tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21290862783438591862024-03-08T14:02:53.995+00:00Reading The SummaSupporting the York Aquinas Reading Group (and anyone else!) as it wends its weary way through the summa theologiae of St. Thomas AquinasGregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.comBlogger121125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-70026864061072115602017-02-25T10:29:00.003+00:002017-02-25T10:29:40.901+00:00An interesting topic came up at our group last night ....<br />
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Is 'water' simple or composite? Discussion of 'simple' <a href="http://www.saintaquinas.com/article5.html">here</a><br />
'Water' would appear to be 'simple'.<br />
<b>Obj 1 </b>If you split water into it's constituent parts, you end up with gas which is clearly not water. <br />
<b>Obj 2</b> If you try to split water, it stops being water, so must be simple.<br />
On the other hand every created thing is composite.<br />
<b>I reply </b>The composite nature of created things is apparent, whether you consider the building blocks from which they are made, or the fact that their being and essence are not the same etc. If you can point at something, you can always demonstrate composition in some sense or other. For example, I can split my pint of beer into two halves. I think what we were really asking without realising it was 'is the form of water simple'. Are forms simple?<br />
<b>Reply to the objections</b> If this is simplicity, then what does complexity look like?Steve Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06705867204487248353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-92161847210131824292016-07-31T06:52:00.001+01:002016-07-31T06:52:17.141+01:00Blogger swallowing commentsBlogger seems to be deleting comments rather than publishing them at the moment. So if you have posted a comment in the last few weeks and it has not appeared, please try again!<br />
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<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-40031784796776198362014-02-16T11:20:00.000+00:002014-02-16T11:20:05.190+00:00Question 102 – The Location of Human Beings in Paradise<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />What of the Garden of Eden itself? What was it and why does the Genesis account place the first human in paradise rather than on a normal part of the earth?<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><b>A1</b>: Was the Garden of Eden really a physical place with a geographical location that we could visit today? Perhaps the Genesis account should be interpreted purely spiritually so that we think of it purely in terms of the perfect state of existence of the first human beings. St Augustine identified these two alternatives as common opinions of his day and a third intermediate position in which a spiritual reality was founded upon a physical reality. This last position was the one that he held and St. Thomas follows him in this opinion; when interpreting something presented in scripture as an historical reality we are free to delve into the spiritual realities flowing from that account but we must not lose sight of the foundational role played by the historical account. Aquinas follows other Church Fathers in placing the Garden of Eden in the East, in the noblest places on Earth.<br /><br />There are some obvious objections that Aquinas must answer. If the Garden of Eden is a physical location then why has nobody found it? Aquinas gives the rather weak answer that it is cut off from our sight by physical obstacles; by mountains and hot regions. Again, the Garden of Eden held the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; scripture tells us that these were spiritual realities, therefore the garden must itself have been spiritual. Aquinas rejects such an interpretation, insisting that they were physical trees that held a certain spiritual power.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: Aquinas asks the seemingly strange question of whether paradise was a place fit for human habitation. The point of the question appears to come from the alternatives proposed in the objections: as men and angels were created ordered towards beatitude, they should have been made inhabitants of the place of the blessed, the <i>empyrean heaven</i> beyond the fixed stars; man being a composite of body and soul implies that he should either inhabit heaven (as soul) or an earthly place where all other animals live (as body).<br /><br />Aquinas answers by arguing that paradise was suited to man because it was a very nice place whose properties supported the infused supernatural power of the soul in maintaining the incorruptibility of the body. Humans were not placed in the empyrean heaven as they were not fitted for it as part of their nature (in the absence of the supernatural gift of grace); they were placed in the Garden of Eden as it was suited to both body and soul.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: Genesis 2:15 states that God put man into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and to guard it. This seems odd; what was there to guard it from? Similarly Genesis 3:17 suggest that man’s need to cultivate the soil was a punishment for the sin of the fall. Aquinas argues that cultivation in the Garden of Eden would have been a pleasant task free of the burden imposed after the fall; similarly, man was guarding the Garden of Eden for himself, lest he lose it by sinning.<br /><br /><b>A4</b>: Genesis 2:15 says that God created the first man and subsequently put him in paradise. It seems rather strange that the first man was not actually created in paradise in the first place; Eve was, after all. Aquinas answers that paradise was certainly fit for human habitation, and fit for human habitation in the initial state of innocence. However, the initial state of human beings was not part of their nature but a supernatural gift of God; to create the first human in the Garden of Eden would have made it seem that the initial state of innocence was part of human nature. Having created the first man with the supernatural gift of grace given to the species, rather than the individual in particular, God created woman from the first man in the Garden of Eden having established the principle of the species.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>The account of the Garden of Eden is to be interpreted as a spiritual reality founded upon an historical reality. </li>
<li>The Garden of Eden was perfectly suited to the human composite of body and rational soul in the state of innocence.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>In answer to the third & fourth objections to the first article Aquinas omits mention of the Cherubim and the flaming sword left by God to guard the Tree of Life; could he not have argued that although the Garden of Eden was a physical place, nonetheless it remains hidden to us because of these guards?</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-53632652341590877602014-02-15T15:27:00.002+00:002014-02-15T15:27:37.357+00:00Question 101 – The Condition of Progeny with Respect to Knowledge<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />We saw Aquinas argue in 1a.q99.a1 for a natural development of bodily coordination for children born in the state of innocence. Here he turns his attention to the question of their intellectual development. What would have been the state of knowledge and the ability to reason for children born before the fall?<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: In Ia.q94.a3 Aquinas argued that Adam and Eve, created in their maturity, would have had full scientific knowledge (that is, knowledge of the principles of things). Would the same have applied to children born before the fall?<br /><br />Aquinas claims that perfection in scientific knowledge was an individual accident of the first human beings, associated with their creation at maturity. The sources of revelation give us no information about what would have been the case with children born before the fall, so to answer this question we have to argue from the natures of things. In the case of human beings, it is natural for them (Ia.q84.a6) to accumulate knowledge through the sensible perception of things. There is no reason not to apply this fact to children who would have been born before the fall, so we should conclude that they would have had to grow in knowledge as we do; the only difference would have been that their rectitude would have meant that their growth in knowledge would have been unhindered by any of the difficulties that face us.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: What about the faculty of reason; would children born in the state of innocence have had the full use of their reason immediately upon their birth? Aquinas’s answer is a parallel to the answer of the first article; the use of reason depends to some extent on the sensory powers (Ia.q84.a7), so if they are not fully developed then the use of reason will remain to some extent in potentiality. Following the reasoning of Ia.q99.a1, the brain and the sensory powers are not fully developed in the new born and therefore the power of reason is not fully developed in them.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Children born in the prelapsarian Garden of Eden would have had to develop in knowledge and in the use of reason as this is part of human nature. Their graced existence would have made this development a lot easier than it is for us.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-35628664554239141422014-02-15T15:25:00.002+00:002014-02-15T15:25:39.505+00:00A Century!Woohoo! A hundred questions done. Only 402 to go...<br />
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Or is it 503?<br />
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<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-40248994445285579672014-02-15T15:21:00.004+00:002014-02-15T15:21:43.498+00:00Question 100 – The Condition of Progeny with Respect to Justice<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />Adam and Eve were created in a state of <i>original justice</i>. Would this supernatural gift of grace have been passed on to their progeny had the fall not intervened? And if such progeny did inherit this state, would they have been <i>confirmed</i> in that state to such an extent as they would necessarily achieve the beatific vision?<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: In Ia.q95.a1 Aquinas argues that human beings were originally created in a state of grace that conferred upon them a sort of rectitude rendering them upright in the sight of God; a state of <i>original justice</i>. In this article he offers more precision to this argument by considering the question of whether such a state would have been passed on to children born to humans in this state. The major argument against such a state being passed on in generation is that it would then seem to be something natural to the human being; therefore continuing after the fall.<br /><br />Aquinas observes that humans by their nature generate what is similar to themselves and that any proper accidents (that is, accidents that follow from the very nature of the species) do pass to progeny. On the other hand, children do not have to be like their parents in non-proper accidents. For example, children inherit the ability to laugh, as this follows from the nature of being a human; but Fred may sport a handsome tan when neither of his parents do. The gift of original justice, however, is a special case. It is a supernatural gift given to the species, but it does not follow on from the nature of the species itself. So in the prelapsarian state of innocence, original justice is proper (in an analogous sense) to the species and is therefore passed down to children from their parents. In reply to the second objection Aquinas points out that it is therefore not passed down, strictly speaking, by the process of generation but rather is infused by God as soon as the body of the child is ready for it.<br /><br />Having recognized the state of original justice as being a supernatural gift to the species, it immediately follows that original sin is a sin that affects the whole species, as it is associated with the removal of the supernatural gift of grace from the species. So when we say that human nature was not changed by the fall we are saying that what is natural to the species was not changed, but the supernatural gift to the species was lost.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: We saw back in 1a.q64.a2 that when an angel takes the decision, at the moment of its creation, for or against God, that decision is irrevocable; the angel is <i>confirmed </i>in its decision. Aquinas now asks about the state of justice for progeny born before the fall; would they have been confirmed in this state of justice? That is, would they of necessity have been unable to turn away from God and away from the state of justice?<br /><br />Angels differ from humans in that human beings have freedom of choice both before an act of choice and after that act. If an angel turns to or from God, that choice is immediately binding forever; if a human turns to or away from God in this life it is always open to them to change their mind and reverse the decision. However, those granted the beatific vision are confirmed in that vision; a human being cannot turn away from the ultimate good once it has been granted. The initial state of innocence did not involve the gift of the beatific vision, therefore human beings (whether Adam or Eve as originally created, or any of the progeny that might have been generated from them in such a state) in the state of innocence retained the free will ability to turn away from God.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Original justice was a supernatural gift to the human species that was lots in the fall.</li>
