Ep. 335: Aristotle on Fundamental Explanations (Part One)

0:09 Mark: Life, a podcast by some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 335 is something like what are the basic building blocks for the explaining the world? We read the first two books of Aristotle's Metaphysics. More information about the book and the podcast please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linson dancing around and landing some good philosophical points like non athletes do in fights.

0:37 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, for my own sake, more honorable if less useful than others.

0:45 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan being at work, being myself.

0:50 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey searching for a place of leisure to obtain knowledge of first causes in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:57 Mark: So I didn't put a year on this. Do we have any idea when this was written?

1:01 Dylan: A long time ago.

1:03 Wes: 340 is going to be my guess.

1:06 Dylan: Yeah. Aristotle was born in 384.

1:09 Wes: He wrote it in his late 30s, I think.

1:12 Mark: I guess the question is, did he actually write it or was this someone's notes? Certainly if he wrote it, it was probably not for publication.

1:19 Wes: It's been said that it's someone's notes and I. It seems pretty clear to me the more I delve into it. Yes, that's definitely the case. It's either someone's notes or it's like a manual for people in the know, right. For friends who are familiar with what he's talking about. It's not an exposition for like people in the school. Yeah, people in the school.

1:38 Mark: So we gave a lot of introductory remarks in the Nightcap that if you didn't listen to at least the preview of that that was publicly available. So we can just not talk about what translations we used and things like that since we already covered that.

1:51 Dylan: Mark, you and your efficiency

1:56 Mark: to get the maximum use out of this. The overall plan, I don't think we said, was to follow the St. John's College seminar setup. There would be three sessions, so three of our podcasts. The first one covering these two books which are Capital Alpha and Little Alpha. So it's sort of actually book 1 and 1A.

2:14 Dylan: That's because book 1A is considered a insertion.

2:18 Mark: And there's not much to it.

2:20 Dylan: It's not much to it.

2:21 Mark: I mean, he basically gets at. I don't know, he doesn't actually prove the existence of God. But he's been talking the whole time about the four types of causation, which apparently he already said what they are in the physics material cause, formal cause Efficient cause, final cause. So I'm sure we'll go over that ad nauseously, which is why we should

2:38 Dylan: have read the physics first.

2:39 Mark: We know what these four are. But here he is not just saying there are four ways you could explain something. But we want to get what are the fundamental explanations. Let's look at what every philosopher before me, all six of them, whatever, has said about, you know, some people just say that, you know, everything is fire. So that's only one type of cause. And he wants to show that that's not sufficient. You need to give more information. You need all four of my causes. The sort of. The conclusion to chapter one is. Yeah, all these people, like talked about some of what I'm talking about, but they talked about it in a very murky way. So I'm right.

3:13 Wes: Mark is directly quoting Aristotle from memory. You need to give more information. That's not right.

3:19 Mark: I believe the word murky is in the Joe Sachs translation. I'm not joking.

3:24 Wes: Yeah, I mean, this is part of what we're going to get in this reading. We're going to get an overview of some of what previous thinkers had to say that touches upon this topic of metaphysics, which is not a word he uses in the metaphysics. And the title comes from some later assembler. Who was it who put the title on it? I forget. But anyway, it's metaphysics literally means after the physics. But he does call it first philosophy.

3:49 Mark: I think it was John Meta.

3:51 Wes: Wisdom. John Meta. And yeah, it's not like other types of sciences. And that's what we're going to start out with, talking about it. In a way. The whole first book begins with a discussion, what is it we're even trying to do here? And why do people even worry about this type of thing?

4:07 Dylan: Yep, that's exactly right. Why would you care?

4:10 Wes: And he starts out from a very general proposition. It's kind of a weird when you pick up Aristotle's metaphysics and the first sentence is, all men by nature desire to know, which is of course very famous. But if you weren't aware of that, you'd think, well, why are we talking about a psychology of knowledge now? Why are we starting with psych? We're not even starting with epistemology. We're starting with the psychology of knowing. How is that going to be related to metaphysics? Why is that his starting point? Why is that his way in?

4:39 Dylan: The whole first couple chapters are talking about different ways of knowing. I think it's a good question, Wes, about why he would start that way. But I think it's going to say something about where he ends up in terms of the kind of beings human beings are.

