Natural Beginnings; How Pleasure Perfects Activity (I-II q.33 a.4) and the Case That All Pleasure Is Bad (q.34 a.1)

Orientation #

He refers back to “the previous article” (q.33 a.3) on the three ways bodily pleasure impedes the use of reason (prev. lecture), and to his earlier comparison of the treatise on pleasure with the treatise on love. He does not say what comes next beyond reading the four questions of q.34. The previous class covered pleasure’s effects (q.33 aa.1-3); the next continues q.34 on whether pleasures are good, bad, or best.

The class, in order #

1. The natural beginning in the arts (“we want to start from the natural beginning”) #

Point: Aristotle knows how to begin; the natural starting point for plays, paintings, statues, music is that they are likenesses (his word is “imitation”, but that word “has been degraded by our commercial use”).

• Opening of Sophistical Refutations and of the Poetics: both speak of the natural beginning.
• Aristotle divides the imitative arts by (1) in what they imitate, (2) what they imitate, (3) how they imitate — in that order. Student asks why “in what” comes before “what”, when tragedy is defined by what it imitates (an action that is serious). His answer: in the definition of a species the difference comes from the object, but when first distinguishing the arts, unity is more in the matter worked in: Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies are both in words; Mozart’s “heavenly twins” (K. 515 in C major, joyful; K. 516 in G minor, sad — as he numbers them “five fifteen, five sixteen”) are the same art; a painter does joyful and sad subjects; carpenters are divided by wood, metal, plastic before chair, table, bed. “It’s like this, of something, in something.”
• Plato, Timaeus 29b: the greatest thing of all is to begin at the natural beginning (archēn … kata physin).
• Albert the Great on the Soph. Ref.: Aristotle begins with the fact that deceiving arguments exist (like theology beginning with “does God exist?”), then with the goal of the sophist before how he achieves it.

2. The natural beginnings of ethics (“what would be the natural beginning in ethics”) #

Point: two natural beginnings — the good is what all want, and a thing’s own act.

1. Aristotle opens the Nicomachean Ethics with a short induction: the good is what all want. Introduced properly as a Socratic dialogue: the boy names goods (baseball game, candy, coke); all they have in common is that he wants them. Then the natural next question: is it good because we want it, or do we want it because it is good? — “the whole dialectic proceeds naturally from that.”
   • Augustine, De Vera Religione (he thinks): the beautiful is what pleases when seen; then, “like the good Platonist he is,” asks whether it pleases because beautiful or is beautiful because it pleases; he has no doubt it is the second. “Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder; it’s in the thing.” This also shows the link between the good and the end.
2. A thing’s own act — explicit in Plato, less so in Aristotle: what that thing alone can do, or does better than other things. Seeing is the eye’s own act; walking the feet’s, though some walk on their hands; writing the pen’s, though kids write with a knife.
   • Why it matters: a thing’s own act done well is its end (knife: to cut well; pen: to write well); so man’s end is found from man’s own act, which involves reason. And virtue is the quality that makes a thing’s own act good: sharpness is the knife’s virtue, dullness its vice.
   • Shakespeare quoted: “that part of philosophy … that treats of happiness by virtue specially to be achieved.”
   • Plato, Aristotle, Albert and Thomas all see these beginnings clearly.

3. Q.33 a.4, the objections (“whether pleasure perfects operation”) #

Point: three objections that pleasure does not perfect operation.

1. Every human operation depends on the use of reason; pleasure impedes reason (previous article); so pleasure debilitates operation. He: not hard to solve — that was bodily pleasure, three ways.
2. “Very interesting”: nothing perfects itself or its cause; pleasure is an operatio (a perfect act, not a motion), so it would be perfecting itself.
   • His account of Aristotle’s distinction: motion is by nature incomplete — walking home, you haven’t walked home yet; once home, you’re not walking. Seeing: when I see you, I have already seen you. To the girl students: “when I love you, have I loved you yet? — Oh yes.” That is a perfect act. Thomas’s word is operatio; for want of a better English word he sometimes says “doing”.
3. Either-or syllogism through three of the four causes (the three based on actuality, leaving out matter, based on passibility): not as end, since operations are not sought for pleasure but rather the reverse (the teacher wants students to enjoy the teaching so they learn it better); not as efficient cause, since operation causes pleasure (I must hear Mozart before it pleases me); not as form, since pleasure is not a habit (Ethics X).

• Sed contra: Ethics X, pleasure perfects operation.

4. The body: two ways (“pleasure, in two ways, perfects operation”) #

Point: as a supervening end, and indirectly on the side of the agent.

