Aquinas on Pleasure, Part 1: Is Pleasure a Passion? (Summa I-II q.31 a.1)

Orientation #

He opens with “so now we’re up to pleasure” and closes by naming the next article, “whether pleasure is in time”; nothing further about last time or next time. The previous class treated concupiscence and anticipated pleasure; the next takes up whether pleasure is in time and joy vs. pleasure.

The class, in order #

1. The plan: four things about pleasure (“four things ought to be what considered”) #

Point: Thomas divides the treatment of pleasure and sadness into four parts, and the first three mirror the treatment of love.

• First pleasure in itself; second its causes; third its effects; fourth its goodness and badness. He asks whether this “reminds you of something else”: a student answers, love (love, its causes, its effects). “Very beautiful way.”
• Fourth part surprises: pleasure is desired for its own sake, so how can it be bad?
• Importance of the topic from Aristotle’s Ethics: pleasure comes up with temperance (book III), with continence (book VII), and again in book X, where Aristotle must “clear up about pleasure” and put it somewhat aside before saying what happiness consists in.

2. The eight questions of the first part (“about the first eight things are asked”) #

Point: he walks the eight articles, remarking “how little we thought about these things.”

1. Whether pleasure is a passio — translatable as passion, emotion, or one meaning of feeling; passio means undergoing, related to “e-motion.”
2. Whether it is in time — touches the disagreement between “the two greatest philosophers, Plato and Aristotle.”
3. Whether it differs from joy. Distinction drawn: pleasure and pain are more bodily (especially touch) vs. joy and sadness more spiritual. Boundary cases put to the class: envy is chiefly a sadness, not a pain; pity is a sadness over another’s misfortune; melancholy a sadness, “a little more spiritual cause.” Signs: we want eternal happiness, not necessarily eternal pleasure; “more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents,” not more pleasure (“another round of beer”); the prayer after communion says gaudium.
4. Whether it is in the intellectual desiring part, the will.
5. Comparison of pleasures of the higher and lower appetite.
6. Comparison of sense pleasures to each other.
7. Whether there is some pleasure not natural.
8. Whether one pleasure can be contrary to another — “I can go from philosophy to Mozart, but not some other pleasures.”

3. Objection 1: Damascene’s operation vs. passion (“operation is a motion which is according to what nature”) #

Point: Damascene (book II of the Orthodox Faith, “always been quoted”) distinguishes operation, a motion according to nature, from passion, a motion against nature — “kind of unusual use of these words.” But Aristotle (Ethics VII and X) says pleasure is an operation; therefore not a passion. He notes the confusion that comes from comparing two authors using words differently.

4. Objection 2: to undergo is to be moved (“pati est moveri”) #

Point: pati est moveri, but pleasure consists not in being moved but in having been moved, since it is caused by the good now attained; therefore not a passion.

• Physics III (he calls it “Natural Hearing”): Aristotle takes up motion, then acting-upon and undergoing, actio and passio, poiein and paschein, the two categories; Thomas there makes a “nice digression” explaining the ten categories and divides them better than Albert the Great does.
• “Having been moved” illustrated by beautiful scenery and Mozart’s music being “restful.”
• Asides: he was asked what Aristotle thinks of the human condition regarding error; Thomas’s commentary on De Anima III, on the early Greeks explaining deception, says people are deceived of themselves, need a teacher, and “we spend more time, pluri tempore, in error than in the knowledge of truth” — a teacher sees how easily students err and how long it takes to see through errors. On his sabbatical working on error he recalled a doctor who thought everyone about to crack up; “we’re that far away from our next mistake.”
• On noise: C.S. Lewis, “Hell is a kingdom of noise”; the French saying le bruit ne fait pas de bien, le bien ne fait pas de bruit; Thomas talks of beautiful music in heaven, noise in hell; army barracks with pocket radios all night, his cousin sleeping in the shop in the navy, rock music used to soften up men under interrogation.

5. Objection 3: pleasure perfects, and to be perfected is not to be altered (“it perfects what operation”) #

Point: pleasure is a perfection of the one delighted (Ethics X: pleasure perfects operation), but to be perfected is not to undergo or be altered (Physics VII, De Anima II); therefore not a passion.

• Pleasure intensifies operation: pleased by Mozart I listen more intensely; pleased by Shakespeare’s words (“wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast”) I meditate on them; enjoying thinking about God I think about him more intensely (e.g. knowledge of future contingents).
• Perfecting vs. altering: did Michelangelo alter the marble or perfect it? Does learning alter you?
• Operation of eye or ear: his brother Mark’s Detroit friends, painters “entirely in their eyes,” noticing shades of colour; Mozart “entirely in his ear,” hearing more than anyone and so delighting more (his reaction on hearing a piece of Bach).
• Student: listening to Mozart is a perfection of what? — Of my hearing; likewise pleasure in seeing Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks (his favourite painting in college) intensifies my seeing; pleasure in understanding God intensifies and “keeps me awake.”
• Aristotle’s “famous passage”: a little imperfect knowledge of higher things delights more than easy leisurely knowledge — knowing the number of chairs in the room is easy and gives no delight; the little he knows of God delights more; as a glimpse of someone we love delights more than a leisurely view of the boss or the bus driver.