4:56 Wes: He wants to try to tell us what metaphysics is by thinking about what is it that ultimately someone considers a wise person to be. He does that in actually part two of this. So we're going to start from a psychology of the wise person and in particular what people in general think of that person. And from that in a way we can derive the characteristics of the thing that that person is doing. And that will tell us what this science of wisdom is, what this metaphysics is. So it's a really interesting approach and

5:28 Mark: it sounds very familiarly Platonic that Plato is a little dismissive of the sort of knowledge that craftspeople, people with a techne have. They know, you know, even doctors, they kind of know, if I give you this thing, you'll probably die. If I give you this thing, you'll probably. It might help you if you have this thing wrong with you. They know correlations, but they don't necessarily know the theory. They know tradition that's been handed down doctoring in his day, but a truly scientific doctrine that knows the real facts of physiology and could break it down into chemistry or something, this would be a deeper kind. So the more elevated you get, the more theoretical you get, the better kinds of knowledge you get, the more wise we think that person is.

6:09 Seth: You're using loaded language there, Mark.

6:10 Dylan: Yeah, it turns on causes. You know, when you say that doctoring is cookery, which is a version of what Plato would say is you have experiential knowledge of your senses that tell you X results in Y or X plus Y results in Z kind of thing. But if you understand the causes, you understand something deeper and more abstract and more true. And the Y's understand the causes.

6:37 Seth: Not abstract, but universal. Yes.

6:40 Dylan: And so this gets to the discussion of why being wise is a higher, more sophisticated, deeper form of knowledge than

6:48 Wes: techne he's really going to lay out. And I think this is very important in this first section. It's something that one might easily just kind of skip over and think, oh, that's interesting. People by nature, desire to know, and animals. You know, there's sense perception, there's memory and experience and all this stuff. But I find all of it quite useful because of this. You know, as Dylan and Seth and Mark, you're all pointing out this role of universality and causality, but also in particular because memory is a really important concept, bridging mere sensation or Sensory perception of physical objects and not being quite up to the point where we start to see cause and effect relationships.

So the way Aristotle talks about it, it sounds like memory is something like procedural learning or there's an induction element to it, Right? So he says, and memory is what adds up to experiences. So we have to have some way of having these repeated sensory perceptions that add up to something that is greater than the sum of the parts. I think in contemporary terms, like if you're thinking about everything we know about epistemology now, we would cram a lot of different stuff into memory, Right. If we're Kant, we're cramming all of Aristotle's categories into that and calling it faculties.

There's a lot that the mind needs to be able to do, to experience things as things, as these persistent entities. To have experiences.

8:20 Dylan: To have experiences in the way we. Yes, because otherwise. That's the distinction with sense perception, Right. You have to have memory in the way you're describing it, Wes, in order to have an experience. It's a kind of abstraction out of sense perception. To even talk about having an experience of something.

8:38 Wes: He uses the example of doctors who can have experience without causal knowledge because they can see that some medicine works in each case. And it works for human beings, which is a certain kind of entity, and it works for certain kinds of ailments. But they don't know why. There's no causal. Right. It's correlation, it's not causation. And that's an example of experience. It points to something causal. So there's some important relationship between that and what we think of as causal explanations, but it's not quite there yet. I think the other aspect of this is the way he talks about memory and experience made me think of habit and makes me think of procedural, non explicit knowledge.

He sounded to me in certain sections like he was saying knowledge is kind of built up on what we think of as explicit. Causal knowledge is kind of built up out of this procedural, non explicit knowledge, which should raise alarm bells in us. We should start thinking about Wittgenstein and meaning as use and things like that. If I'm right about that, you know, if that's a legitimate interpretation, then the ethics habits which become virtues, dispositions to behave in certain ways are not unrelated to this starting point for the metaphysics. Knowing involves something habitual.

Once we get to causality, it's something else. But the foundation of it is something habitual, which is amazing.

9:58 Mark: Interestingly so for me at page two in the Sachs further, we consider none of the senses to be wisdom, even though they are the most authoritative ways of knowing particulars, but they do not pick out the why of anything. So just him granting, which I don't know that Plato would do that you can have knowledge of particulars through the senses. Now, do the senses involve memory? Is that, you know, at least the way we sense things is we associate them with past things. So I actually see this glass as a glass because I remember other glasses, whereas a bee can detect that there's something there. So I just wondering what you guys thought of using the word knowledge there. It seems a little too high and mighty a word to use there for the rest of Aristotle's context.

10:42 Wes: I think all of us are looking at the Routledge guidebook to Aristotle's metaphysics by Vasilis Politis. So he says, yeah, this is unique to Aristotle that he would say that knowledge of, or at least it distinguishes him from Plato, that you would call sensory perception of particulars a form of knowledge. But, Mark, I just wanted to say, even with your example, I would even get more granular because this is one of the things that kind of motivates Plato's forms, which is to say that it's not even just about seeing multiple glasses and to create an experience out of those memories of different sensory particulars, but it's, you know, think in terms of phenomenology, right?

