Summa I, Q.79 a.12: Synderesis as the Natural Habit of Practical First Principles (reason as nature, Heraclitus on listening to reason, habit and power)

Orientation #

At the start he says “we’ll finish the next two articles” of the question and go on to the next one; the understanding of beginnings “is one of the virtues we talked about last week” (prev. lecture). The class ends at a break “before we do our second article”, so only a.12 is treated here (the verified sources list a.13 as also matched; the transcript given stops before it). The previous class treated the five intellectual virtues of Ethics VI; the next treats a.13 on conscience.

The class, in order #

1. The objections and the sed contra (“synderesis is a certain special power distinct”) #

Point: he reads the three objections and the sed contra of a.12, noting the third objection will be solved differently from the first two.

• Obj. 1: things falling under one division are of one genus; Jerome’s gloss on Ezekiel 1:6 divides synderesis against the irascible, the concupiscible and the rational, which are powers; so synderesis is a power.
• Obj. 2: opposites are of one genus; synderesis always inclines to good, sensuality (signified by the serpent, Augustine Trinity XII) always to bad; so synderesis is a power like sensuality.
• Obj. 3: Augustine (On Free Judgment — “the Latin has the word judgment there”, though we often translate “free will”): in the natural judging power there are rules and seeds of the virtues, true and unchangeable, called synderesis; unchangeable rules pertain to reason in its superior part; so synderesis is reason, a power.
• Sed contra: rational powers are open to opposites (Aristotle, “the fifth book” [ed.: Metaphysics IX in the body; he says fifth here]). Reason can reason with probability to contradictory conclusions (courtroom: he is / is not guilty); will can choose to do or not do. Synderesis inclines only to good; if it were a power it would have to be rational, since it is not in the brutes.
• Aside: Boswell’s Life of Johnson — do brutes have reason? Johnson: the bird builds its first nest as well as its last; what reason invents is perfected over time (first airplanes, cars, radios were bad). So the bird is not working by reason.

2. Reason as nature vs. reason as reason (“reason itself, not as reason, but as a nature”) #

Point: Thomas’s answer — synderesis is a habit, not a power — and the opinion that it is “reason as nature”, which he calls “not too far off”.

• Aristotle, “ninth book of wisdom”: nature is determined to one of two opposites (fire always heats the paper, water always wets and softens); reason and will are open to opposites (grammar: “I am” / “I is your professor”; medicine can heal or make sick; will can choose or not, good or bad).
• Common misunderstanding: taking the reason/nature distinction like virtue/vice or black/white, entirely different things. It is rather like man vs. animal, or three vs. two: three contains two and is two plus one; man is not other than animal but animal plus something. So reason contains something of nature.
• What reason knows naturally, it cannot think the opposite of: a whole is more than a part; one is not many. What the will wills naturally: to live well, to like pleasure and dislike pain, to love life.
• Reason as nature (determined to one, knows naturally) vs. reason as reason (investigates what it does not know, often reaches opposite conclusions, changes its mind). Parallel: what belongs to man as animal (senses, emotions) vs. what belongs to man as man.
• The footnote reference is Alexander of Hales (earlier scholastic, teacher of Bonaventure, has a Summa); “maybe in him was already that distinction”.

3. Reasoning as motion from a beginning at rest (“since it is a certain motion”) #

Point: the body of the article — reasoning proceeds from things naturally understood as from an immobile beginning, and returns to them to judge.

1. Reasoning is a motion from one thing to another (Boethius’s proportion, “we talked about that before”: reasoning : understanding :: motion : rest).
2. Motion depends on something at rest: you cannot walk on water because it gives way; you walk on the earth because it stays at rest; Aristotle’s mouse on a mound of grain who cannot get off because the grain keeps moving.
3. If you understood nothing before reasoning you would have nothing to reason from. So what you understand before reasoning you understand naturally — a natural result of experience and the agent intellect (“acting upon understanding”): everyone experiences wholes and parts, the agent intellect separates them, so everyone sees at least confusedly that a whole is more than a part. Student: could an animal have those first principles? — No, because it is tied into reason.
4. What we find by reasoning we bring back to those principles to judge it — “kind of a circle”; reasoning terminates in understanding. This is the meaning of Aristotle’s two books on the perfection of reasoning, the Prior and Posterior Analytics; “analytics” names the coming back to principles, resolving to them.

4. The analogy from looking reason to practical reason (“just as looking reason reasons about lookable things”) #

Point: as there are natural principles of speculation, there must be natural principles of action; and as the former belong to a habit, so do the latter.

