Aquinas’ four ways

From an e-mail to a colleague:

Sorry to bombard you with e-mails in the last 24 hours, but I thought I’d take 5 minutes to copy and paste the relevant section of Aquinas that you and I have been referencing (and from which I’ve quoted sections). It comes from his commentary on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. I’ll put the text from the Ethics first, followed by Aquinas’ commentary, with my gloss in the form of [bracketed] clarifications and a little bit of text formatting. For the ambitious student I’ve included links where Aquinas references Aristotle’s Metaphysics, although you’ll have to scroll down the page to find the relevant chapter of the book that is cited.

Ethics, Bk. 1, Ch. 1:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. But a certain difference is found among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them. Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the [end] products to be better than the activities [in themselves].

Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth. But where such arts fall under a single capacity- as bridle-making and the other arts concerned with the equipment of horses fall under the art of riding, and this and every military action under strategy, in the same way other arts fall under yet others- in all of these the ends of the master arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued.

COMMENTARY OF ST. THOMAS

1. As the Philosopher says in the beginning of the Metaphysics (Bk. 1, Ch. 2, 982 a 18), it is the business of the wise man to order. The reason for this is that wisdom is the most powerful perfection of reason, whose characteristic it is to know order. Even if the sensitive [sensing, such as eyesight and touch] powers know some things absolutely, nevertheless to know the order of [or relationship of] one thing to another is exclusively the work of the intellect or reason.

Now a twofold order is found in things. One kind is that of parts of a totality, that is, a group, among themselves, as the parts of a house are mutually ordered to each other. The second order is that of things to an end. This order is of greater importance than the first. For, as the Philosopher says in the eleventh book* of the Metaphysics (Bk. XII, Ch. 10, 1075 a 15), the order of the parts of an army among themselves exists because of the order of the whole army to the commander. Now order is related to reason in a fourfold way:

1. There is one order that reason does not establish but only beholds, such is the order of things in nature.
2. There is a second order that reason establishes in its own act of consideration, for example, when it arranges its concepts among themselves, and the signs of concept as well, because words express the meanings of the concepts.
3. There is a third order that reason in deliberating establishes in the operations of the will.
4. There is a fourth order that reason in planning establishes in the external things which it causes, such as a chest and a house.

 

2. Because the operation of reason is perfected by habit [i.e., through habituation], according to the different modes of order that reason considers in particular, a differentiation of sciences arises. The function of natural philosophy is to consider the order of things that human reason considers but does not establish-understand that with natural philosophy here we also include metaphysics. The order that reason makes in its own act of consideration pertains to rational philosophy (logic), which properly considers the order of the parts of verbal expression with one another and the order of principles to one another and to their conclusions. The order of voluntary actions pertains to the consideration of moral philosophy. The order that reason in planning establishes in external things arranged by human reason pertains to the mechanical arts.

 

Accordingly it is proper to moral philosophy, to which our attention is at present directed, to consider human operations insofar as they are ordered one another and to an end.

* [really the 12th book, as the medieval ordering was mistaken]

books

Open Secrets by Richard Lischer. The basic plot sounds a little cliché: A young, energetic, and politically liberal Lutheran pastor fresh out of grad school and from the city finds himself assigned to a tiny, conservative, Midwestern farming community. Both parties have difficulty adjusting to the change, but in time they grow to understand each other and a bond of unity and love is created. Despite the quaint, Hollywood premise, Lischer downplays the ideological and superficial cultural differences enough to focus on what really presents a challenge to building relationships: pride, envy, and resent. He shows us the many ways in which God is seen powerfully in the farming village, working in and through the stiffling and awkward Germanic-Midwestern social culture.

Lischer is rather hard on his younger self throughout most of the book, emphasizing his mistakes so as to contrast these hurdles with the grace of God working in his relationships. In fact, pastoral errors drive the narrative through most of the work. He expands on the symbolism of ordinary objects a little too much for my taste and can sound awkward at times when describing what these ordinary things mean to his congregation (his account of sacramental gossip, for example, wasn’t terribly compelling). You get the feeling that he sees himself as a kind of poet and muse for the blue-collar farmer, expressing in lyrical prose the deep meaning behind a dissatisfied grunt, or dirty pair of overalls.

Lischer also relies heavily on his reader to make abstract connections that I felt he could have made more clear without sacrificing the quality of his writing. There are times when his stories shift or end without apparent connections, and I wasn’t always able to tell if I had access to the moral of the story or if I needed to meditate further on what it could be.

Poetics by Aristotle. A near-contemporary critique on Athenian poets and play-writes, Poetics struck me as being several things at once. The text is often (a) corrupted beyond the translator’s ability to work with it, (b) obscure in meaning, even for experts, and (c) referencing unknown people or works. I’m sure to read this again, but the section that most impacted me was Aristotle’s definition (and description) of metaphor. One note of interest is that Aristotle’s definitions of tragedy fit quite well with the typical contemporary romantic comedy! (E.g. Better than average people who happen to have a characteristic flaw; reversals of fortune for the better, which usually happen right before the worst result possible (losing a relationship); reversals are often inflicted by a close friend or family member and happen unintentionally; plots generally follow a unified theme — think of a typical title to these films: ‘How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days’; ‘Sweet Home Alabama’; etc).

