Relation, Part 2: Thomas on Real Relations and Relations of Reason, and the Weak Being of Relation

Orientation #

He begins “a little text here in the middle of page five” of the handout and works down through page ten, so this is a continuation of the previous class’s handout on relation. He refers back once: “I mentioned last time” the De Potentia argument that God creates by knowledge and will (prev. lecture). At the end: “Maybe we should stop now, but I’m sure we’ll finish with this.” The previous class treated relativa secundum esse vs secundum dici and real relations vs relations of reason; the next continues Thomas’s texts on relation as a category.

The class, in order #

1. Names signifying the habitudo itself vs. names signifying its foundation (“sometimes a name is placed upon something”) #

Point: a text (page five) distinguishes three kinds of relative names, and explains why Aristotle put power and science in quality.

• Habitudo glossed as “how you have yourself towards another” — “kind of a strange word.”
• (a) Names signifying the relation itself: Dominus (the lord is lord of the slave); these are relativa secundum esse.
• (b) Names said of God that signify from their first understanding a relation which is by reason in God, and consequently give the essence to understand, since the relation is founded on something essential. Example: Creator — the creature is really related to God and really depends on him, but God is in no way changed by creating us; there is a foundation in God for his being our creator.
• (c) Names signifying that on which the habitudo is founded: science (“always a common example”), equality — fundamentally in a genus (quality, quantity), upon which a respect to the knowable follows; these are relativa secundum dici only, and principally give to understand another predicament (quality), consequently implying a relation. “That’s where Aristotle seems to have interfered with the order.”
• Text on power: (1) to power belongs the notion of being a beginning, which is in the genus of relation; (2) but that which is a beginning of acting upon or undergoing is not a relation but something absolute, an absolute form, and this is the essence of power; conclusion: the Philosopher places potency in the second species of quality, as he places science in the first, though to both “some relation happens.” “You can see how subtle Aristotle was to see this.”
• Aside: De Koninck said “Aristotle is somebody.”

2. The two definitions of relation and what the second excludes (“the necessity of the second definition”) #

Point: the second Aristotelian definition is needed to exclude relativa secundum dici.

• First definition: something “said to be of another” — “kind of a tang definition.” Second: one whose whole being or nature is to be towards another.
• The distinction between the definitions is NOT the distinction between secundum dici and secundum esse: both kinds fall under the first (“this is double of that,” “this is knowledge of that”); the second admits only those whose whole nature is towards another, so it excludes secundum dici from being placed chiefly in the genus.

3. Real relations vs relations of reason; a confusion Thomas clears (“should not be confused with the distinction”) #

Point: the real/of-reason distinction cuts across the esse/dici distinction; a dici relation can be real, an esse relation of reason.

• Objection (the fourth): where there is no relation secundum rem we find only ad aliquid secundum dici, as the knowable, which Aristotle (Metaphysics V) says is relative because something else is referred to it; but some things said of God (Lord, King) are ad aliquid secundum esse; therefore they signify a real relation in God. (Reason can hardly grasp the knowable’s case “unless it makes the other thing relative to the original one.”)
• Reply: “that doesn’t make anything for the thing proposed,” for in both kinds of relative something is found implying a real relation and something implying a relation of reason. Idem, “the same,” implies a relation of reason though relative secundum esse — “I’m the same as myself… because I’m only one,” like saying I’m like myself. Science implies a real relation though relative secundum dici.
• Relations of reason are not in the category of towards something, since the categories divide real being (clear from the distinction of being in “the fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]). Perhaps the “to be” in the second definition points to being in things, not in reason — as Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” is about being in things.
• Some have thought all relations are of reason, arising from the mind comparing things. “This is a mistake,” but its reason is the weakness in being of relations.

4. The weakness of relation’s being: it inheres through other genera (“more remote from substance”) #

Point: relatives are the weakest beings and are in substance only by means of quantity or action/passion.

