Summa I, Q.5, A.4: Why We Want the Good, and the Good as Final Cause

Orientation #

He opens: “we’re up to the fourth article of the fifth question,” and recalls “as you may recall, we went to this before” on whether a thing is good because we want it (prev. lecture). No mention of next time. The previous class covered q.5 aa.1 and 3 on being and goodness; the next takes up aa.5–6 (mode, species, order; the honestum, useful and pleasant).

The class, in order #

1. Recalling the first definition of the good (“the good is what all want”) #

Point: before the article, recover from philosophy how we first define the good.

• Socrates asking “what is good?” of a slave boy or “the American boy”: he gets examples (candy, pizza, baseball, bicycle, vacation); Socrates then explains the difference between giving examples and defining, the definition bringing out distinctly what is common to all. What do they have in common? They are all things he wants. So the first definition: the good is what all want / all desire.
• Aristotle, beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics: a little induction, then “they speak well who say the good is what all want.” Socrates in the Meno: everybody wants something good for themselves.

2. The Euthyphro-type question and Augustine on the beautiful (“does it please our eyes because it is beautiful”) #

Point: is it good because we want it, or do we want it because it is good? (the kind of question Socrates taught in the Euthyphro).

• Parallel: Augustine (he says “in the De Veritate, if I remember rightly” — locus uncertain) quotes the first definition of the beautiful, “that which pleases when seen,” and asks the Socratic question; Augustine: “I have no doubt that it pleases our eyes because it is beautiful.” Then the definition is a definition of the effect of being beautiful — not a perfect understanding, but we know effects before causes and causes first through effects.
• Same question for the good: is the wanting the cause of the good or its effect?

3. Difficulties on both sides (“one too many for you”) #

Point: neither answer is free of objection at first.

• Against “good because wanted”: everyone has wanted something they themselves later recognized as bad. The man at the party: “You want another drink?” — “Yes” — and it was one too many; not forced on you, yet bad for you. The kid driving 100 mph down a city street, later in hospital: no one pushed his foot on the pedal, yet he admits it was not good. So a thing is not good because we want it.
• Against “wanted because good” (good the cause of wanting): (a) the good is not always wanted — how have the cause and not the effect? (b) contrary causes have contrary effects, so the bad should cause turning away; but the last drink shows people want what is bad for them.

4. Settling it by induction (“nature didn’t give hunger to make food good”) #

Point: the argument most proportionate to us in universal things is induction; list fundamental goods and see in each a reason for its goodness apart from the desire.

• Food / hunger: food is good and necessary for man and animals apart from hunger; nature gave hunger because food is good, not to make it good. Generally more hunger, more thirst, when the need is greater.
• Water / thirst: same, even for plants.
• Reproduction: apart from any desire, its good is the preservation of the kind; without it the species goes out of existence — “a very great good”; hence nature implanted the desire.
• Money (“a more human thing”): is money useful because you want it, or wanted because it is useful? Obviously the latter; and to be useful is one sense of being good.
• Conclusion: wanting is not the cause of the good being good but an effect of it; the first definition is a definition by effect.

5. The fuller statement: the good as known (“Romeo doesn’t want Juliet”) #

Point: the good is wanted insofar as it is known in some way by sense or reason; the good as known causes desire.

• This answers the first difficulty: the good is not always wanted because not always known. Romeo at the start of Romeo and Juliet does not want Juliet, as beautiful then as later, because he does not know of her; he wants Rosaline.
• It answers the second: sense and reason can know partially — the good in a thing and not the bad. One wants a delicious poison because delicious, not because poisonous; the good as such moves desire. Or one is deceived by likeness: people eat poisonous mushrooms because they are hard to tell from the good ones.

6. The four causes and why the end matters (“if you do away with the end, you do away with the good”) #

Point: article 4 asks what kind of cause the good is; recall the four from philosophy of nature and “the fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V].

• Matter: that from which something comes to be, existing within it (wood in the wooden chair). Form: the definition of what was to be, what makes the chair a chair intrinsically. Mover or maker: whence there first is a beginning of motion and rest. End or purpose (“final cause,” from the Latin for end): that for the sake of which something is or is done — chair for sitting, medicine for health, studying for knowing.
• Aristotle connects the fourth with the good; “second book of wisdom”: do away with the end and you do away with the good — “no little thing you’re taking away.” Also important for God’s goodness: connection between God being the end of the whole universe and being the supreme good.

