Imagine you’re a Blackfeet kid growing up in the windswept pastures twenty miles east of Midland, with no other Blackfeet around. Like Conan the Wanderer, -the Adventurer, -the Outcast, I was out in the trackless wastelands, far from civilization. The way I saw it, we’d come up the same. Conan’s homeland of Cimmeria was high and lonely? From our back porch in West Texas, I couldn’t see a single light. Cimmeria was packed with formative dangers? Every third step I took, I found myself entangled in barbed wire or jumping back from a rattlesnake. And when I mapped Cimmeria—the land Conan spent decades away from—onto my world, it could have been Montana, where the Blackfeet are.
A Blackfoot Looks at Conan
His experience was very similar.
For some values of "free"
A Princeton professor says he “envision[s] a free speech and academic discourse that is flexed to one specific aim, and that aim is the promotion of social justice, and an anti-racist social justice at that.”
Princeton presumably has some bright people on its faculty, so they should be able to work out that speech and academic discourse aren't particularly free if they're "flexed to one specific aim." He's free to flex his own speech toward that aim, of course. The problem arises when he "flexes" everyone else's to the same rigid direction.
I wouldn't censor this dolt, of course. I confine myself to ridiculing him. I'd even debate him if he'd up his intellectual game, starting with figuring out what words mean. "Flexing to an aim" is a seriously weird form of discourse.
Aquinas on Anger, Fin
This is the last article on anger, and I'm going to go through it a little differently because I want to talk about the Greek a bit. It is a technical question on the psychology, to whit, are the species of anger correctly assigned?
Here are the objections.
Objection 1. It would seem that Damascene (De Fide Orth. ii, 16) unsuitably assigns three species of anger—"wrath," "ill-will" and "rancor." For no genus derives its specific differences from accidents. But these three are diversified in respect of an accident: because "the beginning of the movement of anger is called wrath cholos, if anger continue it is called ill-will menis; while rancor kotos is anger waiting for an opportunity of vengeance." Therefore these are not different species of anger.
Note that this middle species, menis, is the term Homer used for the wrath of Achilles. I suppose the Trojans should be glad they didn't see his kotos.
To say that no species derives its specific differences from accidents is to say that all species differences are substantial. Aristotle divided the world into substances and attributes. A substance, classically, is the kind of thing that can reproduce itself -- man, horse, dog, but somehow also by extension stone, Accidents are qualities these substantial things have that they might not have had: a big stone, a grey stone, a buried stone. So what this objection is saying is that it's only accidental that an anger has 'just begun,' or 'has continued a while.' We'll see how Aquinas responds.
Objection 2. Further, Cicero says (De Quaest. Tusc. iv, 9) that "excandescentia [irascibility] is what the Greeks call thymosis, and is a kind of anger that arises and subsides intermittently"; while according to Damascene thymosis, is the same as the Greek kotos [rancor]. Therefore kotos does not bide its time for taking vengeance, but in course of time spends itself.
The Greek thymos is often translated as "spiritedness." Plato gives it as one of the three parts of the soul, below reason but above the base inclinations. He assigns it as the chief attribute of the warrior "Guardian" class in his ideal city, ruling over base people but being ruled and directed by those few who are guided chiefly by reason.
The -is is similar to the -icitis that you get in a medical diagnosis. Your appendix is a good thing, or at least not a bad one; appendicitis is a diseased condition of the organ. It is proper to be spirited; but anger is a diseased form.
Objection 3. Further, Gregory (Moral. xxi, 4) gives three degrees of anger, namely, "anger without utterance, anger with utterance, and anger with perfection of speech," corresponding to the three degrees mentioned by Our Lord (Matthew 5:22): "Whosoever is angry with his brother" [thus implying "anger without utterance"], and then, "whosoever shall say to his brother, 'Raca'" [implying "anger with utterance yet without full expression"], and lastly, "whosoever shall say 'Thou fool'" [where we have "perfection of speech"]. Therefore Damascene's division is imperfect, since it takes no account of utterance.
OK. Those are the objections. What does Aquinas say about them? He says that the division is correctly given, citing Aristotle as an authority to reinforce some Christian authorities. He replies to each of the objections in technical ways.
These questions of psychology aren't very interesting: 'how is joy divided into technical parts?' I can't get very excited about it, but read it if you'd like and ask questions if you'd enjoy. The Greek, though, is pretty fun.
More wildlife
My same lurking neighbor caught an excellent portrait of one of the three alligators who live in our pond. This one's getting big. He stays politely in his area and has never menaced our cats or dogs, thank goodness.
Ecclesia
On Palm Sunday, an etymological reflection of just how important the Ancient Greek world was to the Church. Both of the leading terms still used today derive from Greek, not Latin or Germanic forms — nor Aramaic. So too “Basilica,” not as common but used widely for very important churches.
I would have told you that ‘kirk” was Germanic, being a Scots word related to “church” but derived from interaction with the Scandinavians (cf. Iceland). And it is, but based on an even older word derived from the Greek.
Aquinas on Anger, VIII
I really wanted to get to Article VII because Aristotle here is quoted saying something that I think is badly argued. The question of the article is whether we can, or can't, have anger without having a relationship of justice with the object of our anger.
I answer that, As stated above (Article 6), anger desires evil as being a means of just vengeance.
This is a real problem, but we'll roll with it for now. A relationship of justice between you and whatever you're angry at (or vice versa) would seem to need to exist, because if there were no justice relationship you would presumably not be angry at having justice violated. That part is straightforward.
But what is a 'justice relationship'? Aristotle and I disagree about where justice arises in human relationships. For Aristotle it appears to arise at the level of politics, not at the level of family or individual relationships as between father and son. Indeed, Aquinas quotes him saying that in this article: "Further, "there is no justice towards oneself . . . nor is there justice towards one's own" (Ethic. v, 6)."
So here's what Aristotle says at Aquinas' 'link' to the EN:
For justice exists only between men whose mutual relations are governed by law; and law exists for men between whom there is injustice; for legal justice is the discrimination of the just and the unjust. And between men between whom there is injustice there is also unjust action (though there is not injustice between all between whom there is unjust action), and this is assigning too much to oneself of things good in themselves and too little of things evil in themselves. This is why we do not allow a man to rule, but rational principle, because a man behaves thus in his own interests and becomes a tyrant. The magistrate on the other hand is the guardian of justice, and, if of justice, then of equality also. And since he is assumed to have no more than his share, if he is just (for he does not assign to himself more of what is good in itself, unless such a share is proportional to his merits-so that it is for others that he labours, and it is for this reason that men, as we stated previously, say that justice is 'another's good'), therefore a reward must be given him, and this is honour and privilege; but those for whom such things are not enough become tyrants.
The justice of a master and that of a father are not the same as the justice of citizens, though they are like it; for there can be no injustice in the unqualified sense towards thing that are one's own, but a man's chattel, and his child until it reaches a certain age and sets up for itself, are as it were part of himself, and no one chooses to hurt himself (for which reason there can be no injustice towards oneself). Therefore the justice or injustice of citizens is not manifested in these relations; for it was as we saw according to law, and between people naturally subject to law, and these as we saw' are people who have an equal share in ruling and being ruled. Hence justice can more truly be manifested towards a wife than towards children and chattels, for the former is household justice; but even this is different from political justice.
We should note immediately that most Americans -- at least -- would object to the formulation that a master cannot be unjust to his slave because the slave belongs to him. Most of us would argue that the master is already being unjust to the slave by pretending to own him. The Bible speaks of slavery a great deal, and does not categorically reject it as we; but in Aquinas' day the Church had moved to ban the practice between Christians as fundamentally unjust given the special equality Christians had as brother sons of God.
Since you were supposed to try to save souls, if you encountered non-Christians you were supposed to convert them rather than enslave them.
Also, I note that it is only at the level of politics coming to be that this kind of injustice is possible. There might be a natural capacity to enslave another, but there can't be a natural right to do it because the other has the same nature as you: a rational human being. If you have natural rights to freedom, he must as well. It is only the rise of positive law that creates this kind of injustice, and enshrines a 'right' to do this as a master and owner rather than just another free man.
