Summa I, Q.5, AA.5–6: Mode, Species and Order; the Noble, the Useful and the Pleasant

Orientation #

He opens by recalling “as we said” that article 5 gives the intrinsic divisions of good and article 6 something more like its subject parts, and closes: “we just finished the fifth question,” the sixth (goodness of God) to begin next time. The previous class treated q. 5 a. 4 (good as final cause, good vs. beautiful); the next begins q. 6 on the divine goodness.

The class, in order #

1. Two kinds of division in articles 5 and 6 (“more like the intrinsic divisions”) #

Article 5 (mode, species, order) is a division into intrinsic parts; article 6 (honestum, useful, pleasant) is “more like” a division of the universal into less universal, “but not entirely.”

2. Article 5, the five objections (“does not consist in mode, species, and order”) #

Point: he reads the five objections (he notes: “unusual to have five objections, he’s really getting carried away”) and the sed contra.

1. Good and being differ in definition (said above); but mode, species, order belong to the notion of being, since Wisdom 11 says God disposed all things in number, weight, measure, to which the three are reduced (species to number, mode to measure, order to weight; “ponder” means weight, so an inclination in a direction). Augustine, Genesis to the Letter IV: measure fixes a mode, number gives species, weight draws everything to rest in stability. His comment: but good is a desirable being, so it includes being plus something; wait to see how Thomas handles it.
   • Aside on species as numbers: Plato said species are numbers; Aristotle in “the eighth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VIII] says only that they are like numbers, and lists likenesses: definitions, like numbers, are not divisible forever; add or subtract one and you have another number, add or subtract a difference and another species. Shakespeare’s “What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more”: take reason from man and he is a beast; sensation from a beast, a plant; life from a plant, a stone. So stone 1, plant 2 (body + life), beast 3, man 4.
2. Mode, species and order are themselves good; so each would need its own mode, species and order, and so on forever (“a nice objection”).
3. The bad is privation of mode, species, order, but does not wholly remove the good, since the subject of the bad is good. His comment: there is more than one sense of good, the good of the nature and the good added to it.
4. What the notion of good consists in cannot be called bad; but we say bad mode, bad species, bad order. Aside: when we say “you’re doing that in the wrong order,” we really mean disorder, so the bad seems to have order.
5. Mode, species, order come from weight, number, measure; but Ambrose (on the six days) says the nature of light is created in none of these. Sed contra: Augustine, On the Nature of the Good: these three are general goods in things made by God; great, little, or no goodness according as they are great, little or absent. His remark: would this question have come up without Augustine? Yet the triad is in Scripture too.

3. The body: good is the perfect; form with what precedes and follows (“nothing is lacking, according to its own perfection”) #

Point: Thomas reaches the three by analysing perfection around form.

1. A thing is good insofar as perfect (so, a syllogism: good is desirable, the desirable is the perfect, which “shows the connection”).
2. Perfect = that to which nothing is lacking according to the mode of its own perfection.
3. Each thing is what it is through its form; form presupposes some things and some things necessarily follow on it. So to be perfect and good a thing needs the form, what is presupposed to it, and what follows (his gloss: can there be a middle without something before and after?).
4. Presupposed to form: the determination or commensuratio (commensuration, “measured with”) of the principles, material or efficient. This is mode; hence “measure fixes a mode.”

• Digression on translating modus: Aristotle’s tropos (way of proceeding in a science) has the sense of turn: a different science needs a different turn of mind (cf. Washington Irving’s Montjoy, “a poetic turn of mind”); Plato’s Republic: the soul turned toward sensible things must be turned round to see immaterial things, mathematics being a 90-degree turn between natural science and wisdom, since geometry studies things found in matter but defined without matter; Lent as turning away from material things. English “way” is closer to road: “I am the way” is Greek hodos, “I am the road”; Latin via (the “inborn road” at the beginning of the Physics). Latin modus carries the sense of size, fit: a way of proceeding that fits the subject like shoes fit a foot; the wrong way gives “a pinched view” or a loose one. Thomas on the Psalms distinguishes modi of Scripture (e.g. modus narrativus). So modus keeps its link with measure, measured by the subject.

4. Species and order (“through its form, each thing is constituted in species”) #

1. Form itself is signified by species (Greek eidos, idea, form): “number gives species,” because definitions are like numbers (Metaphysics VIII again, with the 1-2-3-4 series repeated). Further likenesses he lists: not divisible forever; not more or less, one four is not more four than another.
2. Upon form follows an inclination to an end, action, or the like, since each thing acts and tends to what suits its form insofar as it is in act. This is weight (Scripture) or order (Augustine). Conclusion: the notion of good, as consisting in perfection, consists in mode, species and order.

