Aquinas on Consent (ST I-II q.15, aa.1-3): Will or Intellect, Animals, End or Means

Orientation #

He recalls the prooemium of q.13: after choice and counsel (“which we talked about last time”) come consent and use; today begins consent (q.15). (prev. lecture): the previous class covered counsel (q.14). He ends with “take a little break now”; nothing said about next time. The next class continues with consent (higher reason) and then use.

The class, in order #

1. Where we are: the four acts about the means (“looking at the premium there to question thirteen”) #

Point: consent is the third of three acts of will concerning “those things which are towards the end” (choose, consent, use), counsel being placed before choice. He then reads the prooemium of q.15: four questions, (1) desiring or grasping power, (2) brute animals (“Does my cat consent to go out?”), (3) end or means, (4) only the higher part of the soul, a distinction “that goes back to Augustine”.

• Aside: “Most people don’t know they have a higher part.”

2. a.1 objections: grasping vs. desiring power (“What’s the similarity between grasping and knowing?”) #

Point: Thomas names the knowing power apprehensiva, “grasping”; the objections argue consent is an act of it.

• Why “grasping” for knowing: knowing is a movement from things into the mind; Empedocles already said the thing known must be in the knower, though he could not see in what way. The name is taken from the hand: what the hand grasps is contained in it. Thomas calls the first act of reason “simple grasping” (of what a circle, a stone, a dog is).
• Desiring power vs. knowing power: desire goes out to the thing (“where your treasure is”; “I left my heart in San Francisco”). Losing your mind is always bad; losing your heart is not always bad, “it depends who you lose it to.”
• Obj.1: Augustine (De Trinitate XII) attributes consent to higher reason; reason is a grasping power. (“You can’t argue much against Augustine… maybe we haven’t understood Augustine correctly.”)
• Obj.2: consentire = cum + sentire; to sense is of a grasping power.
• Obj.3: assentire, same root, names application of understanding to something and belongs to intellect; so too consentire.
• Sed contra, Damascene (book II): if someone judges and does not love, this is not a sententia; but to love is of the desiring power. He notes the odd use of “sentence” (a court sentence: consenting to your punishment).
• “A good student is always misled by Thomas first.”

3. a.1 corpus: why appetite takes over the name “sense” (“it is a property of the sense that it knows things that are present”) #

Point: consent implies applying “sense” to something, and the desiring power gets the name sense by likeness.

1. Sense knows things present, here and now, singulars.
2. Imagination grasps likenesses of bodies even when absent; understanding grasps universal reasons, indifferently to presence or absence. (I cannot see a cat unless the cat is here, but I can imagine it or make universal statements about cats in its absence.)
3. The act of the desiring power is an inclination to the thing itself, “the contrary of knowing” (which is by a likeness).
4. So the application of desire to a thing as it inheres in it takes over the name sense, “as it were taking a certain experience of the thing” in which it finds delight — as we say something is “to my taste”, “to your liking”. Wisdom 1: Sentite de Domino in bonitate; he adds “taste and see how sweet is the Lord.” Conclusion: consent is an act of the desiring power. “More clear to somebody in Latin.”

4. Reply 1: “the will is in reason” (“the will is in reason”) #

Point: Augustine’s “reason” includes the will, because Aristotle (De Anima III) says the will is in reason, meaning the rational part of the soul, not the faculty.

• Two ways of dividing the soul: (a) De Anima II, five genera of powers (vegetative, sense, desiring, intellectual, moving); (b) by rising above matter: the animal rises above matter in sensing, the rational soul more in understanding; the will is on the plane of reason, sense and emotion on the second, digestion “down here”, hardly above matter.
• Plato’s Republic: three parts of the soul (reason, irascible, concupiscible) matched to three parts of the city (rulers, soldiers, common people). Fitting the four cardinal virtues into three: temperance in concupiscible, courage in irascible, prudence in reason — but justice is in the will, not the emotions, so Plato there does not distinguish will from reason, though will “could be understood in that part.” Protagoras adds piety to the four. As reason rules the emotions, so the will commands or refuses to go along with them.
• Man has will because he has reason; animals have emotion because they have sensation, but no will. So “it makes sense to put them at that level.”
• Parallel in Scripture: “heart” usually means will but sometimes includes mind; “mind” sometimes includes will. People speak these ways without reflecting on them.

