Is Habit a Quality? Aquinas on Question 49, Articles 1–2, and the Species of Quality

Orientation #

He opens by saying “let’s go back and reread now the first article in the forty-nine question”, and refers back to “the beginning of class” where they saw the eight chief senses of in (prev. lecture). He ends at 4:26 in the middle of a.2’s body, “a cliffhanger”. The previous class treated Aristotle’s senses of “to have” and “in” and the ten categories; the next continues q.49 a.2 on Simplicius’s division and mode, nature and order to act.

The class, in order #

1. Article 1 objections and sed contra reread (“habitus is not a what quality”) #

The point: the three objections against habit being a quality, and the words that must be sorted.

• Aside on 49 = 7×7, like the “forty-nine words of Shakespeare” he calls the best short education in using reason (his standing offer to beat it in fifty or a hundred words).
• Obj. 1 (Augustine, Eighty-three Questions): habitus comes from habere, but to have belongs to other genera — one has a quantity, has money (“you part of the money class”).
• Obj. 2: habitus is one of the predicaments. Categoria (Greek) and praedicamentum (Latin) both come from “to be said of”; in the Gospels they “categorize”, accuse Christ. The predicament of echein: “I have clothes on.” One predicament is not contained in another.
• Obj. 3: every habit is a disposition (Categories); disposition is order of parts; that is the predicament of situs, position.
• Sed contra: the Philosopher in the Predicaments calls habit a quality difficile mobilis; later more precisely a disposition, but disposition too is a quality. “So Thomas has got to clear up all these words.”
• Jerome: ex verbis inordinate prolatis, from words put forth disorderly, heresy arises. Fallacies from words: six (he first says seven, corrects to six; seven outside language). Example: “not the mother of God but the mother of Jesus” — watch that.
• Aside: Sophistical Refutations — equivocation the most common fallacy; awareness of it makes you attentive to words; the common words (being, one, same) are the hard ones, and so is “to have”.

2. Body: the first way of having; the post-predicaments (“common to diverse what. Genera”) #

The point: “to have” said of anything had is common to diverse genera, which is why Aristotle puts it among the post-predicaments.

• The Categories has three parts: the ante-predicaments (what you must know first), the ten categories, and five post-predicaments: opposites, before (and after), together (hama), motion, to have. “That’s not the whole truth about the Post Predicaments” — there are different reasons for the five.
• Why opposites and before/after: to place things in the genera you must distinguish one from another (opposites) and see the order from highest genus to lowest (prior/posterior). Dog and cat are hama; dog and animal are not — animal is before dog, living body before animal. Odd and even numbers are together. Note he used the word place, taken from the continuous.

3. Three grades among things had (“nothing as a middle between the haver”) #

The point: Aristotle “always seeing a distinction that nobody else sees” — what stands between haver and had.

1. Nothing in the middle: subject and its quality or quantity (“kind of a strange thing”).
2. A middle that is only a relation: having a companion or a friend. Aside: “relationship” is even more abstract than “relation”; a relation is not between two people but what I am towards you and you towards me.
3. A middle “not an acting upon–undergoing but something in the manner of” it: one adorns or covers, the other is adorned or covered. Examples of what this shows: clothes worn long fit you, as if your body acted on them; a shoe adjusts to your foot and you can’t part with it; glasses leave an indentation on the nose; a watch becomes almost part of your body. A made-to-measure suit vs. a mass-produced one you act upon till it fits.

• Metaphysics V: habitus is “as it were (quasi) a certain acting upon of the haver and the had”, as in things around us, shoes, clothes, hat. In these is constituted one special genus, the predicament called habitus in Latin; Aristotle uses the Greek (he gives hexis, “to have”, habere). Metaphysics V again: between the one having clothing and the clothing had there is a middle, “having”.
• Story: brother Richard wouldn’t give up the jacket Jack wore to school; his mother helped him off with it and threw it over the garden bushes to cover the flowers — the end of that jacket.

4. The second way: having oneself, and the replies (“this way of having oneself is according to some quality”) #

The point: “to have” as a thing has itself, in itself or towards another, is according to a quality, so in this sense habit is a quality — the sense now in question.

• Metaphysics V: habitus is a disposition by which one is disposed well or badly, towards oneself or another; health is a habit, well disposed towards one’s own body.
• Reply 1: Augustine’s objection takes “to have” commonly, common to many genera.
• Reply 2: takes habit as something in the middle between haver and had; thus a predicament, a highest genus. Aside: a monk’s clothing is called a habit; someone else’s habit wouldn’t fit you; a belt molds to your size (“doesn’t fit me anymore… save it for next Lent”).
• Reply 3: disposition always implies order of something having parts, in three ways (the Philosopher): according to place, potency, species — the last two “kind of the same, but one is imperfect”. Simplicius: he comprehends all dispositions. Secundum locum is situs, order of parts in place: shape alone is not position — sitting, standing, lying need a chair, bed or floor outside you, which is why it goes with the last six categories; crouching vs. sitting, same body shape, but a chair makes it sitting. Secundum potentiam: dispositions in preparation, science and virtue begun. Secundum speciem: perfect dispositions, habits, science and virtue complete. “So we’ll let Thomas have it that habit is quality.”
• The four species of quality are coming: “You’ve got to be scandalized because there are four species.” “Berquist always says… this rule of two or three or both is for the most part” — more than three is hard for the mind, it tries to reduce to two or three to see it is exhausted. Break.

