Preliminary questions . . . 2


‘The Soul’

Interdisciplinary Research Group (2013-2014)

Torrance Kirby (leader)
Marguerite Deslauriers
Peter Marshall
David Lines
Paul Yachnin
Carlos Fraenkel
Douglas Hedley
Simon Goldhill and Philippa Maddern (fellow travellers)

Each member of the Research Group

• will assign two readings to the group
• will write two short (two or three pages) responses (I think we said that each of us would write responses to the readings we assigned)
• will contribute a very short (a paragraph or two) response to the two- or three-page responses

The Group plans to

• organize a video meeting in early 2014
• plan for a presentation at the Ontario Stratford Festival Forum, Summer 2014
• bring into some level of dialogue (1) élite culture works such as Aquinas or Ficino, (2) popular works, texts, and artifacts such as, for example, plays, ballads, gravestone inscriptions or sculpture, and (3) practices such as oath-taking or acting
• seek to develop research questions that relate substantially to the Conversions research project

Our thinking will be informed in some measure by the work of Cognitive Ecology

Some preliminary questions

Is human being composed of a spiritual and a bodily nature?
If so, then what may be said concerning to the essence of that spiritual nature or ‘soul’ (anima, psyche)?
Is the soul identical with the body?
Is the human soul a subsistent reality distinct from the body?
Do animals have souls? Do vegetables? [rocks?]
Is human nature defined by soul, or does it comprise both soul and body?
Is the soul immortal?
Is soul to be identified with ‘mind’ or some intellectual principle?
What are the powers/faculties of the soul?
What is the relationship of these powers to each other?
Is the ‘soul’ distinguishable from its faculties?
If so, do the various distinct powers of the soul also share in immortality?
What are the specific powers of the soul?
What is the relation of soul to the five senses?
Is the intellect one among many faculties, or is it the essence of the soul?
Is the faculty of memory distinct from the intellect?
Is the faculty of reason also distinct from the intellect?
Is there a distinction between a theoretical and a practical intellect?
What is the conscience?
Are the sensuous appetites also faculties of the soul?
What is the relation between appetite and intellect?
What is the will?
What is the relation of will to intellect?
Is the will an intellectual or a sensuous power?
Does humanity possess free-will?
If so, is free-will cognitive or appetitive (or both) in nature?

This is just a beginning . . .


2 thoughts on “Preliminary questions . . .

  • Torrance Kirby Post author

    Some reflections on Aquinas’s treatment of the soul in qq. 75-77 of the Summa

    Throughout the Summa Theologica Aquinas is intensely concerned with he would himself identify as the ‘dispositio’ of both being and of the theological science which seeks to describe it. To begin, therefore, we should take careful note of the precise positioning of the nature of the human soul within his treatise, set as it is in the first of three major divisions or ‘parts’ of his Summa Theologica. He devotes 27 ‘questions’ (qq. 75-102) to the subject ‘De homine’. Of these we begin by addressing the first three, namely qq. 75-78 where he discusses what belongs to the essence of the soul, its union with body, and its powers. It would also be helpful to situate this interior sub-treatise on the soul within the dispositio of the argument of the whole ‘prima pars’ which consists of 119 questions in all: q. 1 treats the subject of ‘Sacred doctrine’ in general; qq. 2-47 treat the doctrine of God and culminate in a general discussion of creation; qq. 50-64 discuss the angels, i.e. ‘spiritual being’ while qq. 65-74 constitute a ‘Hexaemeron’, an account of the six days of the creation, the coming to be of the ‘material world’. The discussion of the human soul in qq. 75-102 thus follows logically and systematically upon the treatment of the spiritual (50-64) and the material creation (65-74) as revealed by Aquinas’s title for q. 75: ‘Of man who is composed of a spiritual and a corporeal substance’. The questions constituting ‘De homine’ concern the bridging of incorporeal and corporeal reality. The concluding qq. 103-119 of the first part of the Summa treat the divine government of creatures (providentia), and they reiterate the order just described, viz. a) God; b) angels; c) inanimate bodies; and conclude with d) the government of humanity (i.e. as composite of body and spirit.) An interesting feature of this division of the first part of the Summa is the marked emphasis Aquinas places on the composite nature of human being; much in his discussion of the nature of the soul turns on his interpretation of the precise character of this composition, and therefore on the relation between ‘spiritual’ and ‘corporeal’ being.
    Q. 75 consists of seven articles or main divisions of discussion. The first article puts the question ‘Whether the soul is a body?’ This would appear to be an ‘aporetic’ approach, perhaps reminiscent of Aristotle’s potted histories of philosophy such as one finds at the outset of the Physics or Metaphysics; by reviewing what others have said concerning the soul Aquinas lays out the problematic of definition. Certain ‘philosophers of old’—a reference evidently to certain Pre-Socratic physikoi (for neither Pythagoras nor Plato held the point of view described)—‘not being able to rise above their imagination, supposed that the principle of [animate] actions was something corporeal; for they asserted that only bodies were real things; and that what is not corporeal is nothing: hence they maintained that the soul is something corporeal’ (q.75, art.1, resp). Moreover, the soul is said by Augustine to be ‘simple in comparison with the body, inasmuch as it does not occupy space by its bulk’ (as not infrequently is the case with Augustine, we seem to have here an adumbration of Descartes). Here we have two opposed accounts—either the soul is corporeal, material, extended, or it is not. Working from the premise (drawn from Aristotle) that the soul is ‘defined as the first principle of life of those things which live’, Aquinas asks whether such a ‘principle’ can possibly be a body? Aquinas rejects this possibility on the most interesting ground, namely on the basis of a general theory of cognition which he will develop and refine over the next several articles and questions. The first clue that the key to understanding the nature of the soul for Aquinas resides in a reflection upon the nature of human understanding—such that the principles of epistemology will aid in elucidating those of psychology—is contained in his observation that these ancient philosophers confused spiritual and corporeal ‘substance’ (substantia = Gk ousia), i.e. ‘being’, owing to their inability ‘to rise above the imagination’. They asserted that only bodies are real and therefore that the soul, if real, must be corporeal. For, Aquinas continues,