Therefore, I submit that Aristotle is wrong about where the justice relationship properly arises: that it arises not at the political level, but at the level of personal relationships. These are also, sadly, often the place where we most regularly and intensely experience anger. We may be unjust to each other there, too; but at least we do not have armies and towers and systems of justice standing over us and telling us that we must submit to a law that renders us a slave.
But set that aside: would we accept that a father cannot be unjust to his children? We would not accept that. There are many duties we think a father owes to his children, and failure to provide those things is an act of injustice. If you starve your children rather than feeding them, that is unjust. If you drink up the family wealth, you have acted unjustly and deprived your young sons of the standing they had a reason to hope to have when they became adults and masters of themselves.
For the purpose of the consequences of this bad argument, it is certainly not true that you cannot be angry with your children -- which would follow if we accepted Aristotle's argument. Since you cannot have a justice relationship with them -- and cannot be unjust to 'your own' -- it would therefore be impossible to be angry with them. This is manifestly untrue. I daresay no parent has ever raised a child without being angry at them, and vice versa.
It is also not true, as Aristotle says and Aquinas endorses, that you cannot be angry with the dead.
"...according to the Philosopher (Rhet. ii, 3), 'it is impossible to be angry with insensible things, or with the dead': both because they feel no pain, which is, above all, what the angry man seeks in those with whom he is angry: and because there is no question of vengeance on them, since they can do us no harm."
This is another area disproven by human experience. Many times we are angry with the dead; although, unlike Aristotle, we are not obligated to imagine them as being free from all possibility of vengeance or pain. Yet even if we do so imagine them, often we are angry at them because of their tragic choices, and the harm and injustice they have done. This can certainly last well beyond the fact of their death.
In any case, this article strikes me as going wrong in a number of places. It relies on one of Aristotle's mistakes -- he was human, however great his mind, and made a few. That leads to bad consequences for our understanding.
Aquinas on Anger, VII
Article VI says that "anger desires evil." That is a very strange thing for Aristotle to say, because he defined the good in terms of desire: the good is what all things desire. (Aquinas followed him, and Avicenna, in the first part of the Summa which concerns the nature of God and thus goodness itself.)
I answer that, Since goodness is that which all things desire, and since this has the aspect of an end, it is clear that goodness implies the aspect of an end.... Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally; for they are based upon the same thing, namely, the form; and consequently goodness is praised as beauty. But they differ logically, for goodness properly relates to the appetite (goodness being what all things desire); and therefore it has the aspect of an end (the appetite being a kind of movement towards a thing).
So this is a real problem, because now evil is the object of desire -- and therefore a good to be pursued. But that can't be, Aquinas has already told us.
No being can be spoken of as evil, formally as being, but only so far as it lacks being. Thus a man is said to be evil, because he lacks some virtue; and an eye is said to be evil, because it lacks the power to see well.
This is Augustine's point, which we were just discussing recently, and a place where Aquinas and Aristotle differ. Evil properly speaking can't exist for Aquinas; it is only a privation or a lack of something desirable, something beautiful, i.e. something good. To say that anger desires the lack of something desirable does not make sense.
It especially does not make sense given that anger is associated here with justice, and has been said to be partially governed by reason and mercy. Justice is a good, not an evil. Injustice is an evil, because it is the lack of something desirable, i.e. justice.
Human will, unlike God's, can be disordered and therefore sinful. If what anger desires is evil, though, it is very basically and radically disordered -- which is the opposite of what Aquinas has been arguing heretofore.
Aquinas on Anger, VI
Article V looks very dense, but its easy to sketch. The question is whether desire or anger is more natural to man. Aquinas references Aristotle's Physics II to say that things are 'natural' to us if they are things that arise from our own nature. This is Aristotle's answer to why things move in different ways: because they have different natures. If you drop a stone, which has the nature of earth, it will move toward the earth. If you pour out a bucket of water, which has the nature of water, it will move to a middle position -- the stone would fall through the lake, but the water will join it. Air naturally sits above them, and fire rises upwards.
