Summa I-II q.29 aa.2-4: Love Stronger Than Hate, and Whether a Man Can Hate Himself

Orientation #

He opens by going back “a moment” to the ad primum of article 2, treated last time (prev. lecture), then reads articles 3 and 4 of q. 29 (verified sources). He does not say what comes next; he begins to announce article 5 and then returns to finish the replies of article 4. The previous class covered love as cause of hatred and their priority; the next continues with self-hatred, hatred of truth and universal hatred.

The class, in order #

1. Back to art. 2 ad 1: three ways of being “together” (“Thomas has a threefold distinction there”) #

Point: things divided ex opposito can be together (simul, Greek hama) secundum rem and secundum rationem, secundum rationem only, or neither.

• Secundum rem and secundum rationem together: two species of animal, two species of colour.
• Secundum rationem together but really one before the other: this is Aristotle’s second sense of “before” (Categories ch. 12-13), “this can be without that, but that can’t be without this.”
  • Numbers: one is really before two, two before three; but when you divide number into two, three, four, “one is not a number before the other” — equally number.
  • Figures: triangle really before quadrilateral, quadrilateral before pentagon; equally species of figure.
  • Motions: change of quality can be without growth “like in chemistry,” but growth not without change of quality; change of place without change of quality, but not the reverse (things must be brought together in place). Yet as species of one genus by one division they are hama.
• Together in neither way: substance and accident — substance is really cause of accident, and even in notion “being” is said of substance first. His illustration: “my nose is more thing than the shape of my nose.” He calls it “a beautiful distinction” and stresses how it shows something can be before in one way and together in another.

2. Art. 3 objections and sed contra (“It seems that hate is stronger than love”) #

Point: the three objections and their grain of truth.

1. Augustine (83 Questions): no one fails to flee pain more than he desires pleasure; fleeing pain belongs to hatred, desiring pleasure to love. His gloss: harder to be brave in battle than to abstain from overeating.
2. The weaker is conquered by the stronger; love is conquered by hate when love turns into hate (“what happened to amor vincit omnia?”). He notes: probable objections contain part of the truth — some hate does overcome some love, “that may not be the whole story.”
3. Affection is known by its effect; a man works harder to repel the odious than to pursue the loved, as beasts abstain from delights because of blows (Augustine, same work). Aside: dogs separated but still mad at each other. Sed contra: the good is stronger than the bad, since the bad acts only by virtue of the good (Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4); love and hate differ as good and bad; so love is simply stronger. Aside: people looking at history tend to see the worst.

3. Art. 3 body: two reasons love is simply stronger (“impossible for the effect to be stronger than its cause”) #

1. From art. 2: every hate proceeds from some love as from a cause; the effect cannot be stronger than its cause.
2. One is moved more strongly to the end than to what is for the end; receding from evil is ordered to attaining good as to an end; so motion toward good is simply stronger.
   • Our Father: first two petitions for the end, third and fourth for means, last three for impediments.
   • Question he puts: is my love of truth stronger than my hatred of error? Aristotle treated error as his “natural enemy,” almost rejecting new ideas automatically — yet love still prior.

4. Why hate nevertheless seems stronger (“hate is more sensible than love”) #

First reason: hate is more sensible (he notes Thomas is thinking here of the emotions).

• Sensing is a certain change; what is already changed is not sensed as when being changed. The hectic (febrile) heat, greater but “turned into a habit and a nature,” is felt less than the tertian heat (he admits not knowing these fevers exactly).
• Hence love is felt more in the absence of the loved — “absence makes the heart grow fonder”; Augustine, De Trinitate X: love is not felt so much as when it lacks (his tentative rendering).
• The repugnance of the hated is felt more than the agreement of the loved: Warren Murray’s immediate reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s theme song in the car — “if you started out with Mozart, he wouldn’t have noticed.”
• Student exchange on pain and pleasure: pain more noticed than pleasure; a student adds that relief from pain is noticed (shoes that finally fit). His comparison: pillow under the head vs. a pin in the bed. He ties this to passio, undergoing: undergoing something bad is more obvious. Second reason: one compares hate to a love not corresponding to it. Loves differ in greatness by the goods loved, and hates are proportionally opposed; the hate answering a greater love moves more than a lesser love. Replies:
• Ad 1: love of pleasure is less than love of self-conservation, to which flight from pain corresponds.
• Ad 2: hate conquers love only through a greater love to which it corresponds; a man loves himself more than his friend, so hates even his friend when contrary to him — Cassius annoyed with Brutus, the scene said to show how well Shakespeare understood men.
• Ad 3: one acts more intensely to repel the hated because hate is more sensible; the beast feels the stick. Aside: his brother’s companion kicking a yapping dog.

5. Art. 4: placement and objections (“whether someone can have hate for himself”) #

Point: art. 1 gave the cause and object of hate, arts. 2-3 hate’s relation to love; arts. 4-6 turn to particular objects, the first being oneself. He notes the Marietti parallels (Secunda Secundae, Sentences II and III, Psalms, Ephesians) and everyday self-hatred talk (the overweight woman; the post-abortion loathing described in a book on abortion).

