Are the Passions of the Soul Bodily? Emotions, the Will, and Immortality (De Anima I, Proemium)

Orientation #

He opens: “today, maybe we’ll look at the second half here of the third part of the proemium,” the difficulties about the properties of the soul, “starting with number seven”; he refers back to “as we said before” on people using “image” and “thought” interchangeably (prev. lecture, not resolved by the context block). Verified sources place the class on the handout “Nature and Kinds of Love”, p. 18, and DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 1123. The previous class treated the causes of error in Pascendi and Aquinas; the next continues the De Anima on the irascible and concupiscible appetites and the natural definition of the passions.

The class, in order #

1. Paragraph 7: the difficulty about the passions (“whether they are all common as well”) #

The point: are the passions of the soul all common to soul and body, or is something proper to the soul alone?

• A student proposes the problem is about different kinds of souls and passions; he corrects: that will be involved, but the question here is whether “what we would call in English the emotions” involve something bodily or not.
• The same question can be asked about sensing and eventually about understanding, but here it is mainly the emotions.
• “To grasp this is necessary but not easy.”

2. Paragraph 8: thinking the best candidate, unless it is imagination (“Thinking seems most to be proper”) #

The point: most doing or undergoing (anger, courage, desire, sensing) clearly involves the body; thinking seems most proper to the soul, but if it is imagination or not without imagination, it too is not without the body.

• Imagining vs. thinking: imagining forms an image, thinking forms a thought; Aristotle distinguishes them in the third book, but there is a likeness, so we say “I imagine” and “I think” as if the same.
• The English word “idea” is used confusedly for either. Henry V’s chorus asks the audience to help with their “imagination” reproducing Agincourt on a wooden stage, but sometimes says “thinking,” as if the same. English philosophers use “idea” unsure whether image or thought. A philosopher’s idea should be a thought; when the girl says “don’t get ideas,” it is images—“he’s probably not doing too much thinking at this time.”
• Eventually we learn imagining is in the body and understanding is not; “at this point, we don’t know that yet”—it is only raised as a difficulty.

3. Paragraph 9: why the question matters—separability of the soul (“If therefore there is something proper”) #

The point: if the soul has a work or passion proper to it, it can be separated; if nothing is proper, it is not separable.

• Phaedo: on his last day Socrates discusses whether the soul survives death; he jokes that philosophers are accused of irrelevance (“academic,” from Plato’s Academy), but this question can hardly be irrelevant to him, who dies today. He adds: it is relevant all our life, since we live differently according to the answer; as Christians we believe it, but with natural reason alone it is a very serious question.
• The argument:
  1. Being is before doing (his “second sense of before”): a thing must be before it can do anything, though perhaps it can be without doing.
  2. But what a thing does is more known to us than its being; so we reason backwards, as Sherlock Holmes tells Watson—from effect back to cause. Descartes’ (and before him Augustine’s) “I think, therefore I am” runs backwards as regards reality: the order of knowing reverses the order of being.
  3. If the soul had being only in the body, it would do nothing except in and through the body, and would perish when the body is destroyed; if it has being in itself, it can be without the body.
  4. The soul’s being is hidden from us (immersed in the body, or the body sharing in it?), so we argue from its doing: if it does something not in the body—the likeliest candidate being understanding the universal—its existence is not just in the body.
• Boundary case from the text: what is straight (his example: the shape of the glass) can be spoken of in separation but cannot exist in separation; so too the soul could be talked of by itself yet not exist by itself—unless it acts by itself.
• His illustration: if I could think only in this room, I would want the room preserved, and there would be no reason to think I could exist apart from it.
• “You see the enormous importance of that question.” The immortality of the soul depends on whether it does something not in the body.

4. The phrase “passions of the soul” (“passiones animae”) #

The point: the traditional name is “kind of misleading,” since it suggests a passion the soul has without the body.

• “Passion” comes from the Latin (and the Greek is similar) for undergoing. Non-living and living bodies alike undergo heating and cooling (my body, the water); only a living body undergoes anger, fear, desire—hence “passions of the soul,” i.e. undergoings only ensouled bodies have.

5. Signs that the passions are with the body (“passions are enmattered accounts”) #

The point: anger, gentleness, fear, pity, courage, joy, loving, hating are all with the body, “for the body suffers something with these.”

• Aristotle’s signs: strong and manifest provocations sometimes provoke nothing; small and faint ones move us when the body is already excited and disposed as when one is angered. His story: a man admires a ticket clerk’s long patience with the public, goes up to compliment him, and the clerk blows up. Also: feeling sad, depressed, joyful or fearful with nothing to point to.
• “More clear”: with nothing fearful present, the passions of one fearing arise. So the passions are “enmattered accounts”—his rendering of the Greek, a logos in matter—and the definition of anger will be “some motion of this sort of body or part or power, from this, for the sake of this.”

