Q.75 a.6 continued: The Natural Desire to Exist Forever, Socrates in the Phaedo, and Replies to the Objections

Orientation #

He picks up at “the last paragraph here”, the sign Thomas adds at the end of the response of a. 6, and refers back to the Phaedo and to the angel who “will explain to you that he’s not God”, “as I said last time” (prev. lecture). He closes by calling a break before “the seventh article” [transcript: “fifty seventh”]. The previous class treated a. 6 on the incorruptibility of the human soul; the next takes up a. 7 on whether soul and angel are one species.

The class, in order #

1. The sign: everyone with understanding desires to be forever (“a sign of this thing from this”) #

Point: Thomas adds to the arguments a sign drawn from natural desire.

1. Each thing naturally, in its own way, desires to be.
2. In knowing things, desire follows knowledge.
3. Sense knows existence only as here and now; understanding grasps existence absolutely and according to all time (the animal fights to be here and now, but does not apprehend existence absolutely).
4. So everyone with understanding naturally desires to be forever.
5. A natural desire cannot be empty: nature does nothing in vain. Conclusion: every understanding substance is incorruptible.

2. “All men by nature desire to know” and why nature does nothing in vain (“nature does nothing in vain”) #

Point: the same logic underlies the opening of the Metaphysics.

• The three questions asked about Aristotle’s first sentence: what does it mean; is it true; why begin with it.
• Signs it is true: we sometimes use our senses just to sense, not to do or make; we all like stories (we want to know whether Little Red Riding Hood reaches her grandmother’s house, not because we will do anything about it, but because wonder is aroused).
• Why begin with it: (a) to show the true goodness of knowledge. Being desired is a sign of good but not a necessary one (we sometimes desire what is bad); being naturally desired is a sign of being naturally, hence truly, good. (b) Thomas in the commentary: someone might ask whether wisdom is obtainable by man at all; a natural desire for it shows it is in some way possible.
• “Nature does nothing in vain” is, Aristotle says, the fundamental principle of all natural philosophy “from the Greeks right through his own works”. Boundary: hunger, thirst, reproduction do not always succeed, but food, water, offspring are not impossible; if they were, nature would not have given the desire. So the natural desire to be forever is a sign that our soul will be forever.

3. Phaedo, friendship and wishful thinking turned around (“love Socrates a little, but the truth much more”) #

Point: Thomas turns the objector’s suspicion into a sign of truth.

• Phaedo: Socrates gives three arguments for immortality; all satisfied except Simmias and Cebes, talking in the corner; Socrates draws out their objections; the friends fall into discouragement, almost despair, and Socrates must lead them out before answering. He urges any further objection be brought out: “don’t love me more than the truth”.
• Nicomachean Ethics I: Aristotle, about to object to the Platonists, says these men are friends but truth is a greater friend, and it would be impious to prefer friends to truth; he takes truth as tied with God. Thomas notes he raises this only in the Ethics, because friendship matters so much in human life (two of ten books are on friendship).
• Why it bites in the Phaedo: Socrates dies today; a friend might not press an objection lest he lose the confidence with which he faces death. Socrates adds that he himself may not examine carefully because he wants the soul to survive: the charge of wishful thinking (“wish was father to the thought”, Henry IV; “too good to be true”).
• Thomas’s move, which he calls “kind of subtle”: the desire is not a reason to question the arguments; because it is a natural desire, it is a sign of their truth.

4. Student: why insist it is a natural desire? (“one thing to be running for your dinner”) #

Point: how we know the desire to be forever is inborn, and why it takes this shape in man.

• Natural means inborn. All things try to be: the animal fights for its life (Aesop: “one thing to be running for your dinner, another to be running for your life”; both pursue existence).
• The difference follows knowledge: sense knows existence only here and now, so the animal fights for the existence it has now; man understands existence absolutely and sees it over a course of time (De Anima: man is the animal with a sense of time). Example: one sentence by itself makes little difference (“why not enjoy some candy or some wine”), but as sentences join up you see the larger picture and begin to live in time. So the desire to be becomes, in man, a desire to be forever.
• Animal life set by the here and now: cat catching animals in the backyard; Raymond Monroe’s rescued kitten, playing with belts until a striped belt terrified it (instinct: a snake; an older cat would not be deceived).
• Man looks backward and forward: Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Johnson’s dislike of the thought of death and his dislike that Boswell knows it.
• The objection “you believe in heaven / immortality because you want to” (something like it in Lincoln, speaking of Plato wanting to believe; Lincoln perhaps a bit of a sceptic) is answered: wanting it naturally is a sign it is true.
• Parallel: the objection that nature fails (a baby born without an arm) is turned by Aristotle into a sign that nature acts for an end, since one cannot fail without aiming. “Did I fail to teach you German this semester?” No: he was not trying to; he may fail to teach philosophy of nature. Cf. self-defeating positions (“statements do not exist” confirms what it attacks); here the turning is less obvious.

