Good, Bad and Privation: Why Act Is Better than Ability

Orientation #

He opens by placing the class: “That’s the end of the first of the three parts of the third part” of the ninth book — the before-and-after of act and ability in definition, time and perfection (prev. lecture); now the second division, act and the good (and the bad). He closes: “maybe we should stop here.” Verified sources: a handout page (“Note for Second Book of Wisdom, Reading One”, p. 10) is read for about six minutes — this is where the Marx/moderns “footnote” and the Sentences texts come from — and the printed volume DHB Vol III, p. 534. The previous class argued act prior to potency in perfection; the next takes up act and potency in relation to truth and goodness.

The class, in order #

1. Where we are: good as another sense of before (“the end of the first of the three parts”) #

The point: the second division (act as better) continues both the before-and-after treatment and the “act is more perfect” argument.

• Recap of the first division’s three senses: before in definition/knowledge; before in time simply (though in some way ability is before in time); before in perfection — shown (a) in the same thing, where what is later in generation is more perfect and more actual, and (b) where the end stands to the thing as act to ability.
• Good/better is itself “the fourth sense of before” — “gooder, better.”
• Aside: in the Summa the substance of God has five basic attributes, and on some a further attribute follows: eternal on unchangeable, everywhere on infinite, goodness on perfect. “If I was going to add to Thomas”: on God being one should follow God is the measure of all things (“the one is the measure”) — a connection Thomas and Aristotle often make (student: “that’s like the fourth way a little bit”). Mentioned only because perfection of act and its being better are connected.

2. Act better than a good ability: the health/sickness line (“the ability to be healthy or sick is in the middle”) #

The point: act is better (beltion) and more honourable than a good ability (spoudaias dunameos).

1. What is able to be is able not to be (from the last reading); what in me is able to be healthy is able to be sick.
2. Picture a line: to be healthy — to be able to be healthy / to be able to be sick — to be sick. The two abilities are “defined by different things” but in the thing are really one ability of contradictories (unlike ability to walk and to talk, which I can exercise at once; I cannot be healthy and sick at once).
3. The extremes: to be healthy is good, to be sick is bad; the ability sits in the middle.
4. Conclusion: the ability to be healthy cannot be as good as being healthy, because “in some way it’s a little mixed up with being sick.”

• Line 15, “the same thing would be true about the bad”: which is worse, to be able to be sick or to be sick? To be sick — because the ability to be sick is the same ability as the ability to be healthy, “so it’s not entirely cut off from the good,” whereas there is “nothing good about being sick.” So the ability to be good is not as good as being good, and the ability to be bad is not as bad as being bad. “Very convincing.”

3. Is badness something actual? Only metaphorically (“my car was totaled”) #

The point: to call being sick or being blind an “actuality” is a distant, metaphorical use; properly the bad is a lack of act.

• Met. V adds a metaphorical sense of “perfect” beyond the first two (complete, whole); Physics III: whole and perfect mean almost the same.
• Example: his car parked by the Hudson, flooded with salt water, “totaled” — a “complete wreck”; how complete is a complete wreck? “Very incomplete.” That distant likeness is the metaphorical sense; strictly the wrecked car is not complete at all.
• Blindness vs. geometry: when I acquire geometry something is added to me and I am actually a geometer; when “my ability to be blind” is actualized, nothing is added. To treat blindness as a form like geometry is a being of reason — speaking of the non-being of something as if it were a form, like saying “nothing is something.”
• His students “are able to be ignorant… in fact I suspect they are actually ignorant” — not an actualization; “to be ignorant is not to know,” though able to know, and especially when one should.

4. The bad is by nature after ability (“bad is by nature after ability”) #

The point: line 17, “bad is not apart from things” — hysteron, after: the bad presupposes the ability.

• What the bad fundamentally is: the non-being of something you are able to have, when you should have it.
• Boundary case: this glass doesn’t see, but that is not the glass’s bad — simple negation, not lack. Lack is not just negation: to be and not to be are more opposed than sight and blindness, which share a subject by nature able to have sight and that should have it. “My glass is not ignorant… but my students are ignorant without any qualification.”
• So one must have the ability for sight before being blind; one can have ability without the bad, but not the bad without the ability.
• Which sense of before? The second: one can be without the other.
• His judgment: Aristotle “is not as complete as he could be” here.

5. Excursion to Physics I: lack of form vs. matter (“form is something godlike, good and desirable”) #

The point: the key to the bad is Aristotle’s distinction of matter from lack of form.