5. Replies 2 and 3: sentire carried over; assentire vs. consentire (“There’s something in between seeing and understanding”) #

Point: names are carried over by likeness, and the two compounds of sentire differ in direction.

• Reply 2: sentire properly belongs to the grasping power, but by the likeness of an experience (being pleased by something) it is carried to appetite. Parallel: “see God as He is” is not the eye but carried to understanding; Aristotle’s “all men by nature want to know” uses eidenai, “to see”, better rendered “to understand”.
• Three senses of “to see”, in order: act of the eye; to imagine (Hamlet, “I see my father now… in my mind’s eye” — that “mind” is imagination/memory); to understand. Students jump to the third, but imagining is more like seeing than understanding is. Sign: in a dream you confuse imagining with seeing, never understanding with seeing. “I can see right now” how someone will react.
• Reply 3: assentire is “quasi ad aliud sentire”, implying distance to what is assented to; consentire is to sense together, implying conjunction. The will tends to the thing itself, so it more properly consents; the understanding’s operation is from the thing to the mind (“potius e converso”, as said in the Prima Pars), so it more properly assents; though one word is used for the other. The intellect can be said to assent insofar as it is moved by the will, “especially in faith.”

6. a.2 objections and a digression on pride (“You brute! That’s not a compliment”) #

Point: three objections for consent in brutes, then the sed contra from Damascene.

• Obj.1: consent implies determination of appetite to one thing; brute appetite is so determined. (“There’s a likeness there certainly, but are you overlooking a difference?”)
• Obj.2: take away the before, you remove the after; consent precedes carrying out the deed; brutes carry out deeds. “I’d like to debate Thomas. I just raise my handkerchief.”
• Obj.3: men are said to consent to something from passion (concupiscence, anger) — every newspaper, every police report.
• Sed contra: Damascene: after judgment man disposes and loves what has been judged from counsel, and this is called sententia, consent; counsel is not in brutes, so neither is consent.
• Digression: Albert the Great arranged a debate with the “dumb ox” and lost, predicting his bellow would be heard around the world — the humility of the older man (Plato saying Aristotle is a whole school by himself; Haydn to Mozart’s father). Pride is the greatest impediment to the life of the mind and (per Warren Murray, on the phone) to the love of God, more than gluttony or drink; Augustine’s amor sui usque ad contemptum. Thomas on St Paul’s epistles: pride is the main cause of error on the side of the will, in two ways — you don’t listen to those who know better and would call you back; and you overestimate your ability and judge beyond your powers. Pius X on the modernists names curiosity first, then pride as the greater cause. Thomas, De substantiis separatis (for his confessor Reginald, unfinished, about twenty chapters), calls Plato and Aristotle the philosophi praecipui, “and nobody had said that before him.” Modern philosophers say the opposite of Aristotle without recalling that or why he said it, whereas Aristotle recalls his opponent’s view and reason and argues against both; Berkeley “discovered there was no matter”, Johnson kicked a stone; “Berkeley opens the door of a study before he attempts to leave it.”

7. a.2 corpus and replies: applying the appetitive motion (“to touch a stone belongs to the staff”) #

Point: consent, properly speaking, is not in brutes, because consent is the application of appetitive motion to doing something, and that belongs to whoever has the motion in his power.

1. Consent implies applying the appetitive motion to something to be done (“that word application here is a key word”).
2. Applying belongs to the one in whose power the motion is: touching the stone belongs to the staff, applying the staff to the stone belongs to the one who moves it.
3. Brutes have appetitive motion from the instinct of nature, not in their power; the brute desires but does not apply its desire, cannot “apply it or not”. (Some dogs, kept fed, eat till they die; some have more sense.) Conclusion: only rational nature, which can apply or not apply to this or that, consents. Parallel: Thomas says the will applies reason to think of this or that (Euclid, a psalm, the Prima Secundae).

