Per Se vs. Per Accidens; Hating the Truth, Hating in General (aa.5-6), and Why Hate Follows Love

Orientation #

He opens by confirming the answer of the previous article (a man can hate himself per accidens, not per se) (prev. lecture), and ends by saying that when they come back in the fall they will start with concupiscence, “question thirty.” The previous class had reached Article Four on self-hatred; the next takes up q. 30 on concupiscence.

The class, in order #

1. Self-hatred and “the good is what all want” (“the bad, as such, is not wanted”) #

Point: the per se / per accidens distinction that answers a. 4 is the same one that saves Aristotle’s definition of the good at the beginning of the Ethics.

1. Aristotle defines the good as what all want, by a little induction (Nicomachean Ethics I).
2. Objection: people plainly want bad things, so how can the good be what all want?
3. Reply: whoever wants the bad must think it good in some way; the bad as such is not wanted. That is per se; the fact of experience (the bad is sometimes wanted, “especially for others,” sometimes for ourselves) is per accidens. Conclusion: without this distinction “you can’t get anywhere in philosophy,” since the very beginning is denied. Thomas “is going to touch upon that in the next article.”

2. Does anything want its own destruction? Matter, sickness, Plato (“the sickness doesn’t wish the health, but the body”) #

Point: Heraclitus’ “one opposite becomes the other” and Plato’s identification of matter with non-being are the same per accidens mistake.

• The sick want to be healthy, so they want something that destroys what they are. Per accidens: the body wants health (it is good because capable of health), the sickness does not (it is in no way good, not capable of the good, but destroyed by it). Aristotle argues that matter desires form because it is perfected by it; the lack of form does not desire the form, for nothing wants what is bad for itself. “That’s all in the first book of Natural Hearing.”
• Plato confuses matter with non-being; the Platonists call accident non-being, “but it’s not nothing”: accidents are not being simply but in some way. His examples: generated by his parents, Duane Berquist came to be simply; studying Euclid he came to be a geometer; walking in he came to be in this room and on leaving will cease to be, “not simply, I hope,” but in some way.
• Augustine, “kind of a Platonist,” speaks of matter as “a something that is a nothing, or a nothing that is something.” Student: he speaks that way of sin too. Reply: sin is a privation, but matter is not a privation.

3. The fallacy of the accident, from Sartre to Moriarty (“seizes even the wise”) #

Point: each of these fundamental distinctions has a common, hard-to-avoid mistake corresponding to it, and the fallacy of accident is the one “even the wise” fall into.

• Sophistical Refutations: mixing up the senses of a word is the most common mistake in words; of the mistakes outside words, the first (the accident) is the one that deceives even the wise, “a very strong way of saying it.” The distinction is used all the time when talking about the Trinity, but one starts with simpler examples.
• Teaching the ignorant: only the ignorant can be taught (as Our Lord came to cure the sick, not the healthy), so ignorance seems to be what makes one able to learn; but ignorance is not what gives the ability to learn.
• Sartre: to really choose steak or salmon from the menu, the will must be undetermined before choosing; that indetermination is a non-being, so non-being in man makes him free (Being and Nothingness). Same mistake as “you can only teach the ignorant.”
• Berkeley: nothing known or sensed by me without being known or sensed by me; what is known by me is in me; so all I know is what is in me. But what I know is the definition of square, not “known by me”; when you learn it, it is known by you and not by me, yet we know the same thing.
• His “step beyond Aristotle”: the fallacy of the accident seizes us especially when the accidental is always and necessarily there. A square can be green but is not always green, so nobody thinks green is per se square; but nobody learns who is not ignorant, and indetermination is always there before choice.
• Hegel’s “tremendous power of the negative”: the negative always comes before, and what always comes before seems per se and to give rise to what follows.
• Sherlock Holmes: there is never a masterpiece crime until Moriarty arrives, so one thinks him the per se cause; “what always comes before is not always what per se.” Break.

