How We Know Our Habits Through Their Acts (Q.87, a.2): Faith, Charity, and the Principle 'Propter quod unumquodque tale, et illud magis'

Orientation #

He refers back to “that same distinction he made before” about the understanding knowing itself, “as has been said above about the mind in the first article” (prev. lecture). No mention of next time; the recording ends mid-sentence. The previous class treated q. 87, a. 1 (the soul knowing itself through its act, not its essence); the next treats a. 9 (whether the intellect knows its own act). Verified sources indicate about 3 minutes on a. 3 near the end, but the transcript as given does not reach a. 3.

The class, in order #

1. Thomas “knows how to articulate the question” (“many questions under each question”) #

Opening aside on method: each “question” of the Summa is really several little questions; Thomas’s skill is to articulate the question, making its parts distinct.

2. Objection 1: Augustine on faith seen in the heart (“that troublesome guy again, Augustine”) #

Point: the first objection argues that habits are known through themselves, not through acts.

• Augustine, De Trinitate XIII: faith is not seen in the heart the way another man’s soul is seen from his bodily movements; one holds it “by the most certain science”, and conscience cries it out.
• Berquist’s aside anticipating Thomas: one can know in the strict sense that one has faith, but not that one has charity; of charity only probable conjecture.
• Conclusion of the objection: habits are known through themselves, not through their acts.

3. Objections 2 and 3 (“the habits of the soul are already present”) #

• Obj. 2: material things outside the soul are known through likenesses present in the soul; habits are already present in the soul by their very nature; so they are known through their own essence, no likeness needed.
• Obj. 3: the principle propter quod unumquodque tale et illud magis (“on account of which each, that more”). His expansion: when the same belongs to two things, but to one of them because of the other, it belongs more to the cause.
  • Simple examples: sweet said of sugar and coffee, coffee because of sugar, so sugar sweeter; wet of water and dishcloth; salty of salt and French fries.
  • Philosophical applications: premises and conclusion both known, conclusion because of premises, so premises more known (“if the premises were not more known than the conclusion, you wouldn’t try to prove the conclusion through the premises”); end and means, medicine desired for health, so health more desired (“I’d be pretty crazy to desire medicine” more).
  • Aristotle, Metaphysics II (“second book of Wisdom”): true said of cause and effect, effect because of cause, so the cause more true; hence the first cause, God, most true. “Amazing, he saw that.”
• The objector: other things are known by the soul on account of the habit (the understandable forms), therefore the habits are more known. Berquist flags now that he misapplies the principle, as the reply will show.

4. Sed contra: acts before powers, so before habits (“habits are the beginnings or sources of acts”) #

• Habits, like powers, are beginnings (principles) of acts; De Anima II says acts and operations are prior in reason to abilities/powers; therefore for the same reason acts are prior to habits, and habits are known through their acts as powers are.
• Ties back to the principle already used: investigate the operation before the power, the object before the act.
• Example: how do you know a man has the habit of playing the piano? He sits down and plays. Speaking English likewise.

5. Respondeo: the habit as a middle, known through its act (“a middle between pure ability and pure act”) #

1. A habit is in a way a middle between pure ability [ed.: potency] and pure act.
2. Nothing is known except insofar as it is in act (said before).
3. Therefore insofar as the habit falls short of perfect act, it falls short of being knowable in itself, and must be known through its own act. Two knowledges of a habit (the same distinction as for the understanding itself):

• A vs. B: (A) perceiving that one has the habit, because one perceives oneself producing its proper act; the habit’s very presence causes the act in which it is immediately perceived. (B) inquiring into the nature and reason of the habit by “studious investigation” starting from its act.
• Example for (A): in Quebec they say you have not really learned French until you dream in French (he never did).
• Example for (B): I know I have a mind because of my thinking; to know its nature I must investigate what kind of power understands the universal or the immaterial (truth): is it a body? does quantity receive something universally?
• Descartes knew he had the ability to think, but did not know what thinking was as much as he thought.

6. Reply to obj. 1: faith perceived by the interior act (“no one knows himself to have faith”) #

• Faith is not known through exterior bodily motions (a man genuflecting may be in bad faith), but the one who has it perceives it through the interior act of his heart: one knows one has faith only by perceiving oneself to believe, i.e. the firmness of one’s assent to what natural reason cannot reason out (three persons in God).
• Anecdote: a teacher giving a course on the five ways gave a “fatherly talk” first: he believed in God’s existence more from what his mother told him than from the five ways; would not be so presumptuous as to say he could demonstrate it; knew he had faith because he could not otherwise explain the firmness of his assent without evidence of the kind one has for a right triangle.
• Charity is harder: a naturally friendly, sociable man cannot be sure whether his love of people is natural or supernatural.

