Summa I, Q.79, Art.11: Are Speculative and Practical Intellect Different Powers? (Seeing vs. Doing; Knowing vs. Loving)

Orientation #

He opens on Article 11 and says that after the article, “in the first part of today”, he may talk about how Thomas uses this distinction for the five virtues of reason; the recording ends at the break with “then we’ll talk about the virtues of”. He recalls earlier articles: the five genera of powers from De Anima II, the article on the inward senses (estimative vs. imaginative), and memory in reason vs. sense (prev. lectures, from his own back-references). The previous class closed article 79’s treatment of intelligentia and previewed this article and the division of intellectual virtues; the next class treats virtue in general and the speculative/practical division as ground of the intellectual virtues.

The class, in order #

1. Why this distinction, and what the words mean (“the looking intellect, right? And the practical”) #

Point: the speculative/practical distinction is Aristotle’s (third book about the soul) and is the one appropriate to philosophy; Augustine’s higher/lower reason (prev. article) belongs more to theology. Thomas uses this one to divide the five virtues of reason.

• Etymology: speculative from the Latin for looking; Greek theoretical, same root as theorem (“something to look at”). In English both words have drifted: speculative thinking now means guessing, speculation means playing the stock market. So he translates: looking understanding vs. doing understanding.

2. The three objections (“grasping and the mover are diverse genera”) #

Point: he reads and explains each objection for diversity of powers.

1. Obj. 1: grasping and moving are diverse genera of powers (De Anima II’s five genera: nutritive, two grasping groups—sense and understanding—desiring, mover). Looking understanding only knows; practical understanding moves and changes the world. Aside: Karl Marx—philosophers have talked about the world, the point is to change it; the practical mind did the work in this chapel, moving things around.
2. Obj. 2: powers are diversified by acts, acts by objects; a diverse definition of object diversifies powers. The object of the looking understanding is the true, of the practical the good; these differ in definition.
3. Obj. 3: Aristotle’s comparison in De Anima: practical is to speculative as the estimative power is to the imaginative. Imagination pictures but does not say “go for it” or “avoid it”; the estimative recognises what to pursue or flee, like practical understanding. Estimative and imaginative differ as power from power (article on inward senses), so practical and speculative would too.

3. Digression on likeness (“Likeness is a slippery thing”) #

Point: the third objection may extend a likeness beyond what it consists in.

• Math example: 4:6 as 2:3; someone infers “2 and 3 are primes, so 4 and 6 are primes”, or “even to odd, so 4 to 6 is even to odd”—not what the likeness consists in.
• Aristotle’s fourth tool of dialectic is the tool of likeness; the Greek skepsis, a consideration where you stop and savour exactly in what way two things are alike.
• Our Lord: “that they may be one as the Father and I are one”—but we are not one in one individual nature, so the likeness does not go all the way.
• Plato in the Sophist: likeness is a slippery thing (he hesitates on the source, settles on the Sophist, calls it common sense); Aristotle in Sophistical Refutations attributes deception to likeness.
• Ink-bottle desks and the fake pool-of-ink trick on mother’s white linen; salt in the sugar bowl: deception by likeness. In general the bad resembles the good and the false the true; “the most dangerous mistakes are the ones which have a real likeness to the true.”
• Student: isn’t the imaginative power here more like memory? He: yes, it functions more like memory, but the point is it does not say pursue or avoid.
• Watching a murder in a Shakespeare play, or a battle painting (Wolfe dying): you don’t jump up to stop it or run to give the last sacraments—the looking reason is like that. Still, the likeness may not reach as far as a difference of powers.

4. Sed contra and the eye and ear images (“by extension it becomes what practical”) #

Point: Aristotle (De Anima III): the speculative understanding by extension becomes practical; but one power is not changed into another; therefore not diverse powers.

