Summa I, Q.81 a.3: Do the irascible and concupiscible appetites obey reason? The political, not despotic, rule of reason over the emotions

Orientation #

He refers back to “last time”: the Latin habit of giving the act’s name to the power (appetitus), the internal senses already distinguished, and the example of little birds crouching under a hawk (prev. lecture). He ends at the reply to the second objection and calls a break, with the third objection still to come. The previous class reviewed the eleven emotions and the concupiscible/irascible division, and the next continues with the third objection and moves into q. 82 on the will.

The class, in order #

1. Opening fragment and the three objections (“whether they obey reason”) #

Point: q. 81 a. 3 asks whether the irascible and concupiscible (the two powers or their emotions) obey reason.

• Before the prayer, a fragment of a music aside: you want music to be both noble and sweet; one could argue Handel is more noble than Mozart.
• Obj. 1 (Augustine, De Trinitate XII): irascible and concupiscible are parts of “sensuality” (he notes the English word does not exactly fit but suits the context); sensuality is signified by the serpent and does not obey reason.
• Obj. 2: what obeys does not fight. Paul, Romans 7: “another law in my members fighting against the law of my mind”; Christ: “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Even Paul experiences this.
• Obj. 3: the sensing power is also below reason and does not obey it, for we do not see or hear when we want to. Romeo can’t see or hear Juliet, while the mice and rats can. So neither should sense desire obey. He notes the objectors already see the distinction between senses and sense desire.
• Aside: Thomas calls Paul “the Apostle” (John Paul II speaks of Peter and Paul as princes of the apostles; there is some scriptural basis in how they name themselves in the epistles, but Thomas’s “the Apostle” is Paul).
• Sed contra, John Damascene: what obeys and is persuadable by reason is divided into concupiscentium and irascentium, one word each in Greek, epithumia and thumos, going back to Plato and Aristotle; Latin later uses “concupiscible appetite” and “irascible appetite.”

2. Respondeo: obeying reason through the cogitative power (“in place of the instinct”) #

Point: they obey the higher part in two ways, as regards reason and as regards the will; not perfectly, but to some extent.

• appetitus sensitivus: appetitus names the act (desire) and then the power to desire, as in English “man is an animal with understanding.” sensitivus: the ability to desire following on the senses.
• Recap of the internal senses: four, two of them retaining what the other two do. Common sense (sensus communis; he prefers “central sense” since “common sense” has other English meanings) is known from the fact that we sense the difference not only between white and black, or sweet and bitter, but between white and sweet (Aristotle, De Anima III).
• Estimative power = what we call instinct: the sheep flees the wolf not because of colour or shape but as something to be fled; little birds crouch when a big bird flies over; a cat reacting to a belt as if to a snake, a natural enemy. No statements (“this is an enemy”), yet the fear in the animal is obeying the estimative power.
• In man, the cogitative power, “particular reason,” brings together individual images as universal reason brings together universals. One difference from instinct: the cogitative sees the singular under the universal (“I see this as a beverage”), so universal reason can influence it. Hence, as in syllogism, singular conclusions follow from universal propositions. Joke: the Tolstoy character who learned “all men are mortal, Socrates is a man” and never thought it applied to himself until his deathbed.
• Therefore universal reason commands sense desire.
• Why “obey reason more than understanding”: applying universal to singular is a work of reason, not simple understanding. Textbook examples: “this woman is not my wife, so this act is adultery, adultery is prohibited”; “this money is not mine, taking it is robbery.” Merely understanding that robbery is wrong does not move; I must syllogize that this is robbery.
• Experience: each can experience that by applying universal considerations he mitigates (not eliminates) anger or fear, or instigates them. Story: driving a new car to Quebec on the potholed Route Président Kennedy, an impatient French driver roars past and his car throws a stone that marks the car; first reaction anger, then “I’m a philosopher, do I care?” — a universal consideration applied.
• Student asks about natus est: related to nature; short for aptum natum est, “naturally apt.”

3. The experience underlying ethics (“if you can’t say no to candy”) #

Point: the Nicomachean Ethics requires this experience; without it you are not in a position to do ethics.

