Appetition

Article 3. Appetition

a) Nature of Appetition

Appetition, appetency, or simply appetite is the organic faculty of tending towards what the senses present as desirable, and of tending away from what the senses present as undesirable. It is the organic or sentient faculty for going after what is sensed as good. This brief description is adequate, for it is obvious that one tends to go after good not only when the tendency is towards a positively desirable reality but also when the tendency is away from an undesirable one; for it is good to avoid evil.

Every creature, lifeless and living, tends towards what suits it. This tendency is called natural appetency or appetite. But we speak here of sentient beings and specifically of man, and of that tendency which is the result of sense-knowledge. This sort of appetency is called sentient appetency or appetite; its exercise is the act of appetizing; the faculty or power for its exercise is appetition.

b) The Appetencies or Passions

We make a distinction between concupiscible appetency and irascible appetency. It is more usual to speak of these appetencies or appetites as the concupiscible and the irascible passions. There is no dishonorable note in our present use of the term passion. Literally, a passion is “an undergoing, an experiencing,” for the term passion comes from the Latin participle passus which means “having suffered, having undergone.” The word patient as a noun, meaning one who undergoes treatment, and the fine noun patience which (with its adjective patient) indicates the noble virtue that quietly and bravely supports trials and sufferings, comes from the present participle of the same verb. A sentient being undergoes something, suffers something (not in the sense of pain) when it experiences the tendency called appetency. Hence the several expressions of the sentient faculty of appetition are rightly called passions.

We classify the passions as concupiscible and irascible. The term concupiscible comes from a Latin verb (concupiscere) which means to have a strong desire. The word irascible is from the Latin irasci, “to be irritated or angry,” and applies to the passions inasmuch as their tendency meets difficulty (which naturally arouses irritation) in attaining the object of desire. The concupiscible passions tend simply to lay hold of what the senses present as desirable, as “good to have,” and to ward off or keep away from what the senses present as “good to avoid.” The irascible passions are appetites aroused by a qualified object, an object with the note of difficulty attached to it; they tend to lay hold of what the senses present as desirable but difficult (or even impossible) to attain, and to keep away from what the senses present as undesirable but difficult (or impossible) to avoid. We might handily classify the concupiscible and irascible passions respectively as the passions of desire and the passions of difficulty. Before listing the several passions we must pause for an important remark.

The tendency of every creature is towards good. The tendency called appetency or sentient appetite is, therefore, always good in itself, and is always a striving towards what is good in itself. In man,—whose nature has been corrupted by the Fall,—the passions may lead to abuse and great evil. But this fact is due to the derangement of man’s nature by original sin, and the consequent breaking away of the natural tendencies from the control of reason under which they were meant to function. They are like wild horses which a perverse will may allow to run away and to cause wreck and ruin. But the horses were not always wild, and the driver not always weak and perverse. Even now, the driver can take light and strength from God’s grace and so can control the restive steeds which carry him through the whole course of sentient life. The tendency of man’s sentient appetites, and of his rational appetite (which we call will) is towards good, but man’s perversity and precipitateness of judgment may, and sometimes does, result in an inordinate use of sentient good or a perverse choice of objects in which the will seeks good. In other words, a man’s tendency towards good may actually result in the attainment of evil because of blindness and perversity in judgment. Thus sin is a possibility, and a lamentable fact. The sinner (one who uses the objects of sentient tendency inordinately and is perverse in rational judgment) may be likened to a motorist who really does desire to go home, but who is so eager to be on the move and so blindly impatient of pausing to inquire out the way, that he drives off furiously in an utterly wrong direction.

The concupiscible passions, or passions of simple desire, are the following:

1. Love and hatred or detestation. Love is the inclination towards good, apprehended tsimply as such. No note of time is in it, or of possibility, impossibility, difficulty, likelihood, or condition. In other words, love is the simple tendency towards good to embrace and possess it, without consideration as to whether the good is to be attained here and now, or later, or whether it is possible to attain, or likely to be attained, or attainable with difficulty, or attainable on fulfillment of some condition. Hatred or detestation is the simple opposite of love: it is the tending away from what is apprehended as evil.

