Despite its Thomism, this is not a history of philosophy. It engages deeply with recent work in
philosophy…
This is an outstanding contribution to the literature that will make a Thomistically inspired view on certain central anthropological questions clearer and possibly more attractive to many readers. Feser’s lively prose and careful argumentation are a pleasure to read, and his ideas are important. I highly commend and recommend the book.
Thomism and animalism
Toner raises
some important lines of criticism as well.
He introduces one of them as follows:
This is a Thomistic work, and the position defended here
falls within the family of contemporary views known as animalism. But unlike some animalists, Feser is not a
materialist: he defends the reality of the soul as an immortal, non-material,
entity…
[S]ince Feser is defending a form of animalism, it is
surprising that the most prominent living animalist, Eric Olson, does not make
an appearance.
He goes on
to cite Olson’s essay “An Argument for Animalism,” from the anthology Personal Identity, edited by Raymond
Martin and John Barresi.
Before I
turn to Toner’s objection, let me pause to comment on these remarks. Toner’s suggestion is interesting, but as it
happens, I have myself long rejected the idea that the Thomistic position
amounts to a version of animalism. And
the reason has to do precisely with the differences he cites between my views
and those of writers like Olson. In the
essay in question, Olson tells us that “animalism implies materialism (animals
are material things)” (p. 319). And in
response to the question whether we are more than animals, Olson says:
If someone complains that the committee is more than just the
chairman, she means that it is not the chairman: it has other members too. If we are more than just animals in something
like this sense, then we are not animals.
We have parts that are not parts of any animal: immaterial souls,
perhaps. (p. 321)
Since Olson
is, as Toner says, the most prominent animalist, I’ve always taken his views to
be paradigmatic of animalism. But Olson
takes animalism to imply materialism and to rule out our having immaterial
souls. Since, as Toner notes, I along
with other Thomists reject materialism and affirm the reality of immaterial
souls, the natural conclusion to draw has long seemed to me to be that the
Thomist view is not in the same family as Olson’s.
Of course,
it’s true that Aristotelians and Thomists take human beings to be rational animals, which is no doubt why Toner thinks
of the Thomist position as a kind of animalism.
But the point is that what Olson
means by “animalism” seems distant enough from the Aristotelian-Thomistic
position to make it potentially misleading to see them as part of the same
family of views.
In fact, the
distance between animalism and the Aristotelian-Thomistic position is even more
radical than what has so far been said indicates. I commented on Olson in my 2005 Social Philosophy and Policy essay “Personal
Identity and Self-Ownership,” where I wrote:
[T]he hylemorphic conception of human nature associated with
the Aristotelian and (especially) Thomistic traditions… holds that the
relationship between the body and the soul – the seat of rationality and
personality – is an instance of the relationship between matter and form
generally. The soul, that is to say, is
the substantial form of the body – that which makes it the distinct kind of
thing it is. The human person, on this conception, is thus a
composite of form and matter, soul and body: neither the soul alone nor the
body alone counts as a complete person, any more than a chunk of matter counts
as a desk apart from its having the form of a desk, or than the form of a desk
counts as a desk without having matter to instantiate it…
This distinguishes hylemorphism from a view that might appear
similar to it, namely, the variation on the bodily-continuity theory that takes
a human being to be identical to a kind of animal. See, e.g., Eric T. Olson, The Human Animal: Personal Identity without
Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For that view seems to entail that our
psychological traits are not essential to us: were your cerebrum to be removed
and put into another body, the rest of your body would, if it survived, still
be the same animal (now just missing an organ) and thus the same human
being. It, and it alone, would be you – even though some other body (the
one that received your cerebrum) would now have (what used to be) your
thoughts, memories, etc. On the hylemorphic
view, though, you are essentially an embodied
soul: both the bodily and psychological (and thus distinctly personal)
aspects are essential… [T]he “animal” view seems to externalize one’s distinctly
psychological traits… (p. 120)
The cerebrum
transfer scenario is one Olson discusses both in his book and in the article cited
above. When he says that human beings
are animals of a certain kind, he takes this thesis to have the bizarre
implication just described. Accordingly,
he says, “the identity conditions of animals… have nothing to do with psychological
facts. Psychology [is] irrelevant to our
identity over time” (“An Argument for Animalism,” p. 325).