7. Article 4, objections and sed contra (“the good is praised as beautiful”) #

Point: Thomas “attacking himself”: it seems the good has the notion of some other cause.

1. Dionysius, Divine Names IV: the good is praised as beautiful; but the beautiful implies the formal cause (we say “shapely” — form). So if good = beautiful, good is formal. “An interesting objection.”
2. The good is diffusive of its being (gathered from Dionysius: the good is that from which all things subsist and are); to diffuse implies an efficient cause, a maker.
3. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I: because God is good, we are; but we are from God as from an efficient cause (recall the first arguments for God’s existence: unmoved mover, first efficient cause).

• No objection from matter: matter “in no way seems to be diffused.” He notes form, mover and end are all based on actuality as against potency (“ability in the passive sense”), so they have something in common. Aside: David of Dinant taught that God is first matter.
• Sed contra: “the Philosopher” (capital P — Aristotle, as Aristotle calls Homer “the poet”), Physics II (“second book of Natural Hearing”): that for the sake of which is as the end and good of the others. He identifies end and good; sometimes the means is called good by reference to the end.

8. The body: good is end; order of causing vs. order of the caused (“first in causing is last in the caused”) #

Point: the basic syllogism and the ordering of the three actual causes.

1. The good is what all desire (the definition by effect).
2. What all desire has the notion of an end.
3. Therefore the good has the notion of the end.

• Popular way to see the link: if people want something they act for the sake of getting it, so it becomes an end; if you see people acting for an end, you gather they consider it good. The Greek word in NE I could almost be translated “all aim at,” closer to end; better to translate “desire,” as Thomas clearly takes it in Latin — but it shows how close the two are.
• But the notion of the good presupposes the notion of efficient and of formal cause, since what is first in causing is last in the thing caused. Old-physics example: fire heats before it induces the form of fire (warms the paper before setting it afire), yet the heat in fire follows on its substantial form. In causing: (1) the end, which moves the efficient cause; (2) the action of the agent moving matter to form; (3) the form. Conversely in the thing caused: (1) the form, by which it is a being; (2) its power of effecting, as perfect in being — each thing is perfect when it can make another like itself (Meteorology IV: animals cannot reproduce until mature; you cannot teach until you know); (3) the notion of good, founding perfection in a being.
• His application: grace is like the form; through it a power; then you act and reach your end — the end is the last thing achieved, but as cause it was the beginning.
• Aside: Shakespeare uses “aim” for “guess” — you aim at what you do not always get.

9. Reply 1 and the digression: is the beautiful for the mind or the heart? (“the beautiful regards the knowing power”) #

Point: beautiful and good are the same in subject, founded on form; they differ in notion.

• Good properly regards appetite (what all desire; appetite a kind of motion toward a thing), hence the end. The beautiful regards the knowing power (“things that please when seen”), consisting in suitable proportion; the senses delight in the well-proportioned as in what is like themselves, sense being a certain ratio, as is every knowing power; knowledge is by assimilation, likeness regards form — so the beautiful pertains to the formal cause.
• Digression, left unresolved: “is the beautiful more the object of the mind or the heart?” A student: “the mind for sure.” Signs for the heart: English “lovely,” a synonym for beautiful derived from “love”; Spenser’s hymns to earthly and heavenly beauty and love (imitating Socrates in the Symposium) seem to identify beauty with love; Romeo sees Juliet as the loveliest thing and falls in love; Dionysius in the Divine Names treats God’s beauty with His goodness, not with His truth (he once argued this to Monsignor Dion). Signs for the mind: Heisenberg on the role of beauty in scientific theories — scientists reject an ugly theory, and if forced to choose between beautiful and true will choose beautiful; geometry — the Pythagorean theorem, the side of the inscribed hexagon equal to the radius (“I think so”); “shapely” ties beauty to form, and form is the proper object of reason (“definition of what was to be”); Augustine, Confessions, “too late have I come to know thee, thou ancient beauty” — knowing; the definition itself: “pleases” points to the heart, “when seen” to the knowing power, and some say good is what pleases, beautiful what pleases when seen. The chemist (retired) on the beauty of chemical structures — beautiful in being known, and only to one who is into it. Aristotle, Metaphysics XIII: the three main forms of the beautiful are order, symmetry and limit (moderation); order is an aspect of the object of mind — Shakespeare defines reason as “large discourse, looking before and after”; Thomas divides reason’s knowledge by the order it considers, starting from Aristotle’s “it belongs to the wise man to order.” So on that side it connects with reason. He closes: there is a connection, since both are founded on form, and form can be the end of generation.
• Aside: Brother Mark’s joke on geometric theorems, “too pleasant, you can’t do too many”; Aristotle’s three rules in the Ethics, one being to beware of the pleasant.

