Summa I-II q.31 a.6–8: Pleasures of Touch and Sight, Unnatural Pleasures, and Whether One Pleasure Can Be Contrary to Another

Orientation #

He opens “should we go into Article Six here?” and closes by saying Thomas will next “look before and after” at the cause of pleasure (the last article “whether wonder is a cause of pleasure”) and then the effects of pleasure (whether pleasure impedes the use of reason, perfects operation, causes thirst or desire of itself, dilates the soul). The previous class treated a.5 (bodily vs. intellectual pleasures); the next treats Christ’s names and appropriation and then q.32 on the causes of pleasure.

The class, in order #

1. Article 6, the objections: is touch the greatest sense pleasure? (“would you rather go blind or go deaf”) #

Point: three objections say sight, not touch, gives the greatest sensible pleasure.

1. The pleasure whose removal ends all joy is greatest; that is sight — Tobit: “what joy for me, who sit in darkness and do not see the light of heaven” (his answer when the angel said “Joy to thee”).
2. Each one delights in what he loves (Rhetoric I); sight is loved most among the senses (Metaphysics beginning); so its pleasure is greatest.
3. The beginning of delightful (pleasant) friendship is most of all vision (“that’s what Romeo says”), and the cause of such friendship is pleasure; so the greatest pleasure is by sight.

• Sed contra: Ethics III (on temperance): the greatest pleasures are according to touch.
• Blind or deaf: students say deaf; one girl, a musician, said blind — as Beethoven might; a cook would sooner lose hearing or sight than taste. Shows each delights in “his thing”.
• His mother-in-law dying and Leo Albert on ice cream tasting like a bologna sandwich: losing taste, “just eating to stay alive.”
• Aside: the neighbour boy will play Romeo in the high school play; he hopes it is done in older dress.
• Aside: Beelzebub, “lord of the flies”; flies on his dad’s farm distract the mind.

2. Article 6, the body: two reasons the senses are loved (“for the sake of the knowing”) #

Point: senses are loved for knowledge and for usefulness (Metaphysics beginning), so sense pleasure is twofold.

1. Eyes for driving and finding things (usefulness) vs. looking at a sunset or a painting for knowledge’s sake.
2. To apprehend knowledge as a good is proper to man; so pleasures of sense by reason of knowledge are proper to man; pleasures by reason of usefulness are common to all animals.
3. By reason of knowledge, sight gives greater pleasure than any other sense.
4. By reason of usefulness, touch: usefulness is measured by order to the conservation of the animal’s nature, and touch knows what the animal consists of (hot, cold, wet, dry), so it is “more near the end.”
5. Hence other animals delight in other senses only in order to the sensibles of touch: dogs do not rejoice in the smell of the hare (leporum, glossed as rabbit) nor the lion in the voice of the cattle, but in eating them (Ethics III). They are “not really enjoying the sunset the way we are.”
6. Conclusion: comparing both, touch is simply greater “within the limits of sense pleasure,” because what is natural in each thing is most potent, and natural desires (food, venereal things) are ordered to pleasures of touch; but sight as serving the understanding is more potent, for the reason given before (prev. lecture) that understandable pleasures are more potent than sensible ones.

3. Digression: the myth of water, air and ether (“suppose you were born in the water”) #

Point: Socrates’ muthos (the Phaedo, “I guess”) as a proportion: living under water you see sun, moon, stars less clearly than through air; above air is ether, as air is to water; the soul after the body sees things more beautiful still.

• Desert night skies (Saudi Arabia) more brilliant, stimulating thought.
• Modern science borrowed “ether” this way: water waves, then sound waves in air, then electromagnetic waves and light needing something that is to them as air to sound; Einstein said no evidence, “so they have a wave with nothing waving.”
• Eyes and ears more important for knowing “in some ways,” but “you got to be careful”: a famous talk on touch and sight — the modern world attached to sight, but the most basic thoughts (substance, good) are tied to touch.