1. As end — not end “on account of which”, but in the sense that any good coming upon a thing and completing it can be called an end. Above the good which is the operation there comes another good, pleasure, the rest of appetite in the good presupposed. Aristotle’s metaphor (Ethics X): as beauty perfects youth — not what youth is essentially, but befitting it. His own phrase: “frosting on the cake.”
   • Augustine’s gaudium de veritate: not what happiness is essentially (the vision is “the whole reward”), but the joy that comes upon it — a supervening end.
   • A monk’s aside: he came to the monastery not because it was Maronite, but the Maronite liturgy is frosting on the cake; Brother Patrick came thinking it was Armenian.
2. As agent cause, indirectly — not as the doctor causes health but as health itself (Ethics X); the one who delights in his action attends to it more vehemently and does it more diligently. Hence (Ethics X) pleasures augment their own proper operations and impede others.
   • Aristotle in the Poetics against happy-ending tragedy: one should not seek every pleasure from tragedy but the pleasure appropriate to it (from the catharsis of pity and fear); a happy ending seeks comedy’s pleasure. The 18th-century English King Lear with a happy ending, until Garrick (or somebody) went back to Shakespeare.
   • C. S. Lewis, preface to Paradise Lost: read it to get the pleasure it offers; Fielding’s Joseph Andrews: warns the reader he may seek a pleasure other than the one intended.
   • His friend Jim teaching Macbeth in Minneapolis, finally calling it “a mystery story”: a pleasure the kids can’t appreciate.
   • Wine: the first-time drinker finds dry wine “bitter”; start with a sweet white (the big sellers; dry rosé is hard to find anywhere; pink Zinfandel at the pro-life dinner); the experienced drinker gets more pleasure from red, but must be accustomed. Same with a high-school girl who preferred comedies to tragedies: tragedy’s pleasure is harder to appreciate, but “once you get a taste for it you’re hooked.” (His count: Shakespeare has about five comedies, ten tragedies.)
   • Ice cream on steak: even if ice cream’s pleasure were greater, you lose the pleasure appropriate to steak.
   • St. Paul advice column: boyfriend wants candy lipstick; answer, “buy him a lollipop” — seeking candy’s pleasure in a kiss.
   • Mozart vs. “this crazy stuff”: people must be educated gradually, led in with more obvious music.

5. The replies (“not every pleasure impedes the act of reason”) #

• Ad 1: enjoying understanding does not impede understanding but perfects it. Bodily pleasure, an act of the concupiscible not following on reason, is increased through pleasure; pleasure that follows on the act of reason fortifies reason. He: this is Plato’s and Aristotle’s main point — the multitude has no taste of the higher pleasures and so tends to excess in the lower; hence the role of the fine arts in educating the pursuit of pleasure.
  • His image of graduated rooms: fine meal and wine; then a door opens on a string quartet doing Mozart; months later another door on Homer and Shakespeare; finally the room with “this guy” (Thomas). “Where’s the beef?”
  • The pleasures of the fine arts are too high for the beasts, too low for the angels: his cat shared his liking for pork chop but only pretended, purring and asleep, to like Mozart.
• Ad 2: Physics II — two things can be causes of each other, by different kinds of cause. He recalls Aristotle’s corollaries on the four causes: (i) many causes as such of one thing (wood, carpenter, sitting, shape, of a chair — each a cause in a different way, not by accident); (ii) mutual causes by different kinds. Operation causes pleasure as efficient cause; pleasure perfects operation as a supervening end.
• Ad 3: clear from the foregoing.

6. Why a question on the goodness and badness of pleasure? (“De bonitate et malitia delectationis”) #

Point: love and pleasure each get a question on the thing, its causes, its effects; pleasure alone gets a further question on its goodness and badness. Why not for love? He raises the question and passes to a related argument rather than answering it directly.

• His old classroom argument “which is better, knowledge or love?” (the “ladies club” wanted love): 1. all knowledge is good (Aristotle, proemium to De Anima: all knowledge good, some better because of a better object or greater certitude); 2. not all love is good (loving to torture, rob banks, bully, eat too much); 3. the love that is good must partake of reason, i.e. of knowledge; therefore knowledge is greater than love. “They take up stones to cast them.”
• Asides: the psychology department’s test — students jumping up and running out of his class to gauge the professor’s reaction; Romney drawing bigger crowds than Obama (2008 fifty thousand, now five; Romney ten thousand) — “keep our prayers going.”

7. Q.34 prologue: four questions (“whether every pleasure is bad”) #

1. Whether every pleasure is bad — Plato sometimes seemed to say so; “he must have been Irish.”
2. Given not every pleasure is bad, whether all pleasure is good. Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, he thinks): “now that you are virtuous, there’ll be no more cakes and ale” — so some bad, some good. The English utilitarians (Bentham), making pleasure and pain the measure, are as if saying all pleasure is good; “Epicureans.”
3. Whether some pleasure is the best.
4. Whether pleasure is the measure or rule by which good and bad in moral matters is judged — Aristotle speaks this way.