    to be a principle of life, or to be a living thing, does not belong to a body as such; since, if that were the case, every body would be a living thing, or a principle of life. Therefore a body is competent to be a living thing or even a principle of life, as ‘such’ a body. Now that it is actually such a body, it owes to some principle which is called its act. Therefore the soul, which is the first principle of life, is not a body, but the ‘act’ of a body (Q. 75, art. 1, resp.).

    Of great interest here is Aquinas’ framing of his discussion of the soul in terms of the human capacity for knowledge. This, of course, involves a grand assumption, namely that the human intellect is not a capacity distinct from the soul, but that it is in reality the very ‘principle’ of the human soul—i.e. its source, beginning, first motion—this, of course, owes much to the Aristotelian definition of ‘the human’ as ‘the rational’—man is the ‘rational animal’. To have a human soul is to possess reason, intelligence, an ‘act’ which is not to be confused with the imagination.
    If the soul is not a body, but the ‘act of a body’, then how does it subsist? In the second article Aquinas maintains not only that the human intellect is incorporeal, but that it is ‘something subsistent; and once again he enlists Augustine in support of this view:

    Augustine says (De Trin. x, 7): ‘Who understands that the nature of the soul is that of a substance and not that of a body, will see that those who maintain the corporeal nature of the soul, are led astray through associating with the soul those things without which they are unable to think of any nature–i.e. imaginary pictures of corporeal things.’ (Q.75, art. 2, sed contra)

