Principles vs. Conclusions, Why Opinion Is Not a Virtue, and Art vs. Foresight (Prudence)

Orientation #

He refers back to his own earlier example on “the whole and part” and to the “distinction of the two senses of virtue” already made “above”; the class picks up in the middle of q. 57 a. 2 ad 2 (verified sources: a. 2 to a. 3, then a. 3 and a. 4 read from the text). He points forward twice: potential parts of virtue “will come up a lot in the secunda secundae,” and the species of foresight (military, political) likewise. The previous class began q. 57 aa. 1-2 on the speculative intellectual virtues; the next continues with the article on whether prudence is necessary for living well.

The class, in order #

1. a. 2 ad 2: formal and material object; principles and conclusions (“seeing the color and the light”) #

Point: a power or habit is not distinguished by the material object when the formal object is one; but principles and conclusions are not seen simul, so understanding and science are distinct habits.

• Reading of ad 2: sight sees colour and light together (simul), light being the ratio under which colour is seen; so one power, not two. Aside: in Thomas, God knows and wills other things under knowing and loving himself, the formal object of his intellect and will. He admits he did not explain the text well and offers: “according to the notion of the object” = the formal object vs. the material object.
• Principles can be considered seorsum, by themselves, without the conclusions, or simul with the conclusions insofar as they are deduced from them. The second belongs to science, the first to understanding; understanding is presupposed to science.
• Example, length and width vs. area of the table: you can know both dimensions without having multiplied; the area is “in the power” of the premises but is not actually known until you reason it out. Woman in the supermarket knows each price seorsum, cannot add in her head, and is surprised at the total. Euclid: the beginnings, then the beautiful conclusions drawn from them.
• Student comparison: Thomas on angels all seeing God but not seeing the same things, like a distant view where someone points out a detail. His reply: something like it, but a private revelation of what God sees in himself would be another manifestation, not seen “through seeing Him”; here the conclusion is seen through the beginnings.
• Distinct but connected habits: one must know the principles in themselves before reasoning from them.

2. The three virtues not ex aequo but in order; the potential whole (“three, two, and one”) #

Point: understanding, science and wisdom are distinguished not equally but in an order, as parts of a potential whole where one part is more perfect than another.

• Text: as the reasonable soul is more perfect than the sensible and the sensible than the living; science depends on understanding as on something more principal, and both on wisdom, which contains both. His likeness: 3 includes 2 and more, 2 includes 1 and more.
• Example (his earlier whole-and-part class): students could not defend “the whole is greater than the part,” even denying it in words; the wise man, distinguishing the senses of “whole,” defends and judges the axioms.
• Student questions on potential parts: are counsel and judgment potential parts of foresight, command being the principal part with the full power? He: counsel and judgment would be potential parts, “part of the power.” The four tools of dialectic: four powers making up the power of dialectic, one way of saying it. Is 2 a potential part of 3? “Well, no, more so” the soul: rational soul contains what the sense soul has, and more. Kierkegaard: blood compared with sap.
• Difficulty flagged: “a very difficult thing to get a hold of.” Aristotle in the chapter on whole and part does not speak explicitly of the potential whole but knows it, since he calls the powers of the soul its parts, which are not quantitative, species, or integral parts. Thomas places the potential whole between the other two kinds: like both, but one cannot say the whole of one part (unlike genus/species), and it is not the composed whole either.
• Aside: it is “kind of funny” that he puts natural understanding ahead of science.

3. a. 2 ad 3: opinion and suspicion are not virtues; we guess before we know (“we guess before we know”) #

Point: only habits that always say the true are intellectual virtues; opinion (dialectic) and suspicion (rhetoric) can be of the true and the false, so they are not virtues, though they come before knowledge.

1. A habit of virtue is determinately to the good, in no way to the bad. Aside: in God virtue is God, so he cannot do bad; I am not my virtue and may not use it.
2. The good of the understanding is the true, the evil the false; so only habits of which the true is always said are intellectual virtues.
3. Opinion, from dialectical reasoning, and suspicion, from rhetoric (enthymeme and example), can be of either; hence not intellectual virtues (Ethics VI).

