--- date: '2023-11-16' description: On Aristotle's Metaphysics. id: Questions about Metaphysics modified: 2026-06-05 15:08:09 GMT-04:00 tags: - philosophy - fruit - philos1aa3 title: Questions about Metaphysics created: '2023-11-16' published: '2023-11-16' pageLayout: default slug: posts/Questions-about-Metaphysics permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/posts/Questions-about-Metaphysics.md generator: quartz: v4.6.0 hostedProvider: Cloudflare baseUrl: aarnphm.xyz full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt --- > \[!question\]- Question > > With a view to action, experience seems in no respect inferior to art \[i.e., technical knowledge, e.g., engineering or medicine\], and men of experience succeed even better than those who have theory without experience… But yet we think that knowledge and understanding belong to art \[i.e., technical mastery\] rather than to experience, and we suppose artists \[i.e., technicians, engineers\] to be wiser than men of experience… \[W\]e do not regard any of the senses as wisdom; yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. (132) > > Here Aristotle says people with experience only do not have knowledge, do not understand, and are not wise, despite their ability to perform some tasks just as well as the professionals. He also says that people who rely on their senses may have authoritative knowledge of a sort, but not wisdom. > > Explain why you think Aristotle says these things, and what you understand him to mean by “knowledge” and by “wisdom”—what they are and why they are good. Strive to explain his points in your own terms, but use brief quotations to convince your reader that what you say really might be Aristotle’s idea. Finally, consider whether Aristotle’s ideas of knowledge and wisdom make sense in today’s world. Is there a different idea of knowledge or wisdom that better suits our situation and experience? In reflecting upon [[thoughts/Aristotle]]‘s [[thoughts/university/twenty-three-twenty-four/philo-1aa3/tut/Being qua being|Being qua being]], especially his demarcation of wisdom from experiential and technical knowledge, I want to set his view against the more fluid conception of knowledge proposed by [[thoughts/Philosophy and Nietzsche|Nietzsche]]. Aristotle places wisdom above other forms of knowledge, stating, _“For the wise man must not be ordered but must order, and he must not obey another, but the less wise must obey him”_ (982a17-19). My argument is that Aristotle’s account of what it is to know holds up today, but his ranking does not. In many fields we now act on knowledge of the “that” without the “why”, and the kind of wisdom that suits this situation is one Aristotle himself described, practical wisdom, which he ranked below theoretical wisdom. ### Experience, art, and why experience falls short [[thoughts/Aristotle|Aristotle]] establishes a clear hierarchy between experience, knowledge, and wisdom: while experience is valuable for practical action, it falls short of knowledge or wisdom. He notes, _“With a view to action, experience seems in no respect inferior to art… But yet we think that knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than to experience…”_ (981a12-26). The reason is the difference between particulars and universals: _“experience is knowledge of individuals, art of universals”_ (981a15-16). The physician does not cure “man” but Callias or Socrates (981a18-20), so the person of experience can treat the patient in front of them as well as the physician can, sometimes better. What the person of experience lacks is the general account of why the treatment works, and so they cannot teach it: _“we think art more truly knowledge than experience is; for artists can teach, and men of mere experience cannot”_ (981b7-10). Aristotle marks knowledge as a progression beyond experience, an understanding of the ‘why’ behind things. He states, _“For men of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why, while the others know the ‘why’ and the cause”_ (981a28-30). This includes both ‘technē,’ a kind of knowledge relevant to making things (craftsmanship or art), and ‘epistēmē,’ scientific knowledge. Both involve understanding the principles and causes behind facts and processes. The same test explains the line about the senses. They _“give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do not tell us the ‘why’ of anything”_ (981b10-13): sight tells me that fire is hot, not why it is. ### Wisdom, and why knowledge is good Wisdom (_Sophia_), according to Aristotle, is the pinnacle in this hierarchy. He observes, _“Clearly then Wisdom is knowledge about certain principles and causes”_ (982a1-3). Wisdom is theoretical knowledge of first principles, which is why Aristotle ranks the theoretical sciences above the productive ones (981b30-982a1) and keeps practical know-how out of it. The wise person knows the most universal causes, which are the hardest to know and the furthest from the senses, and is the one most _“capable of teaching the causes”_ (982a12-14). Why any of this is good is answered in the first line of the book: _“All men by nature desire to know”_ (980a21). Knowledge satisfies a desire we already have, and wisdom satisfies it best, because it is pursued for nothing beyond itself. Men began to philosophise out of wonder, not for any use (982b12-21), and so _“as the man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another’s, so we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake”_ (982b25-28). This is also why the wise should order and not be ordered: the science that knows the end for which everything else is done is the one that directs the others (982b4-7). ### Does it make sense today? The common objection is that technology and the accessibility of information have made deep knowledge easier to acquire, so the boundaries Aristotle draws have blurred. By his own test this does not follow. Easier access to information gives people more of the “that”, which is still experience. Reading that a drug lowers blood pressure is not knowing why it does. A better objection is that in many fields the “that” now runs ahead of the “why”, and we act on it anyway. Surgeons have used general anaesthesia since 1846 without a settled account of how it produces unconsciousness. Machine learning models predict protein structures and write passable prose, and nobody, including the people who build them, can state the causes of a particular output. By Aristotle’s test this is experience, knowledge of particulars that cannot be fully taught as principle, yet it is some of the most valuable knowledge we have. The ranking in Metaphysics I, which puts the person who knows the cause above the person who gets the result, fits these cases badly. Nietzsche goes further. His [[thoughts/Philosophy and Nietzsche#Thus Spoke Zarathustra|perspectivism]] denies that there is a view from nowhere from which the most universal causes could be known: _“There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’, be”_ (_On the Genealogy of Morals_, III.12). As Clark (1990) argues, this is not the claim that all knowledge is merely subjective. It says objectivity comes from adding perspectives, not escaping them, which makes the experience of the practitioner a part of knowledge rather than a stage below it. Nietzsche’s criticism of a predetermined human telos, and the [[thoughts/Chaos|Übermensch]] who creates values rather than discovering them (Ansell-Pearson, 2012), attack Aristotle’s ethics more than this hierarchy, since sophia in Metaphysics I is theoretical knowledge, not moral knowledge. ### Conclusion The idea of wisdom that suits our situation is already in Aristotle, in the _Nicomachean Ethics_ rather than the _Metaphysics_. Practical wisdom (phronesis) is the ability to deliberate well about particulars, and Aristotle grants that _“some who do not know, and especially those who have experience, are more practical than others who know”_: someone who knows that light meats are wholesome but not which meats are light will not produce health, while someone who only knows that chicken is wholesome is more likely to (NE VI.7, [`1141b16`](https://github.com/aarnphm/aarnphm.github.io/commit/1141b16)-21). That is the passage this question started from, seen from the other side. Aristotle still ranked phronesis below sophia, because “man is not the best thing in the world” ([`1141a20`](https://github.com/aarnphm/aarnphm.github.io/commit/1141a20)-22). I would reverse the ranking. Knowing the causes remains the best account of what it is to understand something, but when the causes are unknown, as they often are now, the wisdom worth having is the experienced judgment of what to do anyway, checked against as many perspectives as we can gather. ### Reference 1. Ansell-Pearson, K. (2012). Nietzsche’s Übermensch: A Hero of Our Time. _Philosophy Now_. Retrieved from 2. Aristotle. _Metaphysics_ (W. D. Ross, Trans.), Book I. _Nicomachean Ethics_ (W. D. Ross, Trans.), Book VI. 3. Clark, M. (1990). _Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy_. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from 4. Nietzsche, F. (1967). _On the Genealogy of Morals_ (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 1887)