Why Reason Is Not a Body (Thomas's Three Arguments, Sentences II d.19) and Custom as Law (Summa I-II q.97 a.3)

Orientation #

He says at the end “Okay, Article Four here” — q. 97, a. 4 is next. The class begins as an unplanned digression (“I’m doing a little Kasurik with you”) on a text of the Sentences he had just read while looking into the angels at Kasurik’s suggestion. The neighbouring classes continue the treatise on human law and pass into the Old Law.

The class, in order #

1. Does the soul survive death? (“whether the human soul survives what death”) #

• Aristotle raises the question in the proemium to the three books on the soul; he hints what the answer depends on.
• The sign: being comes before doing (“Even Descartes knew that — I think, therefore I am”). So if the soul has an operation not in the body, its being is not wholly immersed in the body.
• Image (Avicenna’s, taken over by Thomas): is the soul like a ship floating, part in the water and part out, or like a submarine, entirely immersed in matter? If a submarine, no operation outside the body.

2. Is the brain the organ of thought? (“a blow on the light bulb”) #

• A student at Assumption argued: a blow on the eye interferes with seeing, a blow on the brain (or alcohol) interferes with thinking, therefore the brain is the organ of thought.
• Reply by counter-example: in a room lit by one bulb, a blow on the bulb interferes with your seeing me — therefore the bulb is the organ of your sight? Simpler: if Joshua leaves the room I can no longer see him; he interferes not with the organ but with the object.
• Aristotle: the images stand to reason as the colour in the wall to the eye — as object, not as organ. So the argument fails to show organ rather than object.

3. First argument: the receiver must lack what it receives (“lacking in the object that it receives”) #

• Thomas gives three reasons in Sentences II, d. 19 (he thinks a. 1), in a striking order; the first is Aristotle’s in De anima III, and it is built on what was learned earlier about the senses.

1. Sensing is an undergoing, pati: the object acts on the sense, not the sense on the object. Grammar deceives us — “my eyes fell upon the gold”: did your eyes fall on it, or it on your eyes? (a fallacy from language, from false imagination).
2. A sense must be lacking in what it receives, or it is impeded: a sugary tongue cannot taste (brother Mark the wine connoisseur warning against eating or smoking before dinner); an ear with sound always in it could not hear; an eye with a colour in it would be like built-in sunglasses.
3. Reason is open to knowing all material bodies. Therefore reason must lack bodily nature.

• Aside: because we start from what is more known to the senses, we borrow sense-words — “seeing” and “grasping” for understanding. The sense’s undergoing is already further removed than wax taking a seal; reason’s further still.

4. Second argument, and his own from the continuous (“a non-continuous knowledge of a continuous thing”) #

• Thomas’s second: reason knows things universally; whatever is in matter is by that very fact singular; therefore reason does not know in a body. Sensing or imagining a man carries singularity — black, white, yellow, brown, handsome, ugly. Socrates, the ugliest man in Athens, was loved by his students for his wisdom.
• Boethius: a thing is singular when sensed, universal when understood. Thomas in Morality [ed.: locus not given]: you are not seduced by women in general but by this woman.
• His own argument, from the two definitions of the continuous (logic and Natural Hearing VI [ed.: Physics]):
  1. Continuous = that whose parts meet at a common boundary (line at a point, surfaces of a circle at a line, bodies at a surface). Euclid knows the square by a definition — but do genus and differences meet at a point, line or surface? No. So a continuous thing is received in reason in a non-continuous way.
  2. Continuous = divisible forever. But definitions are not divisible forever — you reach a highest genus, and cannot define being by anything more universal; demonstrations likewise are not (else Zeno’s proof, you never reach the conclusion: A is B because A is X, and A is X because A is G…). A student adds: “that’s when the computer crashes.”
  3. What explains the non-continuity is not the thing known (it is continuous), but the receiver: whatever is received is received according to the way of the receiver. Dough or clay keeps a shape; water poured out does not. Therefore reason is not a body.
• On order: the second argument is more subtle and grows out of the first, which is built from what is known to the senses; he says he does not know for certain why this order.

5. Third argument: Avicenna and Shakespeare’s definition of reason (“the ability for large discourse, looking before and after”) #

• Avicenna: no knowing power that is a body can know itself — the ear knows sound but not the ear, the eye colour but not what an eye is. Reason given: such a power knows only in and through its bodily organ, so that organ comes before its object; but nothing is before itself; therefore it cannot know itself. (Not by induction, but by a reason.)
• Shakespeare gives the best definition of reason; Joshua supplies it with help: the ability for large discourse, looking before and after. Reason knows this — so reason knows itself — therefore reason is not a body.
• The ordering is “magnificent”: “large discourse” already touches the universality of the second argument, and the third supplies the definition itself. He notes he has seen these arguments separately in Thomas but does not remember them laid down in this order elsewhere.