• Text: ad aliquid seem more remote from substance and the other genera because weaker in being, whence they inhere in substance by means of other genera. Double/half, equal/unequal — by means of quantity (so quantity is closer to substance than double). Father/son (which implies some quality and some acting upon, generating), mover/moved, lord/slave — by means of action and passion.
• Reason: substance is existence in itself; quantity and quality are beings in another; relativa are not only in another but towards another.
• Aside: a student’s remark about “the war in the south, master and slaves” — “it’s hardly anything.”

5. What makes a relation real: same as the substance, or having a cause in the subject (“guess where it’s from”) #

Point: the De Potentia text (“that’s powerful stuff… being ground down by that De Potentia”) gives the cause of relation’s reality.

• Reality of relations in things is from their being accidents, i.e. having a cause in their subject: “Am I really your teacher? I’m a teacher by reason of something real in me — some knowledge, I hope.”
• Text: relation, by the ratio of its genus, does not have that it is something (what is double in itself? nothing), only that it is towards something; that it is something secundum rem it has from the side by which it is in something: either as being the same secundum rem, as in divinis, or as having a cause in its subject, as in creatures.
• In divinis: is the fatherhood of the Father something other than the divine substance? No — God is altogether simple, so his fatherhood is the same as his substance; “very much a real thing then.” Not so for us: our accidents are not our substance, let alone our relations — double and taller are even more remote from my substance than quantity is (people sometimes confuse the size of a thing with its substantial being; it is closer, but not the same). “That’s a very profound statement.”
• In creatures: I am taller/shorter/equal by reason of my height, a cause in me; with no size I could not be double or taller than you. (Student: “Are you taller than your guardian angel?” — “I’m shorter than him… I was thinking metaphorically.”)
• Relation is not an accident from its being towards something (an accident is something existing in another; a relation with no foundation in me is not an accident in me) but from the fact that it inest. Hence relation alone, by the ratio of its genus, remains with substance in divine things, and there is not an accident but real because the same as God’s substance.
• Who said in God there are just two categories, substance and relation? Boethius. Aside: Boethius is perhaps the greatest mind in the Church between Augustine and Thomas; set out to make Greek philosophy known to the Latins, translated Aristotle (Thomas used his translations), wrote great works in theology and philosophy; a local tradition of veneration as a saint though not formally canonized.
• Some relations are of reason only because they have no foundation in the thing of which they are said.

6. Two things in a relation; “assisting” relations; why absolute things are not in God (“In relation, there are two things”) #

Point: two Sentences texts distinguish the respect (ratio) of a relation from its being, and use it to explain temporal predicates of God.

• In relation: (1) the respect by which it is referred to another, in which the ratio of relation consists; (2) the being of the relation, which it has as founded in some thing — quantity, as in us, or the essence, as in God.
• Those who consider relations only by the respect (from which it does not have that it implies something inhering) say they place nothing really in the thing and call them “assisting” or exterior “affixed” — “getting mixed up in heresies about the Trinity too.” Properly, affixed/assisting relations have no foundation in the thing but only from the relation to another: “right” in the column, said of it because a man is on its left. (“Are you there on my right? You on my left? I’m the center of things here.”)
• Thomas separated quantity and quality (said absolutely) from towards something: what is said absolutely places something in that in which it is by what is private to it; a relation need not.
• Second text: things said absolutely, by their own notions, place something in that of which they are said, as quantity or quality (the size of my body; “how am I today? healthier, sick”); hence neither is found truly and properly in God; we cannot say something of God “from time” except that it changes by receiving what it did not have before. But relation by its ratio places only a relation to another; hence some relations are found not really existing in that of which they are said, and are said newly not from its change but from the change of that to which it is said: God was not always Creator, because of the change in the creature.

7. What relation has in common with the other accidents and what is private to it (“In each of the nine genera of accident”) #

Point: the Summa text isolates relation’s oddity: its proper ratio is not taken by comparison to its subject.

