The Divine Lamp

The following contains the text of Book 1, Chapter 1 of Aristotle’s METAPHYSICS. The translation is that of W.D. Ross and is in the public domain. The source I used for the text is copyrighted under the GNU Free Documentation License. Ross’ text is in plain black script. Section headings in bold type are from McMahon’s METAPHYSICS OF ARITOTLE.  Notes from other non-copyrighted works are in red. My own notes, if any, are in blue.  A brief analysis from McMahon can be found HERE.

The Metaphysics of Aristotle(1).

(1) Metaphysics is sometimes taken as meaning “beyond,” or “above” physics because, according to Aristotle himself, this science is superior to all others. It should be noted, however, that Aristotle did not give this name to his work. According to MacMahon, the designation of it as “Metaphysics” comes from Andronicus of Rhodes “who, out of the materials employed in compiling the Physics, set down after them, and designated as meta physika whatever he found unsuited for insertion here.” Apparently Andronicus, finding that the subject matter of this body of writing was different from The Physics, separated them from that work in his compilation of Aristotle’s texts. Thus the word originally designated their place with in the Organon (body of work) of Aristotle: they were put after (meta) the physics. Other scholars maintain that the term is derived from the fact that it was considered appropriate to study this particular subject only after (meta) having studied The Physics.

1. Man’s natural thirst for knowledge, and a proof thereof.

“ALL men by nature desire to know (2). An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses(3); for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else(4). The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.

2. “all men desire to know.” This, probably, is what Cicero means when he says, in the De Officiis, I, 4,- “In primisque hominis est, propria veri inquisitio atque investigatio.” The assertion, however, that all men desire knowledge, has been objected to, on the ground that in some this desire is wholly absent; but this absence merely mounts to a suppression of the natural desire from various causes; e.g., want of leisure for intellectual pursuits, constitutional laziness, voluptuous habits. This natural craving for knowledge leads to a concentration of individual abilities on particular studies, and thus to a subdivision of intellectual labor. Aristotle omits to notice here the connection between this desire and our social capacities, which ensures the mutual communication between mankind of their mental and scientific discoveries.

Aquinas, in his commentary on the Metaphysics notes that Aristotle gives three reasons why men desire by nature to know: 1. a thing naturally desires its own perfections; 2. by nature things are inclined to perform operations proper to them, and understanding is proper to man’s nature; 3. each thing is inclined to be untied to its source. See Aquinas’ Commentary on the Metaphysics, Lesson 1, under the heading “commentary,” # 2-4.

3. Aristotle thus assigns two reasons for our love of the senses,-their utility, and their being sources of knowledge; or, as Thomas Aquinas expresses it, “in quantum sunt utiles ac gognoscitivi.”

4. “ we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else.” Aristotle’s reasoning amounts to this. Man loves knowledge, and loves the senses, therefore, for their own sakes; that is, so far forth as they are the inlets of knowledge, and, consequently, the sense of sight for the cause he assigns. The elevation of this sense above the others was in accordance with the notions of the old philosophers, and of the scholastics; and this superiority was grounded on the immediateness of the perceptions afforded by the organ of vision, compared with the others which came in through a medium. This notion is discarded by the moderns. All the sense, as such, are equally the source of knowledge, as is most satisfactorily proved by Brown, and with much originality too, in his Philosophy of the Human Mind. I’m not sure this is a fair assessment of all scholasticism which gave more than one reason for sights superiority.

2. Different degrees of knowledge in the brute creation, and their different order of development.

“By nature animals are born with the faculty of sensation, and from sensation memory is produced in some of them(5), though not in others. And therefore the former are more intelligent and apt at learning than those which cannot remember; those which are incapable of hearing sounds are intelligent though they cannot be taught, e.g. the bee, and any other race of animals that may be like it; and those which besides memory have this sense of hearing can be taught.

