Maverick Philosopher

Are the Souls of Brute Animals Subsistent? Considerations Anent the Unity of Consciousness

We have been discussing the view of Thomas Aquinas according to which (i) the soul is the form of the body, and (ii) the souls of some animals, namely rational animals, are subsistent, i.e. capable of an existence independent of matter. I have registered some of my misgivings. Here is another. If our souls are subsistent forms, then why are not the souls of non-human animals also subsistent? If that in us which thinks is a life-principle and the substantial form of our bodies, and subsistent to boot, by what principled means do we not ascribe subsistent souls to all living things or at least to many non-human living things?

Aquinas discusses this question in Summa Theologica, Q. 75, art. 3. He attempts to navigate a middle course between a form of materialism according to which sense and intellect are both "referred to a corporeal principle," and the view he takes to be Platonic according to which both sense and intellect are "referred to an incorporeal principle." On the Platonic view, both sensing and understanding "belong to the soul as such." Thomas points us to Theaetetus 184 c. This is a fascinating passage which, according to Paul Natorp, anticipates Kant's transcendental unity of apperception.

In this passage, Socrates puts the following question to Theaetetus: ". . . which is more correct — to say that we see or hear with the eyes and with the ears, or through the eyes and through the ears?" Theatetus obligingly responds with through rather than with. Socrates approves of this response:

Yes, my boy, for no one can suppose that in each of us, as in a sort of Trojan horse, there are perched a number of unconnected senses which do not all meet in some one nature, the mind, or whatever we please to call it, of which they are the instruments, and with which through them we perceive the objects of sense. (Emphasis added, tr. Benjamin Jowett)

The issue here is the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold of sensory data. Long before Kant, and long before Leibniz, the Plato was well aware of the problem of the unity of consciousness. (It is not for nothing that Whitehead described Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato.)

Sitting before a fire, I see the flames, feel the heat, smell the smoke, and hear the crackling of the logs. The sensory data are unified in one consciousness of a selfsame object. This unification does not take place in the eyes or in the ears or in the nostrils or in any other sense organ, and to say that it takes place in the brain is not a good answer. For the brain is a partite physical thing extended in space. If the unity of consciousness is identified with a portion of the brain, then the unity is destroyed. For no matter how small the portion of the brain, it has proper parts external to each other. Every portion of the brain, no matter how small, is a complex entity. But consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold is a simple unity. Hence the unity of consciousness cannot be understood along materialist lines.

This argument from the unity of consciousness, which of course needs to be more rigorously developed, is present in nuce in Plato in the passage cited. According to Aquinas, if this argument is sound, ". . . it follows that even the souls of brute animals are subsistent." This seems to be a correct inference.

Aquinas hopes to block the inference with the help of Aristotle's De Anima 429 a 24. Thomas gives an argument that I interpret as follows:

1. Although understanding alone is performed without a corporeal organ, as Aristotle maintains, sensation and the operations of the sensitive soul are accompanied by changes in the body at our sensory receptors.

Therefore

2. The sensitive soul has no per se operation of its own, and every operation of the sensitive soul belongs to the soul-body composite.

Therefore

3. The souls of brute animals, having no per se operations, are not subsistent.

Unfortunately, I cannot see that this is a good argument. The gist of the argument is that while there are specific corporeal organs for seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, namely, eyes, ears, etc., there is no corporeal organ for understanding. From this it is concluded that there is a crucial difference between sensing and understanding: it is broadly logically possible that there be understanding without a body; but it is not broadly logically possible that there be sensing without a body. And since we alone among animals are rational, or capable of understanding, we alone have subsistent souls.

What this ignores is that sensing is not merely a mechanical or material process. When my cat simultaneously sees, smells, and tastes her food (or my food as she much prefers) there is a unity of consciousness in her no less than there is one in me when I lay into my food. There is no specific corporeal organ that does this unifying of sensory data, neither in me nor in my cat. The unity-of-consciousness argument against materialism can be 'run' both for man and cat. If it works for me it should work for her. So if the possibility of my disembodied existence follows from there being no physical organ that unifies my consciousness, then we get the same result for my cat, and the difference between man and brute in respect of subsistence of souls cannot be maintained.

To sum up. Thomas wants to say that men, but no brutes, have subsistent souls. This is because men, but no brutes, understand. But sensing is a form of consciousness, and consciousness cannot be understood in materialist terms. Sensing is not a mere collision of atoms in the void. Sensory consciousness, besides displaying unity across its several modalities, reveals qualia. And qualia are a well-known stumbling block to materialism. It is difficult to see why, if understanding supports the possibility of disembodied existence, sensing should not also support this possibility. There is after all only one soul which both senses and understands. The phrases 'sensitive soul' and 'intellective soul' are not to be taken to refer to distinct souls.

Imago Dei in Relation to Aquinas and Christology

This just over the transom from Will Duquette:

 A fool rushes in...