• Two befores in our thinking, tied to Aristotle’s “more known to us, less known by nature,” imperfect knowledge before perfect:
  • Guessing before knowing: the murder case, the husband as prime suspect, questioning until they “get closer to knowing”; dialectic and rhetoric are arts of guessing; weatherman’s 60 percent, economist “barring unforeseen circumstances,” doctor’s tests, jury deciding life or death by guess. Aristotle proceeds dialectically before determining the truth. Thomas calls opinion and suspicion a guess. Einstein: a scientific hypothesis is “freely imagined,” theories “a system of guesses”; even confirmed, a guess; contrast the Pythagorean theorem and the triangle’s angles, which “have really been shown.” “We don’t have too much knowledge. We have a lot of guesses.”
  • Thinking about before understanding, and between them “thinking out,” whose senses can be distinguished by the eight senses of “in” (Physics IV): thinking out the parts of a whole; thinking out a definition (his own definition of the Shakespearean sonnet, and of comedy); the seventh sense, in the power of the efficient cause, thinking out a conclusion, also called reasoning out (syllogism; the grocery total). Often we do not get beyond the guess, or think about something without understanding it.
• Asides: TV write-in polls as wild guesses; people preferring “the Affordable Care Act” to “Obamacare”; a governor’s campaign aide on voters not knowing what candidates stand for.

4. a. 3: whether art is an intellectual virtue: objections and sed contra (“no one badly uses a virtue”) #

Point: why art before prudence: it is more like the speculative virtues, lacking the rectification of appetite (“I can be a good cook and be a glutton”).

• Obj. 1 (Augustine, on free judgment): no one uses a virtue badly, but an artist can use his art badly (doctors and abortion; “no one knows how to kill you better than a doctor”). He: this goes back to the two senses of virtue.
• Obj. 2: of virtue there is no virtue, but of art there is a virtue (Ethics VI); “an unusual objection.”
• Obj. 3: liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic; geometry, arithmetic) are speculative as mechanical arts are practical (Thomas’s Boethius commentary); so art should be numbered with the speculative virtues. He notes a “liberal making” in the liberal arts.
• Sed contra: Aristotle makes art a virtue but not of the scientific part of the soul. Standard definitions recalled: art is right reason about making, prudence right reason about doing; moral virtue a habit with choice in the mean determined by right reason.

5. a. 3 respondeo: art gives the ability for a good work without regarding appetite (“less unlike to the more unlike”) #

1. Art is right reason about things to be made, whose good lies not in how the human desiring power stands but in the work itself being good (wine, dinner, book).
2. The artist is praised as artist not by what will he makes but by how the work is (whether he hates cooking your dinner; the English painter who liked music better but painted well).
3. So art is properly a habit of doing [ed.: operativus], yet agrees in some way with the speculative habits, which is why it is taken before prudence, “from the less unlike to the more unlike.” Parallel: Thomas orders the books on life after the De Anima, sense and sensible, memory, before parts of animals, going further into matter.
4. In speculative habits what matters is qualiter se habeant, how the things have themselves, not how desire stands toward them: the geometer’s demonstration is right whether he rejoices or is iratus. Twentieth-century physicists irritated but forced by the truth; Planck did not like what he discovered.
5. Likewise the artist: the soup tastes good, whether he likes soup or not; making a vodka drink with the right proportions though one does not drink it (“mixologist”); the woodworker’s beautiful walnut table though he hates walnut.

• Conclusion: art has the notion of virtue as the speculative habits do, giving the ability to act well but not the good use, which belongs to a virtue perfecting the appetite.
• Asides: Thomas “proceeds in an orderly way,” not wandering like a modern; Monsignor Dionne asked of every example “why this example?”; Kasurik: you can tell a mind by its examples.

