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:

1. No body is wholly and non-formally self-reflexive.
2. Every intellect in act is wholly and non-formally self-reflexive.
Therefore
3. No intellect in act is a body.

It is easy to see that the conclusion follows from the premises. But are the premises true? More importantly, what do they mean?

Ad (1). A body in this context is any material thing of whatever size, artificial or natural, animate or inanimate. What the first premise says is that no body can act upon itself as a whole. This seems right. If body B acts upon itself, then some proper part of B acts upon some other proper or improper part of B. Thus when I shave myself, one of my hands drags a razor across small portions of my bewhiskered epidermis: the whole of BV does not shave the whole of BV. In the case of a self-inflating mattress, a proper part of the mattress inflates a distinct proper part of the mattress. It would be a fabulous mattress indeed the whole of which inflated the whole of it.  If a heating or cooling system regulates itself by means of a thermostat, a proper part of the system, the thermostat, regulates a distinct proper part of the system.  Absurdities would result were one to suppose that the whole of the system regulates the whole of the system.

Self-cleaning ovens and cats clean themselves, but that is not to say that the whole oven or cat cleans the whole oven or cat; the oven doesn't clean its outside, and the cat does not clean its inside. A boiler that is self-monitoring is monitored by a proper part of itself, not by the whole contraption. And so on for eating, biting, touching, feeding, fueling. What about a machine whose sole function, once turned on, is to turn itself off? The whole of it gets turned off, but the whole of it does not do the turning off.

What about cell division?  Suppose cell A splits into two cells B and C.   We might describe this by saying that A splits itself into B and C, and thus acts as a whole upon itself as a whole, dividing itself in two.  Since B and C are numerically distinct, A does not survive the division as either B or C.  But precisely because A ceases to exist at the moment of division, A is not a counterexample to (1).  A counterexample to (1) would be a physical item that acts as a whole upon itself as a whole while remaining in existence during the time it acts upon itself.

But everything is self-identical, and so one may be tempted to say that bodies stand in the relation of identity to themselves and that therefore there are self-reflexive bodies. To block this silly move, I added 'non-formally' to (1).  Identity is a formal relation.

So premise (1) looks to be true. Or can you think of a counterexample? If (1) is true, then presumably (1) is necessarily true: there is something about the very ontological structure of bodies that disallows their being wholly and non-formally self-reflexive. If the body is simple (non-partite), a literal atom, then there is no possibility of a distinction between agent and patient; but there must be some such distinction if it is to make sense to say that the item acts upon itself.  And if the body is partite, then the part that is the agent cannot be the whole.

Perhaps the closest we can come to a body that is wholly and non-formally reflexive is a light source that illuminates itself along with other things in its environment. But this won't do either.  A lamp illuminates a room and itself, but not every part of itself, the inside of the lampstand, for example. Now imagine a bare light bulb, emitting light, hanging from the ceiling. It does not illuminate the inside of the wire from which it hangs and which supplies it with current. Imagine a light magically on without a source of current. Still, the inside of the filament would go unilluminated, and the glass would do no illuminating.

Premise (1), then, seems true.

Ad (2).The second premise says in effect that every mental act, such as an occurrent episode of thinking that 7 is prime, stands as a whole in some non-formal relation to the whole of itself. What might that relation be? As Aquinas says, the intellect reflects upon itself. But this is perhaps too strong. I can think about something without explicitly reflecting upon my thinking about it. I can think about X without thinking that Iam thinking about X. Many philosophers and psychologists have held, however, that acts (occurrent episodes) of thinking are implicitly self-aware.  Without involving full-blown acts of reflection, they are yet aware of themselves.  Thinking about X, I am not only conscious of X, I am simultaneously albeit secondarily conscious of being conscious of X. This is what Brentano called inner perception and distinguished from inner observation, and what Sartre called the pre-reflective cogito. Intentional consciousness, consciousness of an object, is always simultaneously albeit secondarily consciousness of itself as conscious of the object.

So although it may be too strong to say that the intellect in act is in every case explicitly self-reflective, yet there is a reflexive structure involved in every case:  consciousness of X is consciousness of itself as conscious of X.

