Aquinas on Sense Desire and the Will (ST I, Q.80, A.2): Two Powers, the 'Moved Mover', Universal and Particular in Action, and Temptation

Orientation #

He refers back several times to “the previous article” (prev. lecture): why there is a distinct genus of desiring power at all, namely that inclination follows form and knowing things have forms non-knowing things lack. He also points forward to Thomas’s later treatise on love and its causes, and to his own course on love and friendship. The previous class treated q. 80 a. 1 and this one continues with a. 2, before q. 81 a. 1 next time.

The class, in order #

1. The third objection: no twofold moving power (“There’s not another power, in other words”) #

The recording opens on the third objection, which he calls “a very interesting objection.”

1. The desiring power is ordered under the knowing power, since it is moved by apprehension.
2. So is the power to move from place to place.
3. But there are not two locomotive powers in man, one following sense and one following understanding; “nobody thinks that.”
4. Therefore, for a like reason, there should not be two desiring powers either.

• Aside: a good student at St. Mary’s who brought “a real nice objection every day” and expected to stump him “the next day”; most of these objections are already in Thomas if you read him.

2. Sed contra and the thesis (“the philosopher distinguishes a twofold desire”) #

“The philosopher” is antonomasia for Aristotle. In De Anima III he distinguishes a twofold desire and says the superior desire moves (or should move) the lower. Thomas’s answer: the desire following understanding is necessarily another power from the desire following sense.

3. Desire is a passive power, moved by the apprehended (“a potencia passiva”) #

The point: the desiring power is passive, moved by its object, like the senses and unlike the digestive power that acts on its object; and it is a passive power apt to be moved specifically by the grasping power.

A student cannot follow and asks him to “say it a different way.” His restatement, tying it to the previous article:

1. Everything tends toward something by reason of its form; every other power of the soul tends to its own object.
2. Knowing things have forms that non-knowing things do not have at all.
3. Therefore knowing things have inclinations non-knowing things lack; without knowing there would be only natural tendency, and this whole genus of power would not exist.
4. So knowing is essential, not accidental, to this kind of desire: it is “a desire that follows upon some kind of knowing.”
5. Two kinds of knowing (sensing, understanding) give two kinds of ability to desire. Distinction of objects: sense desire is of the good as known by the senses, i.e. as agreeable to sense (pleasing), a “more limited knowledge of the good”; the will is of the good as known by reason, which knows good also as end, as useful, as common good.

4. Appetibile apprehensum: unmoved mover, desire a moved mover (“desire is a moved mover”) #

Aristotle’s two words appetibile apprehensum, the desirable as known, is a non-moved mover; desire is a moved mover (De Anima III and Metaphysics XII; the ASR “wisdom” is his gloss for metaphysics). Digression from his love-and-friendship course: is the heart active or passive?

• Texts saying love is giving (Juliet “I gave my love”; Thomas on the Holy Spirit called Gift because love is the first gift) vs. texts on the wound of love (Romeo’s scars, Teresa of Avila wounded by the angel) and the everyday “someone made an impression on you” at a party, i.e. their good qualities pressed on your heart.
• Resolution via Thomas’s Sentences commentary quoting the same Aristotle text: a moved mover is passive insofar as moved, active insofar as mover. Chalk example: the middle piece moves the third because it is moved. Which is more fundamental? “It’s a mover because it’s being moved,” so in our love being moved is more fundamental, yet there is something active.
• Why the text matters: God must be first cause not only as first mover but as first desirable; otherwise, making for the sake of something else, He would be a moved mover. God’s love is only a giving: the creature’s goodness is in no way cause of God’s loving, God’s loving causes the creature’s good. With us it is reversed: a thing’s goodness moves us to love it, but only once known (never known licorice or wine, never moved to desire it). Student: is that why it is “more the essence of love to give”? Yes, “more divine to give than to receive.”
• Will vs. emotions: emotions are more being moved; the will more free, able to give.
• Another sense in which all loving is giving: the good is in things, so love goes out to the thing (“I left my heart in San Francisco”; “where your treasure is, there your heart shall be”). The lover may be said to have lost his heart; the knower who lost his mind would have no knowledge, but a lover who did not in some way lose his heart maybe does not love.
• Student: is God moved by Himself when He apprehends Himself? Only in our way of understanding; in God there is no real distinction between knowledge and love, in us there is a real distinction.