4. Article 6, the replies; beauty and the object of love (“the animal pleasure is more than one of knowing”) #

• Reply 1: Tobit means animal pleasure, which most pertains to sight; natural pleasure most pertains to touch.
• Reply 2: sight is most loved on account of knowledge, showing many differences of things (with touch alone you would know nothing at a distance — sun, moon, stars); its being more spiritual is shown by carrying “seeing” over to understanding (“do you see what I mean?”; a student: we also say “grasp”).
• Reply 3: pleasure (most of all of touch) causes pleasant friendship as end; vision causes it as beginning of the motion, impressing the species of the lovable. Romeo does not love Juliet at the play’s start though she is as beautiful: “he’s never seen it.” Definition raised by a student: beautiful is what pleases when seen.
• Is beauty more the object of knowing or of loving? He used to think loving, sign: “lovely” as synonym for beautiful; “I’m not sure that’s so.” Thomas appropriates beauty (species) to the Son, not the Holy Spirit, with a reason in the treatise on the Trinity — more the object of knowledge.
• Heisenberg on the rule of beauty in discovering physical theories; some say it is more important a theory be beautiful than true; a student cites scripture, fallax gratia (beauty is deceiving); Keats’ “truth is beauty” — “not quite the thing,” but shows the connection.

5. Digression: appropriation, Peter’s profession, “come and see” (“the human is put before the divine”) #

Point: what is proper vs. what is appropriated to the Persons.

• Power appropriated to the Father, truth to the Son, love to the Holy Spirit.
• Matthew 16: Peter’s “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (on which the Church is built; Paul VI noted this) speaks properly; John’s “I am the way (hodos, the road), the truth and the life” — as man he is the road, as God truth and life — uses appropriation. In both, the human is put before the divine; theology reverses the order, as John’s Gospel does (the Word, then “the Word was made flesh,” flesh being synecdoche for man).
• Truth is appropriated to the Son because he proceeds as Word; John brings out “Word of God” more than Matthew, Mark, Luke, who say Son of God — so the reason for the appropriation is seen more clearly in John.
• A church father on John 1 “come and see”: “come” invites to the active life, “see” to the contemplative; same order in the Psalm (serve the Lord with gladness; then know that the Lord is God). Aristotle likewise: moral virtues more known to us; one must be disposed by them before contemplation — a morally disordered person is hard to make a good student.

6. Article 7, the objections: is any pleasure unnatural? (“every pleasure is natural”) #

Point: three objections argue no pleasure is against nature.

1. Pleasure in the soul’s affections is proportional to rest in bodies (why we call something beautiful “restful”); a natural body rests only in its connatural place (“good old physics”); so appetite rests only in the connatural — “damn good argument.”
2. What is against nature is violent; everything violent is saddening (Wisdom 5); so nothing against nature is delightful.
3. Being constituted in one’s proper nature, when sensed, causes delight (the philosopher’s definition, above); to be constituted in nature is natural, since natural motion is to a natural term.

• Sed contra: Ethics VII: some pleasures are sick (aegritudinis) and against nature.
• Rock musicians jumping up and down for two hours (Mick Jagger, “a cardiovascular genius”): “there’s no rest there.”
• Aside: Walter Gieseking’s concert at Minnesota, the pin-drop silence, twelve encores ending with Clair de Lune; kept out of the US for having played for Hitler; compared with Jesse Owens.
• Aside: “homosexual marriage is a square circle.”

