Universal Predicates and Universal Causes

Universal Predicates and Universal Causes Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. Lecture St John’s College, Annapolis October 28th, 2022 Proemium I have long admired St John’s College from afar, and so it is truly an honor and a joy for me to lecture here. These past two days I have had the privilege of sitting in on some classes—a wonderful experience. St John’s has always been an object of fascination to graduates of other “great books” colleges, including to my own alma mater, Thomas Aquinas College, whose curriculum is largely copied from St John’s. Indeed, we even used some of the old photo-copied, spiral-bound, manuals from St John’s for lab and music. The quip at Thomas Aquinas College used to be, “I go to TAC, we use the great manuals program.” Far more than the great manuals, or even the great books themselves, however, what St John’s has modeled for other great books colleges, is the Socratic desire for wisdom, and the Socratic attempt to seek for wisdom through conversation or dialectic, dia-logou, through speech. Certainly, there are different modes in which this search can be carried on. Both Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s treatises can be seen as carrying on the Socratic search. If St John’s is associated with a mode like that of the Platonic dialogues that use questioning and aporia and irony to “de-sedimentize” the clichés of our language, Thomas Aquinas College is associated with a mode more like that of the Aristotelian treatises with their patient attention to common conceptions, and their painstaking, almost pedantic, syllogistic unfolding of what is implicit in such conceptions. St John’s is, as Eva Brann has pointed out, “radically nondogmatic.” It embodies no teaching of substance [she writes] but only pedagogic hypotheses, which, though they undeniably and I think unavoidably embody what might be called biases of attention, nevertheless deliver no dogma of any sort concerning the chosen learning matter.1 1 Eva Brann, “A Call to Thought: Pope John Paul II Fides et Ratio,” in: The St. John's Review 45.1 (1999), pp. 109-118, at p. 110. Universal Predicates and Universal Causes • Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. Thomas Aquinas College, on the other hand is intentionally dogmatic—both in the sense of taking a definite position concerning the answers to the fundamental questions raised by the great books, and in the sense of accepting Divine Revelation, and therefore of uniting the pursuit of human wisdom in philosophy to the pursuit of divine wisdom in theology. In this lecture, however, I do not want to focus on that difference. Rather, I want to reflect a little on what exactly it is that we seek when we seek wisdom through speech. 1 Philosophy as the Path to the Universal In the Platonic dialogues, the search for wisdom is often described as beginning with a question about what something is. What is virtue? What is justice? The question is answered by seeing that the thing in question belongs to a more universal kind. But that more universal kind is itself comprehended by an even more universal kind. Thus, the path of philosophy is a path that ascends towards ever greater universality. Wisdom would seem to consist in finding the most universal of all kinds or forms. In a lecture entitled “On Precision,” delivered many years ago here at St John’s, Jacob Klein described the path of ascending universality as follows: In order to grasp what something is, we have to allocate it to a family of things quasi-known to us, and then to allocate this family of things, this genus, to another larger family, also quasi-known to us, and to keep on ascending. Only when and if the last step has been made, can we say that we have found out what the unknown thing, that X which started us off on this journey, is, can we say that we know what it is. It is this last step that illuminates— sunlike— not only all the intermediary genera, but the very thing, the what of which we wanted to know.2 The expression “sun-like” used by Klein in this passage is clearly a reference to Book VII of Plato’s Republic, which, I have been told, the freshmen will be discussing on Monday. It is the famous allegory of the cave. In the allegory, Socrates describes someone emerging from a cave, where he and others have been imprisoned, seeing only shadows of statues projected by the light of a fire onto a screen. Emerging from the cave, this person sees the sun.3 The sun stands for the idea or form of the good (ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα), which “provides truth and intelligence” in the intelligible realm.4 2 Jacob Klein, “On Precision,” in: Lectures and Essays (Annapolis: St J0hn’s College Press, 1985), p. 297. Plato, Republic, VII, 514a-517a. 4 Plato, Republic, 517c. 3 2 Universal Predicates and Universal Causes • Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. Already in Book VI, Socrates has argued that the form of the good is both a universal idea, after which other things are called good, and at the same time a universal cause. This first point has to do with the fact that the word “good” is said