The Virtues of Reason and the Moral Virtues in Aristotle and Thomas

Orientation #

He refers back to “our study of love and friendship” (prev. lecture) for the distinction between love as an emotion and love as an act of the will, and to a passage near the end of Book I of the Ethics on virtue as a praiseworthy quality and on preferring friends to truth being impious. He says that “eventually” the class will look at the proemium of the Ethics. The previous class traced the definitions of good and better to happiness and virtue and surveyed the structure of the Ethics; the next works out the definition of moral virtue and the mean.

The class, in order #

1. Thomas’s division in the Prima Secundae (“what’s the reason’s own act”) #

The point: great minds divide the same thing in more than one way; Thomas explains Aristotle’s division in commenting Book VI but uses another in the Prima Secundae, which is easier at first.

• Reason’s own act is twofold: to know, and to direct us in what we do or make. So the virtues of reason perfect either the speculative intellect (“looking reason”) or practical reason.
• Practical reason subdivided by Aristotle’s distinction between doing and making (making goes to a product): right reason about doing = prudentia / Greek phronesis / English foresight (“the word the Western Church and other people who know how to write English would use”; some say “practical wisdom”); about making = art.
• There are two virtues here but many arts (cooking, carpentry) and several kinds of foresight, which Thomas distinguishes in the Secunda Secundae: the foresight of the individual man (Socrates directing the life of Socrates), of the father of a family, of a king, of a general.
• Plumber and cook: the man with the art does the job much better than you.

2. The three virtues of looking reason (“natural understanding, reasoned-out understanding”) #

The point: Thomas distinguishes three, and wisdom in a way combines something of the other two.

• Natural understanding: what we understand without reasoning it out; Greek nous, Latin intellectus. He adds “natural” because of his name for the second.
• Reasoned-out understanding (or knowledge): scientia / episteme.
• Wisdom: sophists deny things naturally understood (“the whole is more than a part”) with arguments the average Joe can’t see his way out of—he himself gives students a specious argument against it and they are convinced. So it is the wise man’s duty to refute arguments against the axioms, and, since all the key words of the axioms are equivocal, to see the different meanings of whole and part. Reason given “in the fourth book of wisdom.”
• Wisdom could be considered a form of reasoned-out understanding (Aristotle sometimes calls it that), since that is perfected by knowing the cause; but wisdom knows the first cause, God, so it gets a new name. It is “the head of all understanding”: it perfects both the others, knowing the cause of the cause and the axioms better than natural understanding knows them.
• Beginning, middle, end: natural understanding the beginning; reasoned-out understanding (geometry, arithmetic, natural philosophy…) the middle; wisdom the culmination.
• Note the method: five divided into two, subdivided into two and three—“the rule of two or three.”
• Aside: on writing unclearly on the board, and Niels Bohr making pictures in his mind and forgetting to say them to the audience.

3. Why this division makes sense: eyes and ears (“why do you have eyes”) #

The point: Thomas’s division brings out the connection between virtue and the thing’s own act, and the same twofold purpose shows in the senses.

• Eyes: the view over the valley from Assisi, seen just to see it (you make or do nothing with it); and eyes to direct us in walking and making dinner.
• Ears: Handel’s Messiah for the sake of hearing; and “Watch out!”, or the man at the filling station giving directions—not because he is Pavarotti but because he directs you.
• So reason’s act is to understand wonderful things and to direct us in our actions.

4. Aristotle’s division: about beginnings vs. from beginnings (“divide these three against these two”) #

The point: Aristotle divides the two (natural understanding, wisdom) against the three (reasoned-out understanding, foresight, art): the two are about beginnings, the three about what is from the beginnings—and this corresponds to less and more known to us.

• Less known: people have the vaguest notion of wisdom, think it a heap of knowledge (“if my heap is bigger than yours, I’m wiser”); Heraclitus: wisdom is one thing, to know the mind that steers all things. Moderns simply deny natural understanding: everything is a hypothesis tested by consequences.
• More known: everybody knows the art of cooking exists (cookbooks in the Rome airport, Borders: Thai, Chinese, French, Italian with scenes), carpentry, auto mechanics; the brother-in-law with a little high-school carpentry criticising his basement work; everybody knows geometry exists; everybody admires the foresight of Churchill, Washington, Pericles, or generals like Napoleon.
• So Aristotle takes up the more obvious three first and the two last. “That’s not opposed to Thomas, but it’s a little different thing.”

5. The first things are less known: defined by negation (“a statement known not through other statements”) #

The point: natural understanding is about the beginnings of our knowledge (whole more than part; nothing before or after itself; something can’t both be and not be; nothing divided from itself), wisdom about the beginnings of all things, the first causes; and the fact that we define the first things by negation shows they are in a way less known.

