Category: Soul and Body

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?"

 

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.

Four Attitudes Toward Embodiment

Am I ineluctably trapped in a dying animal? Is embodiment an axiologically negative state of affairs or is it an axiologically positive one?  Here are four possible attitudes toward having a material body. They may be loosely associated, respectively, with the names Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Benatar.

a) To exist is good, but it would be better to exist without a gross material body subject to decay and dissolution. The body is an impediment, a vehicle for sublunary roads that it would be better not to have to travel.  I am neither identical to my body, nor dependent on it for my existence; I am a soul temporarily incarcerated in a body from which I will be released upon death. I have fallen from a topos ouranios into a spatiotemporal matrix and meat grinder extrication from which is both possible and desirable.

b) To exist is good, but a gross material body is necessary to exist as a conscious and self-conscious being, whence it follows that embodiment is at least instrumentally  good. I am not (identically) a soul; I am a soul-body composite, both components of which are necessary to exist at all.  

c) To exist is good, but only with a 'resurrected' and perfected body supplied by a divine being that needs no body to exist.

d) To exist is not good because possible only with a gross body.  (See my Benatar category.)

De Anima

David K. writes,

I need some help.  I have been exploring the concept of the 'soul' over the last few months. I've meant it to be a fairly wide open review.  I have 'rounded up the usual suspects' philosophically and worked my way through a great deal of the biomedical writings.  Presently, I am in the middle of two works:  The Soul of the Embryo by David Albert Jones and Soul Machine by George Makari.  I am looking for a contemporary philosophical treatment of the topic.  I have searched the categories on both your blogs but wonder if there is a direction you can point me to as well.   

With pleasure, David.

For a high-level contemporary treatment by a distinguished philosopher of religion, I recommend Richard Swinburne, Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019.  The Soul Hypothesis, eds. Baker and Goetz, Continuum 2011, is a collection of essays by analytic philosophers. For a hard-core old-time  Thomist treatment, one that is probably not quite in line with your current interests as a medical doctor, but still highly relevant given your Catholic upbringing, take a gander at  Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Life Everlasting and the Immensity of the Soul (no bibliographical details in my copy!).  More relevant to your biomedical interests is Norman M. Ford, When Did I Begin? Cambridge UP, 1988. 

Directly relevant to your concerns is  the mercifully short Were You a Zygote? by G. E. M. Anscombe. Also of interest is Erich Klawonn, Mind and Death: A Metaphysical Investigation, University Press of Southern Denmark, 2009.

I'll add further titles if they occur to me. Comments are enabled  if anyone wants to make suggestions.

Finally, here is a review by Thomas Nagel, no slouch of a philosopher, of the Swinburne volume mentioned supra.