I found a passage in De Ente et Essentia that is relevant to my claim that Thomas is not a hylomorphist with respect to the human soul but a substance-dualist. Here is the passage in the Armand Maurer translation. The numbers in brackets are my interpolation. My commentary follows.
[1] This is why among these substances [created intellectual substances] we do not find a multitude of individuals in the same species . . . except in the case of the human soul because of the body to which it is united. [2] And even though the individuation of the soul depends on the body as for the occasion of its beginning, because it acquires its individuated being only in the body of which it is the actuality, it is not necessary that the individuation cease when the body is removed. [3] Because the soul has a separate being, once the soul has acquired its individuated being by having been made the form of a particular body, that being always remains individuated. [4] That is why Avicenna says that the individuation and multiplication of souls depends on the body as regards its beginning but not as regards its end. (On Being and Essence, 2nd rev. ed, 1968, The Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, pp. 62-63.)
Commentary
Ad [1]. Created intellectual substances are either angels or human souls. Angels, of which there are many, are wholly immaterial. They are nonetheless composite beings in that they do not exist in virtue of their essence (quiddity) but receive their existence from God. Since there is no matter-form (hylomorphic) composition in them, what makes them many cannot be matter. And so each is a species unto itself. Their numerical difference is a difference in species.
Human beings, by contrast, all belong to the same species where the genus is animal, the species is human, and the specific difference is rationality. “Man is a rational animal.” The numerical difference of human beings among themselves is therefore not a difference grounded in a difference of species but a difference grounded in a difference in designated matter (materia signata).
Ad [2]. We are then told that a human soul first begins to exist when it acquires a body. Human souls do not pre-exist their embodiment. This is because the human soul is individuated — made to be an individual soul — by its acquisition of a body. Before Socrates acquired a body, there was no individual Socrates. Socrates cannot exist in reality except as an individual human being and he cannot exist as an individual human being without a material body. It is embodiment that brings about his individuation. So far, so good.
Now comes the crucial inference: because the human soul acquires its individuated being (existence) in the material body of which the soul is the actuality, it is not necessary that the individuation cease when the body is removed. Why not?
Ad [3]. The reason is because the soul’s individuation brings it about that the soul is a separate being. Unfortunately, Aquinas appears to be equivocating on ‘separate.’ No doubt the individuation of the soul of Socrates bring it about that his soul is separate from Plato’s soul in the sense of numerically different from Plato’s soul. But that is not to say that the soul of either is separate in the sense of existing without a body either before or after death.
I now explain the two senses of ‘separate.’
The cat is on the mat. The cat is separate from the mat, and the mat from the cat. That is equivalent to saying that cat and mat are numerically different. But neither is separate from designated matter. So ‘separate’ has these two different senses. Separation in the first sense is a symmetrical dyadic relation. It is existence-entailing on both ends: if x is separate from y, then x, y both exist. Separation in the second sense is not a relation at all. A separate substance such as an angel is not separated from anything. There is no parcel of designated matter that the angel Gabriel has to be separate from to be a separate substance.
So it looks as if Thomas is equivocating on ‘separate.’ One hesitates to tax such a great thinker with the fallacy of equivocation. But even if Thomas is not equivocating on ‘separate,’ his argument remains puzzling. Angels are separate substances: although not self-subsistent like God, they subsist without matter. They are individual in themselves, as forms. They need no individuation ab extra. They are already, logically speaking, individuals. Socrates does need individuation ab extra, and it comes from matter. Before he began to exist, he was nothing in reality: he was not a subsistent individual form that acquired a body. He became an individual only when a certain soul-body/ form-matter composite came to be. How then can the soul or form of that composite continue to exist when the composite is no more? This is impossible on Aristotelian hylomorphism, according to which the ‘principles’ of a hylomorphic compound substance are not themselves substances but non-independent ontological ‘parts’ or constituents of the substance of which they are the constituents.