of, predicated of, many things: We both assert that there are […] and distinguish in speech, many fair things, many good things, and so on for each kind of thing. […] And we also assert that there is a fair itself, a good itself, and so on for all the things that we then set down as many. Now, again, we refer them to one idea of each as though the idea were one; and we address it as that which really is. […] And, moreover, we say that the former are seen but not intellected, while the ideas are intellected but not seen.5 In other words, “good” is a universal predicate said of all good things. Moreover, this universal predicate, this idea or form, is more real than the things of which it is said. The second point is that this form of the good is not only a predicate, said of the many, but also a cause. It is a cause our knowing intelligible things (just as the sun is the cause of our seeing visible things): What provides the truth to the things known and gives the power to the one who knows, is the idea of the good [ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέαν]. And, as the cause of the knowledge and truth, you can understand it to be a thing known; but, as fair as these two are—knowledge and truth—if you believe that it is something different from them and still fairer than they, your belief will be right.6 Moreover, it is also the cause of the coming to be of those things (just as the sun causes the generation of living things): I suppose you’ll say the sun not only provides what is seen with the power of being seen, but also with generation, growth, and nourishment although it itself isn’t generation. […] Therefore, say that not only being known is present in the things known as a consequence of the good, but also existence and being are in them besides as a result of it, although the good isn’t being but is still beyond being, exceeding it in dignity and power.7 This universal cause of intelligibility is therefore also the universal cause of being. As Klein notes it must be “something that does not lack anything, that is self-sufficient, complete,— perfect.”8 Glaucon Plato, Republic, VI, 507b; trans. Alan Bloom, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1991). Plato, Republic, VI, 508e-509a. 7 Plato, Republic VI, 509b. 8 Klein, “On Precision,” p. 297. 5 6 3 Universal Predicates and Universal Causes • Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. calls it “ἀµήχανον κάλλος,” overwhelming, or unmanageable beauty.9 The philosopher searches with passionate desire for the knowledge of this universal form. 2 A Difficulty: The Universal as Vague and Confused But here a difficulty arises. Is it true that what is most universal is also what is most causal, most perfect, and most illuminating? Could one not say, on the contrary, that the most universal is what is most abstract, and therefore powerless, vague, imprecise, and imperfect? If we see a figure approaching us in the dark, and you ask me: “What is that?” If I answer, “A being.” I have named it by something very universal. But this very universality under which I have comprehended it means that I have said very little of interest about the thing in question. Of course it is a being. But what kind of being? Is it alive? Is it safe? Is it a human being or a bear or a gorilla or a vampire? I have not indicated anything about that. A somewhat similar objection was raised by the German sociologist Max Weber in a 1917 lecture entitled “Science as a Vocation.” In that lecture Weber summarizes the allegory of the cave, which he sees as an allegory for the discovery of the scientific concept (Begriff), which seemingly enables us to grasp eternal truths: Plato’s passionate enthusiasm in the Republic is ultimately to be explained by the fact that for the first time the meaning of the concept had been consciously discovered, one of the greatest tools of all scientific knowledge. It was Socrates who discovered its implications. He was not alone in this respect. You can find very similar approaches in India to the kind of logic developed by Aristotle. But nowhere was its significance demonstrated with this degree of consciousness. In Greece for the first time there appeared a tool with which you could clamp someone into a logical vise so that he could not escape without admitting either that he knew nothing or that this and nothing else was the truth, the eternal truth that would never fade like the actions of the blind men in the cave.10 But Weber dismisses this enthusiasm as something that no one today could feel: Well, who regards science in this light today? Nowadays, the general feeling, particularly among young people, is the opposite, if anything. The ideas of science appear to be an otherworldly realm of artificial abstractions that strive to capture the blood and sap of real life in their scrawny hands without ever managing to do so. Here in life, 9 Plato, Republic VI, 500a. The translation “unmanageable” is suggested by: Michael Waldstein, Glory of the Logos in the Flesh (Ave Maria: Sapientia Press, 2021), Part I, ch. 5: “The Nature of Logos in Plato’s Republic.” This paper owes much to Waldstein’s treatment of the Republic in that chapter. 