• Does the dog consent? He would not say so in English; a student offers “agrees to go with you” — an interesting word, closer to appetite (“salmon doesn’t agree with me”).
• Reply 1: in brutes there is determination of desire, but passive, like a stone falling by the nature given it; consent implies an active determination, “in control”.
• Reply 2: removing the before removes only what follows from it alone; where an after can follow from many befores, removing one does not remove it — hardening comes from both heat (bricks) and cold (water congealed). Execution follows from consent but also from the “impetuous motion” found in brutes (C.S. Lewis on the full, real emotional life of animals versus our “half stopped” one).
• Reply 3: men acting from passion are able not to follow it; brutes are not; so the reason is not the same.
• Aside: Mozart’s variations on melodies not his own; performers improvising after a concert.

8. a.3 objections: the principle propter quod unumquodque (“on account of which each that more”) #

Point: the objections argue consent is about the end; the first from Aristotle’s principle that the cause has the attribute more.

• Why Thomas argues three times against what he holds: it “makes you think”; the Summa is “for beginners” and a release after the disputed questions with twenty arguments a side. St Mary’s student who brought an objection every class hoping “today I’ll get him”, all already heard from Thomas.
• The principle, expanded: if the same belongs to two things, but to one because of the other, it belongs more to the cause. Sugar and coffee (sugar sweeter); water and dishcloth (water wetter); salt and French fries (salt saltier); good said of end and means because of the end — the end is “gooder”. Metaphysics II (“second book of the wisdom”): the cause of truth is more true — so Christ saying “I am the truth” makes sense as first cause; his imagined dialogue of Augustine and Aristotle. Premises are more known than the conclusion.
• Obj.1 applied: we consent to means on account of the end; consent to medicine because of health, so consent more to health — though “it would seem strange to say I consent to being healthy.”
• Obj.2: the intemperate man’s action is his end (as the virtuous man’s is); he consents to his act; so consent can be about the end.
• Obj.3: desire of the means is choice; if consent were only about means it would not differ from choice. Likeness is slippery (Plato): seeing the likeness but not the difference leads to mistake — salt in the sugar bowl, a cake with salt for sugar. Damascene: after sententia comes choice.
• Sed contra: Damascene: sententia i.e. consent is when a man disposes and loves what he judged from counsel; counsel is only of means; so consent.

9. a.3 corpus: the order of acts and the natural desire of the end (“Did you consent to be happy?”) #

Point: consent is only of the means because it applies the appetitive motion to what counsel has determined.

1. Consent names application of desiring motion to something pre-existing, in the power of the one applying it.
2. Order of things to be done: grasp of the end, desire of the end, counsel about the means, desire of the means.
3. Desire tends to the last end naturally; so applying appetite to an end grasped is not consent but something else (below: simple willing). “Did you consent to be happy?” No. “Did you consent to study Thomas Aquinas?” Yes, as a means.
4. What is after the last end falls under counsel as means, so consent can be about it insofar as appetite is applied to what counsel judged; counsel presupposes desire of the end, desire of the means presupposes counsel. Conclusion: since counsel is only of the means, consent properly is only of the means — after reading Pius X on the Angelic Doctor “you agree to reading Thomas.”

10. a.3 replies: understanding above science, simple willing, choice adds preference (“they do not differ in reality”) #

• Reply 1: we know conclusions through premises, yet of premises there is not scientia (reasoned-out knowledge) but something greater, understanding — Thomas later puts intellectus before scientia. Likewise, of the end there is not consent but something greater, simple willing, “the fundamental act of the will”; the end is like the premises, a proportion Aristotle uses constantly. Student examples: consent to baptism (as an infant, “you didn’t put an obstacle”), the Holy Innocents — left as questions.
• Reply 2: the intemperate man’s end is the delight; he consents to the work on account of it, so he consents to the act as means to the pleasure, not to the pleasure (“doesn’t matter what he does as long as he gets his pleasure”).
• Reply 3: choice adds to consent a relation of preference. Counsel may find plura media; if each pleases, one consents to each; among many pleasing, one is taken before another by choosing. If only one pleases, consent and choice do not differ in re but in definition only: consent as it pleases one to do, choice as preferred to what does not please. “You’re getting very subtle for our big minds.”
• Closing aside: compared with Aristotle and Thomas, let alone God, “I don’t know much”; his paraphrase of God’s words to Catherine of Siena (“I am He who knows, and you are he who does not know”); since all men by nature desire to know, God put in us the desire ultimately to see Him as He is.