• proprium: he translates not “proper” but “private” (also for the common good vs the private good).
• In each of the nine accidental genera two things: (1) what belongs to each as accident, common to all — esse in subjecto; this is what the antepredicaments gave (said of another / existing in another; universal and particular substance and accident). (2) The proper ratio of each genus.
• In quantity and quality even the proper ratio is taken by comparison to the subject: quantity the measure (size) of substance, quality the disposition of substance. The ratio of relation is taken not by comparison to that in which it is but to something outside. “How great is the difference” — all are in a subject, but relation’s connection with the subject is a “strange thing.” Hence the question: from what does relation have existence in things?

8. Digression: two causes of difficulty in knowing, and relation “hit at both ends” (“Relation, you get hit at both ends”) #

Point: Aristotle’s two sources of difficulty explain why relation is so hard.

• Difficulty in knowing is either in the thing (it hardly is) or in us (weakness of mind). Relations of Father, Son, Holy Spirit: the difficulty is in us; ordinary creaturely relations: in the thing, which hardly is.
• The three “looking sciences”: natural philosophy is harder than geometry or arithmetic because about motion and matter — matter by itself not actually anything, only in ability; motion “the act of what is able to be insofar as it is able to be” (Descartes: “what do those words mean?”; his own high-school claim to understand it — “you better be careful”). Wisdom/first philosophy is harder because of the weakness of our mind.
• Same distinction in love: hard to love the common good or God — the problem is in you (God is goodness itself); hard to love cancer or rock and roll — the problem is in the thing. “That’s a nice distinction.”
• Beginning of the eight books of Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]: what is more known to us is less known simply / by nature; we know things confusedly before distinctly. Example: a student is surer she is drinking dry red wine than Cabernet Sauvignon, yet the wine is less known as dry red.
• Aside: his brother Mark the wine authority — Ron McCarthy’s faculty dinner with switched bottles, Mark catching him; their weekly blind tests (he right maybe fifty percent, Mark always); Mark’s first lesson: the two greatest red grapes Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir, the two greatest white Pinot Chardonnay and Johannesburg Riesling, which he teaches the grandchildren.

9. No motion in ad aliquid, yet relation follows upon the term of motion (“It is the nature of relation”) #

Point (middle of page eight): relation has its cause in other genera because it has a minimum of being (the Commentator), and it follows on motion without being its term.

• There is no motion in ad aliquid (proved in Physics V): you can’t try to become double or taller. But since motion ends per se at some being, a relation of necessity follows: alteration (genus of quality) ending in white → relation of likeness to all white things. “Did I become like others, or did I become white?” The real becoming was the whiteness; likeness follows. Generation terminating at form → the relation by which matter is said to be under form.
• Though quantity, quality and towards something are all said of substance by something in it, there is an important difference in the ratio of towards something. (Grandchildren “think they’re growing taller” than the shorter parents.)

10. Relation is not “remaining in a subject” but “in transit towards another” (“Relation in this differs from quantity and quality”) #

Point: another De Potentia text (“my fear is aroused when I see that title”).

• Quantity and quality are accidents remaining in the subject (my size, my knowledge remain in me). Relation, as Boethius says in the book on the Trinity, does not signify as remaining in a subject but in transit toward another (taller, shorter, equal). “Very, very odd being.”
• What is attributed to something as proceeding from it to another does not make composition with it — as acting upon does not with the agent. Hence (Physics V) no motion in ad aliquid: a relation can cease from the mutation of the other alone — parents taller than their children suddenly shorter; the real change was the children’s growth. Likewise action: one changing from idleness to acting is not thereby changed — which would not be if relation or acting upon signified something remaining in the subject. (Student: when I act, where am I? — in the thing acted upon; “that’s the term.”)
• Aside (from last time): De Potentia argument that God created by wisdom and will, not by nature: his creating is not added to his substance, so it must be an act remaining in him; only knowing and willing remain in the doer. “The De Potentia just grinds up my mind”; Thomas must have been popular at Paris.