6. Sed contra: Augustine (“what the great Augustine says”) #

Augustine, City of God IX and XIV, places pleasure — sive gaudium, laetitia — among the passions of the soul. “Thomas has got to clarify the words.”

7. The body of the article (“pleasure is a certain motion of the soul”) #

Point: pleasure is a motion of the sense appetite following sense apprehension, hence a passion of the soul.

1. Properly, a passion is a motion of the sense desiring power (appetitus here names the power, not the act of desire; the power is named from the passion that stands out). Any affection following sense apprehension is such a motion; we have two desiring powers, will following reason and sense desire following the senses.
2. This belongs to pleasure, per Aristotle’s Rhetoric I: pleasure is a certain motion of the soul, and a constitution, simul tota, all at once, in existing nature, and sensible. Thomas explains each term:
   • Motion / constitution. In natural things and in animals, to be moved to perfection is not all at once (before and after — Categories ch. 12 on before, ch. 13 on simul, Greek hama, “together”), but to have achieved perfection is totum simul — “like the only definition of eternity.” Example: making the Pietà took chipping away, but “all at once the thing was done”; it’s all at once that the pie is ready to eat. Student: is Rubinstein perfecting a Chopin piece the same? — Playing it involves movements in time, ten minutes; yet it is all at once that it is finished. Belloc’s verse after his wife died, on Juliet: grace and beauty “all at once were Juliet” — he experienced perfection all at once.
   • Sensed. Difference between animals and non-living natural things: the latter, when constituted in what is natural to them, do not sense it; animals do — the cat purrs after being fed or rubbed. From this sensing a motion arises in the sense appetite, and that motion is pleasure. “Motion of the soul” gives the genus — not the soul by itself without the body; passiones animae must be read as in one because of the soul.
   • In existing nature gives the cause: the presence of a connatural good. Water too hot or too cold, sound too loud (turn it down, it hurts the ears): not proportionate, not connatural, no pleasure.
   • All at once shows the constitution is taken not as being constituted but as in the state of being constituted, at the term of motion. Here the Plato–Aristotle difference: pleasure is not a generation, as Plato held in the Philebus, but consists more in being made [ed.: in factum esse], Ethics VII.
   • Sensible excludes perfections of things without sensation: no pleasure in rocks or “the poor trees.”
3. Conclusion: pleasure is a motion of the animal desiring power following upon the grasping (Thomas’s apprehensio) of the senses; hence a passion of the soul.

• Asides: error vs. mistake — error from “wander,” the mind’s disordered movement; mistake from missing and taking, “take” a word for grasping, so it refers originally to the knowing power; German “perceive” [ed.: wahrnehmen] combines true and take; “misapprehension” a beautiful word. The thing known is in the knower; “where your treasure is, there your heart shall be,” the heart of the will is in the object — “I left my heart in San Francisco”; a friend’s story of a man wanting money, not drugs.

8. Reply 1: “pleasure is an operation” is a predication by the cause (“praedicatio per causam”) #

Point: an operation connatural to a thing and unimpeded is its second perfection (De Anima II) — the power or habit is first perfection, its operation second; when a thing is constituted in its fitting operation, unimpeded by anything extrinsic, pleasure follows, consisting in being perfect in some way. So “pleasure is an operation” is said per causam, not by what it is.

• Term met before: as Aristotle says sensing is an undergoing, because the sense is acted upon by its object, though actual sensing results from the object being joined to the power. (A student’s suggestion that “the good is what all want” is such a predication: no, a different thing.)
• Daily speech: “if you know length and width, you know the area” — that is the cause of knowing the area, not what it is; a student notes length and width also give the perimeter, a different thing. “Steak is my pleasure in life,” “beer is my pleasure,” “my wife is my pleasure,” ice cream: the cause of pleasure, not the pleasure.
• Beatitude: the pleasure in seeing God is from the perfection of the operation; the operation is not the pleasure but its cause.
• Student: Mozart vs. listening to Mozart — what is the distinction? Answer: Mozart’s music is connatural to my ear; hearing it without distraction perfects my hearing, and the pleasure results; hearing is cause, not the pleasure. Vermont fall foliage seen while driving (little mental activity needed) vs. garish department-store colours: nature moderates; colours proportioned to the eye give pleasure. “Seeing the fall foliage is a pleasure for me” is per causam.

