Quality Said in Many Ways: Qualis and 'How', Why Habit Comes First (Prima Secundae), Modus, and the Four Senses of End

Orientation #

He does not say what was done last time or what is next; he refers back only to having spoken “before” about the two sorts of nature and to Thomas on the Trinitarian processions. The neighbouring classes work through the species of quality in Categories 8 with Thomas, before and after this one. The verified sources place most of this class on handout pp. 9–11 (“Quality – Chapter 8”) and, by his page references, pp. 5–6.

The class, in order #

1. Why “quality” has many senses (“qualis quid, right?”) #

The point: the Latin qualis (English “how”) covers both the species-making difference and the accidental category, so the word must be distinguished.

• Genus is said in regard to quid (what it is); difference signifies qualis quid, the same word as the category. Aristotle in the fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V] distinguishes essential quality (the species-making difference) from quality as an accident; so the species-making difference is not necessarily a quality in the sense of the genus.
• Square: genus quadrilateral; genus of that, rectilineal plane figure. How is it a quadrilateral? Four equal sides meeting at right angles: those are its species-making differences. (Triangle three sides, pentagon five; “trilateral” named from sides, others from angles.)
• Porphyry: a difference is what the species has in addition to the genus; genus is “a name said with one meaning, said of many things other in species, signifying what it is” (Porphyry “should have pointed out” the one-meaning clause).
• Differences fit the genus, as taught in the Antepredicaments: animals divided by two-footed/four-footed, but sciences not; “how many sides is your anger?”
• Aside: Chesterton on the French always going at right angles to everybody else, “if for no other reason than that it’s right.”

2. God and the genus of substance; equivocal by reason (“every respectable word in philosophy is equivocal”) #

The point: categories are useful for speaking of God only as likenesses, because the words are equivocal by reason.

1. Some argue God is in the genus substance because substance means per se ens, a thing existing not in another.
2. But Thomas (Summa Contra Gentiles): the genus means “a thing to which it belongs to be not in another”: its to-be is other than the thing.
3. In God substance and to-be are the same (“My name is who I am”). Conclusion: God is not in the genus substance, though there is a likeness; what we learn of substance and relation is useful for God.

• De Koninck in class: “every respectable word in philosophy is equivocal by reason.”

3. Square and cube numbers (“Similiter numeri dicuntur quales”) #

The point: numbers called square or cube show the “how” of a difference more than the fourth species of quality, though there is a likeness.

• Metaphysics text: numbers too are called quales. First number both square and cube: 36 proposed and rejected (not a cube); 64 = 8×8 = 4×4×4.
• Greeks call factors “sides” (sides of six: two and three).
• It belongs to the wise man to point out this distinction, since people confuse: the average man thinks “three persons” and “three fingers” are the same three. (Excerpt on handout p. 5.)
• Aside: the $64 question on childhood TV.

4. Quantus, qualis, and the English “how” (“How are you today, Duane?”) #

The point: English lacks one concrete word for quantity, but “how” runs through both quantity (“how much/how many”) and quality (“how are you”).

• Warren Murray: French has one word; the only English candidate is “size”: size of the room (continuous), size of a crowd or family (discrete). Adverbially: how much (continuous), how many (discrete).
• Driver’s-license anecdote (5'8" or 5'10"): asked “how are you today?” one does not answer with height but “sick,” “depressed,” “angry”: quality.
• Asides: Kellyanne Conway answering questions too well for CNN; Heraclitus at Ephesus on those who expelled the man superior in virtue: “nothing new under the sun.”

5. Thomas: modus of the subject and the four species (“dispositions of the perfect to the best”) #

The point: Thomas divides the species of quality by the modus sive determinatio of the subject according to esse accidentale, taken three ways (handout p. 6, Prima Secundae).

1. According to quantity: the fourth species. Quantity by its notion is without motion and without good or bad; so the fourth species has neither bene vel male nor cito vel tarde transiens.
2. According to action or passion following the principles of nature (matter and form): second and third species. Here one considers done easily or with difficulty, quickly passing or long lasting, but not good or bad, because motion and passion do not have the notion of end, and good and bad are said with respect to the end.
3. In order to the nature of the thing: first species, habit and disposition, and this is part of why it is first. Physics VII: habits of soul and body are “dispositions of the perfect to the best,” perfect meaning disposed according to nature (it is not a vice for a dog to be ferocious). Since form and nature is the end of generation, here good and bad are considered, and easily/difficultly moved as a nature is the end of motion. Metaphysics V defines habit as a disposition according to which one is well or badly disposed; Ethics II, habits are that by which we are disposed toward the passions bene or male. A mode suiting the nature has the notion of good, one not fitting, of bad; and because nature is what is first considered in a thing, habit is the first species.

