ST I q.79 a.9: Higher and Lower Reason in Augustine, and Names Equivocal by Reason (Wisdom and Science)

Orientation #

He opens saying “next time we’ll do nine and ten” and then, after the prayer, “we’re going to do nine and ten today”; the class in fact gets only through the reply to the second objection of article 9. He refers back twice to “last time”: the translation of scientia/episteme as “reasoned out understanding”, and the two ways a name becomes “equivocal by reason” with the man/animal example. Verified source: Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 9 (matched 17 min; the surrounding half hour probably the same article).

The class, in order #

1. Objection 1: the image of the Trinity is in a “part” of reason (“the word part has what Many meanings”) #

Point: Augustine’s word “part” does not force two powers.

• Objection as read: Augustine, De Trinitate XII, puts the image of the Trinity in the higher part of reason, not the lower; the parts of the soul are its powers; so higher and lower reason are two powers.
• His anticipation of the reply: “part” is a very universal word. Aristotle does use “part” for the powers of the soul (a part of the soul’s power is its ability to do this, another its ability to do that), but one can speak of parts within one power, “not quantitative parts, but in terms of the acts and the objects.”

2. Objection 2: nothing arises from itself (“lower reason arises from higher reason”) #

Point: direction of one by another does not require two powers.

• Objection: lower reason arises from higher reason and is ruled and directed by it; nothing arises from itself; so higher reason is another power.
• His note: even within the same power there are different habits or virtues, one of which directs or commands another; and in discursive reasoning one is directed by the premises to the conclusion, within one power.

3. Objection 3: Aristotle’s scientific and opining parts (“the contingent and the necessary are other genera”) #

Point: Aristotle’s two “parts” in Nicomachean Ethics VI seem to be Augustine’s two reasons, and Aristotle seems to call them different powers.

• Objection: the scientific part is that by which the soul knows necessary things; it is “another beginning and another part” from the part that has opinions and knows contingent things. Proof: things other in genus are ordered to another part of the soul; contingent and necessary are other genera, as corruptible and incorruptible.
• Definitions worked out with the class: contingent = able to be and not be (the professor lecturing is able to be standing or sitting; your sitting is contingent); necessary = not able not to be (two is necessarily half of four; if he is lecturing he is necessarily talking, a necessary connection); impossible = not able to be. “There are many senses of necessary,” but this is the sense contrasted with contingent.
• The necessary seems to be the eternal (always so), the contingent the temporal (sometimes is, sometimes is not); so the scientific part = higher reason, which Augustine says “aims at” contemplating the eternal and consulting it for direction about temporal things; the opining part = lower reason, which aims at disposing temporal things.
• His flag: to judge the comparison one has to understand both Augustine and Aristotle, “what does Aristotle mean when he talks about these things there.”

4. Objection 4: Damascene on opinion, mind, and understanding (“the mind is called from what? … measuring”) #

Point: Damascene’s sequence seems to separate the opining part from the mind.

• As read: from imagination comes opinion; the mind judges the opinion true or false (“mind” named from measuring, which he finds interesting); when things have been judged and determined truly, it is called intellectus, understanding. So the opining part (lower reason) is other than the mind (superior reason).
• His caution: “sometimes they’re naming power, sometimes act”; Thomas will interpret Damascene “in a certain way” (the reply was not reached).

5. Sed contra and the example of the eyes (“is it two different eyes that I have”) #

• Augustine himself, De Trinitate XII: higher and lower reason are distinguished only by what they do (their offices); therefore not two powers.
• Example: he uses his eyes to drive up here, and also just to look at a painting, a sunset, a rainbow, “not to do something at all.” Same eyes for the plebeian office and the elevated one.

6. Body of the article: one power, two ways of knowing (“one of them is the what middle”) #

Point: higher and lower reason, as Augustine takes them, “in no way” can be two powers.

• Augustine’s higher reason: applies itself to eternal things (a) conspiciendis, looking at them in themselves, to contemplate them because they are wonderful, as in heaven we will contemplate the beauty of God (Augustine, Confessions, “too late have I come to know thee, thou ancient beauty”; Plato, Symposium, God as the beautiful itself, something you want to see just to look upon); (b) consulendis (whence “consul”), drawing from them rules for what should be done. Lower reason: applies itself to temporal things, here and now.
• Argument:
  1. Temporal and eternal things are related to our knowledge so that one is the middle (medium, middle term) for knowing the other.
  2. By the way of invention or discovery, we come from temporal things to eternal ones. Text: Romans 1:20, “a very famous text,” used a lot in Vatican I, since Paul is saying natural reason can reach some knowledge of God; the invisible things of God are seen through things made, the temporal things. Illustration: the first argument for God’s existence begins from motion, which is tied up with time (natural philosophy takes up motion and time, motion takes time), and reasons to something eternal, the unmoved mover.
  3. By the way of judgment, from eternal things now known we judge and dispose temporal things.
  4. What is known one through the other seems to belong to the same power, as premises and conclusion do.
  5. The middle and what is reached through it can belong to diverse habits: first indemonstrable principles to the habit of understanding (“natural understanding”), conclusions to the habit of science (“reasoned out understanding”, his rendering of scientia/episteme, which goes back to what is naturally understood); from the principles of geometry one can even conclude in another science, perspective.
  6. But the same power of reason has the middle and the last: an act of reason is a certain motion from one thing to another, and it is the same mobile that passes through the middle to arrive at the end. Conclusion: one and the same power is higher and lower reason, distinguished by offices (acts) and by diverse habits perfecting those acts: wisdom, of eternal and divine things, to the higher; science, of temporal things, to the lower.

