Aquinas on Anger, Part 1: Is Anger a Special Passion, and Is Its Object Good or Bad? (Articles 1–2, with side topics on 'simply' versus 'in some way', the natural desire to see God, and the art of logic)

Orientation #

He says “we missed our prayer” and that “the account of the death of Fernando the Saint” was read at the beginning of the last class (prev. lecture). Verified sources place this class in ST I-II q. 46 aa. 1-2, with a stretch matched to Summa contra Gentiles IV ch. 15 and a handout (“Note for Sixth Book of Wisdom, Reading 4”, p. 14); the transcript itself does not name the SCG chapter. The previous class finished boldness (q. 45 a. 4) and introduced q. 46; the next continues with q. 46 aa. 3-5.

The class, in order #

1. The proemium: eight questions about anger (“first about anger by itself”) #

Point: q. 46 divides like the treatise on love: anger by itself, then its cause (and remedy), then its effect.

• Aside on cause and remedy: this is where Aristotle’s Rhetoric helps, since in a courtroom you must know how to arouse anger (to get a harsher sentence) and how to soften it (to defend).
• He runs the eight titles with a first reaction to each:
  1. Whether anger is a special passion: some speak of anger as combining several passions.
  2. Whether its object is good or bad: it arises from something bad (“you’re stepping on my toes”) but aims at avenging, which is good (“I don’t get angry; I just get even”).
  3. Whether anger is in the concupiscible: “strange that this should arise.” His only guess: in the secunda secundae Thomas attaches virtues to the cardinal virtues by shared mode, and mildness (moderating anger) sits beside temperance (moderating food, drink, sex). Shakespeare, As You Like It, “in the very wrath of love” — a metaphor from species to species that shows the likeness.
  4. Whether anger is with reason: texts of Thomas he saw when young say the irascible is in a way closer to reason than the concupiscible (“this for the sake of that”); joke that this is why Mozart wrote those piano concertos, a suggestion he once made to his old teacher.
  5. Whether more natural than concupiscence: “very strange,” what could be more natural than hunger, thirst, reproduction?
  6. Whether more grievous than hate: he expects the reverse, since anger ceases when you succeed in punishing (the bloody nose is a satisfaction), whereas hate goes toward destroying the person.
  7. Whether anger is only toward those to whom there is justice.
  8. On the species of anger. Aside on lowest species: easy in number or figure (all squares are one shape), obscure in cases like dog (“Is dog a lowest species?”), and so with anger.

2. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“Thus, it seems that anger is not a special passion”) #

Point: three objections that anger is not special, which he calls “good objections.”

1. The irascible power is named from anger, but it has many passions, so anger is not one special passion. His gloss: the concupiscible is likewise named from concupiscence, which is only one of the six.
2. Every special passion has a contrary, “as is clear in Peri Hermeneias, inducing to singular”: love/hate, desire/aversion, pleasure/pain, hope/despair, fear/boldness. Anger alone has no contrary; “maybe it ain’t a special passion.”
3. One special passion does not include another, but anger includes sadness (what you cause me), delight (when I get revenge) and hope (when I think I can punish you), per Rhetoric II.

• Sed contra: Damascene (“Thomas quotes Damascene in a number of places”) and Tullius, i.e. Cicero, Tusculans IV, both lay down anger as a special passion.

3. Digression: distinctions, and the natural desire to see God (“something is said to be general in two ways”) #

Point: Thomas, faced with authorities on both sides, looks for distinctions others don’t see; the two first fallacies outside speech (accident; simply/not simply) correspond to two famous kinds of distinction met over and over in philosophy.

