Order Among the Powers of the Soul, Foresight, and Replies to Objections (ST I q.77 a.7, Part 2)

Orientation #

He opens by pointing back to “Article Six” (how the powers flow from the essence of the soul) as the necessary prerequisite for “Article Seven” (one power flowing from another), and at the end says the perfect-before-imperfect point “you understand much better when you do the ninth book of Wisdom” and that foresight and art will come up “later on, when we get into intellect.” The verified-source list places this episode around q. 77, a. 7–8; the content read is the body and replies of a. 7 (article number from his own words; question number inferred). The previous class treated a. 7’s objections and Aristotle’s senses of “before”; the next treats a. 8, whether the powers remain in the separated soul.

The class, in order #

1. Why Article Six had to come first (“the way Thomas has ordered the before and after”) #

Point: one power is before another not in time but as a cause is before an effect, so the whole article rests on a. 6, the essence of the soul as cause of the powers.

1. The essence of the soul causes the powers in more than one way.
2. As mover/maker and as end, a cause is more perfect than its effect.
3. As matter or subject, a cause is less perfect than what perfects it—but it is before “in the generation, when it’s coming to be.”

• Example: in man, reason is before the senses in perfection and as end or purpose of sensing; but in generation the senses “dispose for reason.”

2. Reading the body of the article (“the sense is for the sake of the understanding”) #

Point: the body of the article, read with his translation.

• The soul is compared to the powers as active principle (mover and end) and as receptive principle—“apart by itself” for understanding and will, “together with the body” for sensing, digestion, etc.
• Hence powers before in perfection and nature are beginnings of the others as end or active principle: “the sense is for the sake of the understanding, and not the reverse,” sense being “a certain deficient partaking” of understanding; so by natural origin sense is in some way from understanding, “as the imperfect comes from the perfect.”
• Aside on students: some refuse to call seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching “knowing,” reserving the word for reason; but in some sense they are knowing—the hesitation shows they see sense as imperfect knowing.
• But “according to the road of a receiving principle” it is the reverse: the soul as sensing is subject and “something like matter” with respect to understanding; so the imperfect powers are before in the way of generation, “for an animal is generated before man” (he first misspeaks “man is generated before man,” then corrects).
• His account of the “natural road”: man is by nature animal with reason; animal by definition has senses; the generic (animal) comes first in generation, so the natural road is from senses into reason—while in another way reason, as end, is before the senses.
• Conclusion he draws: two orders, each corresponding to a meaning of “cause”; the very fact that A can be before B and B before A “is a sign that you have more than one meaning.”

3. Digression: every respectable word is equivocal by reason (“equivocal by reason”) #

Point: Aristotle first clearly saw that the words used everywhere (whole/part, before/after), especially in the axioms and in wisdom, are equivocal “not by chance, but by reason,” and by distinguishing and ordering their central meanings he avoided the fallacy of equivocation; Plato only hints at it.

• Feuerbach story (young professor at St. Mary’s, California, needing diocesan permission through the registrar to use “perverse” books for a Marx course): The Essence of Christianity takes the Incarnation (“the mystery today, of the Annunciation”) to mean not that God became man but that man is God. His syllogism: man’s mind is infinite; the infinite is God. Berquist’s diagnosis: man’s mind is infinite as always able to learn more, knowing the universal (I know what an odd number is, said of infinitely many things)—a potential infinity, incomplete; “the infinite is God” means lacking no perfection, universally perfect. Marx and Engels “buy that right up”; Marx’s doctoral thesis preface denies that the human mind has a highest ability. Aristotle and Thomas would find it laughable: “infinite” is listed in Natural Hearing book I as a word with more than one meaning.
• Philosophy-of-nature final exam: students say “nature can’t act for an end because then all things would come to an end”—two senses of end (purpose vs. termination). Aristotle touches this at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics: happiness is man’s end, death is man’s end, so is happiness death? “The right end is the end of the ballpoint pen.”
• Locke, Human Understanding book III, sees the confusion caused by ambiguous words but never goes back to think out the central meanings; only Aristotle and a few followers, Thomas above all, do.
• The eight senses of “in”: Aristotle distinguishes them in Physics IV without ordering them (as he orders senses in Wisdom V); Thomas in his commentary orders them “perfectly”—“I don’t think anybody else could do it.”
• Restated upshot: one power is before another according to one kind of cause (more perfect than its effect); another power is before the former according to another kind (matter, imperfect by nature, receiving its perfection from something else).