7. Article 7, the body and replies: nature taken two ways (“connatural, secundum quid”) #

• “Natural” = according to nature (Physics II; physis).
• Nature in man (a) as reason, which most of all is his nature, constituting his species (Ethics: reason more than anything is man): so delight in contemplating truth and in acts of virtue is natural; (b) as divided against reason, what is common to man and other things and does not obey reason: conservation of the individual (food, drink, lectus, bed) and of the species (reproductive powers).
• In both ways a pleasure can be unnatural simpliciter loquendo yet connatural secundum quid: some natural principle of the species is corrupted in an individual, so what is against the species’ nature becomes per accidens natural to this individual — as water, cold by nature, when heated naturally heats (the shower warms you; the ocean in New Hampshire shows “what natural water is”; the Gulf “like walking into a tub”).
• The corruption may be bodily — sickness (the feverish taste sweet as bitter) or bad complexion (eating earth or carbon) — or of the soul, by custom, “like a second nature”: eating men, coition with beasts or men.
• Aside: this question “should be sent to the president” and the Democratic Party chairman.
• A senior paper claiming man’s end is the fullest development of his individual traits: then a natural coward should develop cowardice; St Francis de Sales, irascible by nature, became the mildest of men by going against his individual nature toward the common nature — which is what we must follow. (Student: God tested him among the Calvinists in Geneva.)
• Student (reporting Stephen Parker): what makes a man precious is not what is unique to him but what is common — the image of God; “unique and unrepeatable, just like everybody else.”
• He notes the more usual sense of “not natural” is (b), reason distinguished from nature (praeter naturam); “you got to be careful about that way of speaking.”

8. Article 8, the objections: can pleasure be contrary to pleasure? (“one thing is contrary to one thing”) #

1. Passions get species and contrariety from objects; pleasure’s object is good; good is not contrary to good but to bad, and bad to bad (Categories; “the two vices, the two extremes”).
2. One thing is contrary to one thing (Metaphysics XII): contraries are furthest apart in the same genus, like only two points furthest apart on a line. His division of Shakespeare’s plays: tragedy and comedy the contraries, two kinds of romance between (Greek and medieval; six love-and-friendship, six mercy-and-forgiveness plays). Pleasure is contrary to sadness, so not to pleasure.
3. Contrariety of the things delighted in is a material difference; contrariety is a formal difference (Metaphysics X).

• Sed contra: things in the same genus that impede one another are contrary; some pleasures impede one another. Mozart on while doing philosophy? The Lebanese on monks reading while eating: “if I’m eating, I’m eating.”

9. Article 8, body and replies: contrary rests, and the pleasure proper to each thing (“Buy him a lollipop”) #

• Body: pleasure is proportional to rest in natural bodies; two rests in contrary terms are contrary (rest above vs. rest below, Physics V); so two pleasures can be contrary.
• Reply 1: good contrary only to bad holds for virtues and vices — two contrary vices (foolhardiness closer to courage, and cowardice), virtue contrary to vice, but not virtue to virtue (“the man in the middle gets hit from both sides”; Coriolanus, truly courageous, seems foolhardy to others). Elsewhere two goods can be contrary: hot good for fire, cold for water. Not in the good of virtue, which is taken by agreement with one thing, reason. Ice cream on steak: you get neither pleasure. (Students: wine with strawberries; some ice cream might match; green tea ice cream.)
• Reply 2: pleasure is like natural rest; sadness like violent rest, repugnant to the animal appetite as the stone on top of a pillar cannot go down; so pleasure is opposed both to some pleasure and to sadness.
• Reply 3: objects of pleasure differ formally too, if there is a diverse ratio of their being delightful, which diversifies the species of the passion. Poetics: do not expect a happy ending in tragedy, that is comedy’s pleasure; tragedy’s pleasure is catharsis of pity and fear. “Kind of the education in fiction is to learn to seek the pleasure that is appropriate to each kind.”
  • Jim Fransak teaching Macbeth as a mystery story: giving up teaching Macbeth properly; a mystery story’s pleasure is not Macbeth’s.
  • St Paul newspaper advice column: boyfriend wants candy lipstick — “Buy him a lollipop”: seeking in a kiss the pleasure of a lollipop.
  • Pornography, apart from the moral defect: seeking a pleasure not proper to fiction.
  • 18th-century “desecrations” of Shakespeare giving Lear a happy ending (Cordelia lives); Antigone, where Creon is the tragic character who loses everything.
  • Student: English curricula now about ethnicity, gender, power — “a political pleasure.”
  • C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost and The Allegory of Love: teaching how to read so as to enjoy a form of fiction hard for us to appreciate now.
  • Wine vs. root beer: drink wine as you drink soda pop and you miss its pleasure (“sniff it three times before you sip”).
  • Greeks played two tragedies then a comedy; ten Hardy novels in a row too much, like the same food every meal; great chefs’ last meal, roast chicken.

