Audio Transcript here:

Hello, today we’re going to talk about the soul part two. And today we’re going to be all up in our feelings. We’re going to be talking about the passions, what those are, how they work, what is the universal motivation behind all of them, and just generally kind of how it all fits together in our discussion of the soul. So stay tuned.

Passion and Appetite of Powers

Welcome Thomistic Womanhood today is part two of the soul. And we’re going to continue talking on the passions and the appetite of powers. So, going Casey Neistat, a little bit right now and we’re going to have like a written diagram. This is my visual aid. And as we can see here, we talked about in the last video the more apprehensive they’re called apprehensive powers. Not apprehensive in the sense of like, you’re nervous, but they’re apprehensive in the sense of like police when the police apprehend a criminal, they grab that guy, right? Well, apprehensive powers are we’re grabbing the stimulation from the outside, we’re the stimuli from the outside world. we’re grabbing it and kind of taking it in and using it as raw material to form decisions and judgments and opinions on. So that’s how that works. So that is what we talked about in the last video.

In today’s video, we’re going to go into the appetitive powers. And what this means is, basically we’re going to look at the appetites of the soul. We’re familiar with the appetite of the body, which you know, I like to eat, basically think of appetite as a desire for something. It’s an inclination towards something, and our soul has inclinations toward things, everybody and we see this, you know, it’s universal. people have inclinations towards stuff, we tend to get mad over the same things, we tend to get sad over the same things, in general, looking at the human condition as a whole, we tend to have these inclinations toward things. And that is what appetite is. We have two main appetites. And under those appetites, each one has an array of passions, and you can think of a passion as an emotion. It’s a feeling, this is our feelings, this is why I said we’re going to be all up in our feelings because that is what these appetites consist of.

Irascible Appetite and Concupiscible Appetite

So the first appetite and in this thing here, we have the irascible appetites and then we have the concupiscible appetites, and I probably should have flip flop this order because the irrational or the irascible one Haha, it is irrational sometimes the irascible one is a little more Spiritual and the concupiscible one is a little closer to the physical side. If you watch my other video, I had said that with our soul, our soul and our body are very tightly intertwined. And this is where everything is strictly spiritual. And this is where it is strictly physical. And then this and here is the gray area where the spiritual and the physical are coming together. And it’s hard for us to tell what’s really, we’re driving things in this middle zone, it can be affected by our soul, and what we think of things like what our opinion is, modern psychology tells us this, I am upset because I think you don’t love me and that can cause us to be upset. That’s where our soul is making a judgment, our intellects, making a judgment, and then we’re feeling feelings in response to that. But on the other hand, our body can cause us to feel feelings too. have you ever felt sad and then all of a sudden you took a nap and you felt better. That can be because our body is influencing us as women, we’re well aware, every month, our feelings will get a little out of control because of our body because of our physical hormones. Modern science doesn’t fully know which parts of the body are controlling, like which parts of the soul like, we don’t really know that maybe just yet. I don’t know if we’ll ever know that. But basically, so that’s how that works. So the first one we’ll get into is the concupiscible appetite. These are again, an appetite is just an inclination. And concupiscible means this is a more simple good, it’s ordered toward a bodily good. Remember how I said if you watched What is truth video, I had talked about how our intellect, our mind is inclined to the truth. We want to know the truth. That’s our inclination there. You can almost say like our intellect has an appetite for the truth. While our concupiscible appetite is an appetite for bodily pleasure. So eating, sleeping, sex, things like that comfort, sitting on a nice comfy chair, having a nice bubble bath. Those are things that were oriented toward. And it’s more physical in the sense that it’s more simple. And we’re oriented toward either going toward the good or avoiding evil, that is kind of what these feelings are in the concupiscible appetite area. So for the good if we perceive something good, we can have love, we can have enjoyment or we can have desire.

