Does the Will Want the End Only, or the Means Too? One Act or Two? (Q.8 aa.2–3)

Orientation #

He closes by saying this is a good place to stop “before you get to question nine next time.” He does not refer back to last time. The previous class treated the circumstances of acts and the opening of the will’s acts regarding the end; the next takes up q. 9, what moves the will.

The class, in order #

1. Article 2, the objections and sed contra (“It seems that voluntas”) #

The question: is willing (voluntas) only of the end, or also of what is for the end? He first notes the name problem: voluntas names both the power and its act, as “understanding” names both the power and its fundamental act.

• Obj. 1 (Ethics III): the will is of the end, choice (electio) of what is for the end.
• Obj. 2 (Ethics VI): to things diverse in genus, diverse powers are ordered; the end, the honest good or the pleasant (delectabile), is in the genus of quality or action/passion, the useful is in ad aliquid (Ethics I); so if the will is of the end it is not of the means.
• Obj. 3: habits are proportioned to powers as their perfections, and among the operative arts one is ordered to the end, another to the means: to the sailor/gubernator belongs the use of the ship, its end; to another art its making.
• Sed contra: in natural things one power goes through the middle and arrives at the end — the stone falls and arrives; the means are the middles by which one comes to the end as term. “Some nice argument.”

2. Article 2, the body: power vs. act (“names a simple act of the power”) #

Point: taken as a power, the will extends to end and means; taken as the act properly so named, it is of the end only.

1. Every power extends to everything in which the notion of its object is found in any way: sight to whatever partakes of colour. The notion of good is in the means too. (He notes this is not the primary sense at issue.)
2. Every act named from the power names the simple act of that power: intelligere the simple act of understanding — as Locke’s book on “human understanding” names the power, but “understanding” also names an act, the simplest one.
3. The simple act is of what is by itself the object; what is good and willed by itself is always the end. Hence will is properly of the end.
4. The means are not willed on account of themselves but in order to the end; the will is born toward them only insofar as it is born toward the end, and what it wills in them is the end. Example: his morning pill box (three pills, once four — “did I double one?”): why does he will to take the pill? For preservation of life, “I don’t have to be healthy, but keeping me alive.” Proportion: to understand is properly of things known secundum se, the beginnings; conclusions are said to be understood only insofar as the principles are considered in them. “This is the famous proportion of Aristotle” (Ethics VII): as the end is in desirables, so the beginning in intelligibles. Whence the “circle in analysis”: mind goes from principles to conclusions, then comes back and sees the conclusion in the principles — why the Analytics are called Prior and Posterior; St. Bonaventure’s “through” the effect to the cause, then the cause seen “in” the effect, the more perfect. He observes Thomas is not simply denying that will is of both: willing medicine insofar as one wills health, “both, but not simply or properly by itself.”

• Aside: one sees all conclusions about God face to face, or the angels point them out; joke on whether we read in heaven (“pull out St. Thomas and read about the beatific vision — no”).

3. Reply to obj. 1 and the digression on Aristotle’s Greek (“all men by birth want to understand”) #

Reply 1: the Philosopher speaks of will as properly naming the simple act, not as naming the power. He finds it “funny he says that” — curious that Thomas says only this. Digression on going from Thomas’s Latin back to the Greek:

• Metaphysics opening: Latin scire, Greek eidenai, to see/understand; “all men by birth want to understand.” A student notes Thomas’s commentary grounds the wanting to know in the wanting to understand — Thomas “correcting” toward Aristotle’s word without having it.
• The philomythos passage: the Latin has “the philosopher is in a way a philomythos”; the Greek, with the article (ho philomythos), says the reverse — the lover of stories is in a way a philosopher, because moved by wonder, but not fully developed. Literature as a substitute for philosophy for some; “more interesting to think about God than whodunit.”
• Same article problem in John 1:1: kai theos ēn ho logos, the Latin “and God was the Word”; the article marks the subject.
• Albert the Great, pointed out by Monsignor Dionne: poetry dat modum admirandi — from Homer the Greeks learned to wonder, a stepping stone to the philosopher’s wonder; “had there been no Homer there would have been no philosophers” (he thinks Monsignor Dionne would agree).
• Student: Flannery O’Connor’s essay on teaching literature — instructors teach sociology, history, anything but literature.
• Personal history: brother Richard’s Oxford Aristotle; only the Politics caught him; then as a college freshman a Shakespeare course led him to read all the plays, and to buy four or five editions of the same play; he turned from a “practical philosopher” (Politics, then Ethics) to a “looking philosopher,” the Shakespearean wonder disposing him for it; Einstein reading Sherlock Holmes.