This seems
to entail that our rationality is not essential to the kind of thing we
are. Animality alone is essential. Obviously, this is worlds away from the
Thomist position. Indeed, if anything,
the opposite extreme view (Cartesianism) is closer to the Thomist position,
even though it too is erroneous. After
all, according to the Thomist view, our souls survive the deaths of our bodies
and retain the use of our rational powers despite our animal powers being no
longer operative. Cartesianism at least gets
that much right, even if it wrongly takes the soul to be a complete substance
in its own right and wrongly judges our animal powers to reside in a second,
distinct substance. Cartesianism makes
the mistake of reducing us to our rationality, but animalism appears to make
the opposite extreme mistake of reducing us to our animality. In reality, we are both rational and animal.
So, the
Aristotelian-Thomistic position seems to me to be at odds with animalism rather than being a version of animalism. It is
no more a version of animalism than it is a version of Cartesianism, but is instead
a third position distinct from both. But
I think Toner is right that it would have been better for me to say at least
something about it in the book, so as to make this explicit.
Thomism and survivalism
Let’s turn
now to Toner’s first objection, which it seems he thinks is a natural one to
raise given that (as he supposes) the Aristotelian-Thomistic view is a
variation on animalism. He begins as
follows:
Feser's “surivivalism”… holds that the human substance that I
am will survive my death. But surely my
death involves the corruption of something. What is this something? Put this another way. Prior to my death, there is a composite of
form and matter present. After my death,
there is not. What is that composite of
form and matter? And what is its relationship
to me?
What I’d say
is that what corrupts at your death is your body, and that for that reason,
while the human substance that you are survives, it does so only
incompletely. In other words, the part
of you that is bodily corrupts, but you
don’t entirely corrupt, because you’re not entirely bodily. You’re also partly incorporeal, insofar as
you have an intellect. As to the form in
question – your soul, the substantial form of the human being that is you –
that is the form of something bodily, but not the form of something entirely bodily, because, again, you are
not entirely bodily. Hence the form
carries on after death as the form of an incomplete substance, namely you reduced
to your incorporeal part, with the matter that the form once informed having
dropped away.
Toner continues:
Olson's work brings out many worries for views like Feser's
that it would have been good to see addressed. For example, does that something that corrupts
at my death have any capacity for thinking? If so, does Feser's view face the worries raised
by the “thinking animals argument”? Of course I do not here suggest that Feser
can't handle such problems. I merely
note that I think he needs to handle them. And his brief way of addressing worries like
this seems to be to compare death with something like a whole-body amputation. But what's “amputated” in death appears to be
the whole composite of matter and substantial form. Can we really compare this to the amputation
of a limb?
Toner asks
whether the something that corrupts at death has any capacity for
thinking. The answer is no, because what
corrupts at death is the part of you that is bodily, and that is not the part
of you that grounds thinking. What
grounds thinking is the incorporeal part of you, which carries on after
death. That you lose the body at death
no more entails that you lose the part of you that grounds the capacity for
thinking any more than the loss of a finger or a leg would entail this. That is why I compare the loss of the body to
an amputation.
Toner
objects that “what's ‘amputated’ in death appears to be the whole composite of
matter and substantial form,” but that’s not quite right. The substantial form carries on after death
and it carries on as the form of a substance, indeed of the same substance of
which it was the form before death, namely you.
But that substance is now, after death, an incomplete substance, because you now have lost the exercise of all
of your bodily capacities and been reduced to just your (incorporeal)
intellect.
Toner
suggests that Olson’s “thinking animals argument” poses a challenge to my
position, but it does not. As Olson sets
out the argument in “An Argument for Animalism,” it basically goes like this:
There is a human animal sitting in your chair; that animal is thinking; you are
the thinking thing sitting in your chair; therefore, you are that animal.