6. Wonder, and a forgotten text (“Isn’t this wonderful?”) #

• Kasurik’s childlike enthusiasm in the hall; the Gospel of Mark read that day, “suffer the little children” and becoming like a child to enter the Kingdom — so too for philosophy, without that wonder you do not have the thing (like the third movement of the Mozart quintet).
• De Koninck, short, stopping in the hall before class on book IV of Natural Hearing on place: “Isn’t this wonderful?” — teaching it since the 1930s and still with more wonder than anyone in the class.
• Monsignor Dionne’s long course on a “forgotten text” of the Sentences; the text Berquist himself forgot to bring up: that logic is closer to natural philosophy than to grammar, though the Trivium puts grammar, logic and rhetoric together and one might think geometry closer to logic.

7. The three objections of q. 97, a. 3 (“whether custom is able to obtain the force of law”) #

1. Human law derives from natural and divine law; the custom of men cannot change those; therefore it cannot change human law either. (Aside: the clerk refusing marriage licences to homosexuals, appealing to the law of God — “law of nature too,” a student adds — her conversion and her six days in jail.)
2. From many evils one good cannot come about. The first man who acts against the law does badly; multiplying like acts does not make it good; but law is a good, being a rule of human acts. (Aside: Martin Luther King, sitting at the counter to change the law.)
3. Making law belongs to public persons who rule the community; private persons cannot make law; but custom grows by acts of private persons. (Aside: the cop will not take it that I made the speed limit for this car.)

• Sed contra: Augustine, Letter to Casulanus — the custom of the people of God and the institutes of the greater ones are to be held for law, and violators of divine laws and despisers of customs are to be coerced.
• Aside: lex orandi, lex credendi — the whole Church praying “Holy Mary, Mother of God” is a custom, and thence the belief.

8. The body of the article (“deeds as well as words declare the will”) #

1. Every law proceeds from the reason and will of the legislator: divine and natural law from the reasonable will of God; human law from the will of man ruled by reason.
2. The reason and will of man are made known by words in things to be done, and also by deeds — each seems to choose as good what he fulfils by his work.
3. By human words law can be changed and also expounded, as declaring the interior motion and conception of reason. Therefore by acts greatly multiplied, which make a custom, law can likewise be changed, expounded, and something caused that obtains the power of law — since multiplied exterior acts most efficaciously declare the inward motion of the will and the conception of reason. What comes about many times seems to proceed from deliberate judgment of reason.
4. So custom has the power of law, can abolish law, and is interpreter of law. (Student: canon law — custom is the best interpreter.) (Student asks whether Augustine says you must go to the lives of the saints to see the meaning of some of these things.)

9. Replies (“a bad use, law and reason overcome it”) #

• To 1: natural and divine law proceed from the divine will, hence cannot be changed by a custom proceeding from the will of man, but only by divine authority; so no custom can obtain strength against divine or natural law. Isidore, Synonyms: let use or custom yield to authority, and let law and reason overcome a bad use or custom. — Applied: the Supreme Court decision of June has no power to establish or corrupt the sacraments, whatever the persecution; with abortion, great harm to the country; “we believe one thing on earth is infallible — not the majority.” Student: the shift from “freedom of religion” (living the faith in the public square) to “freedom of worship” (keep it to yourself) is insidious.
• To 2: human laws are sometimes deficient, so one may sometimes act apart from the law where the law fails, and the act is not bad; when such cases are multiplied and men change, custom manifests that the law is no longer useful, as it would be manifested by a promulgated contrary law. But if the same reason remains for which the first law was useful, law should conquer custom, not custom law — unless the law seems useless because impossible according to the custom of the country, which was one of the conditions of law; and it is difficult to remove the custom of the multitude. Examples: the traffic light that never turns green (Boston); the Englishman in Rome dutifully stopping at a red light on an empty holiday street; the right turn on red, first done customarily because it made sense, then spread, then made law.
• To 3: the multitude is of two conditions. If free and able to make law for itself, the consent of the whole multitude in observing something (which custom manifests) counts for more than the authority of the prince, who has power only as bearing the person of the multitude; so though individuals cannot make law, the whole people can (“taxation or representation,” a student quips). If not free, i.e. lacking power to remove a law laid down by a higher power, custom prevailing in it still obtains the force of law in so far as it is tolerated by those whose office it is to impose law on the multitude.
• Aside: at a job interview a political scientist distinguished law from policy — the speed limit is 60, but the police pursue at 70, not 65; so 65 has in a way the force of law.

10. Aside: the force of custom in knowing (“custom is a tyrant”) #

• Point: custom rules not only practice but knowledge.

1. Thomas in both Summas, before proving God exists, asks whether it is obvious (per se notum) and must answer no. Those who think it obvious are moved by custom: hearing God spoken of and called upon from youth. So custom can make what is not obvious seem obvious, and even what is false seem true. (Brother Mark, annoyed at “today we know the earth turns on its axis” — we don’t all know that, very few do; “where were you when the brains were passed out?”)
2. Aristotle, second book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics II]: custom shapes how we think; accustomed to one way of proceeding, by training or mental makeup, a man tries to proceed that way everywhere — but one should not proceed the same way in every matter (“not geometry”).

