Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005)
Lecture 60: Act, Knowability, and Truth in Being

Transcript
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The end of all our knowledge is the knowledge of the first cause. Then you go back to the first, the premium to the diama, right? And you see that a knowledge of a better thing is a better knowledge, right? From which you can see that a knowledge of the best thing must be, therefore, the end, right? Because the end is always better, but it's for the sake of the end, right? So the end of all our knowledge must be the best knowledge, and that must be the knowledge of the best thing. And, well, they fit together, those two truths, right? You see? But if you're mistaken about one of those, then they're going to clash, right? Yeah. In the first book of the Nicomachian Ethics, Aristotle has reasoned out in a preliminary way, at least, the end or purpose of man, and now he wants to go out to experience and show that everything fits together with this, right? And that's what he says, that the truth, all things harmonize. This is a beautiful example of it, though, you know? These two great truths, huh? It comes up so naturally, because you see how act is more perfect than ability, and how act is, simply speaking, and time and causality and so on, before ability. And therefore, the first cause will be, in fact, the best thing, huh? And then I go on, and I say, well, how much better is God than other things, huh? You see? And you kind of end up wondering, why should you think about anything but about God, right? You know, I kind of joke, you know, if they ask me, what are you going to do to your retirement request? Well, I'm going to think about the best thing. What's that? So I'm going to try and think about the best thing. Why? You know, if knowledge of a better thing is better than knowledge of what is definitely a better thing else, you know, if I think it might bother to think about anything else, I don't see any reason to you. I'll spend my retirement thinking about God, right, huh? And it turns out to be more interesting than anything else. Well, then in the fourth paragraph here, in the top of page 12 there, he draws another conclusion, huh? And therefore, in the things which are from the beginning, in the eternal things, there is nothing, what? Bad, because there's no ability there, right? Okay. Neither failure nor corrupted. So there's nothing in, say, the angel is bad as far as our nature is concerned, right, huh? Okay, another question about the will, but it doesn't go into that here. But therefore, it's the only about God who's pure act, right? You could say there could be nothing, what? Bad in him, right? Okay. Because badness is always after ability. And God is before this ability to be actualized, right? There could be anything bad in God. Again, with the truth, all things harmonize, right? Now, we'll see in other ways that there could be anything bad in God, but this is one reason, right, to see that, huh? I didn't give any break today, but I guess there's no sense in stopping now, right? I guess there could be anything bad in God. I guess there could be anything bad in God. I guess there could be anything bad in God. Now, in the last paragraph of the 10th reading, Aristotle is going to turn from consideration of being and the good, now, to being and what? No, right? And therefore, being and what? True, right? Okay? And what he wants to bring out here is that act is more knowable than what? Ability, right? And an ability is knowable only through act, huh? And he takes a very simple example from the science of geometry. And the geometrical figures are found by act, huh? For we find by dividing, if they were already divided, they would have been clear. But now they exist in ability. Why are the angles of the triangle equal to two right angles? Because the angles about one point are equal to two right angles. If then the line parallel to the side had been already drawn, it would have been clear right away to anyone seeing it. Let's just stop and take an example there, right? That theorem depends upon the theorem about the parallel lines, right? The theorem about the parallel lines says that when a straight line falls upon parallel lines, it makes the, what, alternate angles equal, right? Okay? Now, you look at the triangle. Do you see that the three angles of the triangle equal to two right angles? No. You've got to make actual something that's their own inability. You draw a straight line, as long as you're doing it, through the vertex parallel to the, what, base. Therefore, these two must be, what, equal, right? Being alternate angles. And then these two must be, what, being alternate angles, right? So these two equal to those two, and the third one makes up the two right angles, right? Now it's become actually knowable, right? But it has to be made actual before it's actually what? Knowable, right? Is that what I mean? Right? And it's only there, that line in ability, it's not knowable yet, is it? Even if you know, what you have to know in this case, is this theorem here already, right? The way Euclid does it, of course, is a little different. What he does is to combine two things. He extends the exterior angle, right? And then he draws the inline, what, parallel, right? And then he uses the alternate theorem to make these things equal. And then there's another theorem that's shown that this is equal to the, what, the interior opposite. So this angle is going to be equal to this. It's going to be that. So he combines two things. The exterior angle is equal to the interior opposite angles, plus the three are equal to the right angles. So. But in any case, you have to make actual something that is there only in what? Ability, right? Okay. And of course, we saw in the study of the soul that all those abilities are knowable only through their what? Acts, right? And how do you know you have the ability to see? Yeah. But you open up your eyes, before you open your eyes tomorrow morning, you might go blind during the night time. And this happens to people sometimes, for some horrible reason, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. So you don't really know that you have the ability to see until you open your eyes again, right? And actually see, huh? Some people are sometimes injured, you know, and their eyes are covered up, right? And they're not sure how much ability they've retained until the things are taken off, and so on, right? Okay. And somebody paralyzed or not, right? You know, maybe you don't know, but they can't move his limbs. And you might realize that he's lost his ability. So, even the ability to be mistaken is known by mistakes and right, right? But notice that all the Greek philosophers are disagreeing, you know, that at least all but one are mistaken, right? Maybe they're all mistaken, but, you know, maybe faculty meetings, you know, and have two guys down there counting their votes, right? Well, if they get the same count, yes and no's, and they accept it, they get a different count, and they have to go into it again, right? So, if they get two different counts, yes and no's, at least one of them is left. Mistaken, right? It's made an error, right? Counting. They both could, but at least one has, right? Okay. Why is every angle in a semicircle a right angle? That's supposed to have been a theorem that the first philosopher Thales showed, right? So it's a famous theorem, huh? Okay, well, I suppose there's various ways of doing that, right? So if you have a circle, and you bicep it here, draw the diameter, the theorem says that whatever points you take up here, other than the endpoints, of course, just take the arbitrary here, if you draw straight lines from that to the endpoints of the diameter, this angle will always be a what? Right angle, right? Mm-hmm. Now how do you know that? See? One way, I suppose, would be to take the, what, center of the circle, right? Mm-hmm. And then draw a line from here to, what, there, right? Mm-hmm. Then, what would you know? If two sides are equal there, the ones coming off the center point would be equal. Yeah. But you'd know that, first of all, these, what, six angles from this theorem up above, are equal to what? Four right angles, right? Okay? Mm-hmm. And you know that these two down here would be equal to what? Two right angles. Yeah. So that means that these are equal to what? Two right angles. Two right angles. But now, since the radius and the circle are equal, these two right angles are equal, aren't they? Mm-hmm. And since these two are radius and the circle, these two are equal, right? So one of each is going to be half exactly of the remaining two, and therefore be a right angle, right? Mm-hmm. Make sense? Mm-hmm. Now, if you know, if you know these two theorems, right, then an isosceles triangle, right, the angles at the base are equal. That's the fifth theorem of book one, right? Then you know this theorem right here, right? Okay? These are both in book one. This is in book, what, three, right? Okay. Well, then you know that these two triangles here, right, have interior angles equal to four right angles, right? Okay. And then these two at the base here add up to two, right? Right. So they may be four, have to be two right angles, right? Mm-hmm. And since these are all, what, equal, the radii, right, A and B here must be equal, and C and D. So B and C will be half of A, B, C, and D. And half of two is, of course, one right angle, right? Okay. But you don't have to be concerned here about, let's say, fun of all the details in this demonstration, but you have to make the lines actual, right? Sure. Okay? In order for it to be knowable, right? It's not really knowable, right? And a lot of times, you know, you see in Utah, you know, the construction is kind of the genius of the theorem, right? You see? And once you see how the lines might be drawn, oh, yeah, now it all makes sense to me, right? So Aristotle is saying something is knowable insofar as it is in what? It's actual, right, huh? And it could also say, too, that the knower and the known become one in knowing, right? And so as the knower is actualized, right, what he knows must be actual, huh? But this is a very simple way of showing it here, huh? Okay? So God being pure act is going to be most what? Knowable. That's where Aristotle said back in the second book, the difficulty in knowing must be more in us than in things, right? Because what is most knowable is least knowable to us. And this is the point he makes back in the, what, beginning of the physics, the beginning of the eight books of natural hearing. That what is more knowable to us is less knowable. And what is more knowable is less knowable to us. And there you meet again that kind of distinction that's so important between what is so simply, right, without qualification, and what is so in some way, right, in some imperfect way. You know, you go back to the Mino and you first kind of meet that, that kind of mistake. And even more simple than what Mino brings out there is say, when a student or somebody asks a question, does he know what he wants to know? Or you could say, if you don't know what you want to know, it's kind of hard to ask questions, isn't it? Right? So the man who asks a question must know in some imperfect way what it is he doesn't know. But if he knew it simply without qualification, he wouldn't have to ask the question, would he? You know, they always talk about this, you know, that people are afraid to ask a question because it will reveal the fact that you're ignorant of something, right? But you've got to kind of encourage people to ask questions because if they don't, they remain ignorant, right? And I was reading an account there of Einstein in Berlin and so on where people are kind of afraid to ask questions because of this, you know. Einstein was never afraid to ask a question, right? Right to the point. That's kind of a good thing in Einstein, right? But the, so the point is, you can't ask a question, you certainly can't investigate what it is, right? That you want to know, right? Unless you know in some way what it is you want to know, right? Okay? So the guy is looking for the cure of cancer, you're looking for the cure of this or that disease, right? You must know in some way what he's looking for, right? He must in some way recognize this disease and know what it means to speak of the cause of disease, right? So in some way he knows you're looking for the cause of this disease in particular, right? Without knowing what that cause is, strictly speaking. Okay? Well then we see, we see the moderns there and the materialists being deceived by that kind of mistake, right? When they think that matter is the beginning of all things, huh? What is before other things in some way is before simply they're saying. You see? Yeah. Comes up again and again, huh? So that's a very, very important distinction, huh? But it comes up again in the beginning of the natural road there, or talking about the natural road, huh? Because a road means a before and after, huh? So the natural road in our knowledge, part of the before and after along that road is that what is more known to us is before what is less known to us. But what is more known to us is less knowable, and what is less known to us is more knowable, right? Okay? That's what the Bible's fiction of God dwelling in light and accessible. He's too illuminating, right? He's too knowable. So you'll never know God as much as he's knowable, right? The only one who knows God as much as he's knowable is God himself. But we'll see him as he is. But not as much as he is. So you never get bored with him, Thomas says. You never get bored with God, huh? I suppose he takes up the knowability of these things a bit. You say, act is more knowable now than ability, right? So when Aristotle, if you go back to the second book there of wisdom, remember when Aristotle Aristotle says there can be two causes of the difficulty of knowing. It can be difficult to know because of the defect of the knower, or the defect of the what? The known, right? So the difficulty in knowing matter, the first matter, and in knowing motion and time is that they hardly are. And so when Aristotle takes up time, he says, well, gee whiz. The past doesn't exist anymore. The future doesn't exist yet, right? Is there any time in the now? No. So how can this exist, he says, when the parts of time don't exist, right? You see? I mean, how could this chair exist if the legs and the seat in the back and so on didn't exist, right? It wouldn't exist, would it? Well, the parts of time are the past and the future. There's no time in the now. In the past and the future don't exist. So how can something exist whose parts don't exist, right? So the puzzling thing about the