6. English names: passion, emotion, feeling (“moved to fear, or moved to anger”) #

The point: “emotion” (from motion—moved to fear, anger, pity, sadness) is the better English word; “passion” is sometimes too passionate; “feeling” is less precise but suggestive.

• “Feeling” links the emotions to touch: touch (and to some extent taste) is a sense of the interior, the other senses turned outward, and the emotions are in us.
• The emotions follow upon the senses (to be shown in the third book); the will follows upon reason. So the emotions are shared with the other animals (anger, fear, hunger, thirst), though man’s can be more elevated; the will is shared with the angels and God, who strictly have no emotions. Man, an animal with reason, has both groups of desiring powers.

7. Carrying the names of emotions over to the will (“keeps the formal aspect”) #

The point: since the emotions are more known to us, their names are carried over to acts of the will, keeping the formal aspect and dropping the bodily.

• Love: names an emotion or an act of will; Latin sometimes marks it (dilectio, from choice, vs. amor); Greek has several words—C. S. Lewis’s Four Loves: eros very much emotion, agape used of the love in the will.
• Anger carried to the will keeps “desire for revenge,” drops the bodily change (the child’s heart thumping when the big dog comes).
• The will, following understanding, is also immaterial (as we’ll learn). It is very hard for most people to distinguish emotional love from love in the will: both may be present at once; the will’s movement can overflow into the emotions, and the emotions affect the will. Test case: the love of wisdom (the philosopher’s name)—wisdom is not something the senses know.
• Thomas at the end of SCG I makes this same distinction when speaking of God’s love: names of emotions are placed on acts of will with the bodily aspect dropped, and then some are carried to God—but not all, properly.
• Fear in God: not the bodily aspect (“this guy doesn’t have a heart to go thump, thump, thump”), and not even the formal aspect, since fear concerns an evil difficult to avoid and God in his divine nature can undergo nothing bad.
• Fear in our will: Socrates’ fear of being mistaken. Aside: Warren Murray said of Monsignor Dion that his principal passion is fear—the fear of being mistaken; his first reaction to anything new is to reject it.
• Aside on his sabbatical semester studying the causes of error: like his brother’s friend with a psychology degree who sees everyone on the brink of a disorder, or the college joke that abnormal psychology shows what we all have in exaggerated form—one comes away seeing how easily the mind is deceived. Aristotle: the usual condition is to be more or less mistaken; Thomas: we live longer in error than in truth; and in SCG, showing perfect happiness is not in this life, error is magna pars miseriae—only seeing God face to face removes all error. So error is bad and difficult to avoid: the object of fear, minus the bodily change.

8. Metaphorical predication of God (“metaphorically, anger is said of God”) #

The point: some names that cannot be said properly of God, even formally, are said metaphorically.

• Anger: the angry man punishes; God in his just will punishes. But anger arises from sadness at an evil undergone, and God cannot be sad, so no real anger.
• Pity (the same word as in Aristotle’s work on tragedy; Latin misericordia): no sadness in God, but the one who pities relieves misery, and God’s will to relieve our misery is metaphorically pity.
• Fear cannot be said of God even metaphorically.
• The rule in answer to a student: as regards the bodily aspect, no emotion’s name is said of God or even of our will; as regards the formal aspect, all can be carried to our will; only some to God’s will—those whose object is something bad never; and desire and hope, though for good, are for good not had, so not properly in God, who is good in himself.

9. The eleven emotions (“Basically, 11 emotions”) #

The point: Aristotle gives no complete account, but Plato and Aristotle divided them into epithumia and thumos (Latin concupiscible/irascible, each named from one that stands out—sense desire, anger); Thomas in the Prima Secundae and the De Veritate question on the passions subdivides them into eleven.

