Are the Bold Quickest at the Start? The Treatise on Anger Begins, with Mozart and Modern Philosophy (Question 45, Article 4; Question 46)

Orientation #

He refers back to “the last article” (young people without experience being foolishly bold) and to hope causing boldness “as we were speaking before” (prev. lecture). He announces that anger, the last passion, is “going to be 46, 47” and that its causes will be “the next question.” The previous class worked through article 3 on whether some defect causes boldness; the next opens the first two articles on anger.

The class, in order #

1. Objection 1 and a digression on secundum quid / simpliciter (“the fallacy of simply and secundum quid”) #

He begins article 4 (whether the bold are more prompt in the beginning than in the dangers themselves), reads obj. 1 — trembling comes from fear, fear is contrary to boldness, yet the bold sometimes tremble in the beginning “as the philosopher says in the book on Problems” — and notes we do not know whether the Problems is really Aristotle’s.

Digression (from a conversation with Warren Murray and last night’s class): the De Fallaciis ad quosdam nobiles artistas (dubiously Thomas’s) says the fallacy runs from secundum quid to simpliciter; Albert the Great says usually so, but sometimes the reverse.

• Examples of the usual direction: you do what you shouldn’t because it is in some way good (delicious poison: tastes good, but simply bad); you fail to do what you should because it is in some way bad (not studying because it keeps you from the party — “there’s nothing so good that it doesn’t prevent you from doing something else that is good”).
• Example of the reverse: Meno’s “how can we go looking for what we don’t know?” — because not known simply, he concludes not known in any way. His counter-example: “I don’t know how many students are in class today,” yet counting reaches 23; he knew 23 in some way as “the number of students,” enough to choose the road of counting (whereas “what is a student?” needs a different road). So a researcher into the cause of cancer is not just guessing.
• Thomas: logic has maximam difficultatem and is the exception to studying the easy before the hard, because it deals with what is neither sensible nor imaginable; geometry and natural philosophy are easier, but logic must be learned early as “the way to go.”
• Student: academics dismiss logic as from “dead white males.” He: modern philosophers hardly ever discuss these mistakes, and so fall into them “one after another” — “like young people without experience, being foolishly bold” (last article), unable to see that homosexual marriage is “a square circle.”

2. Objections 2 and 3, sed contra, and “bold imagination” (“Dionysius uses the term bold imagination”) #

He returns to the article.

• Obj. 2: a passion is increased by the increase of its object (the more good, the more lovable); the difficult is the object of boldness; danger present is more arduous than danger foreseen; so boldness should increase.
• Obj. 3: wounds provoke anger, and anger causes boldness (Rhetoric II: anger is audax) — “that’s interesting,” since before we spoke of hope causing boldness; so being struck makes us bolder.
• Aside: Obama’s Audacity of Hope; Dionysius’s “bold imagination” as “really the cause of error.” Example from Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth: scriptural scholars’ claim that Mark’s “you are the Messiah” is original and Matthew’s fuller “the Christ, the Son of God” (followed by “upon this rock”) was added later — “this is bold imagination.”
• Sed contra: Ethics III — the bold are eager before dangers but fail in them.

3. The body: sudden judgment vs. reason that discusses (“the sense knowing power is not collativa”) #

Point: the bold and the brave differ because their movements follow different apprehensions.

1. Boldness is a motion of the desiring power, so it follows the grasp of the sense knowing power.
2. The sense power is not collativa (bringing together, as genus and difference make a definition, or major and minor make a syllogism) nor inquisitive of the individual circumstances; it has a subitum judicium.
3. In a sudden grasp not all the difficulties can be known, so a motion of boldness arises to approach; in the danger itself they sense greater difficulty than estimated and fail.
4. Reason discusses all the difficulties; hence the brave, acting from reason’s judgment, seem more remiss in the beginning (not passionate but deliberate), but in the dangers meet nothing unforeseen — sometimes less than they reckoned — and so persist; or they persist because they take up dangers for the good of virtue itself, whose will perseveres however great the danger.
5. The bold act only on a guess that makes hope and excludes fear; when the unforeseen occurs they “panic.”