6. a. 4: objections that prudence is not distinct from art (“the art of living”) #

• Obj. 1: diverse genera of works do not lose the notion of art; prudence is right reason of works, so it should be called art (Gregory: “the art of living”).
• Obj. 2: prudence agrees more with art than with speculative habits, both being about what can be otherwise (Ethics VI); some speculative habits are called arts, so much more prudence.
• Obj. 3: taking counsel well belongs to prudence, but counsel occurs in some arts (Ethics III: the military art; MacArthur calling his staff, Washington too), and in government and medicine.
• Sed contra: Aristotle distinguishes them; “that solves it.”
• Asides: MacArthur at the embassy in Japan, “we are here, General,” Washington as the greatest American; the father in South Carolina asking whether Lincoln’s birthday is a holiday. Student: Thomas later distinguishes military from political foresight; MacArthur had something of both in postwar Japan.

7. a. 4 respondeo: making passes out, doing remains; prudence presupposes right appetite (“art makes only the ability for a good work”) #

1. Where the notion of virtue differs, virtues must be distinguished.
2. One habit is a virtue only because it gives the ability (facultas, source of “faculty”) for a good work; another because it also makes one use it well. Art gives only the ability, since it does not regard appetite; foresight also the use, presupposing rectitude of the appetite, though it is not in the appetitive power. “Aristotle saw this, and Thomas follows his master.”
3. Reason: art is right reason about making, foresight about doing; these differ (Metaphysics IX, the book on act and ability, second part, senses of act): facere is an act passing into exterior matter (to build, to cut); to act remains in the agent (to see, to will). So foresight stands to human acts, the use of powers and habits, as art to outside makings.
4. Rectitude of reason in speculative matters depends on the beginnings from which reason syllogizes (Thomas says “from principles” rather than “from premises”), as science depends on understanding; in human acts the ends stand as beginnings: “the famous proportion” of Ethics VII, often used by Thomas in theology.
5. Therefore foresight requires being well disposed toward the ends by right desire, hence moral virtue. Thomas on why Aristotle takes up moral virtues before the virtues of reason: they dispose us for them and are more known. Examples: no wanting to eat moderately, no finding the moderate amount; no wanting to be just, no finding the right price; no wanting to treat my wife right, no finding the right way.

• Because making is into exterior matter, the arts are distinguished basically by the matter in which they make (developed in segment 9).

8. a. 3 replies, as read here (“against art”) #

The transcript at this point returns to the replies of a. 3.

• Ad 1: a bad work made with art is not according to art but against art, as one who knows the truth and lies acts against science; so, like science, art “always has itself to the good,” and is thus a virtue, but falls short of the complete notion because it does not make the use good; something else is required, though good use without the art is not possible. Cocktail proportions: Manhattan two to one, brandy and crème de menthe two to one, the reverse “sickeningly sweet”; the lady’s arsenic is not according to art.
• Ad 2: to use one’s art well requires a good will, perfected by moral virtue; so Aristotle says there is a virtue of art, a moral one: the just artist does a faithful work, not cheap material. The ninety-nine-dollar Chinese desk the carpenter said could not be made for the materials.
• Ad 3: in speculative matters there is something by way of a work, constructing a syllogism, a suitable speech, numbering and measuring; habits ordered to such works are called arts by likeness, liberal ones, as against servile arts done through the body, which is under the soul “in a slave-like way,” man being free according to his soul. Sciences ordered to no such work are simpliciter scientia, in no way arts; nobler does not mean more truly art. So the liberal arts are not arts in the same sense: logic as “art” of definitions, syllogisms, statements is not making in the full sense; geometry goes simply under scientia (episteme), though Euclid’s first theorem, making an equilateral triangle, is “a kind of mental making.” Adding up bottles in his head at the package store.

9. a. 4 continued: arts distinguished by matter; the willing sinner in art (“different matters require different tools”) #

• Difference of matter requires different tools and a different way of working: his wife’s dress with scissors and needle vs. his brother-in-law’s houses and tables with hammer and saw (sewing a table, nailing a dress); the glassblower. Aristotle in the Poetics distinguishes the imitative arts first by that in which they make (painter vs. poet), though in defining tragedy he puts first what it imitates. Shakespeare (Taming of the Shrew): “is Vulcan a good carpenter?”; his father’s factory, heating and bending metal, which would wreck wood. “Very important that he says that it’s facere as actus transiens.”
• The good of artificial things is not the good of human desire but of the things themselves, so art does not presuppose right appetite; hence (from Plato) the artist who sins willingly is praised more than one who sins unwillingly, since it is not ignorance: Mozart’s “musical joke” showing musicians’ mistakes; his own knowing use of fallacies; in morals, knowingly killing is worse than unknowingly. Rectitude of will belongs to the notion of foresight, not of art. “A marvelous distinction of the two.”