• Concupiscible (six), arising toward what is pleasant/painful, agreeable/disagreeable to the senses:
  • liking/loving vs. disliking/hating/loathing (“I love licorice, I hate liver”);
  • desire/wanting (for what I like but don’t have—hunger, thirst) vs. aversion (no common word; “turning away”: salmon served at someone’s house), both before the good or bad is present;
  • joy/pleasure vs. sadness/pain, when the object is present (eating the salmon; being given the licorice).
• Irascible (five), arising because there is difficulty in getting or holding the pleasant, or avoiding or getting rid of the disagreeable—“to help get the concupiscible objects”:
  • from desire of a difficult good: hope (you estimate you can overcome) vs. despair. Candy in front of me: no difficulty. The man pursuing the young lady: hope or despair; the fox and the sour grapes: despair.
  • from aversion to a difficult evil: fear vs. boldness/confidence (“confidence” is also used equivocally for hope).
  • from sadness, when you think you can overcome its cause: anger (“you’re stepping on my foot”—“so what?”). Nothing corresponds to joy, since there is no difficulty in it.
• Analogue in the will: reason presents wisdom as good, you love it, lack it, desire it; since it is difficult, you need hope, and discouragement is a kind of despair. In the Phaedo the company becomes discouraged and Socrates leads them back to hope; when early successes make them bold (Simmias), he knocks them down—“three strikes, he’s out”—so a balance of hope and fear is needed. Aside: monastery mazes were said to teach monks patience and perseverance.
• Aristotle: animals fight over food and sex (“they fight over the girl”), and fear what will hurt the body.
• Virtues concern emotions: temperance/moderation with hunger, thirst, sexual desire; mildness with anger; courage with fear and boldness; magnanimity with hope.

10. Recap: formal aspect to the will, and what reaches God (“love and joy can be said properly in God”) #

The point: each emotion has a logos (object good or bad, had or not had, difficult or not) and a bodily aspect; names go to the will formally, never bodily; to God only some.

• Nothing bad can be in God, so none of the emotions concerning evil, even formally; when God became man he could have fear, anger, etc., but not as God.
• Of those concerning good: love and joy properly (formally), since you can love a good whether or not you have it, and more when you have it; not desire, nor hope or despair, which presuppose desire.
• Metaphor: Psalm 94 at the start of the day’s office, “I swore in my anger… they shall not enter into my rest”—anger as a metaphor for divine justice. Despair and fear are nowhere said of God even metaphorically; the recording breaks off mid-sentence.

His words #

• “proemium” / “third part,” “number seven… eighth paragraph… ninth paragraph”; his own paragraph numbering of the De Anima proem.
• “passions of the soul”; passiones animae; undergoings only ensouled bodies have; he calls the name “kind of misleading.”
• “second sense of before”: being before doing.
• “reason backwards”: from effect to cause (Sherlock Holmes).
• “enmattered accounts”; his rendering of the Greek, “a logos in matter” [ed.: logoi enuloi].
• “emotion”: from motion; “feelings”: linked to touch, the interior sense.
• “formal aspect” vs. “bodily aspect” of an emotion; what is kept and dropped when the name is carried to the will.
• dilectio (from choice) vs. amor; eros vs. agape.
• magna pars miseriae: error “a great part of wretchedness.”
• misericordia: pity, metaphorically God’s will to relieve our misery.
• epithumia / thumos; concupiscible / irascible emotions.
• “liking”/“loving”, “disliking”/“hating”/“loathing”, “wanting”/“desire”, “aversion” (“turning away”), “boldness”/“confidence”.
• “magnanimity”, “mildness”, “moderation” [ed.: temperance].

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima, proem, his paragraphs 7, 8, 9 (read and commented; verified sources: handout “Nature and Kinds of Love” p. 18; DHB Vol. III, p. 1123).
• Psalm 94 (Invitatory), “I swore in my anger… they will not enter into my rest” (quoted).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima, third book (imagining vs. thinking; emotions following on sense).
• Plato, Phaedo (Socrates’ last day; discouragement; Simmias).
• Shakespeare, Henry V, chorus.
• Descartes / Augustine, “I think, therefore I am.”
• Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes on reasoning backwards.
• C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, toward the end (love of God, names of emotions); Summa Contra Gentiles on perfect happiness not in this life, magna pars miseriae (book not stated).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae; De Veritate, question on the passions of the soul.
• Aristotle’s work on tragedy [ed.: Poetics] (pity).
• Aristotle on animals fighting over food and sex (locus not stated).
• The fable of the fox and the sour grapes.

His questions #

• “What problem is he going to consider mainly here?” Whether the emotions involve something bodily or not (not, as a student proposed, kinds of souls).
• “Which is more known to us, the being of the thing or what it does?” What it does; hence we reason backwards from doing to being.
• “Passion actually comes from the Latin word… it’s another word for what?” Undergoing.
• “The love of wisdom… is that love an emotion?” No—wisdom is not something the senses know; it is in the will.
• “Can there be any fear in God?” No: neither the bodily nor the formal aspect, since nothing bad is difficult for God to avoid.
• “Why is there this other group of emotions which they call the irascible?” Because of difficulty in getting or keeping the pleasant and avoiding or removing the disagreeable.
• “Why is there no one corresponding to anger with joy?” Because in joy or pleasure there is no difficulty at all.
• “So the difference between the ones that can be said metaphorically [of God] and those that cannot?” Those with a bad object are never said properly; anger and pity metaphorically, fear and despair not even metaphorically.