7. Reply to obj. 2: present as that by which, not as object (“not as objects of understanding”) #

• Habits are present in our understanding not as objects, since the object of understanding in this life is the nature of a material thing, the what-it-is as sensed or imagined; but as that by which the understanding understands.
• Sign: if the object were not the what-it-is as sensed or imagined, interfering with the imagination (the brain) would not interfere with thinking.
• They can become objects, but then must be investigated through their acts, by discourse. Example: convinced from geometry that I understand universally what a triangle is, I reason that what understands universally is not the imagination, which pictures only singular triangles under the conditions of quantity.
• Digression on “beginning” (principium): Metaphysics V begins with the first meaning, the beginning of the desk, the curb of a property, the point of a line; then the foundation of a house; then the agent as beginning; the sense in which my reason is the beginning of my thinking is a much later sense, seen by likeness and difference from the first. College anecdote: “what do they mean by first principles?”, “principle is just a Latin word for beginning.”

8. Reply to obj. 3: the principle holds only within one order (“if it is understood in those things which are of one order”) #

Point: propter quod unumquodque tale is true of things in one order, one genus of cause; not across diverse orders.

• Same order: if health is on account of life, life is more desirable.
• Diverse orders: “health is on account of medicine” makes medicine an efficient cause (mover, producer), not a cause of health’s desirability; so medicine is not more desirable. Put in the same order (medicine as means to health) and health is clearly more desirable. Health causes medicine to be desirable; medicine causes health in another sense, as mover.
• Applied: among things both in the order of objects known, that on account of which another is known is more known, as premises than conclusions. But a habit is not in the order of objects insofar as it is a habit; we know things on account of it not as an object but as a disposition or form by which the knower knows; so the argument does not follow.
• Student question on the sugar and coffee (is sugar an exemplary cause?): his answer, both are in the same order, both sweet; the objection instead changes the order.
• Example: the habit of geometry is not what I know but that by which I know; the average person who knows geometry does not know what the habit of geometry is (Thomas would say: an order of understandable forms). Conclusions are known through postulates and axioms, and later theorems through earlier ones, not through knowing what the habit is.
• Same for the mind: I know geometry’s conclusions through my mind as an ability, not through knowing what my mind is as an object.
• Orders among objects: no order between knowing what a triangle is and what tragedy is (Aristotle’s definition); an order between square and cube, since one can know square without cube but not vice versa.
• Examples of using reason without knowing it as object: children at the trivium learning Euclid; a summer teaching neighbourhood children geometry under the trees (boys persisted, girls went in to make cookies); his own children home from kindergarten naming circle, triangle, square.

9. Immaterial senses known by likeness to the sensible (“pursue a line of thought”) #

• The senses of “beginning” move further from the first (point of line, table edge; where one happens to begin; foundation of house, keel of boat; the mover or maker, which is not in what it moves; the fifth sense, beginning in knowledge), yet a proportional likeness runs all the way: as the table begins here, geometry begins with definitions, axioms and postulates and goes down to the Pythagorean theorem and beyond.
• “Pursue a line of thought” goes back to the point where motion begins. Immaterial senses are understood by likeness to sensible ones, tied to the continuous, time, the common sensibles.
• “Act”: Metaphysics IX, the first meaning is motion, carried over to form, to operations, up to God as pure act; Quebec cinemas’ newsreel “Les actualités”.
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason as “the ability for large discourse, looking before and after”: discourse from the Latin for running, so reason is something like motion, going from one thing to another, though not the same. In my mind I can go to Mars now.
• Aside: the “canals” of Mars seen through the first telescopes, taken for civilization like Egyptian and Mesopotamian irrigation. “We better stop here.”

10. Digression: the principle, truth, and God alone wise (“That’s a wonderful principle, though”) #

• St Hilary of Poitiers, a pagan Greek philosopher who converted (Thomas quotes him most after Augustine): the occasion was opening the Bible and reading “I am who am”; a motive of credibility for a philosopher.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II: the order in being and the order in truth is the same; by this principle the cause is more true than the effect. Had Aristotle read “I am who am” and “I am the way, the truth”, he would have seen the connection: he who is, is truth itself.
• The Greek philosophers agree that God alone, or only God in the full sense, is wise; so partaking of God’s wisdom is superior to natural wisdom; hence Thomas in ST I q.1 and the prologue to the Sentences calls theology wisdom in a higher sense than metaphysics.
• Plato, Laws, against Protagoras: God, not man, is the measure of all things (used by Boethius, Consolation); Heraclitus: as child to man, so man to God; as ape to man, so man to God (“Homo sapiens”, the wise ape, is an ape compared to God); Pythagoras coining “philosopher”: “don’t call me wise; God alone is wise”, call me a lover of wisdom; the same humility in Empedocles (“not more than mortal wisdom is capable of”).
• That humility was lost in the moderns as they moved from Christianity: Hegel puts philosophy above theology (theology a kind of poetry); Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, argues that this is a poetic way of saying man is God, with weak arguments; then Marx and Engels. “Best you can say for them is they’re not lukewarm.”
• Sartre: atheistic not in the sense of exhausting ourselves proving God does not exist, but in that it makes no difference whether he exists; this “seems to be like will”.
• Marx’s preface to his doctoral thesis takes Prometheus as symbol (“in sooth, I hate all the gods”, from Aeschylus), the “first martyr of philosophy”, who is not in doubt about Zeus but revolted: voluntaristic, “I will not serve”. Prometheus Books, the rationalist publisher, sends him unsolicited books; Shelley also took Prometheus, “very perverse”.