time is to see how it is at all, right? So there the difficulty is in the thing itself. It is so what? Potential, right? And in the case of God, the difficulty is in the reverse, in the weakness of our what? Our mind, huh? Now as I pointed out before, you could say you have the same two kinds of difficulty in a way in love, right? It can be difficult to love something because it's not very lovable. In which case the defect is in the thing itself, right? So rock and roll, I don't think it's very lovable. I find it hard to love rock and roll. But I think the defect is not in my heart, but in the thing itself, right? See? But if you find it difficult to love wisdom or difficult to love God, huh? Then maybe the defect is in your what? Heart, huh? Okay? What was that? It's EWT or something like that. They're talking about the mass and so on. And young people and so on. And some people say, you know, oh, the mass is so boring, right? They say, you know, well, the problem is that if you think the mass is boring, it's because you are boring. But it means that the difficulty is in you, right? Not in the mass, right? You know, but other things are boring and, you know. It's kind of funny, I was reading Human Life International, you know, the old newsletter they said. And the father was over in, I was in Indonesia, I guess it was. And they took him to see the big Buddhist temple there, right, and so on. And I guess it's flat at the top there to represent nirvana, nothing, you know. He said, I didn't have to come all this way to, you know, to experience nirvana. I could have stayed home and turned on TV. But TV, it's very boring, right? But it's not in us, the problem. The problem is in the people putting on this temple. But if the mass is boring, it's the trouble is in you, right? So if you find it difficult to love God, the defect, the cause is in your heart. The defect of your heart. If you find it difficult to love cancer, the difficulty is in the cancer, not in you, right? You know, not a very low belief, right? So you have the same two types of difficulties, right? In knowing, right? And Aristotle, in a sense, is showing, right, why the difficulty must be chiefly, for us, in the defect of our mind, right? And that's because we seem to know least the things of the most knowable of all. And so he compares us to the bat, whom apparently he thought flew at nighttime because the light of the day was too bright for it, right? That's what scripture says, right? God dwells in light inaccessible. He's too knowable for us. Okay? But matter and motion and time are not knowable enough, right? So the difficulty in knowing them is in them. And so geometry is more, you know, we can, it's easier for us to learn geometry and sincere than to learn about matter and motion and time or about God, right? But those natural philosophy and wisdom are more difficult than geometry for different reasons, right? Okay? That's kind of striking to see that, huh? You might know what you'll see in the first question of the Summa Theologiae when Thomas is asking for the scriptures, you use metaphors, right? And you say, well, aren't the metaphors appropriate to poetry? And so on. And Thomas will say, well, the reason why poetry and scripture use metaphor are in a way just for the reverse reason, right? It's a sign of something not so accessible to our mind if we use metaphors. But the reason why God is not so accessible to our mind and the things the poet talks about is just reversed. In one case, it's because of the weakness of our mind that these things are not accessible. The other is these other things hardly have any knowability, huh? You can see, you know, when Shakespeare writes a play, let's say, or a Greek dramatist writes a play, you have a plot with a beginning, middle, and end, right? Well, that's a nice order there, beginning, middle, and end, right? But do the events of our life, do they form a beginning, middle, and end? Do they? Just before I came down here, the guy from the computer, I think it's up in my office there, setting up a new program, some kind of crazy thing there. I was getting all my back emails, you know, 60 emails. Now, what does that get through with this class here? You know? In other words, there are many things in our life that don't, you know, seem to form a hole, right? They just, you know? And what the poet does, though, is to select a course of action that has a beginning, middle, and end, and therefore it's kind of appealing to the mind to see that order, right? But you give me an order that things don't, what, have in life, huh? Or you take a great portrait painter, right? And he tries to capture the whole man's character in this one expression on his face, huh? So you get a master like Titian, you know, I think it's kind of a master of the portrait, huh? He seems to capture the man's whole character in this one expression, right? Well, you know how people take pictures of us, you