5. Student: form, existence as something added, angels (“back in question one and four, article three”) #

Point: subsistent forms depend on God, yet have no potency in their substance for not being; that God made them so is a sign He made them to be forever. Whether God would annihilate anything is referred to q. 104 a. 3 (he says “one and four, three”), to return with the second objection.

6. Reply to obj. 1: Scripture in the person of the foolish (“from the person of the insipientium”) #

Point: the texts of Ecclesiastes speak in the person of the foolish (insipientium), and what they say holds of the body, which we share with the beasts.

• Etymology aside: sapientia from sapor; Thomas’s sapida scientia, savoury knowledge. Romeo, about to kill himself, calls his reason “bitter conduct… unsavoury guide”; Thomas’s Adoro te devote, dulce sapere, savouring the Lord sweetly in the Eucharist. Wisdom is savoury and sweet, like wine (in vino veritas), not soda pop; the foolish is insipid, tasteless. “Modern philosophy is very insipid.”
• Reading the reply: man and animals have a like beginning of generation as to the body (all made from the earth), not as to the soul; the beast’s soul is produced from a bodily power, the human soul from God. Genesis signifies this: the earth produced a living soul, but God breathed into man’s face the breath of life. Aristotle, Generation of Animals: the rational soul does not come from the parents; they prepare the body.
• Aside (flagged as not his concern now): the later objection about adulterous or illicit generation; God cooperates with what is natural in the act, not with the sinner’s disorder.
• So Ecclesiastes concludes: dust returns to the earth (said of us too on Ash Wednesday), the spirit returns to God who gave it. Breathing is a like process as to body; not as to soul, because man understands and beasts do not. So it is false that man has no more than the beast; dissolution is alike as to body, not as to soul.
• The objection rests on not reading Scripture carefully; it is placed first because it seems to come from Scripture itself.

7. Reply to obj. 2: created from nothing, but no potency not to be (“a potency to not be”) #

Point: corruptibility means a potency in the thing not to be; createdness implies none.

1. To be able to be created is said not through a passive power but through the active power of the Creator, who can produce from nothing.
2. “Can be turned into nothing” likewise implies in the creature no ability not to be, only that God could not continue to flow existence into it.
3. Corruptible means having in oneself a potency not to be.

• Examples: clay sphere has an ability to be a cube, and actualizing it ends the sphere; “in my body I have an enemy”, something able to be a lion if they fed me to the lions; the healthy body has something able to be other than healthy. A form only has no ability to be anything else, so no passive ability not to be; it could cease only if God ceased to cause its existence, which He could but would not (q. 104).
• Aside: absolute dependence on God will be clearer in heaven, and the folly of revolt. Sartre (from the essay in Kaufmann’s anthology, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre): existentialism is atheistic not by proving God does not exist but in that it makes no difference whether He does; a will asserting complete independence. Dostoevsky’s young man in Crime and Punishment murders to assert freedom above law; a TV film of two boys murdering for the same reason; “kind of crazy thinking, a lack of thinking”. Psalm: the Lord is king in splendour robed… holiness befits His house.

8. Reply to obj. 3: understanding with images while in the body (“proper operation of the soul, according as it is united”) #

Point: we never understand in this life without imagining, yet the understanding is not in the body.

