Summa I-II Q.64 a.2–3: The Middle of Reason, Justice, and the Middle of the Intellectual Virtues (Truth, Contraries, and Opposites)

Orientation #

He says “we’re in the middle of Article Two there, in Question sixty-four” and, “at risk of repeating myself,” goes over Article Two again (prev. lecture). He also refers to “last night,” when he said Aristotle was the first man to understand the words we all use. Verified sources: this class treats ST I-II q. 64 aa. 2–3, with a stretch matched to SCG IV ch. 15 and a handout page (“Note for Sixth Book of Wisdom, Reading 4,” p. 14) on Metaphysics VI. The previous class covered q. 63 a. 4 and the opening of q. 64; the next moves to the theological virtues and the connection of the virtues.

The class, in order #

1. Opening prayer and the angels (“they enlighten our mind, they purge it”) #

Point: after the prayer he notes a “little text of Thomas”: the angels enlighten our mind, purge it, and perfect it.

2. Article 2 objections: middle of reason or of the thing? (“good and bad are in things”) #

Point: the objections press that the middle of moral virtue is a middle of the thing, not of reason.

1. Obj. 1: the good of moral virtue is in the middle; but good (per Metaphysics VI, the handout text) is in things, whereas truth and falsity are primarily in the mind. He explains: the first act of the mind is “simple grasping,” by likeness to the hand — what is grasped is contained in the mind, that is the mind’s good; but love goes out to the thing (“I left my heart in San Francisco”). So the middle should be of the thing. He flags this rests “partly on some confusion as to what middle of reason is.”
2. Obj. 2: reason is a grasping power (“the power of apprehension” — the translators “are afraid of their own language”; Father Owen Bennett: sometimes you must read the Latin to find out what the English means); but moral virtue is a middle of operations or passions, not of graspings.
3. Obj. 3: a middle by arithmetical or geometrical proportion is a middle of the thing, and such is justice’s middle (Ethics V). He notes Thomas will admit this for justice.

• Sed contra (Ethics II): moral virtue is a middle “towards us as determined by reason” — how much I eat depends on my size and work, and reason determines what is too much or too little for me.

3. Article 2 body: two senses of “middle of reason” (“the middle exists in the act itself of reason”) #

Point: every middle of moral virtue is a middle of reason in the second sense; sometimes it is also a middle of the thing.

• A: a middle in the act of reason itself (reason’s act led back to a middle). Moral virtue does not perfect reason’s act but the desiring power (will or sense desire), so its middle is not “of reason” in this sense. (The intellectual virtues’ middle is the next article’s question.)
• B: a middle laid down by reason in some matter; in this sense every moral virtue’s middle is one of reason, since it consists in a middle in conformity to reason. Aside: the Delphic sayings, “know thyself” and meden agan, “nothing too much” — perhaps also nothing too little, but people err more by too much.
• Sometimes (quandoque) the middle of reason is also a middle of the thing: then the virtue’s middle must be a middle of the thing, as in justice. Eating half the turkey or drinking half the gallon would be the middle of the thing, absurdly; the middle is what is too much or too little for me (Thomas: drink usque ad hilaritatem, not to drunkenness or to interfering with one’s activities). Buying a loaf at the going price: I pay neither more nor less, regardless of how much either of us loves bread — a middle of the thing, and that is the middle for reason.
• When the middle is taken relative to us it need not be the same for you and me: grandchildren get little wine, women less than men, an alcoholic perhaps none.
• Why justice is exceptional (Aristotle gives Ethics III–IV to the other moral virtues, V to justice alone): justice is about operations in exterior things, where the right is instituted simply and by itself; the other virtues are about interior passions, to which men have themselves diversely, so rightness is instituted with respect to us.
• Replies: objections 1 and 2 concern the middle in the act of reason, not relevant here; objection 3 concerns the exception, justice.
• Aside: Aristotle understood the words we all use — equivocal by reason — by distinguishing their senses and their order; Thomas likewise; “the actual state of mind is to be mixed up.”

