Category: Aquinas and Thomism

Intentionality in Thomas and Husserl and the Question of Realism

This entry raises the question whether Husserl’s theory of intentionality supports the sort of realism Thomists embrace. I argue that it doesn’t.

My Serbian correspondent Milosz sent me a reference to an article in Commonweal in which we read:

What attracted these Catholics to Husserl was his theory of intentionality—the notion that human consciousness is always consciousness “of” something. This appealed to Catholics because it appeared to open a way beyond the idealism of modern philosophy since Kant, which had threatened to undermine the possibility that human beings could possess an objective knowledge of realities outside the mind, including God.

Husserl’s phenomenology seemed to offer a solution to this problem. His promise to return “to the things themselves” sounded to many Catholics like a vindication of medieval scholasticism, which stressed that human beings have the capacity to objectively know reality independent of the mind. This led some Catholics to dub phenomenology a “new scholasticism.” By pointing “beyond” modern philosophy, they hoped that phenomenology could also serve as a path “back” to medieval thought, so that one might begin from the perspective of modern philosophy and end up somewhere closer to Thomas Aquinas. Husserl’s phenomenology thus opened up the possibility that modern, secular philosophy could be converted to Catholicism.

The Commonweal article is annoyingly superficial, and the last sentence quoted is just silly. Do I need to explain why? At the very most, Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality prior to the publication in 1913 of Ideas I could be interpreted as supportive of realism, and was so interpreted by many of his early acolytes, among them, the members of the Göttingen and Munich circles.    And so in some very vague sense, Husserlian intentionality could be taken as pointing back, via Franz Brentano, to medieval thought and to Thomas Aquinas in particular, assuming one doesn’t know much about Thomas or Husserl. But the claim that “Husserl’s phenomenology thus opened up the possibility that modern, secular philosophy could be converted to Catholicism” is risible.

Undiluted Roman Catholicism consists of extremely specific theological doctrines. No one could reasonably hold that a realistically  interpreted Husserl could soften secular philosophers up for Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Transubstantiation, Papal Infallibility, etc.  (I will note in passing that it was the promulgation of the Infallibility doctrine that triggered Brentano’s leaving of the priesthood.) The most that could be said is that the (merely apparent) realism of the early Husserl was welcomed by Catholic thinkers. In any case, Husserl was not a realist, but a transcendental idealist as I will argue below.

But now let’s  get down to brass tacks with a little help from Peter Geach. I will first sketch the intentionality doctrine of Thomas. It will then become apparent, if you know your Husserl, that there is nothing like the Thomistic doctrine in Husserl. In the second main section I will explain how Husserl’s theory differs and how  it leads him to transcendental idealism.

A theory of intentionality ought to explain how the objective reference or object-directedness of our thoughts and perceptions is possible. How do our thoughts and perceptions reach things in reality ‘outside’ the mind? Suppose I am thinking about a cat, a particular cat of my acquaintance who I have named ‘Max Black.’ How are we to understand the relation between  my mental act of thinking, which is a transient datable event in my mental life, and its object, the cat I am thinking of? What makes my thinking of Max a thinking of Max?  Or perhaps Max is in front of me and I am not merely thinking about him but seeing him.  What makes my seeing a seeing of him? What makes these mental acts, whether of sense or intellect, take an object, and not just any object, but the very object they do take?  Please note that, while I have set up the problem as one concerning the relation of intentionality, it is not obvious that intentionality is a relation sensu stricto as we will see in a moment.

1. Intentionality in Thomas Aquinas

Here is what Peter Geach has to say, glossing Aquinas:

What makes a sensation or thought of an X to be of an X is that it is an individual occurrence of that very form or nature which occurs in X — it is thus that our mind ‘reaches right up to the reality’; what makes it to be a sensation or thought of an X rather than an actual X or an actual X-ness is that X-ness here occurs in the special way called esse intentionale and not in the ‘ordinary’ way called esse naturale. This solution resolves the difficulty. It shows how being of an X is not a relation in which the thought or sensation stands, but is simply what the thought or sensation is . . . .(Three Philosophers, Cornell UP, 1961, p. 95)

But what the devil does that mean? Allow me to explain.

The main point here is that of-ness or aboutness is not a relation between a mental act and its object. Thus intentionality is not a relation that relates my occurrent thinking of Max and Max. My thinking of Max just is the immaterial occurrence in my mind of the very same form or nature — felinity — which occurs physically and thus materially in Max. One and the same form occurs immaterially in my mind and materially in Max. The form itself is as it were ‘amphibious’ as between these two different modes of realization.

Aquinas, following Aristotle, views a concrete spatiotemporal particular such as Max as a hylomorphic compound, a compound of (substantial) form and (signate) matter. Old Max himself, fleas and all, is of course not in my mind, let alone in my head. It is his form alone that is in my mind.  ‘In my mind,’ of course,  is not to be taken spatially. If felinity informs my mind, however, why isn’t my mind a cat?

Here is where the distinction between esse intentionale and esse naturale comes in. One and the same form — felinity — exists in two different ways or modes. The form’s mode of being in my mind is esse intentionale while its mode of being in Max is esse naturale. You will note that the Thomistic doctrine of intentionality presupposes what I call the MOB-doctrine, namely, the theory that there are modes of being. Said doctrine is hardly obvious and is widely denied by distinguished contemporaries. I myself am open to the MOB-doctrine.

Because my thinking of Max just is the intentional occurrence in my mind of the same form or nature that occurs naturally in Max, there is no problem about how my thought reaches Max. There is no gap between mind and world.  One could call the Thomistic theory an identity theory of intentionality, or better, an ‘isomorphic’ theory.  One and the same form occurs in the mind and in the thing but in two different ways: with esse intentionale in the mind but with esse reale/naturale in the thing.  This isomorphism insures that the knower is not enclosed within the circle of his ideas and cut off from the world. It puts paid to the ‘gap problem’  that bedevils post-Cartesian philosophy. For Thomas, there is  a metaphysically antecedent community of nature between mind and world that underwrites the latter’s intelligibility to the former. Extramental beings are knowable by us because of this antecedent community of nature.

This view can be traced back to  Aristotle’s De Anima 431b20: “The soul (psyche, anima) is in a certain sense all things . . .” and a little before that, at 431b15 we read, “the mind when actively thinking is identical to its objects.” (emphasis added) No gap, no bridge, identity!

In sum, the sameness of form explains how the mind contacts reality outside the mind; the difference in modes of being or existence explains why the knower is not the known.  Knower and known are identical in respect of the common nature or form; knower and known are different in respect of how the common form exists in the knower and in the known. The common nature, as common, is neither immaterial nor immaterial, neither intentionally existent nor really existent.

That in a nutshell is the Thomist theory of intentionality. If you can see your way clear to accepting it as the only adequate account of intentionality, then it provides a bonus by supplying a reason for the celebrated real distinction (distinctio realis) of essence and existence. For the account requires that there be two distinct modes of esse, an immaterial mode, esse intentionale, and a material mode, esse naturale. Now if a form F-ness can exist in two different modes, then it cannot be identical to either and must be really distinct from both. (Cf. Peter Geach, “Form and Existence” in God and the Soul, Thoemmes Press 1994, pp. 62-64, orig. publ. 1969)

I have some questions about the Thomist theory, but I won’t raise them here because my present purpose is not to evaluate the Thomist theory but merely to contrast it with the theory of HusserI.

2. Intentionality in Edmund Husserl

We must now ask how Husserl’s approach to intentionality and thus to the possibility of knowledge differs from the above.  I say it does differ and that Husserl’s phenomenology gives no aid or  comfort to Thomist realism.  This is a large and controversial topic and I cannot say much about it in one weblog entry. But I must say something. I am not concerned at present with the tenability of either position. My sole present concern is to show that (i) Husserl is a transcendental idealist, and that therefore (ii)  Husserl’s position is incompatible with Thomist realism.