    At bottom the problem of defining the nature of the soul is nothing less than a problem of cognition. How does the soul think the corporeal without actually being itself corporeal? Can the soul be identical with its imaginative content? How does it have this content? Aquinas maintains that the soul ‘knows’ corporeal things. Yet if the intellectual principle itself ‘contained the nature of a body it would be unable to know all bodies’. That is to say, through sensation and images we have access to particulars and individuals, but it is through intellection that we know the universals. On the face of it this claim would seem to put Aquinas in league with Plato whose epistemology very clearly delineates the distinction between the knowledge of invisible forms or ideas (episteme) from the sensation of the visible objects (phantasia). In Art. 3, however, Aquinas moves quickly to distance himself from the Platonic epistemology, and Plato here plays the foil to the ‘ancient philosophers’ who made no distinction between sensation and intellect. Plato, however, errs in Aquinas’s account, by maintaining that ‘sensing, just as understanding, belongs to the soul as such. From this it follows that even the souls of brute animals are subsistent.’ What does Aquinas mean by ‘subsistent’ one might well ask? The rational soul is ‘subsistent’ in that it can exist, indeed it must exist, in distinction from corporeality, although human beings are nonetheless composite of both rational soul and body. He relates subsistence to the Greek term ‘hypostasis’, which he then Latinises as ‘persona’. The operation of the ‘sensitive soul’ which is shared by humans with the brute animals, requires a ‘corporal organ’ and therefore belongs to the ‘composite’ being of soul and body. Aquinas quotes the 5th-c. Christian historian Gennadius of Massilia ‘Man alone we believe to have a subsistent soul: whereas the souls of animals are not subsistent.’ (Q.75, art. 3, Sed contra) Brute animals are not subsistent ‘persons’, lacking as they do the intellectual soul.
    If the intellectual soul is ‘subsistent’, then is it simply identical with the human? ‘It would seem that the soul is man.’ (Art. 4) Varro (116-27 BCE), the prolific Roman scholar much quoted by Augustine in the City of God, stated that ‘Man is not a mere soul, nor a mere body; but both soul and body.’ This pithy remark cuts to the chase, and in his strong insistence upon the composite nature of the human, Aquinas sides with Aristotle against Plato in defining the soul. ‘It belongs to the notion of man to be composed of soul, flesh, and bones . . .’ But how are the intellective and sensitive modes of knowing related? Plato erred in supposing that sensation was ‘proper’ to the soul, for he held that the soul ‘made use of’ (or was the ‘motor’ of) the body. Sensation is not the operation of the human soul ‘per se’. Rather, sensation is an operation of the whole subsistent individual, but it is cannot be ‘proper’ to him as soul simply, but only as a being composed of both body and soul. For Aristotle, on the other hand, the immaterial intellectual soul was the ‘form of the body’, that is ‘the actuality of a physical body which has life potentially in it’ as Aristotle famously defined the soul in De Anima II.1. In this way Aristotle provides a median position between Plato and ‘the philosophers of old’ by both distinguishing and uniting soul and body. On the one hand, the incorporeality of the soul is demonstrable from its capacity for knowledge of universals; if the soul were corporeal it would know only individuals. At the same time ‘the action of the senses is not performed without a corporeal instrument. Therefore it behooved the intellectual soul to be united to a body fitted to be a convenient organ of sense.’ Here again the incorporeality of the intellectual soul, the ‘principle’ of the living action in the human, is demonstrated by Aquinas as resting upon the nature of cognition. According to Aristotle ‘in all things composed of matter and form, there is no other cause but that which moves from potentiality to act.’ Soul is such a principle or cause of motion to ‘act’.
    By this argument the soul is also immortal and incorruptible (Q. 75, Art. 6). Aquinas begins with an opposing view taken from Scripture which, on the surface, would appear to suggest that humans and animals are altogether alike: ‘the process of life is alike in both; because ‘all things breathe alike, and man hath nothing more than the beast, as it is written (Eccles. 3:19).’ On this view the human soul is just as corruptible (and therefore entirely mortal) as the soul of the brute beast. Aquinas maintains, however, that the ‘intellectual principle which we call the human soul is incorruptible’. That the human soul is ‘self-subsistent’ is manifest in and through its cognitive capacity; its power to know is not confined by the limit imposed by corporeal sensation. The immortality of the soul would appear hear to be proven from Aristotle! ‘It is impossible for a form to be separated from itself; and therefore it is impossible for a subsistent form to cease to exist.’ (Art. 6, resp.) This incorruptibility is the property of a ‘spiritual’ being. When Solomon claimed that men and brute beasts have a ‘like beginning in generation’ this is true of their shared corporeal nature; but it is not true of the rational soul. For, Aquinas maintains, ‘the souls of brutes are produced by some power of the body; whereas the human soul is produced by God … Man is intelligent, whereas animals are not.’ (Art 6, reply to obj. 1)
    The rational or intellectual soul is the ‘form’ of the human being as a body-soul composite. There is no soul ‘in’ a body; the soul ‘actuates’ the potentiality that is the body. Moreover, Aquinas also embraces the Aristotelian account of the three-fold powers, viz. intellectual, locomotive/ sensitive, and vegetative/nutritive. The latter two activities of soul require body by inherent necessity.
    The cognitive significance of the phantasm is developed in Question 76 on ‘the Union of Body and Soul’. The soul is ‘the first thing by which the body lives is the soul. And as life appears through various operations in different degrees of living things, that whereby we primarily perform each of all these vital actions is the soul. For the soul is the primary principle of our nourishment, sensation, and local movement; and likewise of our understanding.’ In the case of the human, the intellectual principle is the primary principles, the ‘form’ of man. As man is the ‘rational animal’ so the intellectual soul is the ‘form’ of the human body. Aquinas continues in his epistemological vein:
    ‘If anyone says that the intellectual soul is not the form of the body, he must first explain how it is that this action of understanding is the action of this particular man; for each one is conscious that it is himself who understands … it is one and the same man who is conscious both that he understands, and that he senses. But one cannot sense without a body: therefore the body must be some part of man.’ As composite of body and soul one might say that the human condition itself is in its very nature a ‘cognitive ecology’! Plato held that there are multiple souls in a single body—an intellectual soul (a ruling part—nous), an active soul (thumos), and a concupiscible or appetitive soul (epithumeia)—hence the construction of the Ideal Republic in order to see these parts ‘writ large’ in the constitution of philosophical rule. Aristotle rejected this division of the soul; for him ‘the intellectual soul contains virtually whatever belongs to the sensitive soul of brute animals, and to the nutritive souls of plants.’ (Q. 76, art. 3) The intellectual soul as ‘form’ of the human body is its ‘entelechy’—the lower sensitive and nutritive psychological functions are fulfilled or consummated in the intellective activity. For the human being the intellectual soul ‘actuates’ the body as living. Yet body belongs to the composite essence of human being. Conversely, human soul is ‘realised’ by union with body. Moreover, ‘the intellectual soul has the power of sense in all its completeness; because what belongs to the inferior nature pre-exists more perfectly in the superior, as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. v). Therefore the body to which the intellectual soul is united should be a mixed body, above others reduced to the most equable complexion.’ In a characteristic manoeuver, Aquinas interprets the teleology of Aristotle’s account of the three levels of soul by invoking the Neo-platonic ontology of hierarchy articulated by Proclus and transmitted by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.
    In speaking of the ‘powers of the soul’ in q. 77, Aquinas observes that ‘sensation belongs neither to the soul, nor to the body, but to the composite.’ Therefore the sensitive power is in ‘the composite’ of body and soul as its subject. Therefore the soul alone, that is apart from the body, is not properly the subject of all the powers. The soul senses nothing without the body, because the action of sensation cannot proceed from the soul except by means of a corporeal organ. There is perhaps implicit here a ‘cognitive ecology’ of a quite fundamental kind in that the material of intellectual cognition begins with the data collected by the sense faculty—what Aquinas calls ‘phantasm’: ‘to understand through a phantasm is the proper operation of the soul by virtue of its union with the body.’ This leads Aquinas to conclude that at death, when the soul is separated from the body, the sensitive and nutritive powers no longer remain:
    …all the powers of the soul belong to the soul alone as their principle. But some powers belong to the soul alone as their subject; as the intelligence and the will. These powers must remain in the soul, after the destruction of the body. But other powers are subjected in the composite; as all the powers of the sensitive and nutritive parts. Now accidents cannot remain after the destruction of the subject. Wherefore, the composite being destroyed, such powers do not remain actually; but they remain virtually in the soul, as in their principle or root (Q. 77 Art.8)