• Occasion: a brother at TAC reported a disagreement there whether the desire to see God as He is is natural or arises from faith (a campus speaker had denied a natural desire).
• SCG side (natural desire): (1) when we know something exists we naturally want to know what it is; we know God exists; therefore we naturally want to know what He is. (2) When we know an effect we want its cause; the wise man knows being in general; therefore he wants its cause, God.
• Other Thomas texts seem to require faith: we don’t know what God is; then we don’t know what it is to see God; then how can we want it? A student: like people looking for a cure for cancer.
• His resolution: “simply” means perfectly or completely. We don’t naturally know perfectly what it is to see God, but we know it in some imperfect way, so both sets of texts are in harmony and “you don’t have to choose one over the other.”
• Second application, happiness: SCG argues man’s happiness is not in this life. But Aristotle, Ethics I and X, defines happiness and faces Solon (“call no man happy until he be dead”; you might get Alzheimer’s — Reagan not knowing what the papers before him were), and finally says men will be “happy as men.” His reading: that is secundum quid, not simpliciter, so Thomas is not opposing Aristotle. A student asks about Aristotle’s “live not merely as men but like God”: he replies that even in book X Aristotle distinguishes human happiness (by foresight [ed.: prudence], especially the leader’s — Churchill on becoming prime minister) from a more divine happiness in wisdom, and the wisdom natural reason gives still makes us happy only as men. Aristotle is silent on happiness after death (though he knew the soul survives; he died of overwork at the academy, still trying to learn), while Plato has Socrates stop the dialogue and tell muthoi about the soul after death, because that escapes natural reason in any complete way.
• Aside: Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (a “disgusting” play full of Greek-tragedy horrors) opens with Titus saying those who died in battle are assured of happiness while survivors never know — like Oedipus or Creon in Sophocles. “We can still be happy as men, if we can avoid the misfortunes of Oedipus.”

4. Article 1, body: three senses of “general” (“universale in praedicando, universale in causando”) #

Point: general (1) by predication, as animal of all animals; (2) by cause, as the sun of all things generated in these lower things (Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4); (3) as an effect produced from the running together of many causes, which contains them in a way in act.

• Sense 2 in ordinary speech: a general in the army. Soldier is said of everyone; Douglas MacArthur is not said of everyone but moves, directs and commands the whole army. Likewise teacher (universal cause) vs. student (said of all). Anecdote: Ron MacArthur, ex-president of TAC, driving with a Laval man who greeted the sunrise with “look at that universale in causando.”
• The sun as metaphor for God in Dionysius: the sun enlightens before it warms, so God enlightens by faith before He warms by charity; hence the Augustine quotation that by believing we come to hope and by hope to love (he attributes it to a liturgical text, name [unclear in recording]).
• Thomas’s comparison: the genus contains many differences in potestate, in the passive sense of power, as matter contains forms; the agent cause contains many effects in active power (virtus a synonym). Aristotle’s dunamis has a passive sense (what matter has) and an active sense (the mover’s), and Aristotle says the active is the first sense; English “power” is stuck on the active meaning, so when he taught that book he used “ability”: the pianist has ability, but the piano is playable; put Perkis in the ring with Cassius Clay and Perkis has no ability but is beatable, breakable — the ability to be acted upon. Genus is to species as matter to form, formed by differences (Porphyry, Isagoge; “species” probably from the word for form).
• Cross-reference: the senses of “in” in Physics IV run through the same likeness: first three are one thing actually in another (we in this room, teeth in mouth, genus in species); fourth, species in genus, is being in the passive ability; fifth, form in matter; then whole in parts; then “you’re in my power,” the efficient cause.
• Sense 3 illustrated: you resemble your mother and your father, each cause remaining in the effect.
• Application: anger is not general in sense 1 (it is divided against the other passions) nor sense 2 (it causes no other passion). Love is general in sense 2: it gives rise to desire in the object’s absence, pleasure in its presence, fear of losing it; Augustine, City of God XIV, love is the “first root” of all the passions (a word he loves); later charity is the form of all the virtues. In sense 3 anger is general: it does not arise without sadness provoked, desire of revenge, and hope of getting it — Rhetoric II, the angry man hopes to punish (a sign hope is a more primary motion than anger). Avicenna, De anima: if a very excelling person inflicts the harm, there is no anger, only sadness — you cannot think of fighting back, you fear he will do more.
• Students: one recalls the Psalm “if a just man strikes or reproves me” (he distinguishes: accepting correction is not about anger); another the abused son who finally shot his father.
• Personal aside on sense 3: cousin Donald, “that’s just like your father”; sister-in-law, “you run just like your brother”; he thinks like his father, feels like his mother (cannot relish the dirty jokes his mother enjoyed).

