Essential vs. Incidental Differences, the Fallacy of Accident, and Replies to the Objections

Orientation #

He begins “in the second paragraph, in the way my text is dividing,” i.e. mid-article, and looks ahead to “the beginning of the next question” where Thomas distinguishes the five genera of powers as in the De Anima. Verified source: probably between q. 77 a. 3 and a. 4 (inferred). The previous class covered the first part of a. 3 (powers distinguished by acts, acts by objects); the next takes up the order among the powers.

The class, in order #

1. What is per accidens does not diversify the species (“color happens to the animal”) #

Point: not every difference of objects yields a different power; only differences of what belongs to the object as such.

• He reads: things that are per accidens (“by happening,” his English) do not diversify species. Color happens to animal, so animals are not divided by color but by a difference of the sensing soul, with or without reason: rational/irrational are the divisive differences of animal (man vs. “the cats around here,” the dog).
• Triangle: not divided into red, white and blue “to be patriotic”; those happen to it. Looking inwardly at what a triangle is (plane figure contained by three straight lines), the three sides are lines that can be equal or unequal, so equilateral, isosceles, scalene divide it per se.
• One step up: rectilineal plane figure divided by three, four, five sides (triangle, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon), again not by color.

2. The fallacy of the accident (“deceives even the wise”) #

Point: Aristotle says this fallacy deceived even the wise, including Plato; it is the opposite of “as such.”

• A student asks whether accident here means exception; he says no, it is the opposite of as such.
• Example: Socrates is a man; man is universal; therefore Socrates is universal. Looks like a syllogism, but man is said of Socrates because it signifies animal with reason, not because it is universal; the universality it has in the mind is accidental to man as said of Socrates. What deceives us, he suggests, is that the accidental is here always present. “Very, very subtle thing.”
• Heraclitus (from the motion course): day becomes night so day and night are the same; the sick become healthy; the young become old; “you are what you become.” Fault: ignoring the subject that remains. It is not sickness as such that becomes healthy but the body that has sickness; when the bad become good, badness does not become good. “I love the sinner, but not the sin.”
• The ugly want to be beautiful, the poor to be rich: not the ugly as such, or they would want their own disappearance; it is the body that wants to be healthy. A student restates: the sick person is not sick in and of himself, so he can move away from sickness; he agrees.
• Malaria (London airport anti-malaria kit): the ancients thought swamp air caused it because no one got malaria who had not been in swamp air; really the mosquitoes, and perhaps not the mosquito as such but something that happens to the mosquito. Netting in the swamp would separate the accidental. A student adds the eighteenth-century Dutch “dank sickness” blamed on canal stench (John Adams as ambassador); he allows it as possible.
• Aside: “put on your thinking cap,” from the medieval professor’s hat, accidental to the teaching.
• Aside: pro-life woman in Peru who told the Pope, “I am the servant of the servant of the servants of God,” and who said our Lord told us to love enemies but not how to love the devil.

3. Drama, language, and accidental unity (“tragedy and comedy”) #

Point: rereading the same text, he tests it on drama and on language teaching.

• Drama is divided per se into tragedy and comedy (representation of the laughable vs. the serious); drama in English vs. French or Spanish is accidental to what a play is.
• The French teacher (his brother Mark’s joke): grammar, literature, history, philosophy all put under “French,” “as if their formal object was qua French.” The unity is accidental: the rules of reasoning and the standards for a plot (beginning, middle, end; interesting characters) are the same in either language. French and English literature belong to one poetic science; French and English grammar to a universal grammar. There is a practical reason the same person teaches both (you must know the language), but they are different sciences. Aside: he has been asked to teach philosophy in French; his French is not good enough.

4. Passible quality: color and sound as per se objects (“third species of quality”) #

Point: the powers differ by what the ability looks to per se.

• He reads: sense as such regards passible quality (his “undergoing quality”), the third species of quality in the Categories, divided per se into color, sound, and the like. Color and sound act on things differently, hence sight and hearing.
• But it happens to a passible quality, e.g. the colored, to be musical or grammatical, large or small, a man or a stone; such differences do not distinguish powers.
• Dividing animal as such gives dog, cat, horse, elephant, not colors; dog and cat are not sensible in different ways and may both be brown. When the next question distinguishes the five genera of powers, one must descend in each case to what is per se and what per accidens.