All we get are snapshots of different angles of the glass. We have to build out an object which is an abstraction, which is not a object of sense perception. We don't see all the angles of the glass at the same time. We don't have a view from nowhere on that entity. And this is one of the reasons people are motivated to do metaphysics in the first place. That's one of the insights that makes people go, wait a minute, what's going on here? We don't have this immediate. So it's a representationalist.

11:49 Dylan: I think it's fine that we keep calling it doing metaphysics, but it's worth reminding ourselves that Aristotle never calls it doing metaphysics. He ultimately calls it inquiry into being qua being, which we'll get to in another reading. But that's what we're articulating in book one is the pathway to what it is we're trying to talk about, which the closest thing is gaining wisdom about how the world works. That is first philosophy, which would be the why that underlies the experience.

12:24 Mark: I don't think we even said, you know, we said that he didn't call it the metaphysics, but the fact that the word meta in Greek just literally means after, just put it afterwards. Whereas it's just one of my favorite philosophical prefixes that you can put meta in front of anything and you get a reflection on the original thing. It's a second order. Are you familiar enough with the physics, Dylan, from having read this to know, is he just saying more about the physics, or is he taking what he said in the physics, like the four types of causality, and saying, hey, where did I come up with that? Why that is he interrogating the physics? So it really is whatever he wants to call it. He really is doing what we would consider metaphysics. Meta.

13:03 Dylan: I mean, I think so. I mean, I think that what Wes said is the generally understood reason for calling it the metaphysics is literally on the shelf in the order that the compilers put the books. It was the one after the physics. But that notion that it is the kind of thinking and reflection that one wouldn't do after one, properly speaking, was investigating the physics and natural causes, that also seems right. I mean, we end up with the recounting of causes in book one here. And that is, at some level, the beginning of what he's trying to do in this book.

13:42 Wes: Yeah, he tells us that this sort of science is more general than the particular sciences, like, say, for instance, biology. Biology is focused on a specific kind of thing and explanations of how those kinds of things work. I think it's a little confusing because the physics, of course, does stay at a very general level. It's concerned with things that are come into being and go out of being. Right. It's generation.

14:08 Dylan: Yeah. Between generation and annihilation, between things that are at rest and not at rest. What's the source of motion? And motion, generally speaking, is a form of change. That's what physics is about.

14:20 Wes: So here the focus is more on what's not changing. Ultimately, the question is going to turn out to be what is substance? That's one of the translations of this word, ousia or thinghood, or primary being is what Politis calls it, because it's sometimes prote ousia, first or primary being. But we'll talk more about what that question means.

14:41 Dylan: You brought up the phrase being at work, staying itself. But I think one good way to get at it, and this is why you would end up with also talking about forms, but with living things, things that are dynamic. It becomes a lot easier to, I think, see the problem from Aristotle's point of view that he's inquiring into is effectively, given all the change that's happening, what are we talking about when we say that a human being is a being? What is it? That's the same. And insofar as I say that a human being is a being, I'm going to say the same thing about a dog and a cricket and a tree. And what is it that they are capturing together, that I'm calling them beings, even though they're manifestly changing, even though I still want to say that they are one thing and they're one thing. And I'm also going to say that they're one thing in the same way that they're one things.

15:35 Wes: I mean, I think there's a few different motivations for why we would again, do. I'll just keep calling it do metaphysics, but that's fine.

15:41 Dylan: That's fine.

15:42 Wes: So one of them. Yeah, what is it even to be a thing? Or there's a prerequisite for that, which is to be a unity. So for instance, if the cat, let's take the notorious analytic example, the cat is on the mat, right? And we're saying that there's the cat, there's the mat, the cat is on the mat. Why can't we just say, well, it's a cat mat, that's the entity there. Cat mat. Yeah, we want to say, okay, those are two distinct things and there's a mind independent reason for them being distinct things. It's not just made up, it's not just my conceptual scheme and oh, I have these certain cognitive interests and that's the way human beings. No, in themselves, objectively, they're two different entities. Although mat is a murky enough problem that maybe we could just say the cat on the horse, if the cat is riding. It helps to have two biological entities because they're so tightly structured.

16:31 Dylan: The fish is in the river.

16:34 Wes: So that's one of the motivations. Aristotle. Later on we'll get to this. In the next recording we'll describe a lot of different types of puzzles that might motivate us to. Or aporiai, as he calls them, that might motivate us to do this again, to do metaphysics. But that's one of them. Another is the emergence problem, or the failures of explanations that simply try to say, okay, here's a natural way to say why a thing is a thing. Let's just describe its parts. Let's just say it's made of. Look, it's made of earth, it's made of fire, it's made of water.