• Speculative: reason naturally understands that something cannot both be and not be. Practical: it naturally understands to do good and avoid bad.
• The first speculative principles pertain to a special habit, the understanding of beginnings (Ethics VI; Greek nous), not to a special power.
• Aristotle in Ethics VI speaks of nous only in speculative reason, so “some people have rashly concluded” he does not see synderesis; but in On the Soul III, in the context of action, he says nous is always correct — something proportional to speculative nous, naturally known to be done. Latin uses the special word synderesis; he does not know where the word came from (Greek-derived?).
• Conclusion: the beginnings of things doable are naturally in the mind and pertain to a special natural habit, synderesis; it “instigates to the good and complains about the bad” insofar as through first principles we proceed to find what to do and judge what we have found.
• Natural understanding is an opus naturae; reasoned-out understanding (scientia, Greek episteme) an opus rationis — but remember reason includes nature, so the work of nature can still involve agent and possible (“undergoing”) intellect and experience.

5. What a habit adds to a power (“Is habit greater than ability?”) #

Point (answering a student’s question raised at the start of class): a habit is something added to the power, an ordering of understandable forms received.

• Both natural understanding and science result from the undergoing understanding being acted upon by the agent intellect using images as tools to separate out something universal; the result is the understandable form, which remains virtually; the habit is nothing other than an ordering of those forms.
• Power gives the ability; habit enables one to do it actually or well — a facility. The power is reduced to act in acquiring the habit but still in potency to actually thinking.
• Aristotle: sense is an undergoing (colour or sound must act on the eye or ear; the result is the form by which one sees); likewise understanding.
• Student: is habit greater than ability? — it is a perfection of it.
• Habits of will and emotion come from repeated acts, “second nature”: the ability to be angry is by nature; being angry neither too much nor too little is the acquired habit of mildness.
• Student: is that what Aristotle says happiness is? — Happiness is man’s own act according to human virtue throughout life; after books II–VI and VII–IX he asks which virtue is highest: virtues of reason above those of emotion and will (which merely partake of reason); in practical reason foresight above art, political foresight highest; in looking reason wisdom highest; happiness by foresight is more human, by wisdom more divine — the highest happiness.
• He then restates the whole argument: from natural understanding in looking reason (more known) to a like natural habit in practical reason; “it’s clear, therefore, that synderesis is not a power, but a natural habit”.
• Thomas takes up habit in the Prima Secundae, going back to Aristotle’s Categories (habit and disposition vs. inborn power). Student: why two species of quality? — Habit and disposition come first among the species because the starting point is substance, the nature; by habit one is well or badly disposed towards one’s nature.

6. The natural road syllogism (“the first road in our knowledge”) #

Point: nature, as what a thing is, is first in it; hence his basic syllogism (from the handout “Distinction of the Roads in Our Knowledge”).

• Minor: the first road in our knowledge is the natural road in our knowledge (seen at once if you know nature is what is first; a man must be a man before he can be white).
• Major: the natural road is the road from the senses into reason. Reason: man is “an animal that has reason” (Shakespeare); the generic develops before the specific in generation — first cell division and growth (common with plants), then senses, last reason (“age of reason”, seven). So we first think about what we have sensed (the child thinks of toys, pets).
• Conclusion (supplied only when a student asks where the syllogism is): the first road in our knowledge is the road from the senses into reason; middle term “natural road”.
• Why change is basic: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs” (Ulysses to Achilles, Troilus and Cressida); his playful chain — no understanding of change, none of changing things, none of unchanging things (known by negation), none of anything; colleagues “can’t really put any hole in the argument” but won’t accept it. Heraclitus concentrated the mind on change between opposites.
• Signs: the word “road” itself is carried from the sensible road to the mind; Christ, “I am the road” (hodos, the same word Aristotle uses); his grandson on the natural road in our knowledge: “there are cars and trucks on it”; Aristotle calls parts of philosophy a methodos, “over a road”.

7. Replies to the objections (“dividing them in the basis of the acts”) #

Point: obj. 1–2 are solved alike (the division is by acts, not powers); obj. 3 is partly accepted.

• Ad 1: anger and sense desire are often unreasonable and so opposed to the act of reason — smokers who say “don’t ever start”; the alcoholic who has taken the pledge; wife-beaters who repent when calm but do it again; bar fights, cars through houses. Aside: the Puritan dunking stool for shrews; Taming of the Shrew jokes because he lives in Shrewsbury.
• Ad 2: synderesis tells one to be moderate; sensuality inclines to excess in sense goods — again acts.
• Ad 3: the unchangeable “reasons” (translate rationes as “thoughts”) are the first beginnings of things to be done, about which one does not err; attributed to reason as a power and to synderesis as a habit — so by both reason and synderesis we naturally judge. Example: do I demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem by my reason or by the habit of geometry? By reason as affected by the habit — the forms ordered in the order of the theorems.

8. Heraclitus and Parmenides: reason common to all (“listening not to me, but to reason”) #

Point: what reason naturally knows is common to all; the private world is false.