4. Article 5: whether one can hate truth (“men love the truth that shines”) #

Point: truth as such cannot be hated; a particular truth can, insofar as it is repugnant to a loved good. Objections as read: (1) good, being and true are convertible (every A is B and every B is A); one cannot hate goodness, therefore not truth. (2) All men naturally desire to know (beginning of the Metaphysics), and science is only of what is true; what is natural is always there; so no one can hate truth. (3) Rhetoric II: men love those who do not pretend to be other than they are, and that only on account of truth (“we want the true man”). Sed contra: Galatians 4, “I was made your enemy by telling you the truth.” Body:

1. Good, true and being are the same secundum rem but differ ratione: the same distinction Aristotle saw first, needed later for the attributes of God, “not invented by the theologians.”
2. Good has the definition “desirable” (Ethics I again); being and true do not. So the good under the notion of good cannot be hated, neither in universal nor in particular.
3. Being and true in general cannot be hated, since dissonance is the cause of hate and agreement of love, and being and true are common to all things. But a particular being or truth can be hated insofar as it is contrary and repugnant to something, for contrariety is not opposed to the notion of being or true as it is to the notion of good. “Kind of a subtle thing.” Three ways a particular truth is repugnant to a loved good:

• as a cause, in things themselves: a man hates a truth he wishes were not true. Shakespeare: the messenger bringing news that your son has been killed; “it’s a hateful truth.”
• as in the man’s own knowledge, impeding pursuit of what is loved: those who wish not to know the truth of faith so as to sin freely; Job 21, “we do not wish the knowledge of your ways.” Augustine’s “willful inadvertence”: “I don’t want to look at that.”
• as in the mind of another: one who wishes to remain hidden in his sin hates that the truth about it be known. Augustine, Confessions X: men love the truth when it shines, hate it when it corrects them. Replies: ad 1 is answered by the convertible-but-not-same-in-definition point. Ad 2: to know the truth as such is lovable (Augustine’s “enlightening”), but per accidens knowledge of a truth can be hateful, not as truth but as impeding something desired: “can’t marry my cousin.” Ad 3: fictitious people are not loved because man loves per se to know the truth, which the unfeigned manifest; hence all the biographies being written. He contrasts the Latin: homo amat secundum se (per se) to know truth, but cognitio veritatis potest esse odibilis per accidens.

5. Article 6: whether hate can be of something in general (“the thing is singular when sensed”) #

Point: even sensitive hate can regard something universally, because a nature can be adverse from its common character; anger cannot. Objections: (1) hate is a passion of the sensitive appetite moved by sense apprehension, which cannot grasp the universal. (2) Hate comes from dissonance, which is repugnant to commonness, but community belongs to the universal. (3) The object of hate is the bad, and the bad is in things, not in the mind (Metaphysics VI, “the sixth book of wisdom, the sixth book after the books of natural philosophy”), while the universal is only in the mind. Sed contra, Rhetoric II (where Aristotle takes up how to arouse or calm the emotions in the courtroom): anger is always toward singulars, hate toward the general; we hate the thief and every slanderer; “we hate these terrorists, in general.” Body:

1. The universal can be taken (a) as under the intention of universality (man as species or genus) or (b) as the nature to which that intention is attributed (man insofar as he is man).
2. Taken the first way, no sensitive power, apprehending or desiring, reaches it: “the thing is singular when sensed, universal when understood” (the “great poet”). The universal is abstracted from individual matter (your flesh and bones are not in the definition of man, “otherwise every man would be me”), and every sense power is rooted in individual matter (the matter of my eyes is not that of yours).
3. Taken the second way, a sense power can be carried to something universally: the object of sight is colour in genere, not because sight knows universal colour but because colour is visible not as this colour but as colour simply; “I can see any color.”
4. So sensitive hate can regard something universally, since from its common nature something is adverse to an animal, as the wolf to the sheep (he first says fox, a student corrects to wolf): the sheep hates wolf in general.
5. Anger is caused by a particular act of the one injuring, and acts are of particulars; hence Aristotle’s line. “I hate salmon in general. I’m not angry with men in general, this man.”
6. Hate in the understanding part, falling on the universal grasp, can be universal in both ways: knowing what a terrorist or an abortionist is, “you can hate them all.” Replies: ad 1, sense does not grasp the universal as universal but grasps that to which universality happens by abstraction. Ad 2, what is common to all cannot be a reason for hate, but something common to many can be dissonant with others and so hateful to them (“dissonance with salmon”). Ad 3 proceeds of the universal under the intention of universality, which does not fall under sense apprehension or sense desire.

