Relation (Ad Aliquid): Real Relations, Their Causes, and the Knower and the Known

Orientation #

He picks up “where I had left off” with the taller/shorter example, and says he has handouts on relations of reason which “we can do if you want to get into that.” The handout page in use is DHB Vol III, p. 195 (verified). The previous class worked through Thomas’s texts on relation as a category and its reality versus its being merely of reason; the next takes up relations of reason from the De Potentia and then the category of quality.

The class, in order #

1. Relation says nothing of what I am in myself (“am I taller or shorter”) #

Point: taller and shorter say nothing about what he is in himself; he is only taller towards somebody, shorter towards someone else. “Strange something”: relation, or towards-something.

2. Why ad aliquid differs from the other genera (“does not have that it lays down something”) #

He reads the second paragraph of the handout text.

1. The other genera, from their own ratio, have that they are something: quantity places my size in me, likewise the rest.
2. Ad aliquid, from the meaning of its genus, does not have that it lays down something; it is “not something, but towards something.”
3. Hence some ad aliquid are nothing in the nature of things but in reason only, which does not happen in the other genera; and even those that are in things “barely are.”
4. Objection anticipated by the text: but neither does ad aliquid have from its genus that it lays down nothing; otherwise no relation would be real and ad aliquid would not be one of the ten genera. Thomas backs this with Aristotle, Metaphysics V, where being according to the ten genera is distinguished from beings of reason (some of which are relations, some negations, and so on): if no relation were in things, there would be no category of relation. Aristotle saw the distinction. Thomas also often quotes Boethius on the weakness of relation; some concluded all relations are of reason, a mere comparing, “but that’s a mistake.”

3. What makes a relation real, and one (“from that which causes the relation”) #

Point: relation has that it be real from its cause, not from being towards another.

• When something real is found in a thing through which it depends on or is compared to another, we say it is really compared or referred: equality is real “from the virtue of quantity, which is its cause.”
• Boundary case, God: the divine relations have no cause; they are the same as the divine substance, and that is what makes them real. “Got to go to the De Potentia to see this.”
• Because a thing has being and unity from the same thing (being and one convertible), a relation’s unity is weighed from its foundation. Example: if I am equal to two different things, is that two relations in me? No: the cause is one, my size, so one relation with respect to many. Likewise one nativity from father and mother, one real sonship, “son of both,” though the respects can be multiplied. “Those seem very hard things.”

4. Scriptum on III Sentences: relations founded on quantity or on action and passion (“one undergoing corresponds to two acting upons”) #

He reads the next text.

1. Relation is not real merely from being said to another, but from what causes it in the thing; unity and multitude come from what gives being; so judge whether a relation is one or many secundum rem by its foundation.
2. Some relations are founded on quantity (equality, on one in quantity); since the unity of quantity is one in one thing, by one equality a thing is equal to all it is equal to.
3. Others are founded on action and passion (Aristotle says this more explicitly in the Metaphysics than in the Categories chapter). Here one undergoing corresponds to two acting-upons when neither agent suffices of itself to complete the action: the one born by one nativity from father and mother. So in father and mother there are two relations secundum rem (father and mother are not in the same relation), but in the one born, one real relation referred to both. “I want to explain that to couples.” Aside on the Trinity: Thomas’s article on whether the divine relations are real: they can be based on quantity or on acting/undergoing; no quantity in God, so on generation; real relation of father and son. Aristotle “first saw this”; joke: “I got the brain of an angel.” Why relation is so hard: either the sublimity of the object and weakness of our mind (Trinity), or the weakness of the thing itself: by its notion it is towards something, not something in me; yet as an accident it must be in us, and it is in me because of its cause. Examples of relation being real: the bar fight, the other man was slouching and now towers over you; if the cat were bigger he would play with me rather than the mouse; if parents were much bigger than the baby (picture of Paul with the little one). Student questions: “this thing is hotter than that”, “wider”, “whiter”, isn’t that a relation? Reply: relations are not based on qualities unless they take on the aspect of quantity (how much) or of acting/undergoing; “wider” goes back to quantity; “whiter” is quantifying the quality, “a very complicated thing,” philosophers always argue about it. In the De Potentia the question of real relation in God has ten or fifteen objections.

5. Relations from a past action: what is left in the agent (“said a father after the action”) #

Point: some relations arise from actions not as in act but as past; one is said father after the action, when the effect is already brought about.

• Such relations are founded on what the action leaves in the agent: a disposition, a habit, a right or power over one’s offspring (“because I generated you”; his mother’s “I changed your diapers”; Cicero, the son always indebted to his father, “your mother too”).
• Because what is left from actions of one kind cannot be but one, such relations are not multiplied secundum rem by diverse actions: no diverse real relations in the one father who begets many sons, nor in the teacher who teaches many. He asks whether he has two real fatherhoods to his two sons, “very hard to judge.”