4. The replies (“heat is recalled back to the heart”) #

• Ad 1: trembling occurs in the bold too, from the recalling of heat from exterior to interior — “white fear,” because your life is in danger; contrast embarrassment, an exterior threat, where blood rushes to the face. In the bold the heat is recalled to the heart; in the fearing it descends to the lower parts (discussed before).
• Ad 2: the object of love is simply the good (make it more beautiful, “I love it even more”); the object of boldness is composed of good and bad, and its motion presupposes hope of the good. If the added difficulty exceeds hope, boldness diminishes; but if boldness remains, the more danger the more boldness — Shakespeare’s captain when outnumbered by the French; “that team is better than our team… then you got to play all the better.”
• Ad 3: injury causes anger only if there is hope (to be said in the treatise on anger); danger exceeding hope of victory yields no anger; but if anger does follow, boldness is increased — “if I get angry with you, I’ll probably be bolder, unless I lose hope of avenging myself.”

5. Student question: boldness as passion and in the will; music and reason (“the emotions can partake of reason”) #

Student: boldness exists as a passion but also in the will? When reason takes account of the dangers, isn’t it more will and reason? He: “maybe the equivocal word”; there he is talking about virtue. Courage is in the body but partakes of reason. Student: one case the passion, the other the perfection — yes. Ethics I: the part of the soul that is reason, the part that is not, subdivided into what can listen to reason and what cannot; moral virtue is partaking of reason in the passions or even the will (justice) — what is essentially rational is more rational than what is rational by participation.

• Mozart’s music is “the best sign” that the emotions can partake of reason; Baroque likewise (his web search on Corelli, a site with Corelli, Bach, Handel, Geminiani). Kasurik: “Duane, you think that’s more understandable than it is” — it sounds reasonable without your seeing the reason, i.e. rational by participation, not thought. Kasurik and Msgr. Dionne thought Mozart a “separated substance,” an “angelic doctor of music.”
• Wagner is irrational and moves to irrational action; rock and roll and the Newport Navy base chair-fight; rock-concert riots. Student: Carl Stern’s autobiography — energy after Mozart, drained after Wagner; his teacher said romantic music “tears you out”; Stern influenced Bernard Nathanson’s conversion. He: from Thomas to Mozart there is no shock in transition.
• Aristotle on sense vs. reason: a too-strong object weakens sense (very hot food, bright light) but reason, after the very intelligible, understands the less intelligible better — so good philosophy lets you recognise reasonable music. Hence his suspicion of philosophers who like jazz (the Clark professor); interview questions at Assumption: what music, beer or wine, coffee or tea. Hegel drank coffee “in great excess,” the practical man’s drink; Samuel Johnson drank tea. Student aside on a firm’s Starbucks upgrade.

6. Proemium of the treatise on anger (“first about anger, secundum se”) #

He turns to q.46: anger in itself, its cause (and the remedy of that cause — “the next question,” 47), its effect — the same division as the treatise on love. Eight questions, with his comments:

1. Whether anger is a special passion — some think it composed, “maybe some truth to that”; no such question for the others, perhaps why anger is taken last.
2. Whether its object is good or bad — “very fundamental… but questionable.”
3. Whether it is in the concupiscible — strange to ask so late.
4. Whether it is with reason — Christ said to be angry at the hardness of their hearts.
5. Whether anger is more natural — Shakespeare’s “in the very wrath of love… clubs cannot part them”: anger is like concupiscence in being vehent. In the Secunda Secundae virtues are ordered under the four cardinal and three theological virtues by likeness of mode: mildness, moderating anger, is attached to temperance, moderating concupiscence, since both passions urge to wrong and need moderation, whereas courage needs strengthening.
6. Whether anger is more grave than hate — anger stops when it has achieved something (a bloodied nose), hate goes all the way; Thomas on “crucify him”: Pilate hoped the scourged Christ’s pitiful look would satisfy them, which it would have had they been angry, not hating. “Is it better to have somebody angry with you than someone hating you?”
7. Whether anger is only toward those to whom there is justice — the angry man hears reason: “you deserve to be punished.”
8. The species of anger. Aside: Thomas here is like Euclid, one theorem after another; “why didn’t I think of that?” (his brother Mark).

