Toner on Immortal Souls

In the journal Ratio, philosopher Patrick Toner kindly reviews my book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature.  From the review:

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.