5. Replies to the five objections (“not because they themselves are subsisting”) #

• Reply 1: the three follow on being only insofar as it is perfect, and so good; remember being is in the idea of the good.
• Reply 2 (the regress): mode, species, order are called good as they are called beings: not as subsisting, but because by them other things are beings and good; not good formally by something else, but that by which other things are formally good, as whiteness is not a being because something is by it, but because by it something is white. His examples: the body is healthy by health; is health itself healthy? No, else another health, and so on. Good differs slightly: goodness can be called good, but not in the way the good thing is good. I am just by justice; justice is not just, but is good — as that by which I am good. Likewise: the creature is what exists, its existence is that by which it exists; asking “does its existence exist?” and demanding another existence turns existence into a subsisting thing and lands in regress — “that might catch a lot, but you ain’t going to catch St Thomas.”
• Reply 3: every being is according to some form, so every being of a thing has its mode, species, order: man as man, man as white, and so for everything said of him. The bad deprives of some being, as blindness of the being of sight, so removes only the mode, species and order following on sight. His gloss: I am good in some way by my substance, good simply by certain accidents; each has its own triad; evil removes one good and leaves another. Even the devils’ nature is good and has mode, species, order, lacking some other.
• Reply 4 (Augustine, On the Nature of the Good): every mode as mode is good; bad mode, species, order are so called because less than they ought to be, or not fitted to what they are applied to — bad as alien and incongruous.
• Reply 5: light is said to lack number, weight, measure not simply but in comparison with bodily things, since its power extends to all bodies as the active quality of the first body, the heaven. Aside: light gave modern physicists trouble too (waves or particles); de Broglie’s collected papers are titled Matière et Lumière, matter contrasted with light though light is still something material, until the twentieth century found a particle aspect to light and a wave aspect to matter. (Break.)

6. Article 6, objections and sed contra (“divided into the honestum”) #

Point: honestum is hard to translate: honorable, or noble.

1. The good, per Nicomachean Ethics I, is divided by the ten categories; but honorable, useful and pleasant can all be found in one category.
2. Every division is by opposites, but these are not opposed: the honorable is delightful, and nothing dishonorable is useful, which would follow if honorable and useful were opposed, as Cicero (“Tullius”) says in On Duties.
3. Where one is on account of another, there is only one; the useful is good only on account of the pleasant or honorable. Sed contra: Ambrose, On Duties, uses this division. Aside: the four great doctors of the Western Church: Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Jerome.

7. The body: the three terms of the motion of desire (“terminated simply to the last”) #

1. The division properly seems to be of human good, but taken higher and more generally it belongs to good as good.
2. Good is desirable, and desirable as the end or term of the motion of appetite.
3. By comparison with a natural body’s motion: motion is terminated simply at the last, in some way at a middle through which one goes to the last; the ultimate term can be taken as the thing itself (place or form) or as rest in it.
4. So: desirable as a middle toward another is the useful; desired as last, the thing toward which desire tends, is the honestum (the end, desired for itself, whereas the useful is desired to reach the end); what ends desire as rest in the thing is pleasure (“rest of the heart”; desire like motion, pleasure like rest). Examples: coming through the door is a goal, but only to be in this room and rest. Thomas on the Psalms explains “sweet” by three likenesses, pleasant, restful, refreshing: “restful” is what fits pleasure here; a beautiful scene called “restful,” a “sight for sore eyes,” the painting he looked up at from his Latin text in the college reading room. Ice cream to quiet a lost child; the bags of candy he made up before cross-country drives, “time for daddy treat,” to settle the back seat.

8. Reply 1: division by categories vs. division of the desirable as such (“according to its own definition”) #

Good as the same in subject with being is divided by the ten categories; by its own definition, this division fits. His development: the division of one is much closer to the categories, since Aristotle divides one into same (substance), equal (quantity), like (quality); one is very close to being, which is why Metaphysics IV makes being and one the subject of wisdom, books 7-9 on being, book 10 on one, and being’s first division is per se / per accidens. But substance, quantity, quality are not a division of the desirable as such: the end is primarily desirable, then rest in it, then the means.

• Augustine speaks sometimes of the end (“the vision is the whole reward”), sometimes of the delight (“beatitude is gaudium de veritate”); Thomas’s communion prayer names both, satietas plena, gaudium sempiternum, jucunditas consummata et felicitas perfecta; “enter into the joy of your master.” Those two belong to the end, the useful to means.
• Studying geometry: is the goal to know or to enjoy the Pythagorean theorem? Knowing; but both pertain to the end. His favourite theorem, “second book, theorem five” [ed.: Euclid, Elements II.5, inferred]: a line cut into equal and unequal segments, the rectangle of the unequal segments plus the square on the line between the cuts equals the square on the half; from it, a square always exceeds a rectangle of the same perimeter, and the difference is the square of the difference of sides: perimeter 20, 5×5 vs 4×6 differ by 1 = 1², vs 3×7 by 4 = 2². “Really delightful to see that.” Delight in reaching the end pertains to the end but follows on it: Ethics X, pleasure perfects operation as beauty perfects youth (not youth’s definition, but expected). Delight is not a means; it is resting contented. Thomas’s prayer dulce sapere; other things are merely useful. He stresses: “that’s very interesting, that first objection”: a thing can be divided in more than one way, but one way divides it as such.