And if you turn loose of a bird, it will move through the air wherever it wants -- because it is free to follow its animal nature, and thus to move where it wants to move; but it will fly instead of crawling because of its specific nature, which is that of a bird rather than simply an animal generally.
Desire is more natural in the general nature of man and all animals; all things want what they desire, and they desire the goods that allow them to continue their existence and that of their species. But specific creatures have specific natures too. Man's is that of a rational animal. Thus, anger -- which responds 'somewhat' to reason -- is more natural to him than desire.
However, by the same argument reason is more proper to him yet; anger must be governed by reason to be fully in accord with his nature.
“Rich kids can always get Algebra or Calculus”
On Substack, Bari Weiss sums up the week's craziness, including California's decision to trap all 8th graders in pre-algebra in the interest of the usual murky goals. She quotes Freddie DeBoer's observation that families with extra cash will just hire tutors, so this equity-inclusion push will consign only the smart poor kids to the needlessly crummy education track. The truth is, though, that these days any kids can get decent algebra or calculus instruction with or without a tutor. Even the poor kids have some kind of access to the internet, where the educational resources are nearly endless. Any kid that was likely to be able to pick up calculus from high school lectures will be able to get it from internet lectures, if not from a book. You don't even have to be Isaac Newton, who, when he found he lacked this essential tool, simply created it during one of the Western World's more famous lockdowns.On the other hand, the way things are going, will there still be colleges where you can go anywhere with higher math? I'd love to see aspiring young workers skip the whole thing, learn the math on their own, and get jobs in STEM industry, minus the political indoctrination.The lockdown link by the way, is a windy attempt to explain why no one should feel bad about not doing world-changing work during lockdown because privilege or something. The problem certainly isn't just that we lack a one-in-a-billion talent! Probably any of us could have pulled it off if we had a Universal Basic Income and some domestic servants.
Aquinas on Anger, V
I have time for a second round of this today, and I find I'm warming to the subject. So, Article 4: Does Anger require an act of reason? Passions usually don't, because --as mentioned -- they were thought to be things that you experience passively. They come upon you, and you experience them.
Anger seems to be a passion, and thus it shouldn't require an act of reason. If that were true, it means several important things in the Aristotelian system. Most crucially, it means it is a lower thing that is more animal than human (this is raised directly in the article). Reason is the human quality; we share many sensations and passions with animals, but they were not thought to share our access to the order of reason. (This was held to be true through the Modern era, which in philosophy means the 18th century. There are strong reasons to doubt it now; but see the reply to objection 2, where even Aquinas creates some doubt.)
Aquinas quotes Aristotle's discussion to show that anger is at least amenable to reason.
...anger is a desire for vengeance. Now vengeance implies a comparison between the punishment to be inflicted and the hurt done; wherefore the Philosopher says (Ethic. vii, 6) that "anger, as if it had drawn the inference that it ought to quarrel with such a person, is therefore immediately exasperated." Now to compare and to draw an inference is an act of reason. Therefore anger, in a fashion, requires an act of reason.
That's a funny argument for Aristotelian psychology. Romantic love, the most canonical of passions, also seems to be amenable to reason in that way. You can (and we all do) reason about people you've fallen in love with, and if it's a really bad idea, you can often decide not to pursue your love. It doesn't make as good a novel, but it happens every day.
The answer to that objection is 'reply to objection one.' Aquinas has a part of the rational soul that was absent in Aristotle. The will -- which is Biblical and Christian rather than ancient Greek -- allows human beings to subject even their passions to reason. In that way it improves and perfects even the strongest passions, by making them subject to rational thought.
This cuts against the idea that anger and vengeance are per se good, however: if God gave you the capacity to moderate these feelings with reason, and if (as Aristotle had argued, and Aquinas agrees) reason is a higher faculty than sensitive emotions, then it is only proper to be angry if and insofar as reason agrees with anger. But reason is not a passion, but an activity; and it is not irrational, but rational by nature. A human being was given the faculty for a good cause, and it isn't wrong to experience anger or even to act upon it. Yet we see here why we are morally obligated to subject any sort of anger or desire for vengeance to our rational nature.
Or, I suppose, we can go to Confession. As Captain Thomas Bartholomew Red said, "What do you think Confession's for?" That line, from a very immoral man's film about the very immoral business of piracy, always struck me as intensely pragmatically wise.
Aquinas on Anger, IV
This has been a deeply profitable, honorable and honest discussion which is almost entirely unlike the kind of useless talk we have so much of. Good for you.
Article 3 gets us even into deeper Yoda territory: anger leads to hate, we are warned specifically in the second objection. It is a kind of desire, a longing of the sort that often leads to damnation. It mixes with sorrow, which is not itself bad -- it can sometimes be a very worthy emotion -- but how brightly that contrasts with the discussion of anger's beauty.
Aquinas takes a bold strategy here: he simply makes a division. "On the contrary, The concupiscible is distinct from the irascible faculty. If, therefore, anger were in the concupiscible power, the irascible would not take its name from it."
That is to say, anger is too pure to be a kind of desire because anger is its own thing. And that's probably right. It ought to be, I guess, since it's included in the doctrine of the largest faith in human history. It's been true enough that we've accepted that argument for nigh a thousand years.
He actually gives more than a bald assertion. It's rooted in Aristotelian psychology, which you can give as much weight or not as you prefer.
"I answer that, As stated above (I-II:23:1), the passions of the irascible part differ from the passions of the concupiscible faculty, in that the objects of the concupiscible passions are good and evil absolutely considered, whereas the objects of the irascible passions are good and evil in a certain elevation or arduousness. Now it has been stated (Article 2) that anger regards two objects: viz. the vengeance that it seeks; and the person on whom it seeks vengeance; and in respect of both, anger requires a certain arduousness: for the movement of anger does not arise, unless there be some magnitude about both these objects; since "we make no ado about things that are naught or very minute," as the Philosopher observes (Rhet. ii, 2). It is therefore evident that anger is not in the concupiscible, but in the irascible faculty."
That may be hard to follow. Here's a helpful analogy, I hope: I said something very similar in the comments to the post on 1883. Yellowstone is like desire, what Aquinas is calling the 'concupiscible passions.' Yellowstone is about a man who loves his home, and wants to maintain it. Ultimately it means a lot to him, but in the end -- as people keep pointing out to him -- if he loses it won't be that bad. He'd just have to sell the land for a lot of money, and could go do something very similar somewhere else like Oklahoma.
1883 is high art. It's the best thing I've seen in years. 'The irascible passions are good and evil in a certain elevation or arduousness,' that's how Aquinas puts it. It's not just whether you cowboy here or there; it's life and death, good and evil, love and hate, the very highest things we know how to want as human beings. For Aquinas, that's so different from things like mere sexual passion as to be categorically different. It's literally not the same thing at all.
Snowfall
What we often call The Blizzard of ‘93 came in April, so it’s not like I have never see this before. I’ve seen it once.
1883
I am only a few episodes into this, but I cannot recommend it strongly enough. It’s a work of real, substantial beauty.
Passacaglia
That’s not a lute, exactly. It’s a theorbo, arguably the most beautiful musical instrument ever made by the hands of man. Almost the most beautiful instrument simpliciter, excepting only the sword.
Aquinas on Anger, III
I'm going to move on to the second article: whether the object of anger is good or evil. It seems like anger is a bad thing; certainly our popular culture claims that it leads in bad directions.
Aquinas says that's wrong. The argument he give is striking: "Augustine says (Confess. ii, 6) that "anger craves for revenge." But the desire for revenge is a desire for something good: since revenge belongs to justice. Therefore the object of anger is good."
Is that right? Is revenge good? You have here the authority of two canonized saints that it is.
You know, I'm just going to stop there for today. That's already plenty to discuss.
Voice of reason?
I'm less skeptical than many on the right about Ukraine, so Col. Douglas MacGregor is saying things in this interview that I don't like hearing. Nevertheless he's worth listening to. Obviously he has many views about the Trump and Biden administrations that line up very closely with my own prejudices.
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