Summa I-II Q50 a3: Habits in the Sensing Powers, with Asides on Imagination, Homer and Euclid, and Memory

Orientation #

He begins “back to Article Three here in Question Fifty” and ends with the words “To the fourth” — i.e. he closes at the start of a. 4. He remarks that from a. 3 “you are going to be looking later on for habits or virtues, especially in the desiring sense powers.” He refers to “what I was talking about last night about the imagination” (unresolved by the context block). The previous class treated q. 49 a. 4 and the beginning of q. 50 (body, essence vs. powers); the next takes q. 50 aa. 4-5.

The class, in order #

1. Prayer, Athanasius, and power vs. habit in the sacraments (“a bad man can what? Nevertheless, give you the sacrament”) #

Point: before returning to the text, he illustrates the power/habit distinction from Thomas on the sacraments.

• Opening prayer adds “Saint Athanasius, pray for us”; aside: he chose Athanasius for a college patristics course and has been attached to him since; Dr. Carroll described Athanasius as red-haired and blue-eyed, “I think he was Irish” (a joke).
• Summa Contra Gentiles IV, on orders: a sinner can baptize and you get all the benefit. One of Thomas’s reasons rests on the distinction between power and habit: the minister has the power to baptize or consecrate from Christ; by his habits (virtue or vice) he is well or ill disposed to using it, but even ill disposed he still has the power. Another reason: if you had to be certain the minister was holy, you would put your hope in man rather than in Christ.
• Aside: Thomas makes Christ’s passion and death the cause of the sacraments (baptism as burial with Christ, per St. Paul; the separate consecration of bread and wine representing the death on the cross), but Christ’s resurrection the cause of our resurrection — “a division there between the two.”

2. Article 3: the objections and the sed contra (“in the powers of the sensing part”) #

Point: he reads the three objections and the sed contra, glossing “sensitive part” as including the emotions as well as the senses (as Aristotle says the will is “in reason”, meaning the rational part, not reason itself).

1. Obj. 1: the nutritive power is irrational, as is the sensitive part; no habit is laid down in the nutritive powers; therefore none in the sensitive.
2. Obj. 2: the sensitive powers are common to us and the brutes; in brutes there are no habits, because there is no will in them, and will (choice) is in Aristotle’s definition of habit.
3. Obj. 3: the habits of the soul are the sciences and the virtues; science belongs to the grasping power (Thomas says “grasping”, not “knowing”), virtue to the desiring; but science is of the universal, which the sense powers cannot grasp (they grasp the singular); so no habits of virtue in the sensitive part either.
4. Sed contra: Ethics III — temperance and fortitude, the two virtues taken up in that book, are virtues of the irrational parts.

• Aside: on Latin word order and how spies are caught by turns of speech; you can tell a man who has studied Thomas by the way he talks.

3. The body: instinct of nature vs. command of reason (“from the instinct of what nature”) #

Point: the sense powers can be considered in two ways, and only under the second can they have habits.

• A: acting from the instinct of nature — then ordered to one thing, as nature is (“nature not being able to be more than one thing, as Shakespeare says”); no ambiguity requiring a habit; so, as in natural powers, no habits.
• B: acting from the command of reason — then able to be ordered to diverse things, and so habits by which we are disposed well or badly.
• Example: the newborn baby’s emotions (a little anger, etc.) arise from instinctive nature with no habit; growing up, first the parents’ reason acts on the emotions, and if habituated to listen to reason a bit they may come to listen to one’s own reason — “a long, long process.”

4. Reply 1: why not the nutritive powers (“rational by what partaking of reason”) #

Point: nutritive powers are not apt to obey the command of reason, so no habits; sensitive powers are, and insofar as they obey reason they are called rational “by partaking” (Ethics I), without having reason in them.

• Aristotle’s division: a part of the soul that has reason; a part that does not, subdivided into what cannot and what can listen to and partake of reason.
• Plato’s comparison: a man taming a horse. Washington Irving’s tour of the far West after 17 years in Europe: wild horses tamed quickly into carrying loads and men — that our emotions do obey reason “we know just from our experience.”
• His car anecdotes (the stone kicked up on the Route du Président-Kennedy through Maine; the young lady rear-ending him near the summits on old Route 9): “I’m a philosopher. Why am I getting this?” — reason talking down an emotion.
• Student: might reason not influence the nutritive powers too, as Hindus who concentrate slow their heartbeat and digestion — so how do we know there are no habits in those lower powers? His reply: perhaps they are influenced through the medium of the sense powers; but you cannot teach your stomach not to digest poison, or not to absorb what makes you fat. Aside: his teenage brother on ice cream, “it just melts, it goes right through.”
• Student adds the essay by Austin [ed.: name as transcribed; possibly Auden] on Mozart and Baroque music representing the emotions in a state harmonized with reason; he agrees Mozart is probably the best example of the emotions partaking of reason. Aside: the Father Boulay story (paying money to stop the playing).