<li>Human free-will allows for a turning to or away from God; until the gift of the beatific vision is given, this decision is reversible.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Understanding the precise relation of human nature and the gift of grace in the state of innocence is important to understanding the twentieth century controversy over the supernatural. Aquinas’s position that this supernatural gift of grace is analogously proper to human nature but does not follow on from human nature itself is a subtlety that can be missed.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-12029356462221945232014-02-15T15:17:00.003+00:002014-02-15T15:17:53.780+00:00Question 99 – The Physical Condition of Progeny<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />The Garden of Eden before the fall was a place of grace and perfection for the first human beings. Would that perfection have led to the children of Adam and Eve (and their progeny after them) to have been born in a state of physical perfection? Returning to a theme of Ia.q92, would female children have been born is such a prelapsarian state, or is the sexual diversity that we see after the fall a consequence of the fall?<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: One of the characteristics of human babies that distinguishes them from most of the rest of the animal kingdom is their lack of physical coordination upon birth; they are basically helpless and entirely dependent upon their parents. Is this condition a by-product of the fall of man? Would babies born in the Garden of Eden have been physically co-ordinated? After all, it seems that there was no imperfection in paradise and such an uncoordinated condition is surely a lack of perfection.<br /><br />Aquinas starts his answer by distinguishing between knowledge that we have by supernatural revelation and knowledge gained through observation about the nature of things. In the absence of revelation about some subject, we should favour the latter in tackling a question like this. In this case, it is clear that it is part of the nature of human beings to be born the way that they are with brains that are yet to undergo the sort of development needed for full physical coordination. On the other hand, if we look to the sources of supernatural revelation on this question (such as Ecclesiastes 7:30), then all we see is the claim that “God made man upright”. But this, of course, should only be applied to Adam and Eve; created in their maturity, they did have such mental and physical rectitude. <br /><br /><b>A2</b>: Returning to the theme of Ia.q92.a1, Aquinas asks whether any females would have been born in the state of innocence. The objections are of a similar nature to those appearing in that former question. For example, Aristotle’s teaching that a female is an “inadvertent male” caused by something going amiss in the developmental process combined with the perfection of the initial state would seem to rule out female births.<br /><br />Aquinas dismisses the objections out of hand in the same way that he answers the objections of Ia.q92.a1: sexual diversity is part of the intention of nature and contributes to the perfection of the species. Both sexes would have been born in the initial state of innocence.<br /><br />Following a line of thinking derived from the understanding of the reproductive process current at that time, the second objection claims that the active power in generation is male and that like will produce like unless it is impeded, either by the male principle being defective or by the female matter being unreceptive. The perfection of the initial state of innocence implies that neither of these conditions could occur and that therefore all births would have been of male children. Aquinas denies that sexual differentiation occurs that way, suggesting that an extrinsic accident is responsible for the differentiation. A coda to his answer is that, in the initial state of innocence, the human soul would have been able to be the source of that accident; the sex of the offspring could have been chosen by thinking about it!<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>In the Garden of Eden children would have been born as we are, lacking the physical coordination typical of babies born after the fall.</li>
<li>Sexual diversity was part of the creation of human beings and is natural to the species that both sexes be present.</li>
</ul>
Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-11367773242940798402014-02-15T15:14:00.003+00:002014-02-15T15:14:36.701+00:00Question 98 – Concerning the Conservation of the Species<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />Aquinas has been concerned with aspects of Adam and Eve’s being as individuals in the state of innocence before the fall. Now he turns to questions about the human species. Had the fall been delayed so that in the state of innocence Adam and Eve had children, and perhaps those children themselves produced progeny there are a number of questions we can ask about these children. In this question Aquinas will turn his attention to how children would have come about in the first place. In subsequent questions Aquinas will ask about their physical state (Ia.q99), their state of original justice (Ia.q100) and their intellectual state (Ia.q101).<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: Would human beings have generated other human beings (for example, by procreation) in the initial state of innocence? At first sight one might have thought not, as this prelapsarian paradise appears to be a state of perfection that doesn’t require any form of growth. As the first human beings would have been immortal in this state, there would have been no need for generation in order to conserve the species. Moreover, when we look at the world as it is, we see that generation and corruption seem to go together; as there was no corruption in the initial state of innocence, neither would there have been generation. Against this, of course, God enjoined the first human beings to “go forth and multiply”; a process that would seem to necessitate generation of some sort.<br /><br />In his answer Aquinas observes that human beings are a sort of mixture; corruptible as far as we are bodily, incorruptible as far as we are spiritual. Also, when we consider the ends of nature we see that incorruptible creatures belong to the intention of nature individually; whereas corruptible creatures belong to the intention of nature not individually but for the sake of the species to which they belong. So when we consider human beings as bodily animals, we have to recognize that generation is part of our nature; something that does not substantially change with the fall. As spiritual creatures, on the other hand, we are ordered individually and <i>per se</i> towards our ends in the beatific vision.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: Would the generation of new individuals in the state of innocence have been by sexual intercourse? Aquinas’s immediate answer to this follows the pattern of the answer he gave in the previous article. Human beings were created with sexual diversity; we can simply observe that sexual diversity by its nature is ordered towards procreation of the species. As the fall did not alter human nature, we can infer that generation would have been by means of sexual intercourse in the state of innocence had it occurred.<br /><br />Aquinas doesn’t leave it there though, and what he continues on to argue has important implications for a much misunderstood area of Christian doctrine. One of the consequences of the fall is that, in our post-lapsarian state, the natural goodness of sexuality is deformed by an attendant <i>concupiscence</i>, which is a sort of disordered and extreme desire for sensuality. Expanding on this theme in the answer to the third objection, Aquinas even argues that the disordered desire of concupiscence may actually subtract from the pleasure naturally associated with sexual intercourse. In the state of innocence humans were graced with the gift of integrity, ordering all the lower powers under the power of reason; sexual intercourse in such a state would have been more sensual than it is to us. In our present state our lower powers are not under the control of reason; their self-indulgence subtracts from what could be experienced or achieved were everything ordered to the same end under the power of reason. The analogy that Aquinas gives is of one who is temperate in the consumption of food compared to the glutton. The former may gain more sensual pleasure from the moderate consumption of food than the latter does from his intemperate consumption.<br /><br />Finally Aquinas points out that the state of sexual continence is a state that turns away from concupiscence, from this disordered desire, rather than a state that turns away from sexuality per se. It is in this regard that sexual continence is so praised by the Church. A natural consequence of this is that in the initial state of innocence such a state of sexual continence would not have been praiseworthy as there was no concupiscence from which to turn; fecundity would have existed without disordered desire.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Generation is natural, as bodily creatures, to the human species. Therefore there would have been generation in the Garden of Eden had the fall not intervened.</li>
<li>Human beings were created with sexual diversity ordered towards procreation; the generation of new individuals in the state of innocence would have been by means of sexual intercourse.</li>
<li>Concupiscence may be seen in contrast to the rectitude of the original human beings. It is a state of extreme sensual disorder. We recall from Ia.q81.a2 that the concupiscible power is the power of the sensitive appetite that is ordered to seeking out what is attractive to the senses and fleeing from what is harmful. Concupiscence is a disorder of the concupiscible power.</li>
<li>Christian teaching on sexual continence is based on a turning away from concupiscence rather than on a turning away from sexuality.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>In the first article Aquinas observes that the point of individual corruptible creatures, that is the intention that nature has for them, is ordered towards the conservation of the species to which the individual belongs. This concord well with modern ideas of the survival of the gene.</li>
<li>The answer to the fourth objection to the second article quotes St. Augustine to the effect that sexual intercourse in the state of innocence would have led to no corruption of virginal integrity. Presumably this is argued for as being a type of the virgin birth of Jesus from Mary. What happened to Mary, in being the second Eve, directs our attention to what would have happened to Eve in childbirth in the state of innocence.</li>
<li>Throughout this section Aquinas observes that the sources of revelation don’t tell us an awful lot about the hypothetical situation of children born before the fall. In the absence of such information, Aquinas’s method is to turn to an understanding of human nature. Human nature was not changed, although it may have been obscured, at the fall and therefore things true about our nature after the fall were true of our nature before the fall.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-47796070455281128432014-02-09T12:17:00.003+00:002014-02-09T12:17:34.116+00:00Question 97 – Man’s Physical State in Paradise<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />After consideration of the intellect and will of the first humans in the Garden of Eden, it is now time to turn the questions concerning their bodily state. In particular, this question gives a treatment of the preternatural gifts of bodily immortality and impassibility.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><b>A1</b>: One of the so-called <i>preternatural gifts</i> given by God to human beings in the Garden of Eden was immortality. In this article Aquinas justifies seeing this as a special gift of grace consistent with, but not part of, human nature. To do so, he identifies three ways in which something may be incorruptible (as bodily corruption is the basis of mortality). In the first way a creature such as an angel does not have any matter at all and is therefore incorruptible by its very nature. Aquinas, being consistent with the cosmology of the time, puts the celestial bodies in this category by arguing that their matter is ordered only to a single form. With such an ordering it is impossible for the matter to take on any other form and therefore the form/matter combination of a celestial must be incorruptible. The second possibility is that something is incorruptible because of the nature of its form. The third possibility is that something is kept from corruption by an efficient cause maintaining it in its current state. It is this last possibility that applies to the immortality of humans in the Garden of Eden. By a special gift of grace the initial humans were kept from corruption so long as they remained subject to God.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: A second gift given to Adam and Eve was the gift of <i>impassibility</i>, which when applied to the first human beings refers to their ability to remain free from any suffering. The point of this article is that the notion of impassibility is subject to two different definitions and it is only one of them that applies here; the objections to this article are built on understanding impassibility by means of the other definition. The proper meaning as it is understood here is that of being acted on in such a way as to remove the object of the action from its natural disposition; some form of suffering, for example. The more general meaning refers to not being the subject of any action; it is in this sense that only God is impassible. <br /><br /><b>A3</b>: Did Adam and Eve have to eat and drink to maintain themselves in the Garden of Eden? They were, after all, impassible and immortal and therefore not eating would have had not have caused suffering or death. However, the Genesis account of creation tells us that the first humans were ordered to eat of the trees of the garden. Therefore if they didn’t they would have sinned and would have lost their immortality and impassibility; so this argument fails.<br /><br />Aquinas could have simply answered this question by observing that human beings are by their nature bodily animals and it is in the nature of such animals to preserve their being by the consumption of food and drink. But he want to go further in order to differentiate between human beings in their initial state of innocence in the Garden of Eden and human beings in their glorified bodily state after the general resurrection. To do so, he identifies the dual nature of the human soul: it is both something that gives life to a bodily animal as well as being a subsistent spiritual being with an immaterial intellective power. In the initial state of innocence the soul acts towards the body as the former, giving bodily life to an animal being, with all the things that go with that state. But after the general resurrection, the soul will give something of its other spiritual nature in order to glorify the body and to give immortality and impassibility; to give human beings spiritual bodies. In this state, human beings will not have to eat or drink.<br /><br /><b>A4</b>: In the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were forbidden from eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and it was their failure to obey that injunction that is associated with the complex series of actions that is the fall of man. They were, however, enjoined to eat of all the other trees of the garden and one of those trees was the Tree of Life. They were driven from paradise lest they continue to eat of the Tree of Life in their enhanced state of knowledge. Was the Tree of Life the cause of their immortality whilst in the state of innocence?<br /><br />Aquinas answers that the Tree of Life prevented the first humans from dying but that it was not a cause of immortality absolutely speaking. By this he means that the power that enables the body to stay in being is a power of the soul itself. What the fruit of the Tree of Life was able to do was to fortify the body in such a way that the power of the soul to conserve the body was not impeded. But each fruit from the Tree of Life was itself a material body and therefore its power to do this was finite and limited. It was not the case that a single bite from the fruit of the Tree of Life would confer immortality but rather that it had to be taken repeatedly as a food in order for the effect to continue.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Adam and Eve were given the preternatural gifts of immortality and impassibility in their initial state of innocence.</li>
