Relations of Reason in De Potentia, and Aristotle's Chapter on Quality

Orientation #

He is closing the treatment of relation (“That’s all the stuff on relation”) and opens the handout “Quality – Chapter 8”; he refers back to the connection of some qualities with “towards something” as something “we talked about before” (prev. lecture), and to the antepredicaments on equivocal, univocal and denominative naming. The previous class treated relation in Thomas (real relations, their founding causes, the knowledge/knowable case); the next continues Categories ch. 8 on the four species of quality.

The class, in order #

1. The “magnificent text”: relations of reason divided (“consists in the order of things understood”) #

Point: Thomas divides relations of reason first into two, then subdivides the second into kinds — “the nearest thing I know” to a complete division.

• Read: a real relation consists in ordine rei ad rem; a relation of reason consists in the order of things understood, which happens dupliciter.
• (a) The order is discovered/introduced by the understanding and attributed to things as understood: genus and species. Example: understanding Tabitha as animal vs. as cat — the relation of animal to cat is in the mind and belongs to things understood as such. He contrasts two orders: comparing “man” in the mind to “you guys” (what is in the understanding to what is outside) vs. comparing man to animal (things understood to each other). Universals exist only in the mind, so genus and species are relations of reason.
• (b) “more subtle”: relations that follow “from a certain necessity the way of understanding” — the understanding attributes them not to what is in the understanding but to the thing; some things not having in themselves an order are understood orderly, though the understanding does not understand them to have an order, “because thus it would be false.” Example: First World War and Second World War — the historian cannot do history without understanding them in order, yet “the First World War really didn’t come before the Second World War” as a real relation.
• Then three requisites for an order: both must be beings; both distinct (“of the same thing to itself there is no order” — his axiom that nothing is before or after itself, so reason “looking before and after” must first find a distinction; Thomas: distinction is presupposed to order); and both able to be ordered to the other.

2. The four cases where a requisite fails (“takes two future things”) #

Point: Thomas gets his kinds by removing one requisite at a time, plus Aristotle’s odd case.

1. One or both not beings: two future things, e.g. planting these vegetables before those next spring, “you haven’t got the seeds yet” (relation of reason only). Aside: he would hate to explain this to a farmer; his father repairing farm machines with his mother along, “old fashioned family planning.” He wonders whether the before/after of motion (yesterday/tomorrow) can be more than a relation of reason. Aside: prophecies speak of future as past; the radio program “You Are There” as an image of eternity — past, present and future all present to God’s eternal now.
2. One thing taken as two: “I’m the same as myself” — not a real relation; “takes two to play relation.”
3. No middle order because one term is essentially a relation: relation to its subject. Application: the objection that if creation is a real relation in the creature, that relation is created, so relation of relation forever — answered by this third point: what is essentially relation is not related by something else.
4. Something taken with an order to another only as the limit of the other’s order to it, though not itself ordered: Aristotle’s scibile — the name signifies relatively but the relation is of reason only; knowledge to the knowable is real, knowable to knowledge is of reason.

• He notes Thomas learned examples from more than one source (Aristotle this one, Avicenna another) and calls the text the most complete he knows — “some of the power of the Disputed Questions on power.”

3. Objection: God is really Lord (“God is the Dominus, not according to reason only”) #

Point: something can be “really” X without a real relation, because the cause of the relation is real.

• Objection (third of several; source of this text uncertain, he says “not from De Potentia, I don’t think”): Dominus signifies a relation, being a relativum secundum esse; God is Lord not according to reason only; therefore these relations are not in God according to reason only.
• Reply: just as someone is really the same as himself though not by a real relation, because the cause — unity of substance — is real and the understanding understands it under a relation; so the power of coercing subjects is really in God, understood in order to subjects because of the real order of subjects to him; as the knowable to knowledge. Hence God is really Lord though the relation is of reason only. Same for Creator: not creator by a real relation to the creature — “very subtle,” “no easy business here.”
• Aside: a professor he knew felt that if God is not really related to us he is “cold and distant,” and wants God to have emotions (he grants: God has emotions in his humanity).
• Digression on emotion vs. choice: the priest asks “do you take so-and-so,” an expression of choice, not of feeling — the choice marries you; a man leaving his wife is not “true to himself,” since choice is more you than emotion (jury: killing in anger vs. plotted murder; a spoken outburst can be walked back better than a written note); Chesterton on marriage honouring a man for keeping his word.

4. Handout summary: about five kinds, and two universal divisions (“about five kinds of relations of reason”) #

• Relations of reason attributed to things only as in the understanding (second intentions, genus/species) vs. said of things in themselves in four ways, departing from what relation requires: (1) one or both not existing outside the mind (today before tomorrow); (2) not distinct (Socrates the same as Socrates); (3) one not orderable because itself a relation (relation to subject); (4) foundation in only one (known to knower). Perhaps in the first three the relation of reason is in both relatives, in the last in one only.
• Two most universal divisions in Thomas: real relation vs. relation of reason; relative secundum dici vs. secundum esse. Warning: secundum esse does not mean real relation — a mistake from language (“Aristotle says the most common mistake is equivocation”); one could crisscross the two divisions but he does not go into it.