Maybe all of them or, you know, but unfortunately, that doesn't explain the fact that the phenomena as we experience them are greater than their parts. It's like, okay, everything's Earth. Well, that's weird because Dylan sure doesn't look like just Earth. You know, maybe at some micro, you know, quantum mechanical level. If we're one of these ancient philosophers, he's Earth. But then how does that add up to looking like Dylan? How does that up to being Dylan? So there's a lot of these different types of puzzles that motivate this sort of thinking.

17:35 Mark: Dylan, is Earth beset by love and strife. Love and strife made the Dylan.

17:40 Wes: Well, it gets closer to modern physics, right?

17:42 Mark: And you just, you know, you just need percentages. It's the exact percentage, Dylan, is the number of the ratio of the. The amount of love over strife manifest in Earth.

17:52 Wes: These things can be written as equations. So, you know.

17:55 Mark: So did we get through chapter one?

17:58 Wes: No, no, not yet.

18:00 Seth: What are we even doing?

18:01 Mark: I mean, it seems like these guys were just jumping ahead because they just can't wait to talk about being, Whereas.

18:06 Wes: So Aristotle is working against the background of Plato and the forms, which were all aware of. And I think we're just trying to give a few intuitive ideas about what it is that might motivate this sort of inquiry. We'll get more into it later. And the reason for bringing that stuff up is because that, in a way, is what Aristotle is starting with, a psychology of knowing. We by nature desire to know, but we desire to know more than just how to be a doctor or just perceptual objects. We want to know why. And we want to know why, even at the most general level.

18:41 Mark: Well, there's supposed to be a parallel between the ascent in understanding and wisdom on the epistemological side and the gravity of what there is to know. So that the common person, the technician, just deals with certain details and experiences. And then as you get more theoretical and more universal, eventually you will get in chapter two to the ruling knowledge, the one that knows for what purpose each thing must be done. This is the best thing in all of nature. So I don't know if he's just pointing out a parallel, but it's actually presented as if we could sort of figure out, it's like all of our everyday.

What do we respect about knowledge? Well, the more wise, the better. And what is sort of the arc of wisdom? The arc of wisdom points at something that maybe most people don't think about. And so that is the point of Aristotle's the First one, to really think about this. Clearly that these other philosophers had some hazy ideas about it and they could point the direction. But now we're going to, as long as we can feel that we shouldn't be investigating this, because only the gods are so wonderful as to be able to look at this exalted science. No, no, it's okay.

We can do it.

19:51 Wes: With a view to finishing up the first section, one of the things he says is that you can be quite successful without knowing about causes. He wants to make this distinction between episteme or scientific knowledge of things, and then the kind of knowledge you have just of from sensory perception or even from experience. You know, I gave that example, the doctor just needing experience to cure particularly individuals because they see a correlation. They don't necessarily know the causation. But in many ways you can be more successful at that level, he says, because if you don't have hands on experience, you're actually prone to error.

This is why I wanted to talk about procedural knowledge as being a foundation. So my point here is that you're calling it an ascent, Mark. These things kind of build on each other. Sensory perception, memory, leading to experience induction, universal stuff, and then ultimately causality, which rides on top of all of those things, I think, including the procedural knowledge layer, including the habitual. What I think is probably a habitual layer. And ultimately he'll say, you know, you can see this in the types of techne, right? Of which being a doctor's one techne or art or craft or however you want to translate it.

Some people are master craftsmen. Some people are handicraftsmen in one of the translations. Some people are architectonic craftsmen, those sorts of craftsmen. You know, they have experience with the particulars. They have that habitual knowledge that allows them to do their job. But then they have the extra thing which is they know why. They know why this particular medicine cures this particular patient. They can give a theory of how it works on the body. And so we think of that. I think Mark is right. He wants to think about our evaluations of those different types of knowing.

We have the highest esteem for the types of knowing that involve knowledge of the causes. We think that's a better way of knowing.

21:49 Seth: This is a really great section of the text where he's calling this out. And what he's pointing to in some respect is, you know, he's not talking about one being better than the other, but he's doing the Aristotelian thing of like, this is this, and this is this, and we define this, and there's three of these and all that kind of thing. But he says, if you're talking about a judgment, so you judge that something is beneficial to this person when they're sick and this other person when they're sick, and then another person. Another person, right?

You're building experience. And when you see somebody who has those symptoms, you say, well, I saw that this was beneficial in the past. But what Aristotle says is that this experience is based on particulars. So there's a sense in which the knowledge that you get through experience is always tied to particulars. And in a sense, it can only be directed at individual particulars that you encounter. And so what he's saying is, when you can, from that experience, come up with a judgment that's universal. This isn't just the universal judgment. It's not a proposition.

