Free Choice and the Will (Summa I, Q. 83, aa. 3–4) and an Outline of How the Soul Knows (QQ. 84–89)

Orientation #

He says the powers of the soul (qq. 77-83) are “what we just finished today” and that next time they will “try to do the first two articles at least” of q. 84; there is no class next week or Thanksgiving week. Verified sources place the class in ST I, q. 83, aa. 3-4 and the proemia of qq. 75 and 84 (q. 19 is also reported matched, but the transcript does not treat it). The previous class treated the fifth objection on dispositions and q. 83 a. 2 (free will a power, not a habit); the next takes up q. 84 a. 1.

The class, in order #

1. Q. 83 a. 3: objections and sed contra (“free judgment is a knowing power”) #

The point: whether liberum arbitrium (“free judgment”) is a desiring or a knowing power.

• Obj. 1: Damascene: free judgment follows at once upon the rational; reason is a knowing power.
• Obj. 2: the very name: arbitrium and iudicium are two Latin words for judgment, and to judge is an act of a knowing power.
  • Aside on the definition of judgment: to separate the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge; in geometry you go back to axioms or postulates, but ultimately to the senses. Hence we say “that makes sense” / “nonsense”, and “a man of good sense” means a man of good judgment, because sense is the beginning of our knowledge.
• Obj. 3: choice especially pertains to free judgment, but choice implies a comparison (collatio) of one to another, which is proper to a knowing power.
• Sed contra: Aristotle, Ethics III: choice is the desire of what is in our power; desire is an act of the appetitive power; liberum arbitrium is that by which we choose.

2. Response: choice is the proper act, and choice is chiefly desire (“desiring understanding or understanding desire”) #

The point: the nature of free judgment must be taken from choice, and choice belongs chiefly to appetite.

1. Choice is proper to free judgment: we are said to have it because we can accept one thing while refusing another, which is to choose.
2. Choice has something from both sides: from the knowing power, counsel, by which one judges what is to be preferred; from the appetite, the acceptance by desire of what counsel judged.
3. Aristotle himself, Ethics VI, left it in doubt (sub dubio): choice is either “desiring understanding or understanding desire”; but in Ethics III he inclines to appetite, calling choice a “counselable desire” — a desire that results from taking counsel.
4. The reason: choice’s own object is what is toward the end, the means, and as such it has the definition of the useful good; the good as such is the object of desire.
5. Therefore choice is chiefly an act of appetite, and free judgment is the appetitive power. He adds: the end is the primary object of the will, since end and good are the same, so the power that desires the end desires the means too. “There’s still a problem with the name” (deferred to the reply to obj. 2).

• Hamlet to Horatio (“since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, and could… distinguish”): the distinguishing is the comparison; Hamlet saw Horatio was not passion’s slave where other men are slaves of one passion or another, and so chose him as friend — the one he asks to watch the king during the play within the play.

3. Replies 1-3: the name, and the will’s likeness of discourse (“don’t fight it”) #

• Ad 1: appetitive powers follow the apprehensive (“grasping”) powers; so Damascene is right that free judgment is found in those who have reason, and this is not against its being appetitive.
• Ad 2: judgment is the conclusion and determination of counsel; counsel is determined first by reason’s sentence, secondly by the acceptance of desire; Ethics III: judging from taking counsel, we then desire according to counsel. So choice itself is called a certain judgment, whence the name “free judgment”. He finds this “a little stretched” for English — perhaps a Latin idiom. His French teacher on idioms: “Don’t fight it, just accept it.”
  • Student asks whether arbitrium and iudicium are simply synonyms. His answer via “learn by heart”: there “heart” means memory (something within, as in “the heart of the matter”), which would sound strange in another language; likewise “judgment” here names the will’s acceptance of what reason has judged, not the act of reason. Take liberum arbitrium as referring to choice.
  • Aside: our ability to choose is connected with our judgment being variable, since we can apply whichever universal we want — e.g. Ginsburg at her nomination applying “women should be equal with men” to abortion; others, “they’ll do it anyway, so make it safe.” “The will can take any way that something is good and take it as being good.”
• Ad 3: the collatio in the name of choice belongs to the preceding counsel, which is of reason; appetite is not collativus, but insofar as it is moved by a knowing power that brings things together (conferente) it has a certain likeness of collation, choosing one thing before another.
  • Headache example: I want to be rid of the headache, so I want to take aspirin, so I want to go to the drugstore — a likeness of discourse in the will because reason sees the connection.
  • Back to Hamlet: distinguishing is reason’s act, but presupposed to the will’s; the distinction reason sees between Horatio and other men is behind the will’s choice — the will “acquiesces in the distinction that reason sees.”