5. Digression: the last six categories are not accidents but “accidentally” (“not accidents. These are the accidents, adverbially”) #

The point: an accident exists in another as in a subject; that is true of the first accidents, even relations, but not of the last six, which Thomas calls accidentaliter, having themselves in an accidental way.

• “I am a geometer” because geometry exists in my mind; “I am clothed” though clothing is not in me.
• What “accidental way” means: I can be a man without being a geometer, a father, clothed; present or absent and I’m still a man (walking out the door).
• His “favorite book”, on the Incarnation: some reasoned that “the Word became man” is something coming after what the Word is, so an accident; God can have no accident and man is in the genus of substance; so it must have itself accidentally — God in Christ as in a temple, or clothed with human nature. That is heresy: they eliminated one sense and explained by the other.
• Scripture says human nature is found in habitu, as if Christ were clothed — a metaphor: clothes are the part of the man you mostly see (“clothes make the man”), so the invisible Word becomes visible through human nature; but he takes on human nature to be a man, not as a suit.
• Common to both kinds: something said of you in addition to what you are; the one because something is in you as subject, the other by something outside you. The ten are “as complete as the Ten Commandments” or the seven petitions of the Our Father (Augustine: nothing you pray for isn’t already there).

6. Article 2 objections (“habit is not a determined species of quality”) #

The point: three objections that habit is not one determined species of quality.

• Obj. 1: habit as a quality is a disposition by which one is well or badly disposed; but that happens according to every quality — figure, heat and cold (“too hot, too cold”). “That’s an interesting objection.”
• Obj. 2: the Philosopher in the Predicaments says hotness and coldness are dispositions or habits, as health and sickness; but hot and cold are in the third species, the sense or “undergoing” qualities. Aside: hard to understand the Categories without a Thomas commentary, which doesn’t exist; one “steals little things here and there” from passages like this.
• Obj. 3: difficile mobilis is not a difference of the genus quality but pertains to motion or passion; no genus is determined to a species by another genus’s differences — differences must come to the genus per se (Metaphysics VII). Aristotle’s own example in the ante-predicaments: one science doesn’t differ from another by being two-footed or four-footed (differences of substance). Kasurik: “he can tell a man’s understanding by the examples he chooses” — Aristotle takes clear, not flowery, ones. Thomas uses the same principle to show the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son: they must differ by differences of origin, since origin is the genus there. He adds: sometimes we don’t know the essential differences and use something accidental to touch on the unknown.
• Sed contra: Categories, one species of quality is habit and disposition.

7. Body begun: why four species is hard to see complete (“three is the first number about which we say all”) #

The point: enumerated divisions are hard to see as exhausted; divisions by opposites are easy.

• His college logic teacher: “maybe another species we don’t know about.”
• Quantity into discrete and continuous (continuous: parts meet at a common boundary — line at a point, plane at a line, body at a surface; discrete: they don’t): opposites, so exhausted. Plato always divides in two by opposites. Numbers odd/even (divisible by two or not), prime/composite (measured by another number or only by one), perfect/imperfect.
• Three is no harder (theological virtues); Aristotle’s sign that three is the first number of which we say “all”. Four requires great thought.
• Where two or three most often fail: names equivocal by reason — the eight chief senses of in (prev. lecture); Categories ch. 12, four senses of before, a fifth attached to the second; Metaphysics V has three, but he follows the Categories, the fourth sense (the better is before) being more remote from before in time, being, knowing.

8. Simplicius’s division of the species (“some are natural… some are adventitious”) #

The point: Thomas quotes the “Clarissimus Aristotelis Commentator” — “even the Clarissimus may not be the equal of Thomas”.

• Natural qualities: in something by nature and always. Adventitious: come from outside, brought to be by something extrinsic, can be lost. Adventitious, acquired qualities are habits and dispositions, differing by facile / difficile mobile: a mood changes by lunch, but a just man doesn’t suddenly turn unjust — “you’ve got to find the price first”, a slow thing.
• Natural qualities according to what is in potency: second species, inborn ability and inability — reason (Shakespeare: “capability for large discourse, looking before and after”), ability to see, grow, digest, reproduce, get angry (aside: Obama angry at his gun law), the abilities of soul.
• According to what is in act: in the deep, third species, sensible qualities (“I’m white or I’m cold”); on the surface, fourth, figure and form. “Sounds pretty good to me. I have no objection.”