• Eye: I look at a painting, sunset, fall foliage, rainbow—looking just for seeing; I look at stop signs, police, other cars—looking for the sake of driving here without an accident. Not two eyes, one for paintings and one for driving.
• Aristotle’s proem to the Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics I] (read earlier): “All men by nature desire to understand”; men use their eyes not only to do or make but sometimes just to see; something is missing in a life that uses eyes only to make or do. He calls this a more exact likeness than the estimative one: the same power used just to know, then used to help make or do.
• Ear: “Park your car further, you’ll get dirty” or “Watch out!"—heard to avoid an accident; asking directions at the filling station; asking your phone number so I can call you—vs. listening to Mozart, where hearing itself is the end.
• Conclusion of the images: not two powers, but one power used for one end (simply to know) and for another (making or doing).

5. The body of the article (“what is accidental to the definition of the object”) #

Point: practical and speculative understanding are not diverse powers.

1. What is accidental to the definition of the object of a power does not diversify the power (as said above). Example: it happens to the coloured, the object of the eye, to be a man, or large or small; all are grasped by the same sight.
2. It happens to what the understanding grasps that it is ordered to doing, or not. (Aside: sometimes we are curious how something is made without intending to make it.)
3. So they differ in this: the looking understanding does not order what it grasps to doing but only to the consideration of truth; the practical orders what it grasps to doing.

• Hence the consideration of truth belongs more to the looking reason; in the sixth book of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics VI] Aristotle says the speculative has truth as its very end, while the practical, if it considers truth, orders it to doing.
• The practical mind’s truths are often very contingent: who is our friend or enemy (the British statesman: no permanent friends, permanent interests; France useful for independence from England, harmful over the Iraq war resolutions in the UN); I am sick today and need this medicine, next week not; headache/no headache, aspirin one day not the next. What you do is individual and singular.
• Thus (De Anima III) speculative and practical differ by their end, and both are named from their end. Looking is for the sake of seeing, hence of understanding truth. Practical from Greek praxis/praktikē, Latin operativus, doing. Same eye, different ends in mind.

6. Reply to the first: mover as directing (“not in the sense of carrying out the motion”) #

Point: the objection misunderstands “moving power”, which means the bodily parts that carry out desire and knowledge.

• The practical understanding is a mover not as carrying out motion but as directing to motion, according to its way of grasping and ordering things: one man gives commands, others do the work; reason directs us in the use of the body.
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason put looking in it, “looking before and after”—and that already involves order, which applies both to seeing order (speculative) and ordering what you know to doing (practical).
• Paralysis would be a defect of the motive power while reason stayed active; the crippled (French, 19th-century, he thinks) scientist whose faithful servant carried out his experiments as he told him what to do; the grand chef ordering the potatoes peeled.

7. Reply to the second: true and good include each other (“the good and bad are in things”) #

Point: true and good do distinguish powers—but intellect from will, not speculative from practical.

• Before reading the reply, his long gloss on why there are two: Aristotle in Metaphysics VI—good and bad are in things, truth and falsity primarily in the mind, especially in the second act, the statement that affirms or denies (spoken or written statement being a sign of the inner one).
• Hence a contrariety of knowing and loving: knowing takes the thing into the mind; loving goes out to the thing (“I left my heart in San Francisco”, “my heart’s not in it”).
• The Latin word here is apprehensiva, grasping; “grasp” is near a synonym for understand, and what my hand grasps is contained in it; for love we say give (“I give my heart to you”). In defining you take the genus and the differences; the mind’s defect is a mis-take. “It’s always bad to lose your mind; it’s not always bad to lose your heart—depends to whom.” Our Lord: where your treasure is, there your heart will be—the heart is in the thing loved.
• Student: isn’t the bad just the absence of the good? He: yes, a lack in the thing out there. This yields a very important difference: there is the same knowledge of opposites (knowing temperance helps me know intemperance; knowing normal blood pressure, high blood pressure; health and sickness; my knowledge lets me know my students’ ignorance) but not the same love of opposites: loving virtue impedes loving vice, wanting normal blood pressure excludes wanting high, because in things one opposite excludes the other and love goes to the thing.
• Boswell’s Johnson: to the man who persisted about a very talented dog (“one does not know what to think”), Johnson: when one sees a very foolish fellow, one does not know what to think of him either.
• Student (Father Brown): so to know virtue you must know vice? He: since vice is a lack of something you can and should have, knowing virtue lets you know vice better than the reverse, as knowledge knows ignorance better than ignorance knows knowledge. Another student is confused; he adds an accidental way: seeing a drunkard or a stingy or extravagant man criticised, one sees that moderation is good—“nothing too much” at Delphi. Student: Thomas says we become slaves to vices. He: yes.
• Applied to God: in this life we can love God more than we know Him, because knowing tries to put God into the mind. Augustine and the boy putting the ocean in a hole: you cannot fit the Trinity in your mind—but you can jump into the ocean; the will is more proportionate to loving Him than reason to understanding Him. Student: “I never caught that before.”
• Holy Spirit as Donum Dei (qq. 36–38, he thinks 38): every gift is given from love, so the first gift is love, and the Spirit proceeds by way of love—giving belongs to loving.
• Metaphor of hot and cold: will is hot, expands and overflows; reason cold, concentrates. Shakespeare: lovers and madmen have seething brains that “apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends”; “keep your cool” means use your mind. “That’s very important to see”: love goes out to the thing itself.
• Now the text: true and good include each other. The true is a certain good (else not desirable), the good is something true (else not understandable). So the object of appetite can be something true under the definition of good (desiring to know the truth), and the object of the practical intellect can be something good, ordered to doing, but under the definition of the true; the practical understanding knows truth as the speculative does, but orders it to work.
• So: the object of will is the good, of reason the true; looking reason wants truth for its own sake, practical reason either isn’t interested in truth or wants truth that can be ordered to doing or making. What confuses is that the good comes under the true: Socrates and the slave boy—what all want; then “is it good because we want it, or do we want it because it’s good?"—seeking the truth about the good as about the triangle.

