Beauty, the Higher Pleasures, and Aquinas's Replies on the Common Sensibles, Touch and Taste

Orientation #

He is continuing the body of a. 3 (“that corresponds to what Thomas is saying here”) and reads its last sentence before the four replies; he ends by proposing “we’ll see if we can get through the fourth article” after the break. The previous class worked through the objections and body of a. 3 (why five exterior senses), and the next takes up a. 4 on the interior senses.

The class, in order #

1. The beautiful is said only of sight and hearing (“the beautiful is that which pleases when seen”) #

Point: that we call only what is seen or heard “beautiful” is a sign these two senses are more spiritual.

1. “Beautiful” is used of the object of sight, and of music (Mozart, the baroque); of food we say “tastes good” or “smells good”, not “beautiful”.
2. The beautiful is for its own sake; smell and taste address bodily need (eating).
3. So sight and hearing have a “more spiritual”, less material object.

• Confirmation from animals: the cat sleeps through the Mozart symphony but comes running when he cooks or unwraps sandwich meat (Tabitha). Animals use the senses only for the practical.
• Temperance (moderation) in ethics concerns touch and taste, especially touch: the glutton who wished he had the neck of a giraffe so the food would go all the way down — an exaggeration showing how “gross” such a person is.
• The pleasures of touch, taste and (partly) smell we share with animals, though in a more refined way (haute cuisine); yet cats know sirloin from canned food, and his cat spattered the wall over leftover cream. Smell for animals is tied to food.

2. Oesterle: fine arts too high for beasts, too low for angels (“too high for the animals and too low for the angels”) #

Point: John Oesterle’s article “Toward an Evaluation of Music” (The Thomist, years ago) explains why the fine arts are proportioned to man.

• Angels have no senses; animals have senses but no appreciation of the beautiful as such; so the fine arts belong to man alone.
• The fine arts are a stepping stone to the higher life: he has never known a philosopher who did not appreciate good music or painting, though many appreciate them without wanting philosophy (“too intellectual”).
• The fine arts are “most pleasingly proportioned to man” because they involve reason and senses, and man is soul and body. Table, sleep, sex are bodily pleasures shared with beasts; understanding is shared with angels and God.
• Aside: the same article argues the superiority of 18th-century (baroque, classical) music over the Romantic and later; people name Bach and Mozart as the greatest.

3. Mill’s pig, and the three kinds of pleasure (“There is what? Angelic pleasures, human pleasures, and beastly pleasures”) #

Point: he corrects and goes beyond Mill’s two-level answer with a threefold division.

• Objection to utilitarianism (all good is pleasure): “a philosophy for pigs”. Mill’s reply: “you’re the pig”, since you assume man has no pleasures the beast lacks; those who have tasted both lower and higher pleasures (even Plato and Aristotle say so) rank the higher greater. Mill is in the empiricist tradition, so appeals to experience.
• His own point: man cannot live without some pleasure; if he cannot taste the higher, he goes to excess in the lower, which do not satisfy.
• Beyond Mill: beastly pleasures (shared with beasts, but had by us in a higher way — haute cuisine, wine); angelic pleasures (understanding, had by us in an inferior way); human pleasures (fine arts, fiction), proper to man because they involve soul and body, reason and senses, emotions.
• Consequence: human pleasures last longest. Easier to sit three hours at a Mozart opera than three hours of study (fatigue). Bodily pleasures obey a “law of diminishing returns”: his brother Mark — only the first beer, in fact the first sip, tastes good; Thanksgiving overeating ends in pain. But one can sit for hours in the National Gallery or the Sistine Chapel enjoying paintings, hindered only by the crowd’s talking.
• Aside (student and he): the Pope’s 33-page poem recollecting his election in the Sistine Chapel and the Last Judgment; excerpt in Inside the Vatican; whether a translation will appear.

4. Smell in between; the senses in heaven; beauty and order (“smell is sort of in between”) #

Point: the ranking sight/hearing – smell – taste/touch is what Thomas is saying, and it is confirmed by heaven and by the nature of beauty.