<li>The bodily state of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was a state consistent with human nature. Therefore they ate and drank as we do.</li>
<li>The Tree of Life conferred immortality in the sense of removing impediments to the conserving power of the soul; it had to be eaten repeatedly as food in order for this effect to continue.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>The connection between the fruit of the Tree of Life and the Eucharist should be clear in Aquinas’s treatment in the fourth article. They are both live-giving, in different but analogous senses.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-17971064562946334802014-02-09T10:21:00.000+00:002014-02-09T10:21:04.566+00:00Question 96 – Man’s Dominion in the Initial State of Innocence<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />The Genesis account of creation records that God gave dominion over the rest of material creation to human beings in a state of innocence. In this question Aquinas enquires into what that dominion consisted in and relates it to the natural order of creation towards God. In making this enquiry he asks a number of questions that are strictly speaking, given the fact of the fall, hypothetical concerning what human beings would be like in a state of innocence in paradise.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: Aquinas finds underlying reasons behind the raw assertion of Genesis 1:26 of the dominion of humans over the animals with three variations on notions of the hierarchy of creation. In the first place he argues that there is a natural order to creation in which the more perfect makes use of the less perfect. As humans sit at the pinnacle of material creation it is therefore natural to them to have dominion over the rest of it. The second argument looks at creation from the point of view of God’s providence whereby lower things are governed by higher things. Finally, looking at the actual properties of man and of the other animals shows one that man has a general ability to make prudent decisions whereas animals lower than humans are only able to make prudential decision in circumstances to which they are adapted; their prudence shows a certain degree of participation in prudence. Aquinas then argues that whatever is such-and-such by participation is subject to that which is such-and-such through its essence.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: Aquinas reads Genesis 1:26 as giving humans dominion over all creatures, not just the animals. But there’s an immediate problems with this: what does it mean to have dominion over a daisy, for example? One can see the effect of man’s dominion in the herding of cattle or in the breaking-in of a horse under the influence of human reason; but ordering a daisy around is likely to end in little but frustration.<br /><br />Aquinas responds by pointing to the way in which human beings have, in a sense, all of creation within themselves. Human beings have reason, like the angels; we have sentient powers, like the other animals; we have natural powers, like plants; we have a material body, in the same way that inanimate objects are material. In human beings the rational powers have dominion over the sentient powers and parallel to this we have dominion over animals by means of the command of reason. Similarly man has dominion over his natural powers and the body itself; but for these the dominion is not one of reason but of use. Therefore we should look for the parallel dominion that man has over the vegetable and the inanimate in the way in which we can make unimpeded use of them for our purposes.<br /><br />The reply to the second objection brings up, and rejects, the point of view that in paradise animals all got along together just fine without killing and eating each other. Indeed, some have argued that cuisine in paradise was exclusively vegetarian. Aquinas argues that, although man’s first sin may have led to the “fall of creation”, animal natures were not changed in that event (in much the same way that human nature was not changed, but darkened, by the fall). As it is in the nature of animals to fit into a predator prey hierarchy, they would have been eating each other in paradise. Indeed, in domesticating animals, humans would have fed other animals to some of the domesticated animals.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: The state of innocence in paradise would seem, at first sight, to also imply a state of equality between human beings; surely, after all, those things that gives rise to inequality between human beings are associated with the consequences of the fall. On the other hand, we recognize at the very least sexual diversity in the very creation of human beings itself. Had there been more than two human beings in paradise, then there would have been diversity of age as well. We can go further than these simple examples: human beings are created with free will and therefore have the freedom of choice of their intellectual and moral development, whatever tools they are born with. There is also no reason to suspect that they would all have been made physically identical (within the sexes); it is perfectly possible for there to be diversity within a perfect creation. Having established that there could be diversity amongst human beings in paradise, we should recognize that the purpose of creation is ordered towards God and that ordering may be most effectively realized through the specialization associated with diversity; as the reply to the third objection observes, God was perfectly free to raise some to a greater degree and some to a lesser degree to achieve His purpose. Such diversity across the range of human attributes must be recognized as a certain form of inequality; but one that does not imply imperfection in creation. <br /><br /><b>A4</b>: The third article established that there could be inequality amongst human beings in paradise; the obvious question arises as to whether that inequality would have led to dominion of one human being over another. To answer this question we have to recognize a distinction in what we mean by dominion. One way of looking at dominion is to see it in terms of a master and slave relationship. In this form of dominion the master has dominion over the slave for the good of the master and of his purposes. It is this type of dominion that could not have occurred in the state of innocence as this cannot occur without some form of suffering on behalf of the slave; even if the suffering is simply that of having to give entirely to someone else what ought to be one’s own.<br /><br />The second way of looking at dominion is to see it more generally in terms of governance. In this form of dominion the ruler has dominion over the subject for the benefit of the subject, or for the common good. Humans being social animals is entirely consistent with organizing themselves for the achievement of common ends by means of a governing hierarchy. This second form of dominion of one human being over another is entirely consistent with the state of innocence.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Human beings have dominion over the rest of material creation. The animals are subject to our reason; plants and inanimate objects are subject to our use.</li>
<li>The state of innocence in paradise is consistent with inequality between human beings.</li>
<li>The state of innocence in paradise is consistent with the dominion of one human being over another, but only in the sense of governance to benefit the governed and the common good.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-27232481445235540562014-01-29T14:31:00.001+00:002014-01-29T14:31:57.653+00:00Question 95 – The First Man’s Will: Grace and Justice<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />In the previous question, Aquinas discussed the state of the first human being’s intellects in the state of innocence before the fall. It is natural then that he should turn to a treatment of the wills of Adam and Eve in the same state.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: As was remarked in the preamble to this section, that Adam and Eve were created in a state of grace is a standard tenet of Christian theology. This is precisely Aquinas’s subject in this article, but he is not concerned with the fact of Adam and Eve’s state of grace in the Garden of Eden but of exactly when they received that grace; was it coincident with their creation, or was it a gift that followed later?<br /><br />In their initial state, Adam and Eve were created in a state of rectitude; that is, their reason was subject to God, their lower powers were subject to their higher powers and their bodies were subject to their souls. This fact is given to us in the content of divine revelation (for example, in Ecclesiastes 7:30). Aquinas observes that, although such a state of rectitude is consistent with a human nature, it is not in itself natural. If it were itself part of human nature then it would have remained after the fall. Therefore this state of rectitude must be considered to have stemmed from a supernatural gift of grace. As Adam and Eve were created in this state of rectitude, they must therefore have been created in grace. One should notice that Aquinas doesn’t claim that every grace that they had in paradise was received at their creation; indeed, in the reply to the fourth objection he allows for the possibility that the first humans made progress in merit by the gift of additional graces.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: In the Ia-IIae of the <i>summa</i>, Aquinas will devote an entire treatise to the human<i> passions</i> (Ia-IIae.qq22-48). In anticipation of this Aquinas asks about the passions of the first humans in the state of innocence. If we at least think informally about what passions are, we might suspect that the initial state of rectitude is inconsistent with the existence of at least some of them. Indeed, this is the position that Aquinas will argue for.<br /><br />It’s important to understand that Aquinas considers the passions to be parts of the sensitive appetite; they are not associated with the will which is the intellectual appetite. The passions have objects that can be good or bad: so love and joy, in the appetitive sense, are passions whose objects are good; the objects of fear and sorrow are bad. In paradise, there were no present or threatening evils, nor were any goods absent. Therefore passions whose objects are bad or which relate to a desire for an absent good were not present in the initial state of human beings. Even those passions that were present in Adam and Eve were present in a different way than they are present in us. In us it is perfectly possible for a passion with good object to exist in a disordered way; in the initial state of rectitude only the passions that were consistent with the judgement of reason were present.<br /><br />The reply to the second objection makes some remarks about the human body and soul being <i>impassible</i> in the state of innocence. Exactly what this means and why it is so will be dealt with in detail in Ia.q97.a2.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: As with the passions, Aquinas will spend considerable effort discussing human <i>virtue</i> (Ia-IIae.qq55-70). These are stable dispositions (<i>habitus</i> as Aquinas calls them) towards the good and away from evil. Aquinas asks whether Adam had all of the virtues in the state of innocence.<br /><br />As the objections identify, many of the virtues are ordered towards constraining immoderation of the passions or in combating evil. If we follow the pattern of the previous article on the passions then we might expect Aquinas to argue that virtues wholly associated with the good existed in Adam in the state of innocence and that those associated with combating some form of evil did not. This is roughly the path that Aquinas takes, but with an important caveat: the modes of existence of the passions and of the virtues are different and this has consequences for how this question should be answered. In the absence of its object a passion, which is simply a movement of the sensitive appetite, does not exist. In contrast, a habit is a stable disposition of the soul that exists as a habit (that is, precisely as that stable disposition) even if it is not in act.<br /><br />With this distinction in mind, we can identify that certain virtues such as charity and justice, which involve no imperfection, existed absolutely speaking in Adam in the state of innocence. On the other hand, some virtues, such as faith and hope, involve some imperfections (in this case absence of things seen or had) that are not necessarily inconsistent with the state of innocence. Adam and Eve did not enjoy the beatific vision in paradise, so faith and hope could exist in them. Finally some virtues, such as repentance, sorrow and shame, are associated with objects that are inconsistent with the state of innocence. These virtues were present in Adam as stable dispositions but they did not exist in actuality. <br /><br /><b>A4</b>: In Ia-IIae.q114 Aquinas will turn his attention to the notion of <i>merit</i>. Merit is a tricky and often misunderstood theological concept that is associated with a human being’s cooperation with the grace of God. As God created humans with free-will and allows them the exercise of this free-will, humans in receipt of certain gifts of grace can cooperate with them or resist them (otherwise humans simply become divine puppets). Provided that we recognize that the ability to cooperate with grace is itself a grace, then the term merit is applied to the eternal consequences of the gift of grace and cooperation with grace considered as rewards. Much more detail will be given in the Ia-IIae, but for now Aquinas simply inquires as to whether Adam’s deeds were more or less meritorious than ours can be.<br /><br />The objections suggest that Adam’s deeds were done in circumstances that made good works supremely easy and that therefore we require greater gifts of grace to progress in merit than Adam required. As grace is at the root of merit this means that Adam’s deeds were less efficacious for meriting than ours. Aquinas answers by making a distinction in ways of understanding how we might approach a notion of quantification of merit. The first approach is to look at the root of merit in charity and grace; the reception of greater grace corresponds to the bringing forth of greater charity which corresponds to a greater degree of participation in the beatific vision. The second approach to the notion of quantifying merit is to look at it from the point of view of quantifying the works that flow from the corresponding gifts of grace, both absolutely (i.e. simply how much is done) and proportionally (i.e. how much is done considered in proportion to how much is available). So when we try to quantify merit we can think in terms of the amount of grace received or in terms of the absolute or proportional amount of work done in consequence of that grace. The former way should be seen as primary (or essential) to the notion of merit and the latter as secondary (or incidental).<br /><br />Seen from the point of view of the first way of quantifying merit, works done in the state of innocence are more efficacious for merit than post-lapsarian works; the state of innocence corresponds to an extraordinarily copious outflowing of grace from God. The same reasoning applies to a quantification based on the absolute quantity of good works; in the state of innocence the extraordinary outpouring of grace facilitated much greater works. However, seen from the point of view the proportional quantity of works, we see that the weakness of human beings after the fall implies that the graced works that they do achieve should be seen in the context of the widow of Mark 12:41. In giving a tiny amount she was giving all that she had; in this sense we can understand post-lapsarian works are more efficacious for grace than pre-lapsarian.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Adam and Eve were created in a state of grace. This state did not preclude them from progressing in grace with additional gifts.</li>