In the concrete act of consciousness, consciousness as a whole is conscious of itself as a whole. Suppose I am conscious of X. The idea is that I am not only conscious of X, a mountain say; I am also simultaneously albeit secondarily conscious of myself as conscious of X. Thus there is a distinction between  C1 of X and  C2 of (C1 of X). But although one can and must draw a distinction between C1 and C2, the two are inseparable: they form a unity, and as it were permeate one another. To borrow a piece of terminology from the later Gustav Bergmann, but apply it in a way he would not approve of, an act of consciousness and the simultaneous secondary consciousness of it form a 'Two-in-One.'  There is an intimate unity, but one that harbors a difference. To distinguish is not to divide. Thus in the unity of one consciousness there is a duality of inseparable but distinct aspects: there is the consciousness of a mountain, say, and together with it, the consciousness of this consciousness of the mountain.

This is one aspect of the unity of consciousness. Consciousness exhibits both diachronic and synchronic unity, and what is under discussion here is one aspect of synchronic unity: awareness of X is simultaneously awareness of (awareness of X).

But I think I hear an objection coming.  "If you say that 'awareness of X is simultaneously awareness of (awareness of X),' then awareness of any one thing will require awareness of an infinity of things. But it seems obvious that I am never aware of an infinity of things.  Besides, your proposal gives rise to a vicious infinite regress." This objection is a misunderstanding since the claim is not that, in order to be aware of X, one must first (either temporally or logically) be aware of (awareness of X).  Such a proposal would indeed trigger a vicious infinite regress.  The claim is rather that every awareness of X is simultaneously accompanied by an awareness of itself as aware of X.  So if there is a regress, it is benign.  But I deny that there there is a regress.  I am now staring at an illuminated Tiffany lamp.  I am aware of the lamp and of being aware of the lamp.  Phenomenologically, however, nothing corresponds to 'aware of being aware of being aware of the lamp.'  One can iterate such phrases unto infinity, but nothing corresponds to them except the primary awareness of the object together with the secondary awareness of the awareness of the object.

Ad (3). I have just made a case for (1) and (2), a case that could be strengthened in several ways in a longer exposition. But I think I have said enough for it to be clear that something like Aquinas' argument above has a serious claim on our attention. The premises are plausible and the conclusion follows from them. And note that one needn't be a hylomorphic dualist to makes use of the argument. The argument is detachable from Aquinas' hylomorphism and could be employed by a Cartesian or a Platonist.  Here is a second version of the argument, perhaps a stronger one than the one culled from Aquinas' text:

4.  Minds as we encounter them in ourselves have the following property P: they are such that they  exhibit in at least some of their operations and at least some times a peculiar reflexivity that amounts to the mind in that operation and at that time being related as a whole to itself as a whole.

5. Nothing in the material world exemplifies property P. Ergo,

6. Minds as we encounter them in ourselves are not material things.

Note that premise (4) is weaker than premise (2) in the original argument. The second argument allows, as the first does not, for the intellect's intermittent reflexivity and for its being reflexive in only some of its operations.  But the weaker premise is all that is needed to show that minds are radically different from everything material in nature.

Comments

[Bjork]

Thanks for this post!

[Bill Vallicella]

You're welcome, Bjork.

[Ben U.]

A stove, oven, or boiler heats up every part of itself. But only one proper part of it does the heating, though every part of it helps spread the heat. So far, your first premiss seems to stand, though losing one of its supports, the idea that no proper part of a thing can act on every part of the thing. But maybe that support should be restored. Maybe it's that no proper part of a stove can act directly on every part? But then there's the question of what counts as "directly" and for my part I'm unsure. Something to do with shortest paths. Then I guess it gets into radiant heat versus ambient heat and heat in solids.

However, in the case of gravitation, all the matter "acts" on all of itself to compress itself toward the center of gravity. Of course, this gets into tricky questions of what sort of action (action at a distance?) is involved in gravitation. Aristotle saw that which we call the gravity well as a material object's "natural place" and end; the falling object is the agency (slamming into the earth); but then all the terrestrial matter likewise is or has agency, force of weight, pressing inwards. Well, if I knew more about GR, I might have somewhere to go with this.

