is it? Yeah, yeah. Or when St. Paul says, without faith, without belief, right, it's impossible to please God, right? Well, then, you say that's necessary, right? And the way, you know, our Lord speaks, you know, without, you know, it's absolutely necessary. It's the way he seems to speak in the Gospels, right? Okay? So, notice all these things that come up, right? With the logic necessary, with the telagranian self. All these things involve understanding some meaning of what? Necessary, right? And, of course, God himself is the one who is necessary to be to himself, right? What does necessary mean there when you say that? Cannot, huh? Yeah, it's very mean necessary, right? Or when I say it's necessary that there be three persons in God, right? Even though I don't understand this too well. But what kind of necessity is that, huh? Because, you know, Thomas has an explicit article, you know, was it choice for the father to serve the son? No, no, no. Well, it wasn't a voluntary act. It was a matter of choice. There's a natural necessity, right? So, this is another meaning of what? Yeah. Yeah. So, it's very necessary to understand the word necessary. So, it's very necessary. So, it's very necessary. So, it's very necessary. So, it's very necessary. So, it's very necessary. reading now, Aristotle is going to be talking about a comparison here of ability and act in the same subject and how one goes from one to the other, right? And he begins in the first paragraph here with this odd thing where he's distinguishing between an ability that seems to be inborn and preceding the act, right? And then these acquired abilities that come to be, as we saw, to perform an act, right? So it's by playing the piano that I acquire the ability to play the piano. And of course this comes up in ethics, huh? It's by doing courageous things that I become courageous and by doing temperate things that I become temperate and by doing just things I become shouts, right? And there's a little paradox there, right? Some of you might say, well, if you become just by doing just things, aren't you just in doing just things? And, well, there's a difference, right? That when you do just things before you're just, there is a what? Struggle there, right? And instability, you might say, right? In you doing the just thing, right? Right? But then as you repeat that act, you acquire the virtue of justice, right? And then you have an habitual inclination to do what is just, huh? And now there's a certain stability there, and there's a it's more pleasant to do it, or more agreeable to do it, right? Right before it might have been a strain to do it, and if you need this, a little uncertainty of how you're actually doing it, right? So, he says, all abilities are either inborn, such as the senses. I don't acquire the ability to see, by seeing, right? But I have the ability to see by nature, and then I see. But some are by use, or by customer, such as that of playing the flute, or by learning, such as that of the arts, huh? Whatever art by use or learning, we must acquire by doing something before. But this is not necessary with those not such, and those for what? Undergoing, huh? Okay? So, the paper doesn't acquire the, what? The ability to be burned, to be burnable, I've been burned. Okay? Now, that's interesting, you know, that distinction, right? And Aristotle, as I said, will raise that problem in the ethics, huh? What do we mean by saying you become courageous by doing courageous things, huh? Because Aristotle would deny that the virtues are simply, what, inborn, huh? Although you might have inclination to some virtue or another. But you don't have, even by nature, an inclination to all the virtues because they're kind of contrary to the way they work. Because some virtues work more by restraining the emotions and some by strengthening them. So it's hard to have an actual inclination to all of them, huh? One thing you notice about powerful men to command, right? They tend to have a sense of anger, right? And you saw that in some of our presidents and so on, huh? They're very nasty with their subordinates sometimes. So, I mean, their inclination to command, which involves the virtue of their command, but then this lack of mildness, huh? They don't have an actual inclination to that. What's the difference between the, by custom and by learning? It seems like this isn't playing the flute in art. Yeah. But, um, we talk about the, maybe the, uh, physical aspect of it, huh? Oh, okay. Okay. But say, as opposed to, say, my, my learning, what? Geometry, right? We're doing geometrical theorem, right? I see. Okay. That's what's nice about, you know, once you know geometry, it's kind of pleasant to think about these things. And, uh, not the same strain that we did before, huh? So when you get out of plain geometry and of solid geometry, you look back on plain geometry, and you go, easy stuff, right? I just know your brother, your brother Mark was very cruel to a friend of mine. He was, my, my friend Pat was convinced he had tricected the angle and your brother Mark is one of the disproved theorem. Yeah, cut down there as ambitious students. Now, in the second paragraph, he's coming back back to, uh, the difference between, what? The natural ability and the rational ability and then, um, how they go to act, right? Because the natural ability is determined to one, so you put