Reason and Will as Natures: Thomas's Two Solutions and the Man/Animal Analogy

Orientation #

He opens with “the second solution” and “the second reading here”, i.e. the solution proposed last time that reason and will are themselves natures, in the reading of Aristotle’s division of natural against rational abilities (prev. lecture). He closes by promising to “go a little bit into the distinction of name equivocal by reason” with easier examples, deferred to next time. The verified-source matching places this class “probably” between Aquinas’s commentary on Metaphysics V lectio 3 and Metaphysics VI lectio 4; the transcript itself names only the texts below. The previous class proposed a broader Boethian sense of “nature” to explain how reason and will act naturally; the next develops a taxonomy of names equivocal by reason.

The class, in order #

1. The objection: the distinction seems to collapse (“greater problem with the second solution”) #

If reason is a nature and the will is a nature, what happens to the distinction between a natural ability and a rational one? Nature/reason and nature/will “seem to collapse.” He takes the answer from De Veritate q. 22 a. 5, objection 6 and reply: objection — what is of necessity determined to something is naturally determined to it; but will is divided against natural desire; therefore the will necessarily wills nothing.

2. Thomas’s reply: will divided against natural desire “cum praecisione sumptum” (“I always go back to my mother”) #

Point: the will is divided against natural desire taken with precision, i.e. against what is natural only (quod naturale tantum); it is not divided against natural desire absolutely but includes it, “just as man includes animal.”

• Man vs. animal: sometimes we divide man against the animals, sometimes we say man is an animal. The animal divided against man is what is just an animal; the animal that man is, is not just an animal.
• Aside: his mother objected to his saying man is an animal; “I don’t mean he’s just an animal. He’s an animal that has reason.” — “Oh, that’s better.”
• So when reason or will is divided against nature, it is divided against what is nature only. “That’s not clear when you read the text” in the second reading, “and therefore you could easily misunderstand it.”

3. A way of naming: name equivocal by reason (“how common that way of naming is”) #

Point: one name is said of two things with more or less the same meaning, but one of the two has something noteworthy in addition; that one gets a new name, the other keeps the common name as its own, and then you divide one against the other. Thomas’s solution may look “very arbitrary” to the average philosopher, but once you see how common this naming is in easier cases (man/animal), it is no surprise that a cause that is nature only is named “nature,” and a cause that is a nature but not just a nature gets its own name, “reason” or “will.”

4. De Veritate q. 22 a. 5, corpus: ordered things and the foundation (“the sense of touch is, as it were, the foundation”) #

Point: in ordered things the first is included in the second, so the second has not only what belongs to it by its own reason but what belongs to it by the reason of the first.

• Man: uses reason by his own difference (rational), but uses senses and food by his genus (animal, living).
• Touch as foundation of the other senses (“a beautiful comparison”): the organ of sight senses white and black as organ of sight, but also hot and cold, and is corrupted by their excesses, as organ of touch.
• Nature and will are so ordered: the will is a certain nature, “because everything that is found in things is a certain nature” — a thing must be what it is before it can be anything else. Every created nature is ordered by God to the good and naturally desires it; so the will has a natural desire of the good suitable to it, and besides this desires by its own determination, not from necessity, as will. As nature is the foundation of will, so what is naturally desired is the foundation of the other things desired.

5. Why a free ability must also be naturally determined: per se before per aliud (“through itself is before the through another”) #

Point: the general reason is from SCG III.46 (references back to Physics VIII): in every order, what is per se is before what is per aliud — “almost an axiom,” and, he says, something Plato was onto, important in every part of philosophy. Argument, applied in the continuation of the ST text quoted before (Boethius, “the book about the two natures,” and Metaphysics V: nature said in many ways):

1. One sense of nature: intrinsic principle of mobile things, matter or form (Physics II). Another: any substance or “even quodlibet” — what a thing is.
2. In the second sense, what belongs to a thing by its substance belongs to it per se.
3. What does not belong per se is reduced to what belongs per se as to its beginning.
4. So in every order of things belonging to a thing, the beginning must be natural, since the through-itself must always be before the through-another.
5. “This manifestly appears in the understanding”: the beginnings of intellectual understanding are naturally known; likewise the beginning of voluntary motions must be something naturally willed.

• Consequence for the moderns: if every statement must be known through other statements, nothing is known through itself — “no little thing to deny.” Mill and Sartre “do not see” that the to-itself comes before the to-another, nor its connection with the natural, so they do not see that reason and will must naturally know or will something as the source of discourse and choice.
• Regress in willing: I will A for B, B for C, C for D — “how can I begin to will? I can’t.” So there must be something willed through itself. Likewise you could not define, state or syllogize without something to start.