• Heraclitus: “It is wise, listening not to me but to reason, to agree that all things are one.” Burnet mistranslates “to my word”: there is no “my” in the Greek, and “listen not to me but to my word” is nonsense that destroys the point. (Logos means both word and reason.)
• “Reason is common to all” — as in daily speech “he won’t listen to reason”, which does not mean my reason. Objector: what reason is there besides my reason, yours, the next man’s? Answer via another fragment: wisdom is to speak the truth and act rightly according to nature — the link is common = natural; what reason naturally knows is common to all, and everything else is found from it and judged by returning to it. The man who won’t listen to reason is cut off from it by emotion or pride.
• “We should not act and speak like those asleep; for the waking there is one common world; the sleeping each go into a private world” — idios (private) gives “idiot”, one who lives in a private world. Asides: 18th-century madhouse visits for entertainment, the man who thinks he is Napoleon; the acquaintance who suddenly talks of his fleet or his army marching on Worcester, then returns to normal.
• Back to On the Soul III: the Greek is nous is always right (like synesis); one translation Thomas uses says “reason is always right” — true of reason in what it naturally knows and judges in that light; imagination is free to imagine anything, even what cannot be, and so is deceptive; reason is not.
• Parmenides: first to see the axioms about being and non-being as the beginning — something cannot both be and not be; one always comes back to this, as Thomas says. One who thinks it can is a “two-headed mortal” — a monster, opposed to nature: one head to think it is, one to think it is not; one head may doubt (she loves me, she loves me not) but cannot assent to both at once.

9. Power and habit again: anger and mildness (“I must be angry by my ability to be angry”) #

Point: something is attributed both to the power and to the habit perfecting it.

• I am angry by my ability to be angry; that I am angry neither more nor less than I should, when and about what I should, is by the habit of mildness (a sense of meekness, but “mildness is a little better”). Christ’s anger at the money-changers and at the obstinate Pharisees who deny the obvious after his miracles; “learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart” — humility and mildness go together, since the proud, whose excellence is not recognised, are given to anger. Socrates’ interlocutors with a position get angry when led into contradiction; the slave boy, a nobody, does not.
• Parallels: do I see by my eye or by my 20/20 vision? lift by my muscles or my strength? The one is a disposition perfecting the other; push-ups build a habit in the muscles, eating moderately builds moderation, restraining anger builds mildness.
• Ends: “a little break here before we do our second article.”

His words #

• synderesis; a natural habit, the natural understanding of the beginnings of things to be done — nous in the practical reason.
• reason as nature vs. reason as reason; determined to one / open to opposites.
• “ninth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX].
• understanding of beginnings [ed.: intellectus principiorum, nous].
• looking reason / lookable things [ed.: speculative reason, speculabilia].
• foresight [ed.: prudence].
• acting upon understanding / undergoing understanding [ed.: agent intellect / possible intellect].
• understandable form [ed.: intelligible species]; the habit is “an ordering of those forms”.
• ability [ed.: potency, power].
• opus naturae / opus rationis; scientia, episteme.
• the natural road; hodos; methodos “over a road”.
• “thoughts” for rationes (in ad 3).
• logos: reason and word; idios: private, whence “idiot”; synesis.
• mildness [ed.: mansuetudo, meekness].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 12 (objections, sed contra, body, replies).
• Heraclitus, fragments: “listening not to me but to reason…”, “reason is common to all”, wisdom is to speak the truth and act according to nature, the waking/sleeping fragment.
• Parmenides, fragment on the “two-headed mortal”.
• Handout “Distinction of the Roads in Our Knowledge”, p. 1 (the natural road syllogism); handout “The First Statement and King of Statements”, p. 2 (inferred from verified sources — probably the Parmenides passage).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Ethics VI (nous, understanding of beginnings; virtues, books II–X); On the Soul III (nous always right); Metaphysics IX (“ninth book of wisdom”); “the fifth book” (rational powers open to opposites); Prior and Posterior Analytics; Categories (habit, disposition, power).
• Augustine, On the Trinity XII; On Free Judgment.
• Jerome, gloss on Ezekiel 1:6.
• Boethius (reasoning : understanding :: motion : rest).
• Alexander of Hales, Summa.
• Thomas, Prima Secundae (on habits and virtues).
• Boswell, Life of Johnson; Burnet on the early Greeks; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Taming of the Shrew; Gospels (money-changers; “I am the road”; “meek and humble of heart”); Plato, Meno (slave boy, inferred).

His questions #

• Is synderesis a power or a habit? A natural habit added to reason, like the understanding of first principles in speculative reason.
• Why must there be something naturally understood before reasoning? Reasoning is a motion, and motion depends on something at rest; with nothing understood first there is nothing to reason from.
• Could an animal have those first principles? No, because it is tied into reason.
• Is habit greater than ability? It is a perfection of the ability — an ordering of the received forms.
• Is that what Aristotle says happiness consists in? Man’s own act according to virtue throughout life; highest by foresight (more human) and by wisdom (more divine).
• Why is the first road in our knowledge the road from the senses into reason? Because the first road is the natural road, and man’s nature as animal-with-reason develops senses before reason.
• Do I demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem by my reason or by the habit of geometry? By reason as affected by the habit.
• What is this “reason” that is common to all, and not just mine or yours? What reason naturally knows, which is common because natural.
• Do I see by my eye or by my 20/20 vision; lift by my muscles or my strength? By both — the one a disposition perfecting the other.