Is Foresight (Prudence) Necessary for Living Well? Art, Right Appetite and Practical Truth (Summa I-II, Q57 A5)

Orientation #

He opens with the prayer and says “now we’re going to find out whether foresight is a virtue necessary for man,” i.e. the fifth article. He refers back to “we saw before” that the moral virtues dispose one well to the end (prev. lecture). The previous class covered q. 57 through art and prudence; the next takes up a. 6 on the virtues annexed to prudence.

The class, in order #

1. The three objections and the sed contra (“foresight is a virtue necessary for living well”) #

He reads the objections in his own English (“foresight” for prudence).

1. Obj. 1: as art is right reason about makeable things, foresight is right reason about doable things; but art is needed only that things come to be, not after they are made; so foresight is needed only that a man become virtuous, not after. He calls it “such a subtle, subtle thing. I never noticed.”
2. Obj. 2: foresight is that by which we take counsel rightly (Ethics VI); but a man can act on someone else’s good counsel; so it suffices to follow those who are prudent. Aside: joke about the Obama administration and “the blind lead the blind”; people who each worked on a section of a thing with no one seeing whether the sections worked together; a child caught doing wrong who has no clue why.
3. Obj. 3: a virtue of reason is that by which one always says the true and never the false; but in counsel about things to be done one errs (“to err is human”), because doable things are contingent, able to be otherwise; Wisdom 9:14, the thoughts of mortals are fearful and our foresights uncertain. So foresight is not a virtue of reason.
4. Sed contra: Wisdom 8 numbers it with the virtues necessary for human life: divine wisdom teaches foresight and sobriety, justice and virtutem, which he takes to mean courage. Aside on names: virtus from vir, so the man’s virtue is courage, the first virtue Aristotle takes up in the Ethics; Greek aretē tied to Ares, god of war. Courage is the more known virtue: you can get the Medal of Honor for one afternoon on the battlefield, but a lifetime of sobriety or justice earns none; it is more obviously needed for the protection of the city (Douglas MacArthur’s speeches).

2. The body: why prudence is most necessary (“to live well consists in doing well”) #

Point: prudence is maxima necessary for human life.

1. To live well is to do well (“nicely said”). Aside: “I’m doing philosophy, I’m living it up”; getting drunk is living it down.
2. To do well it is required not only what one does but how: according to right choice, not only from impetus or passion.
3. Choice is of things toward the end, so its rightness needs two things: a suitable end (debitum finem) and what is suitably ordered to that end.
4. To the right end a man is disposed by the virtue perfecting the desiring part of the soul, whose object is the good and the end — the moral virtues seen before. Example: unless I want to eat and drink moderately I will not find the right amount.
5. To what is ordered to the end he must be disposed by a habit of reason, for taking counsel and choosing are acts of reason, reason “looking before an act” to see the order of things.
6. Therefore there must be an intellectual virtue perfecting reason toward the things for the end: foresight. Hence it is necessary for living well.

3. Reply to obj. 1: art perfects the product, prudence the doer (“cooking is not a perfection of the cook”) #

Point: the good of art is in the thing made; the good of foresight is in the agent.

• Making passes over into exterior matter and is a perfection of the thing made, not the maker: cooking is a perfection of the dinner, not the cook (“thank God”); as motion is the act of the mobile, not the mover.
• Criticism of Karl Marx: he sees man’s fulfilment in making, but making perfects something other than man, so he has the wrong genus of activity; man’s perfection needs an activity that perfects the doer.
• Doing vs. making in English: sometimes “doing” includes making, sometimes it is divided against it; making gets the special name not because it is better but because it adds something, a product.
• Art requires not that the artist operate well but that he make a good work: the cook can be drunk while cooking as long as the dinner is right; as a hammer should strike well or a saw cut well — and these are more acted upon than acting, having no lordship over their acts. So art is not necessary for the artist’s living well; but temperance is necessary for eating well and foresight for how much — needed even after virtue is acquired, because circumstances vary (big lunch? Thanksgiving?).