The Natural Attitude

The realism of Thomas was developed and is maintained within what Husserl calls the natural attitude (die natürliche Einstellung).  In the natural attitude the world we experience, live in, and act upon is naively taken as unquestionably given.  It is uncritically accepted as the ultimate backdrop of all our concerns, practical and theoretical. Within the world so taken there are knowers and things known. It also includes all intentional (object-directed) mental states, whether sensible or intellectual, of humans and animals. They too are taken to occur in the world of the natural attitude.  My seeing the cat or the mat on which he sits  is then explained under the presupposition that there really are,  extra-mentally, knowing beings and known beings.  A knower is a psychophysical complex, a minded organism.  Its mental or psychic states are naively taken as states or processes within the same spatiotemporal world in which the knowers’ bodily states occur.  This is all uncritically accepted and not put into question from within the natural attitude.

The natural attitude is not a philosophical theory, but is  prior to any philosophical theory one might adopt.  It is the pre-theoretical basis from which philosophical theories arise. So one must not conflate the natural attitude with  the philosophical theory of metaphysical naturalism, according to which  reality is exhausted by the spacetime system and its contents.

And while one needn’t philosophize within the natural attitude, and most don’t, one can.  One who philosophizes within the natural attitude may ask how objective knowledge is possible and may also ask about the relation in a knower between mental/psychic states  and physical states. Let’s briefly consider some natural-attitude solutions to the second problem, the mind-body problem.

If our natural-attitude philosopher is an Aristotelian he will hold that a knower is a hylomorphic compound in which anima forma corporis, the soul or psyche is the (substantial) form of the body.  The same goes for the Thomist, mutatis mutandis. If our natural-attitude philosopher is a hard-core materialist/physicalist, however, he will say that mental states are just states of the brain.  If our natural-attitude philosopher is a Cartesian substance dualist, he will reject all three of the foregoing positions and tell us that the soul/psyche/mind is an immaterial primary substance (and thus not a  form or state) really distinct from bodily primary substances. (There are of course other positions in the philosophy of mind such as epiphenomenalism, emergentism, supervenientism, panpsychism, functionalism, occasionalism, parallelism, and so on, all of them developed within the natural attitude.)

The four positions just sketched are all realist in the sense that the things the mind knows are taken to exist independently of the minds that know them.  On realism, the being of the things known is not reducible to their being-known, let alone their being thought-of.  But there is nothing to stop a natural-attitude philosopher from being an idealist who holds, like Berkeley, that esse est percipi, that to be = to be perceived.  On an idealism like this, which Husserl calls ‘psychological’ to distinguish it from his transcendental idealism,  the things known do not exist independently of knowers.

The main point, however, is that all of this theorizing, whether realist or idealist, is being done within the natural attitude.  So just as one must not confuse the natural attitude with any version of metaphysical naturalism, one must also not confuse it with any pre-Husserlian version of realism or idealism. Within the natural attitude, mundane idealists oppose mundane realists; Husserl’s idealism, however, is, or is supposed to be, transcendental or pre-mundane.   We will have to come back to this later.

Another point that needs to be made before proceeding  is that, within the natural attitude, one can perform an epoché or suspension of belief in the manner of such  Pyrrhonian skeptics of late antiquity as Sextus Empiricus.  There is such a thing as a natural-attitude epoché.  Suppose you tell me that Thomas Merton was assassinated by the CIA. There are three main attitudes I can take up with respect to this proposition: Accept, Reject, Suspend.  If I suspend judgment, I take no position with respect to the truth-value of the proposition you assert.  I merely entertain it without affirming it or denying it.  I put it ‘within brackets,’ if you will.  It is then, in Husserlian lingo, eingeklammert. But this Pyrrhonian bracketing is piecemeal and partial; it does not put the whole world of the natural attitude within brackets, as does Husserl’s, as we shall see.

The Pyrrhonian skeptic also advocates a sort of ‘reduction,’ a leading back, not from the thing taken naively as existing in itself to its appearing,  but from the propositional content affirmed as true or rejected as false, to the propositional content itself under bracketing of its truth-value.

Epoché and reduction in Husserl have a far more radical sense.

To understand Husserl, you must understand that his aim is to thematize what had been, before he came along, tacit and pre-thematic, namely the natural attitude and to show that it  presupposes something deeper,  transcendental subjectivity, a pre-mundane region of Being. He proposes to uncover this region of Being by way of a radicalization and purification of the Cartesian project of universal doubt. As he puts it in his late Paris Lectures, “The methodology of purified Cartesianism demands . . . the phenomenological epoché. This epoché eliminates as worldly facts from my field of judgment both the reality [Seinsgeltung] of the objective world in general and the sciences of the world.” (The Paris Lectures, Koestenbaum tr., 10) The word Koestenbaum translates ineptly as ‘eliminates’ is ausschalten. Its  relevant meanings in this context include switch off, disconnect, set aside, make no use of.  The idea is that if one aspires to be truly radical  in one’s philosophizing, and go to the root (radix) of the matter, one must set aside the reality or ontic validity [Seinsgeltung] of the world given in the natural attitude and make no use of any of its facts. In addition, radicality demands that we make no use of the positive sciences that investigate these facts.

But why perform the phenomenological epoché?

Before I can answer this question we need a quick Descartes review. Renatus Cartesius (1596-1650), troubled as he was  by the cacophony of conflicting beliefs, sought objective certainty.  He sought a fundamentum inconcussum, an unshakable foundation for his beliefs.  His method of search was by doubting everything that he could possibly doubt to see if there is anything that he could not doubt.  He sought the utterly indubitable. What he found was the cogito, the ‘I think,’ where thinking (cogitation, from L. cogitare, to think) ) is understood sensu lato to embrace every type of object-directed consciousness, whether perceptual, imaginative, memorial, judgmental, etc. He found that he could not doubt his thinkings (occurrent episodes or acts of thinking, cogitationes).  He could doubt particular objects of thinkings, particular cogitata, whether they exist in reality, and whether in reality they have the properties they appear to have, but he could not doubt the cogitationes directed upon these cogitata.  For example, if I see a tree, I can doubt whether there exists in reality, i.e., extra-mentally, a tree that I see, and I can doubt whether it really possesses the attributes (being in bloom, say) that it is seen to have.  What I cannot doubt is the existence of an object-directed visual experiencing as of  a tree in bloom.

There are, however, not just one but two items I cannot doubt. I cannot doubt the cogitatio, the occurrent episode of object-directed visual awareness, but I also cannot doubt what could be called the CONTENT of this awareness, what Husserl calls the noema of this noesis, namely the cogitatum qua cogitatum.  (Side note: Some philosophers in the analytic tradition assimilate Husserl’s noema to Frege’s Sinn (sense) which mediates linguistic reference.  If for Frege, linguistic reference is routed through sense (Sinn), for Husserl, thinking reference is routed through the noema. I do not endorse this interpretation, but cannot discuss it further here. It is known in the trade as the West Coast interpretation of the noema.)

The Ambiguity of ‘Object’

There is an ambiguity here that must be carefully noted, and it is relevant to the idealism question.   A cogitatum is an object of thought.  But ‘object’ is ambiguous. Do we mean the thing in reality that presumably exists and has properties whether or not anyone is aware of it or its properties? Or do we mean the thing precisely as it appears to a conscious being with only the properties it appears to have when it appears?  The latter alone is the cogitatum qua cogitatum, the object of thought just insofar as it is the accusative of an act of thinking, that is, just insofar as it is a correlate of a cogitatio, the noema of a noesis.  The cogitatum qua cogitatum is what I will call the PURE OBJECT.  It is distinct from the ego, from the ego’s cogitationes, and from the thing itself in mind-independent reality, should there be one.  We can then call the cogitatum simpliciter the THING.