In your comment on Peter Lupu's guest post, you say

> Man was not created in God's material image, since he has none; he 
> was created in God's spiritual image.  But this implies that what is 
> essential to man is not his animal body which presumably can be 
> accounted for in the naturalistic terms of evolutionary biology, but 
> his spirit or consciousness.

However, St. Thomas would say that it is man's nature to be a
rational animal, and hence man's animal body most certainly is
essential.  I appreciate that you might be working in a broader
theistic context rather than an explicitly Christian context; but
given that Christ is God Incarnate, and now dwells in eternity,
it seems to me that man now just is created in God's image, body
and soul both.  From the standpoint of eternity God created the
universe, man in it, and become incarnate as a man as one single
act.

I enjoy your blog; it's part of my continuing education.  Thanks
for providing it.

You're welcome, Mr. Duquette.  Your comment is pertinent and raises a number of difficult and important questions. 

Conceivability, Possibility and Per Impossibile Reasoning

Here is an example of per impossibile reasoning from Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 1, art. 2:

Even if there were no human intellects, things could be said to be true because of their relation to the divine intellect. But if, by an impossible supposition [per impossibile], intellect did not exist and things did continue to exist, then the essentials of truth would in no way remain. (tr. Mulligan)

Retortion and Performative Inconsistency Once Again

This post continues my meditations on the probative reach of retortion.  See the category Retortion for more on this intriguing topic.

1. If a number of us are sitting silently in a room, I cannot say 'We are silent' without in some sense contradicting myself.  In what sense, exactly?  In the performative sense.  Were I to say 'We are silent,' my performance (Vollzug in E. Coreth's terminology) -- in this case my utterance -- would be 'inconsistent' with its content.  Now contents are propositions, while utterance events are not, the reason being that contents are truth-valued (either true or false assuming Bivalence) while utterance events, like all events, are not truth-valued.  It follows that performative inconsistency is not identical to, or a species of, logical inconsistency.  Logical consistency/inconsistency is a relation between or among propositions.  Two propositions are consistent iff they can both be true, and inconsistent iff they cannot.  A single proposition is self-consistent iff its logical form is such as to admit some true substitution-instances.  Clearly, there is nothing logically self-inconsistent about 'We are silent.'   The sentence is not logically self-contradictory.  But I would contradict myself were I to say, in the situation described, 'We are silent.'  Curiously, I cannot say in this situation what I know to be true.  If I were to say it, I would falsify it.  Therefore, the proposition that I know to be true is unassertible salva veritate in the situation in question. No doubt I have the ability to assert the sentence-type 'We are silent'; but I cannot assert it in a way that preserves truth.  But this does not show that the proposition is false, or that its negation -- We are not silent -- is true. 

The Reach of Retortion

Tony Flood e-mails:

Bill, when you distinguish retorsive arguments that work from those that don't, I'm not clear about what you mean by "working." You haven't said that some retorsive arguments are fallacies, but if they're not, then what is their defect?  A "performative contradiction," e.g., "I cannot write a sentence in English," may not be, as you noted, a contradiction between propositions, but to expose its untenability is certainly effective and therefore "works."  Do you exclude performative contradictions from the class of retorsive arguments? If you do and if you're right, my celebration of that "point of connection" was misplaced. (I've modified that paragraph to include the link to your post.)

I will try to answer Tony's question by giving an example of a retorsive argument that does not 'work.'  In Retortion and the Existence of Truth I gave an example that did seem to 'work.'

A Hylomorphic Solution to the Interaction Problem?

Interactionist substance dualism in the philosophy of mind is supposed to face a devastating objection, the interaction objection. In the first part of this post I will present this objection in its traditional form and suggest that it is not all that serious. In the second part, however, I take the objection seriously and consider whether Aristotelian- Thomistic hylomorphism has the resources to counter it.

Aquinas on Intellect's Independence of Matter: Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 49, 8

In an earlier post on hylomorphic dualism, I said that

Aquinas cannot do justice to his own insight into the independence of the intellect from matter from within the hylomorphic scheme of ontological analysis he inherits from Aristotle. His metaphysica generalis is at war with his special-metaphysical insight into the independence of intellect from matter.

To help nail down half of this assertion, the half that credits the Common Doctor with insight, let's look at one of the arguments Aquinas gives for the intellect's independence of matter, the one at Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II, Chapter 49, Paragraph 8:

Also, the action of no body is self-reflexive. For it is proved in [Aristotle's] Physics[VIII, 5, 256a2-33] that no body is moved by itself except with respect to a part, so that one part of it is the mover and the other the moved. But in acting the intellect reflects on itself, not only as to a part, but as to the whole of itself. Therefore, it is not a body.

One will be tempted to dismiss this quaint verbiage as just so much medieval mumbo-jumbo, but I think there is an argument here that has a serious claim on our attention. Taking some minor liberties, I would present the argument as a nice, neat syllogism: