Prima Secundae
Lecture 74: Hope as First of the Irascible Passions

Transcript
================================================================================

The thing loved is had is pleasure, right? When it is not had, the effect is desire or concupiscence. Now, as Augustine says in the 10th book about the Trinity, love is more, what, sensed, right? When indigents who need, right, promise it, right? Whence among all passions of the concubiscible, the more sensible is, what, concubiscence. An account to this from it is the power denominated. Well, maybe it might be even easier to see how it's more known in some way, not just from its being the, what, effect of a cause, right, huh? But from its being more like motion, right? Now, as my teacher, Bill Shakespeare, says, right? Things in motion, sooner catch the eye than what not stirs, right, huh? And as Aristotle says in the 9th book of Wisdom, act comes first from what? Motion, right, huh? Okay? That's why people watch sport games, because it's motion, right? And that's why they watch the movies, because it's motion, right? Motion picture, yeah. And when I was in Quebec, you know, we used to have the newsreels in those days, and they were called des actualités. That's what they were. Well, this is the first sense of act, right, huh? Motion, right, huh? So, desire is more like motion, huh? Pleasure, or delight, is more like resting in the thing, right, huh? And love is, again, not like the motion towards the thing, right? So, desire is more known, because it's more like a, what? Motion. Emotion, yeah, yeah. And in that sense, too, you know, with our reason, right? Why is reasoning, in a sense, more known than what understanding, right? Because it's like emotion, right? Understanding is a stand, it's like a rest, right, huh? It's a discourse. It's like money. Marathon, right? Yeah, yeah. So, I think you could add that to Thomas, huh? As he mentions here, notice what he says in the text of the thing, he says, first, there is a proportion of the object. Secundo movetur ad finum, right? Now one is moved, right? So it's that desire, which is like emotion, right? Tending towards something, right? So motion tends to be what? More known, right? It's like C.S. Lewis kind of says, poetic, you know, God, he's what? He moves so quickly, he's everywhere. Well, it's kind of proportionate to us in a kind of a poetic way, right? Now the second objection was saying that love is a sort of union, right? Well, doesn't that union come after you pursue the object and you're united to it, right, huh? Well, Thomas, of course, sees the distinction, right? To the second it should be said that there is a two-fold union of the love to the lover, right? One is in things, right? Realis, huh? According as there is a conjunction, right, to the thing itself, right? And such a union pertains to joy or pleasure, which follows upon, what? Desire. Another is the, what? Affective union, which is according to aptitude or proportion, right? On account of, insofar as from this someone has an aptitude to another, an inclination, he already partakes in some way of it, huh? And thus, love implies, what? Union. Union, huh? Which kind of union precedes the, what? Motion. Motion, yeah. Yeah. The man pursues the woman because in some way he's attached to her by, what? Love. He likes her, right? Okay? He doesn't attach to Mozart's music, right? Or something, or attach to this food. I wouldn't pursue it, right, huh? Okay? And then pursuing a real union, right, between my ear and Mozart's music, or my tongue and this food I like, huh? You see? So that's a good distinction to what? See, right, huh? You have to see distinction before you can see order, right, huh? But notice the third one, right? He's admitting some truth to the third one, right? And that's the order of what? Intention, right? To the second, to the third, it should be said that pleasure causes love according as it is before in what? Intention. Intention, yeah. So I intend the joy of hearing the music of Mozart. So you have those contrary orders, right, huh? That's what Aristotle often says, you know, what's last intention is first in execution. I first intend to get rid of my headache, then I intend to take aspirin, then I intend to go to the drugstore, and then I start to go to the drugstore, then I get the aspirin, and then I take the aspirin, then I get rid of my headache, right? Yeah. So the order of carrying the thing out, and the intention is just the, what, reverts, huh? That's why we're studying logic, right? That's the last intention, the last thing I intend to study is logic. That's the first thing I study, right? Because it's the tool for all of that, right? Okay. Same way, you know, I'm a lover of wisdom, so wisdom is first in my, what? Yeah, yeah. It's kind of marvelous, man. Of all the two greatest minds up there were Charles Deconic and Maurice Dion, right? My senior Maurice Dion. And Deconic always taught, what, natural philosophy, and Dion taught logic or something along those lines, you know? And one of them taught metaphysics. But they wanted to emphasize, you know, that you have to learn these things, what, first, right? Well. Yeah, yeah. That's why I first started, you know, when I got to that natural theology course, right? And Thomas is arguing that God is unchangeable, and he argues from what he's shown before that he's simple, right? But that's what I learned in the first book of natural