5. Quality, ch. 8: division and the “how” (“this chapter can be divided into three parts”) #

• Three parts: (1) Aristotle “defines” quality (in quotes: a highest genus cannot strictly be defined — a notification) and distinguishes four species, which he sometimes calls genera (something can be both; perhaps because there is less unity here — “don’t push that too far”); (2) properties; (3) the connection of some qualities with towards-something (why he seemed “out of order”).
• Definition by the concrete correlate: as Latins define quality as that by which we are quales; in English one would need “howness” — that by which we are said to be how we are.
• Finally, how we are is said denominatively from the species (antepredicaments: equivocal, univocal, denominative — the word is not kept, as healthy from health, geometer from geometry).

6. First species: habit and disposition (“habit is a disposition”) #

• Aristotle sometimes divides habit against disposition, sometimes says habit is a disposition. Same pattern as man/animal (“if your girlfriend says you’re an animal, she is [insulting you]”): a species with something noteworthy added gets its own name while the rest keeps the common name. Famous case: sophia divided against episteme among the virtues of looking reason (nous, episteme, sophia; practical: art, prudence/foresight), yet in the “fourteen books of wisdom” wisdom is called an episteme — not confusion: it is reasoned-out knowledge of the very first cause, so excellent it gets a new name (his grandchild Sophia: wisdom is “knowledge of God”). Aside: a political scientist who gave up on Thomas because he “uses words in so many senses.”
• Disposition (narrow): easily lost, like mood (“attitude adjustment” cocktails); habit: stable, firm, may define character. Reasoned-out knowledge and moral virtues are habits; health and sickness more dispositions. Disposition in the broad sense covers the whole species, kept in particular for the easily movable, the stable getting the name habitus.

7. Second species and the question of order (“why do you think he gives habit”) #

• Second species: natural ability or inability; Thomas puts the powers of the soul here (to grow, feed, reproduce, sense, reason, choose). Reason defined, “following my teacher Shakespeare,” as ability for large discourse, looking before and after.
• Question: why habit before natural ability, since the ability (reason) is prior to the habit (geometry)? Compare discrete before continuous quantity: discrete is the more perfect measure (one is fixed; there is no smallest line). His preferred reason: by habit we are well or ill disposed toward our nature, which is most fundamental (habit is virtue or vice); and “quality is the disposition of substance” fits the first species especially; it may also be more known.
• Aside: the Worcester mayor calling demonstrators “morons,” sanctuary cities, Trump threatening to cut federal funds.

8. Third and fourth species (“undergoing qualities and undergoings”) #

• Third: undergoing qualities and undergoings (he used to call them sense qualities: hard/soft, hot/cold, wet/dry). Called “undergoing” either because the senses undergo them (hence “sensible qualities”) or because they result from the subject undergoing something (blushing from shame). The undergoings are more transitory — something imperfect in the genus.
• Thomas text read: nulla potentia passiva goes into act unless completed by the form of the agent; impressions of active things are in passive things in two ways — by way of action/undergoing when the passive power is in a state of change, or by way of quality and form when the impression has become connatural (skin permanently dyed by the sun) — as the Philosopher in the Praedicamenta distinguishes passio and passibilis qualitas.
• Fourth: figure and form. Aside: quality is harder than quantity, which divides into two then subdivides; here four at once, and Aristotle says there may be others (his logic teacher Father Delac thought so but could not find one; Thomas says no one ever will).
• Can the four be divided into two or three? The first three are sources of what you do (habit, inborn ability, even undergoing qualities — Aristotle distinguishes exactly these when asking what in the soul is a source of action), while shape is not: in geometry figure and form are without motion, the sphere does not roll off, “the triangles melt and still apply.” That Aristotle gives the first three together and the fourth apart may signal he sees the difference.

9. The three properties (“the first property is to have a contrary”) #

• Contrary: exemplified in first and third species; second and fourth seem to have none, and not every kind under first and third does either. The first–third connection appears in the “fifth book of Wisdom” where the two senses are joined. Simplicius: contrariety in other genera insofar as something of quality is in them. Recall Physics I lectio 11 on whether there is contrariety in substance: on the side of differences, and difference is said (Boethius) in quale quid, “how it is what it is”; likewise in quantity and in relatives secundum dici — qualities. “Don’t worry too much about that.”
• More and less: again first and third; fourth does not admit it — one circle is not more a circle than another (“Every circle is a perfect circle” — Lucy to Charlie Brown); a flattened tire is not a circle at all.
• Strict property: by quality a thing is like or unlike, as by quantity equal or unequal.
• Third part: some qualities are towards another by their genus (each science is knowledge of something); nothing prevents putting them in two highest genera — fundamentally quality, the relation following on them towards-something.