    So, what do we have from our reading of Thomas Aquinas? The structure of the questions in the Prima Pars of the Summa plainly underscores the fact that human being is for Aquinas the key locus for the meeting of incorporeal and corporeal being. By embracing Aristotle’s definition of soul as ‘the actuality of the body’s potentiality for life’ Aquinas adopts a thoroughly Aristotelian, teleological stand. The intellectual soul cannot be confused with body (as with the Presocratics), nor can the faculty of sensation be ascribed an independence of body (as with Plato). Neither can offer a satisfactory account of cognition, and therefore neither offers a plausible account of the nature of the soul. Human being is a composite being. Although the rational soul as incorporeal and incorruptible is immortal, it nonetheless depends upon the body for its fulfilment in knowledge, and this evidenced by its dependence upon bodily sense for the receipt of the sense data, or phantasmata, upon which it works in the formation of its act of understanding. For Aquinas the human intellectual soul bridges the two primary divisions of creation, namely the spiritual and the material worlds. As intellectual the human soul shares self-subsistency with the higher intellectual substances, namely the angels and God’s own self. Adam, after all, was created ‘in the image and likeness of God’. The intellectual soul is without material ‘accidents’ – it is conceptual, universal, essential, and, at the same time, it is embodied as a concrete particular as ‘this person’ Socrates (Aquinas’s example). As ‘this person’ the soul is the actuality of a given individual body. The soul is principle, form, actuality and a living individual in its composite condition of union with body. Yet, for Aquinas, the intellectual soul is by nature immortal. It may be the least of the intellectual beings, albeit lower than God and the angels. As ‘the actuality of an organic physical body with life potentially in it’ the intellectual soul employs of senses in the acquisition of knowledge—the life of the sensitive soul is brought to fulfilment in the life of intellective soul. The body is its corporeal instrument in this sense, although the ‘subject’ of sense perception is properly the whole en-souled rational animal. The human as human must be composite because sensation is indispensable to human experience and the consequent formation of experience into universal knowledge (see Aristotle, Metaph. A—the quest for wisdom begins with the wonder and delight humans take in their senses). Sense experience is both necessary to the formulation of mental images, and at the same time there is in intellection no possession of the particular material object as particular, precisely because there is a mental image of it. The essences derived from the data of the phantasmata are abstractions from material particularity. Abstraction from these images yields knowledge of causes and of universals. The intellectual soul can neither ‘be’ a body as some Presocratics maintained, nor can it merely ‘use’ the body, as Aquinas describes the Platonic view; the soul is incorporeal but is necessarily united to body. Aristotle held that ‘to think is to speculate with images’ (De Anima, 431a17). This definition of thinking is I think decisively significant to Aquinas’s definition of the human soul.
    It seems to me that Aquinas’s dwelling on the process of cognition in his account of the human soul is perhaps the most interesting feature of his discussion in qq. 75-77 from the point of view of our own inquiry. Is it far-fetched to describe the rational soul, through its union with body, as engaged in a sort of elemental ‘cognitive ecology’ in its formation of thoughts through an activity which bridges the divide between the sensuous, corruptible, material world of the ‘outward man’ and the intellectual, incorruptible, spiritual world of the ‘inward man’ (see Q. 75, Art. 4)? It is by rising above and yet, at the same time, depending upon the imagination, that the intellectual soul acquires knowledge. The is, moreover, a ‘conversion’ of the phantasm of the imagination into the abstraction of thought which, according to Aquinas’s argument, reveals the essence of the human soul. It seems to me that there is a good deal in this remarkable distillation of scriptural, Greek philosophical, and patristic wisdom which is germane to the early-modern discussion about the interrelation of conversion, religion, and cognition.

