Question 1, Articles 2–3: Nature Acting for an End and How the End Specifies Human Acts

Orientation #

He does not refer to last time or next time. He says the defence of nature acting for an end belongs to Physics II, “but that’s another course,” and that article 3 “kind of stands by itself” in the question. The previous class worked through q. 1, a. 1 and the structure of the Prima Secundae; the next takes up q. 1, a. 4 on whether there is one last end.

The class, in order #

1. Article 2: the objections and the sed contra (“private to rational nature”) #

Point: he reads the three objections that acting for an end is proper to rational nature, and Aristotle’s authority against them.

• Obj. 1: man never acts for an end unknown to him; many things do not know the end, either lacking knowledge altogether (things without sensation) or not grasping the definition of an end (brute animals). Aside: this is why people call nature acting for an end “anthropomorphic,” a “projection.”
• Obj. 2: to act for an end is to order one’s action to an end, and to order is the work of reason (“as Shakespeare tells us, the definition of reason”).
• Obj. 3: the good and the end are the object of the will, and the will is in the rational part (On the Soul, book three).
• Sed contra: the Philosopher proves in the second book of “Natural Hearing” (the Physics) that not only understanding but also nature acts for an end.
• Example: his snow peas throwing out loops around the strings and pulling themselves up—“a clear example of a plant acting for an end.”

2. The corpus: all agents necessarily act for an end (“if the first be taken away”) #

Point: the end is the first of the ordered causes, so no agent acts without it.

1. Of causes ordered to one another, if the first is removed the others are removed too (he notes the word subtrahi, “to run under”).
2. The first of all causes is the final cause, because: matter does not get form unless moved by the agent, since nothing reduces itself from potency (“ability”) to act—treated most universally in “the ninth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]. Something cannot give itself what it lacks; otherwise it would not lack it.
3. The agent does not move except from the intention of the end: if not determined or inclined to some effect it would no more do this than that; so to produce a determined effect it must be determined to something certain, which has the notion of an end.
4. In rational nature this determination is through rational desire, the will; in other things by natural inclination, natural desire. Example: we say the plant “wants” sunlight or water—sends roots down, grows toward the sun.

• Aside: a former student wrote in about his brother Mark, who made act and potency clear to him in one conversation; “humility and wisdom go together.”

3. Two ways of tending to an end (“as the arrow tends to a determined end”) #

Point: a thing tends to an end either as moving itself or as moved by another.

• Moving itself vs. moved by another: man moves himself to the end; the arrow tends to a determined end because moved by the sagittante, the “arrow shooter,” who directs it.
• Those with reason move themselves because they have lordship over their acts by free judgment, a faculty of will and reason; those without reason tend by natural inclination, as moved by another, since not knowing the definition of end they cannot order anything to an end but are only ordered to it by another.
• The whole of irrational nature is compared to God as a tool to the chief agent. So it is proper to rational nature to tend to an end as leading itself; irrational nature is led by another, whether to an end it apprehends (brutes) or does not apprehend (things wholly without knowledge). He notes Thomas sends us back to Physics II.

4. Reply to obj. 1: acting for an end you do not know (“where’s your Greek?”) #

Point: when man acts through himself he knows the end; when led or impelled by another he need not, and so for irrational creatures.

• Example: as a freshman his adviser Kasurik made him take Greek (“you study philosophy, so you take Greek”); he did it for a purpose without knowing the purpose; only later did he see its value (he sees things in the Greek Thomas could not, and one cannot know what a translation misses until one learns the language). Answer to his own question: yes, the action was done for a purpose; he simply did not know it.
• Student: like the builders, who need not know why the architect does it a certain way—“there is what to do and die.”

5. Reply to obj. 2, and the order of the question about insects (“people wonder whether they have a mind”) #

Point: to order to an end belongs to what moves itself; what is directed by another is ordered to the end, which can be true of irrational nature, by someone having reason.

