De Anima III.10: Desire, Practical Reason, and Looking Before and After

Orientation #

He says “the previous part, as you recall, had been dialectical”; now Aristotle “determines the truth”, first in general (Thomas’s fifteenth reading), then “some particular differences starting down in three eighty and going into chapter eleven”. They are “up to chapter ten here, on page forty-seven”. Verified sources found in the audio: handout “Matter of the Syllogism”, p. 4; printed volume DHB Vol III, p. 300 (the transcript does not itself name either). The previous class treated the incontinent and continent man and the concupiscible/irascible emotions; the next continues into the “immediate pleasant thing” appearing simply good and the mover-moved structure of animal motion.

The class, in order #

1. Two movers: appetite and mind, mind including imagination (“these two are movers, appetite and what mind”) #

Point: Aristotle names two sources of motion from place to place, desire and mind (nous), and here uses “mind” so as to include imagination “if someone should put down imagination as a certain understanding or thinking”.

• Reason for including imagination: “many things follow imagination contrary to knowledge” (science); many men act on images rather than thought, and the other animals, having no reason, must act on imagination.
• Conclusion he draws: both of these (mind, now including imagination, and desire) “are motive according to place”.
• Aside: Shakespeare’s Henry V choruses, which ask the audience to fill out the small stage, alternate between “imagining” and “thinking” in just this way.

2. Practical vs. theoretical mind: one mind, two ends (“differs from the speculative mind by its what end”) #

Point: the mind that moves is the practical mind (praktikos nous), distinguished from the theoretical or “looking” mind not as two minds but as one reason with two ends.

• Looking reason: end is simply to know the truth. Practical or “doing” reason: end is the doing or making of something.
• Eye of the body as analogy: looking at fall foliage just because it is beautiful (no end beyond the seeing) vs. watching the road and cars in order to drive. Ear: listening to Mozart just to hear him vs. hearing “Watch out!” or asking directions at a gas station (not because he is Pavarotti). Same eye, same ear, two ends; not two powers.
• Gregory the Great, Moralia: reason is “the eye of the soul”; “anger disturbs the eye of the soul”, so one sees less clearly when angry.
• Shakespeare, Hamlet: Hamlet says “in my mind’s eye” of picturing his dead father while Horatio and the others look round for the ghost; so “mind’s eye” names imagination, as Gregory’s “eye of the soul” names reason. What imagination and reason share: both know a thing in its physical absence, whereas sense knows only what is present.
• Prima Secundae (prev. mentions, “I think I mentioned before”): of the five virtues of reason, three are in looking reason (natural understanding, nous; reasoned-out understanding, episteme, e.g. geometry; wisdom, which heads both and knows the first cause, God) and two in practical reason (art, “right reason about making”; foresight or prudence, “right reason about doing”).

3. How the two movers are one: the good desired is the principle of practical mind (“this is the principle of the what? Practical mind”) #

Point: the two movers are reduced to something one before them, the good or end desired, which is both wanted and known, and as known is the beginning of practical reason’s discourse.

1. Practical mind knows the end desired and reasons back from it: to get this I must do this, and before that, this, down to “the extreme”, the action I can begin here and now.
2. Headache example: end = get rid of headache; reason: aspirin; none at home; drugstore has it; drugstore is left and down the street; extreme = walk there. So what is desired, as known, begins the deliberation.
3. Apple pie example: the pie desired is the starting point; reason knows what a pie is, asks how to make one (apples, flour), where to get apples (store, orchard, tree in the yard), and ends at picking or buying them.
4. Likewise imagination “does not move without the appetite”: I imagine an apple, desire it, and go where I can get one. Conclusion, in his words: “Something one then is the mover, which is the appetible or the desirable”, in English the good or the end; two causes of one action must be unified, and they are, in a common form, since the same thing is desired and known.

• Vocabulary stop (student question): the Greek here is orexis, the broad word for appetite, not epithumia, the narrower word for sense desire; Latin appetitus; English “appetite” tends to be narrower (food).

4. Why mind does not move without appetite: knowledge is of opposites (“the mind does not appear to be a mover without appetite”) #

Point: Thomas refers to Aristotle’s ninth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX]: the same knowledge is of opposites, so knowledge alone gives an ability for either, and something else, desire, must determine which.

