Are the Souls of Brutes Subsistent?

Aquinas says No but his argument is inconclusive.

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Reader Zacary writes,

I am just a layman who likes studying Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, and recently I haven’t been studying the issue of animals in the afterlife. I stumbled across your post from many, many years ago (all the way back in 2009!) that was about the unity of consciousness argument and the subsistence of animal souls. 

Thank you for writing, Zacary.  That post from 2009 left a lot to be desired, so I rewrote it almost completely and published the result over at Substack. I have no time now to respond  to the rest of what you wrote, but if you read the Substack entry and have questions or objections I will try to answer them here.

Comments

[Vito B. Caiati]

Bill,

Thank you for further developing your 2009 post, which, as you know, I have long appreciated. Over the years, I have endlessly encountered people who uncritically accept what Aquinas, or worse, Descartes believed about the mental life of animals, and it is inspirational to read what you have to say about this matter.

Your argument makes perfect sense to me, someone who has lived in intimate contact with one mammal species, Felis catus, for more than forty years. While I could comment on various aspects of the mental life of my feline companions (13 in all), I would like to raise a question concerning just one, memory. Cats, like other mammals, possess excellent short- and long-term memories. Does not this fact, that is, the persistence in the feline mind of various disparate data that have been previously assembled by “some synthesizing ‘principle’” raise a further objection to Aquinas argument, in addition to that of the unity of consciousness? Maybe I am wrong, but are not the memories of the cat, the residual traces of this earlier synthesis, evidence of sophisticated mental powers that point to the per se operation of the sensitive soul?

Vito

[BV]

Vito,

As a cat man myself, I would enjoy reading your observations on feline psychology.

I argued that sensation in the present cannot be accounted for in material terms, and that this is true for man and cat (and brutes generally). But as you point out, cats remember. I won't argue it out now, but memory in man and brutes also cannot be explained in material terms and is evidence of an enduring self in animals.

There is also an ancestral/collective/ instinctual memory in cats that I don't understand. You will have noticed that kittens and adult cats who have never been outside never dive right into the food presented to them, no matter how appealing it is to them. They circle around and look for predators and threats before they put their heads down into their food. It is some kind of species-memory as opposed to individual memory.

Memory loss points to the materiality of mind while memory's exercise points to its immateriality. Mind is mysterious, but memorial mind is even more so, situated as it is at the crossroads of intentionality and time.

One advantage of cats is that they have no need of the purgation of memory recommended to us by the manuals of mystical theology, any more than they have need of custodia cordis or custodia oculorum.

Still and all, an abyss yawns between man and animal. Where are the libraries of the dolphins?

[Vito B. Caiati]

Bill,

Regarding feline psychology, of which I am sure you know as much about as me, I would only say that the perceptive observations on time in the lives humans as compared to wolfs and dogs made by the philosopher Mark Rowlands in his captivating book The Philosopher and the Wolf, in which he recounts the years that he spent living with a wolf, Brenin. While the argument, drawing on Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return, is more complex than the following quotation suggests, I think that what Rowlands says here about us, wolves, and dogs applies equally to our feline companions. Speaking of his daily routine with his animals his time in southern France, he writes:

“One thing I leaned from the last years of Brenin’s life is that wolves, and dogs for that matter, pass Nietzsche’s existential test in a way that humans rarely do. A human would have said, ‘Not the same old walk again today. Couldn’t we go somewhere different for a change? I’m sick of the beach. Ad don’t get me another pain au chocolate…. And so on and so forth. Alternately fascinated and repelled by times’ arrow, our repulsion causes us to seek happiness in what is new and different, in any deviation from time’s arrow. But our fascination with the arrow means that any deviation from the arrow’s line simply creates a new line, and our happiness now requires that we deviate from this line too. The human search for happiness is, accordingly, regressive and futile. And at the end of every line is only nevermore to see the smile of the one you love, or the twinkling in their eyes. Our conception of our lives and the meaning of those loves is organized around a vision of loss. No wonder times arrow horrifies as well as fascinates us. No wonder we try to find out happiness in the new and unusual—in any deviation, no matter how small, from the arrow’s path. Our rebellion may be nothing more than a futile spasm, but it its certainly understandable. Our understanding of time is our damnation. Wittgenstein was wrong, subtly but decisively. Death is not the limit of my life, Always, I have carried my death with me.

The time of wolves [and cats], I suspect, is a circle, not a line. Each moment of their lives is complete in itself. And happiness for them, is found in the eternal return of the same. If time is a circle, there is no nevermore. And, accordingly, one’s existence is not organized around the vision of a life as a process of loss…. Where there is no sense of nevermore, this no sense of loss. For a wolf or dog [or cat], death really is the limit of life. And for this reason death has no dominion over them. This, I would like to think, is that it is to be a wolf.”

In considering Rowland’s observations, I can’t help but feel that all the many gifts that we have gained as a species, intellectually and emotionally (none of which I deny) come with a very high price, one that the “other nations” (Henry Beston) with which we share the planet are exempt. Sometimes, when I see my cats moving about the house in peace, living in the moment, free from the arrow of time, I imagine them as Buddhist sages, freed from all regret about the past and anxiety and hope about the future.

Vito

[Vito B. Caiati]

Bill,

Sorry: incomplete sentence: "...living with a wolf, Brenin, are worthy of consideration"