Desire is the simplest one, you know, I want this thing, I see this, I want it. You’re kind of like, what’s that saying? I see it, I want it, I buy it. You know, it just kind of like that, desire. Why don’t we just want that enjoyment going up a level here? We have enjoyment is that feeling of relishing that bodily good. So when you’re in a nice hot tub, you feel that enjoyment, it’s like, oh, it’s a nice bubble bath. It’s so warm and relaxing or you have this nice meal and it just tastes amazing. So that’s the enjoyment, you’re relishing in it. And then we have one love, which, surprisingly, you would think it would be a little more complex, but we do have love and it’s kind of a good order toward a person. And so love… Love can be complex. You know this is a complex one. There’s one thing I want to point out about love: we’re going to move through most of these passions pretty quickly one because a lot of them were already familiar with, you know, we know it well. Anger. I have something to say in anger, but things like hope, fear, we know what those are. We’re not going to go too much into detail with them but love. There is an important distinction about love that I want to go over right here. So this is a book. It’s called Introduction to the science of mental health. It’s written by Father Chad Berger. He’s an exorcist. And mu, I’ve listened to his sermons like he’s got quite some stories. But he wrote a book on mental health. And you may think, why would an exorcist do that? Why would they care about mental health? It’s very relevant to that kind of work when somebody is coming to you and says, Oh, I’m possessed. Well, you have to figure out, are they psychologically unhealthy? Are they a little disturbed in the head? Or are they legitimately possessed? So a good Exorcist needs to have a good grounding in modern psychology, as well as the Thomistic. This particular Exorcist, this priest, he knows a lot about St. Thomas, Aristotle, the Thomistic of things, the soul all that so he’s very grounded in Thomistic Psychology, which is the official word for it. I talked about it in the other video, but he’s very grounded in both Thomistic Psychology and also Modern Psychology. Because I hope it didn’t sound like I was knocking modern psychology too much in my last video because it is useful. There’s a lot of times where you need to see a psychologist, but he’s well versed in both and he’s written a book on mental health about it. And so quoting St. Thomas, in this book, he’s talking about love, and it says, quoting St. Thomas “love is defined as the willing of the good of another” Okay, and there is an article in the Summa where St. Thomas talks about love. Maybe we’ll do a video later on about that, simply because as women, you know, love is very important to us and getting it right is crucial. But basically, we’ll just kind of say that love is the good of another. We say a lot of things About Love nowadays, you know, I love chocolate cake or I love this. But as we saw with the passion of enjoyment, we know the chocolate cake. That’s not loving, that’s enjoyment, you’re enjoying the chocolate cake. But the thing about love is there are two kinds of love and this is what I want us to kind of pay attention to.

So the first is when one loves something for one’s own sake or for oneself for yourself, you’re loving this person for yourself. Or you’re loving this person for the sake of the other one, the second form of love, and it’s another Latin phrase, “amore secundum quid ” love in a certain respect, but it’s basically like the love of that person’s like the love of friendship, you love them in and of themselves. And this is an important distinction to make with love. Because as women we need to know when a man says I love you. We need to know what he means by that. A lot of men, you know, we’ve often said, Oh, does he love me for sex? Or does he love me for me? So you know, sorry I’m pointing I probably shouldn’t point that’s rude. You know, instinctively that there are these two kinds of love You know, this is what we women mean when we say that to each other. Oh, I don’t know if he loves me for me or if he’s just trying to get my pants. Well, a lot of times when men are just trying to get in your pants, it’s that first kind of love. They’re feeling the passion of love. You know, it’s, it’s an actual emotion. One of the passions of the soul is love. But they are loving one for themselves. So they’re not loving you for you. They’re loving for the good they can get out of you. And we often have that love for God too you know, we can love God because of the benefits he gives us. You know, men can love us not to be vulgar, but they can love us for our sexual benefits and not really love us for who we are as people. And we can do that with God we can love God for the blessings we get from him and not really love him for himself. And that’s not good. That’s not true love. You know? There’s a reason all the fairy tales back in the day you know if you watch the Disney movies. The Disney movies are themselves built on most while not so much recently was in the night like when I was a kid and Disney was based more on like the original fairy tales now it’s like I don’t know where they’re getting their fairy tales honestly. I mean they had some good movies, Moana was pretty cool. But anyways, the law that’s why it was so important you know, little girls in the fairy tales will be told like oh, you know true love will do this. And you know, the princess in a fairy tale has to discern true love, you know, it’s because of this distinction. You know, we can love something just for ourselves. We can love selfishly, or we can love more unselfishly and we can love for the other person we can truly will. They’re good because it is their good. You know, because we want them to be happy whether or not we’re going to get something out of it. So that’s a distinction in there that I thought was important to call out while we’re talking about love, because as women, I just wanted to say like when you’re sitting there kind of trying to discern these two ways a guy loves you, yeah, you’re philosophically accurate. There are two ways men can love us. And there are two ways we can love men. You know, some women just use men for their money. And again, it’s the same thing. They’re not loving this man in and of themselves. They’re loving for the benefit they can get out of him. And we all have to be careful that it’s very easy to do, you know, we can often love a man, because we don’t want to be lonely, you know, and we don’t necessarily love him for himself. We’re just kind of clinging to him because we don’t want to be alone. It’s something we all do. It’s something we all struggle with. You know, like I said, we even do it with God. And it’s something we have to just work to overcome. We have to try and love in an unselfish way.