Claudius the God by Robert Graves. See my previous post that discusses Graves’ first book: I, Claudius. This sequel seemed to me about as beautiful, well-written, and powerful as the former, and it even did so while treating a far different subject matter. The first book is Claudius’ account of how he became an Emperor despite being an idiot, professional historian uninterested in political games, a fool and stammerer, and despite the crazed killing sprees of his predecessors. Clausius the God is Claudius’ defense of every act, edict, and murder that he comitted as an Emperor. The two novels together are a wonderful historical-fictional embodiment of Lord Acton’s famous proverb: “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I highly recommend both of these novels.

Rothbard on Man

I found a curious section, almost a side-note, in Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty today:

“And so man, not having innate, instinctive, automatically acquired knowledge of his proper ends, or of the means by which they can be achieved, must learn them, and to learn them he must exercise his powers of observation, abstraction, thought: in short, his reason. Reason is man’s instrument of knowledge and of his very survival; the use and of his mind, the acquisition of knowledge about what is best for him and how he can achieve it, is the uniquely human method of existence and of achievement. And this is uniquely man’s nature; man, as Aristotle pointed out, is the rational animal, or to be more precise, the rational being. Through his reason, the individual man observes both the facts and ways of the external world, and the facts of his own consciousness, including his emotions: in short, he employs both extraspection and introspection.”

I wonder what Rothbard is getting at when he says that “rational being” is a more precise way to encapsulate human nature than “rational animal.” Aristotle’s definition involves, as always, what he perceives to be the proper genus and species of the thing: Man is an animal with a rational soul. Inherent in this are all of the workings of the body and mind. Strip man of ‘animal’ and we lose eating and sleeping, sense perception, pooping, communication with others, and everything else that seems to (a) keep us alive, (b) allow us to perceive and utilize the world around us, and (c) provide the foundation for abstraction and reason.

If we allow Rothbard the qualifier and consider humans as rational beings — that is, rational being qua rational being — we lose the very foundation that Rothbard upholds in the beginning of the paragraph: “And so man, not having innate, instinctive, automatically acquired knowledge of his proper ends, or of the means by which they can be achieved, must learn them, and to learn them he must exercise his powers of observation, abstraction, thought: in short, his reason.”

Perhaps it is the case that a human functioning in a rational manner is “in short” utilizing reason, but even Rothbard would agree that you can’t get to reason, abstraction, thought, etc. without first acquiring raw sense data — without first observing things in some sense.

Perhaps Rothbard meant “the rational being” to be read as “the rational being,” or in other words, “the [only] rational being,” so as to distinguish us from all of the other animals, plants, etc. But this would work only insofar as there are no other beings that have, or could potentially have, reasoning faculties. (Christians, of course, will submit at least a few more candidates for us to consider as ‘rational beings’). Aristotle restricts humanity’s genus to animals — i.e. enlivened organic bodies — because it is metaphysically possible for non-animal entities to exist exercising reason, such as the late Socrates’ rational soul. (Aquinas takes this concept and runs with it).

Or perhaps Rothbard had none of this in mind, and I’m reading into it. Still, it piqued my interest, as any author can do simply by quoting Aristotle and following it with “or, to be more precise. . .” (Aquinas, who is receiving only parenthetical treatment in this post, effectively does this in his commentaries on Aristotle, but usually does so under the guise of ‘what the Philosopher is really saying here is. . .’ rather than ‘this is almost true, but better still is. . .’)

books

I, Claudius by Robert Graves. A marvelous work of historical fiction woven together from the early days of the Roman emperors. Graves uses Claudius as a pair of sane eyes in an increasingly mad Roman world, and all of Rome’s great achievements and flaws are on display. At the beginning of the story, Claudius reflects on a prophecy given to him from the Oracle at Delphi, and its themes are carefully developed by Graves as the stuttering Cl – Cl – Claudius goes from family idiot and obscure historian to Roman Emperor (and eventually god). (I hope to read its sequel, Claudius the God, soon). A wholly satsifying and beautiful work.

On Memory and Recollection by Aristotle. A short tract (~8 pages) in which Aristotle further develops the faculties of the human soul (picking up where De Anima left off). It contains a key passage on abstraction and several helpful perspectives in understanding how it is that one recalls and remembers. As usual, his biology is a bit wanting; nevertheless the work has its moments of fascinating insight (e.g. Why is it that all animals have some kind of memory, yet only humans seem to be able to recollect?)

What Has the Government Done to Our Money? / The Case for a 100% Gold Dollar by Murray N Rothbard. Rothbard’s essays on money, collected in this volume, have been hailed as the greatest introduction to the subject of money ever written (this assessment is made by Austrians, of course!). The work embodies everything that is great about Rotbhard’s style: clear, concise, uncompromising, and well informed. I am now confident that I did not really know what money was until I read this work — shame on our educational system! For a short primer on money, banking, inflation, and (let’s not forget) government intervention in our money, there is probably no better work.