Like, if someone has these symptoms, then give them this medicine. That's the experiential layer. But the universal proposition is understanding the cause, understanding the why, and not just the what. That's how you elevate your knowledge. And that's the role of, at least in the Sachs translation, what he calls art or reason on top of experience. So it's not a denigration of the master craftsman, that they're a great woodworker because they've cut and shaped a lot of wood. But if they were to combine that with knowledge of how wood grows and grain textures and the math and the physics associated with it, then their knowledge is elevated.

And his mark for how to tell whether you're in the realm of experiential knowledge versus theoretical knowledge, as you call universal knowledge, is can you teach it? And if you think about that, this is a very concise and very powerful. If I'm a master at my craft, but all I can do is demonstrate it to somebody who has to learn by watching me, then that's one level of expertise and knowledge. But if I can actually explain what I'm doing and transmit the principles and that person can learn, I can teach them, they're still going to have to build up the techne, the handcraft and the experience.

And that's where he says, ultimately, the mark of how we tell whether somebody really has the kind of knowledge that we're interested in seeking is whether they can teach it or not. It's a really beautiful part of the

24:27 Mark: text, and I think a nice improvement over. It's still snobby, but it's not as snobby as Plato, that Plato. His whole project is, I interviewed all these people, they're supposedly experts in their fields, but they ultimately don't know what they're talking about. They don't know because interpreting this according to the Aristotle's framework here is they don't have the higher sort of knowledge, the why of it. And so that in some way, I think, for Plato, invalidates at least they're not wise. So Aristotle says, yeah, wisdom is knowing the why, but he's not denigrating the practical in quite the same way. I think maybe it's just a matter of tone, I don't know.

25:06 Wes: Since we're already mentioning causes and principles, I just want to say that these are translated differently by different people. So the word for cause is aitia, which is also often translated just as explanation, and often makes more sense if you think of it as explanation. So it's ambiguous between those two things. And then principle is arche. But also you can think of it as a beginning or source, and the different translations we're using will translate those things differently.

25:34 Dylan: I think it's instructive to note that the path that Seth described in this first section, where he ends up with wisdom. Wisdom is a knowledge concerned with certain sources and causes. He's still describing a kind of progressive level sophistication of experience. It's rooted in experience, deeply rooted in experience there. But you talked about Wood, a master craftsman who factors in all kinds of other things that they know and are layering into the choices that they're making and the way in which they're executing their craft. And I agree. It's that kind of thing that's turning from mere procedural experience into wisdom.

And that wisdom is rooted in knowledge of sources and causes. But it's still that at this point, right? It's still the motivation of what we understand as being the most fundamental things to know. We're still on the path towards understanding. Well, what would first philosophy be if we were to know the first things about the world, the first causes, what would they be? And this is still on that path. It's still rooted in experience here. This is wisdom. That is a sophisticated form of experience.

26:50 Wes: Just to make clear, the word for that is sophia, as in philosophy. And he's using that synonymously with first philosophy, which is to say metaphysics. And it's the highest of the sciences, right? So it's one form of epistemia. And I do think he ranks these. Right. He ends this section by saying, the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any sense perception, the artist Wiser than the man of experience, the master worker than so on and so forth, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of wisdom than the productive.

So theoretical as in biology. But clearly then, wisdom is knowledge about certain principles and causes. So wisdom would be the highest. But also what he wants to say is, when we're doing metaphysics, sorry to keep saying that we're not doing techne, we're not doing any of these other things. We are doing a theoretical science. He's trying to argue for that. He's not just taking it for granted that first philosophy isn't techne. What he's pointing to is that because we kind of rank these things and we think that something is more properly called knowledge when it deals with explanations, when it deals with causes and principles, then that's probably the route we're on if we're thinking about metaphysics.

And so what that will mean is metaphysics is going to deal with the most fundamental causes and principles. So it'll say what is called wisdom. All men suppose what is called wisdom to deal with the first causes and the principles of things. So not just the intermediate sort of causes that we get in biology and other forms of science, but the very first, most fundamental layer, explanations, causes, principles. And he's going to really make that clear in the next section.

28:31 Mark: Shall we move to the next section?

28:33 Wes: So this is where he's going to say we're going to characterize theoretical wisdom, which is another way of again talking about metaphysics, by thinking about what the wise man. What's the wise man like? Maybe that'll tell us something about what metaphysics is.

28:47 Dylan: And there's what, five opinions we have. He does this all the time too.

28:51 Wes: Right.

28:51 Dylan: And Plato would as well. What do we think is true? What's conventional opinion about certain things?

28:58 Wes: He wants to look at previous thinkers. He's always incorporating the history of philosophy. But also he just wants to think. What do people in general think? Yeah, what does the common person think about this? Let's start from that. In the same way you would start from perceptual particulars. You can't simply ignore those. That is a kind of knowledge. He's kind of a little bit of an ordinary language philosopher. He wants to say, how do people talk about this stuff?

