Euphuia, discernment, and Aquinas' Plato-Aristotle option regarding knowing as identity

This has to do with the question, how did Aquinas know he had to choose Aristotle's theorem of knowing as identity over Plato's theorem of knowing as confrontation. (See also my Wisdom Epistemology article somewhere...). Pat Bryne, in his International Lonergan Workshop Jerusalem contribution, has something very useful on the point, in fact, he sheds great light on the matter, when he notes that for Aristotle, dialectic alone was not enough; something called EUPHUIA was needed, which can perhaps be translated as discernment. 

Question to Pat Byrne:

when Thomas makes a choice between Plato and Aristotle, between knowledge as confrontation and knowledge as identity, is he exercising euphuia? if he is, then your paper is casting wonderful light on what has been a little question for me for several years...

Pat Byrne's reply, 4 april 2015:

     As for Thomas’s choice between Plato and Aristotle, between knowledge as confrontation and knowledge as identity, that is a question beyond my expertise, but it sounds right. Strictly speaking, what Aristotle means by euphoria should be preceded by a meticulous dialectical analysis. That would mean that Aquinas himself should have done something like the questions and answers put to both Plato and Aristotle as sources of great acumen, come to the options of what confrontation vs. identity imply, and then chosen knowing by identity on the basis of the inner light (of both the unrestricted desire and faith). I don’t know how much Plato he actually read. In Verbum Lonergan is contrasting Aristotle’s knowing by identity with a Platonic knowing by confrontation, but he does not actually offer texts to show that Aquinas himself actually did that. Aquinas seems to have gotten the great insight from his careful reading of Aristotle’s De Anima. Whether Aquinas also saw that this posed a dialectical choice against Plato, I am not sure.
        Be that as it may, at some point Aquinas himself no doubt realized he had to abandon knowing as confrontation, because of the options it leads to, and that itself certainly would have been an exercise of euphuia.
        This was a great question. I never thought of applying it in this way. When I heard C.D.C. Reeve explain this, the lights went on for me also — a problem in Aristotle’s dialectics that has been also bothering me for years, and something I never found explained satisfactorily by any other Aristotle scholar.

Person and relation

Jose Kuttianimattathil has asked me to contribute to a Festschrift for Dominic Veliath. The topic suggested is Person and Relation - perhaps because of the Brahman and Person book. I have been collecting matter, mostly from the encyclopedias, on Person, before tacking De Smet and Lonergan.

Something very surprising and unexpected has turned up: Ratzinger criticizing both Augustine and Aquinas for sort of excluding the idea of relation from the definition of the human person - or not allowing the idea of relation, which pervades the concept of divine persons in God, its full and proper generality. Person as intrinsically relational, or, as Zizoulas, an Orthodox theologian, says: Being as Communion.

This makes things interesting and even exciting. What might Lonergan and De Smet, both of whom are soundly Thomist and, as far as I know, do not depart from Thomas, what might they have to say to the provocations of Ratzinger?

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find anything more substantial in Ratzinger than his “Zum Personverständnis in der Dogmatik” (1966), published as  “Zum Personbegriff in der Theologie" in  Dogma und Verkündigung (1973, 4th ed. 2005) and in English translation as "On the Understanding of ‘Person’ in Theology" in Dogma and Preaching: Applying Christian Doctrine to Daily Life (2011). 

"all spontaneous and deliberate tendencies"

“[A] man or woman knows that he or she is in love by making the discovery that all spontaneous and deliberate tendencies and actions regard the beloved.” [Lonergan, Insight CWL 3:720-21.]
(Just noticed the 'discovery' here...)
A habit of charity is a new spontaneity, a new set of laws.
But: deliberate tendencies?

Perhaps we need studies of the experience of love.
There is already a being in love that arises from falling in love – even before the response, which no doubt leads to a new stage in loving. But it may not be the beginning of being in love.
This being in love is not yet mutual, but “all spontaneous and deliberate tendencies and actions regard the beloved.”
What then if the Latin tag (Nihil amatum nisi cognitum) were violated?
In the human case, even if it is love at first sight, the sight precedes.
In God’s case: he is not bound by the tag.
So: we find ourselves in love (with God)?
We discover first, and only then perhaps we can decide?
What do we discover? That all spontaneous and deliberate tendencies regard the Beloved?