5. Passive powers are distinguished by their movers (“Are you kickable?”) #

Back to the body:

1. Passive and mobile things are distinguished according to what acts on and moves them, because mover must be proportioned to movable (my kicking you proportioned to your being kicked, punching to being punched).
2. A passive power takes its very definition from its order to the active: you are kickable because able to be kicked by the kicker.
3. What is apprehended by understanding is of another kind from what is apprehended by sense.
4. Therefore intellectual desire is a different appetitive ability from sense desire. He notes Thomas seems to order the objections so that seeing one helps solve another.

6. Reply to the first objection: known per se, not accidentally (“it belongs to it what per se”) #

Being apprehended by sense or understanding does not merely happen to the desirable: the desirable moves desire only insofar as grasped, so differences of the known are per se differences of the desirable, and desiring powers are distinguished by them as by their own objects. Confirmed by the previous article: no ability to desire without knowing. Preview: in the treatise on love the first cause of love is the good, as object; then knowledge is a cause of love “for the same reason,” because the object is the good as known.

7. Reply to the second: singulars under a universal reason (“by what? Some universal reason”) #

Objection: the object is in things, and things are singular. Reply: intellectual desire is borne toward singulars outside the soul but under a universal reason, “as when it desires something because it is good.”

• Parallel from the previous article: touch and sight both know shape, but one through colour, the other through hardness; same thing, not the same object in the same way.
• St. Francis de Sales on eating: eat because God made you needing food and wills you to keep your health, so the will dominates even sense desire; contrast eating “like an animal” just because hungry. A mother: “I know you don’t feel like eating, but you got to eat something”; his own small breakfasts, and eating more when reason foresees a long morning; eating vegetables one has no appetite for. Same food, not an object of the two desires in the same way.
• Aristotle in the Rhetoric: hate can be of something universal, “the whole genus of thieves”; today, hating terrorists as a genus, not only this one hurting my senses.
• Second difference: intellectual desire reaches immaterial goods sense cannot grasp: truth, wisdom, sciences, virtues, and God Himself. Senses know good only as agreeable (pleasure) and bad only as pain; we know good and bad far more universally. A mistreated animal fears the cruel man who hurt it, but does not hate cruelty in general; we dislike torturers as a whole class. “That’s more subtle to see that difference.”
• Aside: his college logic professor, exasperated, asked “Mr. Berquist, do you have an emotional attachment to the syllogism?” One can have emotional attachment to a girl, not to a syllogism; reason recognises it as the strongest argument; only metre or rhythm in words could appeal to sense.
• Names of love: Latin amor (sense love, emotion; cf. “amorous”), Greek eros (more sensual; “erotic”); Latin dilectio, related to electio, choice, which he renders “chosen love”; the philosopher is named with philia, a chosen love; Aristotle says philosopher and sophist differ by choice of life (to be wise vs. to appear wise). Other Greek words agape (charity) and storge (natural affection for children); C. S. Lewis’s Four Loves; English is poorer, using “love” for romantic love and for what God does.
• Hamlet on choosing Horatio (“since my dear soul was mistress of her choice … her election has sealed thee”): the soul is mistress of choice only with developed reason able to distinguish and compare men; Horatio is “not passion’s slave,” unlike the irascible man, coward, lustful man, drunkard, each slave of a passion. A chosen love, philia not eros.

8. Reply to the third: the universal moves only through the particular (“the universal opinion doesn’t move except through”) #

Reply as Thomas gives it: universal opinion moves only through the particular (De Anima III); reason can move desire directly without sense, but action is singular, so the higher desire moves the lower and no second locomotive power is needed. A student twice says he does not understand; his examples: “I should eat” moves nothing until I sense some food; “pay your debts” until I recognise I owe you; “honor father and mother” until I recognise you as my father; “have you hugged your kid today” until I recognise this is my daughter; “a man should drink” until an individual drink, this glass of water.