• Aside he connects: Thomas on the processions, the Son per modum naturae, the Holy Spirit by way of will; the natural procession comes first: “nature is first” for a different reason.

6. Why modus? measure, limit, way (“womb immeasurable, an infinite breast”) #

The point: modus in Thomas’s text should be understood not as measure but as boundary/limit and as way, both answering to “how.”

• Puzzle: modus means measure (Thomas always quoting Augustine), yet quantity’s species are distinguished by measure; why lead into quality by modus? Answer: modus also means limit; Thomas uses modus and determinatio as synonyms; to be measurable a quantity must be limited.
• Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, “Common Mother, thou whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast”: immeasurable and infinite said as synonyms; the Fourth Lateran Council likewise calls God immensus for infinite.
• Winter’s Tale: “thoughts so qualified” glossed “moderated” (mode and quality together); King John: “mistempered humour … to be qualified.”
• Modus also means way; mode and way are nouns for “how” (the way of doing is how you do it, the way of knowing how you know). Thomas uses it constantly: modus praedicandi, modus procedendi (Boethius, De Trinitate, on how the sciences proceed). Greek tropos, “turn,” as in Washington Irving’s “turn of mind”: professors on a committee approach one question differently.
• Asides: Warren Murray’s claim Shakespeare is greater than Homer because “the church came between” them; a Shakespeare character studying the part of philosophy treating “happiness by virtue especially to be achieved,” a concise statement of the Nicomachean Ethics; Homer’s reason as “looking before and behind,” matched by Shakespeare’s “before and after”; Joshua reading Homer in Greek and the Mozart trio; the sociologist wanting word counts in Thomas, graduate schools wanting a hypothesis to test, word counts used to dispute Shakespeare’s authorship.

7. Ethics II: three things in the soul (“tria sunt in anima”) #

The point: this text is his key for dividing the first three species against the fourth.

• Investigating virtue: passiones (like the third species), potentiae (like the second), habitus (first); nothing in the soul is a principle of action except one of these three. Figure is not a source of motion: the heart shape on a Valentine is not what moves your heart. “The fourth species is not a principle of any operation, as is clear from there being no motion in geometry.” Good and bad are used to get at the genus of virtue and vice.

8. The objections: is habit a determined species? (“It’s very subtle, right?”) #

The point: two objections from the Categories, and Thomas’s replies, show hot and cold and figure enter the first species only by order to nature.

• Objection 1: habit is a disposition by which one is well or badly disposed; but that happens by any quality, figure, hot and cold; so habit is not a determined species.
• Digression on making known a highest genus: Thomas will say quantity is the measure or size of substance, quality its disposition; but a genus is not definable as a species is (definition is by genus and differences), so it is made known through its species. Quantity’s species by their measures: number is a multitude measured by one; a line is not measured by one but by an inch or some length, appropriately not rigorously. Verse measure: Homer’s hexameter; English poets found six feet too long and hit on iambic pentameter (sonnets and blank verse). Latin grammarians misfit Greek grammar to Latin, English to Latin; Latins had a word for induction but borrowed syllogismos.
• Reply 1: disposition implies order; one is disposed by a quality only in order to something; add bene vel male (the notion of habit) and one must attend to order to nature, which is the end. “Beautiful.”
• Objection 2: the Philosopher in the Predicamentis calls caliditas and frigiditas dispositions or habits, like sickness and health; but calidum and frigidum are themselves species of quality; so habit is not distinguished from the other species. That such objections arise shows the priority of disposition.
• Reply: by figure or by heat and cold one is well or badly disposed only in order to nature, as suitable or not (heat or cool a man too much and you kill him). Figure and colour suitable to nature pertain to beauty (so beauty is not the fourth species but goes with habit); hot and cold suitable to nature pertain to health; so the Philosopher places hot and cold in the first species. “It’s very subtle.” Simplicius solves it otherwise in his commentary (“I’m not going to be subject to Simplicius”). He proposes comparing the four senses of limit in Metaphysics V with the four species of quality, but first gives Thomas’s exposition.

9. Four senses of terminus/end (“as many ways as a beginning is said”) #

The point: Thomas’s exposition of Aristotle on terminus yields four senses, a “respectable word” equivocal by reason.

• Aristotle begins Metaphysics V with “beginning,” later takes up terminus (Rome’s station Termini: all roads lead to Rome).