‘Object,’ then, is ambiguous as between pure object and thing.  This parallels the ambiguity of ‘Every consciousness is a consciousness of something’ as between ‘Every consciousness is a consciousness of a pure object‘ and ‘Every consciousness is a consciousness of a thing.’ Suppose I am imagining a winged horse. Am I imagining something or nothing? Something, obviously, but something that does not exist.  In this case, the cogitatum, object of thought, is a pure object, not a thing (res).  A pure object is a Gegenstand inasmuch as it stands over against consciousness-of. A thing, as I am using the term, is not a Gegenstand, but a thing the being of which is not exhausted by its standing over against consciousness-of.  But I don’t call it a Ding-an-sich because, for Kant, the Ding-an-sich is unknowable whereas for Thomist realists the thing is knowable as it is in itself.  In passing, I will also note that we should beware of confusing Husserl’s transcendental idealism with Kant’s.   The main point of difference is that Husserl’s transcendental idealism requires the epoché whereas there is no epoché in Kant. I cannot pause to explain this now.

We must, therefore, distinguish the pure object from the thing. For example, when I look at Max, I see a cat, which is to say: I live through (er-leben) a conscious state that is object-directed, but is this actual experience (Erlebnis) of seeing directed to, and terminate at, a pure object? Or is directed to, and terminate at, an extra-mental thing? In the first case the directedness terminates at a pure object.  In the second case it goes through the pure object and terminates at the thing. In the second case the pure object is an epistemic intermediary, and not the thing known.

In the first case, my living through the experience as of seeing a cat does not guarantee the extra-mental existence of a cat that I see. For it may be — it is epistemically possible — that nothing in reality corresponds to the pure object or even to an ensemble of mutually coherent objects  that appear to successive acts. In the second case the experience latches onto the thing itself, grasping it in its mind-independent being.

Two Uses of ‘See’

The difference between the two cases is reflected linguistically in the difference between a phenomenological use of ‘see’ according to which subject S’s seeing of x is consistent with the nonexistence of x, and a ‘verb of success’ use according to which  S’s seeing of x entails the existence of x.  We find both uses in ordinary English. If I tell you that you are ‘seeing things’ I am telling you that what you are seeing isn’t really there, i.e., doesn’t exist. And in dreams we do see things that aren’t there.   This is the phenomenological use of ‘see.’ The verb of success use, however, is at home in the natural attitude.

Now back to our Descartes review. From Husserl’s point of view, Descartes, with his universal doubt is on the right track, but he doesn’t go far enough. He  is still partially stuck in the natural attitude, and fails to execute, or fully execute, the ‘transcendental turn.’

Descartes’ underlying schema is this:

D. Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum-res.

Husserl’s underlying schema is similar but also importantly different in one respect:

H. Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum-[res].

In (H) ‘res’ or ‘thing’ is bracketed, in (D) it is not. Let the thing be the paloverde tree in my backyard presently in glorious yellow bloom in the Sonoran spring. In the natural attitude we take the tree to exist in itself whether or not I or anyone make(s) it the object of an intentional (object-directed) act, whether a perceiving, a remembering, whatever.

But are we justified in taking the tree to exist in itself?

Granted, my seeing is an intrinsically object-directed state that purports to reveal a thing that exists and has the properties it is seen to possess whether or not I or anyone see it.  This purport is intrinsic to the conscious directedness. To put it paradoxically, the intentional state  intends the object as non-object. (I borrow this formulation from Wolfgang Cramer. It is paradoxical but non-contradictory. The paradox is rooted in the ambiguity of ‘object’ which I have already explained.)

To put it non-paradoxically, the intentional state intends a thing (purports to reveal a thing) the being of which exceeds its being a merely intentional object for a subject. Consciousness-of, by its very nature, purports or ‘wants’ to reach things transcendent of consciousness. This, I claim, is part of the phenomenology of the situation.   I am pretty sure that  Husserl would agree with this. Whether or not he agrees, the point I am making can be put in Husserlian jargon: what is intended is intended to be more than a mere noematic correlate of a noesis, and indeed more than an entire ensemble of mutually coherent noemata.  As it seems to me, what is intended in an intentional state is intended as existing an sich, in itself, and not merely for me or for us.  Consciousness-of, by an inner necessity, desires its own transcendence.  Every noesis is a nisus, a mental striving or perfective endeavor. These last two formulations are mine, not Husserl’s, but in line with his views.  But in the interests of strenge Wissenschaft (rigorous science), this lust for transcendence, which is endemic to the natural attitude, must be chastened and inhibited.

The purport to reveal a thing as it is in itself may also be expressed in terms Descartes borrows from the scholastics. Accordingly, what is intended in an intentional state is the thing in its formal reality (realitas formalis), its formal or trans-objective reality, and not merely in its  its objective reality (realitas objectiva) as an object for a subject.  ‘Objective reality’ refers to the reality the thing enjoys when its stands in relation to a conscious subject. ‘Formal reality’ refers to the reality that the thing has in itself whether or not it stands in relation to a conscious subject.

Of course, the purported reference of an intentional state beyond itself to a thing in reality may not pan out. Usually it does, but sometimes it doesn’t. It may be that  there exists in reality no  tree such as the one the directedness purports to reveal. In the natural attitude, we naturally go along with these purports in the vast majority of cases; we do not inhibit them as we do when we are doing phenomenology in the Husserlian style.

From this example we can begin to see what the phenomenological reduction or phenomenological epoché is all about. It is about inhibiting the natural tendency of mind to posit its objects as existing in themselves. The thing is bracketed as in schema (H): it is re-duced to its appearing. Ducere in Latin means to lead; a reduction, then is a leading back, a regression.

Before we get to the question of Husserl’s putative idealism, we need to ask and answer two questions: (Q1) why would he want to put the world of the natural attitude within brackets, and (Q2) why does he think that Descartes did not  go far enough?

Q1: Why the Need for the Phenomenological Reduction?

The short answer  is to avoid the epistemological circle. Husserl appreciates that one cannot answer the epistemological question of how objective knowledge of real beings is possible if one presupposes what one wants an account of, namely, objective knowledge of real beings. Let me explain.

Consider again my seeing of Max the cat. What makes my seeing a seeing of Max and thus a sensory knowing of Max? How do I know that he exists extra-mentally and has the properties extra-mentally that  I see him to have? A natural-attitude answer might be in  terms of causal actions of physical  things spatially external to my body that act upon my body’s  optical transducers (eyes),  which in turn convert photons into neural information which is then transmitted by electrochemical means to the  visual cortex in my brain, and voila! a cat appears.  Such an account is epistemologically worthless because circular: it presupposes that we have knowledge of both (i) the existence of mind-independent things and of (ii) the truth of the sciences of the natural attitude (physics, physiology, electrochemistry, etc.).  Husserl’s intention  is not to deny or doubt any of this.  His point is that no use may be made of it in epistemology.   A radical critique of knowledge cannot presuppose knowledge.

W. V. Quine would disagree. See his Epistemology Naturalized.

One objection to Quine from a SEP article has an Husserlian flavor:

(2) A second objection is that Quinean naturalism is viciously circular. Among the central tasks of epistemology, it’s said, is to establish that empirical knowledge is possible—that we may, for example, legitimately rely upon empirical science as a source of knowledge. However, Quine would have epistemologists make “free use” of the results of science from the start.

Q2: Husserl on Descartes’ Lack of Radicality

The reduction in Husserl is a two-step move: from the thing to its appearing to a subject, and then from the subject initially and naively taken to be psychological or psychophysical to the transcendental subject.  The reduction is thus a transcendental-phenomenological reduction.  Husserl’s beef with Descartes is that he doesn’t execute the second step.  In Cartesian Meditations, sec. 10, Husserl alleges that the Frenchman fails to make the transcendental turn (die transzendentale Wendung).  He stops short at a little tag-end of the world (ein kleines Endchen der Welt), from which he then argues to get back what he had earlier doubted, including the external world.