11. Student asks him to restate the principle; more examples (“could you go back”) #

Point: Aristotle’s terse form in the Posterior Analytics, “on account of which each, that more”, expanded again: when the same belongs to two things, but to one because of the other, it belongs more to the cause.

• Love: if I love your children because I love you, I love the parent more. Charity: love neighbour because of God, so God more.
• Logic: premises more known than conclusion, otherwise you would not use them to prove it; they would be “equally unknown”.
• Ethics: the end more desirable than the means.
• Natural philosophy, the mover: who moves the chalk, me or the eraser? the eraser only because moved by me, so I am more the mover. Pushing a man off a cliff with a pole: don’t chop up the pole, I am more responsible. Train: each wagon pulls the one behind only because moved by the engine, so the engine is more the mover.
• “You can apply it in every science… In logic, when you talk about” — recording ends here.

His words #

• articulate the question: what Thomas does under each numbered question of the Summa.
• propter quod unumquodque tale et illud magis: “on account of which each, that more”; his expansion, when the same belongs to two things but to one because of the other, it belongs more to the cause.
• Wisdom, second/fifth/ninth book of: [ed.: Metaphysics II, V, IX].
• beginnings or sources of acts: [ed.: principia].
• ability, pure ability: [ed.: potency].
• studious investigation: the second knowledge of a habit, of its nature, starting from its act.
• the what it is as something sensed or imagined: the object of the understanding in this life [ed.: quiddity of a material thing].
• that by which the understanding understands vs. object of understanding: how a habit is present in the mind.
• beginning (principium): first meaning the beginning of the desk / point of a line; later senses by proportional likeness.
• one order / diverse orders: the condition for the principle’s truth; e.g. order of desirable vs. order of efficient cause.
• order of understandable forms: Thomas’s account of what a habit such as geometry is.
• large discourse, looking before and after: Shakespeare’s definition of reason; discourse from Latin “running”.
• Les actualités: Quebec cinema newsreel, illustrating “act” as what is going on.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 87, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1-3; translated from the Latin).
• Augustine, De Trinitate XIII (as quoted in obj. 1).
• Aristotle, De Anima II (as cited in the sed contra: acts prior to powers).
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (the principle “on account of which each, that more”).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II (cause more true than effect; order of being and truth the same).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (the senses of “beginning”), Metaphysics IX (first meaning of “act” is motion).
• Verified sources list about 3 minutes on q. 87, a. 3 and readings from the handouts “The First Definition of Reason” p. 21 and “Note for Readings Two through Four” p. 1; the transcript does not explicitly show these being read (the Shakespeare definition of reason belongs to the first).

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, and prologue to the commentary on the Sentences of Lombard (theology as higher wisdom).
• Plato, Laws (God the measure); Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy; Heraclitus; Pythagoras; Empedocles.
• Exodus “I am who am”; John “I am the way, the truth” (inferred loci not stated).
• Hilary of Poitiers (his book on his conversion, unnamed).
• Hegel; Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity; Marx, preface to his doctoral thesis; Engels; Sartre; Aeschylus, Prometheus; Shelley; Descartes.
• Euclid (taught at the trivium); Shakespeare (definition of reason).

His questions #

• If sweet is said of sugar and my coffee, of my coffee because of the sugar, which is sweeter? The sugar (likewise water wetter than the dishcloth, salt saltier than the fries).
• If the conclusion is known because of the premises, which is more known to us? The premises; otherwise you would not prove the conclusion through them.
• If I desire medicine for the sake of health, which do I desire more? Health.
• How do you know the guy’s got the habit of playing the piano? He sits down and plays: the habit is known through its act.
• Is it a body that understands what truth is? Does quantity receive something universally? Left open as the kind of question a studious investigation from the act must answer.
• Does it follow that medicine is more desirable than health? No; medicine causes health as mover, health causes medicine to be desirable: two orders.
• Is it by knowing what the habit of geometry is that I know the theorems? No; they are known through the postulates, axioms and earlier theorems.
• Do I know the conclusions of geometry through knowing what my mind is as an object? No; through my mind as an ability to know.
• If I love your children because I love you, whom do I love more? If you love your neighbour because of God? The parent; God.
• Who is moving that piece of chalk, me or the eraser? You are more the mover; the eraser moves it only because moved by you.