Read Aquinas on the habit of charity.
It is one of the grounds from which Lonergan’s thinking arises.
I am trying to understand how the habit of charity can be mutual, can be friendship.
What is mutuality?
What is friendship?

Before and afer the infusion of a mutual love (!) there are acts of consent.
But what about: no acts of charity before the infusion of the virtue? (READ!)
Surely there is natural love, besides meritorious love of God?
But, from experience, I would say that seen as process, there would be actual operative and cooperative graces, and therefore consent, before and after the infusion of sanctifying grace.
Even after, a failure to correspond can lead to the death of sanctifying grace.

To be loved is - to change?

I ask myself: are there instances where to be loved is to be changed?
Not always, perhaps: a declaration of love can be sometimes rebuffed, rejected, not accepted.
But there are instances when we have felt loved, when we have been loved into loving. The gift has become a response. And this, before any proper act of consent.
Subsequently there will be place for such acts.
This, more especially when the gift is conscious but not known. When there is an exception to the Latin tag, Nihil amatum nisi cognitum.

Grace and sinfulness

Sometimes I wonder how, despite the sacramental bestowal of grace, our human nature remains weak as ever. Does not Thomas say that grace is the bestowal of a habit, and should not that habit take the place of earlier, sinful habits?

Here is an amazing psychological observations from Lonergan and Aquinas. In Grace and Freedom, Lonergan notes that according to Aquinas, the supernatural virtues not merely give the possibility of a type of action, but also make it spontaneous and connatural. However, there remains the objection from experience that the infused virtues do not always seem to make right action prompt, easy and agreeable. Thomas' answer: neither acquired nor infused virtues totally eliminate the evil inclinations of passion. Still, both operate against such inclinations, though in different ways. Acquired virtues make evil tendencies less sensible. The more rarefied infused virtues may not have this effect at all, but they do break the dominion of sin over us. Nor is the persisting sensible difficulty contrary to the nature of a virtue, for as even Aristotle acknowledged, the pleasure proper to virtuous action may be, at time, no more than the absence of regret. Perhaps the more radical answer to the objection may be that readiness, ease and pleasure are the signs, the external consequences, of the virtues, such secondary effects may be covered over by other factors. (Grace and Freedom, CWL 1:49)

Identity of knower and known

In the area of human cognition, confrontationism, or transferred empiricism, was flourishing. Its principal axiom was that an object is prior to an act concerning that object. (Aristotle and Aquinas distinguished between the sensible, the intelligible, sense, intellect, in potency, in act; they asserted the identity of the knower in act and the known in act; but Scotus and his predecessors and followers taught the identity of the known in potency and the known in act.)
From this there can be no 'intelligible in sensible data,' no 'quiddity in corporeal matter'; and if there is understanding [of the intelligible in the sensible], it is an illusion." (Supplementary Notes on Sanctifying Grace CWL 19:567)

Thomas' virtue ethics

Thomas' virtue ethics: just a glimpse from Ashley's notes, but quite wonderful.

Morality begins in love, works through desire, and is completed in joy.

Interestingly, Thomas gives a central place to the passions and affections in his account of the moral life. Passions empower moral growth and transformation. Becoming good is a matter of learning to love the right things in the right way.

Thomas' ethic is an ethic not of duty, or of law, but of virtue. His primary concern is not just good decisions, but good persons. Virtues are moral skills that make both actions and persons good. They are transforming activities [are virtues activities? are they not rather habits?] that sculpt us into people capable of finding bliss in God.

But Thomas also holds that virtues make us good, but not good enough. What make us 'good enough' are the gifts of the Spirit. The moral life begins with a gift and ends with a gift: it begins with the gift of God's love poured into our hearts, and ends with God's love completing our virtue with a goodness that we could never achieve by ourselves, but only receive.

I found interesting Thomas' distinction between affective (concupiscible) emotions and spirited (irascible) emotions. The affective emotions are love, desire, joy. These are  basic. The spirited emotions are hatred, aversion, sadness. They enable us to be resolute in our pursuit of the good when we face difficulty or are getting discouraged.

