Consent and Higher Reason (q.15 a.4), then Use (q.16, aa.1-2): Is Use an Act of the Will, and Do Animals Use?

Orientation #

He begins directly with “the fourth article here” (q.15 a.4) and stops after q.16 a.2, with “we’ll stop here then”. Inside a.4 he recalls “we saw that distinction before” (reason as including the will) (prev. lecture). The previous class covered q.15 aa.1-3 on consent; the next continues q.16 and opens q.18 on command.

The class, in order #

1. q.15 a.4: three objections (“It seems that consent to acting”) #

The point: whether consent to acting always pertains to higher reason. He reads the objections:

1. Pleasure follows on operation and perfects it, “as beauty in youth” (Aristotle, Ethics X, “famous comparison”); but consent to pleasure pertains to lower reason (Augustine, De Trinitate XII); so consent to act does not belong only to higher reason.
2. The act we consent to is called voluntary, but it pertains to many powers to produce voluntary acts.
3. Higher reason looks toward the eternal reasons (Augustine, XII); but many times a man consents to an act on account of temporal reasons or passions.

• Aside: “a lot of people don’t know if they have a superior reason then, because they don’t consult these things.”
• Sed contra, Augustine XII: a sin cannot be efficaciously performed unless the mind’s intention, which has power to move the members to work or hold them back, cedes and serves the action.

2. Body: the final sentence belongs to the judge of all (“the final what sentence always pertains”) #

Thomas’s argument as he reads it:

1. The final sentence always pertains to what is above, to which it belongs to judge about the others; while what is proposed still remains to be judged, no final sentence is given.
2. Higher reason judges about all things: sensible things we judge through reason, and things of human reason we judge by the divine reasons, which pertain to higher reason.
3. So long as it is uncertain whether one resists according to the divine reasons, no judgment has the notion of a final sentence.
4. The final sentence about things to be done is consent in the act; therefore consent in the act pertains to higher reason, “according as in reason the will’s included” (the distinction seen before).

3. Digression: the higher power distinguishes and orders (“It always belongs to the higher power”) #

The point: his own recurring principle, “shown kind of inductively”, that it belongs to the higher power to distinguish itself from the lower and determine the order of the two.

• Senses vs. reason: the senses cannot make the distinction; reason distinguishes them and sets the road from senses to memory to experience to the universal.
• Imagination vs. understanding: you cannot imagine the difference, but you can understand it, and hence their order and how false imagination deceives.
• Within reason: geometry vs. natural philosophy, which Euclid does not distinguish but the Physics (book II) does, since natural philosophy is higher; and wisdom (book VI) distinguishes itself from natural philosophy and geometry.
• Philosophy vs. theology: theology distinguishes them and shows their order. Hence modern philosophers, “who don’t have any theology”, cannot distinguish the two or show their order, “necessarily a corruption of the whole”, like the senses trying to know the difference between senses and reason; they “don’t even know the distinction between philosophy and geometry.”

4. Replies to a.4 (“consent in the pleasure of a doing”) #

• Ad 1: consent to the pleasure of a doing belongs to higher reason, as consent to the work does; consent to the pleasure of thought belongs to lower reason, to which thinking belongs. Yet about thinking-or-not, considered as an action, higher reason judges, and likewise its pleasure; taken as ordered to another action it pertains to lower reason, because what is ordered to another pertains to a lower art or power, and the end to a higher, whence the art about the end is called architectonic (arche: chief, Greek for beginning). This explains Augustine’s text. Illustration: the geometer decides whether a triangle’s angles equal two right angles, not the natural philosopher; but the order of geometry to natural philosophy is the natural philosopher’s to determine.
• Ad 2: actions are called voluntary because we consent to them, but consent need not be of every power, only of the will “which is in reason”; the other powers are commanded by the will.
• Ad 3: higher reason consents not only because the eternal reasons always move it to act, but because by the eternal reason it does not dissent. “A little obscure to us because we don’t quite know higher and lower reason yet; so let’s leave it at that.”

5. q.16 a.1: is use an act of the will? Objections (“whether to use is an act of the will”) #

The point: he opens the question on use (he calls it “the sixteenth article”; four things asked: act of the will; brute animals; only of things toward the end or also of the end; order of use to choice) and reads the objections.

1. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I: uti is to refer what comes into use to obtaining another; but to refer one thing to another belongs to reason, whose work is to confer, bring into order; so use is an act of reason.
2. Damascene: man makes an impetus to doing (is “impelled”), then uses; but operation pertains to the carrying-out (executive) power, and the act of the will does not follow the act of execution, since execution is ultimate. So use is after operation, which “doesn’t make any sense for the will.”
3. Augustine, Eighty-three Questions: all things are done for the use of man, because the reason given to men uses all things in judging; but judging things created by God pertains to looking (speculative) reason, “altogether separated from the will”; so use is not of the will. (“No, it’s not, as Monsignor Dionne informs us.” “I used to think that myself.”)