10 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in: The Vocation Lectures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), p. 14. 4 Universal Predicates and Universal Causes • Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. however, in what Plato calls the shadow theater on the walls of the cave, we feel the pulse of authentic reality; in science we have derivative, lifeless will-o’-the-wisps and nothing else.11 Weber agrees, at least to some extent with the general feeling that he describes; he thinks that science as a path to the truth of being is an illusion that has been shattered.12 Is Weber right? Is the ascent to the most universal form nothing more than the thinking of an empty abstraction? Was Socrates on the wrong path? 3 Two Kinds of Universal A helpful distinction in thinking through these questions is a distinction between two kinds of universal: universal predicates and universal causes. As we saw, Plato’s Socrates presents these two kinds of universal as coinciding: the most universal predicate is also the most universal cause. But Aristotle tends to keep them separate. St Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century scholastic theologian and commentator on Aristotle, points this out in considering an apparent tension between two texts of Aristotle. Let us look at each of the texts from Aristotle in turn, before considering the distinction that Thomas invokes to resolve their tension. The first text is from the beginning of the Physics, Aristotle’s great work on nature: The natural path is to go from the things which are more known and certain to us toward things which are more certain and more knowable by nature. For the more known to us and the simply knowable are not the same. Whence, it is necessary to proceed in this way, from what is less certain by nature but more certain to us toward what is more certain and more knowable by nature. But the things which are first obvious and certain to us are rather confused, and from these, the elements and principles become known later by dividing them. Whence, it is necessary to go from the universal to the particulars. For the whole is more known according to sensation, and the universal is a certain whole. For the universal embraces many things within it as parts.13 When we sense things, we first have a vague impression of the whole, before distinguishing the parts. For example, in tasting wine we first have a vague impression of its overall taste, but in savoring it we can begin to distinguish the various flavors it contains. In a similar way, Aristotle is claiming, we know things first in a universal but vague way, and then we have to tease out what is latent in that confused knowledge. Aristotle seems here to be supporting the objection that I raised. What is more universal is 11 Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” p. 14. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” p. 17. 13 Aristotle, Physics, I.1, 184a16-26, trans. Glen Coughlin (South Bend: St Augustine Press, 2005). 12 5 Universal Predicates and Universal Causes • Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. vague and confused, the path of philosophy, at least of natural philosophy is not to ascend to the more universal, but rather to descend to the more particular. The second text is taken from the first book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Aristotle is discussing the characteristics of the wise man, one of which is that the wise man is held to be someone who knows everything: [The] knowing of all things must belong to the one who has most of all the universal knowledge, since he knows in a certain way all the things that come under it; and these are just about the most difficult things for human beings to know, those that are most universal, since they are farthest away from the senses.14 There seems to be a tension between these two texts. In the first Aristotle is claiming that the more universal is more known to us, easier for us to know; in the second he is saying that the universal is less known to us, more difficult for us to know. In commenting on this apparent contradiction, St Thomas Aquinas draws a distinction between universal predicates and universal causes: Those things which are more universal according to simple apprehension are known first; for being is the first thing that comes into the intellect, as Avicenna says, and animal comes into the intellect before man does. For just as in the order of nature, which proceeds from potentiality to actuality, animal is prior to man, so too in the genesis of knowledge the intellect conceives animal before it conceives man. But with respect to the investigations of natural properties and causes, less universal things are known first, because we discover universal causes by means of the particular causes which belong to one genus or species. Now those things which are universal in causing (universalia in causando) are known subsequently by us (notwithstanding the fact that they are things which are primarily knowable according to their nature), although things which are universal by predication (universalia per praedicationem) are known to us in some way before the less universal (notwithstanding the fact that they are not known prior to singular things).15 In other words, there are two kinds of universals: universal predicates, and universal causes. I want to consider each one in turn. 3.1 Universal Predicates Universal predicates are names said of many different things, which have something in common. For example, the name “animal” is said of tigers, lions, horses, and so on, on account of something that is common to all of them. “Tiger” is said of many individual tigers, on account of their common tigernature. Little children quickly learn to recognize tigers and distinguish them from all other things. 