• Smell is between enjoying the beautiful and enjoying food: smelling flowers is not eating them. His daughter, a gardener, at Logee’s in Connecticut: plants smelling of strawberry, lemon, lime, licorice — you sniff, you don’t eat. Yet smell is closely associated with food and drink, so less spiritual than sight and hearing.
• Thomas: sense pleasures not opposed to the state of the blessed will remain in the resurrection — not reproduction, eating, sleeping (touch, taste, smell), but seeing the beautiful saints and world, and laus vocalis, vocal praise of God; he cites Job on the stars of heaven (the angels) singing. Visionaries say the Blessed Virgin is far more beautiful than any painting, yet with a beauty that arouses no lust — “a very spiritual beauty”.
• Concession: seeing may not be as immaterial as they thought, but the same order holds. To raise someone to philosophy or theology, one goes from the pleasures of the table through the fine arts to understanding.
• Student: Teresa of Avila, shown first only the hand of the glorified Christ, put in rapture by it; “you don’t know how beautiful the glorified body is”.
• Student objection: from museum work, the fine arts today seem run by the anti-Christian and “very liberal”, taking us away from the divine. His answer: read Oesterle — Romantic music rejected the subordination of emotion to reason, whereas reason introduces what is most essential to beauty: order and symmetry and moderation, “the main forms of the beautiful”. Shakespeare: “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? thou art more lovely and more temperate” — temperance comes from reason moderating.

5. Last sentence of the body (“touch and taste, we said, are most material”) #

Point: the other three senses work through a separate medium, touch and taste through a conjoined one.

• Touch is embedded in the skin, which is its medium; sight, hearing, smell go through air (or water), so that no natural transmutation reaches the organ, as it does in taste and touch. He notes the body postpones the distinction of touch and taste to the third and fourth replies.

6. Reply to obj. 1: only qualities of the third species act on sense (“not all accidents have a power of changing something”) #

Point: sensing knows accidents, but only those with power to alter, i.e. qualities of the third species.

• My being just or unjust, or my ability to walk, does not act on your senses (unless I kick you); shape without colour does not act on you.
• Text: as in Physics VII, sense is altered by the same things by which inanimate bodies are altered — so sense qualities are tied to motion and change.
• Sign: pure mathematics abstracts quantity and figure from sensible matter, and there is no motion or change there. A lead sphere on his head would weigh like Atlas’s burden; a geometrical sphere affects nothing. Walking through a misty sphere (Disneyland) cools you; a geometrical sphere gives neither wet nor dry. A geometrical sphere has no colour, sound, smell, heaviness or lightness.
• Hence those who study nature mathematically (modern scientists and philosophers; among the Greeks, Democritus, on the fragments we have) tend to think there are no sense qualities in the world.
• Student: does every such quality act on one of the five senses? Yes: if it is a quality of the third kind, it acts on one — colour on the eye, sound on the ear.

7. Reply to obj. 2: the common sensibles are in between (“the common sensibles do not move the senses primo per se”) #

Point: magnitude, figure, number, motion and rest are a middle between the proper sensibles (sense qualities, private to one sense) and the sensibilia per accidens.