know, and most of the time we don't like our pictures taken of us, you know, and so on. But one picture doesn't seem to really capture the person's whole character, does it, you see? So the painter is giving in his portrait a meaning, you might say, right, to an expression that no expression in real life has, huh? He's giving more meaning to it than he really has, huh? It's like when you hear, you know, the music of Mozart, you know, and you want to talk about it, you see, something, you know. I go down, I start talking to my professor, and he says, Dwayne, you think that's more intelligible than it is? He can't quite say what it is that Mozart is saying, right, huh? But Mozart seems to be giving a meaning, right, intelligibility to the emotions, right, that they don't maybe really have in real life, huh? You know? So he's raising things up, right, huh? Okay? But in Scripture, you're doing just the reverse. You're trying to bring these things down, right? That's why I say, you know, that Dante is not really a poet in the ordinary sense, huh? The way Homer is, or Shakespeare, right? You know, some people say the Trojan War might have been a little pirate grade sometime. But the way Homer, you know, it becomes a symbol of the whole human life, you know. You know how Job says man's life on earth is a warfare, you know, and he seems to have the whole life there, huh? He seems to be giving much more meaning to some pirate grade than a pirate grade would have in real life, huh? You see? But Dante's trying to bring down heaven and, you know, to the earth that you can't, you know. So he's trying to imitate, in a sense, what Scripture's doing, right? But that's really not so, you know, appropriate for the poet as such, right? You know? I'll give you a copy of Homer, huh? You can have Homer of Dante, you know? Got a nice edition there. That'd be great. Thank you. Yeah. Got the nice Gustav Dorei illustrations, you know those? Oh, yeah. Yeah, those are kind of masterpieces, you know. Oh, yeah. Nice. He used to pick up and find his old ones, you know. My brother Richard had a copy of the Gustav Dorei, and they said, I was going to use bookshops. I finally found, you know. I'd give them some away before, you know, but I've got a couple more, so I'll give you those ones, maybe. Okay, well, next time... We will finish here the book, reading 11, and then we'll look at this dogmatic constitution on the Catholic faith, before we go into the summa, so we can be balanced. So I'll leave these copies for me, I'll take one, you've got enough copying for everybody here, just take one, leave it. Okay, but we won't be into this next time much. Okay, now... angels strengthen the lights of our minds, order and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. St. Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor, pray for us and help us to understand all that you've written. He used to say Nicholas, huh? Yes, yes. Let your stockings out, I see. So now we're down to the 11th reading, kind of continuation of the thing begun in the last paragraph, the last reading, where St. Thomas showed that something is knowable or understandable to the extent it is an act. And now he's going to talk about truth. Now it's interesting that this consideration of goodness in the last reading, and now the consideration of truth here, follows upon the consideration of the perfection of being, huh? And how act is more perfect than what? Than ability, huh? The passability. And therefore it's also better, huh? And also as we'll see here, more true, huh? But notice the order here, huh? That Aristotle immediately after perfect takes up good before what? True, huh? And I think it casts some light upon what Thomas does in the Summa Theologiae, huh? Because when he takes up the so-called substance of God, right? He takes up that he's simple, and that he's perfect, huh? And that he's infinite, and that he's unchanging, and that he's one, in that order, right? Those five things. But to some of them, or most of them, he attaches another question, or some, more than a question in some cases, is something that follows upon that particular attribute. So following upon, say, the unchangeableness of God is his being eternal. So the question on the eternity of God follows upon his being unchangeable. Just like in natural philosophy, the consideration of time follows upon the consideration of motion. And so the negation of motion is followed by the negation of time and eternity. Or on the infinity of God, you take up his being ubiqui, everywhere, huh? Okay? Well, what does he take up following the perfection of God? His goodness. His goodness, the goodness of God, right? He doesn't take up truth there, huh? Okay? Although Aristotle sees a certain connection here, huh? But notice the order. Aristotle takes up goodness first, or better, huh? And then he takes up truth of what is more true, huh? As if good is more closely connected with