Is Aquinas telling us that when Socrates died he became an angel? I reckon not. (That would be quite the metabasis eis allo genos!) Not even the doctor angelicus became an angel at death. He is however telling us that when the philosopher died he became a separate intellectual substance, and thus like an angel in that respect. Bear in mind that for Thomas, an incomplete substance is a substance. An incomplete substance is logically capable of independent existence: it is not an accident of a substance nor a ‘principle’ of a substance.
So, while Socrates post-mortem is no angel, sensu stricto, he is a separate intellectual substance, a substance that exists in reality on its own without matter. How exactly, given that for humans, as opposed to angels, (designated) matter is the principium individuationis?
The Aquinate line seems to be that the individuation that human souls acquire from matter before death remains with those souls after death. But what is the argument for this surprising thesis? The only argument I discern in the above text is this:
a) Designated matter individuates human souls;
b) Such individuation by designated matter makes of the soul a separate substance;
c) A separate substance does not depend on matter for its subsistence; ergo,
d) A human soul once individuated is forever after a separate substance.
But what reason do we have to accept (b)? No reason at all on a strictly hylomorphic approach. In fact, such an approach rules out (b). The form or soul of a living substance such as Socrates is merely a ‘principle’ of this compound sublunary substance — as I have stated many times already. These principles are not themselves substances. So they cannot exist on their own. Hence they cannot exist without matter. On strict hylomorphism, the soul of Socrates cannot continue to exist upon the dissolution of his body.
Everything falls into place, however, once you see that Aquinas is not a hylomorphic monist, but a substance-dualist. He simply presupposes the truth of (b). This presupposition is logical ‘fallout’ from Christianity as he understands it.
Bill,
This post, along with the two that preceded it, are outstanding, first because of their rigorous critical analysis of Aquinas’ position on hylomorphism and the post mortem soul and second because of their clarity and eloquence. Although I am no philosopher, I have been reading and thinking about this problem for many years now, and, for whatever my opinion is worth, I do not see how one might effectively counter the argument that you present. I hope that your critics do not cloudy the discussion by insisting that you either (1) have not understood something basic about hylomorphism, which is clearly false, or (2) by simply assuming the survival of the human soul because when embodied it carries out immaterial operations.
Vito
Thanks, Vito. This topic is fascinating and I intend to go deeper into it. This morning I was reading Pierre Rousselot on angels and Platonic forms. From this book: https://www.marquette.edu/mupress/Rousselot1.shtml
>>Yes, the philosopher and theologian Pierre Rousselot was killed in World War I. Mobilized in 1914, he was killed in action in Eparges, France, on April 25, 1915. His early death, at the age of 36, cut short a promising career as a professor at the Institut Catholique de Paris and a major figure in Neo-Thomism.
Born: December 29, 1878, in Nantes, France
Profession: Jesuit priest and philosopher
Death: April 25, 1915, in battle at Eparges, France
Cause of death: Killed in action during World War I<<
Two other brilliant and promising young philosophers were killed in action in WWI: Emil Lask and Adolf Reinach.
Wittgenstein and Heidegger both served but escaped unscathed.
I would say that your (b) is false.
Socrates’ *soul* comes into existence at the moment his body does, because that’s only when *Socrates* comes into existence, of which his soul is simply a part (like the first cell of his zygotic body): *Socrates* is the unity of his-body-and-his-soul.
Look: Bob, a soldier, loses his arms and legs in a horrific explosion, but survives: he is still *himself*, Bob, despite the loss.
Now imagine that we had the technology to maintain the life of a soldier in a similar situation, but whose head was the only part remaining: the head continued to think and speak by virtue of the life-giving machinery. He would still be the same person that he was before the explosion.
Aquinas would say the soul is just the next step: when your whole body is gone, you remain the same person, just at the greatest extreme of privation: robbed of the possibility of (physical) sensation. You remain yourself, just horrifically deprived of an essential part of you – your body.
So it *cannot* be substance dualism, which implies that – with no body – you are equally *you* as with your body (indeed, your soul has always and only ever been *you*).
John,
you seem to be conflating the eternality of the individuality with the survival of the soul. If Socrates’ individuality is identical to his soul, then it’s insufficient to bring about the post-mortem survival Aquinas seeks to argue for. If the two are distinct, the case for survival hasn’t been made.
