reflections

maybe the textual way may not be the best approach.
Nature/form to end.
Forms/ accidental forms.
3 degrees of being - essence, power, operation (check)
Intensio/remission - w/regard to accidental.

Where to put passions in these? is this unnecessarily complicated? But I have to know that I undersatnd it in order to get a satisfactory order, even if I don't include this whole process, so that I can make my own order. I want to avoid 'unnecessary repetition'. I am taking something that is medium-specific. It's in morals. It concerns remedies. It's all about per accidens - at least that is the exciting part about sorrow. But I can't explain the per accidens where we live until I explain the per se - and how passions fit in here - because otherwise it would be a chaotic phenomenology. And we are always already phenomenologists - philosophy is about making senses of phenomenology in order to deconstruct them again.

Why do I see a need to explain passion metaphysically? I want to get the phenomenological experience using the language of metaphysics - I think metaphysics is in a way at the service of experience in that sense. Is this a wrong supposition? Maybe I am trying to do something that doesn't really work.
How can one feel that one is at a lesser degree of being than one is?
Augustine - Thomas cites in an objection - notes that "were there not still good in the natural appetite, then we would not feel pain at its absence." It's this not rational - not worked out - but definitely imperfectly conscious and pained experience - because at first imperfect - merely perhaps an ennui - an indefinite dissatisfaction - the tiny defect that grows into full blown out sorrow and makes one find out and desire one's object intensely - that is what I want to get at.
I am fundamentally Augustinian "You made us for yourself, o lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." "Resting in God" is open to many interpretations - many degrees, many participations - there are certainly ways of resting in God quoddammodo in this life. But maybe I can't be too romantic and moody here - augustine had lots of fun while he was "restless".
Passion. "defect - in this does the notion of passion consist."
Not that passions are not appropriate defects in some case - passions of joy - for example - passions of completion will always be with us - even in the resurrection. But what is a perfecting is scarcely a movement (I thought Aristotle said passion -maybe it's movement or alteration - got to check) but at any rate.
These would hardly seem to be under the notion of passion - involving our bodies - certainly - what is it about involving our bodies here - being bodies- that involves corruption but there involves no corruption? "Redundancy - these passions would HAVE to be, because he insists that "suffering divine things" involves no bodily change. Can joy thus be conceived as something purely intellectual? then why would "gaudium" be discussed as a passion - he probably has more thna one word - "laetitia" perhaps? but "gaudium" would be the main one.

Still. It remains that passion pertains to defect.
It is only by organizing its defective and potentiality aspect that I can make the other part come alive. And by extension, certainly, I will be being healed myself by learning, not a bad thing!

This is contra-instinctual for me - setting up a discourse in which passions immediately appear as pertaining to "defect". I love being contrary, because prevalent discourses tended to squish me and so I shoved right back at everything by arguing. Youth is entirely irascible, particularly as every power is seen to be oppressive because one is trying to get one's freedom, but exhaustion can make it conscupiscible - and the end of the concupiscible there is exhaustion but also pride in having "achieved" one's limits because one can agree from one's own reflection and experience - which is what everyone really wants - which is what learning really is. And one really can bring corrections to the discourse, or at least point out what people generally overlook - although one is also being corrected, but it isn't problematic anymore because freedom has "emerged" and is emerging - one feels less "threatened". The world I was used to was so different from the worlds I was introduced to - and one of the worlds I was introduced to had the same language as my own world which was mixed up but semi-articulate - ignorance which was coherent enough to be a threat sometimes, which was why I had an odd relationship to things I was familiar with - rebelled but refused to leave entirely in terms of habits - at least, at the same time. I put all of "Christianity" "in suspension" while holding on to it in terms of practice - hoping while making my hope essentially a blind one because I thought it was necessary. And indeed I think I am the better for it although I should be the last to recommend such a course, it is so incredibly contingent. Just because you got better after being sick doesn't mean you can tell people to get sick - there are easier ways to health. Some of us are more precipitate than others - call it magnanimous or call it stupid - I can't pass judgement on myself. I cannot deny that I have been deliberate though, even if it meant deliberately stupid - I didn't choose stupidity but what I thought was the most expedient course. It is about putting all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, and then staking the basket. And this is simplifying the story - were there times intermediately when I could have changed my mind, when I could have seen truth just because I wanted to/thought it should be there? It seems I must say so - but I was so successful at telling my own story to myself that they did not appear at all visible to me.

Anyway. the relevance of my story is this - that I am certain that I have all the elements of my thesis in my head - as seeds. Obviously I should not have been so convinced of what I wanted to write if the elements were not all in there as principle - or at least as effects for which I knew principles fitted like puzzle-pieces (this is why Aquinas says ethics and metaphysics are developed through eachother - you can work from either end) and I am certain that from my reflective experience I can draw both the meatphysics and the morality because I am both a moral and a metaphysical creature. It is just as legitimate to say that I glean purpose from as much as impose it in myself, and that my passions of sorrow were the most successful way for me to do that when I had either lost or voluntarily suspended - it remains unclear and there is no one answer over a historic period of that length - and it is also difficult because I remember choosing but I didn't choose knowingly because I was not as intelligent then as I am now (as I am not intelligent now as I will be after I write my thesis, or even perhaps after tomorrow if I meditate better than I am doing so now). But the role of my passions of sorrow - I glean purpose from my passions - honestly, I do. It's the unsettling "feeling" that something wasn't right that led me to school in the first place. It's the overwhelming depression which led me to recognize that when I thought it was not legitimate to want a father in God, because I wanted to speak to everyone, that I experienced the need of a father and so was grateful to discover that God needn't be my "shameful little secret" - that I needn't purify myself endlessly from a "dependence" but use his help to grow out of dependence (speaking qualifiedly). I thought I had to walk away to give him honor - I walk with my eyes on him and honor is for him through me, and i also rejoice in its reflected beauty.
But Hume (was it Hume) was right when he said, "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions." But he was only restrictedly right in that our passions get confused when we get confused. But why is sorrow used so often as a bait to make men religious? Augustine appeals to "restlessness" (a kind of acedia) to prompt others to recognize their own searching, and by consequence, their need for God. Ecclesiastes uses precisely that "fatigue" of the appetite that Aquinas sometimes describes as sorrow to "in all things remember thy last end". The imitation of Christ I am certain resorts to this kind of argument, and endless sermons for ever. There is something of "defect" that is crying out for a "healer" and this is used for a preaching spot - it is an area of us that is very alert and sensitive to salvation especially when the defect is intense. And there are problems with this - people running to any whichever source - acediacs - or superstitious religion. My sorrow did close in upon me but also focused my intention when I did not have the capacities to do so in a more positive manner.
So what am I trying to talk about.
Sorrow is not a happy thing in and of itself. It pertains to defect, to not having. Through the defect we can determine the medicine? is that it?