9. Reply 2: twofold motion in the animal (“one according to the intention of the end”) #

Point: motion according to intention of the end (the appetite) vs. motion of execution (exterior operation). In one who has attained the good, the motion of execution ceases, but not the motion of the desiring power, which before desired the thing not had and now delights in the thing had. So pleasure is a certain quiet of the appetite (why foliage is “restful,” the appetite at rest in the good present), yet some change of the desiring power from the thing remains, by reason of which pleasure is a motion — “he’s not altogether denying that this motion continues.”

10. Reply 3: the name “passion” carried from suffering to receiving (“How do you translate the word passion”) #

Point: “passion” belongs more properly to passions that corrupt and tend to something bad (bodily sickness, sadness, fear), but some passions are ordered to good (love, desire), and so pleasure is called a passion.

• Naming as we know: the first meaning of passio / paschein is suffering, because most known — a pin stuck in you makes you aware of being acted upon, while your acting on my eyes does not. English “suffering” has stuck on that first meaning (something bad); Greek and Latin carried the word over, dropping the bad and keeping the receiving — Mozart’s music acts on my ear pleasingly; Aristotle in De Anima says sensing is a passio in a new sense.
• His rendering “undergoing”: also first suggests something bad (“he has undergone a lot”), but less stuck on it; students in class undergo something (“why are you doing this to me?”), the teacher acting upon them to improve them — his own teachers at Laval, Kasurik, Monsignor Dionne, Charles De Koninck. So undergoing can even be perfecting.
• “Suffer the children to come to me”: a different sense, allowing.
• Saints undergo something from God who acts on them in a way that perfects; the mystics at the higher stage are more moved by God than moving themselves.
• Closes: “Now, whether pleasure is in time.”

His words #

• delectatio: pleasure; tristitia: sadness.
• passio: undergoing; passion, emotion, or one sense of “feeling”; his preferred English “undergoing.”
• pati est moveri: to undergo is to be moved.
• actio / passio, poiein / paschein: acting upon and undergoing, the two categories.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• pluri tempore: more time (in error than in truth).
• appetitus: the desiring power, not the act of desire.
• apprehensio: grasping, the knowing of the senses; “misapprehension.”
• simul tota / totum simul: all at once; Greek hama, “together.”
• passiones animae: passions of the soul — in one because of the soul, not in the soul alone.
• connatural: fitting to the nature, proportioned (water, sound, colours).
• first vs. second perfection: the power or habit vs. its operation.
• praedicatio per causam: predication by reason of the cause, not by what the thing is.
• motion of intention of the end vs. motion of execution.
• gaudium, laetitia: joy.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 31, prologue and a. 1 (probably; inferred): the four parts, the eight articles, three objections, sed contra, body, three replies.
• Aristotle, Rhetoric I: pleasure as motion of the soul and constitution simul tota, quoted and glossed.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III (temperance), VII (continence; pleasure in being made), X (pleasure perfects operation; happiness; the passage on imperfect knowledge of higher things — book not stated).
• Aristotle, Physics III (motion, action and passion; Thomas’s digression on the ten categories), VII (to be perfected is not to be altered).
• Aristotle, De Anima II (second perfection; sensing as passio), III with Thomas’s commentary (early Greeks, error).
• Aristotle, Categories 12 and 13 (before, simul).
• John Damascene, Orthodox Faith II.
• Augustine, City of God IX and XIV.
• Plato, Philebus.
• Albert the Great on the categories.
• Belloc’s verse on Juliet; C.S. Lewis on hell as noise; Shakespeare (“wisely and slow”); Scripture (“more joy in heaven,” “where your treasure is,” “suffer the children”).

His questions #

• Does the fourfold plan remind you of something else? Yes, the treatment of love: love, its causes, its effects.
• Is envy a kind of pain or a kind of sadness? Pity? Melancholy? Chiefly sadness in each case; sadness is the more spiritual.
• Would you say that when you learn, you are altered? Did Michelangelo alter the marble or perfect it? Perfected, not altered — to be perfected is not to be altered.
• Listening to Mozart is a perfection of what? Of my hearing; the pleasure intensifies the operation.
• Is knowing the length and width of the table knowing its area? No — the cause of knowing the area; a praedicatio per causam.
• Is beer (steak, ice cream, my wife) his pleasure in life? The cause of pleasure, not the pleasure.
• Mozart and listening to Mozart are two different things — what’s the distinction? Hearing the music, connatural and undistracted, perfects hearing; that is the cause, the pleasure results.
• Does the motion cease once the good is attained? Execution ceases, appetite rests, yet some change of the desiring power remains.
• How do you translate the word “passion”? First meaning suffering (most known); carried over to any receiving; his word “undergoing.”