4. Article 3 objections: no middle in intellectual virtue (“now we get to my virtues”) #

Point: three objections deny a middle to the intellectual virtues.

1. Moral virtues have a middle by conformity to the rule of reason; intellectual virtues are in reason itself and seem to have no higher rule.
2. The middle of moral virtue is determined by intellectual virtue (Ethics II: as the wise man determines); if intellectual virtue too had a middle, another virtue would determine it, ad infinitum.
3. A middle is between contraries (colours between white and black, lukewarm between hot and cold; the one and the many in “the tenth book of Wisdom”); but in the understanding contraries are not contrary — health and sickness are known together, the same medical art is about both (the doctor who says “high blood pressure” must know healthy pressure). In matter one excludes the other; in the mind one helps know the other — an argument used for the mind’s immateriality; the same knowledge of opposites in Socrates and Plato; logic studies both correct and fallacious reasoning (Sophistical Refutations beside Prior and Posterior Analytics). No contrariety, so no middle. He notes Thomas will show a way there is contrariety in the mind.

• Sed contra: art is an intellectual virtue (Ethics VI, which lists five: understanding, episteme, wisdom, foresight, art), and of art there is a middle (Ethics II). Mozart complained the golden mean was no longer observed in music; Einstein remarked on Mozart’s wisdom; Aristotle begins from the mean in art as more known to us — meat cooked or seasoned too much or too little is bad. “The supreme gift of the artist is knowing when to stop”: Sherlock Holmes on a man who overdid an incriminating frame-up; a book on Italian art on Titian; writers on Mozart.

5. Article 3 body: the true as the good of intellect (“the good of the intellectual virtue is the true”) #

Point: the good of anything consists in a middle by conformity to a rule or measure that can be exceeded or fallen short of; intellectual virtue is ordered to the good as moral virtue is, so it has a middle.

• The good of speculative virtue is truth absolutely; of practical virtue, truth by conformity to rectified appetite — above all prudence (“you got to have moral virtue before you can have prudence”). Mozart on Osmin’s anger in the Abduction from the Seraglio: the music must represent a man losing control, yet not become displeasing to the ear or it ceases to be music — rectified appetite on both sides; like the chef’s food, healthy but pleasing to taste. Student: much rough music expresses anger; he: “it’s noise.”
• Measure of the speculative intellect: the thing. Truth is in the mind’s opinion and in the speech signifying it “from this that a thing is or is not” (Metaphysics X). If I say you are sitting, true; not sitting, or standing, false. Categories ch. 12: after the four senses of before and after, a fifth — cause before effect: the thing is cause of the statement’s truth though simultaneous with it (as soon as you sit it is true; whenever true, you sit) — so not before in time nor in the second sense (this can be without that but not vice versa).
• Truth: saying what is is, and what is not is not; falsehood: what is is not, or what is not is. Excess = false affirmation (says what is not is); defect = false negation (says what is is not).
• The courtroom oath, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”: not mere emphasis — “the whole truth” excludes false negation (subtracting: I omit Jim who was at the bar), “nothing but the truth” excludes false affirmation (adding: I say Bill was there). Kent in King Lear, “All my reports go with the modest truth, nor more, nor clipped, but so” (Shakespeare’s nor…nor for neither…nor): “more” = false affirmation, “clipped” = false negation, “modest truth” the middle. Falstaff: his buddies who say more or less than the truth are villains and sons of darkness. Three ways of saying the same.
• Aside (Merry Wives of Windsor): Falstaff woos Mrs Page and Mrs Ford to get their money — formally a thief, materially an adulterer, illustrating Thomas’s point that one who commits adultery to rob is formally a robber. Mr Page has no suspicion; Mr Ford is given to jealousy and makes a fool of himself. Story of Charlie in the packet store, terrified the bank women would greet him on vacation and set off his insanely jealous wife. His four kinds of Shakespeare plays each shown by a jealous-husband scene: laughable in Merry Wives, murder in Othello, serious trouble then forgiveness in between.

6. Practical intellectual virtue and prudence (“has the aspect of a thing measured”) #

Point: the truth of a practical intellectual virtue is measured by the thing but is rule and measure with respect to appetite.