• Sed contra, Augustine, De Trinitate X: to use is to take something into the faculty of the will.
• Asides: “I didn’t know all these crazy acts were in my practical life”; his wife asked why he does not apply logic to practical life, which “resists logic”. Obama raising a billion dollars: politicians’ time goes to getting re-elected, not to thinking what is good for the country; a king “would not have to worry about getting elected”; “maybe we should have a king.” Garfield: no time to run the country for the job-seekers; Jim Quigley, party boss in St. Louis, and immigrant mothers with sons in jail; the St. Paul barber who got a railroad job by one phone call from a big shot. On “execution is ultimate”: Aristotle, Metaphysics V on “mutilate”, which requires a member removed but not death, so Thomas says chopping off the head is not mutilate but ultimate. The Eighty-three Questions is like Thomas’s quaestio quodlibetalis or the book attributed to Aristotle on marvelous things, “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”

6. Body of a.1: use is application, first of the will (“implies what an application”) #

Thomas’s argument:

1. Use of a thing implies its application to some operation: riding is the use of the horse, striking the use of the staff (use a hammer, use a knife to cut meat: “that’s part of my practical life”).
2. To operation we apply both interior principles (the powers of the soul, the members of the body: understanding to understand, eye to see) and exterior things (the staff to striking; “Thomas had been a little bit of anger when he wrote this”).
3. Exterior things are applied only through intrinsic principles: powers, their habits, or bodily organs. Hence his principle that we acquire what is not natural through what is natural: tools through the hand; man, “the most imitative animal”, acquires much through the natural inclination to imitate; roads not natural through the natural road of reason.
4. The will moves the powers of the soul to their acts, which is to apply them to operation; so to use is first and chiefly of the will as first mover (using a ballpoint pen originates in wanting); of reason as directing; of the other powers as carrying out, compared to the will as tools.
5. Action is attributed to the chief agent, not the tool: building to the builder; Michelangelo made the Pietà, not the chisel, “except in a secundum quid sense.” Therefore to use is properly an act of the will.

• Aside: the visitor who doubted God is author of Scripture since “God didn’t write those books”; “who built the house out here, the hammer and the saw, or the man?”

7. Replies to a.1: the will moves even speculative reason (“Ipsa ratio speculativa”) #

• Ad 1: reason refers one thing to another, but the will tends to what reason relates to another; so use is said to refer something to another because it is directed by reason.
• Ad 2: Damascene speaks of use as it pertains to the executive powers, “not the origin of it all.”
• Ad 3: speculative reason itself is applied to the work of understanding or judging by the will; so the speculative intellect is used, moved by the will, like the executing powers. (What Msgr. Dionne lectured on at Laval.) Hence a dependence of philosophizing on the will, “before it’s already theology”; hence Thomas and Aristotle: pride is a cause of deception. Father Hardon: “the most important use of your will is to direct your mind what to think about.” Thomas on docility under prudence, taken broadly: reading carefully, frequently, with reverence the words of those wiser; out of pride one fails to do this, makes avoidable mistakes, is not called back from them, overestimates one’s ability and judges what one is not ready to judge. “Wonder is the beginning of philosophy, but wonder is in the will.”

8. q.16 a.2: do brute animals use? Objections and the likelihood digression (“frui is more noble than uti”) #

Objections:

1. Frui is more noble than uti, since we use what we refer to another thing to be enjoyed (De Trinitate X; Augustine’s saying: don’t enjoy what you should use, don’t use what you should enjoy); but brutes enjoy; so much more do they use.
2. To apply members to acting is to use them; brutes apply their feet to walking, horns to striking, “teeth to biting you.”

• Sed contra, Eighty-three Questions: only the animal partaking of reason can use. He notes the word may have equivocation or “breadth of use.”
• Digression on likeness as cause of deception (Plato, Sophist: “likeness is a slippery thing”; the enthymeme in rhetoric, from likelihoods or signs; likelihood in the Poetics; Cicero’s client late because his wife wasn’t ready). His April Fool’s story: told that Kasurik was going to Russia and De Koninck said “I hope he keeps his mouth shut over there more than he does here”; he suspected a set-up because it was so likely, but De Koninck had actually said it. Kasurik’s history with De Koninck (gave up philosophy, tried once more, became devoted, arranged his lecture tours). The exam example: the man who hits the bottle seems to have flunked. “So you gotta watch out for likelihood”; Shakespeare’s “very like.”

