Reason Looks Before and After: Pleasure as the Measure of Moral Good, and Whether Pain Is a Passion of the Soul

Orientation #

He does not explicitly refer to last time or next time; he picks up “Article Four” of the question on pleasure and then “turns the page” to sadness or pain (q. 35), reading its prologue and first article. The previous class treated the goodness and badness of pleasure in the Summa’s passion questions; the next continues q. 35 on whether sadness is the same as pain and contrary to pleasure.

The class, in order #

1. Opening aside: why Christ on the cross is called Christ (“we anoint by the priest and the kings and the prophets”) #

A brief question to the class before the philosophy: Christ is anointed as priest, king and prophet; on the cross he is Christ primarily as priest, though Augustine calls the cross also the chair of the teacher, and it has to do with his kingship too; on the Sermon on the Mount he is prophet and teacher.

2. Reason as “looking before and after”: the sense of time (“those having the sense of time”) #

The point: the first sense of “before and after”, time, already shows how reason can go against sense desire.

• Shakespeare’s definition of reason: the ability for “large discourse, looking before and after” (the passage he identifies as Shakespeare’s; “What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more”; “he that made us with such large discourse… gave us not that capability… to fust in us unused”) [ed.: Hamlet (inferred)].
• “Before and after” has many senses: Categories ch. 12 gives four central senses in order, then adds on the side the crowning sense for the philosopher, cause before effect. The first sense is before in time.
• De Anima III (after the senses and vegetative powers in book II, the intellectual powers, and last the ability to move oneself), Thomas’s 15th lectio, n. 829: Aristotle excludes an objection against “appetite moves”, namely that the continent do not follow their appetite. Solved: in man there are contrary appetites; the continent follows the one that agrees with reason. Contrary desires arise when reason is contrary to concupiscence, and this “in those having the sense of time” — “sense” here meaning reason; those who know not only the here-and-now delectable that draws sense desire but consider past and future.
• The example from ancient medicine: the man with fever; understanding judges he ought to abstain from wine lest the fever grow worse (Greek chalepōteron), but concupiscence incites him on account of what is here and now (dia to parachrēma); what is pleasant in the present seems simpliciter delectabile et bonum, but only because they do not see the future (dia to mē horan to mellon).
• Greek terms glossed as he reads: orexeis (desires), ho logos (reason), hē epithumia (= Thomas’s concupiscentia), enantia (contrary), tois chronou aisthēsin echousin (those having the sense of time), ho men gar nous… dia to mellon… keleuei (the understanding, on account of the future, commands one to abstain), phainetai gar to hēdy… haplōs hēdy kai agathon haplōs.
• Link to Physics IV: time would not fully exist without reason numbering the before and after.
• What he stresses: the simpliciter / secundum quid distinction, “the fallacy of simply and not simply”, is “something that you’re overlooking all the time in your daily life”: choosing something bad simply because it is good in some way, or avoiding something good because in some way it is bad.

3. Falstaff asks what time it is (“what time of day is it, lad?”) #

The point: Shakespeare introduces his greatest comic character, a man who lives like a beast to the senses, by having him ask the time, and Prince Hal answer that the time has nothing to do with the life he leads. Henry IV Part 1, Act 1, Scene 2, London, an apartment of the Prince: Hal’s reply about being fat-witted with drinking old sack (sherry), unbuttoning after supper, sleeping on benches, “unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons… and dials the signs of leaping-houses” (brothels) — “what a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day?” He calls this “amazing”, “natural genius”: the beast-man has no sense of time.

• Aside: Washington Irving at the end of his life to his nephew: idle for us to claim anything; Shakespeare said it all.

4. Q. 34, a. 4: is pleasure the measure or rule of moral good and bad? (“pleasure is not the measure or rule”) #

The point: pleasure is the rule of moral goodness, but as the end in which the will rests; the objections show the ways in which it is not. Objections (which he calls “very good”, because they show the way not to understand it):