5. Reply 2: brute animals (“disturbed by the fear of what pain”) #

Point: brutes left to themselves act from the instinct of nature, so have no habits ordered to operations, only dispositions in order to nature, such as health and beauty; but as disposed by man’s reason to a custom, they can have habits “in some way” — the guide dog for the blind.

• Augustine, Eighty-Three Questions: the fiercest beasts are held back from the greatest pleasures by fear of pain, which turns into custom, and they are domesticated (“mild”).
• What is lacking: the ratio of habit as to use of the will — they lack the power of using or not using, which pertains to the notion of habit (ferocity is something you use when you want to). So properly habits cannot be in them, only imperfectly; “man is a creature of habit.”

6. Reply 3, first pass: desiring vs. grasping sense powers (“custom does much for remembering well”) #

Point: habits belong more suitably to the sense-desiring powers than to the grasping sense powers.

1. The sense-desiring power (“sense appetite” — but “appetite” there names the power) is apt to be moved by the rational desiring power, the will.
2. The apprehensive rational powers, by contrast, receive from the sense powers — the two relations run contrary ways.
3. Therefore more suitable that there be habits in the desiring sense powers, and only insofar as they act from the command of reason.

• Nonetheless in the interior grasping powers there can be habits: becoming bene memorativus (good memory), or in the cogitative or imaginative power; Aristotle in the chapter on memory: custom does much for remembering well.
• Examples of memory tricks: his age (born ‘36: 64 years last century, then add 10, then 3); adding bottle prices at the package store.

7. Digression: imagination in Homer and Euclid (“they produced both Homer and Euclid”) #

Point: the Greeks perfected the imagination two ways — in poetry and in geometry — both necessary to the life of the mind.

• Shakespeare: the lunatic, the lover and the poet are all “compact of imagination.”
• Geometry resolves to the imagination, not to the senses: the plane of geometry is not a desk surface (not flat enough under a microscope; if matter is a beehive of atoms, no flat surface exists out there). The parallel postulate does not speak of parallel lines (nobody can imagine lines never meeting — that is infinite) but of lines that meet when a transversal makes angles less than two right angles, which you can imagine; from that you show what never meets. (Attributed to “the marquis” — [unclear in recording].)
• Poetry is closer to the madman: the Welsh mountain where you wake either mad or a poet; the Catholic actor playing Shylock who hated the Christians while in the role; Marcia Davenport, “you are mad when you are writing”; Dickens jumping from his desk to the mirror to make his characters’ faces, watched by his little daughter; Hollywood actors who play lovers and marry — “role playing.”
• Student: did Euclid structure imagination one way and the poet another? Yes; the finest literature has structure; much contemporary literature abandons it and fails.
• Euclid VII: if the first is to the second as the third to the fourth, the product of first and fourth equals the product of second and third; and alternation of proportion. Aristotle, Poetics: the most beautiful metaphors rest on a likeness of ratios. Romeo and Juliet: Capulet on the apparently dead Juliet — death like an untimely frost on the sweetest flower of the field — perfect because it is a proportion (death : young girl on her wedding day :: untimely frost : sweetest flower). Aside: the little neighbourhood girls in the last pew watching weddings when he was an altar boy.
• Student: did the Greeks build on other cultures? “Western civilization begins with the Greeks.”
• Albert the Great: poetry gives the modum admirandi; a book on the emotional effect of Shakespearean tragedy titled from Hamlet’s end, “woe or wonder.” The wonder of the philomythos is a stepping stone to the philosopher’s wonder: the philosopher wonders about the universal, the historian about the singular, fiction more about the universal than the singular (“the universal singularized and the singular universalized”) — Romeo and Juliet are young lovers, not a 14th-century pair. His love-and-friendship course put Shakespeare between the student’s singular experience of love and Thomas’s universal treatment.
• Other ages excel at one or the other, not both. Homer “the poet” (Aristotle); Shakespeare the only rival, “the poet” in the Federalist Papers (“a long farewell to all my greatness”). Yellowstone frontiersmen reading Shakespeare in log cabins; Tocqueville reading Henry IV in a log cabin that held only a few Shakespeare plays and the Bible — “much better read than we are.”
• Student: has abandoning these structures freed us, given that modern physicists (as in his Natural Hearing class) go back to the Greeks? “It might be something, but we’ve lost an awful lot.”
• Aside: his high-school geometry was nothing compared to Euclid, which he only read after college when his teacher Kasurik said “Go get Euclid”; Euclid, Summa, Shakespeare, music keep the mind stable.

8. Reply 3 resumed: interior vs. exterior senses; the members of the body (“not susceptible of some habits”) #

Point: rereading ad 3 from the start, he completes it: habits in the interior grasping senses, none in the exterior.