4. Q. 83 a. 4: objections and sed contra (“another power from the will”) #

The point: whether free judgment is a power other than the will.

• Obj. 1: Damascene, Orthodox Faith II: thelesis is other than boulesis — Latinized as voluntas (will regarding the end) and boulesis (from boule, counsel: will about one thing in comparison to another, i.e. choice). He suspects voluntas there names the act rather than the power.
• Obj. 2: powers are known by acts; choice, the act of free judgment, is other than willing (Ethics III: willing is of the end, choice of what is for the end).
• Obj. 3: on the intellect’s side there are two powers, agent (acting upon) and possible (undergoing); so the intellectual appetite should also have another power besides the will, and this can only be free judgment.
• Sed contra: Damascene, bk. III: liberum arbitrium is nothing other than the will.

5. Digression on “grasping” (“more where it loves than where it animates”) #

The point: Thomas’s word for the knowing powers, “grasping” (apprehensive), brings out that the thing known is in the knower; love, by contrast, is more in the thing loved.

• “I left my heart in San Francisco”; Christ: where your treasure is, there your heart shall be; Augustine: the soul is more ubi amat quam ubi animat — more where it loves than where it animates. Love is more in the beloved than the beloved in the lover (though that too is true in some way); knowing is the reverse, as what I grasp with my hand is contained in my hand.
• “Grasping” would sound like a vice for the will (grasping after material goods) but names the perfection of knowing.
• Some distinguish grasping and judging; judging presupposes grasping. Hence his complaint about modern philosophers: with Heidegger’s “being” you spend so long grasping what he means that little time is left to judge whether it is true — the colleague at St. Mary’s College still trying to figure out Heidegger’s “being” three years later. Thales’ “water is the beginning of all things” may or may not be true, but at least you know what he’s saying and can examine it.

6. Response and replies: understanding : reason :: will : free judgment (“the same power to rest and to move”) #

The point: will and free judgment are one power, as understanding and reason are one.

1. Appetitive powers are necessarily proportioned to apprehensive powers; as on the knowing side there are understanding and reason, so on the appetitive side there are voluntas and liberum arbitrium.
2. This is clear from objects and acts. Intelligere implies a simple taking of something; properly the principles are understood, known of themselves without a putting together of statements — Aristotle’s nous, Latin intellectus, English “understanding” (he says “natural understanding”), e.g. the whole is more than its part. To reason is to arrive from knowing one thing to knowledge of another; properly we reason about conclusions. (Aristotle defines reason as discursive.)
3. Likewise velle implies simple desire; willing is of the end, desired for its own sake. To choose is to desire something for the sake of getting something else; properly it is of the means.
4. As principle is to conclusion (we assent to the conclusion on account of the principles), so the end is to the things for the end — “a very common proportion that Aristotle uses.” Geometry example: from the whole being larger than the part we come to know that if these angles are equal these sides are equal; so from desiring the end we come to desire suitable means.
5. Hence as understanding is to reason, so willing is to liberum arbitrium. It was shown above that it belongs to the same power to understand and to reason, as to the same power to rest and to move — ancient physics: the heavy body goes down and then rests; “understand” has “standing” in it, like rest; to reason is like to move.
6. Therefore to will and to choose belong to the same power; will and free judgment are not two powers but one — two names for two acts, as with understanding and reason.

