Good and Bad Pleasures, Whether All Pleasure Is Good, and the Best Pleasure: Seeing God (I-II q.34 aa.1-3)

Orientation #

The recording opens inside the body of q.34 a.1, and he says the “first objection here” is like one “we saw before in the previous article” (prev. lecture: q.33 a.4 / q.34 a.1 begun). At the close: “we seem to get through the third article”; next time, since they are going to cover sadness, “might as well start off with pleasure before we get to sadness” (a.4 not reached). The previous class covered q.33 a.4 and the start of q.34 a.1; the next takes pleasure as the rule of moral goodness and moves into pain and sadness.

The class, in order #

1. Why the Stoics said all pleasure is bad (“bend a bit in the opposite direction”) #

Point: Thomas’s diagnosis of the position (Ethics X) that all pleasures are bad, and why the view is unsuitable.

• They attended only to sensible and bodily pleasures, “which are more manifest”: the common man too hears “pleasure” and thinks of something bodily. The “antique philosophers” did not distinguish understandable from sensible things.
• Their aim was medicinal: to withdraw men prone to immoderate pleasure toward “the middle that is virtue.” Ethics example: a bent piece of metal must be bent past straight in the opposite direction. He applies it: the austerities of priests and monasteries are “a bit puritanical” at the beginning, perhaps necessarily; John Paul II, “now in the mean,” can sit and sip wine with the priests. But “there’s a certain danger in saying that all pleasures are bad.”
• This estimate (existimatio) was not suitable because (1) no one can live without some sensible and bodily pleasure; (2) those who teach all pleasures bad are found taking some, and men are more disposed to pleasure by their example than by their words, since in human doings and passions experience “plurimum valet” and examples move more than words. Asides: “began to do and teach” in the Gospels; the three parts of the Last Supper (he did, then taught, then prayed) as what parents must do for children — example, instruction, prayer, in that order, because you can’t control them, only influence them; teaching children to offer their candy so sharing becomes automatic.

2. Some pleasures good, some bad: two roots of the reason (“noise in your soul”) #

Point: pleasure is the rest of the (sensitive) appetite in some loved good, following upon an operation; so its goodness is taken from two sides. (a) From the good rested in. Moral good and bad are said according as a thing fits reason or is discordant from it, as in nature “natural” is what fits nature. Natural rest is in what suits the nature (the heavy thing resting below); unnatural rest in what is repugnant to it (the heavy resting above). So pleasure is good when the higher appetite (will) or lower (emotions) rests in what agrees with reason, bad when in what is discordant “from reason and from the law of God.”

• Discord/chord: Socrates in the Phaedo calls philosophy the highest music. Harmony of emotion and will with reason is music in the soul; otherwise noise. Two kinds of philosophy: “looking” (Greek theoretical, speculative) philosophy seeks the harmony of truth and avoids contradictions; active/practical philosophy seeks first harmony of emotion and will with reason, then of husband and wife, parent and child, citizens — the city as a symphony. C. S. Lewis: hell is a kingdom of noise.
• Newman on erring conscience: a man who thinks eating scrambled eggs is a mortal sin and eats them sins, not because eggs are bad but because he does not harmonize with his conscience. One determined to do what pleases God, though in error about it, is “prejudiced in favor of the truth” and will change as soon as he discovers it.
• Argument against “pleasure as such is good”: one may grant that wanting to torture people is bad; but which unites us more to a thing, wanting it or taking pleasure in it? Taking pleasure. So if wanting the bad object is bad, taking pleasure in it is worse — one is “even more joined to this bad thing.” (b) From the operations. Operations are more akin (affines) to the pleasures joined to them than to the desires that precede them in time; so if desires of good operations are good and of bad ones bad, “multo magis” the pleasures. Wanting to help those in need is good, enjoying it better; wanting to torture bad, enjoying it worse. Boundary cases: one may want to hit someone and not enjoy it, or want to say something nasty and regret saying it. Aside: an interview with a man who tortured and murdered, visibly taking pleasure in remembering it — “totally diabolic.”

3. Replies of a.1: reason impeded, the temperate man, and art (“as in the conjugal union”) #

Ad 1 (like the objection in the previous article): pleasures about the very act of reason neither impede reason nor corrupt foresight; extraneous, bodily pleasures do impede its use, in two ways: (i) contrariety of appetite resting in what is repugnant to reason — whence moral badness; (ii) binding of the use of reason by the bodily change joined to it, as in conjugal union, which is suitable to reason, so no moral badness follows — just as sleep binds reason and is not morally bad. Yet this binding, though no mortal or venial sin, arises from a moral evil, the sin of the first parent; it would not be so in the state of innocence (prima pars on Adam and Eve before the fall — they covered themselves because the emotions were no longer subject to reason).