hearing, the first book of the physics, that whatever moves is composed, right? And Aristotle makes it all to get it clear, right? So you have the, in my mind, from natural philosophy, the statement, everything that moves is composed. Then from the arguments and the question on the simplicity of God, God is not composed. Therefore, you know, yeah, you see, if I didn't have the natural philosophy, it wasn't so clear, I wouldn't be able to follow that argument, right? To the times, I'm just teaching how to read Thomas, he says. Humble, you know. And he would lecture, you know, and then he'd kind of, you know, talk about Brie Russell or some other guy's difficulty. It could seem difficult as the ancient Greek hand that Aristotle was solving, you know? Well, so, you know how they say, you know, if you don't know history, you have to repeat three mistakes. Well, it's something like that, too. If you don't know the first philosophies, you make the same mistake again and again, and over and over again. So it's good to learn how to read Aristotle, but you need Thomas to help you read Aristotle, huh? I told you at the time, one of the philosophies there is going off in the text of the fifth book of wisdom there, and the word beginning, right, huh? And when she dances, look what Thomas says, you know? He's obviously misunderstanding, right? Aristotle, he gives the second sense there of beginning, right, huh? The first sense of beginning is the beginning of the road, right, huh? And the second sense of beginning is where you might begin because you're somewhere along the road, right? Okay, so when I go to Boston, the road I take to Boston, I don't go to the beginning of the road, you go to Boston. It's a waste of time, right? The beginning is where I pick up the highway, right, huh? Okay. And Aristotle compares that to what takes place in knowing, right? We don't always begin from the beginning of the thing, but from what is most known to us, right? Whereas he was confusing what Aristotle was giving a comparison, I like this, as if that's what he's talking about, that second sense, right? You know? Well, it's clear, you know, it's not until what to be like the fifth sense, right, what he's talking about. Well, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's clear, you know, it's They're getting annoying, you know, so, it's understanding the whole text, right? Look what Thomas said, you know? And, you know, I think it must be the answer to that thing about Kajitian, you know, when he tried to comment on Aristotle directly, you know, he started to go off, you know? And he should have confined himself to comment on Thomas, right? It's more proportioned to us. You know, you're illuminated by the angel right above you, right? If you're an angel. And the one above him would be too elevated for you, right? So you have to proportion these things down. We had something like that, that Aristotle went to office and so on, right? And maybe you need somebody like De Kahnik or Dion to learn how to be Thomas, right? Then you learn how to be Aristotle and so on, huh? I was noticing there in the very beginning there of the physics there, where Merbicki translates the Greek text there, scientia, twice, you know, use the word scientia twice. In the Greek text, the word is methodos, and they're going to be steaming, right? Aristotle is using them kind of convertibly there, perhaps, you know, so it's not so much, but sometimes it is important to see that, you know? Sometimes he just, usually he translates methodos, scientia, but sometimes he translates it, he just translirates it as methodos, makes a Greek, a Latin word out of it, you know, Merbicki. He's a very good translator, but you've got to see what he's saying there. Okay, so now you see where love is, right, huh? Why I'm a lover of wisdom, right? Why I'm named from that, huh? Who does Aristotle compare to the philosopher there when he's talking about wonder in the premium? Do you remember that? Say the question again. Who does he compare to the philosopher when he's talking about wonder there? Not the poet, but the philomuthos, right? The lover of plots. Yeah, the lover of fiction or the lover of plots, right? But he's a philomuthos, right? So if you're a lover of fiction, right, huh? But you're being named again from the law, right? That being, say, a man who enjoys fiction, that's true, right? But he's called there philomuthos, huh? Philomuthos is something like a philosopher, I would say, because in muthos, the myth is composed of what wonders, right, huh? Even if you take muthos as being kind of fairy tale, we'd say, you know, the wonder of the child up, you know, glass mountain, you know. How do you climb the glass mountain? So on. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Now we go to what is first among the passions of the, what, irascible, right? To the third one proceeds thus. It seems that spes, hope, is not first among the passions of the, what, irascible. Now notice this text here. He's talking about the passions here, right? But you know when you take the names of passions and carry them forward to the, what, will, right? And sometimes even to the habits of the will and so on. And we have, among the theological virtues, you have caritas, agape, which is to love, right? And you have, what, hope, yeah, and so on. It's a little, this prepares in a remote way, right, for seeing why those should be so principled, right? You know, why should the, is there any connection between the fact that the principle, the first passion of the concubiscible and the first passion of the irascible are love and hope, right? And that the theological virtues, you know, that are in the will, right? One is named from love and the other from hope, right? You know, there's some connection between those two, right? To the third one goes forward thus. It seems that hope is not the first among the passions of the irascible. I could help to think about this when you're, we look at the text at the end of the seventh book about places there. And Aristotle is showing that in all these problems, right, it's easier to, what, destroy than to establish. And there's only one little exception there, which is kind of minor, you know, but, you know, it's all hoping, right, huh? I'm saying, you know, Thomas, you know, sometimes in this good question, you may have 20 objections to the truth, right? So it's easier to attack a parent in the truth. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's something that reminded me of what he's saying there, you know, huh? Yeah. Than to defend it, huh? You've got to answer 20 objections, right? You know, when those objections get through, you're finished. Just when you can't answer, right, huh? I told you about the student I had when I was teaching in St. Mary's, you know, come in, pose an objection, you know, being in class, you know. And I'd have heard all these things, you know, all these objections, you know, so I'd answer it nicely, you know, and so on, you know. And I could see it the way you go, just, you know, kind of relax like this, you have to answer like that, you know. I mean, he told me one time after the chorus sometime, and he thought, you know, it's nice when you have me today, you know. And, well, you know, it's kind of marvelous to read Thomas, you know, enough, you know, you meet, you know, more objections than people can think of, you know. And so you're already kind of prepared for the objection, right? And notice he has a similar objection like he had the first one in the, against love, right? The irascible is named from what? Anger. Anger, right? Anger. But, getting quoting Aristotle, denominatio fieta putziori, okay, from the more potent one, huh? It seems then that anger is putzior, more potent, and before, you know. What? Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Bad, difficult to avoid, right? If you think you might not be able to avoid it, you know, then you have what? Fear, right? But if you think you can easily overcome it, right, then your prize is what? Boldness, right? My friend Jim Frantzak, right? He likes Golden Glove Boxers, you know? One time I had been playing football. They gave me the ball to run. It was just to score an extra point. It was a short run. They opened up a big hole for me, and there's this little pipsqueak of a guy standing there. And I said, oh, no, run right over. Boom! No problem. But if it was a big, heavy guy, I might have had my second thoughts, you know, going another way. Yeah, yeah. We'd go up to the playground there and play a little tackle football, you know? Not really, they could have been hurt easily, but the big guys coming through the center, there, you know, I determined to stop them, you know? All the other guys are fleeing, you know, and I'd tackle and bring them down, you know? For luck, I was dislocated. My brother-in-law in high school, he went out, you know, to play football, you know, and first practice, they got dislocated shoulders, so for the rest, he was just on the running team, you know? He never made it to a football team, but it's easy to get your shoulder, I guess, dislocated, and other things, huh? But I had a little bit of, what, audacity there, right? Boldness, right? Bring this guy down, not to let him go through. You're the center of the line here. We played with a lot of equipment, you know? You had kids, you know, that's how good kids did, you know? Most of the time we just played touch football, you know, but this time we played tackle football, you know, I had a golden part there. And he says, The passion whose object is the good, to wit, hope and despair are naturally before the passion whose object is the bad, right? That's the thing you talked about before, right? That love, desire, and what? Joy are naturally before hate and aversion and sadness, yeah, because the good is before naturally the bad. You see that, you know, the, the, which is more principle, you know, the love of happiness or the hatred of misery. Yeah. If you didn't love happiness, you wouldn't hate misery, would you? Do you love friendship, huh? Then you hate loneliness or something like that, right? Do you know? Okay. So they're naturally before the passions whose object is the bad, to wit, boldness and, what? Fear, right, huh? Thus, nevertheless, that hope is, what? Before desperation, huh? Why? Because hope is a motion towards the good, according to the very notion of the good, of which, whose notion is that it would be, what? Attractive, right, huh? And, therefore, there's motion in the good, per se, right, huh? By desperation, it's kind of accidental. It's a resealing from the good, right, huh? Which doesn't belong to the good, according as it is good, but according to something other, which is the word per accident, right? So, you know, in the story of the fox, right, he's jumping to meet the grapes, right? And it's, they're good, and he wants them, but they're a difficult good because they're so above him, right? He keeps them jumping, and he's getting more and more tarry, but he still can't reach the grapes, right? In the funny sense that he probably would, you know, probably sell her anyway, you know? I actually prefer that to the guy. He wants a girl, you know, but he can't get her, or somebody else is more clever to get her, you know? And so, he says, well, she'd be spoiled anyway, you know? She didn't pursue, you know? But, I mean, it's more natural to, what? Pursue the good, right? Than to give up the good, right? So, the good is more per se. I mean, hope is more per se. A great good subject, and despair is kind of what? A kind of gratitude, right? You think you can't overcome difficulty, right? It's basically a good difficult to achieve, right? It's not difficulty good to achieve, but a good difficult to achieve. Okay. And for the same reason now. Notice, huh? How the order there is changing now, right? Because, you know, when he first spoke of spes and desperatio, and adacia and timor, right? Well, in some way, adacia is like spes insofar as it goes towards the object, right? Spes goes towards the good, and boldness goes towards the bad, right? Then get rid of it, huh? But now, what's more fundamental, though? See? Because the bad, naturally, is what? Repulsive, right, huh? Okay? So, that she goes on to say, and for the same reason, right? Proportionally. Timor, since it is a receding from the bad, right? Is naturally prior, then, what? Boldness, right? Where you're actually pursuing bad, right, huh? You got on the battlefield, fear is more natural than boldness, right, huh? You know? And, you know, I see that even, I get through reading the biography of Washington, you know? But, I mean, that was part of the word of the day, you know? Anybody who, of course, you know, because he praises them and how brave they are, you know? But anybody who is, you know, neglecting his duty, you know, will be shocked, right? You know? That's what they say. And that's the way it ranges to go forward, you know? The guy behind you. You're going to be a dead coward, you might as well, you know, a dead hero, right? You know? Yeah. You know? But your family will get more money, I suppose, if you're a dead hero than if you're a dead coward. You'll go down, remember, remember, and then you might as well get shocked by the enemy. Yeah. But there's a lot of places on Shakespeare, too, in the balance scene, you know? Whether the man has come out the wound in front or back. If you come out the wound in the back, that's a bad sign, you know? You're running away from a thing, right? So that, what? That, however, hope and despair are naturally, what, before fear and audacity. From this it manifests that the desire for the good is a reason wherefore one avoids the, what? Bad. Bad, huh? Okay? In the two teams playing, the two players, the teams are, what? Desireous for, what? Victory, right, huh? So there, so also, hope and despair are the ratio of timorous and audacity, right? For boldness falls upon the hope of, what? Victory. Victory, right, huh? And fear follows the, what? Desperation of coming, right? But anger falls upon boldness, right? For no one, what? Gets angry, desiring revenge, unless he, what? Dears to vindicate himself, right? According to this, Avicenna says in the Sixth Book of Natural Things, right? I was telling Warren this morning the other time on the phone, I was saying how, I'm reading the sentences there right now a little bit, and often Avicenna comes up, you know, and sometimes Thomas, you know, corrects the mistake of Avicenna, but a lot of things he takes as being good in Avicenna, right? He goes with a lot of things. And Warren is saying he's down there and giving his talks down in Argentina there, you know, some student comes up, you know, and he, you know, he's a Muslim, right? And they tell us like the Muslim, oh, yes, he thought highly of that. Avicenna and Avicenna, he takes three things from them. He does correct them sometimes, I don't think. So they were way happy. I guess, you know, now that kind of card, you know, Avicenna and Avicenna are just heretics, you know, by the Muslims. Hmm. Okay. Thus, therefore, it is clear that hope is the first among all the passions, what? Of the irascible. And if the order of all the passions, according to the road of, what, generation, we, what, wish to know, right, huh? First there occurs love and, what, hate, huh? Or weaker words like and dislike, right? Secondly, desire and turning away from them, right, flight from them. Third, hope and, what, desperation. Fourth, fear and, what, boldness. Third, fear and, what, boldness. Fifth, anger, sixth and last, joy, and what? Sadness. Which followed upon all the passions, as Aristotle says, in the second book of the Ethics. Thomas would be looking before and after, right? What did he say? Thus, nevertheless, that love is also what? Before heat, right? And desire before flight, and hope before what? Desperation, and fear before audacity, and joy before sadness, as can be gathered from the things for sadness. Now, again, in Thomas' reply to the first objection, which is similar to the first objection, we name things from what's more potent. Again, he talks about cause and effect there. To the first, therefore, it should be said that because anger is caused from the other passions, has an effect from receding