4. Student’s question: can philosophy show Bush’s Iraq arguments flawed? (“the virtue of foresight or prudentia”) #

Point: this is not directly a question of philosophy but of the virtue of foresight (prudentia), which concerns the singular here and now and cannot be syllogized.

• Etymology: in Secunda Secundae, distinguishing the integral parts of prudentia, an objection says providentia is not a part because it is the same thing; Thomas replies it is the main part and gives its name to the whole—and Latin dictionaries confirm prudentia is a contraction of providentia. He prefers “foresight,” since “prudence” has lost its full meaning; Churchill uses “foresight.”
• Caution, one of the integral parts: sometimes the result is other than intended, even the opposite. Example from teaching the Apology: the Athenians want to silence Socrates’ examining of their lives; Socrates, 70, says that by killing him they make a martyr and invite others to look into them—and “this is the year 2003,” 2,400 years after 399 BC, and we are still examining what was wrong with Athens; Plato would never have written it otherwise.
• The best argument against the war, in his view: it will unintendedly produce more terrorists, since Al Qaeda can use hatred of America to recruit. The reply: perhaps more terrorists, but of lesser “terribleness” if rogue governments are stopped from supplying chemical/biological/atomic means (ricin found in a London apartment and a French railway station; the Japanese subway attack). Student: “one’s talking about quality and one’s talking about quantity”—he accepts that as his own language. “It’s a very hard thing to balance.”
• MacArthur’s Inchon landing (Korean War): dangerous tides, narrow window, but the enemy wouldn’t expect it; Washington sent chief of staff Lawton Collins and an admiral to dissuade him; MacArthur said he wanted “to do what Wolfe did in Quebec” (climbing where no one thought he could, leading to the capture of Quebec and British victory in the French and Indian War, 1754–1763). He had a contingency plan, went over the whole plan with a companion in the boat, then read his Bible all night. It worked; still some maintain he took an unnecessary risk. Machiavelli, History of Florence: nothing more successful than doing what the enemy thinks you can’t.
• Student: hard to syllogize, because “in one sense he’s courageous if it works, and in another sense he’s a fool if it doesn’t.” He agrees: the more you know the situation, the better the estimate; MacArthur studied the tides intensely; “those things are not altogether certain.”
• Churchill and Hitler: Churchill urged intervention early (the Rhineland—Hitler’s own words that opposition would have sent them back “like a dog with his tail between his legs”; Munich); Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” now looks foolish, yet peace demonstrators in London reuse the phrase. Churchill’s point: not peace, but fighting later in a worse position—“that’s the way Bush sees it.”
• Foresight is partly an estimate; some size up situations better than others. Student: so philosophy has a hard part and a soft part? He rejects this: “philosophy is about the universal,” foresight “about the singular here and now.”
• Nixon in Caracas turning off a street two blocks from a bomb; MacArthur and Patton leaving a hill in WWI just before a shell hit—“a sixth sense.” A student offers a different version (both stood through a mortar barrage while others hit foxholes, which is why MacArthur wouldn’t call Patton to the Pacific).
• Closing: foresight and art are in practical reason and concern the singular contingent; to be seen later “when we get into intellect.”

5. Summary of the body before the replies (“closer to the soul”) #

Point: powers closer to the soul as it is more perfect are before in one sense; powers more susceptible and prior in generation are closer to the soul as receptive—two ways one power can come from the soul through another.

6. Reply to the first objection: powers are together (“not through a changing of the soul”) #

Point: a power flows from the essence not through a transmutation of the soul but as a natural result, hence simultaneous with the soul—and so with one power relative to another.

• Examples of natural result: being half of four flows from being two without changing the two; a triangle’s angles equal two right angles; intersecting straight lines yield equal alternate angles.

