Summa I-II Q.18 a.7–9: Species from the End and from the Object; Indifferent Acts in Species and in the Individual

Orientation #

He refers back to the earlier question of whether giving alms for vainglory is one act or two, and to the earlier point that a circumstance can become something essential to the act (prev. lecture). He ends by asking whether to stop “before she stops,” with no announcement of what follows. The previous class treated aa. 5–6 (acts specified by object as referred to reason; interior act by end), the next takes aa. 10–11 and opens q. 19.

The class, in order #

1. Editorial headings and “just give me the answer” (“Did Thomas actually write that”) #

The point: the article-headings and boldfaced conclusions in printed Summas are editorial (Marietti’s “Conclusio”), often not matching well; a student wrote “yes / no” in the margin of an English edition — “the Cliff notes.” He tends to skip to “the seventh one proceeds thus.”

2. A. 7 objections: is the end-species under the object-species? (“steal that he might give alms”) #

The point: the three objections argue that the species from the end is the more particular, contained under the object-species as species under genus.

• Obj. 1: acts get species from object; the same thing cannot be in diverse species non subalternis (not one under the other) — as I am in man, animal, living body, body, substance, each under the next. Therefore the end-species must fall under the object-species. Example: stealing to give alms (he: “Robin Hood”).
  • Digression from Monday’s class: why a definition has one genus but differences plural — square = equilateral right-angled quadrilateral. Two genera would either be superfluous (one above the other, “dog is a quadruped and an animal”) or make the thing two things; differences don’t make two things but determine what the genus leaves undetermined.
  • Aside: Thomas taught him about the predicables in the Summa Contra Gentiles: arguing no name is said univocally of God and creatures, Thomas notes no name is said of both as genus, species, difference, property or accident — showing Porphyry’s five are a division of names said univocally, and must be exhaustive. Porphyry “should have said that”; Msgr. Dionne agreed. Thomas commented only on the Posterior Analytics and (incompletely) the Peri Hermeneias, so his logic must be gleaned from other works.
• Obj. 2: the last difference (ultima differentia) constitutes the most special species; the end has the notion of last; so the end-species is the species specialissima under the object-species. His illustration: “I am giving alms” is further specified by “for what” — to praise God, to relieve my neighbor, “or to relieve my conscience — that’s called restitution.”
  • Aside: in the Catena on Matthew, Christ treats alms before prayer; a Father says one must be good in deeds before one can be good in prayer.
• Obj. 3: the more formal a difference, the more special it is, since difference is to genus as form to matter (Porphyry, “but Aristotle said it beforehand”); the end-species is more formal (it belongs to the interior act of the will, as seen); so it is the most special species under a subalternate genus.
• Sed contra: any genus has determined differences; but acts of the same object-species can be ordered to infinite ends (“theft to an infinity of goods or evils”); so end-species is not under object-species as under a genus.
• Asides: poets and royalty must be allowed their licence (the English comedy where the man ends up married to the homely girl — “he’s trying to get between me and heaven”; Hamlet’s reason for not killing the praying king, which would make him “a monster” if taken strictly). On not doing philosophy on one’s own: better to discover than to learn, but one wouldn’t get far; introductory courses that refuse “a body of doctrine”; Plato thanked the gods that he was Greek, a man, and had met Socrates; Aristotle’s plaque to Plato — the first to show by word and deed that the virtuous life is happy; St Alphonsus on gratitude for being born after Christ, unlike the peoples of the New World.

3. A. 7 body: per se and per accidens ordering; per se division (“fight well is per se ordered”) #

The point: the object of the exterior act relates to the end of the will either per se (fighting well → victory; “in war there’s no substitute for victory — MacArthur”) or per accidens (taking another’s goods → giving alms).

1. Differences dividing a genus must divide it per se, else the division does not proceed rightly (Aristotle, “seventh book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VII]). Bad division: animal into rational/irrational, then irrational into winged/unwinged — being winged “is not a way of being irrational” (birds are irrational, “bird-brain” notwithstanding). Good division: animal into footed/footless, footed into two-footed/four-footed — the later difference per se determines the prior.
   • Parallel from Euclid: plane figure → rectilineal (contained by straight lines) → trilateral, quadrilateral, pentagon: per se of rectilineal.
   • Digression: Aristotle’s division of philosophy (Metaphysics VI, Physics II) is made per se, as Thomas’s Physics-commentary prologue explains: what is divided is certain rational knowledge, which requires abstraction from matter and necessity, so sciences divide by degrees of immateriality — “a very very subtle thing to see.”
2. So when the object is not per se ordered to the end (stealing to give alms), the object-difference does not per se determine the end-difference; neither species is under the other; the act is in two disparate species. Hence “the one who steals to commit adultery commits two evils in one act.”
   • Example: Nathanson’s interview on why young doctors take up abortion — debts, quick money: murder and also avarice, “several kinds of badness in the same act.”
3. When the object is per se ordered to the end, one species is under the other; which one? Three considerations: (a) a difference from a more particular form is more specific; (b) a more universal agent gives a more universal form; (c) a more posterior end corresponds to a more universal agent — victory, last end of the army, is the end intended by the supreme commander; the ordering of this regiment, by a lower officer. Conclusion: the difference from the end is more general, that from the object per se ordered to it more specific. The will, whose object is the end, is the universal mover of all powers, whose proper objects are the objects of their acts. His gloss: as God, cause of being as being, is most universal and last in things.