If the vibrant language is Ashley's, I think we have a very good article here...

Questions for and about Lonergan

I am just back from Thomas Chacko's defence of his thesis, Lonergan's Virtually Unconditioned: The Ground of Judgment, at Dharmaram Vidya Ksetram, Bangalore.

The defence was a rather vigorous affair, with four on the board including the chairperson / moderator, who was also the Dean of the Philosophy Department, and Director of the thesis, Saju Chackalackal. The others on the board were: Jose Nandhikkara, Wittgenstein specialist; Mathew Chandrankunnel, specialist in science and religion; and myself for the Lonergan angle. Saju is a Kant specialist.

The style of defence at Dharmaram is, as I have said, rather vigorous: a no holds barred attack. That, the professors told me, is how they interpret intellectual honesty and challenge.

Some of the questions for and about Lonergan were interesting: Does Lonergan have anything original to contribute, or is he simply repeating Aristotle, Aquinas and Newman? What is the difference between Lonergan and Kant? The only difference between Aquinas and Kant is that Kant was more honest about the limits of knowledge; otherwise, both are agreed that human knowledge is a product of sense intuition as well as the mind. Is Lonergan a critical realist? Then he cannot be an empiricist. Is he empirical? Then he cannot be critical. And so on.

The Kant thing particularly stunned me. Is there no difference between Kant and Aquinas, except in the direction of greater honesty or modesty? I think we have to reflect here on the basic assumptions: does Aquinas assume - as I presume Kant does - that there is a primordial split between subject and object, that we have privileged knowledge of the subject, and that the problem of epistemology is that we have to get from subject to object? Does he not, as Lonergan points out, make an option between Aristotle and Plato - Plato who thought of knowledge as confrontation, and was then faced with ultimate duality when thinking of the knowledge in the Ultimate, and Aristotle who thought of knowledge as perfection and identity, so that he had no problem of duality when thinking of divine knowledge?

Need for an agent intellect

Aquinas on the need for agent intellect:

Aristotle chose a middle course. For with Plato he agreed that intellect and sense are different. But he held that the sense has not its proper operation without the cooperation of the body; so that to sense is not an act of the soul alone, but of the composite. ... But Aristotle held that the intellect has an operation in which the body does not share. Now nothing corporeal can make an impression on the incorporeal. And therefore, in order to cause the intellectual operation, according to Aristotle, the impression caused by sensible bodies does not suffice, but something more noble is required, for the agent is more noble than the patient, as he says. Not, be it observed, in the sense that the intellectual operation is effected in us by the mere impression of some superior beings, as Plato held; but that the higher and more noble agent which he calls the agent intellect, of which we have spoken above, causes the phantasms received from the senses to be actually intelligible, by a process of abstraction. (STh I.84.6 c. Pegis.)

Plato and the via analytica and synthetica

I was surprised and delighted to find Thomas' and Lonergan's via analytica and via synthetica way back in Plato... We are reading Book VI of the Republic in class these days.

The students found it baffling, and I must confess that I would have too, if not for my reading of Lonergan. But: right now, there is the 'connection' - without much understanding.

One way goes from 'assumptions' to the principles. That is the via analytica, I suppose. The other way begins from assumptions and goes on to draw conclusions. The via synthetica, I suppose.

Aquinas' cogitativa, Freud's superego, and Lonergan

Lonergan never ceases to amaze. See, for example, this appropriation of Aquinas' (now little known) cogitativa:

“Incidentally, re anxiety, what the Freudians call the Super-Ego is Aquinas’ cogitativa: just as the little birds know that twigs are good for building nests and the little lambs know that wolves are bad, so little human beings develop a cogitativa about good and bad; it reflects their childish understanding of what papa and mamma say is good or bad and in adult life it can cause a hell of a lot of trouble” (quoted from the 13th of 129 written communications of Lonergan to Crowe, some as short as Christmas cards, some several pages long. This letter is dated 27th December 1955.)(From P. McShane, SURF 4: The Financial Crisis, note 57)