• Aristotle, De Anima III: the proper object of our understanding is the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined, especially of natural and mathematical things. But the understanding of what-it-is is not in the image: the image is of the singular and is continuous; the universal is not in the continuous.
• De Anima: a thing must be separated from matter to be actually understandable. So the separated soul is understandable to itself and understands in a way like the angels, though it is not an angel (“next article”). Two ways of understanding, but in neither is understanding in the body; because its understanding is not in the body, its existence is not just in the body, so it can exist without it.
• Plato, Republic: philosophy as a turning around of the soul and a going up (Greek word carries both; he gives “anodos” [ed.: anodos, “way up”]), from the material to the immaterial. Aristotle in a way agrees: everything studied for the sake of wisdom, which knows the immaterial; but in this life through the material. Romans 1:20, the invisible things of God known through things seen; used by Vatican I for natural reason’s knowledge of God.
• Separated, the soul knows itself through itself, not the roundabout way (soul through powers, powers through acts, acts through objects), and is turned to the angels (“the angel will explain to you that he’s not God”, prev. lecture); a fortiori in the divine vision, face to face, not darkly through a mirror. Now we know God by likeness and as cause, negating the imperfection of the likeness and the deficiency of effect from cause.
• Reading the reply: to understand with an image is the soul’s proper operation as united to the body (if it did not need the body for its fundamental ideas it would not be joined to it); separated, it has another way, like the separated substances, to be made clear later (q. 89). “Another way” does not mean this life’s understanding is material: even now it is not in the body, otherwise it would be of the singular and not open to all material things.
• Aristotle’s proportion: reason is to images as sense is to exterior sensibles. I see your colour and shape; if you leave the room I cannot; yet my seeing is not in you but in my eye or brain. Likewise I understand what a triangle is by imagining one; the understanding is not in the image any more than seeing is in you. So a blow to the brain, alcohol, a blood clot interfere with understanding by removing the image, not because understanding is in the brain.
• Beatific vision: knowing God through God, He being that by which as well as what we understand (“in your light we shall see light”, Psalms).
• St Gertrude, instructed by God through images (as Dionysius explains; cf. Isaiah, the Apocalypse); she asks “why do you do this?” and is told it is natural for a human being to be led this way; “the thing Aristotle would say”. He wishes the Pope would make her a Doctor of the Church; “if you want to know where I am, I’m in the heart of Gertrude.”

His words #

• sign (of incorruptibility): natural desire to be forever, which cannot be in vain
• nature does nothing in vain: fundamental principle of all natural philosophy
• naturally desired vs merely desired: only the first is a sure sign of true goodness
• wish was father to the thought: his tag for the wishful-thinking objection
• natural: inborn
• insipientium: the foolish; insipid, tasteless, the opposite of savoury
• sapientia from sapor, sapida scientia: savoury knowledge
• ability / power not to be [ed.: potency]: what makes a thing corruptible
• able to be created: said through the active power of the Creator, not a passive power
• the what it is of something sensed or imagined: proper object of our reason in this life
• anodos: Plato’s going-up of the soul from material to immaterial
• proportion: reason to images as sense to exterior sensibles

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q. 75 a. 6, the sign at the end of the response; replies to objections 1, 2, 3 Mentioned
• Aristotle, Metaphysics, opening (“all men by nature desire to know”) and Thomas’s commentary on it
• Plato, Phaedo (three arguments; Simmias and Cebes)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (friends and truth), with Thomas’s comment
• Shakespeare, Henry IV (“wish was father to the thought”); Romeo and Juliet (“bitter conduct… unsavoury guide”)
• Thomas, Adoro te devote (dulce sapere)
• Aristotle, De Anima (sense of time; III on the object of understanding; separation from matter)
• Aristotle, Generation of Animals (rational soul not from the parents)
• Genesis; Ecclesiastes (as cited in the reply)
• ST I q. 104 a. 3 (annihilation); q. 89 (separated soul’s understanding)
• Plato, Republic (philosophy as turning around)
• Romans 1:20; Vatican I; Psalms (“in your light we shall see light”; “the Lord is king”)
• Sartre’s essay in Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
• Boswell, Life of Johnson; Aesop; Lincoln (unspecified passage); St Gertrude; Dionysius; Isaiah; Apocalypse

His questions #

• Why does Aristotle begin the Metaphysics with “all men by nature desire to know”? To show knowledge is truly good (naturally desired) and that wisdom is in some way attainable.
• Is the desire to be forever a reason to doubt the arguments, as wishful thinking? No; being a natural desire, it is a sign of their truth.
• How do we know the desire to be forever is natural? All things try to be; in man the desire follows understanding, which grasps existence absolutely and over time.
• Did I fail to teach you German this semester? No; one cannot fail at what one does not aim at, so nature’s failures show it acts for an end.
• Is my seeing your colour and shape in you? No, in the eye or brain; likewise understanding a triangle is not in the imagined triangle.
• Why does God instruct Gertrude through images? Because it is natural for a human being to be led that way.
• Is the soul’s way of understanding when separated the same as in the body? No; another way, like the angels’, though in both cases not in the body (developed in q. 89).