Q52 A2–3: Habits Don't Grow by Addition, the Four Kinds of Order, and Whether Every Act Strengthens a Habit

Orientation #

He opens by saying the second article “depends upon the one we’ve just seen” — there was “an awful lot in that first article” (prev. lecture). He closes by announcing the next question: “the corruption and diminution of habits.” The previous class covered q. 52 a. 1 on how growth-words are carried over to forms; the next treats q. 53 on corruption and diminution of habits.

The class, in order #

1. Article 2 objections: does a habit grow by addition? (“the growth of habits comes about by addition”) #

The point: the objections present the common picture that a habit grows the way wealth grows, by adding more of the same.

• Opening image: money-management ads say “wealth growth”; wealth grows by adding money to what you have. Is that how justice grows? People think of grace this way: “I need more grace… I get a bigger container,” God’s “big treasury of grace”; likewise “bring in some more love of God.”
• Obj. 1: the name growth is carried over from bodily quantity to forms; in bodily quantity there is no growth without addition (Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption I: growth is adding to a pre-existent magnitude). Getting fat is adding fat to fat; his mother: “there’s more of you to love.”
• Obj. 2: a habit is increased only by some agent; every agent makes something in the subject undergoing (as the heater makes heat in the heated); so no growth without addition.
• Obj. 3: as not-white is in potency to white, so less-white is in potency to more-white; not-white becomes white only by whiteness arriving; therefore less-white becomes more-white only by some whiteness coming upon it.
• Sed contra: Aristotle, Physics IV (his “Natural Hearing”): from the hot comes the more hot, no new hot made in the matter that was not hot when it was less hot; so in other forms that are increased there is no addition.

2. The body: partaking one and the same form more perfectly (“more and less perfectly partakes one and the same”) #

The point: the answer depends on the preceding article’s two ways of growth in forms — on the side of the form itself vs. on the side of the subject’s partaking.

1. Growth and diminution in forms that are intended or remitted happens either on the part of the form considered in itself, or from the diverse partaking of the subject (premissa, the previous article).
2. Therefore growth of habits is not addition of form to form but the subject partaking one and the same form more and less perfectly.
3. Illustration: something becomes hot in act by newly partaking the form, not becoming the form itself (Metaphysics VII); by the more intense action of the agent it becomes more hot, partaking more perfectly, not adding something to the form.

• Aside on diminution: a student mentions the criticism in the Apocalypse, “you lost your first love”; he accepts it as a diminution of charity, and adds: if I stop reading Euclid my geometry diminishes.
• Application to study: students who say “I heard that already” — as if they could not partake the same truth more fully. The old lady at midnight Mass: “I heard this last year.” The high-school teacher who repeats without going deeper: “it rots in your head.”
• His own case: he knew Physics I well from undergraduate days (his teacher Kasurik translated the commentary on books I-II; English, Greek, Latin, commentary), yet hearing it taught at Laval was “like a new text,” a “quantum leap” — the teachers “understanding the text much better than you were.” His doctoral thesis: Descartes vs. Aristotle on the three ways of proceeding; Descartes’ confusion of certitude and precision — “am I taller than you?” (sure) vs. “how much taller?” (less sure): precision and certitude do not go together.

3. Why addition fails on either side (“not said to be more white or hot, but greater white”) #

The point: if growth were by addition it would be from the side of the form or of the subject, and neither gives “more white.”

• From the side of the form: addition or subtraction varies the species, as the species of colour varies going from pale to white.
• From the side of the subject: either (a) a part of the subject receives the form it did not have — as if cold “increases” in a man who freezes first in one part, then in many (wading into the cold ocean by degrees, “a new subject receiving the form”); or (b) a subject is added partaking the same form, heat to heat, white to white. In both cases the thing is not more white but magis album, “greater white” — a bigger extent, not a higher degree.
• Aside: the construction worker who came home and lay at the bottom of his pool with a snorkel for fifteen minutes to bring his temperature down.

4. Accidents that do grow by addition: motion, science; bodily habits (“a science is able to be increased according to itself”) #

The point: some accidents can grow by addition because they grow “by themselves,” yet also grow by intensity from the subject.

