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CHAPTER SIX Approaching the Human Sensory Appetite from Below (II) ✦ In Aquinas’s view, the sensory appetite “stands midway between [the] natural appetite and the higher, rational appetite, which is called the will.”1 By virtue of the natural appetite, an entity “tends to [an] appetible thing without any apprehension of the reason for [the thing’s] appetibility; for natural appetite is nothing but an inclination and ordination of the thing to something else which is in keeping with it, like the ordination of a stone to a place below.”2 By virtue of the will, a being that has intellectual powers “tends directly to the very reason for appetibility itself in an absolute way. Thus the will tends primarily and principally to goodness itself,or utility,or something like that.”3 By virtue of the will an intellectual being tends, secondarily, “to this or that appetible thing . . . inasmuch as [the thing] shares in the abovementioned reason.”4 For example, the will orients a human being to seek complete happiness and to do so, in a given situation, partly through the exercise of virtue. The sensory appetite is unique relative to the natural and intellectual appetites . It “tends to the appetible thing itself as containing that which constitutes the reason for its appetibility.”5 Aquinas explains:“[The sensory appetite] does not tend to the reason for the appetibility in itself because the lower appetite does not tend to goodness or utility or pleasure itself, but to this particular useful or pleasurable thing. In this respect the [sensory] appetite is lower than the rational appetite. But because [the sensory appetite also] does not tend only to this or only to that thing [irrespective of an apprehension of the thing’s appetibility], but to every being which is [apprehended as] useful or pleasurable to it, it is higher than the natural appetite.”6 The sensory appetite ◆ 129 ◆ orients a being to interact with particular objects that strike it, on a sensory level, as suitable to its being. For example, it orients a being to seek pleasing companions. A being with both intellectual and sensory powers tends to interact with a given object with regard to the object’s intelligibility (its capability of being apprehended by virtue of the intellect) as well as its sensibility (its capability of being apprehended by virtue of the exterior and/or interior senses). A human tends, for example, to judge (on an intellectual level) that it is morally fine to act kindly toward one’s companions and toward this companion,in particular , even as the human judges (on a sensory level) that this companion is pleasing company. One tends, accordingly, to exercise one’s intellectual and sensory appetites at the same time. One is attracted to the goodness of being kind and thus promoting the well-being of self and others, including this particular other,even as one is attracted to sensible features of the particular other and to particular sorts of interactions with him or her. Yet Aquinas identifies emotions fundamentally with motions of the sensory appetite that are evoked by acts of sensory apprehension,and this is where we must begin.Our concern is to explore in greater detail what it means to say that an emotion is a motion of the sensory appetite. Our more specific concern is to analyze a core set of sensory-appetitive motions or emotions identified by Aquinas. PRELIMINARY POINTS Three points need to be made before proceeding. First, a sensory-appetitive motion cannot be “in act” if it does not have an object, which is supplied by an act of sensory apprehension. By the same token, a particular sensoryappetitive motion cannot be identified and distinguished from other such motions without reference to its object. It bears emphasizing that a motion of the sensory appetite—and thus an emotion—is irreducibly intentional.7 It is thus misleading to argue,as Shawn Floyd does,that for Aquinas,“‘passion’ denotes an act of sense appetite which takes place through a bodily change. Emotion,on the other hand,appears [to us] to have a cognitive component— a belief or judgment about some object or state of affairs. . . . I will suggest that what we call emotion consists, for Aquinas, in two separate acts: an act of cognition and a passion.”8 This representation does not capture the fact that a Thomistic passion is intrinsically object-oriented. One might not be fully or explicitly aware of the object of one’s emotion, but if one...

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