it in front of its, what? Okay. Its matter, huh? They can act upon. You put the paper in front of the, what, fire, the fire on that, you burn it, right? But you put the patient in front of the doctor, and, uh, since he, what, is able to do contrary things to the patient, right? Uh, it doesn't automatically do one or the other, right? And he can't do both. So what determines him, right? There's something else involved there, huh? Since that which is able has an ability for something and at some time in some way and whatever other things necessary add in the definition and since some things can move by reason and their abilities are with reason as you recall in that distinction you made. And some are without reason and abilities without reason more natural ability, right? Those abilities, the former, must be in a thing with soul or the latter can be, what? In things without a soul as well as those that have a soul. Okay? Now, as regards abilities of the latter kind, the natural ones, when the one that acts upon and the one that undergoes meet as they are able, the one must act and the other be, what? Active, huh? But with the form ability, that is to say the ability with reason, the rational ability, this is not necessary, right? And this goes back to the difference we saw in the second reading. For all of these, meaning the natural abilities, are something one, productive of one, right? So the fire is productive of heat and so on, but not of coal. But those are of what? Cotton prairies, right? Okay? So Mozart takes, what, the melody before the development, right? Or the turning of the pot. And then the melody comes back afterwards and it's going from major key to minor key. Okay? So, so if he did everything he was able to be, he'd be making the melody, what? The major key to minor key at the same time, which is impossible, right? Okay? And the doctor would be curing you and making you sick at the same time. Or delivering the baby and aborting the baby at the same time, right? But this is impossible that you do contraries at the same time, right? Okay? Necessarily, therefore, there is something other which, what? Determines. And what is that? Well, it's going to be will. Well, it's going to be will, yeah. It's going to be desire, right? Okay? I can teach the students or I can deceive them, right? My knowledge amazes me to do both. And sometimes, you know, I will deceive them but then I'll, you know, go and correct them in their hair, right? But, I've told you some of those sophisticated things that I know will, but deceive them, right? I told you that I wanted to be getting the physics there where Aristotle reasons out that we should consider things in general or in particular. And the reason he gives is that we know things in a confused way before we know them distinctly. And to know something in general is not as distinct as to know it in particular. So, therefore, the general should come before the particular. And then sometimes just, you know, make things difficult. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on. For them, I say, but Aristotle says in many other places that we sense before we understand. And the sense is no only particulars. The reason to know is the general. So sensing comes before understanding, and the particular comes with the general. So Aristotle has clearly contradicted himself. Oh yeah, they're all lying. He's contradicted himself, right? And I know they're going to be deceived by that, right? And so I say, if Aristotle has come up to the floor, you know, say, Berkowitz, you're a sophist, right? You're seeing these poor students. And by the kind of mistake which I said was most common, mixing up the senses of a word. So when Aristotle says that the general comes before the particular, by general he means the more universal, and by particular the less universal. But when he says elsewhere that particulars come before the general, right, by particulars he means what? For singulars, singulars. And by general, universal. So he's saying that singulars come before any universals, but among universals the more universal comes for the less universal. But because we use the word particular, both for singulars, like when we say Socrates is a particular man, right? And for the less universal, like we say the dog is a particular kind of animal, right? Or particular doesn't mean singular, but something less universal than animal. And we use the word general sometimes to mean, what, universal, and sometimes to mean more universal, right? They are deceived because they can't distinguish the two senses of general and the two senses of, what, particular, right? Okay? Incidentally, I sometimes, you know, give a second objection, say, okay, it got off this time Aristotle, but if the singular comes first, which is closer to the singular, the more universal, the less universal. And it seems, well, the less universal is closer, so wouldn't they go from the singular to the less universal to the more universal? See? But you're forgetting that we know things in a confused way before distinctly. This is a true reason as well as the senses. And so I try to bring it out with some very simple examples. One example I give is the claim to classify alcoholic beverages, right? And take nobody's word for it, right? All your knowledge of alcoholic beverages would begin with individual, singular glasses of whiskey and