Despite his universal doubt, Cartesius remains within the world thinking he has found the sole unquestionable part of it. Although he achieves something very much like a phenomenological reduction, the Frenchman fails to inaugurate a transcendental-phenomenological reduction.  He reduces things to their appearances, but fails to properly identify that to which they appear, the transcendental ego. He misidentifies it as something within the world of things, not a material thing, but an immaterial thing. As I would put, Descartes reifies the transcendental ego. A thing is a thing whether material or immaterial.

The reification consists in the misconstrual of the transcendental ego as substantia cogitans, mens sive animus.  This gives rise to what Husserl calls the absurdity of transcendental realism.  Husserl’s thought seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn one is left with no entity (res) in the world that can serve as the subject for whom there is a world. If everything in the world receives its Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) from the transcendental ego, then this ego cannot be a thinking thing or substance.  It cannot be either the empirical ego (the animated body that psychology and physiology studies) nor can it be a soul substance as it is for Thomas and his followers. It has to be the source of the ontic or existential validity (Seinsgeltung) of the objects that appear.

But this is perplexing. Just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all Seinsgeltung?  Is it at all?  If it is or exists at all, then it is in the world, even if not in the physical world.  It is in the world, the totality of entities. But it can’t be inasmuch as the transcendental ego as the constitutive source of all ontic validity is pre-mundane.

The puzzle could be put like this. Either the constitutive source of all Seinsgeltung is pre-mundane or it is not. If the former, then it would appear to be nothing at all. If the latter, then it is not the constitutive source of all Seinsgeltung.

Conclusion

In a later post I may come back to the problem just posed, which concerns the tenability of Husserl’s final position, but for now, I believe I have said enough to scotch the notion that Husserl’s position supports Thomist realism.  Husserl’s phenomenology  is committed to transcendental idealism, according to which  beings do not exist in themselves but only for transcendental subjectivity.  Here is a characteristic passage:

Alles, was ich je als wahrhaft Seiendes einsehen kann, ist gar nichts anderes als ein intentionales Vorkommnis meines eigenen — des Erkennenden — Lebens . . . . (Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Theorie der Phaenomenologischen Reduktion, Husserliana Band VIII, S. 184 f.)

Whatever I can recognize as a genuine being is nothing other than an intentional occurrence of my own — the knower’s — life . . . .

For Husserl, the very Being of beings is their Being for consciousness, their being constituted in and by consciousness.  Their Sein reduces to Seinsinn, and that Sinn points back to the transcendental ego from which all sense derives. So the Sinn is not Original Sinn, pun intended, but derivative Sinn. Therefore, on transcendental idealism, contingent beings have no need for a divine ground of their existence, their existence being adequately accounted for by transcendental subjectivity. And since they have no need of a divine ground, one cannot prove that they must have such a ground. Husserl’s phenomenology lends no support to Thomist realism such as we find in Gilson and Maritain.  It is indeed incompatible with it.

The Commonweal article under critique is here.

Does the ‘Fixity of Death’ Extend to Thinking?

I cannot repent after death, or make moral progress; can I make intellectual progress post-mortem?  Maybe Ed Feser can answer this question along Thomistic lines, assuming the question has a sense clear enough to answer. Aquinas takes no position on it, at least not in the sections of Summa Contra Gentiles where he discusses the will‘s fixity after death. See SCG, Book Four, sections 92-95.

Aquinas and Hylomorphism Again

Over lunch on Sunday, Brian B asked me to explain my disagreement with Ed Feser and others over Aquinas’ hylomorphism.  Here is a pithier statement than the ones I’ve already posted.

I will assume with Aquinas that human beings after death continue to exist as disembodied souls until the general resurrection. The question I and others have posed is how the persistence of individual  souls after death is conceivable on the Aristotelian hylomorphic principles to which Thomas subscribes.  Why should this be a problem?  The problem is that the following propositions, each of which is a doctrinal commitment of Thomas, are collectively logically inconsistent: they cannot all be true.

a) Designated matter in material substances both individuates their forms and accounts for the substances’ numerical difference. Thus Peter and Paul are two and not one because of the difference in their designated matter.  And their forms are individuated by designated matter as well.  This implies that (i) Peter’s substantial form is numerically different from Paul’s, and that (ii) neither form is an individual form without the matter that individuates it.

b) The souls of living things are substantial forms of their bodies: anima forma corporis. Peter and Paul are living things; hence their souls are individual substantial forms of their bodies. To put it more precisely, Peter and Paul are  form-matter composites.  The psychic or soulic component in each is the individual substantial form, and the material component in each is the parcel of designated matter.  Each component needs the other to be what it is: the psychic-formal component needs the material component for its individuation, and the material component needs the psychic component for its animation.  And neither component can exist without the other: each exists only together with the other. Thus the whole of which they are proper parts is not a whole compounded of parts that can exist on their own,  as substances in their own right, but a whole the parts of which are mere ‘principles’ in scholastic jargon and thus not substances in their own right. This implies that the hylomorphic whole, which is a substance in its own right,  is ontologically prior to the morphic and hyletic parts which are not substances in their own right.  Bear in mind that a primary substance, by definition, is a basic entity that is metaphysically capable of independent existence.

c) The souls of humans, unlike those of non-human animals, are subsistent: they are metaphysically capable of independent existence. So the souls of Peter and Paul will continue to exist after their bodily death in a disembodied intermediate state  prior to their re-embodiment in the general resurrection.

The triad is inconsistent because (a) and (b) taken together entail the negation of (c). Indeed any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one.

In a nutshell: it cannot be the case that souls depend on material bodies for their existence and individuation but continue to exist as individual souls after bodily death in a bodiless state.

What Thomists want to say is that SOMEHOW a substantial form that achieves individuation ‘here below’ pre-mortem by marriage with a hunk of matter, thereby animating said hunk of matter, continues to exist as a disembodied individual soul  ‘up yonder’ post-mortem AFTER the individuating factor has been removed. That makes no sense. What would make sense is that the individual soul cease to exist after the death of the body. Bear in mind that the soul on an Aristotelian hylomorphic mereological analysis is a mere ‘principle’ of the hylomorphic composite entity and not itself a substance.

The conclusion to be drawn from this is that despite the Angelic Doctor’s  noble attempt to stay as close as possible to The Philosopher (philosophus), he is in the end a substance dualist of sorts, though not quite along Platonic, Augustinian, or Cartesian lines.

There was a time when I thought that, with respect to the soul, Thomas was an Aristotelian ‘on earth,’ but a Platonist ‘in heaven.’ (I may have picked up that line from Anthony Kenny.) But then the problem of the SOMEHOW,  the problem of how a human soul can go from a mere non-subsistent ‘principle’ to a  subsistent upon the removal of the soul’s individuating factor, becomes insoluble.  I now think that it would be better to say that, with respect to the soul, the doctor angelicus was a Platonist in both the sublunary and superlunary spheres, both ‘on earth’ and ‘in heaven,’ and this in consequence of his Christian theological commitments which exercise ‘veto power’ over his philosophical assertions.

Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished?

Burnout or viso mystica? A Substack article.