<li>Only passions consistent with the good existed in paradise.</li>
<li>Only virtues consistent with or commensurate to the good existed in actuality in paradise; virtues associated with the suppression of evil were only habitually present.</li>
<li>Adam’s works were more efficacious of merit that are ours, seen from the point of view the grace standing behind them and also from their sheer quantity of goodness. Seen from the point of view of proportionality, our works mat be considered more efficacious. </li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>In the second article Aquinas introduces us to the passions, which are movements of the sensitive appetite. Much more will be said later in the <i>Treatise on the Passions</i>. For now we might wish to remember that English words like <i>love</i> can be associated with a movement of the sensitive appetite but also with a movement of the intellectual appetite. One must be careful of equivocation!</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-40853920921694196292014-01-27T15:42:00.003+00:002014-01-27T15:42:41.365+00:00Question 94 – The State of the First Man with Respect to Intellect.<b>Preamble</b><br /><br />The final section of the <i>Treatise on Man</i> is dedicated to consideration of questions about the state of being of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It is well known in Christian teaching that they were created in a state of grace, a state which they lost at the fall. This simple statement leaves unanswered many questions about what that initial state was, and about what were the consequences of the fall in leaving that state of grace. Therefore Aquinas dedicates the next three questions (Ia.q94 on the intellect and Ia.q95-6 on the will) to the state of man’s soul in the initial state of grace; then there are five questions (Ia.q97-101) on bodily issues. The treatise is rounded off by a question (Ia.q102) on paradise.<br /><br /><br /><b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />As human beings are uniquely bodily intellectual creatures, it is natural for Aquinas to start his consideration of the state of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with questions about their intellects. Created in a state of grace and possessing some extraordinary gifts consistent with human nature, one naturally wonders how the fall from paradise was possible. We will have to wait until IIa-IIae.q163 for Aquinas’s approach to that question, but in the meantime here he lays the groundwork by discussing the state of the intellect of the first human beings.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: Adam’s existence in the Garden of Eden was so wonderful it is natural to ask whether he had the beatific vision of God while in paradise. That is, did Adam see God through His essence? Aquinas quickly recalls that anyone who has the beatific vision cannot turn away from that vision; as Adam sinned, one must infer that he did not have that vision of God.<br /><br />However, Adam did have a cognition of God that is higher than we do in our present fallen state, albeit less perfect than that of the beatific vision. Aquinas explains that in his initial state Adam was created <i>upright</i> (Latin <i>rectus</i>); in this state of rectitude all his lower powers were subject to his higher powers. To expand on this we should notice, along with St. Paul, that one of the features of our current state of existence is that our powers are often at odds with one another. We may will to do something but find ourselves unable to do it; what we want with our heart may be very different from what we want with our head. Adam didn’t have this problem; all of his intellectual, sensory and bodily powers were aligned to common purpose. This means that Adam was not distracted by his senses to spend too much time thinking about sensible things to the detriment of the consideration of intelligible things. Now God is more clearly understood through his intelligible effects (that is, effects that are directly intelligible to the intellect) than through His sensible effects; we have seen from the first questions of the <i>summa</i> how hard it is to arrive at the intelligible effects of God though reasoning about created sensible things! So in the first state of grace man’s natural knowledge of God’s intelligible effects was not masked by sensible tittle-tattle. Aquinas goes on to quote Augustine to the effect that the first man, walking with God in paradise, may also have been directly illuminated with knowledge of these intelligible effects. Again, Adam’s rectitude would have meant that this divine illumination was clearly received rather than masked by sensible considerations.<br /><br />In his reply to the third objection, Aquinas goes further: Adam did not have to arrive at a cognition of God by demonstrations rooted in knowledge of God’s effects (as we have to do). Instead, he had an <i>immediate</i> cognition of God though his effects. Human beings, including Adam, have to see God through a mirror, as it were. For us in our present state that mirror is darkly obscured and we arrive at natural knowledge of God through great effort and with much trial and error. For Adam, that mirror was clear; clear enough for him to see God immediately in all His effects.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: If Adam did not have a vision of God through His essence, then perhaps he could see angels through their essences. After all, we have seen (in Ia.q89.a2) that a separated soul has a perfect intellective understanding of other separated souls and an imperfect understanding of the higher separated substances. Surely the state of Adam’s soul must have been at least on a level with separated souls in this regard?<br /><br />Aquinas answers by distinguishing between two different ways of looking at the state of the soul. In the first way we can distinguish between the two natural modes of existence of the soul: the first being when it is joined with the body; the second when it is separated from the body. The second distinction is between the states of integrity (before the fall) and corruption (after the fall). The mistake lying behind the thesis that Adam had a vision of the angels through their substance is that of making the wrong distinction between Adam’s soul and our souls. Adam’s soul was in a state of integrity but was still joined to his body. This means that the mode of operation of the soul of Adam is like that of ours: it is ordered to the abstraction of intelligible species from phantasms presented to it by the sense. Adam was just better at it than we are.<br /><br />Our natural mode of cognition with soul joined to the body is sufficient to have cognition of the <i>quiddity</i> of exterior things and from thence to have cognition of our own act of understanding (Ia.q87.a3). However, this type of cognition is simply insufficient to make a leap up to the cognition of the angels.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: Aquinas asks in this article whether Adam had <i>scientia</i> (sometimes translated as <i>knowledge</i> and sometimes as <i>scientific knowledge</i>) of everything. The structure of the article will make it clear that Aquinas is going to answer this in the affirmative. Since this is such a startling claim, it is important to understand exactly what he means by <i>scientia</i>.<br /><i>Scientia</i> is the knowledge of things in their causes, which one might informally refer to as <i>understanding</i> or an <i>ability to understand</i>; in particular, <i>scientia</i> is a knowledge of universals rather than of particulars. The claim that Adam had this sort of understanding of everything is not the claim that Adam knew every fact that there is to know but that rather he had an intellect equipped with the knowledge of universals sufficient to understand everything that he did experience.<br /><br />Even this is an extraordinary claim because it seems to set Adam apart from all other human beings. As we grow up we have to accumulate these universals in our intellects through experience; if Adam already had them, without having to accumulate them, it seem that he either had to have a sort of connatural knowledge that we do not have or that he received them through a process of divine infusion, rather like the angels.<br /><br />Aquinas is quite ready to defend such a position. Adam has such <i>scientia</i> though direct infusion from God; the fact that he is the very first human being makes him unique with respect to the rest of us and therefore we shouldn’t be surprised that he has this very special gift. Adam didn’t have to progress through life accumulating such universal knowledge, but he did have to accumulate particular knowledge and put it into the context of that universal knowledge.<br /><br />Aquinas’s fundamental reason for supporting such a position lies in the principle that actuality is prior to potentiality. In order for something to move from potentiality to actuality there has to be something actual that is the cause of that move. God created things in a state of perfection, not only so they existed in themselves, but so they might also be the principles of subsequent things. God created Adam in a perfect bodily state (that is, as a fully formed adult) so that he could be the principle of generation of subsequent human beings; He created his soul with complete <i>scientia</i> so that Adam might lead subsequent human beings in knowledge. So Adam had all the first principles of knowledge virtually containing everything that can be known naturally by human beings.<br /><br />In addition to such natural universal knowledge, Aquinas claims that Adam had sufficient knowledge of the supernatural to direct him to his ultimate end.<br /><br /><b>A4</b>: In the Genesis account of the fall, the serpent deceives Eve into eating the apple from the tree of knowledge. The deception is a subtle one that turns on an equivocation of God’s warning to Adam and Eve that they will die if they touch the tree, but it is a deception nonetheless. So it seems perfectly obvious that despite their graced existence in the Garden of Eden that Adam and Eve were capable of being deceived. <br /><br />Aquinas’s startling conclusion in this article goes against this line of reasoning, claiming that they could not be deceived in their initial state of grace. Before justifying his conclusion he outlines another opinion in which a distinction is made between a sort of cursory assent to a false belief and a firm assent. Some have argued, he claims, that the first humans in their original state could not be deceived in the latter sense, but could be deceived in the former sense concerning non-scientific knowledge (recalling that they had possession of all scientific knowledge). <br /><br />Aquinas rejects even this position. In the state of innocence it was not possible for humans to acquiesce to any positive falsehood; this would have been simply inconsistent with such a graced existence. A falsehood in the intellect is an evil in the same way that a truth is a good and no such evil could be present. A second line of reasoning argues that in the state of rectitude all of man’s faculties were aligned with each other and co-operating; the only way that the intellect is deceived is if it is deceived by a lower power (as the intellect is infallible with respect to its own proper object), and this cannot therefore happen.<br /><br />So how could Eve have been deceived? Aquinas answers, via Augustine, that the deception was preceded by a prior sin; that of a “love for her own power and a proud presumptuousness regarding that power”. In other words, there had already been a movement of the will away from God and the fall itself was complex of sins that culminated in the disobedience of eating the apple. The deception occurred after the state of innocence had started to be corrupted.<br /><br />Other objections suggested that humans naturally are apt to make mistaken judgements, for example, about things in the distance that stretch the abilities of the senses or about future contingents or the interior thoughts of others. For the former, Aquinas argues that man would not have been deceived as he would have been aware of the limits to the sense data available to him and would have therefore made an appropriate judgement. For the latter, two answers are given: the first that Adam would have made contingent judgements not committing himself to a definite answer; the second that God would have assisted him in such circumstances.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>In the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were created in a state of grace and bodily integrity. Thus all their faculties were united rather than divided against one another as they are in our postlapsarian state. Despite these gifts of grace neither Adam nor Eve benefited from the beatific vision; however, they did have an immediate cognition of God though his effects.</li>
<li>Adam and Eve did not have a direct cognition of angels through their substance; the first humans’ cognitive apparatus worked in the same way as ours.</li>
<li>Adam had an intellect equipped with the knowledge of universals (<i>scientia</i>) sufficient to understand everything that he experienced.</li>
<li>Adam and Eve before the fall had such perfect rectitude of body and mind that they were not capable of being deceived. The deception of the serpent occurred after the fall had already started.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>In the first article Aquinas distinguishes between the sensible effects and the intelligible effects of God; perhaps this distinction is not crystal clear. We can take it for granted that God is fully capable of communicating some element (consistent with man’s capacity) of His intelligibility to humans by divine illumination. However, this distinction between sensible and intelligible effects appears to pertain to cognition of God though His created effects. Also, these appear not to be different classes of effects associated with different types of created effect. Rather, Aquinas is differentiating between sensible and intelligible effects in the same thing. We have seen that we can infer, through a process of hard logical demonstration, that God’s sensible effects lead us to certain aspects of His intelligibility. What Aquinas appears to be arguing here is that Adam had a sort of intuitive immediate access to what is intelligible about God through His creation, rather than having to go through our process of argument. Adam saw God through a clear mirror rather than one darkened by sin and obscured by our focus on the sensible aspects of the material world.</li>