But anyways, big tangent on love we’ll go back to the passions here the rest of them so moving on the concupiscible appetites as I was saying for good our love enjoyment and desire for evil if our concupiscible appetite if we see an evil something we that we are not good or could threaten good. We have either hate, sorrow or aversion. So hey, I’m not talking like hate speech. I’m just talking like, I don’t like this you know, love or desires Oh, I want this hate of his own. It’s not necessarily want to push it away. That’s aversion you know, it’s kind of like flight you want to just get away from it. But heat is the opposite. Well, yeah, it’s the opposite of love. You know you are in love, you recognize a good something that you want that is good and beneficial. With hate. You recognize the lack of a good you Recognize a good that maybe should be there but isn’t. And because it’s not there, you don’t like that that can be like, you know, like a man cheats on you can feel certain hate for him because you’re like you were supposed to love me that good of love and fidelity was not there. And so now there’s hatred because you perceive that lack of a good that is all evil in a certain sense, a certain sense evil can be thought of as like a lack of a good. something that was supposed to be there and be good is missing. And so in a way that’s evil. That’s not the official definition of evil. I think there are some nuances to leaving out but that is it. So that’s concupiscible appetite.

Now we’re moving on to the irascible appetite here. So right here on these and again, this is a more spiritual one, than the concupiscible appetites the feelings under the heading of the concupiscible. They’re a little more simple. the irascible appetite, they’re not as simple feelings. They’re a little more complex. That’s why if you’re in a therapy session and you’re trying to unpack anger or unpack hope or something, it’s a little harder to unpack than just love because love, it just happens. It’s more simple. But you know, anger and fear, okay, you got to kind of unpack it a little bit, because these are the ones that are more involved with our intellect. We have to make perception, a judgment call on whether we think it’s good or not before we can even begin to feel these feelings. And again, this all happens in a split second, you know, we don’t even realize this is happening. And it probably sounds complicated that I’m even discussing it like breaking it down like this. But it all happens instantaneously. But there is you know, an additional step with the irascible appetites with these irascible feelings. So with hope, the concupiscible is simple, it’s just ordered toward a good, just wants something good. Whereas the irascible is ordered toward the difficult good. See, there’s a little distinction there. And that’s why you have to involve your intellect before you can even discern whether it’s difficult or not. And so with the irascible appetite, if it’s something good, if it’s difficult, good, you’re gonna have two feelings, you’re gonna have either hope, you know, if you think you can attain it, or you’re gonna have despair, if you know it’s impossible to attain it. Hope, you know, when you first meet that guy, and you’re like, yeah, we’re dating. Like, I hope this works out. You know, you see this good. And it could be difficult, and it’s in the future. But you think if you have a good reasonable chance that it’s going to work out, you think so you feel that hope. And then later if you guys break up, you feel that despair. Now, you know, this good that you were hoping for is impossible. You’re not going to achieve that good, you won’t attain that good. It’s a difficult good, that is going to be impossible to attain and that is despair. And so that’s why the first few days of a breakup when it hits you, you don’t want to get out of bed, you just have no will to live, you’re like, I’m just despairing like, I will never get what I want, and it can be so devastating. But it’s that recognition of the impossibility of attaining your good.