Our frenetic and hyperkinetic way of life makes it difficult to take religion seriously and what is essential to it, namely, the belief in what William James calls an Unseen Order. Our communications technology in particular is binding us ever tighter within the human horizon so that the sense of Transcendence is becoming weaker and weaker. It therefore comes as no surprise that someone would point to ‘burnout’ as the explanation of Aquinas’ failure to finish his sum of theology when the traditional explanation was that he was vouchsafed mystical insight into the Unseen Order:

Klima on Intellective Soul and Living Body in Aquinas and the Immortality of the Human Soul

Gyula Klima:

The composition from intellective soul and living body, and the natural immortality of the human soul (a section of a long paper)
. . . given the immateriality of the intellect, which I will not attempt to prove now, but let us just assume for the sake of the argument, the activity of the intellect cannot have as its subject the composite of body and soul, or as Aquinas would put it, this activity does not communicate with matter. What this means is that its acts are not acts of any parts of the body, in the way in which, say, my acts of sight are obviously the acts of my visual apparatus enformed [informed] by my sensitive soul.
BV:  The first sentence above strikes me as obviously true. For example, when I contemplate the theorem of Pythagoras, what in me thinks that thought?  No part of my living body, not even my brain or any part of my brain.  Nor is it the soul-body composite that thinks the thought. In the schema ego-cogito-cogitatum, where the cogitatum is the theorem in question, the ego cannot be any material thing, and thus no proper or improper part of my material body.  As for the act of thinking, the cogitatio, it cannot be any state of, or process in, any part of my material body.  In particular, it cannot be a brain state or process. So far, I agree with Klima and Thomas.  But suppose  I am having a coherent, ongoing, visual experience as of a tree. Is it obvious that this act of visual experiencing requires eyes, optic nerves, visual cortex, etc. , which is what I take Klima to be referring to with “visual apparatus”? No, it is not obvious, but to explain why would take us too far afield.
The point of agreement so far is that intellective acts do not “communicate with matter.” But if sensory acts do so communicate, then are there two souls involved in my cognitive life, an intellective soul and a sensitive soul?  Or is there only one soul? Only one according to Klima.
But the same sensitive soul also has intellective acts, which Aquinas argues cannot be the acts of any bodily organ, or to put it simply, I am not thinking with my brain (or any other organ for that matter): my brain merely provides, so to speak, “food for my thought”, in the form of phantasms, the singular representations of sensible singulars, which then my intellect further processes in its own acts of abstraction, concept formation, judgment formation and reasoning, all of which are acts of the intellect alone, which therefore cannot have the body and soul composite as their subject, but the soul alone.
BV: Right, we don’t think with our brains.  But we live in a world of concrete material particulars or singulars many of which are also sensible, i.e., able to be sensed.   My knowledge that the tree is green is sensory not intellective.  Phantasms are singular representations of singular sensibles. But it is quite unclear to me how the brain can “provide” or  “serve up” these representations for the intellect to “feast on” and intellectively process.  Are  the phantasms  located in the brain where the intellect gets hold of them for “processing”?  A representation is a representation of something (genitivus obiectivus) and it is is difficult to understand how any part of a hunk of meat can represent anything.  What gives bits of brain matter representational power?  But I won’t pursue this question further here. I pursue it elsewhere. We now come to the gravamen of my complaint against the hylomorphic attempt to explain personal survival of bodily death.
We are told that the soul-body composite cannot be the subject of sensory knowledge any more than it can be the subject of intellective knowledge. This, however, has the consequence that the intellective soul is not only a form, enforming [informing] the body, but is also a subject of its own power, the intellect, and its acts. But then, it exists not only as that by which the living body is, but also as that which is the underlying subject of its own acts which it does not communicate with the body. Therefore, upon the death of a human person, when the soul gets separated from the body, the soul ceases to be the form of the body, but that does not mean that it also has to cease to be. Since its own operations are not acts of the body, they can continue without its union with the body. But to operate, it must exist; so, it can naturally go on existing, as the underlying subject of its own intellectual operations. So, when a person dies, the person ceases to exist, but the person’s soul merely ceases to be a form of their body, which can persist in its being, naturally continuing the life that used to be the life of the person, as a separate soul, until the same person will be miraculously restituted in the resurrection, resuming the same life, now as a whole person again.
I agree with the first three sentences up to ‘therefore’ the bolding of which I have added.  Klima appreciates that the human soul for Aquinas has a dual function. It not only animates the body of which it is the soul, thereby making it a living body, but it is also that which thinks when a human being engages in intellective acts. The human soul is not only that by which the living body is alive; it is also “the underlying subject of its own [intellective] acts,” acts which do not “communicate with matter” and are therefore not the acts of the soul-body composite, the unitary psychophysical complex. So it is not Socrates qua soul-body composite who ponders whether virtue is teachable or whether there is more to knowledge than true belief; it is the intellect alone in Socrates that is the subject of these acts. That sounds right to me.
But we are then told, in the sentences  after therefore, that this individual (not universal) intellective soul will survive the death of its body.  But this is very hard to make sense of for several reasons.  Indeed, it smacks of a blatant non sequitur.  I will present only one reason in this entry. “Brevity is the soul of blog,” as some wit once observed.
 It is in virtue of forms that things are intelligible. If what thinks in a human being post-mortem is a form, however, then that form is not only intelligible but also intelligent.  It is not only intelligible, but intelligible to itself, which is to say that it is at once both intelligible and intelligent.  I find it hard to understand how a pure immaterial form, a form that does not inform anything, a form that is not a form of anything, can be both intelligible and intelligent. I find it hard to understand how  the subject and the object of acts of intellection could be one and the same.  I don’t intend this as a merely autobiographical comment. I am suggesting that anyone ought to find it hard to understand, indeed impossible to understand, and therefore intrinsically  unintelligible.  But in philosophy we are not allowed to make bare or gratuitous assertions. Quod gratis asseritur gratis negatur. So I need to argue this out. I will begin by giving two examples of intrinsically unintelligible notions.
a) The first example of intrinsic unintelligibility is the notion of a thing that causes its own existence. Since nothing can exercise causality unless it exists, nothing can cause its own existence. Not even God in his omnipotence could cause his own existence. For there cannot be an exercise of (efficient) causality unless there exists something or someone that/who exercises it. Necessarily, no action without an agent. But more than that: no action without an agent the being of which is not exhausted in its acting on a given occasion. What that means is that the agent cannot be identical to his action.  If Guido makes a meatball, there has to be more to Guido than that particular act of making that particular meatball, which is to say: no agent is identical to any of its actions, or the sum of them.   Suppose, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, that agent S performs action A. Even in a case like this the agent is not identical to any of his actions or the sum of them.
b) A second example of intrinsic unintelligibility is the notion of an open sentence that has a truth value. ‘___ is wise’ is an example of an open sentence. It can also be depicted using the free variable ‘x’ thusly: ‘x is wise.’ This open sentence, which picks out what Russell calls a propositional function, is neither true nor false: it lacks a truth value. A (closed) sentence results if we either substitute a name for the variable ‘x’ or bind the variable with a quantifier. Both ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘For all x, x is wise’ are closed sentences which attract a truth value. That is a philosopher’s way of saying that they can be evaluated as either true or false. The first is true, the second false. The claim that ‘x is wise’ has a truth value, however, is intrinsically unintelligible: it makes no sense and cannot be understood, by me or anyone.
A pure immaterial form that is both intelligible and intelligent is like an open sentence that has a truth value.  Why? Well, consider the sentences ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Socrates is human.’  The first predicates an accidental form of a substance, the second a substantial form of a substance. Those sentences are both meaningful and true. What makes them meaningful is that they express complete thoughts or propositions: each has a subject-term, a copula, and a predicate-term. What makes them true is the inherence of the forms picked out by the predicates in what the subject-terms name,  something that is not a form.   Socrates is not a form.  He is a composite entity, a hylomorphic compound.  Just as it is unintelligible to suppose that there could be an action that was not the action of an agent distinct from the action, it is unintelligible to suppose that there could be a form that was not the form of something (genitivus subiectivus) that was not itself a form.
More  tomorrow.

Aquinas on Angels and Human Souls: Examination of a Passage in De Ente et Essentia

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.

More on Hylomorphic Dualism and the Distinctness of Souls Post Mortem

Edward Feser writes,

Hey Bill, many thanks for your Substack post on Immortal Souls.  I’ve written up a reply   As you’ll see, at the end I give a shout out to your book Life’s Path: Some Trail Notes which I have enjoyed and profited from.  You are the rare contemporary philosopher who has both technical chops and the virtue of wisdom in the broad sense that includes understanding of concrete human life.  It’s amazing and depressing how many academics are utterly devoid of the latter.