5. Reply to the first objection: act after ability in being, before in intention (“the carpenter is building a house”) #

Point: Thomas grants that act follows power in being, but not absolutely, and not in intention or definition.

1. Absolutely speaking, act is prior to ability (the “ninth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]), but “we’ll leave” that here.
2. In the soul’s abilities, the ability precedes its act in being.
3. Yet the act is prior in intention, because the ability is for the sake of the act; and in definition, as the end is said to be before the agent.

• Carpenter: the house exists after the building, but you cannot define what he is doing without the house; otherwise you could not distinguish it from your mother making an apple pie (wood and bricks vs. dough and apples). “You philosophers talk about such obvious things.”
• The objection that the object is extrinsic: the object is the beginning or the end of the action, and what is intrinsic is proportioned to that. The eye is proportioned to receiving color, the ear to sound, though the sound begins outside. Nut and bolt: the nut is extrinsic, but the bolt is sized to fit it; so the ear must differ from the eye because it is adapted to a different extrinsic thing. He calls these “the replies he has to those first two objections.”

6. Reply to the second objection: contraries and the common genus (“the common genus of both contraries”) #

Point: the objection was that objects distinguishing powers should be contraries, what are furthest apart; but contraries are furthest apart in the same genus, and the genus is the object.

• Black and white in color, sweet and bitter in taste. If a power regarded one contrary per se, the other would need another power; but the power regards the common notion, as sight regards color, not the white.
• Reason added: one contrary is in some way the definition of the other, one being as perfect, the other as imperfect. “Common saying among Plato and Aristotle” that there is the same knowledge of contraries.

7. Digression: senses of “speaking well” (“speaking well of love”) #

Point: from the Symposium he draws out the equivocation Socrates plays on.

• Symposium (“drinking together”): six speeches on love celebrating Agathon’s tragic victory; Socrates last, saying he misunderstood, thinking “speak well of love” meant speak truly, whereas the others had praised it. “He spoke well of you” = praised; praise may be flattery (“you’re another Einstein”).
• Apology: the prosecutors warn the jury he is a good speaker; Socrates: not in their sense; if it means saying the truth, then yes. Speaking persuasively (rhetorician) vs. speaking truly (philosopher); the persuader may sway by image or emotion, “sugared words, as Shakespeare says.”
• The trivium: grammar = speaking according to a language’s rules; rhetoric = persuasively; logic = truly. “Man is a stone” is fine grammar but false; “man am an animal” is bad grammar but true. “I is your professor” wrong grammatically, though a student notes it could be rhetoric for reaching ghetto kids.
• Rhetoric rests on likelihood. Poetics: a likely impossibility is better than an unlikely possibility; Homer’s gods quarrelling (Zeus and Hera over Troy) are ridiculous yet seem likely; Cicero’s seemingly irrelevant details (the man late because his wife was not ready) make the narrative real.
• Kasurik and De Koninck at Laval: Kasurik warned him De Koninck might needle a student of Kasurik’s; on April Fool’s Day Father Stromberg told him De Koninck said of Kasurik’s Russia trip “I hope he keeps his mouth shut over there”; he took it for a prank because it was exactly what De Koninck would say, though the trip was real (Kasurik photographed for the CIA, his wife terrified). Plausibility is what persuasion is: the kid home late must tell a believable story; sometimes the truth is unlikely and not believed.

8. The same knowledge of contraries (“same knowledge of what, contraries”) #

Point: he returns to why Thomas can say one power covers both contraries.

• End of the Symposium: Socrates tells Aristophanes (comedy only) and Agathon (tragedy only) that if they knew what they were doing they could write both.
• Doctor knows health and sickness (knows best how to make you sick); logic is the art of correct and incorrect reasoning, so he can teach or deceive; Politics V teaches how to preserve and how to overthrow a government; ethics studies virtue and vice.
• St. Mary’s College (Moraga) student: you shouldn’t teach ethics, since one learns how to be bad too and most people incline to badness, so you corrupt them. “Pretty good argument.”
• Contraries stand out against each other (white against black, stars against the black sky). So: an ability for white as such would need another for black; an ability for color includes both.

9. Reply to the third objection: same in subject, diverse in ratio (“same and subject to be diverse”) #

Point: the same thing may be object of different powers because it is not their object in the same way. “A more subtle thing.”

