(Cont'd)
We now know a little about how the ancient Greek Christians, the so-called early Church Fathers or Patricians think about the soul. What about the views of
St. Thomas Aquinas, upon whose theology the present day Roman Catholic Church relies? According
Anthony Kenny, in his article "
Body, Soul, and Intellect in Aquinas",
Aquinas got into serious trouble with the mainstream Church when he first tried to apply the
Aristotelian theory of form and matter to the nature of the human "soul" and its relation to the human "body".
For
Aristotle, animals and vegetables had souls no less than human beings (the
vegetative/nutritive soul being the principle behind the growth and propagation of plants and the
sensitive soul being the explanatory principle for animal's sensory activities. What made human beings special was that he is thought to possess a
rational/intellective soul. To
Thomas' contemporaries, there was not just a single form, the
intellective soul but also
sensitive and
nutritive souls and some theorists even thought that human beings had a "
corporal form", in more or less the same way that a stick would have a "stick form" and a stone, a "stone form". But
Aquinas held that there was no need for man to have so many forms and that only one form would be sufficient to explain all of man's various functions.viz. the
rational/intellective soul and that when a man died, there would be no further relationship between the formerly living person and his corpse other than his basic prime matter. For this view,
Aquinas was condemned at Oxford in 1277. To
Aquinas, even animals possessed some form of intellect which enabled it to think simple thoughts. What was special about human beings was that only man had the ability to think thoughts not only by sensory images but also by and in language. Man's "intellect" was special because his "intellect" had two kinds of power: "agent power" which enabled him to abstract
universal ideas from
particular sense experience (something which animals did not have) and "receptive power" which formed the storehouse for the ideas, concepts, beliefs thus abstracted. However, he thought that what was abstracted from individual or particular matters (each with individual and particular forms), was not its
particular form but only its
universal form. But he thought that it was impossible for the pure intellect to grasp "material objects" by itself. Knowledge of "material objects" can be obtained only through the joint efforts of both our intellect and our sensory faculties, which he thought included also
perception,
imagination and
memory.Thus it is only by enlisting the assistance of our "sensory" experience that our " agent intellect" can "know" individual/particular objects/persons and is thereby enabled to "form" singular propositions about such particular objects/persons e.g a proposition like "Socrates is a man."
Aquinas called this relationship of the intellect to the sensory context of its activity "reflection upon phantasms." ("phantasm" including effectively the whole range of our "sensory" experience, which for
Aquinas, included what we now call our "perception" and our "imagination"). To
Aquinas, if something is physically absent from our sight, we can only "see" it by means of our "mental images" of it or (and this is special to man) the imagined sounds and shapes of the relevant "words" representing such picturable objects and with regard to non-picturable "spiritual" entities like souls, spirits, God, we can only use words corresponding to such entities, which we "perceive" or "see" in our fragmentary inner monologues.
Like
Aristotle and
Plato, Aquinas thought that the real "object" of all human "knowledge" was "form", both with regard to sensory "objects" or "objects" forming the subject matter of human "intellectual understanding". To
Aquinas, our senses perceive only the "accidental forms" of the relevant objects appropriate to each of our sensory modalities (eyes/sight, ears/audition, tongue/tasting, nose/smelling, skin/tactile feeling) e.g with our eyes, we can see the colors, the shape, the size of sensory objects and with our nose, we perceive its smell but all such colors, shape, size and smell etc. are considered its "accidental forms" specific to one object e.g.
this particular rose. Its "
substantial/essential form" is not perceived by our senses but can only be grasped by our "
intellect". To
Aquinas, all "material objects" are composed of both "matter" and "form" but the "individuality" of a parcel of matter is not something that can be grasped by our "intellect" . Thus our "intellect" can grasp with its "agent power" what makes
Socrates "human" but not what makes him "
Socrates" as an individual person.To
Aquinas, there is no such thing as the "form of humanity" or "human nature" considered as a species
outside of the human mind. But how does the human "agent power" of our "intellect" act or function according to
Aquinas? Faced with individual/particular/specific embodied human persons consisting of both form and matter, the "agent power" of our intellect acts by abstracting from such particular individuals and create therefrom an "intellectual object" a "universal form" called "humanity" only with the help of both our "senses" and our "imagination". But he did not elaborate on how exactly this was done. We can't really blame him because in his days, he simply could not be expected to have the kind of knowledge about the functioning of the human body, the human mind and the human emotions or the human psyche which we now have.