9. Thomas’s objection to Simplicius (“always what is more natural is before”) #

The point: the division is unsuitable.

1. Many figures and qualitates passibiles (undergoing qualities) are not natural but adventitious.
2. Many dispositions are natural, not adventitious: health and beauty. Aside: granddaughter Isabella Rose; Shakespeare’s “beauty’s rose” is a metaphor from species to genus.
3. This division does not belong to the order of species, “for always what is more natural is before” — nature is what is first in the thing. “What a mind, that Thomas has.” His TAC talk on the order of nature and reason: he found five ways nature is before reason, then a sixth in bed.

• So the distinction of habit and disposition from the other qualities must be taken another way.

10. Quality as mode of substance; mode as what a measure determines (“quality implies a certain what? Way of being”) #

The point: properly quality implies a mode of substance; mode (Augustine on Genesis) is what a measure determines. Sean’s worry: “it sounds like quantity” — “let’s stick with Thomas.”

• Tropos / modus procedendi: the way of going forward must fit the matter of the science, so it supposes measure — like knowing your size in a shoe store; shoes too tight or too loose impede walking. So mode implies determination according to some measure.
• Why not quantity, then? Because the species of quantity are distinguished by the measure involved (a line in inches, a tabletop in square inches); quantity is even carried over to God (“he’s great”).
• Languages aside: Monsignor Dion on words better in one language than another; Thomas on why the Word rather than the Spirit became man (salvation is knowing the first truth, so the one proceeding by way of truth and mind; harmony of logos as reason, defining man, and logos as Word); intelligere “to read within”, but “understand” is better than intellectus or nous; Warren Murray’s Laval linguist: English “the greatest invention of the human mind”.
• That by which the potency of matter is determined according to substantial being is a quality that is a difference of substance. Definition of difference: a name said with one meaning of many things other than kind, signifying how they are what they are (genus and species signify what; difference signifies quale). Grammar signifies both species-making difference and accident by an adjective — equilateral triangle vs. green triangle: grammatically the same, for the logician not. So as the potency of the subject is determined according to accidental being, there is accidental quality, an accidental difference; Porphyry’s “specific” or species-making difference. Metaphysics V cited; stops here, “on the edge of my chair”.

His words #

• predicamentum / category; from “to be said of”; the ten highest genera
• post-predicaments; five: opposites, before, together (hama), motion, to have
• hama; “together”, e.g. dog and cat, odd and even
• habitus (predicament); Greek echein / hexis; having clothes, shoes, as a quasi acting-upon
• difficile mobilis; difficult to be moved or changed
• situs; position, order of parts in place, needing something outside you
• secundum potentiam / secundum speciem; disposition begun vs. complete (habit)
• accidentaliter; the last six categories “having themselves in an accidental way”, not accidents in a subject
• qualitates passibiles; “undergoing qualities”, third species [ed.: passible qualities]
• adventitious; qualities that come to a thing from outside and can be lost
• ability / inability; second species [ed.: potency and impotency]
• mode; “that which a measure determines”; tropos, modus procedendi, “way of going forward”
• difference; “how they are what they are”; species-making (Porphyry) vs. accidental
• fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V]

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 49, a. 1 (objections, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 49, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body up to accidental quality)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Categories: post-predicaments; ante-predicaments (science not differing by two-footed); ch. 12 on senses of before; species of quality; habit as quality difficile mobilis
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (to have, disposition, difference); Metaphysics VII (differences per se to a genus)
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (equivocation)
• Augustine, Eighty-three Questions; On Genesis to the Letter; on the Our Father
• Simplicius, Commentary on the Predicaments
• Jerome, ex verbis inordinate prolatis
• Porphyry (specific difference)
• Shakespeare: the “forty-nine words” on reason; “capability for large discourse”; “beauty’s rose”
• Scripture: human nature found in habitu; the Word became man; his “favorite book” on the Incarnation (unnamed)

His questions #

• How many fallacies come from words? Six (he corrects from seven); seven outside language.
• Why does Aristotle take up opposites and before and after among the post-predicaments? To place things in the genera you must distinguish them and see their order.
• What is between the haver and the had? Nothing (subject and quality), only a relation (friend), or something in the manner of acting/undergoing (clothes).
• Why is position put with the last six categories? Because sitting, standing, lying require something outside you.
• Are the last six categories accidents? Not as existing in a subject; they have themselves accidentally, accidentaliter.
• Why is it hard to see that four species of quality are exhaustive? The mind sees completeness in two (opposites) or three; four needs great thought.
• What is wrong with Simplicius’s division? Many figures are adventitious, many dispositions natural, and the more natural is always before.
• Doesn’t “mode as measure” sound like quantity? Raised (Sean); he defers — “stick with Thomas” — noting quantity’s species differ by measure; left open.