6. Timon of Athens and the Phaedo: misanthropy and hatred of arguments (“there are very few men you can trust completely”) #

Point: the Phaedo’s analogy between the misanthrope and the hater of arguments prefigures the threefold division of the logical art.

• The misanthrope fails to distinguish the very few men you can trust completely, the many you can trust up to a point, and those you cannot trust at all; having trusted a man he should not, he says all men are bad (Dickens’ character in Great Expectations). “As they always say to the girls”: you can probably trust yourself completely with John Paul II, but most men only up to a point.
• Likewise the hater of arguments trusted one more than he should and concludes no argument can be trusted. Socrates: blame yourself, we need a technē peri logous, an art about arguments. Aristotle, the “father of logic,” has exactly the three: Prior and Posterior Analytics (demonstration, apodeixis, trusted completely), Topics and Rhetoric (trusted up to a point, dialectic more than rhetoric), Sophistical Refutations (not at all).
• Timon: extremely generous, always inviting people to dinner with little gifts; his servants see they are not his friends; when he falls into financial straits every friend has an excuse, and he turns against all mankind. “Kind of a strange play”; from Plutarch somewhere.

7. Aside on hating salmon (“he hated salmon in general”) #

A National Review review of a book of anecdotes about novelists; his own footnote will be “he hated salmon in general,” with a salmon-coloured tombstone; the man who left a will to have a bottle of wine poured over his grave each anniversary, so his enemies will dump salmon on his; the restaurant near Berkeley on the way to Quebec that kept fish and steak in one cooler, like Bordeaux cookies boxed with chocolate ones.

8. Why hate comes right after love: the same knowledge of opposites (“there’s the same knowledge of opposites”) #

Point: hate follows love in Thomas’s order not because it is the nearest effect (desire is nearer) but because it is love’s opposite.

• Student: hate depends on love in some way. He asks for a more fundamental reason: the same knowledge of opposites, a famous principle going back to Aristotle and Plato. Inductively: Ethics treats virtue with its opposed vices; logic treats what follows and what does not, good and bad arguments; one science of double and half, of knowledge and ignorance (a lack) and error (more a contrary); the Poetics treats tragedy and comedy (the comedy part lost); Politics V treats revolution and conservation of government, since knowing how to overthrow is knowing how to preserve; Francis de Sales’ Treatise on the Love of God treats how love is generated and grows, decays and dies; Aristotle’s Generation and Corruption. “Sweet and sour pork.”
• Why then not desire first? Love gives rise to all the emotions: I love steak, I want steak; I love the girl, I want the girl; I like Mozart, I want Mozart, so desire is closer in cause and effect. But is wanting the opposite of loving? Learning is closer to knowing than ignorance is, yet ignorance is the opposite. “What’s the same is closer than what’s near” (student). Q. 30 is desire, “which we’ll be seeing in the fall.”

9. The theological order of the Summa vs. Aristotle’s order (“are these two great minds in dissonance”) #

Point: Thomas reverses Aristotle’s order of the virtues because theology begins from God, imitating God’s way of knowing.

• Aristotle: courage and temperance (Ethics III), justice (V), prudence (VI). Thomas in the Secunda Secundae: theological virtues, then prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance: almost the reverse.
• Thomas’s two reasons why Aristotle takes moral virtues before virtues of reason: they are more known to us; and by them we are disposed for the virtues of reason. Courage and temperance before justice because virtues about the emotions are closer to the senses; courage is the virtue of the vir (a Medal of Honor for courage, none for temperance or paying debts).
• Likewise angels before the soul in the Prima Pars, though in philosophy the soul is studied in natural philosophy and separate substances only in wisdom. Theology imitates God, who knows all things by knowing Himself; angels are more like God. God has something like prudence (providence) and justice properly; courage only metaphorically, temperance not even metaphorically. Same point in Summa Contra Gentiles: God in Himself (book 1), then God as creator (book 2); theology’s order is the reverse of philosophy’s.
• Even so, within theology the vice is treated with the virtue: despair with hope, envy with charity.