To the
uninitiated, this may seem like a trivial argument, but it is not. Olson is appealing to mundane facts, but his
point is to use them against theories of personal identity that focus on
psychological attributes to the point of divorcing us entirely from our animal
nature. For example, Locke’s theory does
this when it holds that two persons could switch bodies (as in Locke’s prince
and cobbler example). Views that
identify the mind with software do the same thing when they hold that you could
be uploaded onto a computer and leave human physiology behind altogether. Olson is arguing that, on the contrary, you
are not merely a kind of software, or a set of memories and psychological
traits, that happen contingently to be associated
with that animal sitting in your chair.
Rather, you are that animal
sitting in your chair.
All well and
good. But how is this supposed to be a
problem for my view? I would agree with
Olson that you are the animal sitting in your chair. What we would disagree about is this. Olson would say that that animal is entirely
bodily, and I would say that it is not.
It is partly incorporeal, and it is by virtue of being partly
incorporeal that it is the sort of animal that is able to think. It is also by virtue of being partly incorporeal
that it can, unlike other animals, carry on after its body dies as an
incomplete substance.
But though
Olson would disagree with all that, there is nothing in his “thinking animal
argument” itself that shows that it
is wrong. That argument is simply meant
to support the conclusion that we are animals.
And I agree with Olson that we are animals. What is in dispute between us is whether we
are entirely corporeal animals or partially corporeal animals. Olson’s argument says nothing about that one
way or the other.
Substantial corruption?
Raising
another objection, Toner says that “it would also help if Feser would deal
directly with what Christopher Tomaszewski calls the Argument From Substantial Corruption…
which I suggest is really the principal philosophical reason to endorse corruptionism.” The argument in question is defended by Tomaszewski
in his Proceedings of the American
Catholic Philosophical Association article “Thomas
Aquinas on Death as Substantial Corruption,” and as Tomaszewski
notes, it is an argument earlier defended by Toner himself. As Tomaszewski presents the argument (on p.
222), it reads as follows:
1. The death
of the human person is either a substantial corruption or an accidental
corruption. (Premise)
2. If death
is a substantial corruption, then the person is corrupted at death. (Premise)
3. If death
is an accidental corruption, then either the person is an accidental unity of
substantial body and substantial soul, or the body is an accident of the
substantial soul, or the soul is an accident of the substantial body. (Premise)
4. The
person is not an accidental unity of substantial body and substantial soul.
(Premise)
5. If the
body is an accident of the substantial soul, then the human person is his soul.
(Premise)
6. The human
person is not his soul. (Premise)
7. If the
soul is an accident of the substantial body, then the soul is corrupted at
death. (Premise)
8. The soul
is not corrupted at death. (Premise)
9.
Therefore, death is a substantial corruption. (1 and 3-8)
10. If the
person is corrupted, the person ceases to exist. (Premise)
11.
Therefore, the person ceases to exist at death. (2, 9, and 10)
Why should
one accept the premises of this argument?
The reason, Tomaszewski says, is that they are either explicitly held by
Aquinas or implicit in Aquinas’s more general metaphysical commitments. Hence a Thomist should accept them, and thus
accept the corruptionist conclusion that follows from them.
The first
thing to say is that, of course, survivalists too appeal to what Aquinas
explicitly says and what is implicit in his more general metaphysical
commitments, and draw a different conclusion.
What this indicates – and what is in fact the case, in my view – is that
there is some tension between the various things Aquinas said that are relevant
to this issue. That should not be
surprising. Aquinas does not explicitly
address the controversy between corruptionism and survivalism, which is a
recent development. He had different
targets in view. On the one hand, he
wanted to argue for the immortality of the individual human soul by appealing the
individuality and incorporeality of the human intellect. On the other hand, he wanted to argue against
the Platonist view that the body is entirely extrinsic to the person, by
appealing to the Aristotelian thesis that the soul is the form of the
body.
When carrying
out the first task, Aquinas sometimes says things that make him sound like a
survivalist, and when carrying out the second he sometimes says things that
make him sound like a corruptionist. But
again, he wasn’t explicitly addressing that controversy, and it is a mistake
flatly to assert either that he was a survivalist or a corruptionist. If we’re going to force his position into one
of those categories, we’re probably going to have to at least seriously qualify
some of the things he explicitly says.