5. Article 1, replies and discussion (“to anger are terminated all the motions”) #

• Ad 1: the irascible is named from anger not because every motion of it is anger but because all its motions terminate in anger and because anger is the most manifest of them. He understands the second reason better; parallel: the appetitive power is named from desire (appetitus), not love, because desire is a motion toward something while pleasure is resting; Shakespeare, “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs”; we name by what is most known.
• Ad 2: anger is caused from contrary passions, hope (of good) and sadness (of bad), so it has contrariety within and no contrary outside — like middle colours, where contrariety is found only in the simple colours (black, white) from which they are caused; lukewarm from hot and cold.
• Ad 3: anger includes the other passions not as genus/species but as cause/effect.
• Student restates the Avicenna case: overpowered, not angry but sad, and afraid of more harm; he adds that fear excludes hope here. “Is sorrow sadness?” Yes. He restates the composition: sadness at the insult or pain, hope of paying you back; having something of both does not make anger be them, as having something of father and mother does not make me them.
• Student question, anger and political systems: yes, Aristotle in the Politics. In a democracy you can take anger out in the voting booth; under totalitarianism you are cowed, there is no hope, only sadness — his impression of communist Russia as gray skies; a Hungarian freedom fighter at St. Mary’s close to despair; a Russian after the fall comparing it to being locked in a room with an unpredictable disturbed person.
• Aside: Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece — her suicide arouses the anger that ends in Tarquin’s banishment.

6. Article 2, objections and sed contra (“the object of anger is something bad”) #

• Obj. 1: Gregory of Nyssa (his footnote says actually Nemesius; a joke that Thomas is deceived by equivocation, but “by chance,” not by reason) calls anger the armour-bearer/soldier of concupiscence, fighting what impedes it; every impediment is bad. Aristotle: animals fight over food and sex.
• Obj. 2: anger and hate agree in effect, bringing harm to another; hate regards the bad.
• Obj. 3: anger is caused from sadness (Ethics VII, anger operates with sadness), whose object is bad.
• Sed contra 1: Augustine, Confessions II, anger desires revenge; revenge pertains to justice, a good. Examples: the neighbour’s boy who smashes the plant deserves some punishment; Father’s own story of a child dropping a glass of milk (“nobody’s perfect” — “let’s work on being more perfect and clean up”), which he says controlled anger with sweetness; Father Michael later had the child clean the whole house.
• Sed contra 2: anger is always with hope, whence it causes pleasure (Rhetoric, quoting the poet on how delicious revenge is); fiction built on revenge; a TV murderer relishing again how he stabbed a child abuser in prison.

7. Article 2, body: two ways of grasping, two objects of anger (“anger always regards two objects”) #

1. The motion of the appetitive power follows the act of the apprehensive power (virtus here rather than potentia). Aside: “apprehend” is containing the known in the knower, like getting something into your head; love is the reverse, going out to the object (“I left my heart in San Francisco”).
2. The apprehensive power grasps in two ways: incomplexly, as understanding what a man is (Thomas’s “simple grasping,” the first act of reason, logic’s first part: Isagoge and Categories); complexly, as understanding man to be white.
3. So the appetite tends to good or bad in two ways: simply, as desire, pleasure, sadness; complexly, toward something in which there is something good or bad, as in love and hate. Treatise on love: to love is to wish some good to someone, so two objects, aliquem and aliquod bonum (love of well-wishing vs. love of the good wished).
4. Anger likewise: whoever is angry seeks revenge on someone; it tends to the revenge as a good (hoped, delighted in) and to the person as contrary and harmful, i.e. bad.
5. Two differences from love and hate: (a) anger always regards two objects, love and hate sometimes one — loving wine, hating salmon (student’s example, “good example”); (b) both objects of love are good, both of hate bad, but anger’s are one good (the revenge — sign: pleasure when it succeeds) and one bad (the harmer).
6. Conclusion: anger is a passion quodammodo composed of contrary passions, non simpliciter; and this answers all objections at once, since the objections point to the bad and the sed contras to the good.

• What he stresses: Thomas “doesn’t always take one side” as the whole truth; he sees an element of truth on both sides — and so perhaps with the TAC dispute on the natural desire to see God.

8. Digression: knowing what you don’t know (“Can you know what you don’t know?”) #

Point: the second fallacy outside language, simply/not simply, resolves the paradox of inquiry.