• Readings 12-13 (esp. 13): change is not always between contraries — before virtue you need not have the vice, before true opinion not the false opinion; what is necessary is that you lack the form. The vicious man also lacks it, but not everyone who lacks virtue has the vice — hence easier to raise a child to virtue than to convert the vicious. Aristotle ends with matter, form, and lack of form.
• His teaching practice: he reads reading 9 (the long critique of Anaxagoras) after 12-13, because Anaxagoras mixes up matter and form, ability and act — thinks everything you can get out of matter is actually in it; the absurdities separate matter from form. Then the critique of Plato: Plato separates matter from form but does not distinguish matter from lack of form (“nothing but lack of form”) — same tendency in the Manichaeans.
• How to disagree with a great mind: not “Plato’s wrong because I’m right.” Aristotle follows Heraclitus — you must follow what is common; “those who speak with understanding must be strong in what is common to all.”
• The argument, from a common basis:
  1. Common basis (Aristotle and Plato): form is something godlike, good and desirable — form is act, God is pure act; act is the perfection of a thing, perfection is good and so desirable.
  2. Matter desires form, is perfected and made actual by it, and so seems good because capable of form.
  3. Lack of form is opposed to form; if form is good, lack of form is bad.
  4. If lack of form desired form it would desire its own destruction: one is perfected by form, the other eliminated by it. They cannot be the same. “The ball game is over.”
• So primarily the bad is a kind of non-being — of what one is able to have when one should have it.
• Augustine “exaggerates a bit” (sin is nothing, the sinner becomes nothing) but sees the bad as a kind of negation; against the Manichaeans (for whom matter is bad, as for Platonists and Plotinus) he argues: matter, being capable of form which is good, must itself be good — substantially Aristotle’s argument, apparently independent (we don’t think he had the eight books of Natural Hearing). Thomas could read both; “you have to admire that.”
• Restated: husteron gar te physei to kakon — ability before the bad in the second sense; the bad always presupposes some thing (pragmaton).

6. Student question: metaphor or analogy? (“it’d be a metaphorical analogy”) #

Student: why not say “actually blind” by analogy, since being is said in four ways by analogy (substance, accident, imperfect act…)? He: if there is an analogy it is a metaphorical one — you are calling a lack of act a reality, a completely destroyed thing complete. Student presses: Aristotle says a being of reason is a being by analogy. He: blindness is a being of reason, yes, but “we’re talking about in things now” — in things blindness is not a thing but the lack of a thing.

7. “Bad” is equivocal by reason: Thomas’s three senses (“three basic meanings of bad”) #

The point: Sentences II d. 34 q. 1 a. 2, solution — the text he knows for the three senses.

• First: the lack itself, strictly (blindness). Second: what has that lack (it’s bad to be blind). Third: what causes that lack (my poking your eye), bad because it blinds you, which is bad because blindness is bad.
• Thomas’s order, as read: what is per se malum is said first, the others by relation (ratio) to it; second grade, malum praejacens, the subject, called bad because it has in itself the privation; third grade, the cause inducing the bad, which need not have the privation but makes something have it. First is said absolutely (blindness), second in order to the first, third in order to the second.
• Parallel: “political” said first of the polis, second of government by its relation to the polis, third of revolution — not by relation to the polis but to government (a change of government).
• Further from the text: bad names a non-being (nominat non ens); the per se bad “does not place something” but is said as privation. The subject of privation is something positive, but not bad from that — as the eye is something, but blindness is in it only as negation of vision. The cause, in itself something, is called bad in order to its effect, “also said privatively”; the ratio of non-being comes back to it causaliter, as the ratio of mali does.
• Objection he meets: “aren’t the Nazis bad? they have all this power… beating people up… it’s not just a lack.” Reply: they forget “bad” is equivocal by reason; only the first meaning is just a lack.
• Application to ethics: “he drank too much — that’s not just negation” (the bottle’s going down). To understand a bad human act you must find the lack: man is an animal with reason, so a human act should be ordered and measured by reason. Premarital sex lacks the order of before and after; drinking too much lacks the measure. The disorder is bad in the first sense; the act is bad in the second (it lacks the order, is not the lack); whoever induces me to drink too much is bad in the third.
• Error: etymology — Latin errare, to wander; Greek planasthe (“you err,” to the Sadducees; whence “planet”). Error is the result of a disordered movement of reason; Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, “we wander in illusions” — like the modern philosophers. To see why it is a bad act you must see what it lacks: the order that logic, “knowledge of its own road,” would impose.

8. Therefore nothing bad in eternal things, or in God (“in eternal things… there’s nothing bad”) #

The point: Aristotle’s conclusion from “by nature after.”