Let’s
concede premises 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10 of Tomaszewski’s argument. As to the other premises, it seems to me that
there are two ways the survivalist could reject at least one of them in order
to block the conclusion. The first is to
reject premise 3 as a false choice. For
there is a fourth alternative, which is to say that the substance in question
is not the soul or the body but the person,
of which soul or body are accidents, one of which (the body) is corrupted at
death.
Tomaszewski
briefly considers this objection and rejects it on the grounds that for
Aquinas, soul and body are substantial constituents of the human person rather
than accidents, and are also essential parts rather than accidental, integral
parts of the person (p. 223). But the
survivalist can respond as follows.
Bodily organs like eyes and ears, heart and lungs, hands and feet are
integral parts of the human person. And
obviously a person can lose one or more of those and still survive. But death essentially involves losing all of
them at once. The person nevertheless
survives, because the substance that the person is is not exhausted by these
bodily organs. He also has an intellect,
which is incorporeal and carries on after death. Since (the survivalist could argue) this
follows from Aquinas’s overall account of human nature, either Aquinas should
be interpreted as holding this view, or anything he says that appears to
conflict with it should be qualified or rejected.
Alternatively,
the survivalist could concede premise 3, taking the option of holding that the
body is an accident of the substantial soul and embracing the implication that
the human person is, therefore, his
soul. To block the conclusion of the
argument now, the survivalist would reject premise 6, or rather argue that it
needs to be qualified in a way that prevents it from doing the work that the
corruptionist needs it to do. True, as
Tomaszewski notes, Aquinas says “my soul is not I” (Super I epistolam beati Pauli ad Corinthios lectura, c. 15, l. 2). But immediately before that remark, he says
that “the soul… is not an entire man”
(emphasis added). So, Aquinas can be
read as saying, not that the person can in no
sense be identified with his soul, but only that he is not entirely reducible to his soul. Or, if this is not what Aquinas thought, it
is (so the survivalist could argue) what he should have thought given his other
commitments.
By no means
is this an ad hoc move to get around
the corruptionist conclusion. On the
contrary, Aquinas says many things that imply it. For example, he says that after death, the
soul still understands, prays, and so on.
But only persons can do things like understand and pray. So the soul after death must in some sense be
a person. And obviously, it cannot be
some person different from the person whose soul it is. Your soul is, after all, rewarded or punished
for what you have done, in which case
it must in some sense be you.
In my view,
corruptionists put excessive emphasis on the second, Aristotelian component of
Aquinas’s overall project, which appeals to the idea that the soul is the form
of the body. They are so fixated on this
that they seem to think it obvious that the person must go out of existence at
death. They do not sufficiently appreciate
the implications of the first component of Aquinas’s project, which grounds
immortality in the incorporeality of the intellect. For this leads Aquinas explicitly to judge
that the soul is very different from the forms of other material things, and
indeed is a kind of substance in its own right.
Hence, in Disputed Questions on the Soul, Aquinas
says that “the soul is itself an intellective substance” (Article XV). In the Summa
Contra Gentiles, he characterizes it as an “intellectual substance” even
though it is also the form of the body (Book II, Chapter 68). Now, a person just is an intellectual substance,
according to the Boethian definition of “person” that Aquinas accepts. It follows that, in some sense, the soul must be a person – in which case, since the soul
survives death, the person survives death.
Aquinas also
emphasizes that because it has an incorporeal operation, then although it is
the form of the body, “the intellective soul… which transcends the condition of
corporeal matter, must not be wholly
encompassed by or imbedded in matter, as material forms are” (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II, Chapter
68, emphasis added). Again, he says that
“from the fact that the intellectual substance is in matter it does not follow
that it is a material form, because the
soul is not present in matter in the sense of being embedded in it or wholly
enveloped by it” (Summa Contra
Gentiles, Book II, Chapter 69, emphasis added).
