Hope, Fear and Despair: Socrates' Hatred of Arguments and Whether Despair Is Contrary to Hope (ST I-II q.40 a.1-4)

Orientation #

He opens: “I guess we’re up to the fourth article here in question forty,” and looks back at the proemium to q. 40 to place it; the first three articles were done last time (prev. lecture). He does not say what comes next. The previous class covered the proemium and articles 1–3 of q. 40; the next continues with articles on the causes of hope and hope’s causing love.

The class, in order #

1. The proemium and the four principal passions (“my fear to hope, my sorrows unto joys”) #

Point: the order of the irascible passions in the proemium is not accidental, and hope and fear are two of the four principal passions.

• Proemium of q. 40: first hope and desperation, second fear and audacity (“boldness, as we say sometimes”), third anger. Hope is put before despair, fear before boldness, anger last. There is no separate question on desperation; it enters in a. 4.
• The four principal passions: joy and sadness, hope and fear; Thomas has articles on them in various works.
• Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 3, 4.6: King Henry restored, “my fear to hope, my sorrows unto joys”: all four chief passions in one line. This also shows tragedy vs. comedy: tragedy moves and purges fear and pity (a form of sorrow); comedy moves hope and mirth (a form of joy). The chief passions are what tragedy and comedy divide between them. Going the other way, hope turns into fear and joy into sorrow.
• Gaudium et Spes: the English has “joys and sorrows, hopes and fears”; in the Latin he found this morning, luctus for sorrow and angor for fear (“a thing held by the throat”, “a cousin of fear”).

2. Socrates leading Simmias and Cebes out of despair (“we need technai peri logous”) #

Point: the Phaedo shows despair of arguments and its cure, and anticipates the art about arguments.

• Socrates jokes that whether the soul survives death is hardly irrelevant to one about to die; gives arguments for immortality; Simmias and Cebes each object, Socrates’ arguments no longer seem good, and all fall into despair: how can you trust an argument that seems good one moment and not the next? Since only argument can settle immortality, they must despair of the truth too.
• The narrator: “I never admired Socrates more than now.” Socrates’ comparison: hater of arguments vs. misanthrope (cf. Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens). The misanthrope trusts someone he shouldn’t, or more than he should, is let down, and concludes no one can be trusted; but he is naive: a few men can be trusted completely (your mother; John Paul II or Benedict XVI), some not at all, most up to a point. Likewise arguments: some trustworthy completely, some not at all, some up to a point.
• He maps this onto Aristotle: Prior and Posterior Analytics (trust completely), Sophistic Refutations (not at all), Topics and the argumentative part of Rhetoric (good but not necessary; dialectic more trustworthy than rhetoric). Socrates says in Greek technai peri logous, arts about arguments; “don’t blame arguments, blame you for not understanding arguments.” The misanthrope comparison helps because it is easier to see something wrong with him than with the distruster of arguments.
• After restoring hope, Socrates answers Simmias easily (“bang, bang, bang”), and the company becomes overconfident; he then warns that Cebes will be much harder: he instils a little fear.
• Lesson: a teacher encourages discouraged students and inculcates caution in students who are too hopeful; which is needed “depends upon where the student is.”

3. Kasurik and Monsignor Dionne (“principle of passion is fear”) #

Point: personal examples of the teacher’s balance of hope and fear.

• His teacher Kasurik [name as heard] visited Msgr Dionne at Laval after a class, found him talking quite differently in the office; Dionne: it is the professor’s business to encourage students. Kasurik did not need encouraging but restraining.
• Kasurik, before Berquist went to Laval, objected that Dionne held logic more important for wisdom than natural philosophy (“how do you know about the unmoved mover… that the soul is immortal… there are immaterial things?”). Dionne’s distinction: logic disposes to wisdom by its universality and immateriality; natural philosophy disposes to it by arguing that immaterial things exist.
• Dionne on Berquist’s thesis outline: gently asked what he meant, then “a more serious objection”, a change of order; Berquist saw it at once and dropped the thesis himself.
• Warren R. [prob. Warren Murray] used to say “Monsignor Dionne’s principle of passion is fear”: a new idea was first rejected, and you had to defend it. Kasurik was good at the beginning for encouragement; Dionne for caution.