11. Union as a relation; relations real in one extreme only (“union is a certain relation”) #

Point: the Scriptum super III text applies the foundations of relation to the Incarnation and creation.

• Every relation (Metaphysics V) is founded on quantity or what is reduced to it, or on action and passion. One is reduced to quantity as the beginning of discrete quantity, and upon it are founded identity (one in substance), equality (one in quantity), likeness (one in quality). Unitio is an action/passion by which from many something is made one; upon it follows the relation union.
• Some relations arise from the motion of both extremes and are real in both: fraternity; your father really generated you and you were really generated; “if I’m kicking you, you’re really being kicked.” Some arise from the motion of one without change in the other, where one depends on the other: real in the dependent, of reason in the other.
• God is unchanging (fourth thing shown of God in the Summa, first in the Contra Gentiles). In the Incarnation no change is made in the divine nature but in the human, drawn into unity in the divine person: union is secundum rem in the human nature, secundum rationem in the divine — as the Philosopher’s things relative because others are referred to them.
• Ad tertium: the union said of God is neither Creator nor creature, since in God it is ad aliquid only according to reason; but the ratio is not false, being founded on the real relation of creature to Creator — as with the other relatives said ex tempore of God about creatures, all relations of reason; the eternal relations (Father, Son) are real. Our dependence on God is very real in us; “it’s a one-way street.”
• Asides: could this be applied to marriage? — “relations are very hard to understand, especially the in-laws”; he hates the word “relationship”; his teacher Kasurik said “towards something,” not “relation.”

12. Relation as order; the only two foundations reach something extrinsic (“there be a certain order”) #

Point: a De Potentia text identifies relation with order in things and derives Aristotle’s three modes.

• In things there must be a certain order, and this order is relation; Thomas often speaks of relation as order. One is ordered to another either by quantity or by active/passive power — only these two regard something extrinsic; a thing is measured by extrinsic as well as intrinsic quantity; by active power each acts on another, by passive undergoes from another.
• Substance and quality order a thing to itself only, except as they have the ratio of active or passive power (substantial or material form), or as some ratio of quantity is considered in them: one in substance makes the same, one in quality like; similar and diverse according to more or less in the other.
• Hence (Metaphysics V) species of relation from quantity and from acting/undergoing. The ratio of the modes: as many ways of relation as ways of one thing being ordered to another — according to being, as the being of one depends on another (third mode); according to active and passive power (second); according as the quantity of one is measurable by another (first). One could think much about the connection of “order” and “relation.”
• His rhetorical argument for the reality of taller/shorter: watching his daughter’s cat Tabitha play with a mouse — what would she do to me if I were the size of the mouse? “The fact that I’m quite a bit taller than the cat, this is something very real.”

13. Quodlibet: relations are res naturae from their cause; one cause, one real relation (“Relations differ in this from all other genera”) #

Point (bottom of page ten): the only genus not res naturae from its own ratio; hence the unity of a relation follows the unity of its cause.

• Things of the other genera are res naturae from the ratio of the genus (quantities from the ratio quantity); relations are not res naturae from being towards another, since some respects towards another are rationis tantum — the knowable referred to science only because science is referred to it (Metaphysics V; “first pointed out as [by] Simplicius” [unclear in recording]). Kasurik: compared to Aristotle he had the brain of an angel.
• Relation is res naturae ex sua causa, through which one thing has a natural order to another. Right and left in the animal are real (they follow natural powers); in the column, of reason only, according to the animal’s order to it.
• From the same thing something is a being and one; so there is one real relation only, on account of the unity of the cause: by one quantity one body has one equality, though many respects to diverse bodies. Discussion: if I’m taller than two men, one relation or two? — one, since by the same height; but if I teach you geometry and logic, two real relations; so everybody in the world shorter than you gives one real relation, while reason multiplies respects (“I’m taller than him… than the chair”) — “empty multiplication.” Otherwise one thing would have infinite, indeterminate accidents. The master by one relation is master of all he teaches the same thing. One man by one real relation is son of his father and mother, since by one nativity he receives one nature from both (“I didn’t know that”; against two sonships).
• Aside: quodlibetal questions are his “light reading”; his own ad hoc questions to Monsignor Dionne, who saw no connection among them.