Now, on the other hand, if it’s not related to good weather, you could get it or you’re not going to get it. What if it’s an evil, you’re seeing something and you’re like, this is not going to be good. This is again why breakups are complex. You’re having multiple feelings here, but with anger, you know, the ones that are toward evil, let’s say you see they’re ordered towards the difficult good, but if you can’t get that difficult, good, you’re going to feel different feelings. These are going to be the ones on like the evil side. So you have anger, audacity, and fear. Now When I say audacity, I don’t mean it in the sense that we typically use this word nowadays, audacity was a word originally used in Thomistic psychology to mean a kind of boldness. And the word has still kind of maintained some of that connotation. You know, if a guy will do something really rude, you’ll be like, how can you have the audacity to do that, you know, and it implies boldness, and that is what this word means in the Thomistic psychology way, it is a certain boldness, you are going out, I have some notes on it here somewhere. But basically with audacity, what you’re doing is you’re being aggressive toward an imminent danger because you think you’re going to be victorious. So some kind of danger, you know, some threat to the good, you’re going to be aggressive toward it because you’re pretty confident you’re going to achieve what you’re doing. You know, it’s not like despair, you know, you’re like, I’m never going to get it’s impossible. It’s the opposite. You’re like, oh, I’m gonna freakin kick this thing’s butt you know. Now in a positive sense, this is what we consider courage, you know you’re going out and you’re going to go right or wrong, and you think you can do that. So you’re gonna go do that on the negative side. this can kind of be that boldness you get if you had too much to drink and then suddenly the dance floor starts looking good and like you’re normally really shy and introverted, but like, you have a couple of beers and suddenly you’re like, I’m Beyonce. I’m gonna like to show you guys my moves. And then like, you wake up the next day and you’re mortified. You’re like that’s, that’s Audacity. You were feeling the feeling of audacity, you are going to go out to that danger of not dancing, and you are going to be victorious over that and you are going to right that wrong of you not dancing? So that’s kind of a funny story, but that’s what it means.

So then the next one is anger. Anger is part of the irascible appetite. But it’s known as what’s called a complex passion. Because with anger, you’re feeling two passions at once. There is sorrow, the recognition of a loss of good, you know that’s part of the concupiscible appetite sorrow, strictly speaking, is loss. It’s sadness, but then with anger, it’s like you feel sorrow, but you’re taking it one step over and you’re like, well, this should not have been, you know, like, this was wrong and I’m gonna right that wrong. You know, it can be with audacity, you’re right and wrong, and you don’t necessarily feel like sorrow without it, you know, it’s just, you know, it is what it is. But with anger, you’re right and wrong in the context of a good that you didn’t get that you feel you should have gotten. And that’s why anger is called a complex emotion because it’s both that desire for that like vindication that like revenge and its sorrow. At the same time, but as an example, this is often present in traumas. And this is what psychologists will mean when they’re like, you got to let the anger go. And the reason they’re saying that is from a Thomistic Psychology point of view, it’s because these two passions are intertwined. The anger will not allow you to move past the sorrow because it’s a complex passion, they’re together. So you have to let go of that desire for that vindication. You know, righting that wrong, while my mother was hard on me growing up, and yet she will not apologize. I just can’t move on until she apologizes and we right that wrong. Well, you know, maybe she’s never going to apologize. And you’re never going to get that wrong right, which means you’re never going to be able to let go of the sorrow there as well. So that’s kind of what psychologists mean when they’re like, you gotta let go of the anger and forgive you know, people can be like one And forgive you know that. But they don’t mean forgive in a sense of just like, let that person in and be terrible. What they often mean is you have to let go of that anger, The Thomistic Psychological anger, you know, the desire for that revenge or that desire to write that wrong, so that that loss can be addressed. And yeah, because they’re intertwined. They’re two things together. If you don’t like that vindication, that desire for righting is wrong, you’re never going to heal from that sorrow really, they’ll always be stuck together in your soul. But anyway, that’s kind of how that works.