4. Hope and fear in theology (“presumptuous … despair”) #

Point: the same balance holds for hope in God and fear of his justice.

• Thomas, commentary on the Psalms: hope in God without fear of his justice becomes presumption; fear of divine justice without hope in his mercy becomes despair.
• The confessor must know which to supply: a woman who has had an abortion and is despairing needs hope in divine mercy, not “you’re going to hell”; the careless sinner who “returns to his vomit” (Scripture) needs healthy fear of judgment.
• In tragedy and comedy, by contrast, the emphasis falls on only one side.

5. Mozart’s last five symphonies (“the symmetry A B C B A”) #

Point: the symmetry of the last five symphonies is built on hope and fear, the irascible passions.

• ABCBA symmetry also in Midsummer Night’s Dream (court, peasants’ house, forest, peasants’ house, court) and in the sung parts of the Mass (Kyrie and Agnus Dei ask mercy; Gloria and Sanctus praise; Credo, “the odd bird”, confesses the faith).
• Symphonies 36, 38, 39, 40, 41; there is no 37th (an introduction Mozart wrote for a Michael Haydn symphony was once mistaken for one; the numbers were never changed).
• 36 and 41 in C major: a likeness of magnanimity (Aristotle’s Ethics), which is about hope. 38 and 40: courage, which is about fear; courage has two parts, approaching the dangerous (38, “makes Beethoven look feeble”) and sustaining blows (40, more like patience). 39 in E flat is the odd one, “more like joy.”
• Thomas: the irascible shares more in reason, because you do one thing for the sake of another; concupiscence is immediate. Hence Mozart’s music is “more rationalist” than any other composer’s.

6. Article 4, the objections (“to one thing, one thing is contrary”) #

Point: three reasons why despair seems not contrary to hope.

1. One thing has one contrary (Metaphysics X, “the tenth book of wisdom”); Socrates already had an induction of this in the Protagoras: the contrary of sweet is not sour (sweet and sour pork) but bitter, what is furthest away. But hope is contrary to fear: Physics I (“Natural Hearing”), change is between contraries; “my fear to hope, my sorrows unto joys”; if fear is to hope as sorrow to joy, and sorrow and joy are contraries, then fear is the contrary of hope; likewise tragedy and comedy are contraries. “Beautiful thought. I like that.”
2. Contraries are about the same thing; hope regards the good, despair regards a bad thing that impedes obtaining the good.
3. Motion is contrary to motion; rest is opposed to motion as a privation (motion up vs. motion down are contraries, motion vs. rest are not). Despair implies immobility rather than motion, hope a motion of extending oneself to the good.

• Aside on obj. 3: Thomas has an article on the theological virtue of hope being named from the passion, unusual for a virtue; striving for a difficult good already has a likeness to virtue (though the theological virtue is in the will, not the emotions).
• Aside: the doctor’s wife who worried about him because a young man at the University of Minnesota read author A, then B, then C, got more mixed up, threw the books down and went to live on a farm: despair, “sit there and mope.”
• Aside: joy and pleasure are sometimes spoken of as rest or quiet.
• Sed contra: desperation is named through contrariety to hope (etymology, from the Latin).

7. The body: two contrarieties, approach and withdrawal (“a good that is difficult to achieve”) #

Point: despair is contrary to hope by the contrariety proper to the irascible.

1. In changes there is a twofold contrariety: (a) according to contrary terms, found only in the concupiscible (love/hate; “I suppose you say the same” of joy/sadness); (b) approach to and withdrawal from the same term, found in the irascible. “What a smart guy this guy is.”
   • Fear vs. boldness: about to fight, fear runs away, boldness goes toward; you pick a fight in a bar, see he is much bigger, “time to get out of here.”
2. The object of hope is a bonum arduum. Where there is no difficulty there is no hope: eating from a bowl of popcorn while watching the game is automatic, not hope.
3. Considered as possible, the arduous good is attractive, and hope tends toward it (approach); considered as impossible, it is repulsive, since (Ethics III) when it comes to something impossible men depart, give up; despair regards it so.
4. Hence despair implies a motion of withdrawing and is contrary to hope as recess to excess. This is more striking in boldness and fear, where you really run away; in despair you give up seeking. Peter denying Christ did not despair, he wept; the other one hanged himself on the tree.