• The same middle belongs to prudence as ruling and measuring, and to moral virtue as measured and ruled. Prudence says “I’ve had enough to eat.” Restaurants overfeed you so you return — trying to make you vicious; a hostess is insulted if you don’t eat generously; practical reason may say eat more on Thanksgiving to do justice to grandma’s meal. His paternal grandmother, raised to clean her plate, losing her appetite; he ate what she left so she was not embarrassed — “no mutual understanding.” “Fortunately we won’t have to worry about that after the resurrection.”

7. Replies 1 and 2 (“it is not necessary to proceed forever”) #

• Reply 1: intellectual virtue also has its own measure and takes its middle by conformity to it — ultimately the thing.
• Reply 2: the rule of intellectual virtue is not another genus of virtue but ipsa res, the thing itself. In the Ethics the definition of moral virtue (“habit with choice, in the middle towards us, determined by right reason”) leaves right reason unexplained till Book VI; one might look for yet another virtue, but the thing regulates it. Niels Bohr: theories in correspondence with things.

8. Reply 3: contrariety in the intellect (“contrary things themselves do not have contrariety in the soul”) #

Point: contraries as simple things (health/sickness, virtue/vice) are not contrary in the soul, one being the reason for knowing the other (“opposites alongside each other are more clear”); but in the second act of reason, affirmation and negation are contraries (end of Peri Hermeneias, the book on statements after the Categories).

• Digression on the kinds of opposites: Aristotle distinguishes them in the Categories before before-and-after, and again in Metaphysics V, because opposition is the basis of formal distinction. Marxism (the Laval doctoral thesis) talks constantly of opposites, borrowing “dialectical” from reasoning from probables to opposite conclusions, yet never distinguishes their kinds — “he doesn’t understand the words he’s using.” Four kinds: contradiction, contrariety, privation (lack) and having, relatives. Relatives set aside: double does not eliminate half (the formal distinction of Father and Son in the Trinity), whereas in the other three one eliminates the other. Ordering the three (student guess: contradiction is “absolute”): contradictories (being/non-being, man/not-man) have nothing in common, you must be one or the other; lack/having have a subject in common — a stone is neither blind nor seeing, neither ignorant nor knowing, ignorance being non-being of knowledge in something able to know; contraries have most in common — vice is not mere absence of virtue but a real, disordered habit, another species in the same genus, furthest apart. Yet real opposition: virtue excludes the opposite vice; blindness excludes sight.
• Application: “two is half of four” and “two is not half of four” are both statements, both positive things, so as statements they are contraries though we call them contradictory. Socrates’ slave boy who says double the side is not ignorant but mistaken — thinking something false; every mistaken man is ignorant, not every ignorant man mistaken. To be mistaken is having something in the same genus, hence contrary. “That is very subtle.” Physics I: change is between contraries, sometimes between lack and having. Easier to convince the ignorant than the mistaken: the undecided voter versus the committed Democrat; “the only thing worse than ignorance is error.”
• Thomas’s text: to be and not to be, considered as things signified, are contradictories, one being and the other pure non-being (no subject, let alone genus, in common); but referred to an act of the soul affirming or denying, both lay down something. Aside: of the five things said of God’s substance in the Summa order — simple, perfect, infinite, unchanging, one (a different order from the Contra Gentiles) — “unlimited” is pure negation, unlike the Greeks’ unlimited body or an endless line lacking what a line should have; “I’m perfectly knowing God, but it’s better nothing”; no sé nada. So esse and non esse are contradictory, but the opinion that the good is good is contrary to the opinion that the good is not good, and between these contraries is the middle of intellectual virtue.

9. The two errors on each mystery (“the truth lies in the mean”) #

Point: the two heresies on the Trinity and on the Incarnation show excess and defect around the truth.