• Not simply, but in some imperfect way. Example: not knowing how many students are in class, he counts to twenty-three; he directed himself to twenty-three by knowing there was a number. Example: a girl says she doesn’t know his brother Mark but knows what a man and a brother is — so she knows him, and every man, in a very imperfect way.
• Meno: Socrates and Meno both fail to say what virtue is; Meno asks how you can look for what you don’t know. If that were the whole truth there would be no logic (logike) and no logistike (counting and calculating, not “logistics”), the two general arts for coming to know what you don’t know by what you do (income tax time). Asked “what is a student” rather than “how many,” logic gives the path: genus and differences. “Marvellous what Plato has done”: the objection opening the second part of the dialogue is an objection to there being logic, and its resolution is the discovery of logic’s beginning.
• Student remark on science under Christian tutelage vs. cultures that thought nature arbitrary (Allah, the gods) — acknowledged, not developed.
• First to say we need logic: Socrates in the Phaedo, an art about arguments (techne peri logous), telling good from bad and certain from probable; hence Aristotle as father of logic, the art divided in three: Prior and Posterior Analytics (arguments you can trust completely), Topics (up to a point; rhetoric less so), Sophistical Refutations (not at all; his Wednesday-night class). Socrates’s comparison: arguments are like men — few you can trust completely, most up to a point, some not at all; if you can’t tell them apart you’re naive (advice for girls too).
• Student extension to sources and historians, newspapers; Augustine on things believed and later understood (learning ABCs) vs. history, which is only ever believed (nobody knows Washington was first president; Chesterton takes his birthday on faith; Augustine’s De utilitate credendi, you believe those are your parents); Tacitus on Germany biased by sourness at Rome. He: “sees bias.” Break.

His words #

• “cause and remedy”: the second part of the treatise on anger, tied to courtroom rhetoric.
• “foresight”: his rendering of the virtue perfecting practical reason [ed.: prudence].
• “simply / not simply”, “simpliciter / secundum quid”: simply = perfectly or completely; the second fallacy outside speech.
• “general” (universale) “in praedicando” [ed.: he says “per praedicationem” then “in praedicando”] vs. “in causando”: said of many vs. cause of many.
• “muthoi”: the stories Socrates tells about the soul after death.
• “ability”: his translation of dunamis / potentia, since “power” in English is stuck on the active sense; passive ability = ability to be acted upon.
• “power” (potestas, virtus): virtus “just a synonym for power.”
• “first root” (prima radix): Augustine’s phrase for love among the passions.
• “grasping power”: the apprehensive power; “simple grasping” = the first act of reason.
• “incomplex / complex”: what a man is vs. man is white.
• “aliquem / aliquod bonum”: the two objects of love.
• “vindicta”: revenge, which pertains to justice.
• “quodammodo non simpliciter”: how anger is a composed passion.
• “logike / logistike”: logic and the art of counting and calculating.
• “techne peri logous”: an art about arguments (Phaedo).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I-II q. 46 proemium (the eight titles).
• Thomas, ST I-II q. 46 a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, replies).
• Thomas, ST I-II q. 46 a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body).
• Handout “Note for Sixth Book of Wisdom, Reading 4”, p. 14 (verified source; transcript does not identify it).

Mentioned

• Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles: natural desire to know what God is; happiness not in this life (verified source matches SCG IV ch. 15 for part of the episode; chapter not stated by him).
• Aristotle, Rhetoric II (angry man hopes to punish; anger with pleasure); Ethics I, VII, X; Politics (anger in regimes); Peri Hermeneias (contraries); Physics IV (senses of “in”); Prior/Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations; Categories.
• Porphyry, Isagoge. Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4. Augustine, City of God XIV; Confessions II; On the Utility of Believing. Avicenna, De anima. Cicero, Tusculans IV. Damascene. Gregory of Nyssa / Nemesius.
• Plato, Meno; Phaedo.
• Shakespeare, As You Like It; Titus Andronicus; The Rape of Lucrece; “things in motion sooner catch the eye” (play not named).
• Irving, Chronicles of Fernando the Saint (prev. lecture). Chesterton, Autobiography. Tacitus, Germania (inferred). Psalms, “if a just man strikes me.”
• DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 635 (verified source; not named in transcript).

His questions #

• Why doesn’t anger have a contrary, when every other passion does? Because it is caused from contrary passions, hope and sadness, and so has contrariety within itself, like middle colours.
• Do we have a natural desire to see God as He is? Not simply (we don’t know completely what it would be), but in some imperfect way; both sets of Thomas’s texts hold.
• Is Aristotle’s “happy as men” simpliciter or secundum quid? Secundum quid; happiness in this life is imperfect, so Thomas does not oppose him.
• When do we use “general” in the second sense? A general in the army: not said of every soldier, but moving and commanding them all.
• Who has the ability, the piano or the pianist? The pianist actively; the piano is playable, the passive ability, as matter and genus.
• In which sense is love the most general passion? As universal cause, the first root of all the passions, not as said of them.
• Am I an individual man, or just my mother and father over again? An individual, but with something of both, as anger has something of sadness and hope without being them.
• Does Thomas always take one side of a dispute? No; here he sees an element of truth in both objections and sed contras.
• Can you know what you don’t know? Not simply, but in some imperfect way — which is why logic and calculating exist.