29:17 Dylan: First paragraph of two, he says, just talking about the wise man. First, the wise man knows all things as far as possible, although he has not knowledge of each of them in detail. Secondly, that he who can learn things that are difficult but not easy for man to know is wise sense perception is common to all and therefore easy and no mark of wisdom. Again, he who is more exact and more capable of teaching the causes is wiser in every branch of knowledge. And that of the science is also that which is desirable on its own account for the sake of knowing is more of the nature of wisdom than that which is desirable on account of its results. The superior wisdom is more of the nature of wisdom than the ancillary. For the wise man must not be ordered, but must order. He must not obey another, but the less wise obey him.

30:06 Wes: And then he's going to take all of those features that he just laid out and he's going to break them out. He's going to say, correspondingly, universal scientific knowledge. There's something in it that corresponds to each of those things that we just said about the wise men. So we said about the wise men. He's concerned with general level things. All things or things at the most general level. That's what first philosophy is concerned with. Primary things is the word he's going to use. It's going to be concerned with things that are more teachable, which means that they involve causes.

Sorry, I went. I went out of order. Sorry. Anyway, universal scientific knowledge. It's concerned with universals because they're the most difficult to know. And that's what the wise man is concerned with. It's the science concerned with primary things. And then it's also the most teachable. It's what we're interested in for its own sake.

30:53 Dylan: I want to make a kind of side observation I was experiencing when I was rereading this. There's a kind of pejorative version of Aristotle and this way of thinking about causes that gets brought up. And someone like Descartes would really hammer down on this kind of scholastic version of Aristotle where you end up having the sequence of causes that gets you to something that seems plainly absurd. But you have this string of causal thinking. And I get reminded when I read Aristotle that we started from the particulars here at the beginning. And I think here or in other works, it's worth noting that it would never be Aristotelian to have that discussion of causes that doesn't ultimately also allow you to understand things about particulars, even here.

While we're going to end up getting into being qua being and doing metaphysics and understanding those things. In trying to figure something out about the world and explain things, it would always end up having to be tied to or point to results of particulars in a similar way that thinking about the origins of what we're doing, when we're thinking is about particular things, is motivating his path towards understanding wisdom itself.

32:12 Mark: It's interesting that he's laying this out sort of in the abstract, that he knows if you have the most universal knowledge, you know, in a certain way, all the things that come under it. I mean, that could be. Hey, I know that they're all being like. They could be an entirely empty way.

32:27 Seth: Right.

32:27 Mark: Hegel would point out that this is merely the notion, but yet this is not just the notion. This is the most comprehensible, the most understandable, yet the most difficult things for human beings to know, which those two seem in conflict to me. You know, for Plato, I feel like, okay, people don't usually direct their minds to the forms, so it's difficult to be the kind of person who directs your minds to the forms. But once you do, oh yeah, they just come sailing in. And so, you know, for the person who is in the zone, who is the wisest of the wise, then they will know this general knowledge with the greatest precision, even though you.

You peons, you don't even know what I'm talking about. Is that a good way of resolving the distinction between. It's difficult, yet it's the most comprehensive, it's the most transparent, should be the most easy in a certain way, once you get the hang of it.

33:15 Dylan: I don't know. I get caught up in the pejorative peons kind of language. He certainly is hierarchical about it and that there's people who are better at doing this than others, that's for sure. But I don't think that's anything different than any other kind of knowledge about anything. We would have hierarchies about skills as well as knowledge.

33:34 Mark: Well, he says they're the most difficult because they're the farthest from the senses. So if most people are driven by the senses, driven by desire, are the Bronze people or whatever, then, yeah, of course they're going to have a hard time with it.

33:45 Seth: Make a distinction here between the subject and the method. Right. So senses are common to all people. Reason theoretically is. But reason needs to be trained. You know, it needs to be habituated to look for these things. So the universal truths themselves, it's not that, as he's going to say later on, if you're looking at something, it's not a simple unity, it's a plurality, and you have to start parsing out and individuating aspects, attributes of it, and then causes and whatever that takes work, right? And if methodologically you have the skill to do it, when you can start to identify the single causes or the whys of individual things, you'll have disambiguated the plurality and be focusing on the one thing.

And theoretically, from a knowledge perspective, it should be easier than trying to make sense of experiences of the senses and so forth. But as a subject matter it should not be more complicated. But methodologically to get there, it is. And in that sense, I don't think it's any less elitist than Plato. I guess in that respect, I think

34:52 Wes: it might be helpful to take a contemporary example, even though we have to also give a spoiler alert because I'm going to foreshadow some of the answers to these questions. But take water, right? Everyone who has the requisite senses can have the sensory perceptions of the macro level, phenomenal properties of water, clearness under certain conditions, and so on and so forth. And that's the easiest. And everyone has it. But in a way it's murky because we don't understand the causes, we don't know what the essence is. Right. This is going to become very important as we move on.