9. Reply 2: opposed definitions, not opposed things; pleasure and the utilitarians (“by opposite definitions”) #

The division is by opposite definitions: properly delightful is what has no reason to be desired except pleasure, since sometimes noxious and dishonorable (adultery, fornication); useful has nothing in itself to be desired, only leads further (bitter medicine: if delicious, there would be two reasons to take it; his childhood candy-coated medicine story); honestum has in itself whence it is desired. So here pleasure is taken as other than the honestum, not as following on it: “a lot of subtlety.” This is why Ethics X treats pleasure before the final treatment of happiness.

• Utilitarians (English empiricists, Hobbes, Locke, Mill) identify good with pleasure; hence the animal-rights confusion, since animals feel pain and pleasure too and nothing beyond pleasure and pain is a criterion.
• Objection put: if pleasure as such is good, is pleasure in torturing people good? His answer: if wanting to torture is bad, that is because its object is bad; enjoying torturing joins you more to the torturing than wanting does (you can want without having them in your power); so if the wanting is already bad, the enjoying is worse.
• Mill’s reply to “a philosophy for beasts”: you are the beast, assuming man has only the beast’s pleasures; man has other pleasures. Are they better? Mill’s philosophy can give no reason, only the empiricist appeal to those who have tasted both (like judging the pain of a broken leg against an ulcer). That makes some sense on its own, but is a narrow view. Our end is to see God as he is; the end is substantially the seeing, not the enjoying, though we enjoy it.
• The delightful is closer to the honestum than the useful and can be confused with it, as quantity is closest to substance: Descartes confused extension with the substance of bodies (“Descartes never grew up,” since if quantity were substance a different size would be a different substance); Pythagoreans and Platonists likewise; nobody confuses shape or colour with substance. “Body” names both a kind of substance and a species of continuous quantity.

10. Reply 3: good said of the three not univocally (“secundum prius et posterius”) #

Good is not divided into the three as something univocal, said ex aequo, equally, of them (as a square is no more equilateral than an oblong, both equally quadrilateral). Nor is being said equally of substance, quantity, quality, or of act and ability; it is said secundum prius et posterius, called analogum or equivocal by reason — reason is characterised by order (said earlier today), and prior/posterior is ordering. Good is said first of the honestum, secondly of the delightful, third of the useful. Close: these six articles are a lesson in how to consider the good, in service of speaking about the goodness of God next. (“The prodigal son has returned.”)

His words #

• intrinsic divisions vs. subject parts: his labels for a. 5 and a. 6
• commensuratio; “commensuration, measured with” of material or efficient principles; = mode
• modus; carries the sense of size/fit, linked to measure [ed.: vs. Greek tropos, “turn”; English “way,” Greek hodos “road,” Latin via]
• species; Greek eidos, form
• weight / order; the inclination following form
• honestum; “the honorable, or the noble”; the end desired for itself
• utile; the useful, the means, a middle
• delectabile; the pleasant, rest in the end, “rest of the heart”
• anastasis; his term for the end itself as against the delectabile [ed.: unclear; possibly his coinage or ASR for “honestum”]
• ex aequo; equally, the mark of the univocal
• secundum prius et posterius; the way good and being are said; analogum, “equivocal by reason”
• ability [ed.: potency]

Texts #

Read in class

• Summa Theologiae I, q. 5, a. 5 (objections, body, five replies)
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 5, a. 6 (objections, body, three replies)
• Wisdom 11 (number, weight, measure), within obj. 1
• Augustine, Genesis to the Letter IV; On the Nature of the Good (sed contra, reply 4)
• Ambrose, on the six days (obj. 5); On Duties (sed contra a. 6)
• Cicero, On Duties (obj. 2 a. 6) Mentioned
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII (definitions like numbers); Metaphysics IV (being and one), books 7-10
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (good in the categories); X (pleasure perfects operation; pleasure before happiness)
• Aristotle, Physics, beginning (the inborn road); Plato, Republic (turning the soul)
• Thomas, Commentary on the Psalms (modi of Scripture; “sweet”); Thomas’s prayer after communion; “dulce sapere”
• Shakespeare, “What is a man…” (Hamlet, inferred); Washington Irving, Montjoy
• Euclid, Elements II.5 (inferred from “second book, theorem five”)
• de Broglie, Matière et Lumière; John Stuart Mill, Hobbes, Locke; Descartes

His questions #

• Which of number, weight, measure goes with which of species, mode, order? Species with number, mode with measure, order with weight.
• Is the etymology of tropos, modus and “way” the same? No: tropos is turn, modus is size/fit, way is nearer to road.
• Is health itself healthy? Is my virtue of justice just? No; each is that by which something else is healthy or just.
• Does the existence of the creature exist in the way the creature does? No; it is that by which the creature exists, else infinite regress.
• Is my goal to know the Pythagorean theorem or to enjoy it? To know it; delight follows on the end.
• If you enjoy torturing people, is that pleasure good? No; enjoying joins you more to the bad than wanting does.
• Are the pleasures man doesn’t share with the beast better? Mill can only appeal to those who have tasted both; left as a narrow view.
• Which category is closest to substance? Quantity, hence Descartes’ confusion; likewise pleasure is confused with the honestum.
• Is good said ex aequo of honestum, delectabile, utile? No; secundum prius et posterius, first of the honestum.