1. All things are measured by the first of their kind (Metaphysics X); love and desire go before pleasure; so pleasure is not the rule. His gloss: “before” has many senses — wine is better than grape juice, bread than flour, but grape juice and flour come before in time.
2. A measure must be uniform, as the most uniform motion measures other motions (Metaphysics X; people measure by the sun); but pleasure is various, some good, some bad.
3. Judgment of an effect is more certain from its cause; the goodness of the operation causes the goodness of the pleasure (pleasure in torturing you is bad because torturing is a bad act; pleasure in understanding God, or even the square, circle and triangle, is good because the understanding is a good activity). Sed contra: Augustine on Psalm 7, God scrutinizes hearts and kidneys, for the end of care and thought is the pleasure one tries to reach; Ethics VII, pleasure is the principal end, looking to which we call each man simply good or bad. Response: (1) moral goodness or badness chiefly consists in the will; (2) the will is known good or bad most of all from its end; (3) the end is that in which the will rests; (4) rest of the will (or any appetite) in a good is pleasure; therefore a man is judged good or bad especially by the pleasure of his will. The good man rejoices in works of virtue (seeing justice done, a soldier’s courageous act); the bad man rejoices in evil — like Aaron in Shakespeare’s play [ed.: Titus Andronicus (inferred)]. But the pleasures of the sense appetite are not the rule: food is pleasant to the sense appetite of good and bad alike; the will of the good delights in them when they agree with reason, which the bad will does not care about. Replies: (1) love and desire are before pleasure in the way of generation, but pleasure is before according to the notion of end, which in operable things has the definition of a beginning, from which judgment is most taken — grape juice is for the sake of the wine; prior is said in different ways. (2) Every pleasure is uniform in this, that it is rest in some good; he is good whose will rests in a true good, bad whose will rests in something bad (Hitler’s will resting in domination of the Jews). (3) Pleasure perfects operation in the manner of an end: no operation is perfectly good without delight in the good; so in some way the goodness of pleasure causes goodness in the operation, “an added thing”, as Aristotle says beauty perfects youth.

5. Thomas’s order: why hate right after love (“the same knowledge of opposites”) #

The point: the order love, hate, desire, pleasure, pain is explained by the principle, from Plato and Aristotle, that there is the same knowledge of opposites.

• Desire is closer to love than hate is, yet Thomas treats hate right after love. Reason: one opposite helps you know the other, even more than cause and effect do — as in the Secunda Secundae and in the Nicomachean Ethics, each virtue is taken up with its opposed vices (courage with cowardice and foolhardiness; temperance with intemperance and the nameless vice he calls “puritanism”).
• Cause-and-effect connection illustrated: serve me salmon and I am sad, because I hate salmon; serve me filet mignon and I am grateful — hate causes sadness, love pleasure; but for knowing, love and hate illuminate each other.
• So with the passions: love then hate, then desire (its opposite not taken up, “but that’s important”), then pleasure or joy, now sadness or pain.
• Asides: the fresh student in California who said philosophers should not teach ethics since it teaches how to be bad; Aristotle raises the same problem in the Rhetoric, since the rhetorician can persuade either way. He has been reading the Summa Contra Gentiles again and marvels at the order of its prologue chapters.

6. Q. 35 prologue: the plan for pain and sadness (“first we are to consider about sadness or pain by itself”) #

The point: the division of the treatment of pain (dolor, tristitia), and the eight questions of the first part.

• Division: pain by itself (secundum se); its causes; its effects — as with love and pleasure; then two special additions, its remedies (one does not look for remedies for pleasure) and its goodness and badness. “What a rich mind he had.”
• The eight articles as he reads them: (1) whether pain is a passion of the soul; (2) whether sadness is the same as pain — parallel to joy and pleasure, and one might suspect sadness and joy are more spiritual, pain and pleasure more bodily (touch), used somewhat interchangeably but not perfect synonyms; (3) whether sadness or pain is contrary to pleasure — the reason he considers them next to each other; (4) whether every sadness is contrary to every pleasure; (5) whether to the pleasure of contemplation some sadness is contrary — “a very interesting question”; (6) whether one ought more to flee sadness than desire pleasure — “a very interesting article”; (7) whether exterior pain is greater than interior; (8) the species of sadness.
• On the species: from his work comparing comedy and tragedy — Aristotle puts the purgation of pity and fear in the definition of tragedy; pity is a species of sadness; authors who attribute melancholy to tragedy are mistaken, melancholy is another kind of sadness and not what tragedy arouses or purges (though after several tragedies one might get melancholy, and comedy purges melancholy — the Greeks knew this, giving comedy after tragedies). Envy is another, devilish sadness: in the parable of the workers in the vineyard the literal text is “is your eye evil because I am good?”, the root sense of envy — I cannot stand to see it.
• Asides: the apocryphal story of Thomas distracted in thought during an operation without painkillers; his teacher Kocourek (inferred) describing De Koninck’s concentration while reading; his brother Richard married a girl named Dolores.