And then fear. The last one is fear. You know, we know this is a little different than like aversion or flight, you know, flight and aversion are right there. You know, like that. Fear is where you’re kind of projecting into the future. Again, this is why it’s a more spiritual, so to speak emotion because you’re having to use your intellect To kind of project into the future and go, you know, based on my intellect and what I know, this is not going to go well, and I’m afraid of that I all I, there is an evil that is going to come, you know, and I feel afraid. That’s what that is. So that’s pretty much how that works. And then moving up to, let’s see, I’m looking at my notes here, just making sure that we covered everything. Yeah, that’s pretty much how that works. And before we move on from the passions or emotions, one thing that I want to say about this is all emotions are rooted in some kind of love in the sense of some kind of attachment and desire for something. Because, you know, if you think about it, why do you hate something? Well, because there was a good that was lacking. You know, why are you servile? There was a loss of a good And in both cases, where you loved that good that you didn’t get and that is why all of these emotions are rooted in some kind of love, some kind of attachment. And that is often why like Buddhists will say attachment is the source of all suffering. And so you should just try to snuff out your feelings and, you know, become detached from everything, you know, just try not to have any kind of feelings that could attach you to anything. And you just kind of numb yourself out which is not healthy. 

But because on the other hand, while we’re all familiar, all these emotions here, we’re familiar with the bad effects, but at the same time, if you didn’t have any emotions or passions, you know it’s the philosophical term for it, the Thomistic psychology term, if you didn’t have any passions, life, you would not be able to do anything. Passions are kind of like the engine that drives us down the little paths of life. Think of them as like the horses in the chariot. They have to be controlled, your mind, your intellect has to control your passions, so that you can kind of guide them where you want them to go. But they are what pulled the chariot. If you want to pursue a career, you want to start a family or you want to travel somewhere, you need passion to do that, you need to feel like doing it. This is why, you know, this is why depression can be so harmful to people’s lives. Because when you’re depressed, you know, you don’t feel much of anything, you know, you’re just very apathetic. And then you know, a lot of things that need to get done in life. You just don’t do it because you just don’t feel like it and it can be due to brain chemistry, or it can be due to lifestyle, maybe you’re stuck in a lifestyle that is just very negative and unhappy and you’re getting kind of depressed because of it. But basically, when you’re depressed you don’t have much feeling and so if you’ve ever thought like, oh, it’d be nice to not have feelings? Well, it’s sort of what happens when you have depression. And that’s why it is important to have some feeling and why that Buddhist philosophy of trying to get rid of all detachment that doesn’t work, you know, but anyway, that is how that works.