Thanks for the kind words, Ed.  Now on to your criticisms.

You say that on the A-T theory, “while each individual physical substance has its own substantial form, with physical substances of the same species their substantial forms are of the same kind.” You suggest that this is something I haven’t understood, but I don’t disagree with you.  Your point is that each physical substance has its own substantial form.  That’s right;  we all understand that Aristotelian forms are not Platonic Forms.  Unlike Platonic Forms, which enjoy a transcendent existence in a topos ouranios whether or not they are instantiated here below, Aristotelian forms  can exist only in concrete particulars.  Platonic Forms  are transcendent, Aristotelian forms  immanent. As I see it, Platonic Forms are transcendent in two senses: (i) they exist whether or not any concrete particulars participate in them; (ii) they do not enter into concrete particulars as constituents of them.  Aristotelian (substantial) forms, by contrast, are not transcendent but immanent, and in a two fold-sense: (iii) they cannot exist on their own but only  in concrete particulars; (iv) they exist in concrete particulars as their constituents.  Thus Platonic participation (methexis, μέθεξις) is very different from the relation that obtains between a complete Aristotelian primary substance and its ontological constituents or ‘principles’ which are not themselves substances. Plato and Aristotle thus offer two very different theoretical explications of the pre-analytic or pre-theoretical notion of instantiation.

As you say, and I agree, an Aristotelian substantial form “is a concrete principle intrinsic to a substance that grounds its characteristic properties and powers.”  You also say, and I agree, that on the A-T theory, “the soul is a substantial form of the kind that gives a physical substance the distinctive properties and powers of a living thing.” It follows from these two points that each living physical substance has its own soul or psyche, where the soul of a living thing is its life-principle.   This holds for both human animals such as Socrates and Plato and for non-human animals. We also agree that humans, unlike other living things, have both corporeal and noncorporeal properties and powers. So far, I believe we are ‘on the same page’ at least with respect to what the A-T theory says. I take it we agree on the content of the theory; our dispute concerns its coherence.

But let’s dig a little deeper. It seems to me that the A-T conception further implies that matter (materia signata) plays a dual role: it both individuates and differentiates.  These are different ‘ontological jobs’ even though on the A-T scheme  signate matter does both of them.  Two questions.

(Q1)  Why do Socrates and Plato each have their own individual substantial forms and thus — given that souls are substantial  forms — their own individual souls? Answer: because forms, which cannot exist Platonically, but only in concrete particulars,  are individuated or particularized  by  the  parcels of matter which they inform or in which they inhere.

(Q2) Why do Socrates and Plato differ numerically? Why are they two and not one? Because each is a numerically different hunk of matter.  So matter (designated matter) is the ground both of the individuation of forms — that which makes them individuals and not universals — and that which grounds the  numerical difference of the two complete physical substances.

So much for the pre-mortem situation of Socrates and Plato.  With respect to the pre-mortem  situation, Aristotle and Thomas pretty much agree about human beings (rational animals). Post-mortem, however, important differences surface due to Thomas’s Christian commitments which, needless to say, are not shared by Aristotle.  And so we need to ask how well these Christian commitments comport with the Aristotelian scheme.

For Thomas, human souls after death are (1) subsistent, (2) separable, (3) multiple, (4) incomplete,  (5) personal, and (6) such that the soul no longer functions as a life-principle but  only as a ‘seat’ of noncorporeal intellectual operations. I’ll explain these points seriatim.

Ad (1).  The souls of rational animals, unlike the souls of nonrational animals,  continue to exist after death.

Ad (2). The souls of rational animals can and do exist after death in a disembodied state, i.e., apart from  matter. So they don’t merely subsist; they subsist in an immaterial way.

Ad (3). Just as there are many human beings ‘on earth,’ i.e., in the physical realm, there are many disembodied human souls after death. Whatever the number is, it is neither one nor zero.  Moreover, for each human being that existed ‘on earth,’ there is exactly one soul after death (whether in heaven, hell, purgatory, or limbo) and this soul after death is numerically identical to the soul of the human before death. Thus the soul of Socrates after death is numerically the same as the soul he had before death.

Ad (4). Human souls after death, but before resurrection, are substances all right, but  incomplete substances in that they lack a body when it is their nature to exist in an embodied state.

Ad (5). Human souls after death are persons in that they are conscious and self-conscious, albeit in non-sensory ways. In Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chs. 92-95, Aquinas elaborates on the will’s fixity after death: “souls immediately after their separation from the body become unchangeable in will with the result that the will of [a] man cannot further be changed, neither from good to evil, nor from evil to good.” (Ch. 92, top.)  Suppose you go straight to heaven after death.  Your will will be eternally fixed upon the good. This fixity of will is a modality of consciousness and also of self-consciousness inasmuch as the soul will be aware of its fixity of will.  That is, the soul is aware that it wills, and what it wills. What’s more, the souls in heaven presumably can ‘hear’ petitionary prayers from souls ‘on earth’ and ask God to grant those petitions.  This non-sensory ‘hearing’ is a modality of consciousness. The souls in heaven are aware of the petitions and formulate the intention to intercede with God for the benefit of the earthly petitioners.

Ad (6). Dead humans are no longer alive.   So the soul of a human after death and before resurrection does not function as a life-principle.  It can so function only if it is joined to an animal body that it enlivens or animates. But the soul of a human after death does function as the subject of conscious states such as the volitional state of willing only the good.  The soul of a human before death, however, functions in both ways, as an animating principle, and as that in a human which is aware when it is aware of this or that.  The difference is between the soul as life-principle and the soul as subject or ego or I.

I hope I have made clear that I really do understand what the A-T theory maintains.  My disagreements with Ed Feser are not about the content of the theory, but about its coherence and thus its tenability.

The point I was making in the Substack piece could be put like this.  After the death of a mortal man such as Socrates, and the dissolution of his material body, the soul he had can no longer be his soul. The reason for this is that the individuating or particularizing  factor, signate matter, which made the soul he had his soul, is no longer present after death. To appreciate this point you must not forget that the form of a  (primary) substance is not itself a (primary) substance, but a ‘principle’ — Ed uses this very word — or constituent of a substance which together with the material  constituent constitutes a (primary) substance. Thus the constituents or ‘principles’ of a substance are not themselves substances and therefore not themselves metaphysically capable of independent existence.  Bear in mind that for Aristotle, primary substances are basic entities in the sense that they do not depend on anything else for their existence in the way a smile depends on  face.  But what I have just argued — that the soul of Socrates after death cannot be his own soul — contradicts (3) which is a non-negotiable doctrinal commitment of Thomism.  The lesson to be learned from this is that Aristotelian hylomorphism is not consistent with the characteristic commitments of Thomism.  Note that I am not denying the doctrinal commitments listed above.  My point is that they cannot be rendered intelligible by the use of Aristotelian conceptuality, in particular, hylomorphism.

My point can also be made from the side of differentiation.  Thomas is committed to saying that Socrates and Plato are as soulically  or psychically distinct  in the afterlife as they are in this life.  But in the afterlife before resurrection they lack material bodies.  Lacking bodies, they lack that which could ground their numerical difference. So if the two men after death are two numerically different souls, then souls are not mere Aristotelian forms. They are substances in their own right.  This is why Richard Swinburne, no slouch of a philosopher, speaks plausibly and indeed correctly of “Thomist substance dualism.” (Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019, p. 82)

Aristotle is not a substance dualist, but Thomas is.  This is not to say that Thomas is a substance dualist in the very same sense that Descartes is. But he is a substance dualist nonetheless.