7. Aristotle and the moderns on predecessors and the difficulty of knowing (“we no longer bother to refute our predecessors”) #

Aristotle recalls his predecessors carefully, gives the reason he disagrees, and answers their argument (Melissus in the Physics); moderns hardly recall that predecessors said otherwise, “as if wisdom began with them” (Thomas on the Latin Averroists).

• Berkeley, Principles: difficulty is not from obscurity of things or weakness of mind but from insisting on wrong principles. Aristotle: difficulty is on the side of the thing (motion, time, matter “hardly exist”) or of our mind (God is too knowable). Thomas extends it: some things hard to love because not good (cancer — no fault in your heart), others because of you (the common good, God). Further cases: lifting a weight (too heavy vs. the palsy of age; his airport suitcases); seeing (dark room — fault in the thing; interrogation lamp — weakness of the eye). Berkeley never recalls why Aristotle said this or argues against it; insisting on wrong principles is not “weakness of mind.”
• Santayana: “we no longer bother to refute our predecessors, we just wave them goodbye” — as with abortion, contraception, homosexual marriage dismissed as “the past” (Rush Limbaugh on the new pope). Troilus and Cressida as the best critique of fashion. “If our theories don’t meet the facts, too bad for the facts” (attribution garbled in recording).
• Reading Euclid or Aristotle one learns about things; reading Kant, Berkeley, Hegel one learns only what he thought. Good modern scientists teach about things (de Broglie, La matière et la lumière); the new pope on wonder; more wonder in Heisenberg than in modern philosophers — the Greeks and modern scientists are closer to each other than to modern philosophers.
• Students close on education: schooled but not educated; “80 percent of New York high school graduates can’t read”; elite graduates intelligent in technical areas but “impervious” to reason philosophically. Left as a lament.

His words #

• secundum quid / simpliciter: in some way / simply; the fallacy usually runs from the first to the second, occasionally (Meno) the reverse.
• maximam difficultatem: Thomas on logic, the exception to easy-before-difficult.
• collativa: bringing together (genus and difference; premises); what the sense power is not.
• subitum judicium: the sudden judgment of the sense power.
• audax (anger is “audacious”): productive of audacity, Rhetoric II.
• white fear: heat recalled to the heart, vs. blood rushing to the face in embarrassment.
• bold imagination: Dionysius; “the cause of error.”
• rational by participation vs. essentially rational: moral virtue and (his sign) Mozart’s music.
• secundum se: anger “in itself or by itself,” first part of the treatise.
• mildness [ed.: mansuetudo]: the virtue moderating anger, attached to temperance.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II q.45 a.4 (inferred numbering), objections, sed contra, body, replies.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II q.46 proemium and list of eight articles.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Problems (obj. 1; authorship doubted); Rhetoric II (obj. 3); Ethics III (sed contra); Ethics I (parts of the soul); Physics (Melissus); on difficulty in knowing (locus not stated).
• De Fallaciis ad quosdam nobiles artistas (dubious Thomas); Albert the Great on fallacies.
• Plato, Meno.
• Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth; Mark and Matthew on Peter’s confession.
• Shakespeare: a captain outnumbered by the French (play not named); “the very wrath of love”; Troilus and Cressida.
• Berkeley, Principles; Santayana; Carl Stern’s autobiography; Louis de Broglie, La matière et la lumière.

His questions #

• How can we go looking for what we don’t know we’re looking for (Meno)? We know it in some way — “the number of students in class” — enough to choose the road of counting.
• Why is logic the exception to studying the easy before the difficult? Because it is most difficult (not sensible or imaginable) yet must be learned early to proceed in all of philosophy.
• Does anger cause boldness, as hope does? Yes, if anger follows, boldness increases; but anger itself needs hope.
• Why do the bold tremble at the start? Heat is recalled from the exterior to the heart because life is in danger.
• Does more danger mean more boldness? Only if hope survives; if difficulty exceeds hope, boldness diminishes.
• Is boldness a passion or in the will? Both senses: the passion, and the virtue of courage which partakes of reason.
• Is it better to have somebody angry with you than hating you? Anger stops once satisfied (a bloodied nose); hate goes to crucifixion.
• Is the difficulty in knowing due to the object or to our mind? Either: motion/time/matter hardly exist; God is too knowable — and the same holds for loving and lifting.
• What can be done to reverse the tide in the academic world? left open.