2. Desire and abhorrence. Desire is the tendency towards good apprehended as a future possibility. Abhorrence (sometimes called aversion) is the shrinking back from an evil apprehended, not as present, but as to come.

F. Joy and sadness. Joy is the tendency to rest complacent in the present possession of good. When this complacency is experienced on one’s own account, it is called enjoyment or delectation; when it is pleasure in the success of another person who has achieved good, it is called delight or rejoicing. Sadness is the tendency to disquiet under the weight, of a present evil. Sensed inwardly, it is sadness or sorrow; sensed outwardly, it is pain. For oneself, it is sadness or sorrow; for another, it is grief or commiseration.

The irascible passions, or passions involving difficulty, are the following:

i. Hope and despair. Hope is the tendency towards a good apprehended as difficult, but not impossible to achieve. Despair is the falling back, the “giving up,” in face of a good apprehended as unachievable or an evil apprehended as unavoidable. Hope which is almost ready to die and become despair is called desperation. Desperation is hope in the violence of its death-struggle.

2. Courage and fear. Courage or daring is the tendency to face and war down evils which block the attainment of desired good. Fear or timidity is the tendency to shrink back in agitation when the obstructing evil is apprehended as very difficult to overcome or even well nigh insuperable.

5. Anger {ire, wrath, rage, indignation}. Anger is the strong tendency to violent action in order to fight off an evil or to punish him who inflicts it.

We have seen that all the passions are, in themselves, tendencies towards good. And since the simple tendency to good is love, all the passions are somehow expressions or variants of love. Hatred is, so to speak, the “under side” of love, or it may be called “the other leg” on which love stands. For there cannot be love of one thing without hatred of its contradictory, just as there cannot be a step towards the north without a step away from the south. Love and hatred go thus together. And all the other passions are easily expressed in terms of love and hatred. Desire is the love of good to come; abhorrence is the hatred of future evil. Joy is the love of possessed good; sadness is the hatred of a present burden of evil. Hope is the love of a good difficult to attain; despair is the hatred of an evil impossible to avoid. Courage is the hatred of a superable evil and the love of that which the evil blocks off or balks; fear is the shrinking hatred of an evil weakly deemed insuperable. Anger is the violent hatred of a present and oppressive evil.

We have said that the faculty of sentient appetition is an organic faculty. If this is so, the faculty has its organ. Where, then, is the organ of appetition? Some psychologists say that the heart is the organ in question. Others declare that this organ is an area,—not accurately localized by scientists,—of the brain. The second opinion is the right one. The heart is, indeed, instantly affected by appetition, and the common speech of men recognizes this fact. So we say that one has a loving heart, or has hatred in the heart, or that something is the heart’s desire, or that despair gripped one’s heart, or that joy surged in one’s heart. So we speak of a hopeful heart, a courageous heart, a heart filled with rage. But, after all, the heart is a muscle, not a sensory structure. The heart is well suited to show the “affection,” the influence of “that which is done to” the sentient organism, but not to exercise the appetency itself. It seems correct to say that the organ of appetition is the brain, or, more accurately, part of the brain, and that the organ which manifests appetition,—which shows its effect on the organism,—is, first and foremost, the heart.

Summary of the Article

In this short Article we have defined sentient repetition and have distinguished it from the natural appetency of all creatures. We have classified the sentient appetencies or passions as concupiscible (love-hatred; desire-abhorrence; joy-sadness) and irascible (hope-despair; courage-fear; anger). We have seen that the passions are good in themselves, and lead to evil only when inordinately used or engaged upon wrong objects under the influence of perverse will. We have learned that all the passions are rooted in love. We have found that the organ which exercises appetition is the brain, and the organ which first manifests it is the heart.