• Text read: proper sensibles change sense first and through themselves, being altering qualities. Common sensibles reduce to quantity: magnitude and number are species of quantity; figure is a quality about quantity, its definition lying in the limitation of magnitude (figure: what is contained by a limit or limits); motion and rest are sensed as the subject stands in one or many ways to magnitude (growth, local distance) or to sensible quality (alteration), so to sense motion and rest is to sense the one and the many — the resting thing stays one and the same, the moving is “like a number”, multiplied. Quantity is the proximate subject of the altering quality, as surface is the subject over which colour is spread; so common sensibles move sense not primo per se (note the word primo) but by reason of the quality, yet not per accidens, because they diversify the change: a large and a small surface move sense differently, whiteness itself being called large or small by its subject.
• Examples: a big white house or wall blinds you in summer, a small one would not; painting his father’s woodshed white one summer, needing water every half hour, blinded by the large surface. Shakespeare: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs.”
• Student: is beauty a sensible per accidens? No — the beautiful is what pleases when seen or heard; the eye and ear themselves are pleased (“a sight for sore eyes”).
• Sensible per accidens proper: sugar or salt relative to white — the eye is affected not by sugar as such but by white; the tongue not by sugar but by sweet. Hence deception: salt in the sugar bowl goes into the coffee; a same-coloured liquid in the same bottle. Imitation flavours (the 49-flavour jelly beans: buttered popcorn, caramel corn, coffee, licorice; his son Marcus thinks a popcorn jelly bean improper) show that only the flavour, not the substance, acts on taste.
• Two senses of sensible per accidens: (a) strict — perceived by no sense at all, known by another power (the mind); (b) what is known by one sense is per accidens to another — sweetness is proper to taste but accidental to the eye. Shakespeare: he loves to hear his mistress’s voice though “music hath a far more pleasant sound” — he enjoys not the sound as such but what appeals to another sense. Hearing a friend’s voice: the ear hears the sound, not “being my friend”, yet I rejoice at recognizing him.

8. Reply to obj. 3: touch may be a genus, not a lowest species (“the sense of touch is one in genus”) #

Point: Thomas, following the Philosopher in De Anima II, does not reject the objection; touch may have species below it.

• Text: touch is one in genus, divided into many species, hence of diverse contraries (one for hot/cold, one for wet/dry, etc.), not separated by organ but spread through the whole body, so their distinction is not apparent as with the other senses; taste, perceptive of sweet and bitter, follows touch in the tongue only and so is easily distinguished.
• Aside on the contrary of sweet: a student reading Plato once asked whether sweet has two contraries (sour, bitter); really sweet and bitter are furthest apart — sour is less opposed (sweet and sour pork).
• General point: in one division, one member can be a lowest species and another a genus. Triangles: all equilaterals have the same shape (lowest species), isosceles do not. Euclid’s quadrilaterals: all squares alike, oblongs not. Ethics: courage one virtue, but temperance about food, drink and sex are perhaps three particular virtues, with distinct corresponding vices and distinct temptations (student: gluttony, etc.). Aristotle’s five virtues of reason (art, foresight, wisdom, natural understanding, episteme): wisdom and natural understanding are lowest species; episteme divides into geometry, arithmetic, natural philosophy, ethics, logic; foresight (Thomas) into that of the individual, father, general, king; art into carpentry, metalwork, tailoring, cooking. So we should not assume division always ends in lowest species, though we think so “abstractly”.
• Text continued: Thomas is “a little bit not careful” — one can always say all these contrarieties come together in one proximate genus and one common unnamed genus, the object of touch, as the proximate genus of hot and cold is unnamed. He does not close the door either way.

9. Reply to obj. 4: taste distinguished from touch by its way of being changed (“taste is a little more spiritual than touch”) #

Point: taste is a species of touch, in the tongue only, distinguished not from touch in general but from the species diffused through the body.

• Text: even if touch is one sense by one common definition of its object, taste differs by a different way of being changed: touch is changed by a natural mutation of its organ (not only spiritual) according to its proper quality; the organ of taste need not become sweet or bitter, but is naturally changed only according to the underlying quality, moisture, which is touch’s object. So taste is a little more spiritual than touch.
• Sign: we carry “taste” to higher things — good taste in music, literature, architecture. (Student: but we also say a violinist has a nice “touch”.)