4. Digression: the two operations, God’s making, Avicenna and Plato (“God alone is liberal in the full sense”) #

• At the start of Summa Contra Gentiles II, turning to God as beginning of other things, Thomas recalls this distinction: to know a thing fully you must know what it does, and there are two kinds of doing — that remaining in the doer (God understanding, loving, rejoicing in himself, book I) and making (creating, book II). God’s making my immortal soul is a perfection of me, not of God; he gets nothing out of it; so Thomas always quotes Avicenna, God alone is liberal in the full sense.
• Thomas both criticizes Avicenna (on the possible intellect, and a point in SCG II) and quotes him with approval (beginning of De Veritate, on the so-called transcendentals).
• Avicenna’s view: understandable forms do not remain in the understanding; we turn to a separate substance and the forms flow into us again; phantasms dispose us to turn toward it. Thomas: this differs little from Plato, and Plato does better, since for him sense and imagination only wake reason to recall what it already knows, whereas images do not dispose one to turn to an immaterial substance — one must be withdrawn from the senses to go up to God (St. Paul pulled up to the third heaven, “whether in the body or not”).
• Aside: Emerson and Plato, both great minds, confuse the one that is the beginning of number with the one convertible with being, attributing to each what belongs to the other.

5. Reply to obj. 2: acting on another’s counsel (“he is not yet altogether perfect”) #

Point: one who does the good not by his own reason but moved by another’s counsel does it well only secundum quid, not simpliciter, which is what living well is. Example: a child eats a moderate amount of candy, but under a parent’s counsel (“we’ll put it away now”) — not yet perfect as regards reason directing and the appetite being moved. There is some truth in the objection, but an imperfection in oneself. Aside: embarrassing when you have to tell that to the monks.

6. Reply to obj. 3: two truths (“the true of the practical understanding”) #

Point: “some very subtle things here” — truth of the practical intellect vs. truth of the speculative (“looking”) intellect, Ethics VI; recalled as what students once went round telling everybody.

• Speculative truth: conformity of understanding to the thing (man is two-legged, a dog four-legged). The understanding cannot be infallibly conformed to contingent things, only to necessary; so no speculative habit of contingent things is a virtue, only natural understanding, reasoned-out understanding (scientia), and wisdom — discussed also in the Posterior Analytics.
• Practical truth: conformity to rectified appetite, not to the thing. Such conformity has no place in necessary things, which do not come to be by human will (I do not make the triangle’s angles equal two right angles), but only in contingent things that can come to be by us, whether inward doable things or outward makeable things. Hence the practical virtues are about contingents: art for the makeable, foresight (prudence, the Latin) for the doable.

7. Student question: how does right appetite enter art? (“a happy ending in tragedy”) #

Point: in art one must desire the good proper to that art.

• Aristotle: one should not aim at just any pleasure in tragedy but the pleasure proper to tragedy; 17th–19th-century English performances of King Lear where Cordelia lives and marries seek the wrong pleasure — “a false plan, designing the wrong end.”
• Wine: candified, soda-pop wine and sweet pink zinfandel for beginners who seek the pleasure of dessert in wine; the progression to dry white then red (cousin Michael); package-store story of Carney recommending a wine, versus asking first who it is for and whether they drink wine with meals. Vanilla ice cream or whipped cream on filet mignon: seeking the pleasure of dessert in a steak — “wrong answer.” Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies and the two kinds of romance each have a different pleasure one must know and desire; the pleasure of tragedy has to be got used to (a high school girl who liked only the ones with happy endings).
• His teenage advice column in the St. Paul newspaper: a girl whose boyfriend wants candy-flavoured lipstick; advice “buy him a lollipop” — seeking in a kiss the pleasure of candy, an obvious case of not knowing the purpose.
• Student: building a house seems to be conformity to the plan in mind rather than right appetite. His reply from architecture: the beautiful Minnesota State Capitol and its first office buildings vs. the “space age” building under Governor Freeman (“Freeman’s bordello”), out of place; building codes in nice places; the TAC chapels well planned for prayer; his parish church’s abstract windows (Tullery’s studio, Florence), not good for children or adults; children at Blessed Sacrament in Worcester imitating the Fatima representation outside; St. John’s in Clinton, beautiful windows, most priesthood candidates; churches with coffee machines starting up at communion; his daughter Maria wanting to marry in the cathedral, “a real church”; Christ’s “my father’s house is a house of prayer” — if the building does not dispose you to pray, you did not know what building you should have made. Contrast desire to make a church look like a Frank Lloyd Wright house (student’s phrase, accepted). All-glass houses: you want privacy. An Irish actor struck by the TAC building, gave a Shakespeare talk. The Padre Pio church at San Giovanni and the Los Angeles cathedral as bad modern examples.
• Student: this is not the appetite for the whole life, as in prudence, but for a particular end; judging art by right appetite is not the criterion most people think of. He: Mozart on the golden mean — unless you desire it you will not succeed, even in art. Ketchup on everything so everything tastes like ketchup, vs. preparing meat so as to bring out its flavour; the ketchup label “for hamburgers that need a little help” is for someone who isn’t good at cooking; green ketchup.

