Feser Defends Hylomorphic Dualism Against My Criticism

I want to thank Edward Feser for responding to my recent post, A Problem for the Hylomorphic Dualist.  And while you are at Ed's site, please read his outstanding entry, So you think you understand the cosmological argument?, an entry with which I agree entirely.

Ed writes,

Naturally, since I am a hylemorphic dualist, I completely disagree with Bill here. Let’s start with the last charge -- that hylemorphic dualism “make[s] an exception in the case of the human soul [that] is wholly unmotivated and ad hoc and inconsistent with hylomorphic ontology.” That the view is not “unmotivated and ad hoc” is easily shown. Bill himself would surely acknowledge that there are serious philosophical arguments for hylemorphism, even if he doesn’t accept that view himself. He would also acknowledge that there are serious philosophical arguments for dualism, a view he is sympathetic with. But then he should also acknowledge that someone could find both sorts of arguments convincing. And in that case he should acknowledge that someone could have good philosophical reasons for thinking that there must be some way to combine hylemorphism and dualism.

I agree that there are serious arguments for hylomorphism, and I especially agree that there are strong arguments for dualism.  And I agree that someone who finds both hylomorphism and dualism persuasive will have a motivation to try to combine them by showing how the special-metaphysical thesis of dualism can be accommodated within the general-metaphysical scheme of hylomorphism. 

But if one has good arguments for position A and good arguments for position B, it doesn't follow that one has good arguments for the combined position A + B.  For there may be a good reason why the two positions cannot be combined.  And so it is in the present case.  The case for hylomorphism and the case for dualism do not add up to a case for  hylomorphic dualism.  So while I agree with Ed that one who has good reason to be a hylomorphist and good reason to be a dualist will be powerfully motivated to combine the two positions, I do not agree that the reasons for hylomorphism and dualism, respectively, add up to reasons for the hylomorphic dualism.  A psychological motivation is not the same as a justificatory reason. 

Ed continues:

Nor, contrary to what Bill implies, is Aquinas somehow departing radically from Aristotle. For Aristotle too was committed both to hylemorphism and to the view that the intellect is immaterial -- indeed, to the view that the active intellect is immortal. To be sure, that does not by itself show that Aristotle’s views are identical to or entail Aquinas’s; the Averroists took Aristotle’s position in a very different direction, and contemporary commentators often find it simply puzzling. But the reason they do -- namely, that it seems odd to say both that the soul is the form of the body and that one of its capacities is somehow separable from the body -- is similar to the reason Bill finds Aquinas’s position puzzling. Needless to say, Aristotle had no Christian theological ax to grind; he was simply following the philosophical arguments where they led. There is no reason to accuse Aquinas of doing anything different, and it is hardly unreasonable to suggest that the way to harmonize the various aspects of Aristotle’s position is the way Aquinas does. That does not mean that one might not still question whether Aquinas’s position is ultimately coherent (as Bill does), or criticize it on other grounds. But the charge that it is “wholly unmotivated and ad hoc” -- a piece of Christian apologetics with no independent philosophical rationale -- is, I think, completely unwarranted. 

Clearly, Aristotle had no Christian axe to grind.  And so if the active intellect (nous poietikos) mentioned in De Anima III, v (430a) is a subsistent element of the human soul, capable of existence independent of matter, then Aquinas' position on the human soul would have been anticipated by Aristotle, and what I said, or rather suspected, about Aquinas implanting Christian  notions in the foreign soil of Aristotelianism would be insupportable.  But the interpretation of De Anima III, v is a vexed and vexing matter as the material in the hyperlink Ed provided makes clear.  If, as some commentators maintain, Aristotle is discussing the divine mind and not the human mind, then it cannot be maintained that Aristotle was anticipating Aquinas.

The important question, of course, is whether the human soul, or any part theoreof, can be coherently conceived as a subsistent form, whether this is maintained by Aristotle or Aquinas or both.  Ed now addresses my puzzle head on:

The soul is, for Aquinas, the form of the body. So how could it possibly exist apart from the body? Bill asks why things should be any different with human beings than they are with Fido. But Aquinas is quite clear about the answer to that question: The difference is that the human soul carries out immaterial operations (i.e. intellectual ones) while a dog’s soul does not. And if it operates apart from matter and agere sequitur esse, then it must subsist apart from matter.

I grant that the human soul, unlike the canine, carries out immaterial operations.  The argument is this:

a.  The human soul engages in immaterial operations
b.  Agere sequitur esse: whatever operates I-ly must be (exist) I-ly.
Therefore
c.  The human soul, qua executing immaterial operations, exists immaterially.

But how is this relevant to the issue I am raising?  Let's assume that the above argument is sound.  What it shows is that the human soul enjoys an immaterial mode of being.  But it does not show that a form of an animal body enjoys an immaterial mode of being.  It is one thing to establish that the human soul, or an element thereof, exists immaterially; quite another to show that this immaterial element is a form.  I hesitate to say that Ed is conflating these two questions.  What he might be doing is begging the question against me: he may be just assuming what I am questioning, namely, that the human soul is a form, and then taking an argument for the immateriality of the soul to be an argument for the immaterial existence of a form of the human body.  Quoting further from Feser:

Necessarily, a form is a form of that of which it is the form. But a subsistent form is possibly such as to exist apart from that of which it is the form. These propositions cannot both be true.