9. Body and replies of a.2; Fabre’s insect and the monkey (“only the what rational animal both consents and uses”) #

Thomas’s argument, “very short”:

1. To use is to apply a principle of action to the action, as to consent is to apply the appetitive motion to desiring something.
2. To apply one thing to another belongs only to what has judgment over it, i.e. what can refer one thing to another, which is reason, “which looks before and after, as Shakespeare says.”
3. Therefore only the rational animal both consents and uses.

• Ad 1: to enjoy implies the absolute motion of appetite in the desirable; to use, motion of appetite to something in order to another. Compared by objects, frui is nobler (what is absolutely desirable is better than what is desirable for another; “propter quod unumquodque tale,” which he attributes to Augustine). Compared by the preceding grasping power, use requires more nobility, because to order one thing to another is reason’s, whereas even the senses apprehend something absolutely; order is defined by before and after, the end of Shakespeare’s definition of reason (“large discourse, looking before and after”).
• Ad 2: animals do something through their members by instinct of nature, not by knowing the order of the members to the operations; so they are not properly said to apply or use their members.
• Fabre’s insect: squeezes the victim’s head enough to paralyze but not kill (a dead victim would decay), digs a hole to size, drags it by the antenna, lays eggs on it. Fabre snapped off the antenna; the insect, in frustration, filled the hole with dirt without the victim. What this shows: no reason; if it saw the order of the squeeze to paralysis (the subtler thing, which Fabre himself could not imitate without killing), it would see the easier one, that there is some other place to drag by. In a broader sense one may say animals use eyes and legs; put in “seeing the order of one to the other” and they do not: “like he’s programmed.”
• Student: the monkey using a stick to reach the banana seems a use of a tool. His reply: the monkey raised with a psychologist’s child stays ahead until words, then is left behind, because the kid sees the order of words to things. Student: monkeys press flashed numbers in order faster than humans; his answer: by imagination and memory. Aside: the motor-oil commercial with a chimp changing oil, “new meaning to grease monkey.”

His words #

• higher/superior reason vs. lower reason; the higher judges according to the divine (eternal) reasons; “obscure to us” as yet
• final sentence: the judgment given when nothing remains to be judged; consent in the act is the final sentence about things to be done
• architectonic: the art about the end, “chief art”; arche, Greek for beginning
• looking reason [ed.: speculative reason]
• carrying-out power [ed.: executive power]; “execution is ultimate”
• uti / frui: use, refer to another; enjoy, absolute motion of appetite
• use: application of a thing to some operation; first and chiefly of the will as first mover, of reason as directing, of other powers as tools
• we acquire what is not natural through what is natural
• likelihood: from likeness, “a slippery thing”; enthymeme, argument from likelihood or signs
• reason: “looking before and after” (Shakespeare); order defined by before and after
• instinct of nature vs. knowing the order of members to operations

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 15, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 16, a. 1 (whole article)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 16, a. 2 (whole article)
• Augustine, De Trinitate XII (quoted within a.4), De Trinitate X (sed contra of q.16 a.1, obj. 1 of a.2), De Doctrina Christiana I, Eighty-three Questions (as quoted by Thomas)
• Damascene (obj. 2 of q.16 a.1, as quoted)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Ethics X (pleasure as beauty in youth); Physics II (geometry vs. natural philosophy); “wisdom” book VI [ed.: Metaphysics VI]; Metaphysics V (mutilate); Rhetoric (enthymeme) and Poetics (likelihood), no book given; book attributed to Aristotle “about marvelous things”
• Plato, Sophist (likeness deceives; “I think it is”)
• Thomas on docility under prudence; Thomas’s quaestiones quodlibetales
• Shakespeare: “large discourse, looking before and after”; “very like”
• Fabre, French entomologist; Father Hardon; Msgr. Dionne at Laval; De Koninck

His questions #

• To whom does it belong to distinguish between the senses and reason, and their order? Reason; the senses cannot do it.
• Where does Aristotle distinguish geometry from natural philosophy? In the second book of the Physics, not in Euclid.
• To whom does it belong to distinguish philosophy from theology? Theology; moderns without theology cannot, and cannot show their order.
• Does the natural philosopher decide whether the triangle’s angles equal two right angles? No, the geometer; but the order of geometry to natural philosophy is the natural philosopher’s.
• Who made the Pietà? Michelangelo, not the chisel, except secundum quid.
• Who built the house, the hammer and saw or the man? The man; so God is author of Scripture.
• Arche means what? Chief; Greek for beginning.
• What does Fabre’s insect filling the hole without the victim indicate? No reason; it does not see the order of one thing to another.
• Does the monkey with the stick use a tool? Left effectively open; he answers that monkeys fall behind once words enter, and do such things by imagination and memory.