Now, if the
soul is a kind of intellectual substance and also, despite giving form to the
body, is not “wholly encompassed by
or imbedded in matter” nor “wholly
enveloped by it,” then it seems to follow that the corruption of the body is not the corruption of the substance, for the form is the form
of a substance that is not entirely bodily.
And since an intellectual substance is a person, it follows that the
corruption of the body does not entail the corruption of the person.
Again, this
will require qualifying Aquinas’s statement that “my soul is not I.” It will also require qualifying other
passages. Tomaszewski cites another
passage from Disputed Questions on the
Soul, where Aquinas says:
Furthermore, if the soul were in the body as a pilot in a
ship, it would follow that the union of the soul and body would be an
accidental one. Then death, which brings
about their separation, would not be a substantial corruption; which is clearly
false. (Article 1)
What Aquinas
is rebutting here is not survivalism, though – again, the dispute between
survivalism and corruptionism is a recent one – but Platonism. He is rejecting the Platonic view that soul
and body are two substances each complete on its own and only accidentally
related to one another, and endorsing instead the thesis that soul and body
together comprise a single substance, complete only when both are present. And of course, the survivalist does not deny
that. It is to emphasize that it is only
when soul and body are together that they make up a complete substance that
Aquinas characterizes death as “a substantial corruption.” But according to the survivalist, what he
means, or should mean, is not that it is a complete
corruption of the substance. That can’t
be the case, given the other things we’ve seen him say.
Indeed, in
the very same Article from Disputed Questions
that Tomaszewski quotes from, Aquinas also says that “the intellective soul
must have a complete act of existing in itself, depending in no way on the body.” Again, he there says:
[T]he soul is a particular thing and… it can subsist of
itself, not as a thing having a complete
species of its own, but as completing the human species by being the form of
the body…
For, inasmuch as the human soul has an operation transcending
the material order, its act of existing transcends the body and does not depend
on the body…. [though] evidently its species can be complete only when it is united to a body… [Hence] obviously the
soul itself is established on the
boundary line dividing corporeal from separate substances…
[W]hile the soul can subsist of itself, it does not have a complete species, for the soul needs the
body to complete its species…
[T]he human soul is not
a form totally embraced by matter…
The thing that is properly corrupted is… the composite. Moreover, the body’s act of existing is said
to be corruptible inasmuch as the body by corrupting is deprived of the act of
existing which it possessed in common with the soul; which act of existing remains in the subsisting soul…
[T]he body shares in the soul’s act of existing, but not as
perfectly as the soul does. (Emphasis added throughout)
Now, we
noted already that elsewhere in the Disputed
Questions on the Soul, Aquinas characterizes the soul as an “intellective
substance.” And in the passage just
quoted, he indicates that it is, specifically, a substance “on the boundary
line dividing corporeal from separate substances.” In particular, whereas corporeal substances
are entirely embraced by matter, the human soul is “not… totally embraced by matter.”
For unlike corporeal substances, the human soul has an operation that
does not depend on matter, and for this reason it “can subsist of itself” and “its
act of existing transcends the body and does not depend on the body.” At the same time, it also differs from separate
substances insofar as, unlike them, it is not “complete” in the absence of the
body. This is what puts it on the
boundary line. It is a substance that is
partly corporeal and partly incorporeal, whereas the other two kinds are either
all corporeal or all incorporeal. What
is strictly corrupted at death, though, is “the composite” of soul and
body. But that does not entail that the substance is entirely corrupted. Indeed, the very same act of existing that
the composite had “remains in the subsisting soul,” which always had it more “perfectly”
than the body in the first place. And
that act of existing is a substance’s
act of existing. Hence, the “intellective
substance” carries on after death rather than being corrupted, albeit not in a “complete”
way since the body is needed for its completeness. And since an intellective substance is a
person, the person carries on after
death rather than being corrupted.
That, in any
event, is a survivalist reading of these texts.
And the corruptionist can hardly complain if this reading qualifies
certain things that Aquinas says. For
corruptionists have to make qualifications of their own in order to make
Aquinas’s texts fit their position. For
example, they will have to qualify Aquinas’s remarks to the effect that the
soul is itself an “intellectual substance” or “intellective substance,” or explain
how it could be such a substance without in any sense being a person.