10. Closing: what comes next (“Thomas is going to look before and after”) #

Causes of pleasure (ending with wonder, “that’s for me, philosophers”) and effects: whether pleasure impedes reason, perfects operation, causes thirst or desire, dilates the soul. “Very interesting, this Thomas guy — he uses his reason.”

His words #

• pleasant friendship: friendship whose cause is pleasure (Thomas’s delectabilis)
• knowing vs. usefulness: the two reasons the senses are loved
• animal pleasure vs. natural pleasure: sight vs. touch (reply 1)
• muthos: Socrates’ story of water, air, ether
• ether: what is to electromagnetic waves as air to sound waves; borrowed by modern science
• species: beauty, appropriated to the Son
• appropriation: attributing a common divine thing to one Person (truth to the Son as Word), vs. what is proper (Son of the living God)
• hodos: “road” for “way”
• synecdoche: “flesh” for man
• aegritudinis [ed.: sick, Ethics VII]: sickly pleasures
• physis: Greek for nature
• simpliciter loquendo / secundum quid: unnatural simply vs. connatural in a qualified sense
• lectus: bed
• complexion: bodily constitution, as in eating earth or carbon
• custom, “second nature”: corruption on the side of the soul
• individual nature vs. common nature: the one to be followed
• praeter naturam: reason distinguished from nature
• contraries: furthest apart in the same genus, like two points on a line
• violent rest: the stone on the pillar; sadness
• ratio of the object: diverse reason for being delightful, diversifies the species of the passion
• catharsis of pity and fear: the pleasure of tragedy

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 31, aa. 6, 7, 8 (objections, sed contra, body, replies) Mentioned
• Tobit (Tobias in darkness); Wisdom 5 (violent is saddening); Matthew 16 (Peter’s profession); John 1 (the Word; “come and see”); John (I am the way, truth, life) (inferred: 14)
• Aristotle: Rhetoric I; Metaphysics beginning, X, XII; Ethics III, VII; Physics II, V; Categories; Poetics
• Plato, Phaedo (“I guess”)
• Thomas, treatise on the Trinity (beauty appropriated to the Son)
• Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Coriolanus, Macbeth, King Lear; Sophocles, Antigone; Keats; Heisenberg; C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost, The Allegory of Love; Hardy’s novels; a Psalm (serve the Lord with gladness); Paul VI sermon

His questions #

• Would you rather go blind or go deaf? Most say deaf; a musician said blind — each delights in his own thing.
• Is it natural for water to warm you or to cool you? To cool; heated water warms by a corrupted, per accidens nature.
• Why doesn’t Juliet’s beauty move Romeo at the start of the play? Because he has never seen it: sight is the beginning of love.
• Is beauty more the object of knowing or of loving? He leaned to loving (“lovely”); Thomas appropriates it to the Son, so more knowing — “I’m not sure.”
• Is Peter’s profession proper or by appropriation, and “I am the truth and the life”? Peter speaks properly; our Lord uses appropriation.
• Should I have Mozart on while doing philosophy? Some pleasures impede one another (the monks reading while eating).
• So you put ice cream on your steak? You get neither pleasure; the two are incompatible.
• Why not seek a happy ending in tragedy? That is comedy’s pleasure; tragedy’s is catharsis of pity and fear.