His words #

• premium [ed.: prooemium]: the introduction to a question.
• grasping power / knowing power: apprehensiva; name taken from the hand.
• desiring power: appetite, going out to the thing; “heart”.
• simple grasping: first act of reason [ed.: simple apprehension].
• imaginating power: imagination, grasping bodily likenesses of absent things.
• consentire: cum + sentire, to sense together, implying conjunction.
• assentire: ad aliud sentire, implying distance.
• sentencia [ed.: sententia]: Damascene’s word for consent; he links it to a court sentence.
• higher part / lower part of the soul: Augustine’s distinction (higher reason).
• the will is in reason: reason as the rational part, not the faculty.
• five genera of the soul: vegetative, sense, desiring, intellectual, moving powers.
• eidenai: “to see”, Aristotle’s word usually translated “to know”.
• brute / bestial animals: irrational animals.
• application: applying the appetitive motion to doing something, “a key word”.
• instinct of nature: source of the brute’s appetitive motion.
• impetuous motion: the brute’s passion-driven motion sufficient for execution.
• propter quod unumquodque tale et illud magis: “on account of which each, that more.”
• second book of the wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics II].
• scientia: reasoned-out knowledge; intellectus: natural understanding, its source.
• simple willing: the fundamental act of the will, of the end.
• plura media: several means found by counsel.
• in re / in definition only: how consent and choice differ when one means pleases.
• philosophi praecipui: the chief philosophers, Plato and Aristotle.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 13 prooemium (recalled).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 15 prooemium; a. 1; a. 2 (verified); a. 3 (verified), each with objections, sed contra, corpus, replies.
• Wisdom 1, Sentite de Domino in bonitate (as quoted in a.1). Mentioned
• Augustine, De Trinitate XII (obj.1 of a.1); Damascene, book II (sed contras).
• Aristotle, De Anima III (“the will is in reason”) and II (five genera); Metaphysics II; Metaphysics opening “all men by nature desire to know” (inferred, from eidenai).
• Plato, Republic (parts of soul and city); Protagoras (four cardinal virtues plus piety).
• Thomas, De substantiis separatis; Thomas on St Paul’s epistles (pride as cause of error); Prima Pars on the intellect’s motion.
• John Paul II’s encyclical on Augustine; Pius X’s encyclical on the modernists; Shakespeare, Hamlet (“mind’s eye”); C.S. Lewis on animal emotion; Berkeley and Johnson; Catherine of Siena.
• Verified sources not named in the transcript: handout “Note for Readings Two through Four”, p. 1; printed volume DHB Vol III, The School of Aristotle, p. 535.

His questions #

• What’s the similarity between grasping and knowing? Knowing brings the thing into the knower, as the hand contains what it grasps.
• Does the will in reason mean the faculty of reason or the rational part of the soul? The second; will is on the plane of reason, above matter.
• Where do you put justice among Plato’s three parts? Not in the emotions but in the will, which Plato does not distinguish from reason.
• What’s the second meaning of the word “to see”? To imagine — more like seeing than understanding is (Hamlet, dreams).
• Does the dog consent to go with you? Would you speak that way? Not in English; a student offers “agrees”, but properly consent is not in brutes.
• In whose power is it to apply the appetitive motion? The one who has the motion in his power, as the mover of the staff, not the staff.
• If the same is said of two things, the one because of the other, which has it more? The cause: sugar sweeter than coffee, the end “gooder” than the means.
• Did you consent to be happy? No — you naturally want it; you consent to studying Thomas as a means.
• Did you consent to being baptized? Do the Holy Innocents consent? Left open.
• How do consent and choice differ when only one means pleases? Not in reality, only in definition.