• Digression, prompted by Socrates’ friends: Thomas quoting Augustine that philosophy before Plato despaired of knowing the truth, because all they knew were sensible things and the senses. Heraclitus: everything is a river, always flowing (his classroom example: “where is Berkman?” — you can only point, he has moved before you finish); the senses disagree (tastes good / does not; cold / fine; the sick man tastes bitter). So neither the knower nor the knowable would serve. Socrates turned to politics and ethics and developed definition: define square and circle and you know a square is not a circle, define square and quadrilateral and you know a square is a quadrilateral; Aristotle says he was trying to syllogize, the basis of syllogism being definition. Plato: if we know by definition we know by reason not senses, something unchanging: the forms. Augustine, following Plato as far as the faith allowed, based what we know on the ideas of God; Thomas then goes on to how Aristotle did it. Plato is overcoming that despair but “maybe he’s made a mistake.”
• The Phaedo is the first place he knows where anyone says we need an art about arguments, distinguishing good from bad and necessary from probable; Aristotle eventually developed it.

8. Reply to the first objection (“I hope to know the truth, but I might fear”) #

Point: fear is contrary to hope by objects, despair by approach and withdrawal.

• Fear is contrary to hope by contrariety of objects, good and bad, a contrariety the irascible passions have as derived from the concupiscible; despair is contrary only by excess and recess, the contrariety proper to the irascible. So the objection “has some truth in it,” and the more proper contrary is despair.
• Example: I hope to know the truth and fear to be mistaken; one is about the good (truth), the other the bad (error), which goes back to the concupiscible: I love truth and hate error; if I did not hate being mistaken I would not fear it. Socrates’ fear of thinking he knows when he does not, “a very common state.”
• Aristotle on the early Greeks: they tried to assign the cause of knowing but not of error, though error is more common; they should have.
• Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles: error est magna pars miseriae. Even Aristotle and Thomas were mistaken about the heavenly bodies (a different matter whose form exhausts its ability, hence incorruptible; three kinds of substance in Metaphysics XII), though Thomas once says a change in them might take longer than many men’s lives, so the argument may lack full necessity.
• Augustine: if someone is not sure he loves the truth, ask whether he likes being deceived (love/hate, concupiscible or will).
• Heisenberg and Bohr on quantum theory: “can nature really be as absurd?”; Bohr went skiing in Norway, Heisenberg stayed, saw a way out, made arithmetic mistakes from excitement; each found a solution and they compared. Schrödinger wished he had never gone into physics. Had they not persisted, no discovery. His own case: an undergraduate problem solved years later by putting Thomas and Dionne together; Dionne: “I know where you’re going, Duane.” “Can I go there?”
• Whittaker Chambers: his Columbia fellow students had given up the pursuit of truth, treating ideas “like ping pong balls” (knocked back and forth, nothing at stake); the communists were mistaken but took truth seriously enough to start a revolution. His first doubt came looking at his daughter’s ear: it could not happen by chance. Student: they are stuck in matter.

9. Reply to the second objection (“from the excess of the good only”) #

Point: despair does not regard evil as evil.

• Despair regards the bad only per accidens, as making the good impossible to obtain (as despair of truth, Greek or modern); and despair can arise from the excess of the good alone: people give up thinking about God because it is too far above us; the Jews would not believe Christ could be God, equal to the Father, “too hard to think.”

10. Reply to the third objection and the order of desire, hope, despair (“desperation presupposes desire, just as hope”) #

Point: despair is not mere lack of hope but withdrawal, and both hope and despair presuppose desire.

• Despair implies a distance from the thing desired, not only privation: the original sour grapes (the fox wanted them, could not reach them); the man who cannot win the girl decides she would be spoiled anyway; those who say truth does not matter, “love is what’s important.”
• Desire comes first; because the good is difficult, desire is followed by hope if I think I can overcome the difficulty, by despair if not; about what we do not desire there is neither. Desire is not always followed by either (popcorn again).
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason: “large discourse, looking before and after.” His question: what does reason always see before it sees a before and after? A distinction. So one must see the distinction between desire and hope (hope: movement toward the difficult good when you think you can overcome the difficulty) before the order.
• Both are about the good, which falls under desire.
• Aside: the rising hope of the Jupiter Symphony’s last movement; Warren Rey [name as heard] pointed out that Mozart combines four or five melodies there, as with the dances in Don Giovanni: “man completely in control.” “The glorious music of Mozart,” as his friend Washington Irving says.