• “By nature” (physis) marks a sense of before other than time — the second, sometimes the fourth.
• Conclusion: in things from the beginning and eternal, which lack this ability, there is nothing bad. Thomas adds “insofar as they’re eternal” (the bad angels); in their substance, with no ability to have and to lack, nothing bad.
• “You can syllogize”: God is pure act, therefore nothing bad in God; so the first cause is good — also knowable from its being perfect. “Really beautiful.”
• Student: is this as close as you can get to a definition of bad? Yes — but remember the equivocation; only the first sense is just a lack.
• ST I q. 48 a. 5 ad 1, read: because bad is privation, not pure negation, not every defect of good is bad, but the defect of a good one is apt to have and ought to have; defect of vision is bad in the animal, not the stone. Likewise it is against the ratio of a creature to be conserved in being by itself (the same thing gives being and conserves it), so this defect is not the creature’s bad. (Unsure how best to translate “defect.”)
• His own footnote (handout): Marx sees man’s dependence on God, for being and conservation, as bad — deceived by pride into calling bad what is not. Likewise the moderns see the learner’s dependence on a teacher, the support of believing a worthy mind, as bad — pride again. Student: they imply an ability we should have; he: yes, they deny an order among human beings — the wits, dimwits, midwits. Student: even a wit learns from a wit; he: true, man is social; the wit discovers, the dimwits like us learn from the wits, the nitwit cannot even learn.

9. Perfection in evil (“perfection in evil”) #

The point: Thomas on the metaphor of “becoming actually bad.” Sentences II d. 44 q. 1 a. 1 (he says “article one two”): perfectio in malitia is not perfectio proprie dicta, sed quasi transumptive — the term for metaphorical likeness — as we say a perfect thief (perfectum latronem) or “the perfection of blindness,” fully blind, “as is said in the fifth book of the Metaphysics.” Thomas knows that. “Maybe we should stop here.”

His words #

• ability: his standing term [ed.: potency]
• book of wisdom: [ed.: Metaphysics]; Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• gooder, better: the fourth sense of before
• beltion, spoudaias dunameos: better; a good ability
• the ability of contradictories: one ability in the thing, defined by opposite terms
• totaled, complete wreck: metaphorical “complete” — really very incomplete
• being of reason: the non-being of something thought as if a form (blindness, “nothing is something”)
• lack: his word [ed.: privation]; not mere negation — non-being of what a subject is able to have and should have, when it should
• hysteron / husteron gar te physei to kakon: the bad is by nature after (ability)
• second sense of before: one can be without the other
• what is common: Heraclitus’s rule for disagreeing with a great mind
• form is something godlike, good and desirable: the common basis with Plato
• equivocal by reason: one name, meanings related by ratio (relation) to a first
• per se malum, malum praejacens, cause “praefaciens” [ed.: as heard; Thomas’s third grade is the cause inducing the bad]: the three senses
• nominat non ens, causaliter, ratio mali: bad names a non-being; the ratio comes back to the cause
• order and measure of reason: what a human act should have; its lack is the first sense of moral bad
• planasthe, to wander: error as disordered movement of reason
• wits, dimwits, midwits, nitwits: his ranking of learners
• perfectio in malitia… quasi transumptive, perfectum latronem: metaphorical perfection in evil

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, second division of the third part (act better than good ability; line 15 on the bad; lines 17-18, husteron te physei to kakon; eternal things)
• Thomas, Scriptum on the Sentences II, d. 34, q. 1, a. 2, solution (three senses of bad), read and glossed in Latin
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 48, a. 5, ad 1
• Thomas, Scriptum on the Sentences II, d. 44, q. 1, a. 1 (or 2; ambiguous) — perfectio in malitia
• His handout note (verified: “Note for Second Book of Wisdom, Reading One”, p. 10) — Marx and the moderns footnote

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (senses of perfect, incl. metaphorical); Physics III (whole and perfect); Physics I readings 9, 12, 13 (Anaxagoras; lack of form; Plato)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae, treatment of the divine attributes (unchangeable/eternal, infinite/everywhere, perfect/good); “the fourth way”
• Heraclitus, fragment on following the common
• Augustine, against the Manichaeans; “sin is nothing”; Plotinus
• Gospel, Christ to the Sadducees, “you err” (Matthew 22:29, inferred)
• Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, “we wander in illusions”
• Karl Marx (on dependence upon God)
• DHB Vol III, The School of Aristotle, p. 534 (verified source)

His questions #

• If I were to add to Thomas, what would follow upon God being one? God is the measure of all things — the one is the measure.
• Can the ability to be healthy be as good as being healthy? No — it is the same ability as the ability to be sick, so mixed with something bad.
• Which is worse, to be able to be sick or to be sick? To be sick; the ability is not cut off from the good, being sick has nothing good.
• When your car is a complete wreck, how complete is it? Very incomplete — “complete” there is metaphorical.
• When I become blind, has something been added to me? No; blindness as a form is a being of reason.
• Is the glass’s not seeing the bad of the glass? No — simple negation, not lack; a lack presupposes a subject apt to have it.
• What sense of before is “bad is after ability”? The second: one can be without the other.
• Aren’t the Nazis bad, with all that power — not just a lack? “Bad” is equivocal by reason; only the first sense is just a lack.
• Is this as close as you can get to a definition of bad? Yes, for the first sense; the second and third are said by relation to it.
• Can you really speak of perfection in evil? Only quasi transumptive, metaphorically — the perfect thief, the perfection of blindness.