10. Envy against friendship; charity as friendship (“a friend is another self”) #

Point: knowing what friendship is lets one recognize envy as its contrary.

• In his love-and-friendship course he added, influenced by charity as a kind of friendship (“I don’t call you servants, but friends”), that envy is opposed to friendship: if I am sad at your success, that is contrary to wishing you good. English novelists: it is hard to bear success well, harder for one’s friends to accept it. Roommates: a girl whose roommate is asked out by a nice guy going places; two guys, one gets the job or the girlfriend.
• Homer and Shakespeare see the father’s love for a son as the model: Shakespeare’s sonnet on rejoicing in his friend’s success, compared to a decrepit father watching his son; Achilles mourning Patroclus as a father mourns an only son. In his experience no father envies his son’s success, because the father sees the son as a continuation of himself, another self, which is what a friend is.
• The article whether charity is friendship: objection that friendship requires mutual love yet we must love enemies; Thomas’s distinction that loving someone you love his children and relations as a secondary object, so the enemy is loved as secondary object.
• Aristotle: opposites placed alongside each other are more clear.

11. Closing: what comes next (“we’ll start with concupiscence”) #

In the fall, concupiscence. He notes Thomas goes from concupiscence to delectatio without treating aversion, though after pleasure he treats dolor, pain and sadness; so aversion must be understood in treating concupiscence. Anecdote: at a dinner honouring de Koninck and de Monléon, de Monléon said they should be praising Thomas, the master; de Koninck replied they should be praising Aristotle, Thomas’s master.

His words #

• per se / per accidens: as such vs. what happens to what is as such.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• convertible: A and B are convertible if every A is B and every B is A.
• secundum rem / ratione: the same in the thing, differing in definition.
• willful inadvertence: Augustine’s name for not wanting to look at a truth.
• homo amat secundum se … cognitio veritatis potest esse odibilis: per se loves to know truth; per accidens knowledge of truth can be hateful.
• “sixth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VI].
• intention of universality vs. the nature to which it is attributed.
• in genere: colour in general, as object of sight.
• technē peri logous: an art about arguments (Socrates).
• apodeixis: demonstration.
• same knowledge of opposites.
• vir / virtue: courage as the man’s virtue.
• another self: what a friend is.

Texts #

Read in class:

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 29, a. 5 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 29, a. 6 (objections, sed contra, body, replies) Mentioned:
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (“the good is what all want”); Ethics III, V, VI (order of virtues)
• Aristotle, Physics I (matter, sickness and health); Sophistical Refutations; Rhetoric II; Metaphysics I (all men desire to know) and VI (inferred); Poetics; Politics V; Generation and Corruption; Prior and Posterior Analytics; Topics
• Galatians 4; Job 21
• Augustine, Confessions X
• Plato, Phaedo; Heraclitus
• Sartre, Being and Nothingness; Berkeley; Hegel
• Shakespeare, Timon of Athens; a sonnet on his friend’s success; Homer, Iliad (Achilles and Patroclus) (inferred); Dickens, Great Expectations; Plutarch
• Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles I–II; Secunda Secundae (order of virtues; charity and envy; whether charity is friendship)

His questions #

• Is the answer that a man can hate himself per accidens but not per se? Yes; and the same distinction defends “the good is what all want.”
• Does something want its own destruction? Only per accidens: the body wants health, the sickness does not.
• Before you choose, is your will determined to have steak or salmon? Sartre says no, and makes indetermination the cause of freedom: the fallacy of accident.
• Why should hate be taken up after love? Because there is the same knowledge of opposites, not merely because hate depends on love.
• Is wanting the opposite of loving? No; it is nearer as effect, but hate is the opposite, as ignorance is to knowledge.
• Why does Thomas reverse Aristotle’s order of the virtues, and take angels before the soul? Theology imitates God’s knowing, from God to creatures; philosophy goes from what is more known to us.
• Does God have courage or temperance? Courage only metaphorically; temperance not even metaphorically; justice and providence properly.