As briefly mentioned above, to
Aquinas, human "intellect" has, not only what he called an "agent power", but also what he called a " receptive power". something we nowadays would refer to as our capacity to remember the things previously learned (stored in the form of ideas, concepts, beliefs, "knowledge") or our "memory", which Aquinas conceived of as a kind of
tabula rasa into which we deposit such new ideas etc. as and when they are "formed", a process which Aquinas thought was quite passive (contrary to what our present day psychologists and cognitive scientists tell us). This kind of thinking however has left its traces even nowadays in the way we talk e.g. we speak of being "informed" about a matter and we call gaining "knowledge" about something the acquisition of "information."
How is
Aquinas' "intellect" related to our sensory perception? To
Aquinas, "sense perception" was, like the acquisition of "intellectual information", also a matter of "reception" of the "forms" of "immaterial matter" e.g. our sense takes in the color of gold, without the gold and the "forms" thus received by our senses were then passed to or stored in the "fancy" (phantasm) ) (our "imagination" in the original sense of formation of internal mental "images" of the object perceived by our sensory organs) which can be reshuffled later to produce images of whatever we later wish to think about. Thus when we "see" the sun, what enters our "eyes" is not the "actual sun" with all its mass, light, colors etc: we "perceive" only the various "forms" associated with the sun. In the same way, when I "think" of a horse, what appears in my "intellect" is the
immaterial and
universal "form" of the horse. What makes a "real horse" a "horse" is the "form" of a "horse". It is just the universal and immaterial "form" of the horse which exists in my mind, individualized and materialized in the "real horse". What we would call the "real horse" has a natural existence in the "real world" and when
Aquinas "perceives" it or when he "thinks" about it, it has an "intentional existence" in
Aquinas' "intellect".
Although
Aquinas distinguishes between the "universal form" of a horse and "
my mental image" of it as it is embodied in
my own mind and thus peculiar to "
me", he is not very clear about the exact relations between the two. It seems that to
Aquinas, as far as we can gather, our thoughts are "ours" in so far as they must be "expressed" through "our" mind (what we would now call our "brain) which in turn is contained in "our" body.
Kenny thinks that this is just as well because he thinks that terms "me", "my self" , "my ego" and "I" are not different from or do not refer to anything different from the human being to which such terms are applied. In his words, "the belief in a self which is different from the human being whose self it is is a grammatical illusion generated by the reflexive pronoun. It is as if a philosopher was puzzled what property of "own-ness" was which my own room possesses in addition to the property of being mine."
To
Kenny, the "grammatical error which is the essence of the theory of the self is a deep error" but this mistaken notion or "illusion" of the "self" has a number of different roots the most important of which according to him, are what he calls the "epistemological root" and the "psychological root".
The epistemological root of the notion of the "self" is what
Kenny calls "Cartesian skepticism" initiated in
Descartes'
Meditations in which he convinces himself that he can doubt whether the world exists and whether he has a body but not that he has a mind: "I can doubt whether I have a body, but I cannot doubt whether I exist; for what is this I which is doubting". Thus the "I" must refer to something not involving the body but nonetheless forming a part of Descartes as a human being. Thus to Descartes, his ego or self is a substance whose essence is pure thought: the mind or
res cogitans.(the thing which thinks). The psychological root comes from the idea that "imagination" is an interior sense of a posited "self", which according to the Lockean empiricism, is the "subject" of the relevant inner sensation, the eye of inner vision, the ear of inner hearing and the mystical possessor of both inner eye and inner ear and whatever inner organs of sensations may be "fantasized". To
Kenny, "What
sense the thoughts in my mind have depends on
my mastery of the language in which they occur, in
my decoding of the symbols and imagery in which they are embodied" and "What
reference they have depends on the history of this
body, making the links between the current image and the remembered events which provide the context for the reflections of" what
Aquinas calls "phantasms" (or "images"). Currently some philosophers regard "memory" as the key to our "personal identity" whilst others see "bodily continuity" as its essence, whilst still others would use both memory and bodily continuity as the relevant criteria. Those who separate personal identity from bodily identity follow those medievals who argued for the plurality of forms whilst those who identify the two effectively subscribe to the thesis for which
Aquinas was condemned.