• A conclusion is a statement known through other statements; a beginning is defined as a statement known not through other statements—negating the condition of the conclusion. “Known through themselves” is an affirmative but misleading way of saying what is negative in meaning.
• Parallel: the good desired “for its own sake” means desired but not for the sake of anything else. Medicine for health, health for happiness; happiness not for the sake of anything—you can’t desire happiness for the sake of happiness, since your desiring it would then cause your desiring it.
• Likewise Thomas defines the good (“what all want”) by what comes after it, its effect: it arouses desire.
• You are aware of the effort of learning geometry, but “when did you learn that a whole is more than a part?"—it seems you always knew it; hence some thought we are born knowing these. If not, we come to know them so naturally we are unaware of how.
• Native language vs. French: you can point to your French teacher, but not to your teacher of English, picked up “by osmosis” from mother, father, siblings.
• His eyes: right eye reads but blurs the far end of the table, left eye sees the far end clearly but cannot read—strange to see the distant better than the near, like the mind with what is closest to it.
• Very few axioms are ever identified: the whole/part example, Aristotle’s axioms about being and non-being, Euclid’s short list; but “nothing is the beginning of itself” and the like are axioms not recognised as such.
• Asides: kids’ Latin answer “the greatest accomplishment of the Romans: they spoke Latin”; the frustrated French student.

6. Moral virtues: Thomas’s order vs. Aristotle’s order (“proceeding in contrary directions”) #

The point: the Secunda Secundae divides moral virtues by the four cardinal virtues (faith, hope, charity first; then prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance; other virtues by likeness); Aristotle takes courage and moderation (Book III), then lesser virtues, justice last (Book V), foresight in Book VI—the order reversed.

• Student’s suggestion: Aristotle goes from the sense appetites to the will to the intellect. He does not reject it but adds: the Secunda Secundae is theology, where all things are considered in comparison to God.
• Which cardinal virtue is least like God? Temperance—we don’t even metaphorically call God chaste or sober; we do metaphorically call him strong; he has understanding and will, so foresight without our defects, and justice is much said of God. Hence faith, hope, charity (God their object) first, prudence and justice (like God’s intellect and will), then fortitude, then temperance.
• Generalised from the beginning of Summa Contra Gentiles Book II: theology’s order is contrary to philosophy’s. Philosophy reasons from creatures known through the senses to God, who is the last thing known—logic, geometry, arithmetic, natural philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, wisdom, and in the last part of wisdom, God. Theology, based on faith, takes God’s own way of knowing: God first, other things in comparison to him.
• “You’ve got to forget that order and not mix it up with the order in philosophy.”

7. Why Aristotle begins with courage (“the Medal of Honor”) #

The point: courage is the moral virtue most known to us, as the most praised.

• End of Book I calls virtue a praiseworthy, honorable quality; the Medal of Honor is given for courage—never for a lifetime of moderate eating or paying what you owe, but for “one glorious afternoon on the battlefield.”
• The greatest work of Greek fiction, the Iliad, celebrates it.
• Etymology: Greek arete related to Ares; Latin virtus to vir; the closest native English word is “manhood”—the soldier’s virtue. “Are you a man or a mouse?” is about courage, not temperance; Shakespeare’s “manhood” usually means courage, sometimes stretched to cover any human virtue—a particular virtue’s name used for the whole.
• Plato’s Laches: Socrates and an old general on what courage is.

8. Why courage and moderation go together (“concerned with our what body”) #

The point: both are about strong emotions and about the body, so they are more known than the virtue of the will.

• Courage: fear and boldness; moderation: desire for bodily pleasure (food, drink, sex). Justice: the will.
• From the love and friendship study (prev. lecture): love names an emotion or an act of the will (love of God, of wisdom, of justice vs. love of this music, this woman); college students on day one all say love is an emotion—the emotion is more known, and the distinction hard to see. So virtues of the strongest emotions (fear of death, bodily pleasure) are more known than the virtue of the will.
• Second bond: courage is about what threatens the body’s survival (bullet, fire, shark); moderation about what preserves the body and species and pleases it.

9. The Book IV virtues: exterior goods and evils (“liberality or generosity”) #

The point: after the two virtues about our own body come about eight lesser virtues; the first five concern exterior goods and evils. (He says “about eight”; his list has eight, matching.)

• Liberality/generosity: money and things measured by money, an act all can have; munificence: large sums—the man at Pompeii who married a countess and set up hospitals and schools. Connection to the body: money buys food and house; “cost you an arm and a leg”, a big down payment feels like losing a limb—echoing courage.
• Magnanimity (great honors) and philotimia, “love of honor” (small honors), differ as munificence and liberality do; Aristotle takes liberality before munificence but magnanimity before philotimia, “very subtle reasons” he won’t explain. Achilles and Agamemnon magnanimous; West Point’s “Duty, honor, country” says nothing about money, whereas the MBA is more concerned with money; some think honor the end of civil life; Churchill, de Gaulle, Washington, MacArthur.
• Mildness (not “meekness”): the emotion of anger, aroused by insult, the opposite of honor—an exterior evil. Achilles lacks it.
• Emotions mapped: courage fear/boldness; moderation desire; liberality somewhat; the honor virtues hope and despair; mildness anger.
• Aside: erasing to make room—“it’s because there’s no foresight on the board.”