6. Student: two senses of “known through itself” (“two different senses of through itself”) #

• Negative sense: “known through itself” as a grammatically imperfect way of saying not through another statement (not proven by itself).
• Positive sense: the axiom “a whole is more than a part” is known not through other statements but through its parts. “You got to be careful.”
• Connection of per se with nature, from the Posterior Analytics: interior angles equal to two right angles belong to triangle by what it is; when straight lines intersect, the vertical angles are equal because the lines are straight. What belongs to a thing by reason of what it is belongs to it to itself, “because you are nothing more than yourself.” Thomas’s solution: see the connection between through-itself and nature, then that through-itself precedes through-another.

7. Student objection: “you’re changing the meaning of what the itself is” (“The axioms are not the ability to know them”) #

Objection: the “itself” of a proposition known through itself and the “itself” of reason’s nature seem to be different senses. He grants “a kind of double sense,” then replies:

1. Reason is the ability to know; the axioms are not the ability to know them.
2. Reason knows the through-another things only when it knows the things that come before (picking up Euclid, I am not able to know the Pythagorean theorem “until I’ve gone through the first 46 theorems”).
3. The very first things reason knows, it knows through no other knowledge, so only through its own ability — hence to itself, hence to its nature. “You see, this is difficult.”

8. Mill, and the model of two and three (“three is two plus one”) #

Point: Mill in On Liberty (liberty of thought) sees many of Aristotle’s reasons for dialectic but will not admit dialectic leads to any beginning of science — he sees reason only as reason, not as nature, taking the nature/reason distinction as one where each entirely excludes the other.

• Wrong model: virtue vs. vice (neither is the other plus something).
• Right model: two vs. three. Three includes two, but since it is not just two it gets a new name; when divided, three is divided against what is just two, cum praecisione tantum sumptum.
• The tempting error: “three is half of six, two is half of four,” so no two in three — seizing on what is proper to three as three. Likewise the moderns seize on reason as reason (not determined ad unum) and forget reason as nature. “That’s kind of the common opinion now” in philosophical circles; Sartre applies it to the will.
• He stresses: “perhaps every mistake of our mind or reason comes at least in part from not understanding a distinction,” and this one “is in fact misunderstood by most, if not all, the modern philosophers.”

9. Why reason as reason is more known: Shakespeare and De Anima III (“reason is not the imagination”) #

Point: Shakespeare’s “large discourse, looking before and after” defines reason as reason, not as nature; for reason as nature you must go to De Anima III.

• Aristotle separates reason from imagination first by reason as reason (discursive): I can imagine terrorists coming in, or winning the million-dollar sweepstakes, without any reason; I cannot think it without a reason (I know I bought no ticket). Imagining a terrorist does not necessarily frighten; thinking one is there, I would be afraid. Reason as a nature is separated from imagination only later, so is less known.
• Aside: Aristotle on how it is easy to know the truth — no one misses it entirely, the efforts of many get much, “the proverbial door, who can miss it?” (locus not stated).
• We name reasoning from reason; “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs”: understanding looks like standing around doing nothing, reasoning looks active. Hence Sartre: the will is completely free, and thinking you must will happiness is “bad faith” — “very serious consequences.”

10. Student: demonstration is determinate, yet through reason (“resolve back to natural understanding”) #

Objection: in a demonstration you know the conclusion determinately, though through reason. Reply: because it resolves back to natural understanding; Thomas puts intellectus before scientia, and reason depends on natural understanding. You are not determined until you resolve to what is determined; in dialectic, arguing both ways, you reach no determination — and for Mill that is all reason can do (stopping the movement is “dogmatic”). Student: so dialectic is more characteristic of reason as reason — yes.

• Prior and Posterior Analytics are so named because of resolution: generating syllogisms, finding them, resolving them to their beginnings; the culmination is the return to the beginnings.
• Euclid I.6: if equal angles but unequal sides, cut off from the greater a part equal to the lesser and draw to the corner; two triangles with equal sides containing equal angles would be equal, but one is a part of the other — the whole cannot equal the part; so the sides are equal. Resolves to “the whole is more than the part” (Euclid: the lesser cannot equal the greater).

11. Student: if nature means “what it is”, how is reason more than what it is? (“of the butter to be hard”) #

Objection: if nature means what a thing is, reason cannot be more than its nature. Reply: it is not more than what it is, but more than what is just nature; two/three again — half of four does not belong to three as three, yet there is a two in three. Nature as nature is determined to one.

• Student: reason’s three acts; the first act is determined (no error about first notions, which lack definitions), so nature is the first act. Reply: why restrict nature to the first act? Some statements you are forced to put together and not divide; in syllogism you are not forced. The abilities are determinate in some way insofar as reason has a nature.
• Shakespeare’s definition: reason is the ability to know one thing through another; it could not have that unless able to know something by itself. Are these two abilities? Not like the ability to walk and to talk (exercisable together); more like the butter’s ability to be hard and to be soft — defined differently, but not two abilities, “with differences.” So: reason able to know without discourse = reason as a nature; able to know one thing through another = reason as reason.
• Will: as it necessarily wills happiness and cannot choose misery, will as nature; as open to opposites and able to choose, will as will. Defining will as “the ability to choose” is like defining reason as “the ability for discourse.”