6. Summa Theologiae: unity of relation from cause, not terms (“not according to its terms”) #

1. The unity or plurality of a relation is observed not according to its terms but according to its cause or subject, since that is what makes it real.
2. Otherwise each man would have two sonships, one to father, one to mother; but by the same birth he is born from both, so by the same relation referred to both. Trinity application (his): the Holy Spirit proceeds from Father and Son; two relations would give a quaternity, “not what I like.” They speak of spiration as act and passion. The Spirit’s way of proceeding is so unlike anything in creatures that it has no proper name; we use the common name procession, whereas the Son has generation or begetting. Same reason for the teacher who teaches many by the same science, and the lord who governs diverse subjects by the same power (Trump joke). Distinction: diverse causes differing in species vs. diverse causes of the same species.

• Differing in species: nothing prevents many relations in one man, teacher of some in grammar, of others in logic (he uses geometry); other ratio of magisterium, hence diverse relations, whether to diverse students or the same by diverse sciences.
• Same species: father of diverse sons by diverse acts of generation; the paternity cannot differ in species since the acts do not; and since many forms of the same species cannot be at once in the same subject, there is one fatherhood. Boundary case: father of one by natural generation and of another by adoption, then different. Aside: one interpretation of “Our Father who art in heaven” finds three paternities: fatherhood of all creation, our father by adoption, and the Father in heaven by eternal generation.

7. Real relations and the ten categories (“the category of relation is about real relations”) #

The real/reason distinction is not made much in the Categories; Thomas points out the category is about real relations and cites Metaphysics V, dividing being: act and ability [ed.: potency]; the figures of predication (ten categories); against these, being of reason, and accidental being divided against all of them. So if all relations were of reason there would be no relation among the genera of being. He recalls his own earlier reason why Porphyry treats species before difference: same knowledge of opposites, genus and species being relative to each other and defined by reference to each other; but those are relations of reason.

8. Digression: five, the post-predicaments, and styles (“commonly regarded by scholars as spurious”) #

• His attachment to the number five (Duane has five letters, five fingers, likeness the cause of love): the Categories has five antipredicaments (class first guessed four), five post-predicaments, ten categories (five and five).
• The Loeb edition’s footnote at the start of ch. 10 (“we have now said enough on the subject of the categories…with opposites next we must deal”) calls the following chapters spurious; but all the commentators (Cajetan and the rest) treat the post-predicaments, and “nothing accidental” is attached there; to be discussed when they reach them.
• Same with Hebrews: most scripture scholars deny it is Paul’s; a student notes some Fathers doubted it, and the style argument. He replies from Thomas: Thomas’s Latin is easy except the Ciceronian dedicatory letter to the Pope; a man writes differently to nieces and nephews than to the Pope; C. S. Lewis on addressing God; the Anima Christi and Thomas’s Eucharistic prayer.

9. The threefold diversity of relatives (“of relatives there is found a threefold diversity”) #

He reads: some relatives imply relation existing only in reason on both sides; some real on both; some real on one side, of reason on the other.

• Both of reason: being referred to non-being (towards nothing is nothing real); today before tomorrow (tomorrow does not exist, and a student adds today does not either, “not as one thing”); World War I before World War II; Shakespeare before Shakespeare, “at least their souls” exist.
• Both real: father and son (not the Trinity here).
• One real, one of reason: Aristotle’s famous example, science and the knowable. Knowing a material thing immaterially: the thing does not share that immaterial knowing, so has no real relation to me, but I have one to it. Thomas’s parallel in the De Potentia: creature really related to God as creator, God to creature only by reason. He asked such questions interviewing a philosophy candidate. Reason for the diversity: the foundation is found sometimes in one only, sometimes in both.

1. Science to the knowable is founded on a grasping secundum esse spirituale (immateriality the root of knowledge), which is only in the knower; in the thing the form is according to natural being.
2. Contrary for lover and loved: the relation of love is founded on desire of the good, and the good is not only in the soul but in things. “The Philosopher” (so named by antonomasia), Metaphysics VI: good and bad are in things, true and false in the soul, “one of the most profound things that Aristotle ever said.” Avicenna, Metaphysics III: in lover and loved a disposition is found in both relatives, not in knower and knowable; so both real.
3. Likewise equality, immediately founded on quantity.