4. A. 7 replies (“this apple, by its color”) #

• Ad 1: by its substance a thing is not in two non-subordinate species, but by what comes to it it can be: this apple is under “white” by colour, under “smells well” by odour (aside on apple cider: liquid vs. solid, “where does cider come from?”). So one act in a single species of nature (the reproductive act) is, by supervening moral conditions, in two moral species — adultery or the marital act.
• Ad 2: the end is last in execution but first in the intention of reason, from which moral species are taken.
• Ad 3: difference is form to genus as making it actual, but the genus is also more formal as more absolute and less contracted; the parts of a definition reduce to the formal cause (Physics), so genus is formal cause of species insofar as more common. “There’s a lot to be thought about there.”

5. A. 8: is any act indifferent in its species? (“lift up a straw from the earth”) #

The point: acts whose object includes nothing pertaining to the order of reason are indifferent in species.

• Objections: (1) evil is privation of good (Augustine), and privation and habit are opposed immediately with no middle (the Philosopher) — sight or blindness, hearing or deafness; (2) acts are specified by end or object, each of which is good or bad; (3) a good act has the due fullness of goodness, a bad act lacks something, and every act either has it all or lacks something.
• Sed contra: Augustine, De sermone Domini in monte: some facta are media, done from a good or bad soul, of which it is dangerous to judge.
• Body: give alms to the needy — good in species; steal (“taking what belongs to another”) — bad; pick up a straw, go to the field — indifferent. Aside: scratching one’s beard, but that may not even be a human act; Thomas considers acts universally, not the particular act, where a reason for acting will make it good or bad.
• Ad 1: two privations — privatum esse, which takes the whole away (blindness/sight, darkness/light, death/life), with no middle in the proper subject; and privari, being-deprived, as sickness of health, a way toward total loss without taking all away, not always immediate with its habit. Evil is privation of good in this sense (Simplicius on the Categories): it leaves something good, so a middle is possible. He finds it strange: “even to be a little sick is bad” (aside on his mother’s near-deafness and dementia). A student objects: in the moral life it is either according to reason or not; if you don’t consider the act in relation to reason, aren’t you back in the species of nature? “Put that on the shelf — a puzzle.” How the reply solves the problem “is not altogether clear.”
• Ad 2: every object or end has natural goodness or badness, not always moral, which is what is being treated. Aside: is whistling good or bad? “Depends on why you’re doing it”; grandchildren forbidden to whistle indoors.
• Ad 3: not everything an act has pertains to its species; not containing the full goodness in its species makes it neither bad nor good, as man in his species is neither virtuous nor vicious (a child).
• Open discussion, left open: is having the main meal at noon vs. evening indifferent — a custom, perhaps good, “not a moral act”? Speaking French vs. English — bad if to snub, good to keep secrets from a terrorist; the March for Life rosary said decade by decade in English, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Polish (“the universality of the church”); praying in Latin vs. English.

6. A. 9: indifferent in the individual? (“whether some act is indifferent secundum individuum”) #

The point: a. 8 was secundum speciem, a. 9 secundum individuum; Thomas takes the other side here.

• Objections: (1) every species can contain an individual, some act is indifferent in species, so some individual act is; (2) habits are caused by like acts (Ethics II), and the Philosopher (Ethics IV) says those of even temper and “probable disposition” [ed.: garbled in recording] are not evil yet not good, lacking virtue — an indifferent habit; (3) sometimes a man orders an act indifferent in species to no end of virtue or vice (“unconscious, as we’d say”).
• Sed contra: Gregory’s homily: an idle word (otiosum verbum) lacks the usefulness of rectitude — no just necessity or pious usefulness — and is bad, since account must be rendered on judgment day (“the chattering classes”); otherwise it is good; so every word and every act is good or bad.
• Aside: John Paul II asking President Hagan of Assumption College, “Do you tell Polish jokes at your school?” — “Ever since your election, Holiness, they’ve been forbidden.”
• Body: an act indifferent in species may be good or bad in the individual, because a moral act has goodness not only from the object but from circumstances, which are like accidents — as things belong to an individual man by individual accidents, not by his species. Every individual act has some circumstance drawing it to good or bad, at least on the side of the intention of the end (what was JP II’s end — to discomfit, or to relax the president?). Since rationis est ordinare, an act proceeding from deliberating reason not ordered to a due (debitum) end is thereby repugnant to reason and bad; if ordered to a due end, good; and it must be one or the other. So every act proceeding from deliberative reason, in the individual, is good or bad (“Augustine said this before Thomas”). But an act from imagination alone — stroking the beard, moving hand or foot, humming a melody picked up without noticing (his wife humming Mozart) — is not properly moral or human, and is indifferent as outside the genus of moral acts. “It makes sense” and explains the earlier trouble.
• Student question: earlier Thomas said the moral act is one act with its substance from both object and end (alms for vainglory, one act); why is the end now a circumstance, which is accidental? His answer: the end is in some way outside the substance of the act — end and mover are extrinsic causes; and Thomas said earlier a circumstance can become something essential when it changes the act from good to bad.
• Asides: Brother Mark and the children’s Batman whose lines are aimed at the adults — a double audience, like Mozart’s music (“everybody will like it,” but only the connoisseur fully) and like Scripture, and Thomas too; Sam Rosen, a Lebanese-born physician fluent in English, who reads the Summa’s simple words and cannot understand them; Thomas’s autograph manuscripts “look like Arabic”; Ratzinger’s handwriting; joke of Thomas signing the second edition at Barnes & Noble.