What we need to know, the cause, the explanation of something, is to know its essence, which in the case of water, turns out to be H2O. Now Seth, as you're pointing out, that takes a lot of work, a lot of scientific investigation to start out from that kind of knowing something vaguely would be easy part to knowing it essentially knowing this causal dynamic micro level system that through its dynamism produces these macro level properties. But there's a clarity once you know that the essence is H2O, even though it's hard. Science is hard. You're in the high school lab with all the little molecule things and it's not fun necessarily.

I guess some people find it fun, but when you know it, it's clearer. I think maybe that's a way of getting at the paradox that Mark is pointing to. So that's a particular science, right? Physics. But you could kind of scale that up to metaphysics, which is to say, yeah, the phenomenal world of the world of change and flux is easy to know in that limited way. Metaphysics is the hardest of all things. But when we do get some, some clarity on it, I mean, one of

36:30 Mark: the reasons it's easier to understand, it's simpler, is because it is a model and it's a simplified model so that, yes, you know, H2O and then maybe you can predict how it's going to chemically interact with other things. You can do some fluid dynamics, but unless, you know, like you're talking about it being clearer, the water itself is probably not clear. You know, it's like we never see real triangles.

36:54 Dylan: You always see water with stuff dissolved.

36:56 Mark: Right. We'd have to do the titration or whatever it was, where you steam it up.

37:00 Wes: You guys need a Brita, Brita filter. I've had some clear glasses of water. That's a good point.

37:06 Mark: You know, Aristotle sort of known by contrast to Plato as more scientific, more empiricist, but to me, he always sort of splits down the middle that if you're really going to insist that the general knowledge, this abstract knowledge is superior, then it can't just be like that. It's a model that might be a poor model and not actually explain this particular waterfall or whatever very well, because there's more things going on with the waterfall than your very simple model of, well, this is what water would be. You know, think about when people have these economic theories that just cannot actually account for the data. But you might say, oh, well, I don't understand all that messy data out in the world, all that messy stuff. But my theory is so pure and simple and so easy to understand. Well, that's because it's a theory.

37:55 Dylan: I think this question of what is it that you know about the phenomena? Like, so say, what is it you know about water? And Wes gave the account about, well, it's H2O. And you're making the point. Well, water in the world is never H2O, which is true. Or when you're saying, oh, there's the river of water, you're picking out something that is the dominant feature of it, which is that it's mostly water. But you very quickly end up saying, well, it's got plenty of other stuff in it, right? Even if I ignore the fish, there's all the other particles and all the other stuff dissolved in it, but the way it's behaving in the world is as if it were pure water.

So you're making that extrapolation same thing with your waterfall example, right? Somebody says, well, you say, well, I know everything there is to know about water and gravity. And you say, okay, well, great, then why am I getting wet when I'm standing over here? That's going to be a very complicated problem of fluid dynamics and how the water is going over the waterfall and hitting these rocks and that. Or maybe I'm not getting wet at this place. And that's not going to be from that simple explanation. It's going to be much more complicated.

Maybe it doesn't come out in the metaphysics. Maybe it comes out in other things. I guess my experience with it has been that even when you come across things that are like, well, your conclusion is just dumb because it's just clearly not the right conclusion, it's still rooted in those conclusions or trying to extrapolate observations, and often they end up being wrong. But the goal of understanding that cause, and I don't know about the model thinking, I don't know, that way of talking about that we use now that we're making simplifications that are extrapolating out from the phenomena.

And we always have to understand it as an approximation. I don't know if that's part of Aristotle.

39:42 Mark: And it's kind of good that we're not using that we have the what it is rather than the essence of the thing, because we use essence as an oversimplification. It's not, you know, that particular lake that I point to. Well, it's essentially water. What I mean by that is it's mostly water. For practical purposes, we can treat it as water, but not for everything. You know, maybe you can't drink it. Maybe it's a very important way. It's not essentially water. The essence in that case sort of depends on why you want to know

40:11 Dylan: in the metaphysics, those distinctions he's not worrying about.

40:14 Wes: Right.

40:14 Dylan: We're in this part where he's motivating us, getting to that first philosophy bit. And I guess I got us sort of down this road, you know, insisting that in some ways we get back to the particulars. But maybe I'm just wrong about that.

