Last year I did a few posts on the tenth predicament (ninth accident),
habitus, i.e., habit in the sense of vestment, which is roughly the category in which one substance is predicated as an accident for another. I looked at a number of different people and what they said about this -- Jeremy Bentham, Robert Sanderson, James Beattie, Thomas Aquinas, John of St. Thomas. I was recently playing around with various automatic translation programs, and decided to test them with a passage from Juan José Urráburu's
Institutiones Philosophicae on the same category. Urráburu (1844-1904) is a case of an extremely important figure in the history of philosophy whose name is rarely known. He was a Spanish Jesuit whose eight-volume
Institutiones Philosophicae, begun about 1890 and finished in 1900, and five-volume
Compendium version of the same work, was of overwhelming significance and importance for the early twentieth-century Neo-Scholastic movement; in effect, it became the primary reference for most of it, and shaped its structure and approach. Unlike in the previous posts, where I translated, the following translation is basically that of Google Translate (which has become quite good at translating Latin, even though it is still very occasionally odd in particular translation preferences and occasionally gets phrases the wrong way around), although I have checked it briefly for any very obvious errors and have also regularized its clothing terms to use 'vestment' and 'vested' for the similar vest- terms in the original. It is from volume 2 of the
Institutiones,
Ontologia, disputation 6, chapter 4, article 3 (section 378).
This category (*habitus*) expresses the meaning according to which something is said to be clothed or adorned by something adjacent to the body—such as vestments or protective armor (e.g., a breastplate, helmet, etc.); it is thus defined by Gilbert in terms of bodies and the things adjacent to them. Consequently, the primary subject of the determinations belonging to this category is man alone, since he is the only animal that uses vestment out of necessity and natural instinct. Nevertheless, animals can secondarily be the subjects of such denominations insofar as they are clothed or armored through human ingenuity—for example, a horse or a monkey—as can statues vested in human fashion, and temples or houses adorned with tapestries and hangings. Also included here are terms like "gilded," "whitewashed," "red-hot," and similar ones, which arise from one substance being accidentally superimposed upon another in the manner of an ornament.
This follows St. Thomas, but in a very specific later reading that (as I have said elsewhere) St. Thomas may not have actually meant. I am a bit baffled by the last sentence, which at first seems to contradict everything else in this paragraph; but I suppose Urráburu probably means that these are figurative cases.
Now, the denomination belonging to this category can be stated in two ways: first, as "having vestment," and second, as "being vested." In the first sense, the denominating form is the act of having or wearing the vestment—or the actual state of wearing it and the union, as it were, of the vestment with the body; it is in this sense that Aristotle could write that *habitus* is an intermediary between the one who has the vestment and the vestment that is possessed. In the second sense, the form is the vestment itself, which—acting like an extrinsic form and through its adjacency to the body (a kind of union)—denominates the body as "vested." Similarly, when a body is denominated as "having a soul," the denominating form is the state of possession or union; but when it is called "animated," the form is the soul itself. Furthermore, the very habition, or adjacency of vestment is nothing other than a twofold contiguous ubication—one of the vestment, the other of the body; while this falls under the category of *Ubi* insofar as it involves the office of locating, it belongs to the category of *Habitus* insofar as it involves the office of clothing or uniting the vestment to the body. The Eximious Doctor explains all this at length and excellently, and one may also consult him regarding the species of *Habitus*.
The second-to-last sentence I had to restructure, because Google's translation was very loose (one of its weaknesses is that it tends at times to translate technical terms colloquially, which is sometimes nicely clear but sometimes makes a complete hash of things). The 'Eximious Doctor' is Suarez. While it is true that the category of vestment presupposes the category of 'where' (or 'place', as it is often called), this is, I think, because it presupposes all of the categories. As usually conceived by the scholastics, there is basically an ordering in the categories; we have the fundamental first four (substance, quantity, quality, relation), and then the next six, sometimes called the sex principia, which all presuppose the fundamental four: action, passion, when, where, posture (situs), vestment (habitus). But even within the sex principia, it is very obvious that when and where presuppose action and passion, and that situs presupposes all four of those, and then habitus presupposes all of them. Thus I think it is very misleading to say that habition, i.e., the act pertaining to habitus, is 'nothing other' than being reciprocally in the category of 'where'; for one thing, habitus presupposes situs almost as much as it does ubi, and second, reciprocal contiguous placement would not usually be habition at all. (Indeed, on Urráburu's own acceptance of the traditional idea that the category of vestment only applies to human beings, it could not possibly be so.) Thus there must be something distinctive about vestment. The obvious thing, of course, is that in reciprocal contiguous placement, the reciprocity is precisely not enough to get you vestment; vestment involves something like a dependence, and thus involves an asymmetry. You literally wear your clothes; your clothes do not literally wear you. Indeed, even figuratively saying that your clothes wear you indicates that something has gone very wrong.