However the "illusion" of the "self" or the "ego" arose, it is certain that it is a question which has interested people besides philosophers. What is the right way to think of the continuity between a foetus and a baby, between the "soul" of the baby as his foetus or as his born body( an issue related to the present day debate about whether abortion should be permitted) as the continuance what Aquinas calls his "vegetative soul" in an unconscious human body be looked upon as an indication of the "permanence" of a "rational soul" which is charged with his "moral duty"? Since 1914, the Catholic church has accepted that "the same rational soul is united to the body in such a way that it is one and the only substantial form and through it a human being is animal, living, bodily and substantial." But it remains an issue for many philosophers.
Gerard Manley Hopkins in his treatise on
St. Ignatius' spiritual exercises, wrote: "We learn that all things are created by consideration of the world without or of ourselves, the world within. The former is the consideration commonly dwelt on, but the latter takes on the mind more hold. I find myself both as man and as myself something most determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see: I find myself with my pleasures and pains, my powers and my experiences, my deserts and guilt, my shame and sense of beauty, my dangers, hopes, fears and all my fate, more important to myself than anything I see...And this is much more true when we consider the mind, when I consider my self-being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, or
I and
me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: What must it be to be someone else. Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the same feeling. But this only multiplies the phenomena to be explained so far as the cases are like and do resemble. But to me, there is no resemblance: searching nature I taste
self but at one tankard, that of my own being."
Hopkins is not alone.
David Hume also tried to find out the nature of this "self" by introspecting and looking within himself and by trying to reflect on what is going on in his own mind and his own consciousness but failed to find anything which could reasonably be identified as his own "self". All he found was a bundle of sensations: " When I enter most intimately into what I call
myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch
myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."
Kenny explains why this is so. He argues: "This is because the self is a mythical entity. A taste of which everything tasted would not be a taste, since taste is a faculty of discrimination; a self which is perceived no matter what it perceived is no better than a self which is not perceived at all.". In so finding, he mirrors the view of the great Buddha, to whom the concept of "self" is "empty" because there is nothing in the so-called "self" which stays the same from moment to moment. The self is not something "concrete" like a stone, which "has" or more accurately "is" what we normally understand as "substance/matter" which as Descartes says, has "extension" and takes up physical "space". It is something intangible. something which exists nowhere except in our own "mind" (which "mind" is itself nothing but a concept we created inside our "brain" and only insofar as we give it a name). Are we our body? If so, is the body we have at birth, the body we have at age 7 when we enter primary school, the body we have at age 17 or 18 when we graduate from high school, the body we have at age 21 or 22 when we graduate from college and the body we have when we die the same body or a different body? Are we our personal biography? If so, isn't it true that with each moment, with the happening of more and more "events" in our lives, our biography too is changing all the time? Are we what we own or possess? A house, a car, a spouse, children, bank accounts, stocks and shares? Is our ownership of these just "notional" or what lawyers refer to by the legal fiction as "chose in action" (literally, "things in action" or metaphorical "things" which have meaning only in so far as they form part of certain legal relations between people recognized by the law courts but in reality just a "bundle" of abstract rights and obligations which themselves are nothing but abstract "concepts" invented by our minds) with only such "reality" as people will continue to treat them "as if" they were truly "ours". Physically, it is quite clear that "we" are not the same as our house, our car, our spouse, our children, our bank accounts, our stocks and shares etc. except as Fromm says, we choose to live and relate to others and to the world in a "having" mode of existence. Are we our "fame". our "reputation", our "honours", our "qualifications"? Again, are these things as "real" as say, an egg, a table, a chair? If they exist, where in the world do they exist except in our "imagination" (in its original meaning of forming or creating an image in our mind)? In so far as they are "real" in the sense of being "recognized" by others, how long will they last? Do they have any true or real permanence or stability at all? Did not the Pharoahs build pyramids? Are the pyramids now nothing but the objects of curiosity and wonder by people who are anxious only to click on their cameras and then hurry away to their salads and barbecued chicken or beef? Where or what or how exactly is that "self" we normally so treasure and stress "ourselves" out to protect, defend and whose interest we try so desperately to promote? Shall we not find the kind of emptiness at the core of our psyche that
Peer Gynt found in
Henrik Ibsen's play as he followed the troll's motto, ""Be thyself and to hell with the world!" ?.
(To be cont'd).
Is this a duck or a rabbit