<li>The obvious and very standard question arises that if Adam was so gifted, why did he fall? If he was gifted with free will as well as the gifts of grace and rectitude, why was his free will not a subject of that rectitude?</li>
<li>Adam and Eve were created in grace and were given the <i>preternatural gifts</i> (such as the rectitude and infused <i>scientia</i> described above but also immortality and the absence of concupiscence). The latter gifts are gifts that are consistent with human nature whereas the former gift exceeds human nature. After the fall, we do not possess the preternatural gifts and we can only hope for the gifts of grace by faith and our end in the beatific vision. In the spirit of filling a gap, theologians have speculated on what a human being created in a<i> state of pure nature</i> or in a<i> state of unimpaired nature</i> would look like. The former state consists of the absence of grace and of the preternatural gifts but also the absence of sin; the latter state lacks the gifts of grace but possesses the preternatural gifts and benefits from the absence of sin.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-62428342516769052102014-01-26T08:47:00.004+00:002014-01-26T08:47:58.984+00:00Question 93 – Man Made to the Image of God.<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />“And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness”. These words of Genesis 1:26 have often fascinated exegetes. What is its fundamental meaning and why is there a distinction between likeness and image? Aquinas introduces this question as being about the <i>purpose</i> or <i>end</i> of humanity’s creation insofar as humans are made in God’s image and likeness. He is concerned to understand what it means for something to be made in the image and likeness of God but he also wants to understand how the image of God in man relates to man’s ultimate purpose.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: In Genesis 1:26 we read that man was made in the image and likeness of God. This allows Aquinas a straightforward answer to the question of whether the image of God exists in man! However, he takes the opportunity to add a little precision. After Augustine, he differentiates between a <i>likeness</i>, in which there is some sort of resemblance to a prototype and an <i>image</i>, which is definitely modelled on the prototype. So the concept of an image contains the concept of a likeness, but the reverse does not hold. Going further, we must differentiate between an image and a <i>perfect image</i>. In the latter there is a notion of equality; a perfect image has the same dignity or function as its prototype. This idea of equality is lacking from a (non-perfect) image. <br /><br />Aquinas concludes that man is definitely modelled on the prototype of God is some way and therefore can genuinely be called an image of God. But the image of God that man is falls short of being a perfect image; following Col. 1:15, only the “Firstborn of every creature” is the “Image of the invisible God”. Aquinas makes a linguistic distinction based on the Latin of the Vulgate version of the bible: man is made <i>to</i> the image of God (<i>ad</i> imaginem Dei) rather than <i>in</i> the image of God. This distinction signifies that the approach to the image of God in man is actually an approach to something in the far distance.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: Aquinas makes use of the first article’s distinction between image and likeness to address whether the image of God is unique to man amongst the animal kingdom. He argues that something is an image of a prototype rather than just a likeness when it is either in the same species as the prototype (rather than just in the same genus) or when it shares a proper accident like shape with the prototype. So, the son of a father is an image of his father; a bronze statue of a great queen is an image of the queen herself. We can identify a sort of hierarchy of likeness: an arbitrary thing is like God in that both it and God exist; an animal is like God in that they are both living; a human being is like God in that they are both intellective. It is this last likeness that raises human beings to the level of being made to the image of God.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: Human beings occupy a puzzling place in the hierarchy of creation. Lying at the boundary between the spiritual and the material they are the lowest of the intellectual creatures, beneath the hierarchy of angels, and yet they are especially favoured by God. As they are lower in the hierarchy of intellectual being, does this mean that the image of God is found to a greater degree in angels than in man? Or rather, does humanity’s favoured relationship with the creator mean that the image of God is stronger in man?<br /><br />Aquinas answers by making a distinction. We can think of being the image of God in two ways. In the first and primary way, being in the image of God relates to the intellectual nature of the creature. As such angels bear the image of God more strongly than man as they are the more perfectly intellectual creatures. However there is also a secondary sense, and in this secondary sense the image of God is stronger in man than in the angels. This latter sense lies in a sort of imitation of God that is not open to the angels: the examples that Aquinas gives are of the way that man come from man in analogy to how God is from God and in the way that the human soul in present in the body in analogy to the way that God is present to the created world. <br /><br /><b>A4</b>: We’ve seen that the first woman was made from the rib of Adam, so perhaps we should ask whether only some human beings are made in the image of God rather than in the image of Adam. If we also consider that only some are predestined to eternal glory and that sin destroys the image of God within man, then perhaps we would be inclined to this position.<br /><br />In answering this question Aquinas takes the opportunity to distinguish between different senses of the image of God in man. The first sense identifies the image of God in man with man’s intellectual nature that allows him to understand and to love God. In this sense, all humans carry the image of God; this is the image corresponding to <i>creation</i>. The second sense is that of the justified human; this is an image corresponding to<i> re-creation</i> in which they have a habitual but imperfect understanding and love of God. In the third sense, the gloried in heaven have a perfect understanding and love of God and an image of <i>likeness of glory</i>. <br /><br />Therefore we can rightly say that all human beings are made in the image of God in the first sense; but not every human being is made in the image of God in the latter two senses.<br /><br /><b>A5</b>: As God is both divine substance and Trinity of divine persons, an obvious question to ask is whether the image of God in man pertains to the substance of God or to the persons of the Trinity. The questions is framed in such a way that the objections support the idea that the image is to do with the substance of God. Three of the objections are based on discussions by other Church Fathers, but the third argues that as knowledge of the Trinity is an object of faith beyond natural reason this could not be consistent with having a Trinitarian impression within our minds because this would allow us knowledge of the Trinity by introspection as an alternative to revelation.<br /><br />Aquinas replies that the distinction between the divine persons is intrinsic to the divine nature and therefore any image worth its name should both be of the divine substance whilst maintaining the distinction of persons, even if this distinction is only representational or vestigial. Counter to the third objection we have to remember that the image of God in man is not perfect image. Following Augustine we can identify Trinitarian aspects of our own minds, but these are simply not enough for us to demonstrate the existence of the divine Trinity.<br /><br /><b>A6</b>: In the second article, Aquinas argued that it was in our intellective natures that our likeness to God becomes sufficient to be considered an image. Other creatures bear some likeness to God in that they exist or in that they are alive but this can only be considered as a vestigial image. He now asks whether it is only because of that intellective nature that we carry the image; or are there any other aspects of human beings that correspond to the image? <br /><br />Aquinas is firmly of the opinion that this image is only rooted in the intellectual nature of human beings, arguing that the way in which other creature are like God does not rise to the level of an image. In the uncreated Trinity there is a procession of the Word from Him who speaks and a procession of Love from both of these (Ia.q28.a3). In human beings this is mirrored by the coming forth of a word (expressing a concept) from the intellect and by the coming forth of love from the will. In non-human living creatures this does not happen, or rather what happens in the higher non-intellectual creatures is only a trace of what happens in humans.<br /><br /><b>A7</b>: Aquinas has firmly asserted that the image of God in man is associated exclusively with the intellect. Can more be said? Is it the mere fact that human have intellects that are capable of thinking that founds the image of God, or is it something more? Following on from the analogy established in the sixth article, Aquinas claims that the image of God in man is to be found in the intellect as it is in act; that is, as it is actually thinking. The Trinitarian structure of human thought, wherein the mind expresses a word and the will expresses with love, is found most fully when the mind is actually thinking. We can, however, say that the image of God exists in the intellect in a secondary way with regard to the habits and powers of the intellect when it is not actually in act; we can consider the acts of the soul to exist virtually in the powers of the intellect to act.<br /><br /><b>A8</b>: So far in this question Aquinas has taken the image of God in man to refer to the image of the Trinity insofar as it is reflected in the structure of the intellect in act. Perhaps it is possible that this image does not simply refer directly to God as its object. After all, the acts of our intellects that give this Trinitarian correspondence don’t simply happen when we’re thinking about God; they work whenever we’re thinking about any object whatsoever!<br /><br />To answer this Aquinas goes back to his understanding of the divine processions. The Word of God is begotten of the Father insofar as He knows himself, and Love proceeds insofar as He loves Himself. So when we look for the image of God in man we must look for acts of the intellect that mirror this mode of divine procession and which therefore imply a likeness that corresponds sufficiently close to be an image. As Aquinas puts it, we’re looking for a representation (as far as is possible in a creature) that corresponds to the species of the divine persons. When we think about things other than God, like a rock or a horse, it is clear that there is a specific difference between these objects of the intellect and between any species that might be representational of the Trinity. Therefore, the divine image in man is associated with the word that is conceived when we are thinking about God and the love that is derived from that word. We might also note that the procession of the divine persons in God is associated with a self-contemplation. So to a certain extent the same is true in the intellect of man; self-contemplation also corresponds in a way to the image of God but only insofar as this self-contemplation is leading towards God.<br /><br /><b>A9</b>: The final article in this question is dedicated to a more detailed examination of how <i>likeness</i> is distinguished from <i>image</i> when we are considering humanity made in the image and likeness of God. Aquinas has already observed that the idea of a likeness is more general than that of an image and that a likeness can be considered an image if it is sufficiently close to represent the actual species of the prototype in some sense. One might also note that the more general concept of likeness corresponds to a certain degree to the transcendental notion of unity, or of being one. Something that is the likeness of something else can be considered one with that something else in a certain sort of way. <br /><br />If we think about other transcendentals such as good, then we may identify a helpful analogy. The idea of the good can be consider under two aspects, one prior to and the other consequent from a particular individual. That is, a particular human being can be considered as a particular good (at the very least insofar as he exists) prior to consideration of any other human beings. But that individual man can be also be considered as consequently good if he is a particularly good example of his species. The same is true when we consider the concept of likeness: likeness can be considered as prior and preliminary to image and can also be considered as subsequent to image insofar as the likeness signifies a certain perfection of the image.<br /><br />This approach gives us two ways of distinguishing likeness and image. In the first instance, we can consider likeness to be preliminary to image and therefore to be found in more things. In the second way, we can consider likeness subsequent to image insofar as the image is a more vivid or perfect likeness of its prototype.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Human beings are made in the image and likeness of God.<i> Likeness</i> is a generality of resemblance that attains more precision in the notion of <i>image</i> and yet more precision in the notion of <i>perfect image</i>. The image of God in man is an image that reflects both the divine unity of substance and the blessed Trinity of persons.</li>
<li>The image of God in man is associated with man’s intellectual nature, and more specifically with the acts of the intellect. More specifically still it is in acts of the intellect that are associated with the contemplation of God that give the firmest relation to the image of God in man. </li>
<li>Although as related simply to intellectual natures, the image of God is found to a greater degree in the angels, there is a secondary sense in which man images God more perfectly than the angels.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Aquinas lays the foundation for his ideas about the image of God in man on a distinction between likeness and image. A likeness is a sort of resemblance; it is sufficient to become an image if the likeness represents the species of what is being represented. But, as is pointed out in the first article, the approach that any created likeness can make towards God is a very distant one. One might ask whether anything created can, at such a distance, really resemble God in a sufficiently close way to meet Aquinas’s criterion of image. Likewise, in the other direction one might argue that lots of things in creation show principles of unity and of tri-unity in such a way as to resemble God. Aquinas’s solution to these problems is to identify that which is unique to man in creation in resembling God; the intellect.</li>