• Motion increases by adding time or by adding to the way (path), staying the same species because of the unity of the term; it also increases by intensity, the same motion done more or less promptly.
• Science increases by addition according to itself, as when someone learns more conclusions of geometry (“the same example — stole it from me”); and by intensity from the subject’s partaking, as one man considers the same conclusions more expeditiously and clearly than another. TAC students put at the board to do a theorem: some do it more expeditiously; a student: “very clear — or else I would just not do it.”
• Bodily habits (health, beauty): “non multum” by addition, since an animal is not called healthy or beautiful unless all its parts are; what leads to a more perfect commensuration is the transmutation of simple qualities, which grow only by intensity on the side of the subject. How this stands for virtues is deferred.
• Aside: teaching parallel sections of the same course, saying it better but in less time the second or third year, and the difficulty of MWF vs. TTh sections keeping pace — “make very clear notes.”

5. Replies, and the digression on change of place (“change of place is really addition”) #

The point: the replies restate that the agent makes the subject partake the pre-existent form more perfectly; the digression shows why people naturally picture change as addition.

• Ad 1: bodily magnitude too grows two ways: by adding subject to subject, as in living things (adding fat to fat), or by intensity alone, as in things rarefied (water to steam without adding matter) — “a lot of things to think about,” without going into what rarefaction really is.
• Ad 2: the cause increasing a habit always makes something in the subject, not a new form, but makes it partake the pre-existent form more perfectly, or extends it further.
• Digression: among the early Greeks the change most known is change of place (money from your pocket to mine — I grow wealthier, you diminish), and there is a tendency to make it the only real change and to explain the others by a hidden change of place. Empedocles’ coffee: sugar added while he is out; he returns and says “bitter has become sweet — a change of quality”; the Empedoclean reply (“Fools… you have no far-reaching thoughts”): the coffee is still bitter, the sugar still sweet; only a change of place from bowl to cup. Tea kettle: cold water becomes hot — a change of quality; “you dummy,” the atoms are just moving faster — a change of place. Modern science began with change of place and tried the same reduction; Einstein, The Evolution of Physics, on the caloric that drifts from hot body to cold. Pointillist painting (Monet, the seashore): colour changes “by more dots,” addition. Change of place can be imagined as change of quality cannot; hence the difficulty seeing ability and act.
• Heisenberg’s “well-known formula”: every elementary particle is composed of all the rest, because out of any you can eventually get all the rest. Does it follow? You get tables and chairs from trees, but there are no chairs in the trees. Anaxagoras: everything composed of everything, with mind separating out; Empedocles’ love and hate only bring together and separate — still change of place. Water and hydrogen/oxygen, atoms and protons/electrons: “well, maybe.” But particles got out of a particle may be bigger than the original — nonsense on a change-of-place picture, where they must be smaller. Warren Murray heard Heisenberg insist on his admiration for Aristotle’s potency (ability), as in the Gifford Lectures. This is why he reminds us of these things when people want “a little more love, a little more justice.”
• Ad 3: what is not yet white is in potency to the form itself, so the agent causes a new form in the subject; what is less white already has the form in act and is in potency only to a more perfect participation, which follows from the agent’s action.

6. Break-time digression: the four orders and the offshoots (“the order which reason does not make but considers”) #

The point: Thomas’s division of order in relation to reason (the “famous text” in the Ethics) leaves mathematics unplaced, and rhetoric and experimental science are “offshoots” that cannot be shoved into one member.