1. Psalm 10: “who loves iniquity hates his own soul”; many love iniquity. Jokes: “who loves rock and roll hates his own ears”; “who likes salmon hates his own taste” — the salmon lunch aside.
2. We hate those to whom we wish and do evil; some kill themselves. Chesterton’s observation: suicide is directed against the whole world, “none of you is worth living for”; Shakespeare presents Brutus and Cassius killing themselves nobly; Empedocles.
3. Boethius, Consolation II: avarice makes men hateful; so every man hates the avaricious; some are avaricious. Sed contra: Ephesians, nemo unquam carnem suam odio habuit — said in the context of marriage; aside about men who kill their wives.

6. Shakespeare: Richard III’s dream (“Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I”) #

Point: the soliloquy after the ghosts curse Richard dramatizes exactly the distinction of art. 4. He recounts the ghosts blessing Richmond (whom he calls “the future Henry the Fourth” [ed.: Henry VII]) and cursing Richard, then reads the speech: Richard fears himself though “there is none else but I”; “Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I” — likeness causes love, and one is more than like oneself; then “I rather hate myself for hateful deeds”; “fool, of thyself speak well; fool, do not flatter”; conscience with a thousand tongues crying guilty; no pity to himself. His question: does Richard love himself or not? In one sense he hates himself, in another he must love himself — a distinction is needed to understand the play.

7. The body of art. 4: per se impossible, per accidens possible (“It’s impossible that someone per se loquendo hates himself”) #

1. Each naturally desires the good; one can will something for oneself only under the notion (ratio) of good; the bad as such is outside the will (Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4).
2. To love someone is to wish him good (as said before). Conclusion: it is necessary that one love oneself, impossible per se to hate oneself — he stresses the strength of “necessary” (cannot not be). Per accidens it can happen. Digression on the distinction: of Aristotle’s thirteen fallacies (Sophistical Refutations), six from words (first: equivocation, “mixing up the senses of a word”), seven from things (first: per se/per accidens; second: simply/in some respect). Examples: can a philosopher cook dinner? — not as a philosopher, but per accidens (Mrs. De Koninck taught to cook by her husband; Eisenhower at the grill; “a general can cook then — per accidens”). Aristotle: the fallacy of the accident “deceives even the wise”; his joke that to start your own philosophy you need only ignore one of these distinctions (Descartes; “make a lot of money that way”). Meno digression: you cannot investigate what you don’t know — then why pay cancer researchers? Answer: one can know imperfectly what one does not know: not knowing how many students or chairs, but knowing enough to count; getting the number fifteen, one knew “in some way” fifteen. The girl who says she doesn’t know his brother Mark yet knows what a man and a brother are: in some way she knows every man, as knowing what a chair is one knows every chair, “but not simply.”

8. First way per accidens: good secundum quid, bad simpliciter (“secundum quid bonum”) #

Point: one may desire for oneself what is good in some respect but simply bad, and so per accidens wish oneself evil.

• The simply/in-some-way distinction is “very important in ethics”: one does what one shouldn’t because in some way it is good; omits what one should because in some way it is bad (mass on Sunday vs. more sleep).
• Sweet poison, delicious poison that smells and tastes good — “you want it, but it’s not really good simply”; he has used it of pornography. Aristotle: what is good here and now often not good simply; looking before and after shows it (smoking and cancer, not from one puff). His cinnamon-coated bitter pill as a child.
• Getting rid of a rival to be king, or for promotion: willed under the aspect of good.

9. Digression on division and the three basic distinctions (“what’s the difference between distinction and division”) #

• A Greek treatise on division (perhaps Andronicus), paraphrased by Albert, gives about six kinds of division. Every division is a distinction, not every distinction a division; a division is a distinction of the parts of a whole. Two main kinds: division of an integral whole into parts, and of a universal whole (genus into species; katholou from holos, “particular” from “part”). Accidental division (white into snow and milk) less important.
• The treatise includes distinction of senses of a word (he doubts it is division strictly), but lacks per se/per accidens and simply/not simply, which are not divisions. These three distinctions, he says, are “extremely important in philosophy,” recur constantly, yet no part of logic teaches them formally — except by way of the fallacies.
• Learning the distinction by the mistake: “the whole is more than the part” vs. man is an animal (his mother: “not just an animal”) — animal is part of what man is yet includes dog, cat, horse; if the whole is not more than the part, geometry, rhetoric and practical philosophy are gone. Geometry is “knowledge of reason” yet doesn’t say what reason is — a multiplicity in the speech rather than the word; a definition of reason [transcript: “Shakespeare’s definition,” likely ASR] is knowledge of reason in both senses; Aristotle: wisdom is knowledge of God in both senses (of the first cause, and which God alone has fully).
• Early Greeks/Heraclitus: if the cold becomes hot, the cold is hot — fallacy of the accident: not the cold as such but the metal; the ignorant come to know by their ability, not their ignorance. Sartre (“that French existentialist”) identifies ability to choose with lack of choice, so freedom is non-being and man brings non-being into the world — the same confusion.