• Examples: the doctor’s knowledge can make you healthy or sick; logic teaches how to reason well or badly, to teach or to deceive; grammar teaches “I am a man” and “I is a man”; Politics V shows both how to preserve a government and how to overthrow it; knowing how to cook a steak is knowing how to ruin it (the new kitchen toaster with buttons one to ten: dark old bread at eight, cinnamon-raisin at four or five, and I also know how to burn it).
• Objection he recalls from a St. Mary’s student: you should not teach ethics, since one learns how to become bad as well as good, and most people incline to be bad. He grants “he had a point”, and answers with Aristotle’s Rhetoric: the same objection (Hitler, Castro moved crowds) can be made against just about any art.
• The contrast in Metaphysics IX: a natural power like fire is determined to heat, not cool; a rational power like the medical art is capable of opposites, hence needs desire to determine it.
• The will is also an appetite (Greek boulesis): when one is moved according to reason one is moved according to will. But “desire can also move against reason”, and there the Greek is epithumia, Latin concupiscentia, his English “sense desire” (perhaps “sensual desire”, though that is too particular): desire for what is agreeable to the senses, even against reason, as in adultery.
• Contrary desires in man previewed: will wants to get up; the body wants five more minutes, ten more minutes (his alarm clock is across the room so it cannot be shut off without rising).

5. “Every understanding is right”; good and apparent good (“every understanding is right”) #

Point: at 374 Aristotle says nous pas orthos esti; he means something in practical reason like natural understanding, which cannot be mistaken.

• Analogy: everyone knows a whole is more than one of its parts; likewise everyone knows do good and avoid bad, do not harm others, be just, the very general things “that belong sometimes to the natural law”.
• Following that natural light you act correctly; departing from it comes from disordered desire or from imagination. Madmen in the daily papers follow imagination, not nous; others follow sense desire against reason. So desire and imagination can be right or not right; natural understanding of right and wrong is always right.
• Hence “the appetible is what always moves”, either the good or the apparent good: to strong sense desire adultery appears good; to great anger striking or killing appears good; the madman imagines a duty to kill; terrorists follow envy and anger and a false imagination that blowing oneself up leads to paradise. The apparent good moves only insofar as it appears good, through desire or imagination.
• The good that moves to action is the practical good, here and now, and so contingent. “It’s apparent, therefore, that this sort of power of the soul called appetite moves.”

6. Footnote: those who divide the soul’s parts badly (“comes back again to his critique”) #

Point: 375 returns to the critique of those who divide the soul without enumerating all its parts, with Plato’s Republic in view (reason, thumos where anger, confidence and boldness are, and epithumia).

• Aristotle’s reply: that threefold division may serve ethics, but as a division of the whole soul it is inadequate, since feeding, sensing and the rest are omitted, and epithumetikon and thumikon differ from each other less than from those.
• Thomas’s Latin for the two: concupiscent and irascible appetite. The concupiscent concerns what is agreeable or disagreeable to the senses: liking and disliking, then wanting and avoiding, then joy or pleasure at getting what one wants, pain or sadness at not escaping what one shuns.

7. Contrary desires arise only in “things having a sense of time” (“things having a sense of what? Time”) #

Point: 376 gives the fundamental distinction: desires become contrary when reason (logos) and the sense desires (epithumiai) oppose each other, which happens not in the other animals but in man, described as one who has a sense of time. He calls this “very subtle”.