7. A. 9 replies (“does not have from his own species”) #

• Ad 1: “indifferent from its species” in two ways: (a) that indifference is owed to it by its species — no act is so, since no object of a human act cannot be ordered to good or bad through the end; (b) that it has neither good nor bad from its species and gets one through something else — as man has from his species neither to be white or black nor to be not-white or not-black; whiteness comes otherwise than from the principles of the species.
• Ad 2: the Philosopher calls “bad” properly what harms other men (“kind of like we do sometimes”); the prodigal, too generous, harms only himself, so is not bad in that sense; here “bad” means whatever is repugnant to right reason, and so every deliberate individual act is good or bad.
• Ad 3: every end intended by deliberating reason pertains to some virtue or vice: one who orderly sustains or rests his body orders it to the good of virtue. Aside: Thomas on eutrapelia (“easily turning,” the virtue about humorous things) quotes the Apostle John on relaxing the bow lest it break — so even rest can be ordered to good, “but most of the time, I suppose it’s not.”

His words #

• non subalternis — species not one under the other; the same thing cannot be in such diverse species.
• genus (singular) / differences (plural) — one genus because two would be superfluous or make two things; differences determine what the genus leaves undetermined.
• “seventh book of wisdom” — his rendering of Metaphysics VII [ed.: Metaphysics].
• per se vs. per accidens division — later difference per se determines the prior (footed → two/four-footed) vs. not (irrational → winged).
• species specialissima — the most special species, constituted by the last difference.
• disparate species — two species neither under the other; the act is in both.
• privatum esse vs. privari — privation that takes the whole (blindness) vs. being-deprived that leaves something (sickness).
• facta media — Augustine’s “middle deeds,” dangerous to judge.
• secundum speciem / secundum individuum — the difference between a. 8 and a. 9.
• otiosum verbum — idle word, lacking just necessity or pious usefulness.
• circumstances “as it were accidentia” — accidents of the individual act.
• rationis est ordinare — it belongs to reason to order.
• debitum end — due, suitable end.
• eutrapelia — “easily turning,” the virtue concerned with humorous things.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I-II q. 18 a. 7 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas, ST I-II q. 18 a. 8 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas, ST I-II q. 18 a. 9 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics VII (“seventh book of wisdom”) on per se division; Metaphysics VI and Physics II on the division of philosophy; Physics on parts of the definition as formal cause
• Thomas, prologue to the Physics commentary, division of sciences by immateriality (inferred)
• Porphyry (difference as form to genus; the five predicables)
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (no name said univocally of God and creatures; chapter headings), no locus
• Thomas’s commentaries on Posterior Analytics and Peri Hermeneias (mentioned as his only logic commentaries)
• Euclid, definitions of plane / rectilineal figures
• Catena Aurea on Matthew (alms before prayer)
• Augustine, De sermone Domini in monte; Simplicius on the Categories; Gregory, homily on a Gospel
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II and IV
• St Alphonsus (gratitude for Christianity); Plato, Aristotle’s epigram for Plato; Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Nathanson interview
• Thomas on eutrapelia and the Apostle John (no locus)

His questions #

• Why can a definition have many differences but only one genus? Two genera would be superfluous (one above the other) or make two things; differences only determine what the genus leaves undetermined.
• Why is winged / unwinged a bad division of irrational animals? Winged is not a way of being irrational; a per se difference must determine the prior difference, as two-footed determines footed.
• If someone steals in order to commit adultery, how many evils? Two evils in one act — two disparate species, neither under the other (likewise abortion for money: murder and avarice).
• Which is more general, the species from the end or from the object per se ordered to it? The end-species, since the more posterior end corresponds to a more universal agent (victory / supreme commander).
• Is “even to be a little sick” bad, given Thomas’s privari? He finds it strange; how the reply solves the problem “is not altogether clear” — left open, “put on the shelf.”
• Is whistling morally good or bad? Depends on why you’re doing it.
• Is it indifferent whether you take the main meal at noon or in the evening, or pray in French, Latin or English? Left open; a custom, perhaps “not a moral act.”
• Why does Thomas now call the end a circumstance if object and end make up the substance of the act? The end is an extrinsic cause, outside the act’s substance in some way; and a circumstance can become essential when it changes the act’s goodness.
• Is a bodily act like stroking the beard or humming a moral act? No — from imagination, not deliberating reason; indifferent as outside the genus of moral acts.