10. The word “how” as limit or determination (“how seems to signify the limit”) #

• “How” in combination: how much / how many = quantity (Greek has one word covering discrete and continuous; French too, per Warren Murray; English uses “size” — size of a room, size of a crowd or a family of nine). Asking “how many are coming to dinner” (the parish beer and wine tasting) asks to limit to a number.
• The difference (Porphyry) signifies how something is what it is, limiting the genus: square — how is it a quadrilateral? equal sides at right angles; isosceles — two equal legs (standing with feet apart; make them equal and it is equilateral). “How are you today?” asks for something definite.
• The four meanings of how in the fifth book of Wisdom correspond to the four meanings of limit; the reduction of the senses of how to two points to the distinction of first and third (perhaps second) species from the fourth — to be checked in the Metaphysics. Quality is how simpliciter, not how much/many (quantity), how towards another (relation), or how it is what it is (difference).
• Cajetan on the Categories read in Latin (quality determines the potency of the subject; other accidents “taste of” quality insofar as they determine potency, hence quality is described per quale simpliciter) — “I don’t think it helped me too much.” Aside: this Cajetan, sent to argue with Luther, is not the canonized St. Cajetan.

11. Is quality one genus? (“quality is among those things said in many ways”) #

• Puzzle: Aristotle says quality is said in many ways; the Metaphysics gives four senses, and the species seem distinguished like senses of a word rather than by opposites — quality “seems to be less one genus than quantity did.” Thomas in the Wisdom commentary compares the senses with the species. Student: “maybe we have more than 10 categories.”
• His reply: a word being equivocal does not stop it being used univocally (substance means what-it-is of anything, e.g. of an even number, and also the first genus); by all four you are said to be how — but the notion of a highest genus is not very distinct, since it cannot be defined.
• Thomas: quadrilateral is both genus (of square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid, trapezium) and species (of rectilineal plane figure), but is defined as a species by genus and difference — as a man who is both father and son generates as father, not as son. Do not say a genus as such is a species (then highest genera would be species, lowest species genera). Ends: “get rid of this horrible, horrible stuff.”

His words #

• in ordine rei ad rem: where a real relation consists.
• dupliciter: the twofold way a relation of reason arises.
• “necessity of the way of understanding”: relations of reason attributed to things themselves.
• scibile: the knowable, related to knowledge by reason only.
• relativum secundum esse / secundum dici: Thomas’s second division of relatives; secundum esse ≠ real relation.
• Dominus: Lord; “the Lord’s man” for Dominican.
• “howness”: his English for quality; “that by which we are said to be how we are.”
• “looking reason” [ed.: speculative/theoretical reason]; nous “natural understanding”; episteme “reasoned-out knowledge”; sophia wisdom.
• “foresight” [ed.: prudence].
• “fourteen books of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics]; “fifth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V].
• “natural hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• “undergoing qualities and undergoings” [ed.: passible qualities and passions]; passio, passibilis qualitas.
• nulla potentia passiva: no passive power goes into act unless completed by the agent’s form.
• in quale quid (Boethius): “how it is what it is,” the difference.
• quale simpliciter (Cajetan): quality as how without qualification.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, De Potentia (locus not stated): relation of reason in ordine rerum intellectarum, the two ways and the requisites for order.
• Objection 3 and reply on Dominus (Thomas; source not identified by him).
• Handout “Quality – Chapter 8,” pp. 1–3, on Aristotle, Categories ch. 8 (verified).
• Thomas on potentia passiva and the two ways impressions are in the passive (locus not stated).
• Cajetan, commentary on the Categories, on the name of quality (Latin).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V: four senses of how, senses of limit; Thomas’s commentary comparing them with the species.
• Aristotle, Physics I, Thomas lectio 11: contrariety in substance.
• Simplicius on the Categories.
• Porphyry on the difference; Boethius, in quale quid.
• Aristotle, Ethics: virtues of theoretical and practical reason.
• Shakespeare: “large discourse, looking before and after.”
• Chesterton on marriage.
• Avicenna as source of another relation of reason.

His questions #

• Is the order of animal to cat, or of the First to the Second World War, a real relation? No — a relation of reason; the first attributed to things as understood, the second following the necessity of our way of understanding.
• Is “I am the same as myself” a real relation? No; “takes two to play relation,” though the cause (unity of substance) is real.
• If creation is a real relation in the creature, must that relation itself be created, and so on forever? No; what is essentially a relation is not related by another relation.
• Is God really Lord, really Creator, if his relation to us is of reason only? Yes, really, because the cause and the creature’s order to him are real; but not by a real relation.
• How can Aristotle divide sophia against episteme and then call wisdom an episteme? It is reasoned-out knowledge, but so excellent (of the first cause) that it gets a new name.
• Why habit or disposition before natural ability, which is more fundamental? Perhaps because by habit we are well or ill disposed toward our nature; and it may be more known.
• Can the four species be divided into two or three? The first three are sources of action, the fourth (figure) is not.
• Is one circle more a circle than another? No; the fourth species does not admit more and less.
• Is quality predicated of its four species univocally? By all four you are said to be how; but the notion of a highest genus is not very distinct — left largely open.