• Asides: jokes about not being able to sleep at his age; grandchildren who nothing wakes (Father Abbott’s story). Thomas in the Summa Contra Gentiles: one can see something has gone wrong with the human race (murders in Chicago). Ad 2: the temperate man does not flee all pleasures but the excessive ones not suitable to reason. He can listen to Mozart: Oscar’s essay “towards an evaluation of music” — Mozart and the Baroque, unlike the Romantics, move the emotions in a state of harmony with reason; the Romantics will not allow emotions subject to reason. Tchaikovsky wading into the river to drown himself, yet listening to Mozart because it “saved him from himself,” and writing the Mozartiana. That boys and beasts pursue pleasure does not show pleasure universally bad, since in them is a natural appetite from God. Ad 3: art is not of every good but of exterior things made — art is right reason about making, a product outside us; prudence and virtue are about operations and passions in us, so pleasure pertains more to them. Yet some art is factiva delectationis: pulmentaria (to do with food — the cook making food taste good) and pigmentaria (coloring, “might be more cosmetics”), Ethics VII. Cosmetics from cosmos, the beautiful ordered whole; the order of the universe is the best thing after God; sapientis est ordinare. A student suggests cosmos could also be seen as something God made freely, to please himself or us, not necessary. Break.

4. a.2: the objections that all pleasure is good (“this is what I like to hear”) #

Obj 1: good is divided into honorable (honestum), useful and pleasant; all honorable is good, all useful is good, therefore every pleasure is good. Obj 2: the per se good is what is not sought for the sake of another (Ethics I); it is laughable to ask someone why he wants to be pleased; what is per se is said universally; so every pleasure is good. He explains per se with the triangle: interior angles equal to two right angles belongs to triangle as such, so to every triangle; being green does not, so from a green triangle you cannot conclude all are green — only per se premises and conclusions can be known necessarily; whether a triangle is green is “more of sensation than of reason.” Obj 3: what all desire is per se good (the good is what all want); all want some pleasure, even boys and beasts. Sed contra: Proverbs 2, those who rejoice when they do bad and exult in the worst things. Aside: to stop at the objections would be what St Alphonsus calls “willful inadvertence.”

5. Stoics, Epicureans, and why the middle explains the extremes (“some part of the truth”) #

Point: Stoics held all pleasures bad (he notes the Augustine reference in his edition), Epicureans pleasure as such good and so all pleasures good (the pleasure of torturing, as pleasure, good); Aristotle is between. Argument that the truth lies in the middle, “very interesting”:

1. The two articles take the two extremes; erring minds run to extremes.
2. Parallel: Trinity — three persons so three natures, or one nature so one person; Incarnation, the reverse — two natures so two persons, or one person so one nature (monophysites). Truth: three persons, one nature; two natures, one person.
3. Extremes cannot explain each other: if only one person and nature, why would anyone think three? But the middle explains both — from three persons one can see why someone thinks three natures.
4. A probable opinion must contain some part of the truth; if one extreme were the whole truth, the opposite would have no basis at all. Conclusion: if some pleasures are good and some bad, one sees how someone thinks all good or all bad; if either extreme were true, the other would not even be probable. The Epicureans’ deception: not distinguishing good simply (good as such) from good for this one. Good for this one though not good as such, in two ways: (i) suitable to a disposition he now has that is not natural — the leper eating something not simply suitable to man’s complexion (he doesn’t know the example’s origin); chemotherapy, devastating yet good for the cancer patient; (ii) what is not suitable but is estimated suitable. On “estimate”: the English word has changed, but keeps the idea of something not altogether certain (estimate a speed, a weight); “supposed” would do. Conclusion: since pleasure is rest of the desiring power in the good, if the good is good simply the pleasure is simply pleasure and simply good; if good only for this one, it is neither pleasure simply nor good simply but secundum quid or apparent. Mapping: apparent good ↔ estimated suitability; good secundum quid ↔ bad disposition (chemotherapy: good “in some way,” not simply). Asides: the Grateful Dead and “Deadheads” as a sick name; de Maupassant on the obligation in democracy to love the ugly; he told a modern composer that beauty is objective “because so many modern artists studiously avoid it” — you can only avoid what you can spot.