• Ethics of temptation: two universals in the head (adultery is bad; pleasure is to be pursued); the tempted man puts the singular under the wrong universal, does not apply the one he should.
• Charities: you cannot give to all; one cause must come under the universal before you write a cheque; “you don’t give money to needy in general.”
• Student objection: this sounds like “a higher appetite moves by means of the lower.” Answer: it moves you to do something with the lower as middle, because action involves the body.
• Socrates’s paradox that bad-doing is ignorance: the adulterer knows adultery is wrong, but at the moment of acting does not apply the universal to this act; “we all do that,” in non-moral matters too. Student: Thomas says especially with lust; yes, strong emotions. Hence less responsibility in dreams. The Rape of Lucrece (Msgr. Dionne thought it a good picture of temptation): the man knows, is not waiting for full consideration, sees only one aspect. This is why we have free judgment: we can apply all kinds of universals (procrastination bumper sticker: “I haven’t begun to procrastinate”), reasons for and against; animals are determined by nature to judge one way in given circumstances.
• Student asks to reconnect with the objection: the objection rests on a likeness (both desire and locomotion under knowing powers) and misses the difference; action is always singular, so the universal moves to action only through the singular. Talk “honor your father” all day and never honor him, until this man before me is my father with nothing to sit on. Even a purely intellectual desire (“knowledge of God is the best knowledge, I’ll study God today”) is executed through this individual book on my desk. In philosophy or geometry one reasons from universals to universal conclusions; but moving the body is singular: I move my body, not “the human body.”
• Correcting a young person: they admit the universal but did not apply it; smokers who say “never start.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: the man who hears the doctor and does not act is a useless hearer, likewise the hearer of ethics lectures; “for virtue to know is little or nothing”; moral/ethical virtue from ethos, custom; one must be accustomed, habit being second nature; parents begin it (the box of candy put away for tomorrow). Francis de Sales irascible by birth, made mild by repeatedly controlling anger. King Lear’s “hysterica passio” (student supplied). Closing anecdote about de Sales seeming too soft is [unclear in recording].

His words #

• “grasping / knowing power”; “desiring power” [ed.: apprehensive and appetitive powers]
• “the what power to move around” [ed.: locomotive power]
• antonomasia: “the philosopher” for Aristotle
• “potencia passiva” [ed.: potentia passiva]: a power moved by its object rather than acting on it
• “appetibile apprehensum”: the desirable as known, a non-moved mover; desire a moved mover
• “the twelfth book of wisdom”: his gloss for Metaphysics XII
• “chosen love”: his translation of dilectio, tied to electio; “sense love” for amor
• eros, philia, agape, storge: the four Greek loves (Lewis)
• “free judgment” [ed.: liberum arbitrium]: ability to apply any of many universals
• ethos: custom, source of “moral/ethical” virtue

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I q. 80 a. 2: objection 3, sed contra, body, replies 1–3
• Hamlet, Hamlet’s speech to Horatio (quoted from memory) Mentioned
• Aristotle, De Anima III (twofold desire; unmoved/moved mover; universal opinion moves through the particular)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics XII (God first desirable)
• Aristotle, Rhetoric (hating the whole genus of thieves)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (useless hearer of medical advice; knowing is little or nothing for virtue)
• Thomas, Commentary on the Sentences (moved mover in love)
• Thomas, treatise on love, causes of love (good, knowledge) (inferred: ST I-II q. 27)
• ST I q. 80 a. 1 (prev. lecture)
• Romeo and Juliet; Teresa of Avila; St. Francis de Sales; The Rape of Lucrece; King Lear; C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves; “Where your treasure is, there your heart shall be”

His questions #

• Is sensing or understanding accidental to these desiring powers? No: without knowing there would be no such desire at all; the known enters per se into the object.
• Is the moved mover a mover because moved, or moved because a mover? A mover because it is moved; being moved is more fundamental in our love.
• Is the heart active or passive in love? Both: passive insofar as moved, active insofar as it moves; God’s love is only a giving.
• Are sight and touch the same sense because both know shape? No: one knows it through colour, the other through hardness.
• Does the animal hate cruelty in general? No: it fears the one who hurt it; we can hate the whole class of torturers.
• Am I going to honour anybody by knowing “honour your father and mother”? Not until I recognise this man as my father.
• Is the adulterer ignorant that adultery is wrong (Socrates)? He knows it, but at the moment of acting does not apply the universal to this act.
• Why do animals not have free judgment? They are determined by nature to judge one way in given circumstances; we can apply all kinds of universals.