perfect, huh? And this looks back, well, let's finish my comparison first. Where does Thomas take up truth? That God is true or truth itself, huh? In the Prima Paris, huh? Well, it's not until he gets into the consideration of the operations of God, right? And he's talked about his understanding and so on, right? Well, this looks back to what we saw in the sixth book of wisdom, that good and bad are chiefly in, what? Things. But truth and falsity are primarily in the mind, huh? Okay? Well, Thomas is very close to what Aristotle says in book six. So he talks about the substance of God, he talks about the perfection of God's substance, and then about the goodness of God's, before he's ever even talked about the, what, will. He doesn't talk about the will until after he talks about the understanding of God, huh? But he talks about the truth of God after he talks about the understanding of God. And that shows a real understanding of what Aristotle taught us in the sixth book of wisdom, huh? That good and bad are primarily in things, right? And true and false, primarily in the mind. And that's the reason why there can be the same knowledge of opposites, as we said before, but not the same love opposite. So it's the same science of ethics that is about virtue that also tells you about the vice as opposed to virtue. And knowing what virtue is helps you to know what vice is, huh? Just like knowing what health is helps you to know in medical art what sickness is, huh? But there isn't the same love of virtue and vice. And that's because love goes out to the thing in itself, and one opposite excludes the other in things. But knowing brings it into the mind and the understanding of one opposite helps you to understand the other opposite. That's why our pages are black and white, huh? Because it's easier to see it, huh? Opposites stand out in contrast to each other. But it's not true about love, right? So the love of virtue impedes the love of vice and vice versa. Yeah. Now here, Aristotle doesn't bring that out, you know, because he's looking at kind of the basis of truth in things, huh? But nevertheless, it's significant, I think, that he takes up truth after taking up goodness here, right? He's done perfection, then goodness, and then what? Truth, right, huh? Because goodness is more closely connected with perfection, huh? And that will come out in the way Thomas will proceed in the Summa Theologiae. I'll remind you, Nate, when you get there. I mean, when I first read the Summa Theologiae, the first parting way, I used to have a wonderful course, and I was in college called Natural Theology, and we do the questions in the Summa up to the Trinity, right? You know, in philosophy. Because, you know, the substance of what Thomas is doing there is taken from arguments that reason can come up with. But I didn't realize the significance of goodness being taken up with the perfection of God in the treatise on substance before he even talked about his will, right? And truth not being taken up until you're in the treatise on the operation of God, and after his understanding. But when I saw the sixth book of wisdom, then a light broke upon me. Your style illuminated me, right? But you see how Thomas understood those things, huh? Okay? It's interesting, you know, when Plato approaches the beginning of things, in the Republic, when he touches upon this, and then in the Symposium, he speaks of the first thing as being the good itself, right? And the beautiful itself, right? He doesn't define it as the true itself, although it is the true itself, too. But you wouldn't maybe see that so clearly until you'd seen that the first thing understands, and therefore there's truth in the first cause, huh? So let's look here at the eleventh reading here. Since being and non-being are set according to the figures of predicates, huh? That refers back to the ten what? Categories, right? And of course category is a Greek word for being what? Seda, right? Okay? And sometimes Thomas speaks of the logic of the first act as being about the predicate. And suddenly the part that's come down to us from Aristotle in that first part is just the book called The Categories, huh? But in Latin they'll call it the predicamenta, huh? But it's taken from this word predicate. And I used to call it the ten sit-ups. Speaking English virtually, huh? But also he says by ability or act of these, huh? So you can speak of something in each of the ten genera, ten predicates, ten figures, in ability or an act, right? I'm able to be five foot ten, now I'm actually five foot ten, right? Something's able to be a man or a dog, and now it's actually a man or a dog, right? But act can be applied even to God, right? He's not in one of these ten. So the distinction of a built-in act in some ways is more universal than that of the distinction of being according to the figures as a predicate. And we even speak of the fact that he's not in the world, right? He's not