1. End of magnitude: the point is the end of the line, the surface of the body or the stone. “The end of Shrewsbury” when he leaves it, not its destruction. Sophism from mixing senses: happiness is the end of life; the end of life is death; therefore happiness is death: “most common mistake in thinking.”
2. Terminus of motion or action, that to which, not that from which: to be here today was the end of his journey but not his purpose; the man runs a mile and stops. Largo modo both extremes are called terms (“every motion is between two terms”).
3. Cuius causa fit aliquid, the end of intention, one of the four causes: he ran for exercise or health, not in order to stop; death is his end in the second sense (Henry V waiting for Henry IV to die).
4. The substance, essence, definition: Aristotle’s perigraphe, drawing a line around, echoes the first sense. Thomas: it is terminus cognitionis, knowledge begins from exterior signs and arrives at the definition, which contains that by which the thing is known; add equilateral and right-angled to quadrilateral and the square is “fenced in.” Plato compares defining to hunting (lions in India driven by noise): don’t let it escape; change one difference and it is not the same definition; natures are like numbers. Term of knowledge is term of the thing, since knowledge is by likeness.

• Comparison: as many ways as beginning, so many and more is end said; every beginning is in some way an end, not every end a beginning; that to which motion is end only, that from which both. Two “ends” of a line, never two “beginnings”: end is in some way more radical.
• Revelation: “Alpha and Omega, first and last, beginning and end.” In which sense is God beginning? Not as the point in the line or the foundation/keel or the Isagoge in logic (beginnings in the thing); as the beginning not in the thing, the mover or maker. And end: end of the whole. Is reality a line or a circle? The evolutionist thinks line, so beginning and end differ; if God is beginning and end of all, reality is a circle. Aristotle’s circle: the bakery moves the senses, senses move desire, desire brings you back to the thing.

His words #

• qualis / quid: the how vs. the what; difference signifies qualis quid.
• species making difference: what the species has in addition to the genus (Porphyry).
• Antepredicaments: differences fit the genus.
• fifth book of wisdom / the book after natural philosophy [ed.: Metaphysics V].
• natural hearing [ed.: Physics].
• equivocal by reason: De Koninck’s dictum on philosophical words.
• size: his English for quantity covering continuous and discrete.
• modus sive determinatio / terminatio: Thomas’s synonyms; taken as limit, not measure.
• bene vel male; cito vel tarde transiens; facile/difficile: the marks of first, second-third, fourth species.
• immensus: council’s word for infinite = immeasurable.
• modus praedicandi, modus procedendi: “way of proceeding”; Greek tropos, “turn of mind.”
• terminus / end: four senses (of magnitude, of motion, cuius causa, definition); terminus cognitionis.
• perigraphe: drawing a line around, description.
• largo modo: both extremes of motion called terms.
• arche and telos: Aristotle’s words behind Alpha/Omega, beginning/end.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V, on qualis (“similiter numeri dicuntur quales”; handout p. 5).
• Thomas Aquinas, Prima Secundae, on modus of the subject and the species of quality, with two objections and replies (handout p. 6; question on habits, inferred).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II, “tria sunt in anima” (Secunda Ethicorum).
• Thomas’s exposition of Aristotle, Metaphysics V, on terminus.
• Shakespeare: Timon of Athens (Common Mother); The Winter’s Tale (“qualified”); King John (“mistempered humour”). Mentioned
• Aristotle, Categories ch. 8 (handout pp. 9–11; hot and cold as habits); Antepredicaments (differences).
• Aristotle, Physics VII; Metaphysics V on habit and on beginning.
• Porphyry, Isagoge (genus, difference).
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (God not in genus substance); Thomas on the Trinitarian processions.
• Boethius, De Trinitate (modus of the sciences).
• Simplicius, commentary on the Categories.
• Fourth Lateran Council (immensus).
• Revelation (Alpha and Omega).
• Plato on defining as hunting; Chesterton; Washington Irving; Homer.

His questions #

• How is a square a quadrilateral? Four equal sides meeting at right angles: its species-making differences.
• Is God confined in the genus of substance? No: in God substance and to-be are the same; the category is only a likeness.
• What is the first number that is both a square and a cube? Sixty-four.
• If someone asks “how are you today,” would I say five foot eight? No: quality, not quantity, answers “how.”
• Why does Thomas use modus to distinguish the species of quality if modus means measure? Because modus also means limit (synonym of determinatio) and way, both answering to “how.”
• Is the Valentine heart shape the source of your heart’s motion? No: the fourth species is not a principle of operation, as geometry has no motion.
• Is my stopping after a mile my purpose? No: stopping is end of motion (second sense); health or exercise is the end as purpose (third).
• In what sense is God the beginning and the end? Beginning as mover/maker, not as a part in the thing; end of the whole; so reality is like a circle.