6. Replies of a.2 (“the pleasant is said according to the appetite”) #

Ad 1 — “very interesting”: honestum and the useful are said according to reason (the useful because reason orders it to something), so nothing honestum or useful is not good; the pleasant is said according to the appetite, which sometimes tends to what does not suit reason, so not everything pleasant is morally good. Caution on “useful”: perhaps useful for the honestum, since a gun is useful for robbing a bank and a car for getting home but “friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” Ad 2: pleasure is not sought for another because it is rest in the end; but the end can be good or bad, though nothing is an end except as good — possibly an apparent good. Ad 3: all desire pleasure as the good, since pleasure is rest of appetite in the good; but as not every good desired is truly good, not every pleasure is truly good. Bad to want the bad, worse to delight in it: “if I shouldn’t want to tell you off, I shouldn’t enjoy telling you off.”

7. a.3: is some pleasure the best? Objections and sed contra (“returning to your natural state”) #

Obj 1: no generation is best, since generation cannot be the last end; pleasure follows generation (Plato’s idea) — one is pleased from being constituted in one’s nature. Shakespeare “to thine own self be true”; a student: the Eastern Fathers (Life of St Anthony?) speak of redemption as restoring nature. His anticipation: not all pleasures are tied to generation; some follow operations that are perfect acts — understanding, hearing Mozart — “more like being than becoming”; dinner is more like becoming satisfied. Obj 2: the best cannot become better by addition; pleasure with virtue is better than virtue without. Obj 3: the best is universally good, as we say of God; the per se is before and more potent than the per accidens — “a very important before and after”: per se before per accidens, per se before per aliud; pleasure is not universally good. Sed contra: beatitude is the best, the end of human life, and the end is better than what is for the end; beatitude is not without pleasure — Psalm 15, he will fill you with joy with his face, pleasures at his right hand usque in finem. Aside on words: Greek makarios (beatitudes, Psalm 1 makarios aner) = beatus = blessed; Aristotle’s eudaimonia (“a good daemon,” a superior being’s help or the soul) in the Ethics, eutychia in the Poetics, like our “happiness.”

8. Plato’s two failures and the pleasure of seeing God (“fill me with joy with your face”) #

Plato (unlike Stoics and Epicureans) held some pleasures good and some bad, but none the summum bonum or optimum; he failed in two things.

1. Seeing sensible and bodily pleasures to consist in motion and generation (Aristotle’s glutton feeling the food go down; filling up with food), he “estimated” that all pleasures follow generation; since generation and motion are imperfect acts, pleasure would lack the character (ratio — “notion,” “aspect”) of ultimate perfection. Manifestly false in intellectual pleasures: one delights not only in the generation of science (learning, wondering) but in contemplating knowledge already acquired — a theorem of Euclid, “delicious,” thought again.
2. He said the best is the simpliciter summum bonum, the good abstract and not partaken of (bonitas itself, God); but we speak of what is best in human things. The best in each thing is its last end; the end is said in two ways, the thing and the use of the thing (the avaricious man’s end: money, or the possession of money). So man’s last end is God himself, the summum bonum simpliciter, or the enjoyment of him, which implies pleasure; thus some pleasure can be the best among human goods — the pleasure of seeing God face to face (laetitia cum vultu tuo), “not the same as face to face with little grandchildren.”

9. Replies of a.3, and philosophy versus theology on God (“the best knowledge”) #

Ad 1: not every pleasure follows generation; some follow perfect operations, so nothing prevents some pleasure being best, though not every one — the operation whose object is the best thing, seeing God as he is. Augustine’s Confessions, “too late have I come to know the ancient beauty”: the beautiful is what pleases when seen; if God is beauty itself, seeing him is most pleasant, the optimum pleasure though not the summum bonum simpliciter. Beatitude as gaudium de veritate, the lux vera. Ad 2: that argument holds of the best simpliciter, by partaking of which all things are good — God cannot be improved; every other good becomes better by addition (one saint’s face in heaven more beautiful than another’s). Also, pleasure is not extraneous to the operation of virtue but follows on it (Ethics I). Ad 3: pleasure is not best from being pleasure but from being perfect rest in the best thing; so not every pleasure is best or even good (torturing; asking one sense of “before” before another — “that’s torture”), just as some knowledge is best but not all. Aristotle: wisdom is the best knowledge, knowledge of God in two senses — God is what is known, and it is knowledge God alone has, or has fully; had Aristotle partaken of divine wisdom by faith, he would see it as more wisdom than first philosophy. In theology God is considered first and other things as he is their beginning and end, imitating God’s way of knowing (he knows others by knowing himself); in philosophy we know God from effects, so Aristotle studies effects for the first ten or so books and reasons about God only in the twelfth book of the Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics]. Thomas at the start of Summa Contra Gentiles book II: the order in philosophy is contrary to that in theology. Asides: introductions to philosophy that begin with the existence of God begin in the wrong place; better to begin with Mother Earth, as the poets did before the first philosophers said water; English “ground(s)” for cause (“grounds for divorce”) and “understand” for knowing the cause — so Mother Earth fits “ground of things,” extendable to God.