I expect Ed to balk at this and reiterate the bit about ‘incomplete’ substances formulated above in point (4).  Let’s think this through as sympathetically as possible.  If a life-principle is actually functioning as such, then there must be a physical body it enlivens or animates. It therefore makes perfect sense for Thomas to say to say  that it is the nature of  a  life-principle to be joined to a body.  For a life-principle to be a life-principle of a material thing, there must be a material thing whose life-principle it is. So if human souls are life-principles, then it is the nature of the human soul to have a body. But post-mortem souls before resurrection are not functioning as life-principles. And yet Thomas insists that after death and before resurrection human souls continue to exist and are numerically the same as the souls that existed before death.   One survives one’s bodily death as a person, as a self, as a subject of conscious states. So is it not obvious that human souls before death and after death (but before the re-embodiment consequent upon resurrection) are not mere substantial forms but substances in their own right?  I say it is obvious and it puzzles me that what is obvious to me is not obvious to Ed.  Try this syllogistic chain on for size.

  1. No forms for Aristotle are substances.
  2. All souls for Aristotle are forms. Therefore:
  3. No souls for Aristotle are substances. (1, 2)
  4. All and only substances for Aristotle are capable of independent existence. Therefore:
  5. No souls for Aristotle are capable of independent existence. (3, 4)
  6. Some souls for Aquinas are capable of independent existence. Therefore:
  7. Some souls for Aquinas are not souls in Aristotle’s sense of ‘soul.’ (5,6)

I conclude that Aquinas’s conception of the soul is not hylomorphic sensu stricto but substance-dualist. Hylomorphism does not render the angelic doctor’s doctrinal commitments intelligible.  And that was my point.

I have heard it said that Thomas is an Aristotelian on earth, but a Platonist in heaven.  That is an approximation to the truth, but it just now occurred to me that it is not quite right, and may be more clever than truthful.   For Aquinas is committed to the diachronic numerical identity of the person or self both in this life and on into the after life. So even in this life there has to be more to the soul than a life-principle. I conclude that even in this life Thomas is not wholly Aristotelian.  If Thomas is a substance-dualist in heaven, he must also be one on earth as well .A follow-up post will make this more clear.

Addendum (10/29).  This morning I found a section  on Aquinas in John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, Eerdmans 1989, p. 11-13.   Cooper makes points that support what I argue above. He states that Thomas “combined important features of the Aristotelian body-soul relation with a basically Augustinian dualistic framework.” Although “Thomas uses Aristotle to emphasize the unity of human nature,” he “remains with Augustine in affirming that the soul is a distinct substance which can survive biological death.” Cooper appreciates that a Christian cannot take an Aristotelian  approach to the soul. “For Aristotle’s soul is only the form of the body and not a substance as such. Therefore it cannot survive death as an individual entity.” (13) Thomas abandons Aristotle by holding that “the soul is both the form of the body and an intellectual substance in its own right.” 

Swinburne, Cooper, and I are saying the same thing.

A Problem for Hylomorphic Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind

Top o’ the Stack.

Edward Feser’s Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature may well be the best compendium of Thomist philosophical anthropology presently available. I strongly recommend it. I wish I could accept its central claims. This entry discusses one of several problems I have.

The problem I discuss in this installment is whether an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) hylomorphic analysis of human beings can make sense of our post-mortem existence as numerically distinct persons.

Mind-Body Dualism in Aquinas and Descartes: How Do They Differ?

Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, views the soul as the form of the body. Anima forma corporis. Roughly, soul is to body as form is to matter. So to understand the soul-body relation, we must first understand the form-matter relation.  Henry Veatch points out that "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are principles of being." (Henry B. Veatch, "To Gustav Bergmann: A Humble Petition and Advice" in M. S. Gram and E. D. Klemke, eds. The Ontological Turn: Studies in the Philosophy of Gustav Bergmann , University of Iowa Press, 1974, pp. 65-85, p. 80)  'Principles' in this scholastic usage are not  propositions.  They are ontological factors (as I would put it) invoked in the analysis of primary substances, but they are not themselves primary substances. They cannot exist on their own.  Let me explain.

Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method

August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

Read the rest at Substack.

The piece concludes:

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, and with it the exclusively internal validation of all knowledge claims, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason or subjectively validated but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and accept that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

Addenda (8/9/2025)

  • I say above that there are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, but is that right? Perhaps not. It might be closer to the truth to say that philosophy by its very nature rests on the autonomy of reason, and that the  "other conception" is not philosophy sensu stricto but a worldview. If so, any view according to which "faith is its own guarantee" is not philosophy or a philosophy, but beyond philosophy.
  • Thomas wears at least four 'hats.' He is a philosopher, a Christian, a Christian theologian, and a mystic.  You could be any one of these without being any one of the others. He plays the philosopher in the praeambula fidei of the Summa Theologica wherein he attempts to demonstrate the existence of God in his quinque viae or Five Ways.  These proofs make no appeal to divine revelation via Scripture nor do they rest on the personal deliverances of mystical experience. They proceed by discursive reason alone on the basis of sense experience.
  • So you could say to me that Thomas's theistic worldview is not beyond philosophy inasmuch as the philosophy of the praeambula is an integral part of his defense of the Christian worldview. My response will be that the Five Ways do not conclusively prove the existence of God, let alone provide any support for such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation (which of course they were not intended to do). So in the end, a will-driven leap of faith is required to arrive at Thomas's theistic worldview. So at best, the Five Ways are arguments (not proofs) that render rationally acceptable Christian belief.  Rationally acceptable, but not rationally mandatory. In the end you must decide what to believe and how you will live. My concluding sentence, "the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason" is not quite right. I should have written: the decision to accept the Christian worldview, while neither it, nor the generic theism at its base, can be proven from natural reason operating upon the deliverances of the sense, can nonetheless be rendered rationally acceptable.
  • "Go ahead, believe!" Thus spoke Wittgenstein. "What harm can it do?" I add: you won't be flouting any canons of rationality.

Thomas Aquinas: Unity is Our Strength!

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, Chapter 1, C. J. O'Neill, tr., University of Notre Dame Press, 1975, p. 35, para. 2, emphasis added:

. . . since causes are more noble than their effects, the very first caused  things are lower than the First Cause, which is God, and still stand out above their effects. And so it goes until one arrives at the lowest of things. And because in the highest summit of things, God, one finds the most perfect unity — and because everything, the more it is one, is the more powerful and the more worthy – – it follows that the farther one gets from the first principle,  the greater is the diversity and variation one one finds in things. The process of emanation from God, must, then be unified in the principle itself, but multiplied in the lower things which are its terms. 

Key  ideas in and suggested by the above passage:

1) Unity admits of degrees.  Some unities are 'tighter' than others. 

2) The supreme unity is the divine unity. It is the 'tightest' of all, so tight in fact, that God is devoid of all complexity or internal diversity and is therefore ontologically simple, as I explain in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on divine simplicity. God is pure unity, Unity itself in its highest instance.

3) At the other extreme is pure diversity, a mere collection of items that cannot even be called a collection in that that there is nothing real that collects them, nothing real that they share and that makes them that collection as opposed to some other actual or possible collection. Such a collection is so 'loose' that it does not deserve to be called a collection. We could aptly refer to it as a mere manifold, a mere many-ness.  Think of the membership or extension of  a mereological sum of utterly disparate items.  That would be a pure diversity or mere many-ness.

4) Perfection comes in degrees, and so the divine unity is maximally perfect.  A mere many-ness is maximally imperfect.

5) The notion of perfection in Aquinas and thinkers of his stripe blends the ontic with the axiological/normative.  To be is to be good.  A being is good in the measure that it is, and in the measure that it is, it is good. That, I take it, is the meaning of ens et bonum convertuntur. The terms 'a being' and 'a good thing' are convertible terms, which is to say, in Carnapian material mode: necessarily, for any x, x is or exists if and only if x is good,  valuable, pursuit-worthy. (That I reference Carnap in this context should have the old positivist rolling in his grave.)