14 15 Aristotle, Metaphysics, I.2, 982a21-25, trans. Joe Sachs (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 1999). St Thomas Aquinas, In Metaph. I, lect. 2, 46. 6 Universal Predicates and Universal Causes • Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. This is rather extraordinary. There seems to be a common inner form or nature of tigers, expressed in their appearance that children, as it were, “recognize.” It can seem almost as though a child has already seen the form of a tiger in a previous life and is now recollecting it. For the Socratic tradition, such universal predicates are not mere words that we apply to “classes” of things that happen to appear similar to us. Rather they grasp something true about reality, a true common nature or essence that is among or over the many things. But there are two different ways in which the Socratic tradition accounted for such universals. Recall that Socrates in Republic VI argues that the predication of the common name “good” to many good things, implies the existence of one true idea or form of the good. He makes a similar argument in Republic X, using different examples, to show that whenever one name is said of many, the is one true form, above the many. The many are mere imitations; the one idea or form is the true being: Then let’s now set down any one of the ‘manys’ you please; for example, if you wish, there are surely many couches and tables. […] But as for ideas for these furnishings, there are presumably two, one of couch, one of table. […] Aren’t we also accustomed to say that it is in looking to the idea of each implement that one craftsman makes the couches and another the chairs we use, and similarly for other things? For presumably none of the craftsmen fabricates the idea itself. How could he? […] And what about the couchmaker? Weren’t you just saying that he doesn’t make the form, which is what we, of course, say is just a couch, but a certain couch? […] Then, if he doesn’t make what is, he wouldn’t make the being but something that is like the being, but is not being. And if someone were to assert that the work of the producer of couches or of any other manual artisan is completely being, he would run the risk of saying what’s not true.16 The true couch is the form or idea of a couch, which has not been made by human hands. It is separated from matter and motion, from flux of becoming in this sensible world. The particular couches made by craftsmen are mere images and not true being. As always in Plato, it is unclear to what extent he wants us to accept the conclusion of this argument as true. Aristotle, at any rate, does not think this view of things was really taught by Socrates, but rather that it was invented by Socrates’s students: The opinion about the forms [or: ideas] came to those who spoke about them as a result of being persuaded by the Heracleitean writings that it is true that all perceptible things are always in flux, so that, if knowledge and thought are to be about anything, there must be, besides the perceptible things, some other enduring natures, since there can be no knowledge of things in flux. And then Socrates made it his business to be concerned with the moral virtues, and on account of them he first sought to define things in a universal way. […] But Socrates did not make the universals or the definitions separate, while those who came next did, and called beings of this sort forms; so 16 Plato, Republic, 596b-597a. 7 Universal Predicates and Universal Causes • Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. for them it followed by pretty much the same argument that there are forms of all things that are spoken of in a universal way.17 Aristotle thinks this teaching is false. In his Metaphysics he gives numerous arguments for rejecting it. Many of these reasons were already anticipated by Plato himself in the dialogue Parmenides. I want to briefly consider just one of these arguments. Aristotle writes: But according to the necessities of the case and the opinions about the Forms, if they can be shared in there must be Ideas of substances only. For they are not shared in incidentally, but each Form must be shared in as something not predicated of a subject.18 I take Aristotle to be building here on insights that he explains in his works of logic. Primary substances, that is, things which exist in their own right, are neither present in some other subject nor are they predicated (said of) a subject.19 For example, “Socrates” is not