His words #

• habitudo — “how you have yourself towards another”; a strange word [ed.: relation, disposition-toward]
• relativa secundum esse / secundum dici — whose whole nature is towards another / said relatively but fundamentally in another genus
• “the fifth book of wisdom” — [ed.: Metaphysics V]; “fifth book after the books of Natural Philosophy”
• “Natural Hearing” — [ed.: Physics]
• “ability” — [ed.: potency]; matter is “only something in ability”
• proprium — he translates “private,” not “proper”
• secundum rem / secundum rationem — real / of reason only
• inest — “is in”; the notion of an accident is from inest, not from ad aliquid
• “assisting” or “exterior affixed” relations — relations with no foundation in the thing (right in the column)
• “in transit towards another” — Boethius’s account of relation vs. “remaining in a subject”
• res naturae / res rationis — thing of nature / thing of reason
• “looking sciences” — [ed.: theoretical/speculative sciences]
• “towards something” — Kasurik’s rendering of ad aliquid instead of “relation”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, on names signifying the habitudo vs its foundation (handout p. 5; work not stated)
• Thomas, power placed in the second species of quality, science in the first (work not stated)
• Thomas, reply to the fourth objection on idem and science (work not stated)
• Thomas, on ad aliquid being weaker in being and inhering through other genera (work not stated)
• Thomas, De Potentia: relation real either as the same as substance in divinis or by a cause in its subject; relation as accident from inest
• Thomas, Sentences: two things in relation; “assisting” relations
• Thomas, Sentences: things said absolutely vs relations said newly of God
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae: two things in each of the nine genera of accident
• Thomas (handout p. 8): relation has a cause in other genera; no motion in ad aliquid but relation follows (Physics V cited)
• Thomas, De Potentia: relation “in transit towards another” (Boethius, On the Trinity, cited)
• Thomas, Scriptum super III Sententiarum: union as a relation; Incarnation; ad tertium
• Thomas, De Potentia: order in things is relation; the three modes of Metaphysics V
• Thomas, Quaestiones Quodlibetales (handout p. 10): relations res naturae ex sua causa; one real relation from one cause Mentioned
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (knowable; species of relation; division of being)
• Aristotle, Physics V (no motion in ad aliquid); Physics I (inferred) (more known to us vs by nature)
• Boethius, De Trinitate; Boethius on the two categories in God
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles on God’s immutability
• Thomas, De Potentia, argument that God creates by knowing and willing (prev. lecture)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet, “to be or not to be”
• The Commentator [ed.: Averroes], relation has a minimum of being
• Simplicius (on the knowable)
• Descartes on the definition of motion

His questions #

• Is “Creator” a real relation that God has to us? No — the creature really depends on God, but God is in no way changed; there is only a foundation in God.
• Is my being the same as myself a real relation? No — a relation of reason, because I am only one; yet idem is relative secundum esse.
• Is the fatherhood of the Father something other than the divine substance? No — God is altogether simple; his fatherhood is the same as his substance, hence real.
• Who said that in God you have just two categories, substance and relation? Boethius.
• Did I really become like others, or did I become white? I became white; the likeness follows upon the whiteness.
• When I act upon something, where am I? In the thing acted upon — “that’s the term.”
• If I’m the same height as two different men, do I have two real relations to them? One real relation, by one cause (my height); reason multiplies the respects. Two relations only if by two causes, e.g. teaching geometry and logic.
• Is one man’s sonship of his father and of his mother two sonships? One — by one nativity he receives one nature from both.