Substantial forms without substances?
Toner raises
one last objection:
Feser asks “How could a form exist apart from the substance
of which it is the form?”… He views this as a key question, since on the
corruptionist account, our substantial forms exist after our deaths without informing anything… Feser
agrees with some critics of Thomism that the continued existence of a substantial
form after the destruction of the substance it informed is incoherent. But he shouldn't agree with these critics. When Feser cites Denys Turner and William
Hasker making this objection, he points out that, for example, Turner suggests that
the human soul is like the Cheshire cat's smile, which couldn't survive the
death of the cat. But the objection treats
the human soul as a mere accidental form. Once it is so treated, of course it seems
mysterious to think it could survive. But
neither Feser nor his corruptionist opponents think of the human soul this way,
and Feser himself has explained in detail that the human soul has its own operation
(intellection) and so isn't dependent on the body for its existence. Indeed, all substantial forms other than the human
soul are educed from the potency of the matter. But the human soul is specially created by
God. It has an origin and an operation
wholly distinct from the origins and operations of any other substantial form. Suggesting, then, that, like all other
substantial forms, its continued existence after the corruption of its
substance is unacceptably mysterious seems unmotivated. The objection that Feser thinks his
survivalism answers is no objection at all.
But what I
find puzzling is that Toner is in no way puzzled. First, it is true that the example Turner
cites (the Cheshire cat’s grin) happens to be an accidental form, but that is
not essential to the point he was making.
We can state his point instead by trying to conceive of a situation
where the substance of the Cheshire
cat is entirely destroyed and yet the cat’s substantial form (not just the form of cat in the abstract, but that cat’s individual substantial form) somehow nevertheless persists. That is, of course, if anything even more absurd than the cat’s grin
persisting, not less. And that’s the
problem with the corruptionist position.
To say that the human soul persists after death but that the substance
of which it is the form in no way persists sounds like saying that the substantial
form of a cat could persist, without the substance that was the cat in any way
persisting.
In no way
does it help for Toner to suggest that the solution to the problem lies in the
fact that “the human soul has its own operation (intellection)… [which] isn't
dependent on the body for its existence.”
For while intellection doesn’t depend on the body, it doesn’t follow that it or any other operation could fail
to depend on a substance. In particular, it hardly follows that it
doesn’t depend on the particular sort of substance that we call a person.
Indeed, angels possess intellects despite not having bodies, but they
are substances, and in particular they are persons. Yet the corruptionist seems to be saying that
intellection occurs despite there being no person nor even any substance around
to carry out this operation!
Or, if the
corruptionist admits that there must be such a substance, but that it is an incomplete one, then he owes us an
explanation of how this differs from the survivalist view – which is precisely
that the person carries on as an incomplete substance. Nor will it help to say that an incomplete substance
carries out this operation, but that this substance is not a person. For how could a substance carry out
intellection without being a person?
True, it is an incomplete
substance, but all this entails (the survivalist will retort) is that it is an incomplete person, not that it is a non-person.
Nor does it
help for Toner to suggest that the mystery is solved by noting that God
specially creates the human soul. For
even God cannot specially create something the very concept of which is
incoherent (round squares, for example).
So, if the notion of a substantial form existing without there being any
substance for it to be the form of is an incoherent notion, then even God could
not create such a thing.
Nor would it
help for the corruptionist to suggest that such a thing is not naturally
possible, but that God creates it by way of a miracle. For one thing, even miracles cannot involve
something the concept of which is logically incoherent. For another thing, even if the corruptionist
scenario were not incoherent, if it required a miracle then it could not claim
to be an accurate presentation of Aquinas’s
view of the soul. For Aquinas claims to
be telling us what the soul is like by
nature, not what it is like as a result of special divine supernatural action.
So, it seems to me that Toner’s objections to survivalism can all be met. But I appreciate the serious engagement with my book that these important objections represent, and I appreciate his very kind words about the book.
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