in another subject the way his color is in him, but nor is “Socrates” predicated (said of) anything else. We do not say “man is Socrates,” or “6 feet tall is Socrates,” or “Xantippe is Socrates.” But, Aristotle seems to be arguing, the forms seems both to be primary substances (things in their own right not present in other things), but also to be predicated of the passing things of this world. For example, when we say “Socrates is a man” then we seem to be predicating the form of man of Socrates. Aristotle does not think this really fits with how we use speech. Aristotle takes a different route in explaining universal predicates. For Aristotle, what is going on in universal predication is that our minds are abstracting the common nature from the many things among which it exists. In reality, the common nature exists within the natural things, but our minds can receive something of it without receiving everything. This is why we can have the idea of a material being, say a tiger in our minds in an immaterial way. The universal predicate “tiger,” which we say of all individual tigers, is immaterial only because our minds have taken the intelligible form of tiger without the matter of individual tigers. This immaterial form exists in our minds as an “intention”; that is, as something that intends, points toward, the concrete beings from which it is abstracted. There is no immaterial form of tigers above the many tigers. Rather there is only the one form of tiger in the material tigers. 17 Aristotle, Metaphysics, XIII.4, 1078b-1079a, trans. Sachs. Aristotle, Metaphysics, XIII.4, 1079a, trans. W.D. Ross, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928). 19 See: Aristotle, Categories, 5, 2a11. 18 8 Universal Predicates and Universal Causes • Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. 3.2 Universal Causes Let me now turn to the second kind of universal distinguished by St Thomas Aquinas: universal causes. What is meant by a universal cause? What St Thomas means by it is not a cause that has many effects that are on the same plane of being—for example, one mother who has many children. (The scholastics call such a cause a “univocal cause,” because it has the same nature as its effects). But rather a cause that has many effects, while being on a higher plane of being, as it were, than the many effects. (The scholastics call this an “equivocal cause,” because it has a different nature than its effects). Why might one think such causes exist? Ronald McArthur, the founding president of Thomas Aquinas College, wrote an essay on universal predicates and universal causes in which he offers the following argument: It is manifest by induction that Socrates comes to be, and that he is generated by his mother; his existence is necessarily dependent upon hers in such a way that if she had not been, he would not now be. A question however, remains; Socrates’s mother causes an effect similar to herself, for Socrates is an individual with the same nature as she. Since the mother was also generated and at one time was not, and since human nature is found in her, it follows that she is not the cause of that nature, either in herself or in Socrates; if she were the sole causal explanation of the nature of Socrates, she would (since she also has that nature) have to be the cause of herself. It is the same with all univocal causality; no univocal cause can be the cause of the nature of the species in which it participates. The mother is the cause only of the existence of human nature in Socrates. She is not the cause of the form, but of the informed composite, since it is the composite which is generated. It is necessary, therefore, if we wish to explain the nature as such, to seek a cause which transcends both son and mother.20 Note the similarity of this argument to Socrates’s argument about the couch-maker in Republic X. Just as the couch-maker does not make the idea of the couch, so the mother of a human being does not generate human nature. But the conclusion is slightly different. Instead of concluding to a separate form (“the man itself”), McArthur concludes to a higher kind of cause, a cause of human nature as such. This is what is meant by a “universal cause”. This is a different kind of universal than a universal form. This kind of universal is not said of particular things. We do not say “this man is the universal cause of human nature.” Nor is this kind of universal of the same nature as the particular effects that it causes. It must in some way contain the being that it gives its effects (nothing can give what it does not have), but it contains that being in a higher mode than the effects contain them. Just as a couch-maker must in some way already have the form of couch contained in the power of the art in his soul if he is to 20 Ronald P. McArthur, “Universal in praedicando, universal in causando,” in: Laval théologique et philosophique 18.1 (1962), pp. 59-95, at pp. 69-70. 