7. Reply to the second objection: an accident is not the subject of an accident (“quantity before quality”) #

Point: one accident as such is not the subject of another, but substance receives one accident before another, and by one “as a kind of middle” receives another.

• Categories example: quantity before quality; that is part of why we can consider quantity without quality. Surface is subject of color “at least as we sense it”—color spread over a surface; shape presupposes quantity (student asks whether he said shape is quantity; answer: it presupposes it).
• His guardian angel “helping me think now”: not out of shape but without shape, having no body and so no quantity; I, the dog, the cat, the tree are receptive of shape through quantity.
• Aristotle’s order of categories: substance stands under all, then quantity, which is before some qualities (color presupposes surface, shape quantity in general).
• Parallel: plane geometry as prerequisite to solid geometry; natural philosophy as prerequisite to wisdom.
• Applied: the soul receives one power through another, in one or the other of the two orders of the body.

8. Reply to the third objection: powers divided by opposites (“the opposition of perfect and imperfect”) #

Point: the powers are opposed as perfect and imperfect, like species of numbers and figures, and this opposition does not impede one originating from another, since the imperfect naturally proceeds from the perfect.

• Two and three: three contains a two but is not just two, it is two plus one. His mother objecting to “man is an animal”; he: not just an animal, an animal with reason—“that’s better.”
• Flag: understood “much better when you do the ninth book of Wisdom,” where you find the first cause is most perfect, universally perfect.

His words #

• essence of the soul: “the nature of the soul, the essence of the soul as he calls it in Latin.”
• before: “always means some kind of order”; as a cause is before an effect, not in time.
• the road of a receiving principle / the natural road: order of generation, from senses into reason [ed.: via principii susceptivi, order of generation].
• deficient partaking: sense relative to understanding.
• equivocal by reason: many meanings, not by chance, with an order among them.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics]: “the fifth book of Wisdom,” “the ninth book of Wisdom.”
• foresight: his English for prudentia, from providentia; “prudence has lost its full meaning.”
• caution: an integral part of foresight.
• natural result: how a power flows from the essence, not through a “changing” or “transmutation of the soul.”
• susceptible / receptive: the soul as matter-like cause of the powers.
• middle: one accident as the means by which substance receives another.
• perfect and imperfect: the kind of opposition among the powers.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 77, a. 7 (q. number inferred): body and replies to objections 1–3, translated aloud.

Mentioned

• Summa Theologiae, a. 6 of the same question (powers flow from the essence).
• Aristotle, Categories (quantity before quality; order of categories).
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing [Physics] I (“infinite” as equivocal); IV (eight senses of “in”), with Thomas’s commentary ordering them.
• Aristotle, Wisdom [Metaphysics] V (ordering of senses), IX (imperfect from perfect; first cause universally perfect).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, beginning (two senses of “end”).
• Plato, Apology (Socrates to those who condemned him).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, integral parts of prudentia (providentia, caution).
• Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity; Marx’s doctoral thesis preface.
• Locke, Essay on Human Understanding, book III.
• Machiavelli, History of Florence.

His questions #

• In what sense is one power of the soul before another, since not in time? In the way a cause is before an effect—two ways, as the soul is cause both as end/mover and as receiver.
• What is the “natural road” from sense to reason? Animal (generic, with senses) is generated before man; the senses dispose for reason, which is nevertheless the end.
• Is seeing, hearing, tasting “knowing”? Yes, in some sense—an imperfect knowing compared with the mind’s.
• What is the mistake in “man’s mind is infinite; the infinite is God”? Equivocation: potential infinity (always able to learn more) vs. universal perfection.
• (Student) Can philosophy show the arguments for invading Iraq flawed? Not directly: that belongs to foresight, about the singular here and now; philosophy is about the universal.
• (Student) Does philosophy then have a hard part and a soft part? No—philosophy is about the universal; foresight is not philosophy.
• Does a power flow from the soul by changing the soul? No, as a natural result, simultaneously—like being half of four from being two.
• (Student) Is shape quantity? No, it presupposes quantity; an angel without a body has no shape.
• How can powers divided by opposites originate one from another? Their opposition is of perfect and imperfect, like two and three, and the imperfect proceeds from the perfect.