'In the measure that' conveys the idea that there are degrees of being, an idea anathema to most contemporary analytic philosophers.  Divine unity is maximally perfect unity, and thus the unsurpassably best unity and the unsurpassably most real unity. God is really real, ontos on; at the other extreme, non-being, me on, or an approach thereto  as in the limit concept (Grenzbegriff), material prima.

6) God's unity is the unity of the transcendent One which does not and cannot form with the Many a super-manifold in which God is just one member among the others. The One and the Many do not, taken together, form a many of which the One is just one more item among the others.  Why not? Well, the One is other than or different from the Many both in its nature and in its way of existing. God, for Aquinas, is One to the Many of creatures, but is neither a creature, nor  a member of a super-manifold of beings each of which is or exists in the same sense and the same way.  

7) Aquinas says above that the more unified a thing, the more powerful it is. So God, the maximally unified being — so unified that this being (ens) is (identically) Being or To Be (esse) itself — is the maximally powerful being.  

And so, in conclusion, I say to Canadian pretty boy Justin Trudeau, that diversity is precisely not "our strength," and that you and like-minded State-side fools are to be condemned for your willful self-enstupidation.

My point stands whether or not one accepts Thomism. 

Soul a Mere Life-Principle? How then Explain Conscience?

Aristotle, and following him Aquinas, thinks of the soul as the life-principle of a living body, that which animates the body's matter.  A natural conception, but a dubious one, as it seems to me, one not up to the task of accounting for conscience.  We humans are not just alive, we are also conscious both in the mode of sentience and in the object-directed mode as when we are conscious of this or that. The philosophers' term of art for this object-directed type of consciousness is  intentionality. A special case of object-directed consciousness is knowledge of things and states of affairs. Beyond this factual knowledge there is presumably also moral knowledge, knowledge of right and wrong. Whether or not conscience is indeed a source of knowledge, it is a faculty of moral discernment and evaluation.  An exercise of this faculty results in an occurrent state of consciousness which is a state of conscience. 

So life, consciousness, and conscience are all different. Panpsychism aside, something can be alive without being sentient, a unicellular organism, for example, and of course anything sentient is conscious.  Now we are not merely sentient, but also conscious of this and that.  Beyond this, we command a faculty of moral discernment and evaluation which is what conscience is. 

It is clear that to be alive is not the same as to have a conscience. Plants and non-rational animals are living things but have no conscience. My cats, for example, are alive, and moreover they are conscious, but they cannot tell right from wrong. If they think at all, they do not think in moral categories. They do not evaluate their actions or omissions morally. They lack the capacity to do so. Humans have the capacity for moral discernment and evaluation, if not at birth, then later on, whether or not they exercise it, and whether or not their consciences have been well formed.

Now the soul is presumably the seat of conscience:  it is in virtue of my having a soul that I have a conscience, not in virtue of my having a body.*  But then it would seem to follow that the soul of a man cannot be a mere life-principle. For it is not in virtue of my being alive that I have a conscience. The argument, then, is this:

1) Being alive and having a conscience are different properties. Therefore:

2) It is not in virtue of my being alive that I have a conscience. 

3) It is in virtue of my having a soul that I have a conscience. Therefore:

4) The soul cannot be merely the life-principle of my body. 

Possible Objection

At best, what you have shown is that the soul cannot be merely a life-principle. But what is to stop this principle from doing other jobs as well?  However it is with non-rational animals, in a human being, the soul is not merely (i) a life-principle but also (ii) the locus of conscience, (iii) the subject of intentional states, and (iv) the free agent of one's actions.

In a later entry I will  respond to the objection.

__________

*If there is post-mortem judgment, it will be the soul that will be is judged, and judged morally, not the body, which implies that the soul is the seat of conscience and free agency. "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world but suffer the loss of his immortal body soul?"

 

A Problem for Hylomorphic Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind

Edward Feser's Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature may well be the best compendium of Thomist philosophical anthropology presently available.  I strongly recommend it. I wish I could accept its central claims. This entry discusses one of several problems I have.

The problem I want to discuss in this installment is whether  an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) hylomorphic analysis of human beings can make sense of our post-mortem existence as distinct persons. Thomas Aquinas maintains that after death the souls of rational animals, but not the souls of non-rational animals, continue to exist as disembodied forms, numerically distinct among themselves. What the following argument seems to show is that the survival of distinct souls is impossible on hylomorphic dualism.  I will not be questioning whether in fact we survive our bodily deaths. In question is whether A-T style hylomorphism renders it intelligible.

1) A primary substance (a substance hereafter) is a concrete individual.  A man, a horse, a tree, a statue are stock examples of substances.  A substance in this technical sense is not to be confused with stuff or material. Substances are individuals in that they have properties but are not themselves properties.  Properties are predicable; substances are not. Substances are concrete in that they are causally active/passive. 

2) Material substances are analyzable into matter (ὕλη, hyle/hule) and form (μορφή, morphe). A-T ontological analysis is thus hylomorphic analysis.  

3) The soul of an animal, whether rational or non-rational, is not a complete substance in its own right, but the (substantial) form of its body. Anima forma corporis. Hylomorphic dualism is not a Cartesian dualism of complete substances, but a dualism of ontological constituents of one and the same complete substance.  

4) Substances of the same kind have the same substantial form, where the substantial form of a substance is the conjunction of the essential (as opposed to accidental) properties that make the substance the kind of substance it is. Unlike Platonic Forms, Aristotelian forms cannot exist except as instantiated in matter.

5) There are many numerically different human beings (human substances).  I assume that the reader is familiar with the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity and difference. (Comments are enabled  if you have questions.) 

6) Since these substances of the human kind have the same form, it is not their form that makes them numerically different. (4, 5) What then grounds their numerical difference?

7) It is the matter of their respective bodies that makes numerically different human beings numerically different. (2,6) Matter, then, is the principium individuationis, the principle of individuation, the ontological ground of the numerical difference of material substances, including human beings.  It is matter that makes Socrates and Plato numerically different substances, not the substantial form they share.

8) A human being is a person.

9) A person is an individual substance of a rational nature. (Thomas, following Boethius)

10) There are many numerically different persons. (5, 8)

11) Only embodied, 'enmattered,' persons are numerically different from one another: embodiment is thus a necessary condition of difference of persons. (7) It is matter that makes a person the particular person that he is. The matter in question is not materia prima, but what Thomas refers to as materia signata (designated matter, signate matter) in his De Ente et Essentia. As Feser puts it in his Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (2014, p. 199):  "The matter that is the principle of individuation is, in Aquinas's view, matter as made distinct by quantity or dimension — designated matter . . . .

12) At death a person suffers the loss of embodiment, which implies that after death, a person survives, if at all, as a disembodied form (until the general resurrection, at which time the disembodied soul/form acquires a resurrection body).

Therefore

13) After death a human person ceases to exist as the particular person that it is. But that is to say that the particular person, Socrates say, ceases to exist, full stop.  What survives is at best a form which is common to all persons. That form, however, cannot be me or you.  Thus the particularity, individuality, haecceity, ipseity of persons, which is essential to persons, is lost. (11, 12)

 

Are the Souls of Brutes Subsistent?

Aquinas says No but his argument is inconclusive.

Substack latest.

Reader Zacary writes,

I am just a layman who likes studying Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, and recently I haven’t been studying the issue of animals in the afterlife. I stumbled across your post from many, many years ago (all the way back in 2009!) that was about the unity of consciousness argument and the subsistence of animal souls. 
Thank you for writing, Zacary.  That post from 2009 left a lot to be desired, so I rewrote it almost completely and published the result over at Substack. I have no time now to respond  to the rest of what you wrote, but if you read the Substack entry and have questions or objections I will try to answer them here.