5. “from sensation memory is produced in some of them (brute animals), though not in others.” That memory is a distinct faculty of man, much less in brutes, is denied by Brown; but that what we term memory in the human species is found in brutes, is shown by Locke in the instance of birds, after a few attempts, learning to warble particular airs of music.

3. Comparison between men and brutes.

“The animals other than man live by appearances (6) and memories, and have but little of connected experience; but the human race lives also by art and reasonings.

6. “Appearances.” It is not, however, quite so easy to determine the meaning of this word in the philosophic works of the ancients. In the present case, Aristotle seems to mean those ideas that are conveyed into the minds of animals by means of their representative power…Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary, defines (the word) thus: Quae est motus factus sensu secundus actum;” which reminds us of Hobbes’ definition of sensation itself.

4. The different degrees of human knowledge, and their order of development.

Now from memory experience is produced in men; for the several memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience. And experience seems pretty much like science and art.

5. The generation of art and science from experience.

but really science and art come to men through experience; for ‘experience made art’, as Polus says, ‘but inexperience luck.’ Now art arises when from many notions gained by experience one universal judgement about a class of objects is produced. For to have a judgement that when Callias was ill of this disease this did him good, and similarly in the case of Socrates and in many individual cases, is a matter of experience; but to judge that it has done good to all persons of a certain constitution, marked off in one class, when they were ill of this disease, e.g. to phlegmatic or bilious people when burning with fevers-this is a matter of art.

6. The comparison of art to experience, in regard to practice.

“With a view to action experience seems in no respect inferior to art, and men of experience succeed even better than those who have theory without experience. (The reason is that experience is knowledge of individuals, art of universals, and actions and productions are all concerned with the individual; for the physician does not cure man, except in an incidental way, but Callias or Socrates or some other called by some such individual name, who happens to be a man. If, then, a man has the theory without the experience, and recognizes the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail to cure; for it is the individual that is to be cured.)

7. The superiority of art over experience, in regard of knowledge.

But yet we think that knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than to experience, and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience (which implies that Wisdom depends in all cases rather on knowledge); and this because the former know the cause, but the latter do not.

8. Three proofs in support of the above proposition (#7)

The first proof. For men of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why, while the others know the ‘why’ and the cause. Hence we think also that the masterworkers in each craft are more honourable and know in a truer sense and are wiser than the manual workers, because they know the causes of the things that are done (we think the manual workers are like certain lifeless things which act indeed, but act without knowing what they do, as fire burns,-but while the lifeless things perform each of their functions by a natural tendency, the labourers perform them through habit); thus we view them as being wiser not in virtue of being able to act, but of having the theory for themselves and knowing the causes.

The second proof. And in general it is a sign of the man who knows and of the man who does not know, that the former can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than experience is; for artists can teach, and men of mere experience cannot.

The third proof. “Again, we do not regard any of the senses as Wisdom; yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do not tell us the ‘why’ of anything-e.g. why fire is hot; they only say that it is hot.

9. Speculative rather than active art is wisdom.

“At first he who invented any art whatever that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility. Hence when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered, and first in the places where men first began to have leisure. This is why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure (7).

7. Aristotle here shows the paths through which men must travel into this “wisdom,” or first philosophy; and for this purpose adduced the example of the Egyptian priests, who were enabled to construct the speculative sciences of geometry and mathematics by having enjoyed the leisure from the laborious employments of life. They were thus allowed an opportunity of contemplating the heavenly phenomena, and, from such observations of experience, of deducing the abstract sciences. The student will do well to consult Alexander’s Commentary on the passage, and the more elaborate explanation of Asclepius, taken from Ammonius.

10. That wisdom is a science of causes, reaffirmed, and stated as the object of the present treatise.

“We have said in the Ethics what the difference is between art and science and the other kindred faculties; but the point of our present discussion is this, that all men suppose what is called Wisdom to deal with the first causes and the principles of things; so that, as has been said before, the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any sense-perception whatever, the artist wiser than the men of experience, the masterworker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of Wisdom than the productive. Clearly then Wisdom is knowledge about certain principles and causes.

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