10. a. 4 replies; the cardinal virtues (“prudent leaders or governors”) #

• Ad 1: the diverse genera of artificial things are all outside man, so the notion of art is not diversified; foresight is about human acts themselves, so the notion of virtue is diversified.
• Ad 2: foresight agrees more with art in subject and matter (both in the opinionative part, about the contingent), but art agrees more with the speculative habits in the notion of virtue, lacking rectitude of appetite; prudence is closer to the moral virtues. Hence the cardinal virtues: three moral virtues plus foresight, a virtue of reason, because it presupposes rectified appetite; not art or geometry; one cannot understand the enumeration without how foresight differs from both. Plato’s Protagoras has five, adding piety.
• Ad 3: foresight is bene consiliativa about what pertains to the whole of man’s life and its last end; some arts take counsel about their private ends, so good counsellors in war or sailing are prudent leaders or governors (gubernator, helmsman), not prudent simpliciter. Phi Beta Kappa: philosophy the helmsman of life.
• Aside: balloons over his house, one that came down into a tree.

His words #

• simul / seorsum: conclusions seen together with the principles vs. principles by themselves.
• beginnings: his rendering for principia [ed.: principles]; “natural understanding” = habit of beginnings.
• ex aequo: “equally”; the three virtues are not distinguished equally but in order.
• potential whole / potential parts: the powers of the soul as its parts; between the universal and the composed whole.
• foresight: his rendering of prudentia [ed.: prudence].
• guess: opinion and suspicion; dialectic and rhetoric as “arts of guessing.”
• thinking out: between thinking about and understanding; senses via the eight senses of “in.”
• qualiter se habeant: “how they have themselves.”
• facultas: ability for a good work; source of “faculty.”
• facere as actus transiens: making, an act passing into exterior matter; doing remains in the agent.
• simpliciter scientia: sciences ordered to no work, “in no way arts.”
• bene consiliativa: taking counsel well about the whole of life.
• gubernator: helmsman, governor.

Texts #

Read in class:

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 57, a. 2 ad 2 and ad 3.
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 57, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, respondeo, ad 1-3).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 57, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, respondeo, ad 1-3).
• Verified sources also list a handout, “The Matter and Order of Wisdom,” p. 11, and DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 460; the transcript does not name them.

Mentioned:

• Aristotle, Ethics VI (opinion and suspicion; art; counsel), III (counsel in the military art), VII (ends as principles).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (act; making and doing); the chapter on whole and part (Metaphysics V, inferred).
• Aristotle, Physics IV (eight senses of “in”); Poetics (imitative arts distinguished by that in which they make).
• Augustine, De libero arbitrio; Gregory (“the art of living”); Thomas, commentary on Boethius (liberal and mechanical arts); Plato (the willing sinner in art; Protagoras, five virtues); Euclid; Einstein; Kierkegaard; Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew.

His questions #

• Can’t you see the length and width of the table without seeing the area? Yes; the area is in the power of the premises but not known until multiplied.
• Are counsel and judgment potential parts of foresight? Yes, part of the power; command is the principal part (student), fuller answer deferred to the secunda secundae.
• Why isn’t there a virtue for opinion, in dialectic? Opinion and suspicion can be of the true and the false; virtue is only to the good.
• We guess before we what? Know; and we think about something before we understand it.
• Why does he take up art before prudence? Art is more like the speculative virtues, lacking rectification of appetite; from the less unlike to the more unlike.
• Why distinguish prudence from art and not from the speculative virtues? The dialectician distinguishes things that are closer; the difficulty is there.
• How do we get from facultatum to our word faculty? Left open (asked, not answered).
• Is geometry to be put under scientia or under arts? Simply under scientia, with some likeness to art.
• Why is foresight, a virtue of reason, put among the cardinal virtues with the moral virtues? Because it presupposes rectitude of the appetite.