  • Paul Yachnin

    Dear Colleagues,

    First of all, apologies and thanks–apologies to the group for how long it has taken me to respond to Torrance’s illuminating and provocative commentary on Aquinas and thanks for Torrance for giving us such a strong, generous start. I hope that I and all of us can make up for lost time over the next couple of months.

    Torrance has outlined very clearly Aquinas’ thinking about the soul itself and about the nature of the person as necessarily a composite of soul and body. What I find most intriguing in Torrance’s commentary is the emphasis on the dynamic relationship of soul and body. “There is no soul ‘in’ a body,” he says, “the soul ‘actuates’ the potentiality that is the body.” But the claim about Aquinas’ understanding of  body-soul dynamism is more surprising than that. Of course, for Aquinas the soul is immortal, but in an important sense it comes to be realized by its interactivity with the body and the senses: “Although the rational soul as incorporeal and incorruptible is immortal, it nonetheless depends upon the body for its fulfillment in knowledge.” Indeed, Aquinas believes, Torrance tells us, that “the human intellect is not a capacity distinct from the soul, but that it is in reality the very ‘principle’ of the human soul.”

    Soul, then, is intellect (elsewhere, Torrance uses the word “cognition,” which is even more strongly  based in the processual), and soul is in some sense realized by way of dynamic incarnation. Where before I read Aquinas and Torrance on Aquinas, I was thinking of my idea of ‘theatre as soul-making practice’ as something entirely at odds with early modern thinking about the soul, now I can begin to discern a pathway that leads  to an account of Shakespeare’s theatrical practice of soul-making as in a line with and in dialogue with traditional and early modern thinking about the soul. I will have more to say about how that might work when we come to read King Lear.

    yours,

    Paul

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