• On translation: the Latin grammatical order is the logical order here; sensitivi is contracted by apprehensivi as against the desiring powers.
• Interior powers (as opposed to seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching) can bear habits: bene memorativus, or in the cogitative power (which compares individual intentions as reason compares universal ones), or the imagination — because even these are moved to operating by the command of reason (you command your senses to form an image when you want to think of something).
• Exterior grasping powers — sight, hearing — are not susceptible of habits: by the disposition of their nature they are ordered to determined acts, like the members of the body, whose habits are rather in the powers commanding their motion. Aside: where does the ability to dance come from? “There is something in the body there. I don’t know.”
• Memory, then and now: before printing “and all this computer junk” one had to memorize much more; the printing office “wrecking my memory”; the high-school teacher’s “what’s important is to know where to find it”; the cloud; people who no longer know any phone numbers. Thomas probably knew the Psalms by heart better than any modern scholar with his apparatus; students report Franciscans once had to memorize all the Psalms, later priests a Gospel. From the few psalms and poems he has memorized: you notice things you would not otherwise, even while memorizing.
• Aristotle’s On Memory and Reminiscence: brute memory vs. recollection, which is done in an orderly way. The Missouri mule struck by lightning that avoided the spot the rest of its life (“he remembered”; “didn’t know lightning never strikes twice”). The robins nesting on the downpipe behind his house, secure from squirrels.
• Conclusion he draws: from a. 3, later on you look for habits and virtues especially in the desiring sense powers, with passing reference to the others.
• Closing aside on imagination burning out: physicists get their ideas in their twenties or thirties (Einstein’s 1905 papers; the Nobel for the photoelectric effect; Heisenberg young); with age understanding improves but imagination fails — reviewing Euclid his own imagination is not what it was twenty or thirty years ago. He stops at “To the fourth.”

His words #

• sensitive part / sensing part: includes the emotions as well as the sense powers.
• grasping power: Thomas’s apprehensiva, “not the knowing power” [ed.: apprehensive power].
• desiring power / sense-desiring power: appetitiva; “appetite” names the power [ed.: sense appetite].
• instinct of nature vs. command of reason: the two ways the sense powers act.
• rational by partaking: sense powers as obeying reason without having reason in them.
• dispositions in order to nature: health and beauty in brutes, as against habits ordered to operations.
• bene memorativus: having a good memory (interior sense habit).
• cogitative power: compares individual intentions as reason compares universal ones.
• Natural Hearing: his name for his physics class [ed.: Physics].
• modum admirandi: Albert the Great — poetry gives the way of wondering.
• philomythos: lover of myth, whose wonder is a stepping stone to the philosopher’s.
• universal singularized / singular universalized: fiction’s object.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 50, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies; ad 3 read twice); he stops at the opening words of a. 4.
• Handout “On Dividing Shakespeare’s Plays”, p. 3 (verified source, 10 min); the transcript shows only the Shakespeare digression, no explicit reading. Mentioned
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles IV, chapter on a sinful minister and the sacraments.
• Aristotle, Ethics I (rational by partaking) and III (temperance and fortitude); De Anima III (sense appetite moved by will); On Memory and Reminiscence; Poetics (metaphor from ratios).
• Augustine, On Eighty-Three Questions (fierce beasts tamed by fear of pain).
• Euclid, Elements VII (proportion theorems); the parallel postulate.
• Shakespeare: Midsummer Night’s Dream (inferred, “compact of imagination”); Romeo and Juliet (untimely frost); Hamlet (woe or wonder); Henry VIII (inferred, “a long farewell”); Merchant of Venice (Shylock); Henry IV.
• Albert the Great on poetry; the Federalist Papers; Washington Irving; Tocqueville; Marcia Davenport; Dickens.
• Printed volume DHB Vol III, The School of Aristotle, p. 1465 (verified source; not named in transcript).

His questions #

• Why can a bad man nevertheless give you the sacrament? Because he has the power from Christ; his habits only dispose him well or ill to using it.
• Why are there no habits in the sense powers as they act from the instinct of nature? Because nature is ordered to one thing; no ambiguity to be determined.
• Why can the sensitive powers have habits when the nutritive cannot? The sensitive are apt to obey the command of reason and are rational by partaking; the nutritive are not.
• Can reason influence the nutritive power, as the Hindus slow their heartbeat? (student) Perhaps through the sense powers; but you cannot teach your stomach not to digest poison.
• Do brute animals have habits? Not properly — they lack the use of the will; only dispositions to nature, and imperfect habits through custom imposed by man.
• Why are habits more suitable in the desiring than in the grasping sense powers? The sense appetite is moved by the will, whereas reason receives from the senses.
• Did the poet structure the imagination as Euclid did? (student) Yes, in another way; the finest literature has structure.
• Has abandoning the Greek structures freed us? (student) It might be something, but we have lost fundamental things.
• Where does the ability to dance come from? Left open — “something in the body there. I don’t know.”