• Third objection: the same object is known and desired. Reply: nothing prevents what is the same in subject being diverse in definition (ratio) and so pertaining to diverse powers.
• Reason and will: reason knows the truth about the will; the will wills the good of reason. The same thing is object of reason as true or knowable, of will (“the will or the heart”) as good or lovable.
• Eye and touch both know surface and shape, one through color, the other through hardness (resistance).
• Food: object of sense (smell, taste) as sensible; of hunger/emotion as good, nourishing.
• Theological virtues: all have God in some way as object. God is object of faith as first truth (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”; “I believe God who can neither deceive nor be deceived”), of charity as goodness itself; hope is harder, relying on God’s power and mercy. God’s truth and goodness are not different parts of God, yet He is not the object of faith and charity in the same way: a formal difference.
• Loves distinguished by their objects even when the woman is one: wife vs. mother; sister vs. daughter (his daughter Maria loved by him as daughter, by his sons as sister; Paul as son and as brother; his brothers Marcus and Richard loved by him as brothers, by his parents as sons). One love differs from another “not by being loved, but by what it is that you’re loving.”
• Ophelia loved by Laertes, Polonius and Hamlet (the grave scene: whose love is greater; a different kind of love). Juliet: does distinction of acts by objects break down, since Romeo’s and her father’s object is the same? Following Thomas: same in subject, differing according to ratio, as wife vs. daughter. Both think her dead; both sorrow, but a different sorrow (an only daughter vs. “only happiness”). The class ends here.

His words #

• “by happening”: his English for per accidens; opposite of “as such.”
• fallacy of the accident: Aristotle says it deceives even the wise, including Plato.
• “the sensing soul”: difference of which, with or without reason, divides animal.
• poetic science; universal grammar: the sciences to which French and English literature/grammar respectively belong.
• “undergoing quality”: passible quality, third species of quality in the Categories.
• ability: [ed.: potency/power], his usual rendering of potentia (carried from prev. lecture).
• “ninth book of wisdom”: [ed.: Metaphysics IX]; act simply prior to ability.
• intention: the act is before the ability in intention, since the ability is for the sake of the act.
• contraries: furthest apart in the same genus; the genus is the object.
• “speaking well”: praising / persuasively (rhetoric) / truly (logic) / by the rules of a language (grammar).
• likelihood: the basis of rhetoric; likely impossibility vs. unlikely possibility (Poetics).
• same in subject, diverse in ratio: his English, “this woman as wife / as mother”; he gives Latin secundum eandem rationem [ed.: Thomas’s text has “secundum rationem”; his “eandem” appears to be a slip].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 77, a. 3 (inferred), second part of the body and replies to objections 1, 2, 3, read in his own English with Latin glosses.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Categories, third species of quality (passible quality)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (“ninth book of wisdom”), priority of act
• Aristotle, De Anima (the five genera of powers, at the start of the next question)
• Aristotle, On Poetic Art (likely impossibility), Politics V (preserving and overthrowing governments), and on the fallacy of the accident
• Plato, Symposium (speeches on love; Socrates with Aristophanes and Agathon) and Apology (the “good speaker”)
• Homer (Zeus and Hera over the Trojan War); Cicero (a defense narration)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet (Ophelia’s burial), Romeo and Juliet (“sugared words” unlocated)
• John 14 (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”) (inferred)

His questions #

• Do you distinguish kinds of triangles by red, white, and blue? No; those are accidental; equilateral, isosceles, scalene divide it per se.
• Socrates is a man, man is universal, so Socrates is universal: what’s wrong with it? Man is said of Socrates as animal with reason, not as universal; the universality is accidental.
• Is it the sick as such that become healthy? No; the body that has sickness becomes healthy; sickness never does.
• Does a drama in English and one in French give different species of drama? No; tragedy and comedy are per se differences, language accidental.
• Are the dog and the cat sensible in a different way? No; they might both be brown.
• If the object could be extrinsic, how does it distinguish an intrinsic power? What is intrinsic is proportioned to the beginning or end of the action, like bolt to nut.
• If objects distinguish powers, must contraries belong to different powers? No; the power regards the common genus, as sight regards color, not white.
• Does a good speaker speak persuasively or truly? Equivocal: rhetoric persuasively, logic truly, grammar by the rules of a language.
• In what way is God the object of charity? As good, goodness itself (a student answers); of faith as first truth.
• Does the distinction of acts by objects break down with Romeo’s and the father’s love of Juliet? No; same in subject but different in ratio, wife vs. daughter.