In his Essay on Logic, Jeremy Bentham tackles (as one might expect from the title) the subject of logic, all done with his characteristic unearned confidence and obnoxious curmudgeonliness. No one could learn very much about logic from the essay, I think, but there are occasionally interesting things. When talking about the Aristotelian categories (of which he seems to have only secondhand and limited knowledge), he spends an extended amount of time on the tenth category, habitus (echein), which gets various translations as Possession, Having, Vestment, Clothing, and so forth, the category for things like 'shod', 'clothed', 'dressed', and so forth. Bentham's sarcastic comments on the subject are actually a good way to think through the category.
Habitus, vesture, human clothing, for such is the intimation given by the corresponding portion of the illustrative distich, nec tunicatus ero.
The illustrative distich is from Robert Sanderson's mnemonic verse in his Logicae Artis Compendium, which is Bentham's primary source on the history of logic. The distich is:
Arbor Sex Servos Fervore Refrigerat Ustos,
Ruri Cras Stabo, nec Tunicatus ero.
In English, that would mean roughly, "The tree cools six burned servants from the heat; I will stand in the field tomorrow, but not clothed." But, of course, it's a mnemonic; each capitalized word in the original gives an example of the category.
But clothing, human clothing, is it not a substance? Here, then, we have given, in the character of the name of a predicament distinct from all the rest, an article included under one of them, viz. the first.
More insightful than it looks; that which is worn is indeed a substance, and this is the distinctive feature of habitus as a category. Some people suggest that Aristotle's original intention for the category was that it be a rest state reached by change, which seems more general than Aristotle had in view, although it would make some sense. The traditional list of ten categories was long known to divide; the first four categories (substance, quality, quantity, relation) and the last six categories (action, passion, when, where, posture, having). The latter, which came to be known as the sex principia, all seem clearly to presuppose the category of relation in some way (Bentham, jumping on this, previously claimed that they all just reduce to relation), and one way to understand the division is take the first four to be categories specifically concerned with being (complete actuality) and the final six to be specifically concerned with changing (incomplete actuality). However, in part because of the influence of Aristotle's examples, it was also natural to take being clothed as a central feature of this particular category. But this works as well, and ironically, it is precisely for what Bentham is criticizing. Clothing is when one substance becomes accident-like relative to another substance, without being incorporated as a substantial part. In wearing shoes, you take a different substance, the shoes, and you use them in such a way that you yourself change from being unshod to being shod; the shoes become as-if accidents to you.
The accident strictly speaking is the state of wearing; but in the state of wearing another substance becomes predicable indirectly of you, as an adjunct of you. This is the distinctive feature of the category, and contrasts with the other five of the sex principia, all of which seem to be presupposed by this category. The Thomistic way of accounting for the sex principia is that they involve attribution to a subject of something beyond itself (which is why they presuppose relation). Action and passion are the categories for which the 'something beyond' is a cause or an effect; when, where, and posture are the categories for which the 'something beyond' is a measure (in particular, a change or a container, with the latter occurring in two different ways); and vestment is when the 'something beyond' is adjoined.
Late scholastics sometimes divided this category into ornament and equipment; it's clear that these are not mutually exclusive (shoes are both for use and for adornment), but these do seem to be the primary candidates for how one substance can become an adjunct for you. One substance can be adjoined to another as a sort of closely connected sign (adorned) or as a sort of closely connected tool (equipped).
Clothing, a predicament distinct from substance? On equal ground might additional predicaments, in any number, be stated as having existence, as being entitled to a place upon the list, many of them, perhaps most, a better title.