4. Reply to obj. 2: ex aequo vs. per se / per aliud (“having themselves what equally”) #

Distinction: genera ex aequo se habentia (colour and sound, taste and smell: neither more sensible than the other) get diverse powers vs. what is through itself and through another, which always go to the same power. Boundary case: sight sees colour and light, by which colour is seen. Useful and honest good are not ex aequo, not univocal, but per se and per aliud. Applied to reason: principles known through themselves and conclusions known through principles cannot belong to different powers; so the same power wants health and wants medicine for health — “you can’t want what is for the end without wanting the end,” though perhaps by different acts.

5. Reply to obj. 3: habits vs. powers (“not whatever diversifies a habit”) #

Point: what diversifies habits need not diversify powers; habits are determinations of powers to special acts. Aristotle has different habits for principles (nous, intellectus, his “natural understanding”) and for reasoned knowledge (episteme, scientia) — different habits, not different powers. Moreover every operative art considers both: the ruling art considers the end as what it is about and the means as what it commands (aside: the head of the ship must be the one with knowledge, “not just anybody, like Barack Obama”); the shipbuilding art does the means and orders them to the end; each art has its own end and its own means. Geometry, arithmetic, natural philosophy: different habits, not different minds — “in a faculty meeting you might think they are.”

• Aside: Aristotle “the best balanced mind in history” — anatomy, history, logic, concrete and abstract; some poems lost; Thomas’s prayers as his poetry.

6. Article 3, the objections and sed contra (“where there is one for the sake of another”) #

The question: by the same act is the will born to end and means?

• Obj. 1 (Topics): where one is for the sake of another, there is one only; the means are willed only for the end.
• Obj. 2: the end is the reason for willing the means as light is the reason for seeing colour, and light and colour are seen by one act.
• Obj. 3: one natural motion goes through the middles to the last.
• Student adds a theological argument: Pius IX defining the Immaculate Conception said it was one and the same decree of God’s will for the Incarnation and his mother — end and means. “So it seems.”
• Sed contra: acts are diversified by objects; end and useful are diverse species of good.

7. Article 3, the body (“the will is born towards the end in two ways”) #

1. The end is willed by itself, the means only on account of the end; so the will can be born to the end without the means (“want to be healthy without wanting to take medicine”), but not to the means without the end.
2. So the will is born to the end in two ways: absolutely, by itself; and as the reason for willing the means — as reason sees the beginning by itself, and as reason for the conclusion.
3. One and the same motion is born to the end as reason for the means and to the means; another act is born to the end absolutely, which sometimes precedes in time: one wills health, then deliberating how to be healed, wills to go to the physician. Likewise one first understands principles by themselves, afterwards in the conclusions. He connects this to the student’s Pius IX case. In God there can be no multiplicity of acts: he wills us only insofar as he wills himself as end of creation.

• Aside: Bonaventure, God is the beginning of all precisely because he is the end. Apocalypse “alpha and omega,” “first and last,” “beginning and end”: “beginning” there means mover or maker. Aristotle’s “beginnings, causes, or elements,” which Thomas explains at the beginning of the Physics commentary: either beginning wider than cause, cause wider than element (Metaphysics V); or element = matter, beginning = mover/maker, causes = form and end — the latter sense fits archē in the Apocalypse (not a point, not matter, not form).
• Aside: God does not reason, sees all in himself at once. Summa Contra Gentiles opening: no study more perfect, sublime, useful, delightful, each backed by reason and text (perfect: “blessed the man who partakes of wisdom,” Ecclesiasticus or Wisdom; sublime: likeness to God who made all in wisdom, likeness cause of friendship, the wise man a friend of God; useful; no boredom). The elephant-in-the-street story: Thomas would rather believe an elephant than that a brother lied.