• Aside on method: modern natural scientists refuse nature acting for an end because it would require a mind behind nature. He reads Aristotle’s care in Physics II: action for an end appears so much in insects that some people wonder whether they have a mind. Aristotle does not reason from their having a mind to acting for an end, but from people’s wondering to the presence of action for an end. “That doesn’t; it’s out of order the way you’re thinking there”—the moderns start from “no mind, therefore no action for an end,” but the question whether it has a mind, or is directed by a mind, cannot even arise until you see action for an end.
• Nature-vs-chance premise: if nature were not directed to an end it would reach it only by chance, hence rarely; but it reaches it almost always; therefore it acts for an end. Then: does action for an end require a mind? Yes, either in the agent or in what directs it.
• Example (Fabre): the insect paralyzes—not kills—its prey with a doctor’s precision (Fabre himself could only kill it), digs a hole to size, drags the victim by the antenna, lays its eggs on it so the young have fresh food. When Fabre cut the antenna off, the insect came back, was frustrated, and filled the hole without the victim. Shows: action for an end that looks intelligent, yet the experiment indicates it is not by mind—a mind clever enough to paralyze could find another place to grab (even our forefathers dragging the woman by the hair could switch to a leg). So it is directed by another.
• Aside: carnivorous plants that catch and digest insects.

6. Reply to obj. 3: will and the universal good (“particular causes are moved by a universal cause”) #

Point: the object of the will is the end and good in general, so there is no will in things lacking reason, which cannot apprehend the universal; they have natural or sense desire, determined to some particular good.

• Example: the act of contrition (“because they offend Thee, my God, who art all good”)—you need will and reason to be penitent this way; his brother Mark on the damned, who rejected the very reason everything else is desirable. Thomas on Romans: all men want the good in general—“that’s where the mistake always is.”
• Particular causes are moved by a universal cause, as the ruler of the city, intending the common good, moves by command all the particular offices; so all things lacking reason are moved to their particular ends by some rational will extending to the universal good, the divine will. “A marvelous text.”

7. Article 3: the objections and the sed contra (“the end is an extrinsic cause”) #

Point: does a human act get its species from the end?

• Obj. 1: of the four causes matter and form are intrinsic, end and mover extrinsic; a thing has its species from an intrinsic principle (this is a chair by the form in it).
• Obj. 2: what gives species is prior, but the end is posterior in being. Aside: “preposterous”—putting after before—as a sign that reason looks before and after; his old pun on Descartes, “put the cart before the horse.”
• Obj. 3: the same thing is in one species only (dog or cat, not both), but the same numerical act can be ordered to diverse ends.
• Sed contra: Augustine, On the Morals of the Church and the Manichaeans: as the end is culpable or praiseworthy, so are our works.

8. The corpus: species from act; action and undergoing (“if the fire heats the water”) #

Point: each thing has its species from act, not potency, so human acts, both as actions and as passions, are specified by the end.

1. Things composed of matter and form are in their species through form: dog and cat, table and chair, break down to the same matter and differ by form; form is act, matter is what can be formed in different ways.
2. The same holds in motions: motion is distinguished into “acting upon” and “undergoing” (his translation of action and passion), and both get their species from act—action from the act that is its principle, passion from the act that is the term. Example: fire heats water because it actually has heat; the water is being heated, and its undergoing is known by its result, being hot. Second example: Father Peter could act on him because of the Greek he actually had (he explained Pie Pelicane in Thomas’s prayer); Duane underwent the process, its term being the formation of his mind.
3. So calefactio as action is a motion proceeding from heat, as passion a motion to heat; and the definition makes known the species (ratio speciei).
4. Human acts, whether per modum actionum or per modum passionum, take species from the end, since in them man moves himself and is moved by himself; acts are human insofar as they proceed from deliberate will; the object of will is the good and end; so the beginning of human acts as human is the end, and likewise their term is what the will intends as end—as in natural agents the form of the generated conforms to that of the generator. Aside: Aristotle sometimes calls the form an end because it is the end of generation (the form of the chair is the end of the wood being reduced to act), so the form gives species from that side too.
5. Ambrose on Luke: mores are properly called human, so moral acts get species from the end; moral acts and human acts are the same.