Bentham very notably provides no examples at all of anything that might be at least equally entitled to a place on the list. It is very difficult to come up with another category that definitely should be on the list, in part because (whether you think the original discussions in Aristotle had any principled scheme behind them or not) the list does seem to cover most of the things we predicate of things. And on the other side, it's hard to deny that we do, in fact, treat clothing in a special way as if it were almost part of what it clothes, and that this does affect what we say of things that are clothed. Even if you held, like Bentham, that the category is in some sense arbitrary and non-natural, that doesn't change the fact that we do in fact treat clothing in a different way from the way we treat everything else, and our language does in fact reflect this. There are things other than clothing in the strict sense that we do give special treatment -- you can say of someone that he is housed, for instance, in the sense of possessing a house, but one could argue that this falls under this category as an unusual case of non-clothing having something broadly like the relation to us that normally only clothing has. Clothing is a very good candidate for being the paradigmatic case, even if one held that, strictly speaking, the category also has to include things that are not strictly what we would call clothing. (One could also argue that any non-clothing cases are cases in which the category is predicated metaphorically, by a figure of speech, rather than properly.)
A curious predicament, a predicament, the exemplification of which is mere matter of contingency, a predicament which, at one time, had no existence, which in one place has, in another place has not, existence at this present time.
Before eating of the fatal apple, neither Adam, nor Eve his wife, had any clothing,—had possession, or so much as any idea of any such predicament. In fact, it had not any exemplification or any existence. At the very instant of its being placed, the first fig leaf that was ever placed, gave birth to this predicament, gave birth to the first individual from which the species, such as it is, pregnant with all the individuals that ever belonged to it, took its rise.
Some of the scholastics, like Thomas Aquinas, held that it is in fact true that this category is only properly predicated of human beings, so there would be no proper exemplification of it prior to the existence of human beings. Bentham has a tendency to dismiss things without giving any reason why, and this is a good case. He doesn't give us any actual reason to think it is absurd that human beings using human language might have a class of predications that completely presupposes something done by human beings. This is particularly the case, since Bentham thinks all accidents are "fictitious entities"; only substances are "real entities", so most of the categories don't have a real exemplification at all, being at best ways we linguistically compare and contrast substances. Fictitious entities, as Bentham understands the term, don't actually exist; they arise from the limitations of language. So it's hard to see why he's being so sarcastic about it. And likewise, it's not an absurdity that the first instance where we could predicate of something that it was clothed, required the invention of clothing.
There is something striking about the idea of human beings inventing an entirely new category. Nonetheless there are a few puzzles with Aquinas's position, which occasionally come up in scholastic discussions. Walls can be tapestried, which seems quite a bit like clothing, and in fact, statues can be dressed in clothes. Even more plausibly, horses can be shod and saddled, dogs and cats can be collared, and the like. On Aquinas's view, these are all extended senses based on the fact that by human intervention we can give an artificial relation to them on the model of our own clothing. Dogs themselves don't really wear collars; we put leather or cloth strips around dog's neck on the model of necklaces and collars in human beings, and then by a figure of speech treat the dog as wearing a collar.
I confess I'm not entirely convinced by this, in the sense that I can fully see that there would be a difference between the human cases and the cases of tapestried walls, saddled horses, and collared dogs, but I don't really see why that would affect either the predication or relation. Yes, these cases are derivative cases causally, but if you put sweater on a dog, it seems to be more than merely figuratively wearing a sweater. There are even purely natural cases, like the hermit crab with his adventitious shell, that seem difficult to distinguish from our wearing of clothes. To be sure, we often use this category metaphorically; we might say that the armadillo is armored, which is a figure of speech because what we are calling 'armor' is quite clearly just a part of the armadillo. But if we went around saying that the hermit crab was shelled, it's not at all clear why we would think that we were saying that the hermit crab was wearing the shell figuratively. If vestment is the category in which one substance is predicated of another substance specifically as adjoined to it, then the hermit crab's being shelled seems to count as vestment, despite no human intervention. And if that's the case, then it seems we should treat the cases of the horse's being saddled and the dog's being collared as vestment as well.
Perhaps St. Thomas is thinking of the category as being linked particularly to action. We, ourselves, wear clothes; being shod, despite the passive construction, is something we do as well as something done to us. Being shod is not something horses do; it is only something done to horses. This distinction between active vestment and passive vestment does seem important for many purposes. But passion is a category just like action, so I'm not sure that this would make a difference. We can distinguish cases in which we clothe ourselves and in which we are clothed by another. If someone puts clothes on you while you are asleep, for instance, you still seem to be clothed in the proper sense.
