The Eleven Emotions: Their Place in Ethics, Rhetoric, Poetry, Music, and Talk About God (with a Digression on Mozart)

Orientation #

He does not name last time or next time. A student opens by asking “any chance we could review the eleven emotions?” and he answers that is what he meant to do; the class is that review and its consequences. Verified sources place the episode probably between Summa Theologiae I, q. 81, a. 2 and a. 3 (inferred). The previous class treated the division of the sense appetite into concupiscible and irascible, and the next treats whether these obey reason.

The class, in order #

1. The six concupiscible emotions (“six emotions that belong to the concupiscible”) #

Point: the concupiscible emotions arise directly from something being agreeable or disagreeable to the senses; two are basic and four arise from them.

• Agreeable to sense → liking or loving (same emotion; loving is stronger). Disagreeable → disliking or hate. Candy tasted and liked; salmon tasted and hated. Childhood box of unlabelled chocolates: biting into a maple one, “that’s dislike it.”
• If you don’t have what you like → wanting / desire (Latin desire, English want). Aside on English as “one of the best languages for philosophy”: “want” also means lack (“you’re sadly wanting”), which shows this emotion belongs to the good absent. Hunger and thirst are the obvious cases: “as a sort of what, we’re very much aware of that.”
• Opposite of desire: no good English name; use the Latin aversion, a turning-away.
• Good you like present → joy, pleasure, delight. Bad you cannot avoid → sadness or pain: being served salmon at your house. St Margaret Mary: her family’s dislike of cheese, and the condition on entering the convent that she never be made to eat it (not kept, he says) — hate of a sensible thing, turning away, and sadness when it is forced on you.
• Summary: two basic ones; from each, one emotion in the absence and one in the presence of its object.

2. The five irascible emotions and where each arises (“if there’s no difficulty in my getting”) #

Point: each irascible emotion arises from a concupiscible one, but only when there is difficulty, and depends on an estimate of whether the difficulty can be overcome.

• No difficulty → no irascible emotion. Difficulty: you want the very same piece of candy or steak I want.
• From desire of a difficult good: if I estimate I can overcome the obstacle → hope, which “moves me to make an effort”; if not → despair. The fox and the grapes: hope while he estimates he might reach them, despair after many jumps. The man courting a woman other men also desire: hope if he thinks he can win her, despair if the rivals are cleverer, handsomer, wealthier. This is why the name “hope” is carried over to the will and even names a theological virtue: movement toward a good hard to get.
• From aversion when the bad is hard to avoid, or forced upon you: if I may not be able to resist → fear; if I think I can overcome it → boldness (“confidence” is also used, but that word is sometimes used for hope too). The neighbourhood bully who threatened to cut his ears off over a lost rubber: “scared stiff”; went home and got his brother Richard.
• From joy: nothing — there is no difficulty in enjoying a good.
• From sadness or pain, when something bad is present or forced upon you: if you estimate you can get rid of its cause → anger. Someone standing on my toes saying “so what?”: if he is too big, fear and go on suffering; if I think I can beat him, anger rises and I shove him. An insult causes a “more spiritual” pain that anger tries to repulse.
• Count: five irascible, six concupiscible.

3. White fear and red fear; why joy has no irascible counterpart (“white fear and the red fear”) #

Point: fear is subdivided by its bodily signs, and sadness, unlike joy, can give rise to a further emotion.

• Fear of death: the man turns pale — white fear. Fear of dishonour, disgrace (shame): the face turns red — red fear. The ancients’ physiological reason: in danger to the body the blood withdraws to the source of life; in danger of disgrace, an outward thing, it rushes to the cheeks. Student asks whether this is what physiologically happens: “that’s what the ancients say, but it makes some sense.” Shakespeare plays on it in one of the sonnets — stolen flowers, some red with shame, some pale with fear (no sonnet number given).
• Nothing analogous with joy: “just enjoy yourself.” With sadness there is the getting-rid of its cause; if you cannot, it stays sadness, “and maybe fear for the future.”