7. Q. 35, a. 1: is pain a passion of the soul? (“two things are required for pleasure”) #

The point: pain, like pleasure, belongs to the appetitive power following apprehension, and in the sense appetite is most properly called a passion of the soul. Objections: (1) no passion of the soul is in the body, but pain can be in the body — Augustine, On True Religion: bodily pain is a sudden corruption of the safety of something the soul uses badly. (2) Every passion belongs to the appetitive power; pain rather to the apprehensive — Augustine, On the Nature of the Good: pain in the body comes when the sense resists a more powerful body. (3) Every passion belongs to animal appetite; pain rather to natural appetite — Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter: unless some good remained in nature, no good lost, there would be no punishment/pain.

• His warning on “passiones animae”: it does not mean they take place in the soul and not the body — emotions are bodily, as Aristotle argues at the beginning of the De Anima; it means they are less bodily than the way even a stone is affected, a way of being affected only possible with an animal soul. Sed contra: Augustine, City of God XIV, lists pain among passions of the soul, citing Virgil (“these they fear, these they desire, in these they rejoice, in these they are pained”). Response, as he reads it:

1. Two things are required for pleasure: the joining of the good, and the perception of that joining — Mozart’s music joined to my ear, and my perceiving that union.
2. Likewise for pain: the joining of something bad (bad because it lacks a good it should have) and the perception of it — the awful background music in the restaurant with Warren Murray; Father Valais paying musicians to stop.
3. What is joined without the aspect of good or bad for the thing cannot cause pleasure or pain (sniffing then tasting the wine: pleasure from perceiving a union suitable to the tongue). So good and bad as such are the objects of pleasure and pain, and good and bad are the objects of the appetitive power (as true and false are of reason); hence pleasure and pain pertain to the appetite.
4. Every appetitive motion following apprehension (as opposed to natural desire — “this plant wants a lot of sun”, “broccoli is a big feeder”) pertains to the intellectual or sense appetite; natural desire follows the apprehension not of the one desiring but of another who made that nature. Since sense pleasure and pain presuppose sense in the same subject, pain like pleasure is in both the intellectual and the sense appetite. He prefers “grasping” as translation of apprehensio.
5. Every motion of the sense appetite is called a passion, especially those that “sound to be in some defect” (in defectum sonat), because passio originally means suffering (the Passion of our Lord). Aristotle carries “suffering” over to the senses, dropping the note of destruction (a receiving that perfects), then to understanding; English “suffering” is stuck at the first meaning. His alternative rendering “undergoing” also has an originally bad sense. The student should suffer in the Greek sense: undergo the teacher acting on his mind for its good; so Mozart acts on the emotions for their good.
6. Hence pain in the sense appetite is most properly a passion of the soul, as bodily harms (molestiae) are passions of the body; Augustine, City of God XIV: pain especially is called a sickness. Contrast: Physics III, acting and undergoing without the bad sense, though with active and passive. Replies: (1) pain is said to be of the body because its cause is in the body, but the motion of pain is always in the soul (motus doloris semper est in anima), since the body cannot sorrow without the soul — which he takes not to mean “in the soul alone”: only understanding and willing are activities of the soul not in the body (the brain-probing experiment where the subject could imagine steak or chocolate but no willing could be produced, so the doctor concluded the will was not in the brain). (2) Pain is said to be of the sense not as an act of a sense power but because bodily pain requires perceiving that this pin is unsuitable, just as pleasure requires perceiving the union of a good. (3) Sadness over the loss of a good shows the goodness of nature, not because pain is an act of natural desire, but because nature desires something as good, and when it is sensed to be taken away, pain or sadness follows in the sense appetite — when the electricity goes off and Mozart stops, “endless sorrow”.