10. Where Thomas places goodness and truth in the Summa (“how subtle Thomas is”) #

Point: Thomas’s order shows the same Aristotelian distinction. After the existence of God he treats the substance of God, then the operations (understanding and willing). In the substance, in both Summas, five things, some with attachments: unchanging, with eternity attached; infinite, with being everywhere; perfection, with goodness attached. Truth is treated under the operation of understanding. Goodness in the substance, truth in the operation: “it goes back to Aristotle.” Aside: Thomas explains what Damascene and Augustine really meant, “the kind of guy you need.”

11. Student objection: doesn’t the known thing also found the relation? (“the known is in the knower”) #

Student: in lover and loved the relation is real both ways because there is something real in the loved thing; but the known thing also has something (actuality, being) by which it is knowable. His answer:

1. Love proceeds from the lover to the thing in itself: if I love the woman I want her herself; so love is said to be in the thing loved (“I left my heart in San Francisco”; “where your treasures are, there your heart shall be”; “my heart’s not in it”).
2. In knowledge the known is in the knower; the early Greeks saw this; the first act of mind is simple apprehension, grasping, and what is grasped is in the hand.
3. Hence truth is primarily in the mind, the good primarily in the thing. Student: so the existence of the thing is a cause of my knowing? Yes, but not in the same way as the grasp of my mind; the thing has a being in the mind it does not have in itself, and I do not know everything that is. Both truth and goodness are transcendentals convertible with being, yet Thomas keeps the difference. Follow-on: charity, the highest love, remains in heaven when faith disappears; the will is more proportioned to God than the mind; “easier to jump into the ocean than to get the ocean inside you” (the boy appearing to Augustine); in theology we know more what God is not; the Fathers on “enter into the joy of your Lord,” not the joy entering you. “Very, very subtle.” Aside: a student asked about Kuhn; he prefers the scientists on their own knowledge (Heisenberg, Einstein, Born, Duhem as working physicist and historian); Einstein: a hypothesis is freely imagined; “get it from the horse’s mouth.”

His words #

• ad aliquid: towards something; his rendering of relation as a category.
• “lays down / places something in”: his rendering of what the other genera have from their ratio and relation lacks.
• secundum rem: according to the thing, i.e. really one or many.
• “acting upon” and “undergoing” [ed.: action and passion]: the second foundation of real relations.
• “ability” [ed.: potency]: in the division of being by act and ability.
• “figures of predication”: the ten categories as a sense of being.
• “Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics]: “fifth book of Wisdom.”
• magisterium: the teacher-relation; ratio magisterii differs by science.
• “the Philosopher by antonomasia”: Thomas’s name for Aristotle.
• esse spirituale: the spiritual being of the form in the knower, on which science is founded.
• “simple apprehension, simple grasping”: the first act of the mind.
• “transcendentals”: true and good, convertible with being.

Texts #

Read in class

• Handout text on why ad aliquid differs from the other genera and on the unity of relation from its cause (DHB Vol III, p. 195, verified; Thomas, locus not stated).
• Thomas, Scriptum on the Sentences, Book III: relations founded on quantity or on action/passion; relations from past actions (locus not stated).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae: unity of relation from cause not terms; diverse causes of diverse or same species (locus not stated).
• Text on the threefold diversity of relatives and its reason (Thomas; locus not stated).
• Aristotle, Categories ch. 10, opening line, from the Loeb edition, with footnote.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (division of being; beings of reason); Metaphysics VI (good and bad in things, true and false in the soul).
• Thomas, De Potentia (relations in God; creator and creature).
• Boethius on the weakness of relation.
• Avicenna, Metaphysics III.
• Porphyry (species before difference); Cajetan on the post-predicaments.
• Cicero on the son’s debt to the father; Epistle to the Hebrews; C. S. Lewis; Anima Christi; Kuhn, Duhem, Einstein.

His questions #

• If I am equal to two different things, is that two relations in me or one? One: the cause, my size, is one.
• Do I have two real fatherhoods to my two sons? No: what one kind of action leaves is one; only natural generation vs. adoption would differ.
• Does the teacher who teaches many have three real relations? One, by the same science; but grammar and geometry give diverse relations.
• Does the Holy Spirit have two relations, to the Father and to the Son? That would give a quaternity; one procession, without a proper name; left largely open as “very difficult.”
• Is “this is hotter than that” a relation? Only insofar as the quality is quantified; “a very complicated thing.”
• Is God really related to the creature? No, a relation of reason; the creature is really related to God.
• Why is the relation of lover and loved real on both sides but not knower and knowable? Love goes out to the good in the thing; the known is in the knower.
• Where does Thomas treat the goodness of God, and where the truth of God? Goodness attached to perfection, in the substance; truth under the operation of understanding.