beer and wine that you drank, right? But now when you started to, what, classify these things to see the universals, right? What would you see first, huh? The distinction between beer and wine, or the distinction between Budweiser and Miller's, or something? Or the distinction between Carbonet, Sauvignon, and Pinot Noir. Well, you'd see the distinction between wine and beer before you'd see the distinction between particular kinds of wines, huh? And, of course, another reason for saying that is that the distinction between the difference between wine and beer is much greater than, say, between Carbonet, Sauvignon, and Pinot Noir, or between different kinds of wines and beer, right? So it's easier to see, right? All right, give an example. If you're going to classify the vegetation on this campus, present company excluded that. All you know is you'll begin with your senses, right? So the individual trees and bushes and patches of grass that you saw, right? But now among the universals, what would come first? Tree and bush are the particular kinds of trees, particular kinds of grass. Well, you'd see the difference between trees and grass before different kinds of grass, huh? Different kinds of trees. When I was in college in a botany class, you know, we had to go out and identify trees on the campus, and no one mixed up a, what, broadleaf tree with a needle one, but you get the nori pine, all kinds of might, which I can never keep straight. Then they start mixing them up, right? You see? Okay, so although all the analogy of the trees on campus begins with their senses, and therefore is singular trees, huh? You'll see the difference between a needle tree and a pine tree, I mean, a needle tree and a flat-leaf tree, before the difference between different types of needle trees and so on. So I gave you this other example I love with, I asked them, which is better, breathing or philosophizing? I told you that. And, of course, I said earlier in the class, it wouldn't mix up the senses of the before and after, right? They'd forgotten that. They told them that. You didn't see what you didn't see. And so I said, now why do you say that breathing is better than philosophizing? Of course, the reason I give, right, is that breathing, if you're not breathing, you won't be doing anything else. I said, well, that shows that breathing is before philosophizing, philosophizing in the second sense of before and being, right? Breathing can be without philosophizing, but philosophizing cannot be without breathing. But we're not asking whether breathing is before philosophizing in the second sense of before. We're asking in the fourth sense, is it better? You see? And you're saying that because it's before in the second sense, it's before in the fourth sense. I said, that would be like saying that because Chaucer is before Shakespeare in the first sense of time, right? Therefore, he's before him in the sense of being better. That's obviously no mistakes, eh? Okay? But I know they're going to make this mistake, right? You see? So, I'm able to what? Teach them and to deceive them, right? In my knowledge of logic and so on, it enables me to be the one, right? And I can't both teach and deceive them at the same time, okay? So, what determines, then, that I do one rather than the other? Yeah, do I love them or I hate them or something, right? Do you want to get to heaven? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did I stop to see my students? So, Aristotle says, then, in the fifth paragraph, Necessarily, therefore, there is something other which determines. I say this is desire or what? Choice, huh? Okay? For whichever two things is chiefly desired, it will make when it is present and is able, and near the undergoing, right? Therefore, everything which has an ability with reason, when it desires that which it has an ability, and as it has it, necessarily makes this, right? So, when I choose to teach, and the student is there, and it's only teachable, then I teach, right? Okay? Or if I choose to deceive, right? And the deceivable is there, then I deceive. Okay? He said, you don't have to add nothing outside preventing, because we put in our idea of possible, right? That you have all the, what? Circumstances, right? When you can do this. Okay? He goes on to point out that even if one has a wish or desire to do two things or contrary things at the same time, one will not do them, right? One does not have the ability to, what? Do both at the same time, yeah. Now, that's kind of important, huh? You go back to the first philosophers, and you get the two great thinkers that are pedigrees in Anaxagoras. And Anaxagoras says that the greater mind is responsible, right? Mover, right? And you may recall that he came to see this perhaps in this way. like effects have like causes, huh? That's probable, right? And then he sees the order in artificial things, like the order in the building here, say, or anything made by art. And he sees the likeness between that and the order in what? Natural things, huh? That order is so similar that if art was to make what nature makes, it would make it in the same order, right? So if my natural teeth were replaced with artificial teeth, the dentist would make it in the same order, and the dentist would make it in the same order, We put the biting teeth in front and the chewing teeth in back, in the same order that