As for the properties of this category, it possesses almost none that are peculiar to it. However, certain accidents seem to pertain to it in a special way—specifically color and shape; for just as these two contribute greatly to beauty, so too do they contribute to the nature of ornamentation. Gilbert and the author of the *Summa of Aristotle's Entire Logic* also assign a twofold property to this category: that it has no contrary and that it admits of degrees (more and less). Yet this latter property is not to be understood as the admission of degrees through intrinsic intensification. "For since *Habitus* is a kind of substance, it cannot admit of more and less any more than substance itself can; just as, for the same reason, it lacks a contrary. Rather, it is said to admit of more and less through a certain kind of addition—not merely an extensive addition regarding the subject (which is common to other accidents), but through the multiplication of vestments around the same part of the body; in the same way that a person wearing two tunics is said to be 'more clothed' than one wearing only a single tunic. Hence, it is also a distinctive feature of this category that one of its forms can be placed over another—either quasi-accidentally through human choice (as when garments are of the same type) or essentially through the very nature of the attire (as when a toga is placed over other vestments)—even though the denomination always refers immediately to the person himself; for it is the man who is denominated 'wearing a toga.' And even if it happened that he lacked inner vestments and wore only the toga, he would still be denominated in that way. It is also, in a sense, proper to this category that its forms are distinguished according to the organic parts of the human body, yet they denominate the man absolutely; for although shoes or a hat are located only on the feet or the head, the man is said absolutely to be 'hatted' or 'shod.' And one point rightly follows from the other; for when a form is not naturally suited to apply to the whole except by reason of a specific part, then—existing in that part alone—it denominates the whole, just as a man is called 'curly-haired' solely because of his hair. Thus, since a shoe is an extrinsic form belonging only to the foot, it denominates the whole while existing in that part; and the same applies to other instances. Conversely, when a denomination naturally pertains to the whole, it is not derived simply from forms of this kind; and therefore, a man is not said absolutely [to be defined by them], even if he is wearing shoes or a hat, etc."
The long quotation starting with "For since Habitus" is from Suarez (from Metaphysics, disputation 53). I find myself of two minds with regard to Suarez's rejection of the idea that vestment admits of more and less in a proper sense (which, as he says here, would involve intensity). It is true that we usually say someone is 'more clothed' when they have (quantatively) more clothes on them. Nonetheless, I wonder if there's a sense, not often discussed but nonetheless real, in which vestments admit of degrees in how much they clothe you. That is to say, not as a matter of having more clothes, but of having clothes that clothe you more. In particular, vestment involves a relation between two substances, usually called adjunction or adjacency, that seems like it might admit of degrees, or something very like it. We perhaps talk about this very indirectly when we talk about 'fit'. But I don't know; it's something I hadn't really thought about before. Suarez (and with him Urráburu) rejects the idea that vestment admits of degrees because vestments are substances, which does not admit of degrees; but vestments are substances adjoined to substances in the manner of accidents, and the adjunction itself is not something he is taking into account.
However, I very much like two points in the Suarez quotation. The first is the recognition that vestments can 'nest', and that this is related to the fact that they function as extrinsic forms, in particular, as extrinsic forms for parts, although the vestment is attributed absolutely to the whole person. These are, I think, more important than has usually been recognized. Nonethless, Urráburu does not do anything with them, although I find it interesting that he thought it important enough to quote the whole thing.
In any case, another entry in my quixotic quest to become the World's Foremost Expert on the category of habitus, if only because no one else can be bothered.