8. Q.34 a.1, objections and sed contra (“it seems that every pleasure is bad”) #

1. What corrupts prudence and impedes reason is secundum se malum, since the good of man is to be according to reason (Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4 — his old formula: a good human act is a reasonable act, a bad one unreasonable). Pleasure corrupts prudence, the greater the more; in venereal pleasure one cannot understand anything (Ethics VII); Jerome on Matthew: in the time of conjugal acts the presence of the Holy Spirit is not given, even if the prophet is serving the office of generation (“tough talk” — he is unsure of the referent, guesses Jeremiah or the prophet told to go in to the prostitute [unclear in recording]). “Killjoys, these guys.”
2. What the virtuous man flees and the deficient pursues is bad in itself, since the virtuous man is the measure and rule of human acts (Ethics X); the spiritual man judges all things (the Apostle); boys and beasts pursue pleasures, the temperate man flees them. “Like a real puritan.”
   • Digression on the incarnation: Thomas’s dialectic borrowed from Augustine — man can be seen and followed but is not the perfect model; God is perfect but cannot be seen; so God became man. Tension between Plato (the perfect, the good itself, is the measure of the imperfect; Laws: against “man is the measure of all things,” the Athenian says God is) and Aristotle (we need a known standard, so the virtuous man). Parents want their children to have good friends to imitate.
3. Virtue and art are about the difficult and the good (Ethics II); no art is ordered to pleasure; so pleasure is not good. Students object: the art of cooking? Shakespeare’s epilogue, “strive to please you every day.” He: “I’m glad those aren’t the right answers … let me finish the article.” “This is a hard teaching, who can follow it” (John 6, in his words “chapter six”).
   • Bonaventure on bodily penance, an objection he likes: Paul says flesh and spirit are enemies; Christ says love your enemies and do good to them. “Lent rolls around — not going to do it this year.”

• Sed contra: Psalm 36, Delectare in Domino; divine authority induces to nothing bad, so not every pleasure is bad. Class ends here.

His words #

• natural beginning: the point from which a science or discussion naturally starts (Aristotle, Plato archēn kata physin)
• likeness: his preferred rendering of Aristotle’s “imitation”, which “has been degraded”
• a thing’s own act: what that thing alone can do, or does better than others (Plato); its end is that act done well
• virtue: the quality that makes a thing’s own act good (knife’s sharpness); vice, the opposite
• operatio / “doing”: Thomas’s word for a perfect act (seeing, loving, pleasure), as against motion, which is always incomplete
• supervening end: an end that “comes upon” an operation, completing it — “frosting on the cake”
• gaudium de veritate: Augustine’s account of happiness, taken as the supervening joy, not the essence (the vision)
• secundum se malum: bad in itself
• measure and rule of human acts: the virtuous man (Ethics X)
• “prudence”: he prefers not to use the English word for prudentia; also renders it “foresight”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 33, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 34, prologue and a. 1 (objections 1-3, sed contra)
• Plato, Timaeus 29b (a phrase in Greek)
• Augustine, De Vera Religione (definition of beauty; work named tentatively “I think”)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, opening; Albert the Great’s commentary
• Aristotle, Poetics, opening (division of imitative arts) and on tragedy’s proper pleasure
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (opening induction), II, VII, X
• Aristotle, Physics II (four causes, corollaries)
• Aristotle, De Anima, proemium (all knowledge good)
• Plato, Laws (God the measure)
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4; Jerome on Matthew; Psalm 36; 1 Cor (“the spiritual man judges all things”) (inferred); John 6 (“hard teaching”)
• Shakespeare: Twelfth Night (cakes and ale), King Lear, Macbeth, an epilogue; Mozart K. 515/516 (inferred from “five fifteen, five sixteen”)
• C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost; Fielding, Joseph Andrews; Bonaventure on corporal penance (work unspecified)
• Note: the verified-source list gives Summa Contra Gentiles IV ch. 15 for 10 min; nothing in the transcript corresponds, so it is not treated here.

His questions #

• What’s the natural starting point to talk about plays, paintings, statues, music? A likeness (imitation).
• Why “in what they imitate” before “what they imitate”? Unity of an art lies first in the matter worked in (words, wood), then subdivided by object.
• What would be the natural beginning in ethics? The good is what all want; and a thing’s own act (its end and its virtue).
• Is it good because we want it, or do we want it because it is good? Left open as the dialectic to follow; for beauty, Augustine says the second.
• Does the teacher teach so students will enjoy it, or want them to enjoy it so they learn better? The latter — operations are not sought for pleasure.
• Should you put ice cream on your steak if its pleasure were greater? No; you lose the pleasure appropriate to steak.
• Which is better, knowledge or love? Knowledge: all knowledge is good, not all love; good love partakes of reason.
• Why does pleasure get a question on its goodness and badness when love did not? Left open.
• Is no art ordered to pleasure — what about cooking, or the playwright? “Those aren’t the right answers”; deferred to the article’s reply (not reached).