• Standard example: sense desire diminished by abstinence, by saying no.
• His brother Richard’s advice when he was stuffing himself with candy: no sin to eat candy, but if you can’t say no to something lawful you’ll end up not saying no to something unlawful. If you never deny yourself even lawful things, the appetites get too strong.
• Anger: saints by nature irascible (Francis de Sales); some children more given to anger, and correction can make them mild.
• Fear of public speaking: little tricks such as picking out one person in the audience and addressing him, then another — universal considerations that mitigate fear, to dominate rather than be intimidated by the audience.
• Story: as a senior he goofed on a school requirement; his advisor Casuri laughed, “Duane, I thought you were smarter than that”; he felt anger rising but thought “I owe so much to him, I can’t get angry with this man.”
• “A soft word turns away anger”; to some extent it takes two to make a fight, though some persist. That is the experience that has to underlie ethics: emotions can be to some extent calmed or tamed.

4. Obeying the will: execution and the ordered movers (“expects the command of the will”) #

Point: sense desire is also subject to the will as regards execution through the moving power.

• In other animals motion follows at once on the concupiscible or irascible: the sheep fearing the wolf immediately flees, since there is no superior appetite to fight against it. Man is not immediately moved but awaits the command of the will, the superior desire.
• Examples: his brother as a boy picking up a block to throw at him, mother comes over with a patting; after a while he’d pick up the block, stop and look around for mother — some command over it. People seething with something in hand, thinking twice; the body is not automatically moved by anger. Someone on a diet struggling not to reach for the candy bowl or the drink: the will is more powerful; I can say no.
• Argument: in ordered moving powers the second mover moves only in the power of the first; so the lower desire does not suffice to move unless the superior desire consents. Aristotle, De Anima III: the higher power moves the lower as the higher sphere moves the lower.
• Plato compares reason and emotion to a man and horses which he must tame. Washington Irving, Tour on the Prairies: wild horses hard to capture but broken in amazingly quickly. The saints speak of violence used on oneself to bring emotions under reason.
• This control is much less after the fall. Thomas (and Augustine) hold Adam and Eve could not fall through the passions; it had to be a spiritual sin, pride. In the fallen state emotions instigate many sins: several capital vices are named from emotions (anger, lust, drunkenness).

5. Reply to obj. 1: sensuality and first movements (“signified by the serpent”) #

Point: sensuality is signified by the serpent as regards what is proper to it on the part of the sensing power; irascible and concupiscible name sense desire more on the part of the act induced from reason. He finds this phrasing “a little bit strange.”

• Underlying idea: emotions are common to us and the other animals, so they are sometimes moved by the sensible without reason at all (developed in the next reply).
• Moral theology aside: when is lust or anger a sin, or a mortal sin? First movements of the appetite that almost precede reason and will are less than mortal sin when reason and will do not consent. Similar case: “judging others” — when something is flagrantly out of line (a prostitute soliciting) one judges almost automatically; not a firm judgment, and he does not think it is the sin of judging others.

6. Reply to obj. 2: despotic vs. political rule (“two kinds of rule”) #

Point: from Politics I, the soul rules the body despotically, but understanding rules appetite by political and kingly rule.