• Trinity: one nature, three persons. Three natures for three persons (Arians) says what is not is; one person for one nature says what is is not.
• Incarnation reversed: one person, two natures. Two persons (Nestorian, unnamed) says what is not is; Eutyches and the Monophysites (one physis) deny the second nature — what is is not. Thomas speaks of following the right tramite of truth between the two. St Vincent of Lérins: in divinitate alius atque alius, not aliud atque aliud; in Salvatore aliud atque aliud, not alius atque alius — alius the person, aliud the nature. Aside: it would be interesting to talk with a man who is God, better still to listen to him.
• Closing asides: Goethe’s image of the wise man parting truth from falsehood which close again behind him; Roger Kimball [ed.: transcript “Brian Kimball”] of the New Criterion on modern intellectuals preferring the mean between right and wrong; Robert Frost, “middle of the road, where they paint the line, worst place to drive” — mediocrity.

His words #

• “middle” — his rendering of medium [ed.: mean]; “middle of reason” vs “middle of the thing.”
• “simple grasping” — first act of the mind, by likeness to the hand [ed.: simple apprehension].
• “sixth book of metaphysics” / “tenth book of Wisdom” — Metaphysics VI and X.
• meden agan — “nothing too much,” Delphic saying.
• usque ad hilaritatem — Thomas on drinking, “to the point of cheerfulness,” not drunkenness.
• quandoque — “sometimes”; the middle of reason coincides with the middle of the thing.
• “foresight” — his rendering of prudentia; “understanding, episteme, wisdom, foresight, art” the five intellectual virtues.
• “rectified appetite” — the measure of practical truth.
• Peri Hermeneias — the book on statements, second logical book after the Categories.
• “lack and having” — privation and possession; “relatives” the fourth opposite.
• ipsa res — “the thing itself,” the rule of intellectual virtue.
• esse / non esse — contradictory as things signified; the opinions contrary.
• tramite — the right “path” of truth (Thomas).
• alius / aliud — person / nature (Vincent of Lérins).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q. 64 a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q. 64 a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Passage matched to SCG IV ch. 15 (verified source; probably the Trinity/Incarnation errors segment)
• Handout on Metaphysics VI, lectio 4 (verified source; “good is in things, truth in the mind”)
• Shakespeare, King Lear (Kent’s line); Falstaff’s “villains and sons of darkness”
• Vincent of Lérins, alius atque alius formula

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Ethics II (mean, art), III–IV (moral virtues), V (justice), VI (five intellectual virtues)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (opposites, before and after), X (truth from the thing; one and many)
• Aristotle, Categories ch. 12 (senses of before), opposites chapter
• Aristotle, Physics I (change between contraries); Sophistical Refutations; Prior and Posterior Analytics
• Plato, Meno (slave boy) (inferred)
• Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello
• Summa Theologiae I on God’s substance (five attributes) vs Summa Contra Gentiles order
• Mozart on Osmin (Abduction from the Seraglio); Sherlock Holmes; a book on Titian; Niels Bohr; Goethe; Roger Kimball; Robert Frost; DHB Vol. III p. 635 (verified source)

His questions #

• Should I eat half the turkey or drink half the gallon? No: that is a middle of the thing; food and drink have a middle towards us.
• How do they translate “apprehensiva” in English? “Power of apprehension” — they are afraid of their own language.
• What did the seven wise men say at Delphi? Know thyself, and nothing too much (meden agan).
• Is “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” mere emphasis, or something different? Different: “whole truth” excludes false negation, “nothing but” excludes false affirmation.
• In Kent’s line, what kind of falsity is “more,” and what is “clipped”? More = false affirmation; clipped = false negation.
• How many kinds of opposites does Aristotle distinguish, and how are the three besides relatives ordered? Four; contradiction most opposed (nothing in common), lack/having share a subject, contraries share a genus.
• Is the slave boy ignorant or mistaken? Mistaken — he thinks something false; every mistaken man is ignorant, not conversely.
• Are “two is half of four” and “two is not half of four” contradictory or contrary? As statements, both positive, they are contraries, though we call them contradictory.
• Is “unlimited” said of God a negation or a lack? Pure negation.
• Is it easier to convince someone ignorant or someone mistaken? The ignorant; the mistaken resist.