12. More examples of the naming, and the closing question (“Four fingers and a thumb”) #

Point: naming one ability “natural” and the other “rational” uses the pattern of §3.

• Categories: habit divided against disposition, yet habit is a firm and stable disposition; the firm ones get the new name.
• Nicomachean Ethics: episteme divided against sophia, yet in the book on wisdom, wisdom is the episteme of being as being; episteme is knowledge through causes, wisdom knowledge of all things through the first causes, so it gets a new name.
• Nursery: you buy a plant or a tree, yet a tree is a plant.
• “Treat the girl as a person, not a thing,” and the bumper sticker “the best things in life are not things”: “thing” has two meanings.
• “How many fingers?” Five — or four fingers and a thumb; the opposable thumb gets a new name.
• So: nature in the wide sense is one and determined to one; what is only that keeps the name nature; what adds the noteworthy ability to know other things through what it naturally knows, or to will other things for the sake of what it naturally wills, gets the name reason or will. That is the sense of “nature” in the second reading.
• Student (form): fire’s form makes it be what it is and do one thing; the mind’s form makes it know — he calls this “a sideshow,” “another side to the issue.”
• Student: does fire get a new name too? If animal is divided into man and beast, there is no equivocation; but when the irrational animal is called “animal,” that sense differs from the original — that is one way a name becomes equivocal by reason. Student’s question whether “nature” becomes equivocal in the same way is left for the next class.

His words #

• “the second solution”: that reason and will are natures (prev. lecture)
• cum praecisione sumptum / quod naturale tantum: taken with precision, what is natural only
• name equivocal by reason: one keeps the common name, the other gets a new name for something noteworthy
• “to itself” / “through another”: his rendering of per se / per aliud
• “what beginning”: his filler for principle [ed.: principium]
• “quodlibet”: nature as any substance or “even anything”
• “kata holou” (as heard): said alongside per se [ed.: probably kath' hauto]
• “looking before and after”: Shakespeare’s definition of reason as discourse
• “reason as reason” vs. “reason as a nature”; “will as will” vs. “will as a nature”
• determined ad unum: what belongs to nature as nature
• “natural understanding”: intellectus, put before scientia
• “reasoned understanding”: his rendering of episteme
• “the anima”: [ed.: De Anima]
• “bad faith”: Sartre’s charge against thinking one must will happiness

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, De Veritate q. 22 a. 5 obj. 6 and ad 6; part of the corpus (ordered things, touch and sight, will as nature)
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles III ch. 46 (per se before per aliud; references to Physics VIII)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae, continuation of the text quoted before (Boethius on the two natures; Metaphysics V; Physics II) — locus not stated (I-II q. 10 a. 1 inferred)
• Euclid, Elements I prop. 6 (worked through)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, “the second reading” (prev. lecture)
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (per se, triangle, vertical angles); Prior Analytics I (generation, finding, resolution of syllogisms)
• Aristotle, De Anima III (reason vs. imagination); Aristotle on the ease of knowing truth, “the proverbial door” (locus not stated)
• Aristotle, Categories (habit and disposition); Nicomachean Ethics (episteme vs. sophia); “the book on wisdom”
• Plato (on per se before per aliud); Mill, On Liberty, chapter on liberty of thought; Sartre
• Shakespeare: “large discourse, looking before and after”; “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs”

His questions #

• If reason is a nature and the will is a nature, what happens to the distinction between natural and rational ability? It is divided against what is nature only, as man is divided against what is just an animal.
• If every statement is known through other statements, can anything be known? If everything is willed for something else, can anything be willed? No; the through-itself must come before the through-another.
• Do we mean the axioms are known “through themselves” as a negation, or positively? Both senses exist: not through another statement; or through their parts — be careful.
• When reason knows the very first things, is it knowing them through knowing something else? No — only through its own ability to know, hence to itself, hence to its nature.
• Is virtue a vice plus something, or vice a virtue plus something? No; that model is wrong — nature/reason is like two/three.
• If you divide two into two and two-plus-one, which one gets a new name? Three, because of the third one; yet three still includes two.
• Is the butter’s ability to be hard and to be soft the same ability? Yes; and reason’s knowing through itself and through another is like that, not like walking and talking.
• Do you object to speaking of reason as nature and reason as reason? Class accepts it: reason able to know without discourse vs. able to know one thing through another.
• How many fingers do I have? Five — or four fingers and a thumb: the thumb gets a new name.
• Does “nature” become equivocal by reason in the same way as “animal”? Left open, to be taken up next time.