11. Faith, hope, charity: two orders (“the greatest of them is love”) #

Point: Paul’s ranking and Augustine’s sequence are different orders.

• Dei Verbum’s proemium quotes Augustine: by believing we come to hope, by hoping to love. Paul: these three remain, the greatest is charity. Which of Aristotle’s four orders? Paul’s is the fourth, the order of goodness.
• Which is second? He inclines to hope; Dionne was cautious, but Warren Murray showed him a text of Thomas in the disputed questions (on hope, he thinks) saying hope is greater than faith. Thomas’s account: by faith we know our end (the creed ends in eternal life), by hope we tend toward it, by charity we are already in some way joined to it. Closer to the end is better, as first philosophy is better than natural philosophy and that than geometry, by nearness to wisdom. (Therese of Lisieux: her union with God already complete: union of love, not of vision; Augustine never said that, the vision is the whole reward.)
• Augustine’s order is the order of coming-to-be and of teaching: Thomas’s catechetical instructions expound the creed, then the Our Father (hope), then the commandments of love. Also the sapiential books: Job defends faith against the chief objection (evil in the world), the Psalms are prayers like the Our Father, the Song of Songs is charity.

His words #

• desperation: his rendering of despair, following the Latin
• audacity / boldness: the passion opposed to fear
• principal (chief) passions: joy, sadness, hope, fear
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]: change is between contraries
• the tenth / twelfth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics X / XII]
• technai peri logous: arts about arguments (Phaedo)
• principle of passion: Dionne’s was fear
• bonum arduum: a good difficult to achieve, object of hope
• excess and recess [ed.: accessus/recessus, approach and withdrawal]: the contrariety proper to the irascible
• contrariety of terms: proper to the concupiscible
• luctus, angor: Latin of Gaudium et Spes for sorrow and fear
• error est magna pars miseriae: error is a great part of misery (Summa contra Gentiles)
• ability [ed.: potency]: the form of the heavenly bodies exhausts the ability of the matter
• large discourse, looking before and after: Shakespeare’s definition of reason
• order of goodness: the fourth of Aristotle’s four orders

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I-II q. 40, proemium; a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies)
• Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 3, act 4, scene 6 (“my fear to hope, my sorrows unto joys”)
• Vatican II, Dei Verbum, proemium quoting Augustine (believing, hoping, loving)

Mentioned

• Plato, Phaedo (Simmias, Cebes, misology); Protagoras (one contrary)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics X (contraries); Physics I; Ethics III (the impossible); Metaphysics XII (three substances); Prior and Posterior Analytics, Sophistic Refutations, Topics, Rhetoric
• Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes (Latin luctus, angor)
• Shakespeare, Timon of Athens; A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Thomas, commentary on the Psalms (presumption/despair); Summa contra Gentiles (error magna pars miseriae); Disputed Questions on hope (hope greater than faith, per Warren Murray); catechetical instructions; article on the virtue of hope named from the passion (locus not given)
• Thomas quoting Augustine on pre-Platonic despair of truth (locus not given)
• Augustine on liking to be deceived (locus not given)
• St Paul, “the greatest of these is charity”
• Scripture: the dog returns to his vomit; Job, Psalms, Song of Songs
• Mozart, Symphonies 36, 38, 39, 40, 41; Don Giovanni
• Heisenberg on Bohr; Whittaker Chambers

His questions #

• What is the contrary of sweet? Not sour but bitter, what is furthest away.
• Is reaching into the bowl of popcorn hope? No; there is no difficulty, so no hope.
• When Peter denied Christ, did he despair? No, he wept; Judas hanged himself.
• Is fear the contrary of hope? Yes, by contrariety of objects, derived from the concupiscible; despair is the proper contrary, by withdrawal vs. approach.
• What does reason always see before it sees a before and after? A distinction.
• Which of Aristotle’s four orders is Paul using in “the greatest of these is charity”? The fourth, the order of goodness.
• Which is better, hope or faith? Hope, per Thomas in the disputed questions; hope is closer to the end.
• Why does hope come before charity in Augustine’s line? It is the order of coming-to-be and of teaching, not of goodness.