• The four orders: (1) not made by reason but considered by it — natural things, with metaphysics included by Thomas’s footnote; (2) made by reason in its own acts — logic; (3) made by reason in acts of the will (and emotions) and what proceeds from them — ethics, domestics, politics; (4) made by reason in exterior matter — mechanical arts. He notes Thomas really first divides into not-made / made, then subdivides made into three; “Aristotle’s even worse,” ten categories.
• Mathematics is not mentioned in the text he first saw; some texts (the Leonine?) put it under (1), which he thinks may be a mistake made by assuming the three theoretical sciences of Metaphysics VI always go together. Mathematics has a foundation in things (quantity) but is completed in reason by abstraction — “a little bit of both,” like the universal: man, dog are separated from this man, this dog only in the mind, yet with a foundation in things, unlike a chimera or unicorn; against Plato’s separated forms. A student asks whether this bears on Anselm’s argument; “it’s a little different.”
• Rhetoric: Aristotle calls it a paraphues, an offshoot, of logic and of political study. The Rhetoric treats enthymeme and example (like syllogism and induction in dialectic) but also kinds of government and the emotions. One persuades by argument, more by moving emotions and prejudices — a matter of the customs of men. Nixon giving different talks to businessmen and labourers; the most persuasive thing is the image of oneself (“I feel your pain”); McCarthy under sniper fire projecting fearlessness — one must understand courage to project it; Demosthenes mocking an opponent who came up the hard way — good rhetoric in an aristocratic slaveholding society, bad in a democracy that admires the self-made man.
• Mechanical arts differ by matter and tools: his brother-in-law the carpenter (hammer, saw) vs. his wife the dressmaker (needle, scissors) — same tool for different woods, but not for wood and cloth.
• His use in a philosophy-of-science course: Heisenberg says modern science is a union of natural and technical science; the experiment is both natural and artificial, so experimental science is an offshoot of the natural order and the mechanical, as rhetoric is of logic and politics; one cannot know these things without acting on them in ways that change them.
• Aside from a student: whether photography is art or technical science (argued at the Art Institute and Field Museum) — a gadget, but a matter of seeing light, shapes, composition; Ansel Adams; removing the wires on a computer.

7. Article 3 objections: does any act increase the habit? (“not every act takes you to a new level”) #

The point: three arguments say every act increases, the sed contra says negligent acts diminish.

• Obj. 1: multiplying the cause multiplies the effect; acts cause habits; so multiplied acts increase them. Obj. 2: same judgment about the same; all acts from the same habit are similar; so if some increase it, any does. Obj. 3: like is increased by like; each act is like its habit.
• The current phrase “take it to a new level” — but not every act does.
• Sed contra: the same is not a cause of contraries; Ethics II: some acts from a habit diminish it when done negligently — prayers rattled off may diminish hope.

8. The body: intensity of act vs. intensity of habit (“the intensity of the act is proportional”) #

The point: an act equal to or exceeding the habit’s intensity increases or disposes to increase; a deficient act disposes to diminution.

1. Similar acts cause similar habits (Ethics II) — the Meno question whether virtue is taught; moral virtue by repeated acts. Children taking toys or candy that are not theirs, coaxed (“did Jane say you can take that?”), asked to share a piece, becoming generous; the family of six or seven where candy vanishes; the billfold his brothers and he found in Minneapolis, returned by the newspaper ad, and his father refusing any reward — inculcated so deeply that “I just can’t” take loose cash (though a special edition of Shakespeare “I’d be worried about”); counting the church money; the thief who takes a little today and more next week.
2. Likeness and unlikeness are not only by same or diverse quality but by the same or diverse mode of partaking: black is unlike white, and less-white unlike more-white; motion from less white to more white is as from opposite to opposite. Contraries need not be extremes — grey to white is like black to white. Two Gentlemen of Verona: Proteus, seeing Silvia, thinks his former girlfriend “a swarthy Ethiope” beside her (the name from the shape-changing god).
3. Use of a habit lies in the will of the one using it: one having a habit may not use it, or do the contrary act, or act with an intensity not proportioned to the habit.
4. If the act’s intensity equals or exceeds the habit’s, the act increases it or at least disposes to growth — like an animal’s growth: not any food taken increases the animal, nor any drop of water breaks the stone, but multiplied it does; so multiplied acts increase the habit.
5. If the act’s intensity falls proportionally short of the habit’s, it disposes not to growth but to diminution. His case: had he stayed in St Paul chatting with friends about Physics I he would not have grown; the intense consideration at Laval made him understand it more — the brother’s friend: “he’s so intense… this is kind of tiring.” The forgotten text of Thomas comparing logic to natural philosophy rather than to grammar (he would have put grammar with logic, both liberal arts), and asking Monsignor Dionne a question at a party to rescue him from small talk.