And then the next step up so now that we’ve kind of talked about our passions, this is kind of the integration between the body and the soul, and then we move up to the strictly spiritual. on the will and when I say the will, I don’t necessarily mean like a guy will I mean it more like I will do this thing or you know, Will you get me that? Will you get me that camera or whatever. it is will you be referencing that person’s decision-making ability, that is what that is. And so when our mind is ordered toward the truth, but our will is ordered toward the good. And so when we’re choosing, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to choose the good. And interestingly enough, human beings the way our intellect and our soul and everything is wired up, we cannot choose evil as such, we can only choose it under the aspect of good. And that’s something that kind of blew my mind. I went to a very Thomistic college. It was a private school. And we studied Latin, the Summa, theology, philosophy, all this stuff. And I remember when my professor first told me this, I raised my hand and I was like, will explain like, explain Hitler, you know, explain these like serial killers like of course, human beings choose evil. And he was like, No, if you think about it, they weren’t choosing evil. They were choosing something that in their work intellect they thought was good, to them it was good, you know, to Hitler, he came up with all these reasons why getting rid of the Jews was a good idea, you know, or serial killers, you know or rapist, here’s a one rapists will come up. Well, she deserved it. She was asking for it, you know, it’s not Oh, I’m a terrible human being. It’s Oh, well, you know, I was just, you know, she wanted me to, you know, they have to rationalize it and make it be good. And people think, oh, they’re just saying that to impress other people to influence other people’s judgment and no, that’s part of how human beings are wired. This is how temptation works. You know, when you have like, the devil and he’s trying to tempt us to sin. This is how it works. He can’t come to us and tell us Oh, you should cheat on your wife. You know what, you’re going to get divorced, you’re going to lose your house, oh my gosh, you’re going to like to pay child support for the next 10 years totally ruin your finances, but you should cheat on your wife. That’s a great idea. No, he’s not going to say that. Because human beings will see the evil of it, and we don’t choose evil. That’s not how we are. No, he’s not gonna say that. He’s gonna say, Look at how beautiful your secretary looks. You know, I bet she’d just feel great. Just look at the way she’s smiling, look at the twinkle in her eye. That’s how you get people to sin. So that’s kind of how that works. You know? And again, another example if you’re thinking like, oh, should I say that juicy bit of gossip? That’s probably going to ruin this girl’s reputation because I’m not sure it happened, but I’m pretty sure it happened. rash judgment. Have you seen the video on the truth? Yeah. But let’s say you’re thinking about this. You kind of made a rash judgment. You think this girl might be sleeping with? But you’re not really sure what you’re like, Oh, you know, the devil is not going to tempt you to do it and be like, Oh, if you say this, all your friends are gonna think that you’re a spiteful jealous brat. no what he’s going to tell you. He’s going to tell you, oh, if you tell your friends this, you’re going to look like the one in the know, you’re going to be the one that figured it out before everybody else. Yeah, see the difference there? You see how wine is just evil. And you’re not going to pick that? Oh, I’m going to look like an idiot. All my friends are going to think I’m this jealous brat like, Oh,no, no, no, he’s not going to say that. He’s going to tell you the good part of it, you know.

And so this is how our will works, our ability to choose. And this is why being in touch with reality is so important. Because if you are wrong in your assessment, and you think something’s good When it’s evil, you will choose that thing. And then you’ll experience all these terrible consequences. And you’re like, that’s not what I wanted, especially, you know, like us women, if you get into a relationship with a guy who’s a complete jerk, you know, and all our friends are like, why? Like, here’s why abusive relationships, let’s say your boyfriend hits you. And people were like, Why on earth Are you staying in this relationship? You’re such an idiot. And there can be a lot of shame there because you’re like, why am I like, What’s wrong with me? It’s because there’s some aspect of good, however small, there’s something good about that relationship. So that good is avoiding breaking up with him. You know you don’t have to go through that heartbreak. You know, maybe you’ve been through it before and you’re like, Oh, I just don’t want to go through that again. You’re choosing the good of avoiding that heartbreak versus, you know, the evil of him abusing you. And so that’s how human beings work. You know, this is the way we make our choices. We pick the good, we aim for the good. And then you know, we will, the consequences will come and hopefully your choices, a more complete good, you’re picking something that is more fully good, rather than Oh, well, it was just good under this one aspect and I didn’t really realize that it’s gonna have these other consequences, you know. So that’s kind of how that works. But yeah, basically, that is a soul.

So I hope that was helpful to you. And the soul you know, you can get really into detail on it. There’s like whole textbooks and things written on it, but I’ve kind of stayed at a fairly high level and I’ve tried to keep it pretty practical. And yeah, so I hope that was helpful to you. If you have any questions. Leave me a comment. I watched the comments. And so yeah, otherwise, like, share, subscribe, you know, do all things and hope you have a great day. See ya.