10. Closing asides on sight, touch, and smell (“the touchstone of certitude”) #

• Greek fragments single out senses: Heraclitus prizes “the things that can be seen and heard and learned” — eye and ear are the senses of learning from another; Empedocles pairs sight and hearing in one fragment, sight and touch in another.
• Sight and touch alone know shape, and shape (“form”) is basic to our thinking: species as a form in logic, democracy a form of government, tragedy and comedy forms of fiction.
• Touch excels in certitude: the apostle Thomas wanting his finger in the nail holes and the side; “touchstone of certitude”; touch the most basic sense; Aristotle and Thomas: a man with good touch has a good mind (prev. class, “we saw that”).
• Student: touch and sight help experience beauty? No — we never say something “feels beautiful”; it feels, smells, tastes good. Only of what is seen or heard, even in common speech. A rose “smells beautiful” only by association with the rose’s beauty (like the mistress’s voice); the smell per se is “good”, not beautiful.
• Student: holding one’s nose, one tastes little; taste is mostly smell. He: exorcisms leave a bad smell; exhumed saints smell of roses, where a corpse should revolt — a sign from God. We and the animals recognize corruption in food by smell, appropriately, before tasting.

His words #

• beautiful: “that which pleases when seen” (or heard); said only of sight and hearing.
• moderation / temperance: the virtue concerned especially with touch and taste.
• beastly, human, angelic pleasures: shared with beasts; proper to man (fine arts, fiction); shared with angels (understanding).
• law of diminishing returns: bodily pleasures fade and turn to pain as need is satisfied.
• laus vocalis: vocal praise of God in the resurrection.
• qualities of the third species: those with power to alter; the only sense objects [ed.: passibiles qualitates].
• sensibilia propria / private sensibles: sense qualities proper to one sense.
• common sensibles: magnitude, figure, number, motion, rest; a middle between proper and accidental sensibles.
• primo per se: how proper sensibles move sense; common sensibles do not, but by reason of the quality.
• sensible per accidens: (a) known by no sense, but by mind; (b) known by one sense, accidental to another.
• lowest species vs genus: a member of a division below which are only individuals vs one with species below it.
• episteme: one of the five virtues of reason; “knowledge”, divided into the sciences.
• foresight [ed.: prudence], natural understanding [ed.: nous/intellectus], wisdom, art: the other virtues of reason.
• natural vs spiritual mutation: how touch (natural) and taste (only underlying moisture) are changed.
• touchstone of certitude: touch as most certain sense.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 78, a. 3: last sentence of the body; replies to objections 1–4 (read and translated). Mentioned
• Aristotle, Physics VII (cited in reply 1).
• Aristotle, On the Soul II (cited in reply 3).
• John Oesterle, “Toward an Evaluation of Music”, The Thomist (inferred spelling).
• John Stuart Mill, on utilitarianism (the “philosophy for pigs” objection).
• Shakespeare: “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” (Sonnet 18, inferred); “things in motion sooner catch the eye”; “music hath a far more pleasant sound” (Sonnet 130, inferred).
• Job, on the stars of heaven singing.
• Teresa of Avila, autobiography (student).
• Plato, a dialogue on each thing having one contrary (unspecified).
• Euclid, division of quadrilaterals.
• Fragments of Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus.
• The Pope’s poem on his election (aside).

His questions #

• Why do we say food tastes good but not that it is beautiful? Because the beautiful is for its own sake and belongs to the more spiritual senses, sight and hearing.
• If a person doesn’t enjoy the beautiful in painting and music, how is he going to rise to the philosophical life? He isn’t; the fine arts are a stepping stone from bodily pleasures to understanding.
• Are there only human and beastly pleasures, as Mill says? No: beastly, human (fine arts, fiction), and angelic (understanding).
• Does my being just, or able to walk, or a shape without colour, act on your senses? No; only qualities of the third species do.
• Would a geometrical sphere affect me as a lead or misty one does? No; pure mathematics has no motion, so no sense qualities.
• Is beauty a sensible per accidens? No; it pleases the eye and ear themselves; sugar relative to white is the example.
• Do all isosceles triangles, or all oblongs, have the same shape? No; so one division can contain both a lowest species and a genus.
• Is touch a lowest species? Possibly not; Thomas leaves the door open (one unnamed common genus or several species).
• Do we ever say something “feels beautiful”? No; “feels good”; beautiful is reserved for the two highest senses.