• A student: something like this for a ball player — structured exercise, or golfing with someone who knows what he’s doing, and you come back better. His daughter sent to Italy to improve her Italian accent.
• Asides: Warren Murray hearing Dante recited in Italian for the rhythm (“I just have to read Dante in English”); the College of St Thomas English professor with a photographic memory who read Dante, Arabic, Greek, German and played the organ at Christmas Mass, and assigned more books than anyone could read, “no absolution” for not reading them; Kasurik’s definition of a poet as “a man with his brains kicked out,” which Crowell endorsed; Cardinal O’Malley knows eight languages.

His words #

• growth by addition — the objections’ picture: more justice added to justice, grace as a fuller container.
• premissa — the preceding article on which this one depends.
• intended / remitted [ed.: intensified / remitted] — forms that admit more and less.
• partaking [ed.: participation] — the subject’s partaking of one and the same form more and less perfectly.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• magis album — “greater white”: more extent, not more degree.
• rarefied — growth of magnitude by intensity without addition (water to steam).
• non multum — bodily habits grow “not much” by addition.
• commensuration — the proportion of parts in health/beauty, reached by transmutation of simple qualities.
• ability [ed.: potency] — what Heisenberg admired in Aristotle.
• order made by reason / not made by reason — the four orders of the Ethics prologue.
• paraphues — “offshoot”; Aristotle on rhetoric; extended by him to experimental science.
• mechanical arts vs. liberal arts — order made in exterior matter vs. the rest.
• similar acts cause similar habits — Ethics II, the principle of a. 3.
• mode of partaking — likeness/unlikeness by degree, not only by quality.
• intensity of the act / of the habit — the proportion that decides increase or diminution.

Texts #

Read in class:

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 52 a. 2 (objections, body, replies).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 52 a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body).
• Thomas, prologue to the Commentary on the Ethics (the four orders), from memory (inferred locus).

Mentioned:

• Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption I (growth is addition to pre-existent magnitude).
• Aristotle, Physics IV (more hot from the hot); Physics I (his Laval experience; Kasurik’s translation of the commentary).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VII (partaking the form); Metaphysics VI (division of theoretical philosophy).
• Aristotle, Ethics II (negligent acts diminish; similar acts cause similar habits).
• Aristotle, Rhetoric (enthymeme and example, governments, emotions).
• Plato, Meno; Apocalypse (“lost your first love”); Empedocles’ fragments; Anaxagoras.
• Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona; Demosthenes’ speeches; Dante.
• Heisenberg, Gifford Lectures; Einstein, The Evolution of Physics.

His questions #

• How does your wealth grow, and is that how habits — justice, grace, love of God — grow? No: not by addition of form to form, but by the subject partaking the same form more perfectly.
• Is there a diminution of charity? Yes — “you lost your first love”; likewise geometry diminishes if you stop reading Euclid.
• Do precision and certitude go together? No: I am sure I am taller than you, less sure how much taller.
• If growth were by addition on the side of the subject, what would you get? Not “more white” but magis album, greater white — a bigger cold body, not a colder one.
• Can science grow by addition? Yes, by learning more conclusions; and also by intensity, considering the same ones more expeditiously and clearly.
• When water is rarefied into steam, are you adding more matter? No — growth of magnitude by intensity alone.
• If you can get all the rest out of any elementary particle, must it be composed of all the rest? No — you get chairs and tables from trees without chairs being in the trees.
• Where does mathematics fit in the four orders? Where does rhetoric? Mathematics: foundation in things, completed in reason — “a little bit of both”; rhetoric: an offshoot of logic and politics, not to be shoved into one.
• Is the experiment something natural or artificial? Both — experimental science is an offshoot of the natural and the technical.
• Does every act increase the habit? No: only an act proportionate to or exceeding the habit’s intensity; a remiss act disposes to diminution.