10. Reply 2: ‘move’ and ‘make’ carried over to end and form (“what moved Romeo to go over the garden wall”) #

Point: the good is diffusive of being in the way an end is said to move — “you got to be very careful about that.”

• “Move” properly names the third cause (the wind moved the leaves) but is borrowed for the end: what moved Romeo over the Capulets’ wall, or the man up the tower to Rapunzel? Her beauty moved him — the end moving. Wisdom moves the philosopher as end, not as efficient cause.
• “Make” likewise, properly the maker, is applied to form: what makes this wood a chair and that a table? its form, not a carpenter. “Cat” and “act” have the same letters; what makes this the word “cat”? the order of the letters — form as order or ratio (his potato example, a two-to-one ratio).
• Metaphysics XII: Aristotle’s God the unmoved mover has no mover in the sense of an efficient cause, and is not moved to act by some good other than Himself, which would be a mover in the sense of the end; He communicates Himself by loving His own goodness.
• “The most common mistake in thinking”: mixing up senses of a word.

11. Reply 3 and closing recap (“a man is said to be good simply by having a good will”) #

Point: “because God is good, we are” refers to the final cause.

• One having a will is called good insofar as he has a good will, because through the will we use all that is in us; a man is not called good for a good understanding — “put that in your pipe and smoke it,” philosophers — but for a good will; the will regards the end as its proper object. “Nice way of answering that objection.” God cannot will us except in willing Himself, loving His own goodness.
• Recap syllogism: the good is what all want; what all want is the end; therefore the good is the end — and the popular version (wanting ↔ aiming).
• Closing: the moderns leave out the end in natural science and understand little in ethics — thereby doing away with the good; “a real problem.”

His words #

• the good is what all want / all desire — first definition, “by effect”
• the beautiful is that which pleases when seen — Augustine’s first definition of the beautiful, also by effect
• induction — the argument “most proportionate to us in universal things”
• the good as known — the fuller statement of the cause of desire
• “fifth book of wisdom,” “second / twelfth / thirteenth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V, II, XII, XIII]
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics]
• definition of what was to be — the formal cause; “shapely” — form as shape
• mover — “whence there first is a beginning of motion and of rest”
• end, purpose, “final cause” — that for the sake of which
• ability in the passive sense [ed.: potency]
• “the Philosopher” — Aristotle, as Homer is “the poet”
• aim at — his gloss on the Greek of NE I; Shakespeare’s “aim” = guess
• first in causing, last in the caused
• lovely — English synonym for beautiful from “love”
• order, symmetry, limit — the three main forms of the beautiful (Metaphysics XIII)
• “move,” “make” — properly the third cause, borrowed for end and form

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 5, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (opening: the good is what all want; the three rules on pleasure, book unstated)
• Plato, Meno; Euthyphro; Symposium
• Augustine, on the beautiful ("De Veritate, if I remember rightly" — his locus uncertain); De Doctrina Christiana I; Confessions (“too late have I come to know thee”)
• Aristotle, Physics II; Metaphysics II, V, XII, XIII; Meteorology IV
• Dionysius, Divine Names IV
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Spenser, the four hymns; Rapunzel
• David of Dinant (God as first matter); Heisenberg on beauty in theories

His questions #

• Is it good because we want it, or do we want it because it is good? We want it because it is good; the definition “what all want” is by effect.
• Is money useful because you want it, or do you want it because it is useful? Because it is useful — and useful is one sense of good.
• What kind of cause is the good? The end: what all desire has the notion of an end.
• Which is first in causing and which in the thing caused? In causing: end, agent, form; in the caused: form, power, good.
• Is the beautiful more the object of the mind or the heart? Student: “the mind for sure”; he gives witnesses both ways — left open.
• What moved Romeo over the garden wall? Juliet’s beauty — “move” in the sense of the end, not the efficient cause.
• What makes these letters the word “cat” and not “act”? The order of the letters — form, not a maker.
• Is a man called good for a good understanding? No — for a good will, since through the will we use all that is in us.
• What is the most common mistake in thinking? Mixing up senses of a word.