causes. Therefore, from it is where the more manifest, the potency is denominated, right? I think you could also say in terms as being, what, a more manifest motion, right, huh? Okay. And I was talking about the metaphor there of Shakespeare, right? Where he says, and as you like it, they're in the very wrath of love, right? Clubs cannot part them, right? You see? So there's certain similarity between anger and concubiscence, right? And so much that Shakespeare can give it that metaphor, right? And when Thomas takes up, you know, the emotions, I mean, the virtues and the secundus, he attaches to the principle of virtues, prudence and fortitude and justice and fortitude and temperance, right? Other virtues that have the mode of that one, but in a different matter or a different passion. So the virtue that moderates, what, anger, right? Which you might call mildness, right? Something called meekness, but I think mildness is a better word. Is attached to, what, temperance, right, huh? So just as temperance moderates a violent, what, you know, vehement emotion, you know, desire for a sense of pleasure, right, huh? Whether it be food or drink or sex, some of this sort. So mildness is moderating a violent or vehement thing, anger, right, huh? And, you know, you can see the newspaper every day, right, huh? People are always getting into trouble because of concubiscence, right? They pursued a woman or they drank too much, you know? Or they got angry and they hit somebody or go over them or did something like that, right, huh? But these are violent emotions, you know, vehement, you know, emotions. And they have to be what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's why, you know, they say, I used to say, men drink, you know, huh? Their reason, of course, for the emotions is weakened, right, huh? And some men who are inclined to concubiscence are going to get amorous, right? And the other men who are more irascible in nature, they get angry, yeah. And they tend to, you know. That's right. Yeah, yeah. So, but if those are strong emotions and involving, you know, bodily change and so on, then they're going to be more known to us, right? So it seems to be, you say, no more abstractly than they could, that answer the objection, right? You know, it's an effect, right, huh? It seems even more clear to me, at least, I don't know, that the motion is very clear, right, huh? So when a man gets angry, you can kind of, easy to tell, right, huh? You can kind of tell somebody's afraid, but more quickly you can tell if he's angry, right? Don't you think so? Mm-hmm. Body change going on in the way he's behaving, you know? In his face. Yeah. Now, in regard to the second objection here about departing from something and so on, to the second should be said that the arduous is not the reason for, what, acceding to something or desiring it, but rather the fundamental object, which is the good, right? And therefore hope, which directly regards the, what, good, is before. Although audacity sometimes is for something more, what, arduous or even anger in some cases, right? The boldness to fight, right, might be more difficult, right? But you're, again, approaching something bad, which is not, per se, to be approached, right? Or to be avoided, huh? He talks about fear. Fear makes him take counsel, right? It's not too severe. A politician has to run scared, you see? Not a very good life, you can think of it. And again, the third one, he's making the same point about the good being before. To the third, it should be said that desire first, in per se, is moved towards, what? The good. As in its proper object, right? And from this is caused that it recedes from the bad, huh? For the emotion of the appetitive part is proportioned, not to the natural emotion, but to the intention of nature, which before intends the end, then it intends the emotion of the contrary, which is not sought except an account to attain the end of it. Well, notice, I'm called a lover of, what? Wisdom, right? Why am I called a lover of wisdom and not a hater of folly? Or why is it said that, as the great Socrates says in the dialogue, that the attaters, right, that wonder is the beginning of philosophy, right? There's how it talks about men begin to philosophize out of wonder, right? You know? Why do they say that? Rather than say the philosophy begin in the flight from error, right? Trying to escape error. That's important to Socrates, too, right? Because he's thought that most men think they know what they don't know, right? I remember one year I had a sabbatical and I was talking about looking to error, you know, mistakes, you know? So, but why do I want to avoid error, right? Truth. Yeah, yeah. It's more fundamental, in a sense, to want to know the truth than to avoid error, right? And if I didn't want to know the truth, but I really care about avoiding error. That's what Augustine said, he sort of manifested that everyone loves the truth. He says, well, if somebody's not sure if he loves the truth, ask him if he likes to be deceived. Yeah, yeah. Don't be able to be deceived. No. Maybe it'd be kind of funny to say, you know, I want truth because I want to avoid error. You know, it doesn't make sense, right? Yeah. Or, I want pleasure because I want to avoid pain. You see, if I want pleasure, I can't have pleasure if pain's getting in the way, right? So, I want to avoid pain because I want pleasure. Take a little break here now before we do that.