8. Reply to the third and the break (“do not diversify the intellectual powers”) #

Point: many differences diversify sense powers but not intellectual powers. Same pattern coming with the desiring powers (two tied to sense, one to reason), and seen before with memory (diverse in sense, one power in reason). Break; virtues of reason to follow.

His words #

• looking understanding/reason: speculative, from Latin “looking at”; Greek theoretical [ed.: speculative intellect]
• doing understanding: practical, Greek praxis/praktikē, Latin operativus [ed.: practical intellect]
• grasping powers: the knowing powers, Latin apprehensiva [ed.: apprehensive powers]
• mover power: the bodily parts that carry out desire and knowledge [ed.: motive/locomotive power]
• the sixth book of Wisdom: [ed.: Metaphysics VI]; the premium of the Wisdom: [ed.: proem, Metaphysics I]
• skepsis: Aristotle’s word for the consideration of likeness, fourth tool of dialectic
• Donum Dei: gift of God, name of the Holy Spirit
• second act of the mind: affirming or denying, where truth and falsity primarily are [ed.: judgment]

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 11 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 4; handout “Note for Sixth Book of Wisdom, Reading 4”, verified source): speculative end is truth; good/bad in things, true/false in mind

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima III (extension of speculative to practical; differ by end) (inferred locus)
• Aristotle, De Anima II (five genera of powers)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I, proem (“all men by nature desire to understand”; eyes)
• Aristotle, Physics I (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 13; handout “Note for Book One, Reading Thirteen”, verified source—no explicit reading of it appears in the transcript)
• Plato, Sophist (likeness slippery); Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (deception by likeness)
• ST I, qq. 36–38, Holy Spirit as Gift
• Boswell, Life of Johnson; Shakespeare (definition of reason; “seething brains”); Plato, Meno (Socrates and the slave boy) (inferred)

His questions #

• Is it two eyes I have, one for seeing paintings and one for driving? No; the same eye, ordered to different ends.
• Where does the practical mind’s truth differ from the speculative’s? It is often contingent and singular, ordered to doing.
• Is the practical understanding a mover in the sense of the moving power? No; it directs to motion, it does not carry it out.
• Do true and good diversify powers? Yes, but intellect from will, not speculative from practical; true and good include each other.
• Is the same knowledge of opposites also the same love of opposites? No: knowing one opposite helps know the other; loving one excludes loving the other.
• Can we love God more than we know Him in this life? Yes; knowing tries to put God into the mind, love goes out to Him (jump into the ocean).
• Is it good because we want it, or do we want it because it’s good? Left open here; raised as the Socratic question about the truth of the good.
• Do you buy that then? The class assents.