• Examples of the pleasure proper to a thing: drinking red wine as you drink beer, or water, or soda pop, ruins it — you must be educated to it. Using good eyes to know music, or putting your ear against a painting. Samuel Johnson coming to appreciate music as “acquiring another sense”; Boswell passing up Johnson’s company to hear Handel.
• Aristotle in the Poetics on those who want tragedy to have a happy ending — the 17th- and 18th-century rewritings marrying off Cordelia; one should not seek every pleasure from tragedy but the pleasure proper to tragedy, which is not that of comedy. Fielding’s preface to Joseph Andrews warning the reader not to expect the accustomed pleasure of another kind of fiction. A friend teaching Macbeth as if a detective story, because the students cannot adjust.
• His own adjustment to Homer: put off by Mark’s lousy paperback, he bought a colleague’s fine edition and read a book of the Iliad a night till he could not put it down. You can get accustomed to a food you disliked — but vanilla ice cream on filet mignon seeks the wrong pleasure.
• The advice-column story: the boy wants his girlfriend in candy-flavoured lipstick; answer, “buy him a lollipop” — the pleasure of a kiss is not the pleasure of candy. So too four different kinds of Shakespeare play, and the violin-piano sonatas versus the symphonies.
• Custom makes a customary statement seem known or true; hear ill of a man all your life and you cannot think him good, though he be slandered.
• Tocqueville on democratic customs: the love of equality is stronger than the love of liberty — hence liberty of religion yielded for equality; the whole argument over blacks and whites, women and men, lesbians, rests on equality (“all love is equal”).
• “Custom is a tyrant” (Shakespeare): a tyrant rules for his own good and for a part rather than the whole — so custom makes you know one way of proceeding and apply it everywhere. The college committee joke: economist, sociologist, English professor, philosopher each approaching the same question their own way; the sociologist asking “I suppose you’re doing a word count on Thomas”; the scientist asking “what experiments is this based on?”
• Student exchange: Burke or Chesterton, “custom is the democracy of the dead” [transcript: “the democracy of the day”] — are there true customs and mere fads? Answer: fads by their nature pass (a two-year-old computer nobody will touch); they say it takes a hundred years to know whether a work of art is worthwhile. Another student on The Long March and the reengineering of Western customs — likely to do much damage but not to take root, being far from natural law; done through propaganda and getting the children young. Closing line, quoted: “Fair is foul and foul is fair, hover through the fog and filthy air.”

His words #

• pati, “undergoing / suffering” — what sensing is: the object acts on the sense.
• “immersed in the body” — Avicenna’s way of speaking, taken over by Thomas; ship vs. submarine.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics].
• “the ability for large discourse, looking before and after” — Shakespeare’s definition of reason, which he calls the best.
• “non-continuous knowledge of a continuous thing” — his own formula for knowledge by definition.
• per se notum, “obvious” — of a proposition known through itself.
• “second book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics II].
• lex orandi, lex credendi — cited as a case of custom grounding belief.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 97, a. 3 — whole article, objections, sed contra, body, replies.
• Augustine, Letter to Casulanus — sed contra.
• Isidore, Synonyms — in reply to obj. 1.
• Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super Sententiis II, d. 19 (he says “I think it was the first article”) — reported, not read verbatim.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De anima, proemium and books II–III; Physics VI (continuity) and IV (place, De Koninck’s course); Metaphysics II; Poetics.
• Boethius, on singular when sensed, universal when understood.
• Avicenna, that a bodily knowing power cannot know itself.
• Euclid, definition of the square.
• Thomas, both Summas, on whether God’s existence is per se notum; “in Morality,” on being seduced by this woman.
• Shakespeare, Hamlet (inferred), King Lear, Othello, Macbeth; Fielding, Joseph Andrews; Homer, Iliad; Boswell’s Life of Johnson; Tocqueville; The Long March.

His questions #

• Does the human soul survive the death of the body, and on what does the answer depend? On whether the soul has an operation not in the body, since being comes before doing.
• Is the brain the organ of thought, since a blow on it interferes with thinking? No — the blow may strike the object, not the organ; images are to reason as colour in the wall to the eye.
• Why must reason lack bodily nature? Because a knowing power must lack what it receives, and reason is open to receiving all bodies.
• Why does knowing a square by a definition show that reason is not a body? Because a continuous thing is there received non-continuously, and what is received is received according to the way of the receiver.
• Can a bodily knowing power know itself? No — its organ is prior to its object, and nothing is prior to itself; but reason knows what reason is.
• Can custom obtain the force of law and remove law? Yes for human law, since multiplied deeds declare the reason and will of the legislator as words do; never against natural or divine law.
• Can private persons make law by custom? A free multitude can as a whole; an unfree one’s custom has force of law in so far as it is tolerated by the higher authority.
• What is the force of custom in knowing? It makes the non-obvious seem obvious and the false seem true, and makes one carry a single way of proceeding into every matter — “custom is a tyrant.”