<li>Having introduced this question as investigating the purpose or end of man’s production in the image and likeness of God, Aquinas doesn’t actually spend much time discussing this! Most of the discussion is about an understanding what it means to be in the image and likeness of God. Perhaps Aquinas’s answer to this latter question implicitly answers the former and he takes this as obvious. Man images God insofar as man has an intellectual nature contemplating God: in being made in the image of God, man turns to God in intellectual contemplation in this life and in the beatific vision in the next.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-19194018249006489152014-01-20T08:03:00.006+00:002014-01-20T08:03:59.598+00:00Question 92 – The Production of Woman.<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />After the creation of Adam, it is natural for Aquinas to turn his attention to the creation of Eve. At the most fundamental level, this question is about the role of sexual differentiation in the creation of human beings; why are there two sexes? Aquinas, of course, was writing before thought had been given to the competitive advantage offered by sexual reproduction. He frames his answers in the context of his hierarchical understanding of creation in which every part of nature has its place. Thus considered, he is seeking to understand woman’s role in creation, especially in relation to man.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: According to the Genesis creation account, God creates a man (Adam) and then He creates a woman (Eve). Aquinas asks the rather curious question: was the creation of this woman <i>fitting</i>? What he is trying to get at in asking this is an understanding of women’s role or place in that creation; we have to remember that for Aquinas everything has its place and nothing in nature is in vain. Against the objections posed, Aquinas is firm: scripture tells us that it is “not good for man to be alone”; in fulfilling the destiny of humanity, there is an essential sexual complementarity. For Aquinas this is most expressed in the role of woman in generation; a term that should not be limited in meaning to the idea of simply producing children, but in everything to do with nurturing the well-being and continuity of the species.<br /><br />After a quick scan through the hierarchy of sexual differentiation amongst living things, Aquinas concludes that the sexual differentiation of humans is ordered to an appropriate differentiation of the tasks that facilitate their highest task, which is intellectual contemplation. <br /><br />The first objection raises the biological idea of Aristotle that females are “males gone wrong”; if they are such, they would have had no place in God’s perfect creation. Briefly, the idea here is that in generation the active male principle (contained in the semen) is implanted in the passive female principle and would naturally become a male child if some power does not intervene to divert this development from its course to produce a female child. Aquinas’s answer is ingenious: he says that what happens in a <i>particular nature</i> (that in the powers and forces that bring about the development of the child, in this case the male semen) is irrelevant. What matters is that the creation of a female child is <i>ordered to the intention of nature</i>. In other words, what matters is what God intends for nature as a whole. How he brings it about is His business. <br /><br />The second objection is based on the observation of the subjection of women to the power of men. In his answer, Aquinas differentiates between two types of subjection. The first type is <i>servile subjection</i>, in which the one subjecting makes use of the one subjected for the former’s own purposes. The second is <i>civil or economic subjection</i> in which the subjection is for the good of those subjected. The first type of subjection did not exist before the fall, and should not be seen as just; the second did, and reflects the hierarchy of creation ordered to the common good. Aquinas argues that man is more naturally endowed with the power of rational discernment and therefore is ordered more fittingly to the position of power. <br /><br />The third objection is that woman provides an occasion of sin for a man and therefore it would have been unfitting for God to put such a distraction in Adam’s way in the Garden of Eden. Aquinas’s reply raises a smile: if God had removed all things from the world that man had managed to turn into occasions of sin, there really wouldn’t be much left!<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: The second question of fittingness is to try and understand why Eve is described by scripture as being made from Adam. This didn’t happen in the creation of other animals and doesn’t happen in the natural generation of any animal; why didn’t God create woman in the same way that He created man?<br /><br />Aquinas gives four reasons. In the first place, having the entire human race originate from one adds to the dignity of that one. Second, the mutual realization that Eve came from Adam would bind them together more strongly. Third, the subjection of Eve to Adam is mirrored in this relationship of origin. Fourth, such an origin provides a figure for the Church taking her origin from Christ. <br /><br /><b>A3</b>: It was fitting for Eve to be created of Adam; but why from a rib? There doesn’t seem any natural way in which a rib can be made into a woman, wouldn’t it detract from Adam’s perfection and wouldn’t it hurt?<br /><br />Aquinas identifies two reasons for why this formation was fitting. In the first place, taking a part from Adam’s body signified the intimately close union between man and women. Choosing a part, such as a rib, from the middle of the body symbolizes that neither would the woman dominate over the man nor would the man subject the women to servile subjection.<br /><br />The rib was made into a woman by a miraculous addition to the matter of the rib, not through some natural process. Losing a rib did not detract from Adam’s perfection because that rib contributed to Adam’s perfection as the source of the species rather than as an individual.<br /><br /><b>A4</b>: Eve was made from the rib of Adam, but does this imply that Eve’s creation was not directly performed by God but mediated through some other powers? Aquinas argues that the only method of natural generation of a human being is though generation from the matter involved in the male or female seed. Therefore to bring about Eve’s creation from a different form of matter involves direct divine intervention.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br /><ul>
<li>Irrespective of the process by which woman is generated her position is ordered towards the fulfilment of nature and is therefore of equal dignity to that of man.</li>
<li>Man and women are sexually differentiated in order to share out the necessary tasks that facilitate intellectual contemplation.</li>
<li>Eve was created from the rib of Adam by direct divine intervention.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br /><ul>
<li>Aquinas’s views on women are sometimes misunderstood, in particular misreading his answer to the first objection of the first article as supporting the view that women are formed inadvertently. Aquinas is not concerned at all with the physical biology of reproduction, but with the metaphysical place of woman in creation: the former is irrelevant, the latter is what matters.</li>
<li>This is a question in which close attention to the Latin text is useful. In particular, one must pay careful attention to where the words <i>homo</i> and <i>vir</i> are used: <i>vir</i> means a male person, <i>homo</i> can mean a male person but is often used to simply denote a person of either sex. Indeed,<i> homo</i> and its derivatives can be used to denote humanity in general. So in Genesis 2:18 where we are told that it is “not good that man for man to be alone”, the Latin word used derives from <i>homo</i>, suggesting that we are being told that it is not simply the particular human being Adam that needs a partner, but that companionship is fundamental to humanity. Similarly, in the first article, we are told that <i>humans</i> are ordered towards intellectual contemplation.</li>
<li>In answering the second objection to the first article Aquinas claims that woman is naturally civilly subject to man because the discernment of reason naturally abounds more in man. The underlying idea being that, before the fall, the rational hierarchical governance of humanity is the form of governance that will promote the common good most effectively; and therefore the more rational should be in charge. Unfortunately Aquinas leaves his answer at this level of generality but with the little coda recognizing that there are differences between individuals (even before the fall). He does not address how the relationship of subjection might be modified between an individual man and an individual woman by the variation of powers of rationality between individuals. After all, Aquinas would have been well aware of the effective rule of some queens! </li>
<li>Aquinas describes the notion of civil subjection tersely. One must be careful reading him not to impose modern notions of subjection on his implicit scheme.</li>
</ul>
Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-5300682642040384732014-01-12T09:46:00.002+00:002014-01-12T09:46:40.420+00:00Question 91 – The Production of the First Man’s Body. <b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />Aquinas has treated of the creation of the human soul in Ia.q90. Now it is the turn of the human body. Was the first human body created <i>ex nihilo</i> or was it formed out of pre-existing matter; and did God form this body immediately or through some form of mediation?<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: According to (the Vulgate version of) Genesis 2:7, God made man from the “slime of the earth”; in other words, man’s body was formed out of pre-existing matter rather than <i>ex nihilo</i>. One might have thought it more appropriate for the body of man to be created entirely <i>ex nihilo</i>, like his soul, given his central place in creation, but Aquinas argues against this.<br /><br />He argues that man’s perfection derives from his particular place in the hierarchy of creation; within man is, in a certain sense, a composition of all things in that creation. Man has within himself a rational soul from the genus of immaterial subsistent beings; he is uniquely balanced in his constitution; he is bodily, made out of matter. Humans are a sort of “miniature world” and it is in this that they have their perfection. Therefore it is perfectly fitting that they are formed from the slime of the earth.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: We have seen in the previous question that God creates each human soul immediately <i>ex nihilo</i>. In contrast, the first article of this question argued that the human body is created out pre-existent matter. Is it also true that the creation of the body is mediated in some way or is the actual formation of the human body like that of the soul, performed immediately by God? The bulk of the objections to this article focus on the fact that if something can come to be through created causes (that themselves, of course, come to be by God’s primary causality) then there is no need to posit immediate formation by God.<br /><br />Aquinas answers that the very first human body had to be made immediately by God as the appropriate previous material principles were not present in order to make such a body through created causes. Once the first human body was created it provides the material principle for the formation of further such bodies.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: When we look at human beings in comparison to the rest of the animal kingdom we note that other animals possess attributes or tools that would come in very handy if we possessed them too. If man is at the pinnacle of the animal kingdom, can we really therefore say that the human body is appropriately constituted for such a position?<br /><br />The key to the answer is that something is made as best as it can be made with respect to the end intended for it. There really is no point in making the furriest, fluffiest hammer as this really doesn’t help a hammer to be a good hammer. In the case of the human body, its proximate end is to receive a rational soul, and to that end it is appropriately constituted. One might object that this does not answer the question of why we might not have better version of what we already possess: for example, wouldn’t having a better sense of sight be an unqualified advantage? Aquinas replies that we must take into account the balance of the constitution of any animal; in humans this balance is set to achieve what humans are designed to achieve.<br /><br />The reply to the third objection to this article contains an amusing discussion about why it is appropriate that human beings have an upright stature.<br /><br /><b>A4</b>: This final article, on the description of the production of man by scripture, takes the unusual form of a set of objections simply followed by answers, without any formal central reply. It’s simply a collection of miscellaneous questions with no great uniting theme. The reply to the second of these objections associates Aquinas with the Trinitarian interpretation of the plurality contained in the phrase “let us make man” of Genesis 1:26. The other objections and their replies are straightforward.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Whereas all human souls are created ex nihilo by God, the first human body was formed out of pre-existing matter. The very first human bodies were formed immediately by God, but subsequent bodies come to be by material principles.</li>
<li>The attributes that human bodies possess are appropriate to the end that human beings are oriented towards.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>In the second article Aquinas appears to be arguing that the very first human body has to have been created immediately by God as it is the very first exemplar of its kind and could not have been formed out of pre-existing objects by created causes. There is similar to the idea that like must create like and anything entirely new must be newly created by God. At this point one must naturally wonder what Aquinas would have made of the material part of the concept of evolution; of new forms of living being coming to be out of old forms.</li>