His words #

• existimatio / “estimate”: a thinking or supposition; the English word suggests something not altogether certain; “supposed” would also do.
• plurimum valet: experience “most of all is value” in human doings and passions.
• “looking philosophy”: theoretical/speculative philosophy, seeking harmony of truth; against active/practical philosophy, seeking harmony of will and emotion with reason.
• discordant / chord: moral badness as noise in the soul, music as harmony with reason.
• affines: operations more “the same sort of thing” with their pleasures than with the desires preceding them.
• multo magis: much more — pleasures in good/bad operations good/bad more than the desires.
• “bounding/binding of reason”: the tying up of reason’s use by bodily change (conjugal act, sleep), no moral badness.
• factiva delectationis; pulmentaria (food), pigmentaria (coloring, cosmetics?): pleasure-making arts.
• cosmos / cosmetics: the beautiful ordered whole; sapientis est ordinare.
• honestum: the honorable, “the moral good”; with the useful, said according to reason.
• per se good: not sought for another; what belongs per se is said universally (triangle).
• “willful inadvertence” (St Alphonsus): stopping at the objections.
• good simply vs good for this one; secundum quid good vs apparent good.
• ratio of ultimate perfection: “notion,” “aspect.”
• makarios, beatus, blessed; eudaimonia (“good daemon”); eutychia.
• usque in finem; laetitia cum vultu tuo; gaudium de veritate; lux vera; summum bonum simpliciter vs optimum among human goods.
• per se before per accidens and before per aliud: “a very important before and after.”
• “the twelfth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics XII], “first philosophy”.
• ground / understand: English words for cause and knowing the cause.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 34, a. 1 (body from “as is said in the tenth book of the Nicomachean Ethics,” replies 1-3)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 34, a. 2 (whole)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 34, a. 3 (whole)
• Proverbs 2 and Psalm 15 (sed contra quotations, as cited by Thomas) Mentioned
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X, VII, I (as cited by Thomas); the bent-metal example “in the Ethics”
• Summa Theologiae I, on the state of innocence (as cited by Thomas)
• Augustine on the Stoics (reference in his edition); Augustine, Confessions (“too late have I come to know the ancient beauty”)
• Plato, Phaedo (philosophy the highest music)
• Summa Contra Gentiles (something gone wrong with the human race); SCG book II beginning (order of philosophy vs theology)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics XII (“twelfth book of Wisdom”); Poetics (eutychia)
• Newman on erring conscience; C. S. Lewis (hell a kingdom of noise); Shakespeare (“to thine own self be true”); Life of St Anthony (student, uncertain); de Maupassant; Oscar’s essay “towards an evaluation of music”; Euclid

His questions #

• Which unites us more to something, wanting it or taking pleasure in it? Taking pleasure; so pleasure in a bad object is worse than desiring it.
• Why is “good” or “bad” said in moral matters? According as a thing fits reason or is discordant from it, as natural/unnatural in nature.
• Does the binding of reason in the conjugal act make it morally bad? No, no more than sleep; but it arises from the sin of the first parent.
• Does the temperate man flee all pleasures? No, only excessive ones not suitable to reason (he can listen to Mozart).
• If one extreme (all good / all bad) were true, why would anyone hold the other? There would be no basis; the middle position explains why each extreme is probable.
• How can something not good as such be good for this one? By an unnatural disposition (leper, chemotherapy), or by being estimated suitable (apparent good).
• Why is the pleasant not always good, if the honorable and useful always are? They are said according to reason; the pleasant according to appetite.
• Is pleasure tied to generation, as Plato thought? Not all; some pleasures follow perfect operations (understanding, hearing music), more like being than becoming.
• Which pleasure is the best among human goods? The enjoyment of God, seeing him face to face — not the summum bonum simpliciter, which is God himself.
• Where should philosophy begin, with God? No; God is last in philosophy (known from effects) and first in theology.