• Music digression attached to point 1: Politics VIII, music is a likeness not only of the emotions but of the virtues (the virtues concerned with emotions); a march is a likeness of courage; the Jupiter (41st) and Linz (36th) symphonies, both in C major, likenesses of magnanimity (De Koninck: “probably right”; once he tried to make the Linz philotimia, the lesser virtue about honors); keys: C and D more for the irascible, D major for Don Giovanni and Figaro, Così fan tutte in C major, E-flat in between; his old debate with brother Richard whether the piano concertos or symphonies are greater — he argued from the Poetics (plot is the soul of tragedy, and the concertos have more plot), but now holds the symphonies higher, especially for moral education; music can represent courage, temperance, magnanimity, not well justice or foresight; De Koninck: “Mozart’s a separated substance” (a young man’s attraction to Bach noted). Asides: De Koninck teaching Physics I since 1935 and still seeing something new; Monsignor Dionne’s classes as “undergoing”.

His words #

• “before and after” / prior; many senses; first sense in time; the crowning sense, cause before effect.
• “sense of time” (chronou aisthēsis); in Aristotle’s text “sense” means reason.
• “simply and not simply” — simpliciter / secundum quid; the fallacy of overlooking it in daily life.
• concupiscence — concupiscentia, Greek epithumia, sense desire for what is pleasing to the senses.
• pleasure — rest of the will or any desiring power in a good.
• end — has in operable things the definition of a beginning, from which judgment is most taken.
• “the same knowledge of opposites” — principle from Plato and Aristotle governing Thomas’s order.
• “puritanism” — his name for the nameless vice opposed to intemperance.
• dolor — pain; tristitia — sadness.
• passiones animae — not “in the soul, not the body”, but less bodily than a stone’s being affected.
• passio — originally suffering; his rendering “undergoing”; in defectum sonat, “sounds to be in some defect”.
• apprehension — apprehensio, which he prefers to render “grasping”.
• natural desire — inclination following the apprehension of the one who made the nature, not of the thing desiring.
• molestiae — bodily harms, “passions of the body”.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 34, a. 4 (whole article, objections through replies).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 35, prologue (division and eight questions).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 35, a. 1 (whole article).
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on De Anima III, lect. 15, n. 829, with the Greek of Aristotle, De Anima III.
• Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1, Act 1, Scene 2 (opening exchange of Falstaff and Hal).
• Shakespeare, “What is a man… large discourse, looking before and after” [ed.: Hamlet (inferred)].

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Categories, ch. 12 (senses of before).
• Aristotle, Physics IV (time and reason); Physics III (motion, acting and undergoing).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics X (measure by the first of a kind; uniform motion), cited in objections.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VII (pleasure the principal end), sed contra; virtues with vices.
• Aristotle, Politics VIII (music as likeness of virtues); Poetics (plot the soul of tragedy; purgation of pity and fear); Rhetoric (persuading both ways); De Anima I on emotions as bodily.
• Augustine, On Psalm 7; On True Religion; On the Nature of the Good; On Genesis to the Letter; City of God XIV (with Virgil).
• Thomas Aquinas, Secunda Secundae (order of virtues and vices); Summa Contra Gentiles prologue chapters.
• Scripture: parable of the workers in the vineyard (“is your eye evil because I am good?”).
• Shakespeare, Aaron [ed.: Titus Andronicus (inferred)].

His questions #

• For which reason is Christ on the cross called Christ? Primarily as priest, though also teacher (Augustine’s chair) and king.
• What is the first meaning of before and after in the Categories? Before in time.
• Who is Shakespeare’s greatest comic character, and where does he first appear? Falstaff, Henry IV Part 1, Act 1, Scene 2 — asking what time of day it is.
• In what sense is pleasure before love and desire, if they are generated first? According to the notion of end, which in action has the definition of a beginning, from which judgment is taken.
• Which is closer to love, hate or desire — and why then does Thomas treat hate right after love? Desire is closer; but there is the same knowledge of opposites, as with virtues and their vices.
• Why does Thomas take up pain immediately after pleasure? Because sadness or pain is contrary to pleasure (the third question of q. 35).
• What is required for pleasure, and for pain? The joining of a good (or a bad, lacking a due good) and the perception of that joining.
• What do good and bad stand to, as true and false stand to reason? To the appetite; hence pleasure and pain are in the desiring power.
• Why call emotions passiones animae if they are bodily? Because they are less bodily than the affection of a stone; possible only for what has an animal soul.
• Does “motus doloris semper est in anima” mean in the soul alone? No; only understanding and willing are acts of the soul not in the body.