4. Where the eleven matter: ethics and the kinds of sadness (“very important for what ethics”) #

Point: the division of the eleven emotions is needed for ethics, rhetoric, poetic science and music; some emotions subdivide by object.

• Three kinds of sadness from his article on comedy: pity (sadness over another’s misfortune, a good sadness), envy (sadness over another’s good fortune, a bad sadness), melancholy (sadness over one’s own miserable state or the world’s). Distinguished by object; matters for ethics since envy is to be avoided, pity is good.
• Tragedy (Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare) moves us to pity and fear and purges them. Romeo and Juliet’s prologue names both (“piteous overthrows”, “fearful passage”). Aristotle’s definition of tragedy: a likeness of an action serious, complete and of some magnitude, in sweetened language, moving us to pity and fear but purging or purifying these — “a very subtle thing.”
• Comedy moves us to mirth and hope; mirth is a form of joy. So the two main forms of fiction concern the four chief emotions: joy, sadness, hope, fear. Thomas has an article on the four principal passions; the four appear in church documents (Church in the Modern World: “the joys, the sadness, the hopes and fears”) and in St John of the Cross’s rectifying of them.
• Ethics: moral virtues have emotions as matter. Courage — fear and boldness; temperance/moderation — what pleases the senses, desire and pleasure, hunger and thirst; patience — sadness; mildness — anger; magnanimity — hope and despair (pusillanimity the vice). Understanding the emotions gives the matter of a number of virtues and vices.

5. Rhetoric and the three means of persuasion (“second means of persuasion”) #

Point: rhetoric needs the emotions because moving the audience’s emotions is the second means of persuasion.

• Aristotle’s three means: (1) the image you project of yourself; (2) moving the emotions and customs of the audience; (3) least important, the argument — “the father of logic says that.”
• Courtroom: anger and pity (mentioned earlier in the course). Deliberative rhetoric, the political assembly: fear and boldness — an audience moved to boldness votes for war. WWI: they thought it would be over in weeks; Verdun, six hundred thousand dead, more than some American Civil War battles. Moved to fear, they would be less inclined.
• Aristotle, Rhetoric book II, treats the emotions relevant to jury, legislature, election; friendly or unfriendly feeling toward someone influences a vote. Anger is, he thinks, the first emotion Aristotle takes up there.
• Nixon–Kennedy debate: radio listeners thought Nixon won (better in reason); TV viewers thought Kennedy won (image — young, vibrant; Nixon’s make-up, beard). “People are more moved by the image than by the argument.”
• Contrast: Thomas treats emotions in the context of moral theology or philosophy; the rhetorician has a different reason. Poetic science has two reasons: to represent people under emotions, and because forms of fiction move emotions — good fiction to a better state, bad to a worse. Music both moves the emotions and represents them, by imitating their natural sign in the human voice.

6. Music: major and minor keys for the emotions (“major keys for certain emotions”) #

Point: great 18th-century music tends to assign keys to emotions, so understanding the emotions is needed to understand music.

• Joy → major; sadness → minor. Irascible: anger → minor; hope → major; despair → minor; fear → minor; boldness → major.
• Mozart’s tendencies: C or D major for marches and the irascible — Jupiter and Linz symphonies as representations of hope, magnanimity; B-flat or G major for the jubilant. Anger in the two concertos, the 20th in D minor and the 24th in C minor; Don Giovanni going down to hell, he thinks D minor. The “heavenly twins” quintets: K. 515 in C major (joy), K. 516 in G minor (sadness). Sometimes a “little plot”: a major melody returns in the minor in the development.
• Caveat: “it’s not always clear exactly what the joy is about.”

7. Carrying the names over to the will, and to God (“carried over to what God”) #

Point: emotion-names become equivocal when carried to the will by dropping the bodily aspect; of the eleven, only love and joy can be said of God properly.

1. Emotions (“feelings”) involve a bodily change — obvious in shame, anger, fear; sadness weighs the body down. The will, like reason, is not a body. So when a name is carried over to an act of will, the bodily aspect is dropped and the formal aspect kept (anger: desire for revenge; hope: movement of the appetite toward a difficult good). Thomas: this is how names become equivocal by reason — dropping part of the meaning. Nearly all eleven can be carried to our will.
2. Which can be carried to God? Test the formal aspect:
   • “Can you speak of desiring God?” No — it would mean some good God lacks.
   • “Can God undergo anything bad?” No — so none concerning the bad.
   • “Is anything difficult for God?” No — so none of the irascible, whose object is the arduum, the difficult: no good hard for God to get, no bad hard to avoid, no inflicted bad hard to get rid of. Excluded “by the very definition.”
   • Remaining: love and joy, said properly; not two different things in God. St John: “God is love”; “more joy in heaven”; Aristotle knew of love and pleasure in God and how simple and perfect his rejoicing is; Christ: “enter into the joy of your master.”
3. Metaphorical: anger for divine justice, the will to punish — Psalm 94 (old numbering), “swore in his anger… not enter into my rest”: firm in his justice. Pity, a sadness, for mercy, the will to relieve our misery. Perhaps boldness, by likeness to the bold man who approaches and overcomes dangers. Fear in no way, not even metaphorically: “no real likeness there.”
4. Student: what differs between properly and metaphorically, if both drop the body? His answer: anger arises from sadness, impossible in God; the likeness is “in the effect” — God punishes as the angry man punishes, but simply wills to rectify. With metaphor “you really aren’t keeping the formal aspect… at all.”
5. Source: “beautiful” — the last part of the first book of the Summa Contra Gentiles, where Thomas recalls the emotions, shows how the names go over to the will, then which go to God. So this is the fifth place the emotions matter: theology, “ultimately about God.”

• Aside on love: love is for a good, present or absent, stronger when present; “you don’t have love, you don’t have anything.”
• Aside: the story that Thomas on his deathbed thanked God he had understood everything he read; Berquist doubts it (“I can’t even understand the directions for my computer”; the Greek font that won’t print). Students recall Thomas puzzled by St Paul, praying and rising with “now I see it”; St Paul in his cell; absorbed through surgery (“shows the separation of powers”). Resolution: perhaps he understood everything, “but not instantly.”

8. Music’s power, healthy and unhealthy music, the composers (“music is the most persuasive of things”) #

Point: music moves the emotions most powerfully, poetic second; 18th-century music represents emotions in harmony with reason, Romantic music does not.

• Student restates the four: ethics, rhetoric, poetic science, music. Movies move us both ways, music and story; successful movies were “fortunate” in their music (Gone with the Wind, Brian’s Song); the Nazis used marches persuasively. Dryden’s ode for St Cecilia’s feast: Timotheus at Alexander’s banquet, one music making him warlike, another amorous. Shakespeare aware music provokes to good or bad.
• At TAC, well-disposed kids are more easily brought to good literature than good music: emotions malformed by music are hard to change; literature “a little more intellectual”; “customs so strong.” His brother Marcus’s talk on music.
• Student: does music bypass reasoning? “Not entirely.” The excellence of 18th-century music is representing emotions in harmony with reason while respecting their nature; the Romantics would not accept that subordination — so 18th-century music is more beautiful than 19th, and one should be accustomed to it. Tchaikovsky’s devotion to Mozart, from his letters: fleeing the disorder of his own life (suicide attempt); his Mozartiana; his own music reflected his life.
• His own path: family 78s of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky; his uncle the violin teacher: “come to Mozart”; brother Richard’s course with Austin’s essay “towards an evaluation of music,” after which he turned to Baroque and Mozart.
• Student: is Beethoven a Romantic? At the beginning of it; Mozart taught him a little; on hearing Mozart’s 24th concerto, “we shall never equal that.” Ranking from a California discussion: Mozart, Handel, J. S. Bach, with Corelli (Arcangelo, buried in the Pantheon; all his surviving music instrumental) also up there; Vivaldi good but not Corelli’s equal; Johann Christian Bach (went south, became Catholic) influenced Mozart. Mozart revised Handel (hyphenated “Handel-Mozart” Messiah recordings); played Bach’s organ and studied his unpublished manuscripts; Baron van Swieten’s Sundays of only Bach and Handel.
• Student surprised Mozart’s life was disordered: “judging by the movie?” — the film makes him a rock star; “close your eyes and just hear the music.” Recommended biography: Alfred Einstein’s (cousin of Albert). Albert Einstein: Beethoven made his music, Mozart found it, part of the universe always; his brother Mark on Romeo and Juliet likewise. Mozart on composing coming naturally (“piddling”). Mozart died in his thirty-sixth year; Berquist attended the 200th anniversary of the birth (1956) and of the death. Monsieur Dionne: Bach “trop sévère”; Handel warmer. Recording ends as he begins to argue Handel’s case.

His words #

• concupiscible / irascible: the two sense appetites, six and five emotions respectively.
• liking or loving; disliking or hate: the two basic emotions, from agreeable/disagreeable to sense.
• wanting / desire: liking for what is absent; “want” also = lack.
• aversion: Latin, turning-away; opposite of desire, no good English name.
• joy, pleasure, delight: liked good present.
• sadness or pain: unavoidable bad present.
• hope / despair: from desire of a difficult good, by estimate of success.
• fear / boldness: from aversion to a bad hard to avoid; “confidence” ambiguous.
• anger: from sadness, when one estimates one can remove its cause.
• white fear / red fear: fear of death (pale) vs shame, fear of disgrace (red).
• pity, envy, melancholy: three kinds of sadness by object.
• mirth: a form of joy, moved by comedy.
• four chief emotions: joy, sadness, hope, fear.
• second means of persuasion: moving the audience’s emotions (after image, before argument).
• equivocal by reason: name carried over by dropping part of its meaning [ed.: equivocal by design, aequivocum a consilio].
• formal aspect: what is kept when the bodily aspect of an emotion is dropped.
• arduum: the difficult, object of the irascible.
• properly vs metaphorically: kept formal aspect vs likeness in the effect only.
• respondeo: mentioned for Thomas’s asking which names go to God.

Texts #

Read in class

• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Prologue (recited from memory).
• Aristotle, definition of tragedy (Poetics, inferred), paraphrased.
• Psalm 94 (old numbering), “swore in his anger,” paraphrased.

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, last part.
• Thomas Aquinas, an article on the four principal passions (no locus).
• Aristotle, Rhetoric II; the three means of persuasion.
• Shakespeare, a sonnet on stolen flowers, red and pale (no number).
• Vatican II, Church in the Modern World (inferred: Gaudium et Spes).
• St John of the Cross, on rectifying the four emotions.
• 1 John “God is love”; Luke “more joy in heaven”; Matthew “enter into the joy of your master” (loci inferred).
• Berquist’s own article on comedy (pity, envy, melancholy).
• Dryden, ode for St Cecilia’s feast (Timotheus).
• Austin’s essay “towards an evaluation of music”; Alfred Einstein’s biography of Mozart.

His questions #

• The concupiscible emotions arise directly from something being what? Agreeable or disagreeable to the senses.
• If there’s no difficulty in getting what I desire, is there any irascible emotion? No; the irascible arises only when there is difficulty.
• Is that what physiologically happens (blood withdrawing or rushing to the cheeks)? That is what the ancients say; “it makes some sense.”
• Can you speak of desiring God? No — that would mean some good God does not have.
• Can God undergo anything bad? Is anything difficult for God? No and no; so none of the bad-concerning or irascible names apply properly.
• What is different in the metaphorical use from the proper? (student) A likeness in the effect only — God punishes as the angry man punishes; the formal aspect is not kept.
• Does music bypass reasoning? (student) Not entirely; 18th-century music represents emotions in harmony with reason.
• If Mozart is the best, who would be second and third? (student) Handel, then Johann Sebastian Bach, with Corelli also up there.
• Is Beethoven considered a Romantic? (student) At the beginning of it.