Another angle: why consciousness as a mover, an agent? If by "consciousness" we mean something with capacities volitional, competential, affective, and cognitive, then okay. But if we're discussing a passive, intellectual cognition - neither will's agency, competency's bearing & coping, nor affectivity's excitedness - but a stable cognition about layers of awareness, layers which become differentiated (actualized?) only if one thinks or has thought actively about them, then we're discussing a kind of form or structure. In a structure, is every part balanced against every part, not in direct contact but still in some significant sense? Not always. But, in a sensitive structure, I would suppose so, and a structure can have both sensitivity and integrity. If cognitive awareness is both sensitive and stable like, say, a web, where motions and vibrations travel very swiftly and more or less directly through the web in an informative way because of the globally effective ways in which the web's parts are supported and linked by one another, then, vice versa, does a web count as a material object which is non-formally reflexive in its supportedness, if not in active, driving agency?

But even if we were considering only a passive intellectual awareness, it's still an aspect of a mind which, unlike a web, has at least the potential to act on or "do something about" the objects of consciousness, even if sometimes the action is mental and cogitative or is more about changing one's relation to them than about changing them. (One can't change the past, but one can adhere to it in habit or break with it.) If the capacity for awareness of one's awareness has a function, maybe it pertains to learning - learning such things as self-control and revising one's habits of interpretation, retraining one's instincts, etc. So in the end it's not really like a web, or like other such phenomena which one could probably dig up, and, if a mind is a material body, it's of a unique kind. But Aquinas spoke about the immateriality of the intellect, not of the whole mind in the modern sense. So it gets too complicated for me again. Signing off! and thanks for your post, it got me to thinking pretty hard today.

[Bill Vallicella]

Interesting comments, Ben. I have time for just one response.

Consider just the heating element in an oven. It might be a gas burner or an electrical element that emits heat when a strong current is passed through it. It seems plausible to say that the heating element heats itself and every part of itself, which seems to be a counterexample to Aquinas' first premise according to which "one part is the mover and the other the moved." But is it true that a gas burner when ignited heats EVERY part of the gas burner? If it heats every part, then it heats every part of every part 'all the way down.' I am assuming the plausible mereological principle that if a whole has parts, then it also has as parts all the parts of those parts. (Contrast this with sets which do not have as elements all the elements of their elements. E.g. {{a}, {b}} has {a}, {b} as elements but does not have a, b as elements.)

Arguably, however, there are parts of the burner that do not get heated. Heat is a form of kinetic energy of molecules, and so I wonder whether an individual molecule can be said to have a temperature, or whether this can be said only of molecules in the aggregate intereacting with each other. If the latter, then no individual molecule of the burner is heated by the burner when ignited.

Below the molecular level, at the atomic and subatomic levels, it seems one can no longer speak of heat or or temperature. Does the burner heat up constituent electrons, protons, nuetrons, neutrinos, quarks? Isn't 'heat of an electron' a meaningless expression?

There is also this empirical question: does a flame heat every part of itself? The flame heats the metal burner (though not every part of the metal burner as I have just argued); but does the flame heat every part of itself? For example, does it heat the oxygen it consumes? How could it heat it if it consumes it?

[StMichael]

I think the potential or virtual infinite of knowledge acts is more what Aquinas intends to indicate in the second premise. So, he says in the sixth paragraph of 49 that the intellect can understand universals (infinites), which indicates it cannot of the same nature as a body (as every material body is finite). This is what he expands on when he points out that the intellect can reflect upon itself. The intellect can both terminate its acts within its own knowledge acts (I know that I know "ad infinitum," which Aquinas explicitly acknowledges in paragraph 9), as well as know itself as a whole (I understand that I have an intellect, and that it has such-and-such a nature). Both are "infinite" acts in obtaining to universals.

In terms of your own proof, I think premise 5 might be too weak (susceptible to a god-of-the-gaps criticism). It seems you would need some sub-proof that shows that material reality cannot exercise this sort of activity in order to demonstrate that it is truly of a different nature from matter. Aquinas attempts to provide this with the discussion of the finite/material and infinite/immaterial distinction.

[David Brightly]

Hi Bill,

I agree it's very hard to find an example of a body that acts on the whole of itself in the required way. I think this may be because bodies are spatially finite. But though acts of the intellect may be hard to locate spatially, surely they have bounded extent in time, and it's equally hard (if not harder!) to see how the beginning of an intellectual act can be aware of the whole of itself, including its as yet to come end. So I'm not convinced that acts of the intellect have the required reflexive property either.