10. Second way per accidens: taking body for self (“man is most of all the mind of man”) #

Point: one may will good to what one wrongly takes to be oneself.

• Each thing is most of all what is chief in it: the city does what the king does — the king declares war, France is at war; “l’état c’est moi”; aside about the dean’s death and “half the faculty’s gone.”
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X: reason more than anything is man. But one may estimate oneself to be chiefly one’s bodily and sense nature: “anybody home?” — we count bodies; the soul seems a ghost in the body; when soul separates from body one sees which is the chief part; “ignorance of the soul,” not Heidegger’s ignorance of being.
• Such men love what they estimate themselves to be but hate what they truly are, willing what is contrary to reason. Both ways: the lover of iniquity hates his soul and himself (ad 1).
• Polonius, “to thine own self be true”: Coriolanus, brave but angry, says he is false to himself when made to show his wounds — but is he true to himself in being true to his anger? A married man pursuing a passion: true to passion or to his choice? which is more you? The alcoholic who joins AA: true to himself in the drink or in his reasoned choice?
• Student objection: isn’t the lover of iniquity then loving himself per accidens? His answer: you naturally love yourself but love what you think is yourself; in the Sentences Thomas says such a man loves himself in his actions and emotions but really hates himself. Examples: Golden Gloves friend Jim Frensac on boxers worshipping the body; the actress or the feminist tennis player aborting for figure or career — good to the body she takes for herself, bad to her soul.
• Passion vs. premeditated murder judged worse because “more you doing it”; the cement-truck story and the Italian crime of passion dismissed.
• “Know thyself” as exhortation to know the soul. Father Harding on angels: no bodies, but not nobodies.

11. Replies to objections 2-4 (“even those who take their own lives”) #

He begins art. 5, then goes back.

• Ad 2: no one wills evil to himself except grasped as good; suicides take death as good insofar as it ends misery, pain or dishonour — Romans, Japanese generals, today’s “death with dignity.”
• Ad 3: one hates something accidental to oneself, not oneself: the sick man hates his sickness, the actress her fat — this follows from loving oneself.
• Ad 4: avarice makes one odious to others, not to oneself; it comes from disordered self-love, willing oneself more temporal goods than one ought.

His words #

• simul / hama: “together”; things divided by one division of a genus are hama secundum rationem.
• secundum rem vs. secundum rationem: really vs. in notion/account.
• “the second sense of before”: this can be without that, not that without this.
• hectic heat / tertian heat: fevers used for habitual vs. felt change.
• passio: “to undergo”; undergoing the bad is more obvious.
• per se loquendo vs. per accidens: as such vs. “by happening.”
• secundum quid bonum / simpliciter malum: good in some way, simply bad; “simply and not simply.”
• ratio boni: “the notion of good.”
• “mistake for mixing up the senses of a word” [ed.: equivocation]; “fallacy of the accidens.”
• katholou: from holos, whole; universal whole vs. integral (composed, put-together) whole.
• Nemo unquam carnem suam odio habuit: “no one ever had his own flesh in hate.”

Texts #

Read in class:

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 29, a. 2 ad 1 (briefly); a. 3 whole; a. 4 whole.
• Shakespeare, Richard III, Richard’s soliloquy on waking from the dream before the battle (handout p. 7, per verified sources). Mentioned:
• Aristotle, Categories chs. 12-13; Sophistical Refutations (thirteen fallacies); Nicomachean Ethics X.
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4; Augustine, 83 Questions and De Trinitate X; Boethius, Consolation II; Psalm 10; Ephesians.
• Plato, Meno; treatise on division (perhaps Andronicus) and Albert’s paraphrase; Thomas, Sentences (Marietti parallels).
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Brutus and Cassius), Coriolanus, Hamlet (Polonius); Chesterton on suicide.

His questions #

• Is my love of truth stronger than my hatred of error? Yes simply, though hate of error can seem stronger, as in Aristotle’s reflex rejection.
• Why is pain more noticed than pleasure? Sensing is being changed; the bad undergone is more felt (pin vs. pillow); relief from pain also felt.
• Does Richard love himself or not? In one sense he hates himself, in another he must; the per se/per accidens distinction is needed.
• Can a philosopher cook dinner? Not as a philosopher, but per accidens.
• Why pay researchers to find what they don’t know? One knows imperfectly what one seeks, as knowing to count the chairs.
• Do you know my brother Mark? In some way, knowing man and brother; not simply.
• Is the man true to himself when true to his anger, passion, or drink? He is true to his choice and reason, which are more himself.
• Isn’t the lover of iniquity loving himself per accidens? (student) He loves what he thinks is himself; he really hates himself.
• Which is worse, a murder of passion or premeditated? Premeditated, because “more you doing it.”