<li>In the third article, Aquinas’s argument that the balance of our constitution would be put out of kilter by an excessive ability in, for example, the senses, seems to require more justification. Perhaps things like a thick hide or excessive fur might be seen as incompatible with human ends, but this reasoning doesn’t seem to apply to all bodily attributes.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-51692824082182747762014-01-12T09:26:00.003+00:002014-01-12T09:26:38.781+00:00Question 90 – The Production of Man with Respect to his Soul. <b>Preamble</b><br /><br />Although Aquinas’s <i>Treatise on Human Nature</i> extends from question 75 through to question 102, one often finds commentaries on this treatise curtailed at question 89. This marks what might be seen as a boundary between Aquinas’s “philosophical” treatment of man and his scriptural or theological treatment. Modern tastes might see the first part of the treatise as having more lasting importance that the second, but Aquinas probably thought of this first part as preparatory for the second part. Such neglect of the second part is regrettable since even if one were to disagree with the conclusion of the master, one would be very foolish to neglect his method. <br /><br />Aquinas breaks this section of the treatise into four parts. In the first three questions, Ia.q90-2 he considers the origins of human beings, in Ia.q93 he considers the goal of the production of humans, in Ia.q94-101 he will consider their status and condition when they were first produced and in Ia.q102 he will consider their location when they were first produced.<br /><br /><br /><b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />As the human being is a composition of body and soul as form and matter, the first line of enquiry that Aquinas takes about the coming to be of humans is to ask about the origin of the soul. He will turn to the production of the body in the next question and will pay particular attention to the initial production of woman in the question after that.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: The first article deals with the question of whether the human soul originates as part of God’s substance; one might read Genesis 2:7, wherein God breathes life into Adam, as supporting this point of view. But as Aquinas points out, this is a claim that is, on the face of it, implausible. At the very least one must observe that the human soul is in potentiality with respect to certain things; something that is not true of God’s substance. Clearly Aquinas, in raising this strange idea, is dealing with an opinion current in his day and wishes to squash it with no further ado.<br /><br />Aquinas identifies the erroneous opinion as arising from two ancient positions. Firstly those who considered that all things in the world are bodies would naturally be drawn to an opinion that the soul must be a body that is derived from the body of God. Secondly, those who realised that immaterial substance exists but did not progress beyond the idea that the form of God provided the form of everything (a sort of <i>world soul</i>) would also hold this opinion. The discussion of Ia.q3 demolished these positions and therefore such an idea of the origin of the human soul vanishes as well.<br /><br />In the reply to the first objection, one should note Aquinas interpreting the breathing of Adam’s soul as figurative language for the production of the soul. <br /><br /><b>A2</b>: When we think about a material object we can think of the object in terms of various compositions: matter and form, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence. For such an object we think of its potentiality in terms of the matter out of which it is made and of its actuality in terms of the form that makes it what it is. Similarly we can think of the form of the object as that which gives being to the object. If we turn to something like the human soul, then we might be tempted to transfer this reasoning without change and think of the human soul as being made out of some sort of spiritual matter, made to be what it is by a spiritual form suited to such spiritual matter. This latter theory, often associated with figures such as St. Bonaventure, is rejected by Aquinas. As we have seen in Ia.q75 & q76, Aquinas considers the human soul to be a subsistent form that informs the human body; the composition of actuality and potentiality in the soul is not a composite of matter and form, rather the soul is a form that informs the body. A subsistent form is not made of anything; it either subsists entirely on its own (in the case of the angels) or it is what makes something what it is (in the case of the human being).<br /><br />So whereas we can rightly think of material objects coming to be by being made out of something that previously exists, we cannot transfer this reasoning to immaterial subsistent forms such as the soul. Such forms have to be created out of nothing. Something material comes to be by its form being received into an already existing material object that is in potentiality to receive the new form. This cannot happen for the human soul (and for angels); there simply is nothing pre-existing to receive anything.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: One might ask whether the human soul is created directly by God or whether some form of intermediation occurs. The human soul lies at the lowest point of the hierarchy of immaterial being and therefore one might think that the beings higher up the hierarchy bear some of the labour of creation.<br /><br />Aquinas rejects this as contrary to the faith: God alone is able to create <i>ex nihilo</i>. If angels were involved as intermediaries in the creation of the human soul then they would be making the soul out of something received from higher in the hierarchy. This would no longer be a genuine creation but a making out of something pre-existing. <br /><br /><b>A4</b>: Was the soul of Adam created before his body and are the souls of subsequent human beings created before their corresponding bodies? Throughout history, there have been those that claim the soul is created first and then fitted into its body. Most famously Origen held this view, believing souls to be metaphysically complete in themselves and then subsequently tied to human bodies. As Aquinas points out, even St. Augustine can be interpreted as supporting some form of this view.<br /><br />Aquinas argues that God “instituted the first things in a state of natural perfection” and that as the soul is naturally the form of the body then the soul is not created before, and in isolation from, the body. He handles the obvious objection, that the soul is subsistent and remains in being after the death of the body, by observing that the death of the body is a defect of the body, a defect that is not supposed to exist when the soul is created.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>The human soul is created immediately by God out of nothing.</li>
<li>The human soul does not pre-exist the body as this would create the soul in a state lacking its natural perfection.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>In the fourth article, Aquinas puts a lot of weight on the principle that God creates things in a natural state of perfection and that the soul, although subsistent in its own right, requires a body to be in such a state of perfection. The state of the soul after death and before the general resurrection is in a strange state of tension; naturally able to subsist, but in a state not natural to it. </li>
<li>The fourth article argues that the soul does not pre-exist the body, but does not touch upon the question of whether the body pre-exists the soul! Aquinas took the view that matter could only receive a form if it was in a state suitable to that reception. On the basis of the biological understanding of that period, such a reception would not occur at the point of biological conception; instead there would be a succession of vegetative, animative and finally rational souls in the development of the embryo. Modern biological understanding has shown that the developmental course is set as soon as the embryo’s DNA is established; put in medieval terms, such a newly conceived embryo can be receptive of its rational form even if many of its powers are obstructed until bodily development proceeds. The Church has never given a doctrinal definition of the point at which the human soul is infused, but most modern Christian philosophers would now argue that it is at the point of biological conception.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-43715665522429309402014-01-05T13:17:00.002+00:002014-01-05T13:18:16.214+00:00Question 89 – A Separated Soul’s Cognition.<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />So far in the <i>Treatise on Human Nature</i>, Aquinas has been almost exclusively concerned with the operations of the soul whilst it is joined with the body during its earthly existence. We saw, however, that the soul is a subsistent form (Ia.q75.a2) capable of existing separate from the body. This fact raises some obvious questions about what the soul can understand when it is separated from the body. In such a state are there any cognitive operations at all, or does the soul enter some form of suspended animation? If it can have some sort of cognitive understanding, then what sort? What might the objects of such a <i>post-mortem</i> understanding be; can the separated soul gain new knowledge or is it restricted to reflection upon what it learned on earth? What of its knowledge of what is going on amongst those people and things that the soul left behind at death? This question is entirely dedicated to a consideration of questions of this sort.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: Once the soul is separated from the body, the soul no longer has available to it any of the bodily organs associated with cognition; all that is left is the immaterial intellect. Can such a separated soul continue to have intellectual cognition? Certainly nothing new is coming in via sense organs, as they are bodily and no longer available to the separated soul. Even worse, there is no longer the power of the imagination available to the intellect, so the agent intellect can no longer shine a light on any phantasms in order to abstract<i> quiddity</i>. There may, of course, be the possibility of a supernatural form of cognition granted by a gift of grace; but if we are simply thinking in terms of the possible natural cognition available to the separated soul, then it is hard to see how this can function after death. The <i>sed contra</i> presents a perplexing counter-argument: one of the distinguishing aspects of the human soul is that it can exist separated from the body; it is a subsistent form. As a subsistent form it must have its own proper operations that do not depend on the separated body; surely therefore, the intellect must be able to operate once the body is gone because intellectual cognition is proper to the soul.<br /><br />Aquinas agrees that this is perplexing but goes on to argue that the soul has two modes of understanding. The first mode of understanding occurs when the soul is united with the body and consists in the abstraction of form from material objects via the illumination of phantasms by the agent intellect. This first mode of understanding should be considered as the natural mode of understanding for a soul because it is natural for a soul to be united with a body. But still, a soul can subsist independent of a body; corresponding to this second state of being, there is a second operation of the intellect, a different mode of understanding. The first mode of understanding corresponds to the cognition of intelligible species after they are abstracted from their material being; the second mode of understanding is ordered to the cognition of those things that are intelligible absolutely speaking. That is, of those forms that do not have to be abstracted from a material mode of being.<br /><br />Unfortunately this argument leaves Aquinas with an awkward question to answer. If the human soul is capable of a mode of understanding that does not require the abstraction of form from phantasms, why bother with a mode of understanding that does when the soul is united with the body? To deal with this Aquinas appeals to the hierarchy of intellectual being. Beings higher up the hierarchy understand things in more generality through simpler forms; beings lower in the hierarchy understand in more particularity through a larger number of more specific forms. It requires a stronger intellect to receive perfect cognition through simpler forms, so an intellect lower in the hierarchy, and therefore weaker, would receive a less perfect cognition if it were required to receive that cognition through simpler forms. As the human intellect lies at the bottom of the hierarchy of intellectual being, it is natural to it to receive the most specific of forms; that is, forms abstracted from material being.<br /><br />In the reply to the third objection Aquinas makes an important clarification. The separated soul no longer has cognition through the abstraction of forms from material being, nor does it have cognition solely through the forms that are retained in the passive intellect from the time of its bodily existence. Its new mode of understanding is like that of the other separated immaterial substances, coming from a participation in the divine light of God. In this mode of understanding it is turned towards higher things. One might be inclined to say that the soul’s first mode of understanding is natural and that the second is supernatural; but this would be a mistake. The soul, although naturally united to the body, also has a natural mode of existence separate from the body; likewise the corresponding second mode of understanding is itself natural to the soul.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: We’ve seen that the separated soul has a secondary mode of understanding beyond the normal mode that operates when the soul is united to the body. The next series of questions to address must concern what the soul understands through the natural operation of this secondary mode. Does it, for example, have an intellective understanding of other separated immaterial substances?<br /><br />When united to the body the soul has an understanding of itself only insofar as it is in act (Ia.q87.a1); when separated from the body it obtains understanding not from a turning towards phantasms but by turning towards things that are intelligible in their own right. Therefore, in such a mode of understanding, the soul understands itself through itself. We can generalize this observation to see how the soul in this mode of understanding has cognition of immaterial separated substances. Separated intellectual substances have an understanding of other separated substances in a mode in accordance with their own substance. Therefore a separated soul has perfect cognition of other separated souls; these being at the same level of the hierarchy of intellectual being as the soul. It has a less perfect and indistinct understanding of intellectual beings, such as angels, that are higher in the hierarchy.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: We recall that angels have a perfect cognition of natural things through species received from the divine light (Ia.q55). As the separated human soul looks a little bit like an angel, albeit lower in the hierarchy of immaterial intellectual being, perhaps we can say that the separated human soul has cognition of all natural things. This is true to a certain extent according to Aquinas, who will steer a middle course between the objections and the multiple counterarguments in the <i>sed contra</i>. Following the pattern established in the second article of this question, separated souls do have cognition of all natural things, but it is a general and indistinct cognition befitting the position of the soul in the hierarchy of being.