40:27 Wes: I think for the purposes of this, you guys have me thinking a little bit more about the psychology of this, which is what is it that is so satisfying and makes us feel like we've explained something to give these causalities explanations to point out. Okay, X causes Y. Therefore I've explained why. I don't want to delve into that. I don't know. There's an answer to that. It's a very difficult question. But he does say something towards the end of this section that also made me think of that, which is that with science we feel like we end up in a better condition than we started. This is again, another little psychological remark.

41:00 Dylan: So this is the end of section 2.

41:02 Wes: Yeah, so he'll say at 9,83 a 17 or so. But we must end in the contrary. And according to the proverb the better state, as is the case in these instances too, when men learn the cause. For there is nothing which would surprise a geometer so much as if the diagonal turned out to be commensurable. Maybe read a little bit at the beginning of that paragraph. Yet the acquisition of it knowledge must in a sense end in something which is the opposite of our original inquiries. For all men began, as we said, by wondering that things are as they are as they do about self moving marionettes, which I did not know that they had back then, or about the solstices or the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with the side.

For it seems wonderful to all who have not yet seen the reason that there is a thing which cannot be measured even by the smallest unit. But we end in the contrary and better state. So I think the psychological point here is that if we want to say something is a science and that science involves these explanations, fundamentally causes, we have to say that our grasping of them puts us in a better state. It satisfies something. A pragmatist would say something about this, right? We have to do a psychology of this and say, because if it didn't feel good, we didn't feel satisfied by that, then we wouldn't be calling it science.

42:22 Dylan: It satisfies our wondering. There's that psychology of. It's even a physical experience of satisfaction when you figure something out. Well, what do you mean by that? That's what he's talking about there, right? And that's what you're pointing to, Wes, is that there's a conclusion that says oh, I got it right when I say it all makes sense. That's what the psychologies we're talking about.

42:43 Wes: We think back on our philosophy of science episodes where we say, okay, so now there's predictive value to this, right? We have a model for water, for instance, H2O and we can do things with this. But he'll say here also, just above, he'll say we're not looking for productive science. We're not looking for a techne. It's not simply about doing things. Its philosophy is sourced in wonder. It's sourced in the sense of ignorance and this desire to know. And that really is not about utility. And then he goes into this little excursion and that's why it started when people had free time, right? That's, you know, the more leisure people had then the more they would do this type of thing. And that's why all part of why it's thought of as more estimable and all that.

43:18 Seth: Yeah. The more slaves they had.

43:20 Wes: Yeah, I was gonna. I skipped right past that.

43:22 Seth: I think this is a good point to just touch on the Routledge commentary because there's a really nice section in there where the author talks about how Aristotle thinks that help me with the pronunciation aporia problems or puzzles. That humans are unique. Getting into this concept of psychology. Humans are unique in that we're motivated to try to solve puzzles and solve problems. And that's what directs our spirit of inquiry in a lot of sense. And of course contradictions and opposites. And so for prototypical aporias. And he says in there that, you know, the question of what is being is not just a regular question, but it's actually a problem and a puzzle that presents itself to us and makes us puzzled about it.

That ties up in a really nice little bow. And I think also in some way illuminated to me when I unfortunately start looking back at my life and seeing all of the things that I thought were revolutionary that I'm now reading Aristotle back into. Like Heidegger, for example. The question concerning being that's in Being and Time is ultimately Aristotle's question as well. He's going to answer it differently. But being is a great mystery. What is it for something to be? What is being apart from all individual beings? That is the puzzle par excellence next to like mind, body.

Right. Those are the kind of the two

44:47 Wes: big ones wrapping up this section. There's one more thing he emphasizes which is that we want to make sure when we're talking about explanations and causes, we talk about the good. We talk about the. For sake of which he makes a special point of mentioning that. And it's going to come up again and again. We can't ignore functional explanations if we're going to be doing this science.

45:08 Mark: Yes, that seems a good. We'll start part two with the four causes, that being one of them. At least that's what I've got in my notes. You were making me think of how crass Neo is in the Matrix. That he's gained the superior knowledge of the underlying source code and he uses it for practical benefit to bend the spoon and kick really fast. And really he should just contemplate be the guru. That used for purely understanding means would be the more dignified way that that movie could have gone down a little less action. Perhaps my dinner with Neo.

45:41 Seth: We don't have my dinner with Keanu

45:43 Wes: Reeves as the philosopher. That would be riveting.

45:49 Dylan: I want to come back to this question about. As we Go along about whether or not the philosopher ought to be practical either, because I think it's a worthwhile question.

45:59 Seth: I'll just say if you can't wait until the next episode to find out what Dylan's talking about, go listen to our Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance episode.

46:11 Mark: All right, thanks for listening to part one. Come back next week for part two or become a partially examined Life Citizen supporter at partiallyexaminedlife.com support. There are a couple different ways that you could get it right now. See you in a bit.