• Ad 1: thelesis and boulesis differ by diversity of acts, not of powers. The power and its simple act share a name (will/willing), as understanding names both power and act.
• Ad 2: election and voluntas taken as ipsum velle are diverse acts (this is how Aristotle takes voluntas when distinguishing it from election), but they belong to the same power, as understanding and reasoning do; voluntas can also name the power, which has both acts.
• Ad 3: the intellect is compared to the will as a mover, so no agent/possible distinction is needed in the will; the two intellects are needed for our understanding, but the form is one mover of the will. “That was simple enough.”

7. Proemium to q. 75: where we are in the treatise (“man, who is composed from the spiritual and the corporeal”) #

The point: locating q. 84 within the treatise on man.

• After the spiritual creature (angels) and the corporeal creature, man, composed of both — the order of the Psalms of praise (angels, then beasts and such, last men; the canticle of the three young men; Ps. 147 or so) and of Genesis 2 read with Augustine. Philosophers call man a microcosm; the Arabs, on the horizon between the material and immaterial worlds.
• This is a theological order: in philosophy you study man and the soul before the angels, which is why this course, a follow-up to the philosophical study of the soul, skips the angels.
• Two parts: the nature of man (through q. 89) and his production (from q. 90, skipped). The theologian considers man’s nature on the part of the soul, the body only in its relation to the soul — so the title de homine is really more de anima, resembling Aristotle’s treatment of the soul almost in separation from the body.
• Following Dionysius, Angelic Hierarchy ch. 11, three things in spiritual substances: essence, power (virtus), operation — qq. 75-76, 77-83, 84-89. He warns one can’t understand nature without powers, or powers without acts; the later parts give the details.

8. Proemium to q. 84: which acts, and the divisions (“by what it knows them”) #

The point: theology treats in particular only the acts of the intellectual and appetitive powers, and of these only the intellectual here.

• Why those and not digestion or walking? Student: because not connected to the body. He: theology considers everything in reference to God, and only intellect and will can have God as object; also these are the subject of the human virtues — as in Aristotle’s ethics all virtues are in reason (intellectual virtues), in the irascible appetite (courage, mildness), in the concupiscible (temperance, “maybe intrepidity”), or in the will (justice).
• Acts of the appetitive powers pertain to moral science, treated in the second part (moral theology). Thomas will be more complete than Aristotle on the intellectual acts.
• Division: how the soul understands joined to the body (qq. 84-88) vs. separated (q. 89) — Aristotle doesn’t treat the second in the De Anima; its place would be wisdom (metaphysics), but theology has no such split.
• Joined to the body: bodily things below it (84-86); itself and what is in it (87); immaterial substances above it (88).
• Bodily things: by what it knows them (84); in what way and order (85); what it knows in them (86).

9. Preview of the articles, qq. 84-89 (“whether the soul knows bodies through the understanding”) #

The point: a run through the article titles “so you get a sense of what he’s doing.”

• Q. 84 (eight): knows bodies through understanding; through its own nature or through species; species innate (Plato, “and some moderns”); flowing in from separated forms (Plato) or from the angels (Avicenna); sees all in the eternal reasons — prompted by Augustine, whom some misread as if we see things in God himself; acquires intelligible knowledge from sense — as in the “Proemium to Wisdom”: sense, memory, experience, then the universal separated out; can understand without turning to phantasms — Aristotle: even knowing what a triangle is, I imagine one to consider it; whether judgment is impeded by impediment in the sensitive powers — not being able to imagine a dodecahedron doesn’t stop you understanding it, but there are more serious injuries.
• Q. 85 (eight): abstracting from phantasms; abstracted species as what is understood or that by which (Thomas: by which); the more universal known first; many things at once; composing and dividing (affirmative and negative statements); whether it can err (“this is for you, brother”); whether one understands the same thing better than another; the indivisible known before the divisible — geometry knows the indivisible by negation: surface (no depth), line (no width or depth), point (none, or “what has no parts”), because sense knows composed things.
• Q. 86: singulars — Boethius: singular when sensed, universal when understood (this glass vs. “a glass”); infinites; contingents; the future.
• Q. 87: knows itself through its own nature (the angel’s way, not ours in this life); habits in it (how do you know you have geometry?); its own act (I know that I know what a triangle is); the act of the will.
• Q. 88: knows immaterial substances in themselves (no); through material things (yes — as the Church says of God); whether God is first known by us (no; “a Franciscan” today says so, “a strange position”).
• Q. 89: can the separated soul understand (in a different way); separated substances — his teacher Kasurik: on first seeing your guardian angel you’d say “this is God”; all natural things; singulars (a problem without senses); whether the habit of science acquired here remains and can be used; local distance (the soul is not in place); what is done here. The beatific vision is treated elsewhere. Student joke: “Touched by an Angel.”