• Asides: schoolchildren who seem to say “why are you doing this to me”; De Anima distinguishes senses of undergoing; Johnson defending a teacher who beat pupils (“if there’s no permanent damage”).

9. Mores, custom, and doing things without thinking (“nature’s custom”) #

Point: he is wary of mores, since it means custom; Aristotle even speaks of nature’s custom, though custom is divided against nature.

• Student: Tocqueville on mores and manners.
• Men can be accustomed to many more things than a dog or cat: occupations; driving a distance and not knowing what you’ve been doing; shaving both thinking and not thinking about it. Stories: his brother in the Marines “shaving” with no blade in the razor; a cousin, a philosophy major in the Navy, allowed a mustache—“it’s not in the manuals.”

10. Student question: a moral act as action or passion? (“when I’m walking home, have I walked home?”) #

Point: Thomas is only drawing a likeness to the better-known case of motion, not dividing the whole act.

• Student: how can an act of justice or courage be understood as an action and as a passion? Answer: Thomas starts from your being responsible—you move yourself, so your act is in a way a moving and a being moved (student: “motivated”). Thomas is not getting into that distinction here; strictly, acting upon and undergoing belong to motion in natural philosophy, where mover and moved are not the same.
• Imperfect vs. perfect act (Aristotle’s simplest way of distinguishing motion from operations like understanding or willing): walking home / making a chair vs. seeing a painting, loving someone, drinking a glass of water. When I’m making the chair I haven’t made it; when I’ve made it I’m not making it—the imperfect act exists only while incomplete. Seeing, loving: while doing it you have done it. Our grammar’s “perfect” (I have walked home) is built on the imperfect kind. In the ninth book Aristotle stops there: happiness must be in a perfect activity—sensing, understanding, loving—not walking home or making a chair.
• The likeness: the end is in the act as its beginning (as a moving, choice is for the sake of an end, what you have in mind) and as its term (as a being moved, what you try to achieve); so there is truth in saying the end specifies the act.
• Caution: Thomas will later say an act done for something else “takes on” that other thing—one virtue commands another, one vice another. Adultery to rob someone: a bit of both, but more an act of injustice, the one formed by the other. Charity as the form of all the virtues: teaching out of love—more an act of love, the end being more formal; a mother feeding her baby vs. a wet-nurse making her living—a different act.

11. Why is ethics named from custom and not from choice? (“customary philosophy”) #

Point: ethics (from ethos) and moral philosophy (mores) mean “customary philosophy,” yet the science seems to be about what is by choice.

• He puzzles: Aristotle puts choice in the definition of moral virtue (a habit by choice); isn’t ethics about what you have some choice over—drinking too much or in moderation, paying debts? Yet the moral virtues are named from custom, since you become temperate or intemperate by repeated acts (friend who drank every Friday and Saturday till closing).
• Student: customs are formed by choices. He: and habits from custom influence choices. Both directions: custom almost determines what you choose (nationalities choosing different foods from the same supermarkets; you can tell what he’ll order), and repeated choices give rise to custom. Parallel: natural philosophy is about things by nature, customary philosophy about things by custom. Left open.
• Student: the Benedictine vow conversatio morum, translated many ways.
• Asides: he chooses not to eat fish except walleye pike with almond slivers; “the only good fish is a disguised fish.”

12. Article 3, replies: proximate and remote ends, killing a man (“to kill a man”) #

Point: the same act in the species of nature can be diverse in the species of morals.