• Connection he draws: Shakespeare’s definition of reason, “a large discourse, looking before and after” (prev. lecture, “we learned”), completed by the looking before and after; and Aristotle’s Categories, that the first meaning of before and after is in time. Man lives in time more than any animal (exams next week).
• Sense alone is confined to the here and now, Lady Macbeth’s “ignorant present”; so one pursues a pleasure or flees a pain without its consequences, while one who looks before and after may refuse some pleasures and undergo some pains (the dentist).
• Examples, each showing the same: dieting (the candy bar now vs. oneself slim three months on); freshmen sick from drinking more often than seniors (the senior sees tomorrow: drink moderately and you can drink again); the smoker who desists because a relative has emphysema (Eisenhower at Normandy and the Bulge, “a four pack man”, with lung trouble); men who abstain from illicit sex for fear of disease, AIDS in Africa, though he flags that avoiding disease “is not the full reason” for avoiding such things; Thanksgiving overeating, where time enjoyed at table against time in distress shows they are “not maximizing their pleasures”; avoiding the dentist, “not minimizing my pains”; the student choosing parties and pizza over study, when learning builds cumulatively and cramming the night before flunks out, so they seem, like an animal, tied to the here and now.
• Shakespeare, Henry IV Part One: Falstaff’s first appearance is his asking Prince Hal the time, and Hal’s reply that time is nothing to him; a man pursuing momentary sense pleasure to whom time has no relevance.
• Text: “the mind, because of what is to come, commands restraint, while desire, because of what is immediate” (hoi gar nous … epithumia [ed.: Greek as he gives it]). Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece as a representation of temptation, pursuing the momentary act one will regret.
• Aside: Dickens borrows “the ignorant present” in David Copperfield (David and Dora’s engagement); English novelists often quote or paraphrase Shakespeare.

His words #

• mind (nous): here used by Aristotle to include imagination as well as understanding.
• looking reason / doing reason: his English for theoretical (theoretikos) and practical (praktikos) mind [ed.: speculative / practical reason]; one reason, two ends.
• eye of the soul: Gregory the Great’s name for reason; mind’s eye: Shakespeare’s for imagination.
• natural understanding (nous), reasoned-out understanding (episteme), wisdom: the three virtues of looking reason; art “right reason about making”, foresight “right reason about doing” [ed.: prudence] the two of practical reason.
• the extreme: the last thing reasoned to, the action one can actually begin.
• appetite / desire (orexis, Latin appetitus): the broad word for desire, broader than English “appetite”.
• sense desire (epithumia, Latin concupiscentia): desire for what is agreeable to the senses; he avoids “sensual desire” as too particular.
• will (boulesis): desire that follows reason; also an appetite.
• concupiscent / irascible appetite: Thomas’s Latin for epithumetikon and thumikon.
• apparent good: what appears good through desire or imagination, as opposed to the true good.
• practical good: the good here and now, contingent.
• the ignorant present: Lady Macbeth’s phrase for the here-and-now to which sense is confined.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima III.10, with Thomas’s commentary, lectio 15 (his paragraph numbers 372, 374, 375, 376); “page forty-seven” of their text.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics (“ninth book of Wisdom”), via Thomas’s reference: same knowledge of opposites; fire vs. medical art.
• Aristotle, Politics V; Rhetoric (objection that rhetoric serves good or bad); Categories (first sense of before and after is in time).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Prima Secundae (five virtues of reason).
• Plato, Republic (three parts of the soul).
• Gregory the Great, Moralia (“anger disturbs the eye of the soul”).
• Shakespeare, Henry V (choruses), Hamlet (“mind’s eye”), Macbeth (“ignorant present”), Henry IV Part One (Falstaff asks the time), The Rape of Lucrece.
• Dickens, David Copperfield.
• Thomas’s commentary n. 380 and De Anima III.11 (next).

His questions #

• Is the distinction of practical and theoretical mind a distinction of two minds? No: one and the same reason with two different ends, as the same eye sees foliage for its own sake and the road in order to drive.
• If desire and mind are two movers, how are they united in one motion like walking to the drugstore? In the good desired, which as known is the beginning of practical reason’s deliberation: “something one is the mover, the appetible”.
• What is the Greek word for appetite here, and is it the same as desire? Orexis, the broad word; epithumia is the narrower sense desire.
• Why does the mind not move without appetite? Knowledge is of opposites (doctor, logician, grammarian, cook), so desire must determine which is done.
• Should ethics be taught, since it teaches how to be bad as well as good (the St. Mary’s student)? He grants the point but answers with the Rhetoric: the objection holds against just about any art.
• What does “every understanding is right” mean? Natural understanding of right and wrong (do good, avoid bad, be just) is always right; desire and imagination may or may not be.
• What always moves us? The desirable: the good, or the apparent good insofar as it appears good through desire or imagination.
• Why do contrary desires arise in man and not in the other animals? Because man has a sense of time, looking before and after, while sense is confined to the ignorant present.