• Aside: priests describe sense desire as an animal caged for years that you can never quite trust, like pets that suddenly attack a child.
• Aristotle’s setting: a Greek household has father, son and slave, so the father is both father and master. Paul’s domestic instructions (husband/wife, father/son, master/slave) reflect this; the Odyssey shows Odysseus with faithful wife, son and faithful swineherd Eumaeus.
• Aside from this: liberal vs. servile education. Aristotle, Metaphysics: the slave is for the sake of the master, the free man for his own sake; by likeness, knowledge not for its own sake is servile, for its own sake liberal. Liberal arts are the beginning of liberal education, wisdom the end, Euclid’s geometry and natural philosophy in the middle.
• Aristotle’s question: should reason rule the emotions as a master rules a slave or as a father rules a son? Two differences: (1) end: the master rules for his own good, the father for the son’s good; (2) the slave has nothing to say, the son has something to say about what he will do.
• A father forcing a son into his own profession when unsuited treats him as a slave. Story of his father’s business friend from Minnesota: sent his son to Amherst, the son flunked out, unfit for any college; asked what he really wanted, he said a gasoline station, and the father bought him one — “what a father’s supposed to do.”
• Applied: reason rules the emotions for their good and they have something to say; consult their inclinations within reason. If emotionally not in the mood to study, maybe don’t force it; a diversion, e.g. the end of the ball game (Boston down 5–2, bases loaded two out, home run ties it, walk-off homer in the tenth; the next night Baltimore scored seven in the first). Someone who turns the TV off before the program ends feels frustration: “six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
• Thomas’s actual analogy: reason’s rule over the hand is despotic — it doesn’t resist at all; but “don’t get angry, don’t be afraid” doesn’t work like that; the soldier still feels fear going into battle.
• Student: does Thomas develop the need to listen to the emotions? He follows Aristotle, his master.
• Student: how reconcile the father-son rule with the saints’ violence on themselves, which seems despotic? Answer: that may be above the human mode (“the kingdom of heaven is taken by violence”). Thomas’s commendation and division of Scripture (his opening lecture on the Scriptures) gives three kinds of virtue from the ancient fathers: Proverbs ordered to living in this world using its goods moderately (political virtues); Ecclesiastes (“vanity of vanities”) to contempt even of moderate use, giving up lesser goods for greater, being purged; Song of Songs, the soul purged of attachment to earth. John of the Cross: held to earth by a little thread; the dark night belongs to the second stage. Paul counts everything as loss (the word is stronger, manure). Margaret Mary Alacoque, read this fall; saints mixing ashes with food — above the human mode.
• Aristotle’s heroic virtue, NE VII: after human virtues (books II–VI) he treats bestial vices below human vice and heroic (divine) virtues above it. A hero in Greek myth had one divine parent and one mortal. Thomas would place this at the level of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which is why the gifts are not called virtues: virtue operates in a human mode. Bestial vice: barbarians, and a figure he names (transcript “Don Luceno” [unclear in recording]) enjoying someone torn apart by dogs — not ordinary human vice like fornication but something perverse.
• Student summarises: listening to the emotions means the ruler understands the ruled so as not to break them but help them. He agrees; Thomas here treats the human rule, not the superhuman.
• Back to Thomas’s words: despotic rule is over slaves (servus, slave or servant) who cannot resist because they have nothing of their own; political and regal rule is over the free who, though subject, have something of their own from which they can resist. The members of the body obey at once — the hand and foot move on the soul’s desire. Sense desire is apt to be moved not only by the estimative/cogitative under universal reason but also by imagination and sense; hence we experience it fighting reason when we sense or imagine something pleasant that reason forbids or something sad that reason commands. That it resists in one way does not exclude that it obeys in another.

7. Intemperance a childish vice; experience of taming (“that is not passion’s slave”) #

Point: Thomas (II-II, on intemperance) calls it a childish vice [ed.: ASR gives “advice”/“device”], an analogy to a child not corrected young who grows too strong-willed to control.

• Concupiscible appetite is to reason as child to parents: if parents cannot enforce no early, the child may strike them or leave; if he does not say no to candy, desire grows too strong to obey when something unlawful comes up. Plato’s horse again: the man thrown keeps mounting until the horse is tamed; the man dragged with foot in the stirrup is finished.
• Aristotle insists on experience; children ruled as they should be are visibly happier, less run down emotionally; uncontrolled emotions make life miserable.
• Hamlet to Horatio: the man who suffers all and suffers nothing, whose “blood and judgment” (emotion and reason) are commingled, not a pipe for fortune to play, “not passion’s slave.” The emotions should not be slaves of reason, but when reason is the slave of the emotions there is complete disorder.
• Evenness under fortune: a Canadian study found lottery winners less happy afterward, divorces and messes; people jump off buildings at bad fortune (a San Francisco high-school girl on the roof over her boyfriend). Shakespeare’s Italian plays (Romeo and Juliet, Othello) are full of emotion: “I am fortune’s fool.”
• Fear: an Assumption College student cured stage fright by a speech course requiring spontaneous speeches, later ran for class office. Women usually more given to fear (afraid of the dark basement, can’t watch a frightening movie alone; his daughter grabbing his arm at the outdoor film about stealing the Russian airplane, “Foxfire” or so [ed.: likely Firefox]), and learn to control it with maturity.
• Anger controlled over time. An alcoholic actor cured excessive drinking by taking up wine and learning about it — letting the appetite have something to say — though others need total abstinence (AA). His father-in-law quit smoking by chewing gum for a year; a student who couldn’t study without a toothpick.

8. Music, fiction and the education of the emotions (“nothing so changes the soul of man”) #

Point: good music and fiction play a role in reason’s political, not despotic, rule of the emotions, since they appeal to sense and emotion yet move it reasonably.