nature has done. Now we know the cause of the order in artificial things, which is the human mind, right? So if you see the similarity then in the order in the parts of an animal and the parts of an artificial thing, and you know the cause of the order in the artificial things, and like effects of like cause, right? Then it becomes a reasonable guess that there's a greater mind, right, responsible for the order in natural things. Makes sense, huh? But then you have these other philosophers like Empedites, who speaks of love and hate as being the movers, huh? And he has a kind of mindless love and hate moving the world. And that's why he has kind of, you know, ideas like some of the modern evolutionists, you know, where things are brought together and they cut them being brought together and they cut them being brought together and eventually they make sense. God knows how many failures, right? And then you have Parmenides, when he condescends and talks about the natural world, he talks about love as what moves things, right? Okay. Well, now in the light of this being said here, who's right? Right, see? Or does each of them have a part of the truth? What would you say about this? Is the first mover a greater mind, a greater reason, right, than our own? Is it shown by the order in these things? Or is the first mover love, right? Or love and hate? Which is it? It's probably the higher intellect moving nature and how it is to am. Yeah, but if there's the same knowledge of opposites, right, going back to what we saw in the second reading, and mind makes you capable of doing contrary things, you can't do contrary things together at the same time, it doesn't automatically follow from a greater mind, some effect, right? If it automatically followed whatever it's capable of, if it automatically did what it's capable of, it would do what? Contraries. That's impossible, right? So, as he says here, there must be some appetite, right? Love or hate or whatever it is, right? That determines that one will do this rather than, what, that choice, right? So, maybe there's not much of truth in what both of them are saying, but neither one has the whole truth about what the mover is, huh? Okay. What? Dante. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But sometimes we might say that the divine mind is the cause of these things, right? You know, Thomas, the way he begins the Summa Contra Gentiles, you know, he says that the end of the whole universe is the end of its first mover, and its first mover is intellect, and the end of the intellect is truth. Therefore, truth is the end of the whole universe, right? He's emphasizing that it's his mind, right? But another time, he might emphasize the fact that, what, God doesn't produce us by natural necessity, like some of the Neoplatonists who are maintaining, right? Or, like, you know, Spinoza would say, you know, that the universe precedes from God, like the equality, the two right angles precedes from what the triangle is, right? That God produces by kind of natural necessity. And I think you find in the Vatican I, right, you know, his concern about that error, right? And emphasizing that God does not produce the universe, right, by natural necessity, but it's a matter of choice, right? Okay? So there's an element of truth in what both are saying, huh? Okay? And sometimes, you know, when I teach the early Greeks, I will say, let me present what they say as reasonable guesses, right? Not necessarily the truth, right? And so we try to see a reason that they might have for what they're saying. But then I also have this kind of comparative thing, and I'll say, you know, why is an axiomonez position a better guess than, say, Therese, right? It's the first matter. Why is air a better guess than water, right? There are various reasons, like, you know, air is thinner than water, right? And so I asked him, you know, is the first matter the thickest of things or the thinnest of things? And do you make the thin out of the thick, or do you make the thick out of the thin? Well, I have to just think of a thick book, you know, where it's made out of thin pages, right? So it seems that the first matter would be the thinnest of things, right? Just like an atom is thinner than, what, a molecule, and a proton or electron is thinner than an atom, right? So the thinner something is, the more, what, the better guess it would be for the first matter, right? So if I say the molecule is the beginning of all things, and you say the atom, and someone else says the unmutipartible, you're getting thinner and finer, right? So the poets say Mother Earth is the beginning of all things, and Thales says water, and that siminence is air, right? So you're getting something finer and thinner, so that's, okay. So sometimes I'll ask them, who's better, Empedocles or Anaxagoras, right? Because Empedocles says the movers are love and hate, and Anaxagoras says it's mine, right? Right, then. Okay. Well, I say, which, apart from the fact that Empedocles takes two causes, you know, instead of one, but he has one love which brings things together, right, and one that separates things, which is hate, right? Okay. So I say, which is a better separator of things, hate or mind? My second example is, was it hate to split the atom? Or is it the mind that figured out how to separate these things, right, huh? You know? And even washing