10. Closing review and asides (“How is this whole treatise divided”) #

He quizzes the class with books closed: treatise into two (nature / production); first part into three (Dionysius); acts into two (this life / separated); this life into three (below / itself / above); the first of these into three (by what / how and order / what).

• Aside: reading his divisions makes one more orderly in one’s own writing; pseudo-Thomas’s treatise on the Eucharist (about thirty-two conferences; author unknown, perhaps Thomas of Anglia; in the Vivès “blue” edition and the Opera Omnia CD) divides “take and eat… this is my body… do this in memory of me” into food, sacrifice, memorial. He is preparing a text of it.
• Scheduling: no class next week or Thanksgiving; a grandchild’s baptism announcement (Lucy Marie).

His words #

• free judgment: his rendering of liberum arbitrium; also “free choice”, “the ability to choose”.
• judgment: to separate the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge.
• counsel: reason’s judging what is to be preferred, prior to choice.
• counselable desire: his rendering of Aristotle’s phrase for choice, a desire resulting from counsel.
• collatio: bringing together, comparison of one to another; appetite is not collativus but has a likeness of collation.
• grasping powers: his rendering of apprehensive/knowing powers; brings out that the known is in the knower.
• ubi amat quam ubi animat: Augustine, the soul is more where it loves than where it animates.
• thelesis / boulesis: Damascene’s two Greek words, Latinized voluntas / liberum arbitrium.
• natural understanding: his name for intellectus / nous, the power knowing principles.
• ipsum velle: willing itself, the simple act of the will regarding the end.
• agent and possible: the acting-upon and undergoing intellects.
• proemium: the introductory division of a question or part.
• virtus: power, ability (Dionysius’s second of essence, power, operation).
• Proemium to Wisdom: his name for the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics [ed.: Metaphysics I.1].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 83, a. 3 (whole article) and a. 4 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 75, proemium; q. 84, proemium; article titles of qq. 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89
• Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet to Horatio (“since my dear soul was mistress of her choice”) (inferred: III.ii)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III (choice as desire of what is in our power; counselable desire) and VI (choice as desiring understanding or understanding desire)
• John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa II (thelesis/boulesis) and III (liberum arbitrium is the will)
• Dionysius, Angelic Hierarchy ch. 11
• Augustine (ubi amat; eternal reasons; reading of Genesis 2)
• Psalms of praise (canticle of the three young men; “Psalm 147 or so”)
• Aristotle, De Anima; Metaphysics I (“Proemium to Wisdom”); Boethius on singular and universal; Avicenna; Plato
• Pseudo-Thomas, treatise on the Eucharist (Vivès edition)

His questions #

• What’s the definition of judgment? To separate the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge.
• Is distinction more the act of reason than of the will? Yes, but reason’s act is presupposed to the will’s; the will acquiesces in the distinction reason sees.
• Are arbitrium and iudicium just synonyms? (student) Take liberum arbitrium as naming choice — the will’s acceptance of reason’s judgment — an idiom like “by heart” for memory.
• Why does love seem more in the thing loved, while the known is in the knower? Grasping brings out that knowing contains the known; love is where it loves (Augustine).
• Just as understanding is to reason, so willing is to what? To liberum arbitrium; hence one power, two acts.
• Why consider only the acts of the intellectual and appetitive powers? Only they have God as object, and they are the subjects of the virtues.
• How is this whole treatise on man divided, into two or three? Two: nature (to q. 89) and production (q. 90); the first into three by Dionysius’s essence, power, operation.
• How are qq. 84-89 divided? Two: this life (84-88) and separated (89); this life into below (84-86), itself (87), above (88); 84-86 into by what, how and in what order, what.