7. Digression: sapientia and scientia, and names “equivocal by reason” (“Is Aristotle contradicting himself”) #

Point: the same name can be affirmed and denied without contradiction when it is kept by one of two things while the other gets a new name.

• The puzzle: Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics VI distinguishes episteme from sophia (he once says “sixth book of Physics”, corrected in effect by his later “sixth book, Nicomachean Ethics”), yet in the book on wisdom, the Metaphysics, calls sophia an episteme; Latin does the same with scientia and sapientia; English with knowledge and wisdom. He would prefer one word covering both. This is “a very common way of naming” that people don’t realize.
• First way (the new thing has an excellence): episteme = knowing why, the causes; sophia is knowledge of the very first cause, of God, so it gets a new name and the other knowledge of causes keeps the common one. So sophia both is and is not an episteme.
  • “Animal”: man is an animal (living body with sensation, like the cat), yet “you’re an animal” from your girlfriend is an insult; his mother disliked him calling man an animal, taking animal as the brute. Man’s excellence (reason, will, immortal soul) makes man not an animal in the narrowed sense.
  • “Thing”: “treat somebody like a person, not like a thing”; yet a person is a thing, “not nothing,” a very special kind of thing.
• Second way (student’s question: is cat/kitten the same as this?): only one of the two has fully what the common word means; the immature one gets the new name. Cat is the adult; kitten the undeveloped cat.
  • Philosophical case: intellectus divided into understanding (the power) and reason. Man has the ability to understand only weakly, “intellectus obumbratus” (Isaac; he flags the Latin), the overshadowed understanding; Shakespeare defines reason as ability for “large discourse, looking before and after,” and looking means trying to see; Augustine: more things in scripture he does not understand than he does. It takes time and discourse, so our defective ability gets the new name reason, whereas the angel understands everything right away, without study or reasoning.
  • Asked for a shorthand: “I don’t know if they have a name”; in one case reason is divided against understanding, in the other not. Most people stress equivocals with greater difference of meaning, “but these are still common enough.”
  • Habit/disposition in the Categories: sometimes habit is a disposition, sometimes divided against it; habit is a firm disposition not easily lost (virtue is a habit), disposition then a weak one, like “mood”: a joke changes it, the “attitude readjustment” of happy hour, a child’s moods through the day. Habit adds firmness, so this is the first kind.
  • Nomen/verbum, onoma/rhema in the Peri Hermeneias: sometimes rhema divided against onoma, sometimes verbum called a nomen. Which kind? Common meaning of nomen: a vocal sound signifying by human agreement, no part signifying by itself; the verb signifies with time, the noun without. So “noun = person, place or thing, verb = action” is a mistake: “action” is a noun, timeless, while “acts”, “acted”, “will act” signify present, past, future. The verb adds something, the noun gets the new name (first kind). English can say name, noun, verb, but tends to use “name” for noun.
  • Man/woman: “you know what St. Thomas says,” but they argue it the other way, maybe woman has something special; his own guess: woman goes back to the idea of a hood, the veil, a veiled human being (he used to joke “woe to man”). Either way “man” is equivocal: in one sense a woman is a man, in another not. His classroom trap: “Is man the only animal with reason?” Yes. “Are you a man or a woman?” So she cannot reason; “show me that you can reason.” The word shifted sense.
  • Application (he says “sophia is kept for a knowledge of the lower things, and wisdom is a new name” [ed.: evidently scientia/knowledge is kept for the lower]): Aristotle contradicts himself no more than that woman does.
  • Plant nursery: one does not call a tree a plant; “plant” is kept for smaller things, maybe not even a bush; the tree gets its own name.
• Aside: he chopped down a tree the other day; the neighbour asked whether he knew it would fall that way (it leaned that way, other trees would have stopped it, and he cut more on that side).