10. The three social virtues, about doings (“friendliness, truthfulness, eutrapelia”) #

The point: approaching justice, the virtues concern doing rather than emotion.

• Friendliness, not friendship: being agreeable to people who aren’t your friends strictly—airplane banter getting the window passenger out; jump-starting or pushing a stranger’s car, hoping he’d do the same. Aristotle regards it as very important.
• Truthfulness (veracity, veritas): not the truth of geometry but showing yourself in words and deeds as you are, neither boastful nor falsely humble; Teresa of Avila, “humility is the truth.”
• Student asks whether foresight fits here: no, that is a virtue of reason, Book VI.
• Eutrapelia, “easily turning”: turning what is said into something amusing—exercised on the two-hour bus rides; Shakespeare’s Byron in Love’s Labour’s Lost described with those words, “always with becoming mirth.” Jokes right or wrong by time, subject, company, and one’s position: Bishop Bradley’s “four engines and three bishops”; John Paul II asking President Hagan of Assumption College, “Do you tell Polish jokes at your school?… You don’t tell them around here very much either.” English “sense of humor”—does it name a virtue? maybe.
• Earlier virtues were about emotions; liberality involves attachment to goods, like attachment to one’s body—hence “a man of substance,” though his money isn’t his substance. Justice is about whether you did it right, not whether you were sad or joyful paying what you owe.
• Aside: the suitor who told the father “we’ll eat on crates” and drove him from the room.

11. Why humility is not among Aristotle’s virtues (“virtues whereby one lives well in the city”) #

The point: Thomas, asking whether humility is a virtue, meets the objection that Aristotle omits it, and replies that the Ethics treats the virtues for living well in the city.

• All the listed virtues are necessary to the city: no city without justice, no defence without courage, trouble from drink and adultery, need for munificence, liberality, friendliness, humor, showing oneself as one is.
• Humility is primarily putting oneself under God, and under others (abbot, father) as representing God—so it belongs to theology. Aristotle touches it when pursuing truth: men deceived by pride (boastfulness its first species), and in Book I preferring friends to truth is “impious”—Thomas: because opposed to God, who is truth itself.
• Ethics is oriented to political philosophy; the Ethics is “the elements of political philosophy,” to be seen at the proemium.

His words #

• looking reason; the speculative intellect “to speak English” [ed.: speculative reason]
• foresight; right reason about doing, prudentia / phronesis [ed.: prudence]
• art; right reason about making, techne / ars
• natural understanding; what we understand without reasoning it out, nous / intellectus
• reasoned-out understanding (knowledge); scientia / episteme [ed.: science]
• wisdom; knowledge of the first cause, God; “the head of all understanding”
• the rule of two or three; dividing into two or three members
• about beginnings vs. from beginnings; Aristotle’s basis for dividing the five
• beginning; a statement known not through other statements
• moderation; his word for temperance; courage for fortitude
• munificence; liberality with large sums [ed.: magnificence]
• philotimia; love of honor, about small honors
• mildness; virtue about anger (not “meekness”)
• friendliness; not friendship
• truthfulness / veracity; showing oneself as one is
• eutrapelia; “easily turning”, the virtue of appropriate jokes
• manhood; nearest English to virtus

Texts #

Read in class

• None read verbatim; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Books II–VI structure discussed; Book I end on virtue as praiseworthy and on impiety of preferring friends to truth (recalled) Mentioned
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae (division of intellectual virtues); Secunda Secundae (kinds of foresight; cardinal virtues; humility, “is humility a virtue”)
• Thomas, Commentary on Nicomachean Ethics Book VI
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles Book II, beginning
• “the fourth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IV (inferred)]
• Heraclitus on wisdom; Euclid’s axioms; Plato, Laches; Homer, Iliad; Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost (Byron); Teresa of Avila

His questions #

• What is reason’s own act? Twofold: to understand, and to direct us in what we do or make.
• Is there some other way of dividing these five, in three and two, that illuminates them? Aristotle’s: natural understanding and wisdom are about beginnings; the other three about what is from the beginnings—less and more known to us.
• When did you learn that a whole is more than a part? It seems you always knew it; we come to know such things unaware of how.
• Can you desire happiness for the sake of happiness? No—your desiring it would cause your desiring it; “for its own sake” means not for the sake of anything else.
• How does Thomas divide the moral virtues in the Secunda Secundae? By the four cardinal virtues, other virtues by likeness to them.
• Two greatest minds proceeding in contrary directions—how do you explain that? Theology considers all in comparison to God (temperance least like God, last); philosophy starts from what is most known through the senses.
• Why does Aristotle begin with courage? Most known to us as most praised: Medal of Honor, the Iliad, “manhood.”
• What do courage and moderation have in common? Both about strong emotions (fear/boldness, bodily desire) and both about the body’s survival and preservation.
• Which of the cardinal virtues is least like God? Temperance.
• Why is humility not among Aristotle’s virtues? The Ethics treats the virtues for life in the city; humility puts oneself under God, so belongs to theology.