• Reply 1: the end is not altogether extrinsic to the act, since it is compared to it as beginning or term; it is of the notion of act to be from something (action) and to something (passion).
• Reply 2: the end as it is before in intention pertains to the will and so gives species.
• Reply 3: the same numerical act, as it once goes forth from the agent, is ordered to only one proximate end, from which it has its species, but can be ordered to many remote ends, one the end of the other. Killing a man, the same in natural species, can be ordered to the conservation of justice or to satisfying anger: the executioner carrying out the judge’s sentence is an act of justice; my whacking your head off in anger, an act of injustice/vice. Motion takes species from its per se term, not an accidental one; the moral end is accidental to the natural thing and conversely. “A subtle thing,” but clear in the example. The proximate end is the “why”: to carry out the law, or because I’m angry.
• His parallel with words: honey on toast vs. calling his wife “honey”—same letters, sound and order, so in one sense the same word; but a figure of speech is precisely not to have the same meaning, so if “name” includes meaning in its notion it is not the same name, as the sermocinales sciences [ed.: reading of garbled “sermo sinologicus”] would judge. He is still working it out when the recording ends: “name means what you mean”—left open.

His words #

• “Natural Hearing”: his rendering of the title of the Physics [ed.: Physics].
• “ability”: potency [ed.: potentia].
• “ninth book of wisdom”: [ed.: Metaphysics IX].
• subtrahi: “to run under,” taken away, of the other causes when the first is removed.
• natural desire: the natural inclination by which non-rational things are determined to an end.
• sagittante: “arrow shooter,” the archer who directs the arrow.
• “acting upon” / “undergoing”: his translation of action and passion [ed.: actio / passio].
• calefactio: heating up; as action a motion from heat, as passion a motion to heat.
• ratio speciei: what the definition makes known.
• per modum actionum / per modum passionum: the two ways of considering human acts.
• mores: customs; hence “customary philosophy” for moral/ethical philosophy (ethos, custom).
• imperfect vs. perfect act: motion, which exists only while incomplete (walking home) vs. operation complete while occurring (seeing, loving).
• conversatio morum (student): the Benedictine vow.
• sermocinales sciences [ed.: reading of garbled transcript]: the sciences concerned with speech.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 1, a. 2 (whole article, with replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 1, a. 3 (whole article, with replies)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics II (nature acts for an end; insects and “whether they have a mind”)
• Aristotle, On the Soul, book III (will in the rational part); senses of undergoing and acting upon
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (“ninth book of wisdom”; nothing reduces itself from potency to act; perfect and imperfect act, happiness in perfect activity)
• Aristotle’s definition of moral virtue as a habit by choice (locus not given)
• Augustine, On the Morals of the Church and of the Manichaeans (sed contra of a. 3)
• Ambrose, on Luke (mores are properly human)
• Thomas on Romans (all men want the good in general)
• Thomas’s prayer with Pie Pelicane (inferred: Adoro te devote)
• Fabre’s observations of insects; Boswell’s Johnson; Tocqueville; the Rule of St Benedict (conversatio morum); Shakespeare’s “definition of reason” (unlocated)

His questions #

• Was there a purpose for my studying Greek? Was the action done for a purpose? Yes; he simply didn’t know it—knowing the end is not required when one is led by another.
• Does action for an end require a mind? Yes, but either in the one acting for the end or in what directs it; the question arises only after you see action for an end.
• Why isn’t the science named from choice rather than custom? Left open: custom shapes choice and repeated choice makes custom.
• When I’m making a chair, have I made a chair? When I’m seeing the painting, have I seen it? No / yes—imperfect act vs. perfect act.
• If you commit adultery in order to rob somebody, is it an act of injustice or of intemperance? A bit of both, but more injustice; the one is formed by the other.
• If I teach you out of love, is this an act of love or an act of teaching? More an act of love; the end is more formal.
• When the executioner kills you, and when I kill you in anger—what act is each? Justice and injustice: the same act in natural species, diverse in moral species.
• Is “honey” on toast and “honey” for my wife the same name? Left open: same word by letters and sound, not the same name if name includes meaning.