clothes and so on, right, huh? It's the mind that figured out how to separate these things, huh? What do you do if you get red wine stains on a white tablecloth, huh? What do you do? What? Send it to the tablecloth? No, no, you take it to the sink, and you boil water, and you pour boiling water, and it comes out. Like it does. You know? Okay, that's it. That hate that made me see how to separate that red stain from the thing? No, it's cancer. Sure, you hated the red thing, so. That's why you wanted to get rid of that. Or we talked about how the geometry, right, separates quantity and shape from things that matter. Was it hate that separated them, right? Of course, the mind is always dividing and what? And, you know, okay, so the mind seems then a better, what, separator than what? Than hate, right? It separates things, huh? But hate can't separate them. And then I say, now, which is better to bring things together, love or mind, you see? Well, there, you might argue that love is a better to bring you together, right? But Empedocles makes a mistake of saying that, what, love brings things together in different ratios, and that's how you get different things, like flesh and blood and bone, they have different ratio. I say, now, where does that word ratio come from? Yeah, yeah. So, is it love that makes the bartender, I say, combine the whiskey and the sweet vermouth in the ratio of two to one? Well, you'd have to love, what, manhattans, right? To put them together in the right, what, ratio, right? And these little books on, you know, what proportions or ratio you're supposed to have, you know, that they give aside to, they call it mixology. But even the name, mixology, uses the word logos, right? Rather than love, right? So it's mind that puts things together in a certain ratio, huh? And so I argue in many ways that mind's a better guess, right? It can do what hate does better, maybe, separate things better than hate does, right? And as far as love, it's a little more answer to clear, but mind is more able to bring things together in a definite ratio than what... Love would seem to be, right? And then it has an advantage of being one instead of two. You can do what the others do, and even better, with what? But that maybe isn't the whole thing, right? Because you come back in the light of this here and you say, hey, maybe each of these great thinkers sees a part of the truth, right? And go like that, will. Yeah. And what's the reason for that? Because the mind cannot produce something, what? Automatically, you know? It's capable of contraries. And therefore it needs something else, and that's desire or choices, he says, that would determine it to do one of the opposites rather than another, right? I need the love and the aid of Empedicles. I love the students, I'll teach them, if I hate them, I'll deceive them, right? You see? In a sense, if the doctor aborts the baby, he says he hates the baby, right? It's his hate, in a sense. He might claim to love the one, but he's really hating her, right? He's hating the baby, right? But if he delivers the baby, then it's because he loves the baby, right? That's it. But his medical art enables him to be the one, right? And so his ability that he has in medical art doesn't determine which one he will do. And he can't do both. So there's got to be love or hate there to determine which one he does, huh? So this is important in understanding God, right? As I say, there are these other thinkers that make the other mistake, though, of saying what? That God produces the universe by a kind of natural necessity, huh? But then when you go to the Trinity, you've got a little more problem there, right? Because there you don't have... The Father was not able to produce a son and not to produce a son. And in our scripture passages where it says, you know, the Father loves the son and shows him everything, right? But that love is an approbation, you might say, right? He didn't... You know, the Church Fathers are very clear about that, Dan, that he wasn't against his will. But it was with his love that he generated the son, right? But it wasn't through love as a clause, right? But because God naturally understands himself, that he naturally forms... or actually precedes his thought of himself, right? Because he naturally loves himself, right? So there's not a ability for opposites there, right? The Father and the Son are not able to not breathe the Holy Spirit. Okay? But, you know, sometimes the Fathers want to bring out that they weren't forced to do this, like, you know, against their will, so this thing, right? You know? It's not harming their will. It wasn't harming their will. When you're talking in comparison to creatures, right, then you have to see that God's choice there is involved, huh? Chesterton, when somebody asks, is it the best of all possible royalties? No, it's the best of all impossible. Impossible? Yeah, because it's not necessary by itself. God doesn't create by a natural necessity. Yeah, yeah. Thomas spends a lot of time in the Subacandajin here, that's reasoning against this idea of natural necessity, huh? But this kind of came back in the modern mind, Spinoza, Hegel, and people of that sort, that creeps into the other thinkers from them. A dangerous, dangerous thing. Well, that's a good place to stop now, because this is the end of the first part now of the ninth book, huh?