8. Article 3, the replies and the reply to the sed contra (“light can be seen without colour”) #

• Ad 1: the argument holds insofar as the will is born to the end as reason for the means; likewise reason, born to the beginning as reason for the conclusion, sees both by one act.
• Ad 2: whenever colour is seen, light is seen by the same act, but light can be seen without colour (from De Anima — a student had not heard this; he calls it essential to the point). So whoever wills the means wills the end in the same act, not the reverse.
• Ad 3: in execution the means are middles and the end the term, so as natural motion sometimes stops in the middle, one may do the means and not achieve the end; in willing it is the reverse — the will comes through the end to the means, as understanding comes to conclusions through the beginnings, the media, middle terms; the understanding sometimes has the middle and does not proceed (you need a teacher like Euclid to deduce), and the will sometimes wills the end and not the means. His question to students: can you love wisdom without loving logic? — perhaps not until you see the need for logic. Thomas at the beginning of the Psalms commentary: all want happiness; the roads differ, and the ends of the roads; virtue the road to happiness, vice to misery — the morning paper full of examples of misery.
• Reply to sed contra: useful and honest are not species of good ex aequo divisae, but per se and per aliud; the will’s act can be born to one without the other, not the reverse; as the mind to the axioms without conclusions. So you can love wisdom without logic, not logic without wisdom — “logic is not for its own sake, thank God.”
• Student aside: the angels’ purification, enlightenment, perfection — higher angels point out conclusions to lower who see the principle.
• Aside: his adviser Kasurik forced him to take Greek before college (“that’s not a reason”); he did not want it, but if he had seen it necessary for philosophy he would have wanted it — an instance of the point.

His words #

• voluntas: same name for the power and for its act, like “understanding”.
• honestum: “always a question how you translate,” honourable good, good in itself.
• delectabile: the pleasant.
• utile: the useful.
• ad aliquid: the genus of the useful [ed.: relation].
• gubernator: sailor/steersman, whose art uses the ship.
• secundum se: known by themselves, the beginnings.
• “beginnings”: his rendering of principia/archai [ed.: principles].
• “natural understanding”: his term for nous, intellectus, the habit of principles.
• episteme / scientia: “reasoned-out understanding.”
• ex aequo se habentia: genera “having themselves equally,” e.g. colour and sound.
• “looking philosopher” vs. “practical philosopher”: theoretical vs. practical [ed.: speculative].
• eidenai vs. scire: to see/understand vs. to know (the conclusion).
• philomythos: lover of stories/myths/plots.
• dat modum admirandi (Albert): poetry “teaches us how to wonder.”
• media: middle terms, the middles.
• archē: “beginning” in the Apocalypse, taken as mover or maker.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q. 8 a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies).
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q. 8 a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies, reply to the sed contra).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics, opening sentence and the philomythos passage (Greek against the Latin).
• John 1:1 (Greek against the Latin).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Ethics III, VI, I (in the objections); Ethics VII (the proportion); Topics; De Anima (light and colour); Prior and Posterior Analytics; Metaphysics V (inferred, “fifth book of Wisdom”); Politics; Physics (beginnings, causes, elements).
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Metaphysics (first lesson, inferred); commentary on the Physics, beginning; Summa Contra Gentiles, opening; commentary on the Psalms, beginning; on the angels’ purification (locus not given).
• Bonaventure, the mind’s journey to God; “God is the beginning because he is the end.”
• Albert the Great, poetry dat modum admirandi.
• Apocalypse, alpha and omega.
• Locke, Essay on human understanding (inferred title).
• Pius IX, definition of the Immaculate Conception (student).
• Flannery O’Connor, essay on teaching literature (student).
• Shakespeare’s plays, Twelfth Night; Homer, Iliad and Odyssey; Sherlock Holmes.

His questions #

• Is “voluntas” the name of the power or of the act? Both; the article concerns it as act, and so it is properly of the end only.
• Why do I will to take my pill? For preservation of life, not the pill for itself.
• Is colour more a sensible thing than sound? No, they divide sensible ex aequo; hence different powers.
• Could there be one power that knows the axioms and another the conclusions? No, they are not known ex aequo; conclusions are known through the beginnings.
• Are the habit of principles and the habit of science different powers? Different habits, not different powers.
• Can the will be born to the end without the means? Yes (health without medicine); not the means without the end.
• Can you love wisdom without loving logic? Perhaps, until you see the need for logic; but you cannot love logic without loving wisdom.
• Can light be seen without colour? Yes (De Anima), and that is essential to the reply.
• Will we have time to read in heaven? No — face to face with God one does not pull out St. Thomas.