That they can both be true can be seen when we keep in mind how Aristotelians understand concepts like necessity, possibility, essence, and the like. Suppose we say that it follows from the nature or essence of a dog that it has four legs. Does that mean every single dog necessarily has four legs? No, because a given dog might have lost a leg in an accident, or failed to develop all four legs due to some genetic defect, or (if only recently conceived and still in the womb) may simply not yet have developed all four legs. What it does mean is rather that a mature dog in its normal state will necessarily have four legs. As Michael Thompson and Philippa Foot have emphasized, “Aristotelian categoricals” of the form S’s are F convey a norm and are not accurately represented as either existential or universal statements of the sort familiar to modern logicians. “Dogs have four legs” is not saying “There is at least one dog, and it has four legs” and neither is it saying “For everything that is a dog, it is four legged.” It is saying that the typical dog, the normal (mature) dog, has four legs.

I of course agree with the bit about the dog and his nature.  But I question its relevance to my point.  I grant that from the fact that it is the nature of a dog to have four legs it does not follow that every dog has four legs.  In parallel with this, Ed seems to be suggesting that while it is the nature of a form to be a form of something, it does not follow that every form is a form of something. I deny the parallel.  The claims are on different levels.  The 'canine' claim is about a particular nature (essence), dog-nature.  My claim is about the principles (in the scholastic sense) deployed by hylomorphic ontologists  in their ontological assays.  A form is a 'principle' not capable of independent existence in the manner of a primary substance.

How form and matter operate in the analysis of material substances becomes clearer if we examine a criticism the distinguished Aristotelian Henry Veatch lodges against Gustav Bergmann. (See here for the rest of the post from which the following blue section is excerpted and for bibliographical data.)

Veatch Contra Bergmann

Veatch now lodges a reasonable complaint against Bergmann. How could "matter or bare particulars [be] among the ultimates that one arrives at in a process of analysis. . ."? "For how could anything which in itself is wholly indeterminate and characterless ever qualify as a 'thing' or 'existent' at all?" (81) On Bergmann's assay, an ordinary particular has more basic entities as its ontological constituents. But if one of these constituents is an intrinsically indeterminate and intrinsically characterless entity, how could said entity exist at all, let alone be a building block out of which an ordinary particular is constructed?

For Veatch, form and matter are not ontological atoms in the way bare particulars and simple universals are ontological atoms for Bergmann. "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are principles of being." (80) 'Principle' is one of those words Scholastics like to use. Principles in this usage are not propositions. They are ontological factors invoked in the analysis of primary substances, but they are not themselves primary substances. They cannot exist on their own. Let me try to make Veatch's criticism as clear as I can.

An ordinary particular is a this-such. The thisness in a this-such is the determinable element while the suchness is the determination or set of determinations. Veatch's point against Bergmann is not that ordinary particulars are not composites, this-suches, or that the thisness in a this- such is not indeterminate yet determinable; his point is that the determinable element cannot be an ontological atom, an entity more basic than the composite into which it enters as ontological building block. The determinable element cannot be a basic existent; it must be a principle of a basic existent, where the basic existent is the this-such. This implies, contra Bergmann, that what is ontologically primary is the individual substance, the this-such, which entails that matter and form in an individual substance cannot exist apart from each other. They are in some sense 'abstractions' from the individual substance. The form in a material this-such is not merely tied to matter in general, in the way that Bergmannian first-order universals are tied to bare particulars in general; the form is tied to the very matter of the this-such in question. And the same goes for the matter: the designated matter (materia signata) of Socrates cannot exist apart from Socrates' substantial form.

Veatch says that Bergmann cannot have it both ways: "His bare particulars cannot at one and the same time be utterly bare and characterless in the manner of Aristotelian prime matter and yet also be 'things' and 'existents' in the manner of Aristotelian substances." (82-83)

 The point I want to underscore is that, as Veatch puts it,  "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are principles of being."  Ed continues,

Similarly, to say “Human souls are associated with bodies” is to say that the human soul in its normal state is associated with its body, just like the human hand in its normal state is associated with its body. But it doesn’t follow that it cannot exist apart from the body, any more than it follows that the hand (at least while its tissues are still alive) can exist apart from the body. And again, the reason this is possible with the human soul and not with Fido’s soul is that the human soul, unlike Fido’s soul, carries out immaterial operations even when it is associated with the body.

Here again I think Ed is failing to engage the problem I raised.  I do not question that the human soul in its normal state is associated with its body.  And I do not question that it can exist apart from its body.  What I am questioning is the conceptualization of the human soul as a form.  And so, while Ed has said many things with which I agree, he has not given me a reason to retract my criticism.  To put it another way, he has not given me a reason why I should accept argument A below over argument B:

Argument A:  The human soul can exist apart from its body; the human soul is the form of the human body; therefore, there are forms that can exist apart from the matter they inform.

Argument B:  The human soul can exist apart from its body; no form can exist apart from the matter it informs; therefore, the human soul is not the form of the human body.

I have another argument that Ed may recall from our discussions at my old Powerblogs site, namely, an argument based on the premise that a form cannot be a subject of experience, which is what a soul must be.  But that's a separate post.