• Oscar’s essay “Towards an Evaluation of Music” in The Thomist, read in high school through his brother Richard: 18th-century music over Romantic and later, representing the emotions as subject to reason paternally; Mozart representing and calming sadness.
• Aristotle, Politics, on music in education. Father Boulay (one of his four teachers) collected Church Fathers on music; Thomas: nothing so changes the soul of man as music. Letting kids listen to any music is terrible: a rock star said it’s all about sex. Music is the most persuasive thing (a hummed melody picked up in a room; Shakespeare’s statements; the Nazis’ use of it).
• Student asks about Boulay’s collection: lost; some Laval articles left by Father Anthony remain; a passage on Matthew “we played and you did not dance.”
• Plato and Aristotle: music educates the emotions. Aristotle’s definition of tragedy includes catharsis (purification, purgation) of pity and fear; comedy purges melancholy. Catharsis is originally medical (hence “purgatory”), then of the emotions, and Socrates’s dialogues are a catharsis of reason from a dominating mistake.
• Closing: the reply shows Thomas is not naive (see his commentary on Paul) that emotions do not obey like the hand; hence “childish vice” and Aristotle’s remark that upbringing makes a great deal of difference, “or rather all the difference.” Break.

His words #

• sensuality; parts of it are the irascible and concupiscible; English word doesn’t exactly fit
• “the Apostle”; Thomas’s name for Paul
• concupiscentium / irascentium; Damascene’s terms, Greek epithumia and thumos
• appetitus sensitivus; “sense desire,” name of act given to power; sensitivus = following on the senses
• estimative power; what we call instinct
• common sense / “central sense”; sensus communis, the sense that compares white and sweet
• cogitative power / particular reason; sees the singular under the universal
• natus est; short for aptum natum est, naturally apt
• mitigate; reason lessens, does not eliminate, anger or fear
• despotic rule vs. political and kingly (regal, paternal) rule; over those with nothing of their own vs. the free with something of their own
• servile vs. liberal knowledge; not for its own sake vs. for its own sake
• heroic (divine) virtue; above the human mode, like the gifts of the Holy Spirit; bestial vice, below human vice
• childish vice; Thomas’s name for intemperance [ed.: ASR “advice/device”]
• “blood and judgment”; Hamlet’s terms, glossed as emotion and reason
• catharsis; purification/purgation, medical then moral, of pity and fear

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 81, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, respondeo, replies 1–2)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet to Horatio (“not passion’s slave”), quoted from memory

Mentioned

• Augustine, De Trinitate XII (obj. 1)
• Paul, Romans 7 (obj. 2); Paul’s domestic instructions; “counts everything as loss”
• John Damascene (sed contra)
• Aristotle, De Anima III (common sense; higher power moves lower as sphere moves sphere)
• Aristotle, Politics I (two rules); Politics on music in education
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (experience; upbringing; book VII heroic virtue and bestial vice)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics (slave for master, free man for himself; wisdom the end)
• Aristotle, Poetics definition of tragedy (inferred; he names only “when Aristotle defines tragedy”)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II on intemperance as childish vice; his commendation and division of Scripture; commentary on St Paul
• Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (name garbled); Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies; Homer, Odyssey; Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Othello; Matthew (“we played and you did not dance”); John of the Cross; autobiography of Margaret Mary Alacoque; Oscar [Frankena?] “Towards an Evaluation of Music,” The Thomist (author’s surname not stated)

His questions #

• Do the irascible and concupiscible obey reason? Yes, to some extent, both reason (through the cogitative power under universal reason) and the will (through execution).
• Why are they said to obey reason more than understanding? Because applying universal to singular (“this is robbery, therefore wrong”) is a work of reason, not simple understanding.
• What does the estimative power mean? Instinct: the sheep sees the wolf as something to be fled, not by its colour or shape.
• Why doesn’t the sheep wait before fleeing, while a man does? No superior appetite in the animal; man awaits the command of the will.
• Should reason rule the emotions as a master rules a slave or as a father rules a son? As a father: for the good of the emotions, and they have something to say.
• How does reason rule my hand? Despotically; it does not resist at all — unlike “don’t get angry.”
• How reconcile the father-son rule with the saints’ violence on themselves? (student) Such things are above the human mode, heroic virtue, the level of the gifts.
• Does good music and fiction have a role in reason’s rule over the emotions? Yes, a paternal rather than despotic one; 18th-century music shows emotions subject to reason.
• Is recognising a flagrant sin on sight the sin of judging others? He doesn’t think so; it is not a firm judgment.