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256 Chapter 8 T h e P o s si b i l i t y of H um a n Ha ppi n e s s i n Aqu i nas Different Kinds of Happiness There are elements of Aquinas’s understanding of the human being that could lead one to conclude that human fulfillment in this life is an achievable goal. The good is not always beyond us—sometimes it is present and possessed. Intellect and will, for example, are not always restless and unsatisfied in Aquinas’s scheme. Although the reason does advance from one piece of understanding to the next, opening our soul up to further horizons of being, the work of the intellect is “simply to apprehend intelligible truth.”1 The movement of reason leads the intellect to rest (quiescere) in the possessing (habere) of what is true.2 The will, likewise, is not just the faculty that takes us beyond who we are through desire, it is also the faculty that allows us to enjoy the good we have desired once we attain it. The will is directed to the end even when it is present, and not just when it is absent.3 Fruitio, “enjoyment,” is connected with “the delight [delectationem] which one has in realizing the longed-for term, which is the end.”4 The intellect perceives the good as agreeable (perceptio convenientis), and the will finds complacentia in it (“satisfaction” or “pleasure”).5 1. ST I.79:8c. 2. ST I.79:8c. 3. ST I-II.3:4c. 4. ST I-II.11:1c. 5. ST I-II.11:1ad3. happiness i n aqu i nas = 257 This notion of rest and enjoyment may seem to undermine the central argument of this book. I have been suggesting that intellect and will function for Aquinas in a similar way to Sartre’s consciousness and beingfor -itself. We are by nature open to what we are not (through intellect) and striving to become what we are not (through will), and our identity as human beings consists in a perpetual going-beyond ourselves toward another identity that does not yet exist, toward our future perfection. Whenever we seek a particular good, we are seeking our own good, which is precisely our being insofar as it does not yet exist.6 Even if the good we seek is simply the preservation of what we already have (like health or friendship ), there is still a sense in which this preservation of our being in the future is something we do not yet have, which is the very reason why we are seeking it. Our being is necessarily fractured by the decentering that intellect and will bring about. If in fact we can reach this perfection and actually be happy with it, if we can possess an identity without having any distance from it, if we can halt this constant movement beyond, then the picture I have presented of Aquinas’s human being is false. For Sartre, to be human is to go beyond what we have and what we are. For Aquinas, it seems, we can at some point rest content with what we have and what we are; in Sartre’s terms, we can reach a state of becoming pure being-in-itself. Rest, possession, enjoyment, satisfaction: these are concepts that would indicate to Sartre the dark night of identity and the dissolution of consciousness. With these questions in mind we can examine the extent to which Aquinas thinks that we can and cannot be happy in this life. Happiness, beatitudo, as we saw in chapter 6, is the satisfaction we hope to find when we reach our final goal and attain the perfection we have longed for. We can want many different things at the same time, large and small, yet at any one moment there must be a deepest desire that motivates us, an overriding goal that functions as an organizing principle to our actions, one which we long for as our “perfect and fulfilling good [bonum perfectum et completivum].”7 Happiness is the perfect good, “which satis6 . This is true even when our attention is directed away from ourselves to the good of other people or other things, since our desire is still personal and part of what we wish our own life to be about. See the discussion of “the good” in chapter 2 above. 7. ST I-II.1:5c. [3.16.81.94] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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