The reason is that whether or not Socrates experiences an afterlife, it remains true that now and for all eternity, the individual Socrates has existed and his individuality will always be *there*, so to speak, even if not in a concrete individual. But he will always be a part of the worlds history and even God can’t make it so that Socrates has never existed.
Well this remnant is hardly what Aquinas was after. It would be like saying that we survive our death, because the matter of our corpse doesn’t cease. No, Aquinas wants that remnant to be capable of entering heaven. There’s genuine survival of the bodily death. Hence also the Thomistic emphasis on humanities intellect as the immaterial, immortal aspect. Because that what you are describing is not limited to human beings, but is shared amongst all biological organisms.
What you are describing at best gives us a kind of corruptionism, which permits God to resurrect us again, but in the meantime we’d remain, well, dead.
So to conclude, you’d need something more, and if you think Aquinas provided that, then he’s a substance dualist. That position by the way does not in any way entail that bodyless existence can’t be most diminished.
Dominik,
you say, “If Socrates’ individuality is identical to his soul, then it’s insufficient to bring about the post-mortem survival Aquinas seeks to argue for.”
and that is precisely what Aquinas does NOT say: Aquinas says that the soul is the one PART of us that survives the absence of our bodies, in the selfsame way that you would survive the loss of your limbs, and, mayhaps, the rest of your body.
Socrates is not identical to the soul of Socrates: he is identical to Socrates.
You didn’t address the issue or don’t understand the problem. To reiterate: what you say is compatible with Socrates not experiencing an afterlife. That the soul and the individuality aren’t identical, is clear; the latter persists even absent of the formers continued existence, though of course in a mode entirely uninteresting to Aquinas. That is what I made clear in the passage you quoted. Also, the former can’t exist without the latter.
But now the second issue. The soul in Aristotle is the life principle of the body, of Socrates. What you contend is that this life principle exists independently of the body, even when it came to exist at the same time. The question is how it does that and secondly, how that is not substance dualism.
Because as I’ve just noted, corruptionism doesn’t help the issue. The soul must still be in some ways active as to be capable of receiving its matter back, without its own unity having been destroyed in the process of bodily death. That is conceivable on dualism of substances. On a view where it is the animating factor of a body? Not so much. So that is something your comments here haven’t provided.
I take this problem to be the exact reason why a structural realist like Peter van Inwagen toys with ideas like God preserving our matter right before our death, to keep it dormant until the general resurrection. Because its structure, its soul, would cease were death to ever occur.
Dominik,
In your second comment, you show you understand the problem. You appreciate that the soul (anima, psyche, Seele), if it is merely the life-principle of an animal body, cannot be a subsistent item apart from the designated matter (materia signata) that it animates or enlivens. So if there is to be personal survival of death, the soul cannot be a mere life-principle, and it cannot be a mere form, given that, necessarily, every form is a form of something that it informs. So his conception is not hylomorphic but substance-dualist. Aquinas may be an Aristotelian ‘on earth,’ but he is a Platonist in heaven. Anthony Kenny, a top Aquinas scholar takes this line.
The score is Kowalski 1- Doran 0.
What you say abuut PvI is not at all clear. Do you mean “right after our death’? Which article or book of PvI are you thinking of?
Dominik,
What you say in the second paragraph of your first comment is very interesting. Suppose there is no personal survival of bodily death: Socrates the person ceases to exist at death. Still, it will always be the case that Socrates existed, that he came to be, lasted a while, then ceased to be, body and soul. Nothing that happens in the future, and nothing that anyone does in the future can erase the fact of his having been. Not even God can make it be the case that Socrates never existed. As Aquinas says somewhere , not even God can restore a virgin. There is a curious modality, necessitas per accidens, that attaches to contingent events such as the event of losing your virginity. But of course to be immortal in this diluted sense is a shabby substitute for the genuine article, and this is not what Aquinas intends.
And I doubt that this is what Doran is saying although his failure to understand the problem gives you some justification is trying to understand him the way you do.