8. Student question: are sapientia and scientia habits? (“what habit does is not to give you the raw ability”) #

• Yes, a kind of habit, a virtue (habit divides into virtue and vice); wisdom is a disposition of reason, reason is habituated.
• What a habit of reason does: not the raw ability to think, but to think orderly and easily: with the habit of geometry he can go to the board and demonstrate the early theorems without difficulty. Moral parallel: the just man finds it easy to give you what is yours, no struggle to return your money. Aristotle, after the virtues, distinguishes continence and incontinence, where there is a struggle between passions and reason, sometimes one winning, sometimes the other; that man lacks the virtue yet; the temperate man has no struggle about eating, drinking, pursuing the woman, “he just doesn’t think about doing those sort of things.”
• Sapientia and scientia are used in more than one sense, but always with that opposition: wisdom of the higher things, science of the lower. Even the gifts of the Holy Spirit called knowledge and wisdom keep it (wisdom there attached to charity); he declines to discuss the gifts now. At the beginning of the prima pars Thomas distinguishes the wisdom that is theology from wisdom as a gift. Philosophers originally used “wisdom” for the most divine part of philosophy.

9. Replies to objections 1 and 2 (“the higher is going to give principles to the lowers”) #

• Ad 1: according to whatever reason there is for making a partition, one can speak of a part; divided by diverse offices (acts), higher and lower reason are called parts, not because they are diverse powers.
• Ad 2: lower reason is said to be deduced from and regulated by higher reason insofar as the principles lower reason uses are deduced from and directed by the principles of higher reason. Same thing in the natural order: arithmetic gives principles to music, geometry to perspective and astronomy, even to medicine: a round wound heals less quickly than a blade wound, because the two lines of a blade cut meet at a common angle and the parts can close up, while the round hole cannot (the class ends here; replies 3 and 4 and article 10 not reached).

His words #

• “abilities”: his rendering of the powers of the soul [ed.: potencies].
• contingent: able to be and not be; necessary: not able not to be; impossible: not able to be.
• “aims at”, “applies itself to”, “pays attention”: his renderings of Augustine’s intendit for higher and lower reason.
• conspiciendis / consulendis: looking at eternal things in themselves vs. taking rules of action from them.
• way of invention (discovery) vs. way of judgment: temporal to eternal, eternal to temporal.
• “natural understanding”: the habit of first indemonstrable principles [ed.: intellectus principiorum].
• “reasoned out understanding”: his translation of scientia / episteme.
• “offices”: the acts by which Augustine distinguishes the two reasons.
• “equivocal by reason”: a name kept by one of two things while the other gets a new name; two ways: the new thing has an excellence, or lacks the full meaning [ed.: analogical naming; he says the ways have no standard name].
• intellectus obumbratus: the overshadowed understanding (attributed to Isaac).
• nomen / verbum, onoma / rhema: name vs. verb, verb signifying with time.
• habit: a firm disposition, not easily lost; disposition: a weak one, “mood”.
• sapientia vs. scientia, wisdom vs. knowledge: always the higher against the lower.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 9: objections 1–4, sed contra, body, replies 1–2.
• Romans 1:20 (as quoted in the article). Mentioned
• Augustine, De Trinitate XII (higher and lower reason; image of the Trinity).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI (scientific and opining parts; episteme and sophia; continence/incontinence placed after the virtues).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics, “the book on wisdom” (sophia an episteme) (inferred locus).
• John Damascene (imagination, opinion, mind, intellectus).
• Augustine, Confessions, opening (“too late have I come to know thee”).
• Plato, Symposium (the beautiful itself).
• Aristotle, Categories (habit and disposition).
• Aristotle, Peri Hermeneias (onoma and rhema).
• Isaac (intellectus obumbratus); Shakespeare (reason as “large discourse, looking before and after”); Vatican I (use of Romans 1:20); Summa I, opening (theology as wisdom vs. gift of wisdom).

His questions #

• The parts of the soul are its what? / Powers, or abilities.
• The contingent is defined as what? / Able to be and not be; the necessary, not able not to be.
• Is it two different eyes I have, one for driving and one for looking at the sunset? / No, one power, different uses.
• What is the middle for knowing the other? / Temporal things for finding the eternal (invention), eternal things for judging the temporal (judgment).
• Is Aristotle contradicting himself when he distinguishes sophia from episteme and then calls sophia an episteme? / No: the name is equivocal by reason, kept by one and the other gets a new name.
• Is a person a thing? / Yes, in some sense; a person is not nothing, but a very special thing.
• Is the word “action” a noun or a verb? / A noun, since it signifies without time.
• Which kind is nomen/verbum? / The first kind: the verb adds signifying with time.
• Which kind is man/woman? / Left open (“you know what St. Thomas says”; his own guess, veiled human being, would make it the first kind).
• Are sapientia and scientia habits? / Yes, habits, indeed virtues, that make thinking orderly and easy.