8. Close: looking reason and doing reason (“Homer taught the other Greeks”) #

Point: the distinction between “looking reason” and “doing reason” (speculative and practical) is very interesting, and Aristotle saw it: Homer taught the Greeks that a good plot is not everything that happened to one man but a course of action with a beginning, middle and end; if a man does not aim at that he will not succeed and gets something episodic. Class ends there.

His words #

• Deo gratias (opening prayer, garbled in ASR).
• “foresight”: his English for prudentia; “prudence is the Latin word, foresight the English.”
• “makeable” / “doable”: factibilia / agibilia [ed.: standard Latin terms he implies but does not utter].
• virtus from vir; aretē tied to Ares: virtue named first from courage.
• magister / “the master”: Thomas, at “I answer.”
• maxima: prudence is “most of all” necessary.
• debitum finem: the suitable, right, proper end (class offered several renderings).
• “desiring part of the soul” [ed.: appetitive part].
• “lordship over their own acts”: what tools lack.
• simpliciter vs. secundum quid: doing well absolutely vs. in a respect.
• “looking understanding” / “looking reason” [ed.: speculative intellect]; “doing reason” [ed.: practical reason].
• “natural understanding, reasoned-out understanding or scientia, and wisdom”: the three speculative virtues.
• “rectified appetite,” “right desire”: the measure of practical truth.
• “the transcendentals”: his name for the topic of the opening of De Veritate (“so-called”).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 57, a. 5 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies), read in his own translation.
• Book of Wisdom 9:14 (quoted within obj. 3); Book of Wisdom ch. 8 (sed contra).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Ethics VI (obj. 2; reply 3, the two truths; courage as first virtue in the Ethics).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II, beginning (two kinds of operation; critique of Avicenna); SCG I on God’s immanent acts.
• Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, beginning (quoting Avicenna on the transcendentals).
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (the speculative habits).
• Aristotle on tragedy’s proper pleasure and on Homer and plot (Poetics, inferred).
• Avicenna on liberality and on the separate substance; Plato on recollection; St. Paul’s third heaven; Karl Marx; Emerson; Mozart on the golden mean; Shakespeare’s King Lear.

His questions #

• Whether foresight is a virtue necessary for living well? Yes, most of all: living well is doing well, which requires right choice, and choice of the means needs an intellectual virtue.
• What are the two things the rightness of choice requires? A suitable end, and that which is suitably ordered to the end.
• Why does making get its own name, divided against doing? Not because it is better but because it adds something, a product.
• Is cooking a perfection of the cook? No, of the dinner; making perfects the thing made, as motion is the act of the mobile.
• Why does one need foresight even after becoming virtuous? Because one must still judge how much to eat, according to circumstances.
• If a man does the good on another’s counsel, does he do well? Yes, but only secundum quid, not simpliciter, which is what living well is.
• How is the truth of the practical understanding taken? By conformity to rectified appetite, whereas speculative truth is conformity to the thing.
• How does right appetite enter into art (student)? One must desire the pleasure or good proper to that art — tragedy, wine, a church that disposes to prayer.
• Is right appetite really the criterion for judging a house or a meal (student)? He answers yes: unless one desires the golden mean one will not succeed even in art; the student’s reservation is not fully resolved.