9 Universal Predicates and Universal Causes • Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. cause it in material out of which he makes a couch, so the universal cause must have all the perfections that it gives in a higher way. McArthur goes on to show many differences between these two kinds of universal. For example, while a universal predicate is vague and confused, compared to the specificity of particulars, the universal cause has the being that it gives to particulars in a more intense mode than those particulars themselves. The universal cause causes not just general features of its effects, but the whole particular effect in its ultimate specificity. 4 Conclusion: Wisdom and the Form of the Good As I noted earlier, Aristotle holds that the wise man has the most universal knowledge. In his commentary, St Thomas Aquinas argues that this should not be taken to mean only that the wise man knows universal predicates (so that he can say, for example “being is,” and have thereby said something true about all things), but more importantly that he knows universal causes. This fits with the rest of Aristotle’s discussion of the wise man in Metaphysics I.2. He argues that the wise man not only knows all things, and the most difficult things, but also has the most precise knowledge, that he is most able to teach, and that he knows what is worth knowing for its own sake, rather than for something else. Therefore, Aristotle concludes, what the wise man knows are first principles or causes of things, including that cause which is their last end or purpose: So from all the things that have been said, the name sought falls to the same kind of knowledge, for it must be a contemplation of the first sources and causes, since also the good, or that for the sake of which, is one of the causes.21 Later on in the Metaphysics it will become clear that these “first” causes have the features that I have associated with “universal” causes. Hence St Thomas Aquinas was able to read the feature of “knowing the universal” that Aristotle ascribes to the wise man, as referring not to knowing universal predicates, but to knowing universal causes. In Metaphysics XII, Aristotle approaches the first causes by an analysis of causes of motion and change, of what we can call agent causes. I do not want to follow him through all the steps of that argument, but I do want to point out that at the end of that argument he changes over to talking about a different kind of cause, namely “the good” or the “final cause.” 21 Aristotle, Metaphysics I.2, 982b9-10, trans. Sachs. 10 Universal Predicates and Universal Causes • Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. To understand this shift it is useful to recall Aristotle’s famous distinction between four kinds of cause in the Physics. There he distinguishes the material out of which something is made; the form that makes the material to be a definite thing; the agent which puts the form in the material; and the end or good, for the sake of which the agent puts the form in the material.22 The causality of the other causes depends on the causality of the good, since the material and form can only be causes when the agent joins them, and the agent can only act if he has some reason for acting, which is given by the good he is trying to achieve. The good is thus primary, since it moves everything else, but is itself unmoved.23 The good is the object of desire and choice, it is that for the sake of which every movement and change takes place. The unmoved mover that Aristotle’s finds in Metaphysics XII is therefore good: The final cause, then, produces motion as being loved, but all other things move by being moved. Now if something is moved it is capable of being otherwise than as it is. […] But since there is something which moves while itself unmoved, existing actually, this can in no way be otherwise than as it is. […] The first mover, then, exists of necessity; and in so far as it exists by necessity, its mode of being is good and it is in this sense a first principle.24 The first and most universal cause, therefore, is the good. Here Aristotle’s argument converges with that of Socrates’s in Republic VI-VII. But while Socrates arrives at the form of the good that is both a universal predicate and a universal cause, Aristotle arrives at a good which is only a universal cause, but not a universal predicate. This good is not said of other good things. This good, Aristotle argues is a living, thinking being. He calls it “the God” (“ὁ θεὸς”): If, then, God [ὁ θεὸς] is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God.25 This compels our wonder: It is this wonder at the universal cause and source of all being, perfection, and goodness that is for me the greatest inspiration for the life of philosophy. Max Weber, would take 22 See: Aristotle, Physics, II.7. Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.7, 1072a. 24 Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.7, 1072b, trans. Ross. 25 Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.7, 1072b, trans. Ross. 23 11 Universal Predicates and Universal Causes • Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. this as a sign that I am an “overgrown child.”26 But when it comes to the search for that “ἀµήχανον κάλλος,” that overwhelming beauty, I am content to be a child. 26 Cf. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” pp. 16, 17. 12