<br /><br /><b>A4</b>: We saw in Ia.q86.a1 that the human soul united with its body does not have cognition of singulars. Does the situation change when the soul is separated from the body? At first sight, as the objections point out, it would seem not. After all, the only cognitive power that remains in the separated soul is the intellect and it’s the same intellect that was present when united with the body. Similarly, we’ve seen above that the separated soul only has a general and indistinct cognition of natural things; therefore it surely cannot understand singulars. On the other hand, the intellect of the separated soul receives species directly from divine illumination; surely it must be up to God to determine what the separated intellect can conceive.<br /><br />Aquinas treads a middle ground. The separated soul has cognition of some singulars but not all. To argue this point, Aquinas reminds us of the two modes of intellective understanding: the first is through abstraction of form from phantasms; the second is through an influx of forms directly from God in divine illumination. It is indeed through this latter mode of understanding that the human soul can understand singulars. We saw in Ia.q14 that God has cognition of all things, universal and singular, through His essence. He infuses knowledge of singulars and universals as He pleases into the angels, therefore He is able to do the same for the separated human soul.<br /><br />Separated human souls are not as well off as the angels, though, in this regard. Although angels can have perfect and proper cognition of things, the separated soul is constrained by its mode of being. It is restricted to a cognition of certain singulars that have a particular relationship to the soul: those previously understood; those with an affective tie; those determined by a natural or by a divine ordination.<br /><br /><b>A5</b>: This article and the next form a pair. Aquinas is concerned with the question of whether scientific knowledge (that is, demonstrative knowledge and reasoning) gained during an earthly life is retained after the soul is separated from the body by death. The second objection to the sixth article generalizes from scientific knowledge to any knowledge at all: “…there is no way in which a separated soul will be able to have an act of intellective understanding through intelligible species acquired here”. In this article, Aquinas asks whether the habit of scientific knowledge gained during the earthly life remains in the separated soul; in the next article he will ask the corresponding question about the act of scientific knowledge. If we recall the difference between habit and act then we will understand that in this article he is asking whether the expertize to reason scientifically is retained and in the next whether an actual act of scientific reasoning can occur, based on knowledge gained during the bodily existence of the soul.<br /><br />The way that the intellect acquires habits of scientific understanding involves repeated acts of the intellect turning towards phantasms produced by the imagination; so the habit of scientific knowledge involves a habitual component that is proper to the passive intellect but also an aptitude within the sentient powers for working with the intellect, facilitating the act of scientific understanding. Of course, when the soul is separated from the body, this latter sentient aptitude is no longer present, but the habitual power within the passive intellect is. Aquinas supplies a small coda to his reply to answer those who might argue that the forms present in the intellect might be destroyed at the separation of soul from body; he argues that the mechanisms by which such destruction might occur simply do not apply in this situation.<br /><br /><b>A6</b>: Having seen in the fifth article that the intellectual component of the habit of scientific knowledge remains in the separated soul after death, we must now ask whether this habit can be brought to an actual act of scientific knowledge. After all, the act of scientific knowledge in this life depends upon an interaction between the immaterial intellective powers of the soul and the material sentient powers. The latter are simply not present after death and so it is quite conceivable that such habitual knowledge remains dormant until the general resurrection!<br /><br />Having set up the machinery of two different modes of understanding for the intellect in the articles above, it is not surprising that Aquinas turns to this in answer to this article. The intellect no longer turns to the retained species using phantasms of the imagination, rather it understands them in the light of divine illumination; that is, in the mode appropriate to the separated soul.<br /><br /><b>A7</b>: When the soul is united with the body during our earthly existence we depend on our senses to gather information about material being. In these circumstances, spatial separation between our senses and a putative object of cognition impedes our coming to an understanding of that object. This remains true even in this age of tremendous technological advances in remote sensing; if the equipment is turned off or pointed in the wrong direction, we will know nothing of the remote object!<br /><br />Does the same remain true when the soul is separated from the body? Aquinas claims that the situation here is quite different from that of our bodily existence. The separated soul has intellective understanding of singulars through an influx of divine light; the divine light is not subject to the restrictions of distance in the way that physical light is. Therefore spatial distance simply does not impede the cognition of the separated soul.<br /><br /><b>A8</b>: One of the questions of perennial interest to people of many faiths concerns the relationship between the souls of the departed and those who remain in the land of the living. The Christian scriptures give answers that can be interpreted in multiple ways and it not clear that they unambiguously answer the question of whether, through the normal course of affairs, the souls of the dead have knowledge of what is happening amongst the living. Perhaps they do, but maybe their attention is fully turned to higher things and they only gather such knowledge when new separated souls arrive to join them or if God has some particular reason for enlightening them.<br /><br />If we look at Aquinas’s understanding of the operation of the intellect after death, then this too is open to answers either way. On the one hand, the soul can no longer abstract new knowledge from phantasms derived from the senses; but on the other hand, as the soul is illumined by the divine light it is perfectly possible that this includes illumination about what is happening on earth. Perhaps the illumination includes information about those specifically related or involved with the separated soul whilst in earth. Aquinas turns to Gregory the Great and to Augustine to see if the opinion of the Fathers can offer direction on this question. Gregory seems confident that the souls of those in heaven do look down upon those on earth; but Aquinas argues with his reasoning. Augustine disagrees, though states that his opinion is precisely an opinion and others may wish to disagree. <br /><br />At the last Aquinas leaves a definite answer to this question open, but the structure of his answer and the replies to the objection suggest that he favours the opinion that, in the normal course of affairs, separated souls have their attention turned to higher things and that they have knowledge of earthly affairs only through God’s ordination through the divine light.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br /><ul>
<li>The human soul has two modes of intellective understanding. When united with the body, the first mode of intellection occurs through the abstraction of forms from the phantasms provided by the senses. When separated from the body, the second mode of intellective understanding occurs in which divine illumination replaces the absent senses.</li>
<li>Through the second mode of intellective understanding the separated soul can have a direct intellective understanding of other separated immaterial substances. The perfection of this understanding depends upon the level of the object of intellection in the hierarchy of intellective being. So, the separated soul can have a perfect understanding of other separated souls, but its understanding of beings higher in the hierarchy is indistinct.</li>
<li>In the condition of separation from the body, the soul can have a general and indistinct cognition of all natural things and it can have a precise understanding of certain types of singular.</li>
<li>The habit and act of scientific intellection remain in the human soul after separation from the body insofar as these are particular to the immaterial intellect. The act of scientific knowledge can occur by means of the divine light.</li>
<li>The question of whether separated souls have knowledge of what is going on back on earth seems open to alternative opinions.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br /><ul>
<li>Although Aquinas does not explicitly say it in the first article, it would seem that a natural consequence of his argument is that the secondary mode of intellectual understanding available to the separated soul by necessity results in a less perfect and more indistinct cognition than that resulting from the primary mode. Although the blessed in heaven are in receipt of a perfection of their natures by supernatural means, their intellects remain human intellects restricted by their natures.</li>
<li>Aquinas talks of the separated soul as having a general and indistinct cognition of things through the species received by divine light; but he doesn’t elaborate what this actually means.</li>
<li>The second mode of intellective understanding operates after the separation of the soul from its body; but can it, and does it ever, operate whilst in this earthly life?</li>
<li>One might be concerned that Aquinas’s theory of the cognition of separated souls is in some ways arbitrary; designed to fit into his understanding of the hierarchy of intellectual being rather than being based on philosophical argument. But, as with his angelology, the data that he has to work with are sparse. Human cognition in this life is restricted to the abstraction of material forms from material beings and from what can be deduced from that. Our knowledge of cognition in the afterlife is only hinted at in the sources of revelation.</li>
</ul>
Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-18671334720532608272014-01-05T07:50:00.003+00:002014-01-05T07:50:51.661+00:00Question 88 – How the Human Soul Understands Those Things Above it. <b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />We have some sort of understanding of the immaterial: on the one hand we understand material objects though the abstraction of immaterial forms from the phantasms produced by the senses; on the other hand, we can prove with certainty that God (who is most definitely immaterial) exists. In this question Aquinas asks for more precision about our knowledge of the immaterial. In particular, if we think about separated immaterial substances (such as angels), can we have a direct cognition of them through themselves; that is, can we perceive them directly as immaterial? Or is it rather the case that our understanding of the immaterial is necessarily indirect?<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: According to Aquinas’s account, Plato’s theory of forms implies that the very first things of which we have intellective understanding are precisely the immaterial subsistent forms that provide the paradigms for all material things. On the contrary, Aristotle teaches that we arrive at an intellective understanding of the forms of material objects by abstraction from the phantasms that our sensory powers produce from what is received in the sense organs. Aquinas favours this view of Aristotle’s by which our primary mode of cognition involves such abstraction of material forms from the phantasms of material objects. Accordingly, we simply do not have direct access to knowledge of immaterial substances such as forms through themselves.<br /><br />Aquinas is not satisfied by leaving the answer at this point. At the time he was writing other theories concerning the operation of the intellect were circulating; in particular, Averroes’s theory of the separated agent intellect. Given that Aquinas understands our intellect as abstracting the immaterial from the material, he appears to take Averroes’s theory as being the only candidate to posit the direct understanding of something immaterial through itself. For in this theory Averroes advances the idea that the agent intellect is itself an immaterial separated substance on the same level, so to speak, as other immaterial substances. Therefore it is natural to the agent intellect, thus understood, to have intellective understanding of immaterial substances. We then derive our understanding of immaterial substances through the union of the agent intellect with us.<br /><br />Aquinas then goes on to describe Averroes’s mechanism for the union of the agent intellect with us. In this theory, the relationship of the agent intellect to the intelligible object (that is, of a material object) either has to be a relationship of a principal agent to its instruments or a relationship of matter to form. These might be better seen through analogy. If we think of the action of understanding something intelligible in analogy to the act of cutting something, then the agent intellect directs the intelligible in a way similar to the craftsman directing his instrument, the saw. Similarly if we think of the act of understanding in analogy to the action of heating where the form of heat informs its subject, the fire, then we see the agent intellect informing the intelligible object in making it actually intelligible. Either way, agent/instrument or matter/form, there is an actualization of potentiality in the reception of the intelligible in the passive intellect and it is in this actualization that the union of active intellect with us occurs. What is more, this union becomes stronger as more is received in the passive intellect, so that the perfect happiness of the human being lies in receiving all intelligible objects in the passive intellect. This union being complete, the active intellect’s direct understanding of separated immaterial objects comes with it.<br /><br />Aquinas attacks this theory with six counter-arguments. The first two of these arguments return to an earlier theme: such an account where the passive and the active intellects are not considered powers of a soul that is the form of the body leads to a situation where it is not actually the human being that understands but something separated that understands for us. The second pair of counter arguments focus on the need to have received all material intelligible species before such a union is obtained. On the one hand, it seems that receiving the intelligible content of all material objects does not exhaust the capacity of the agent intellect (as it can understand the immaterial) and therefore it seems artificial to posit perfect union on only the reception of the material. On the other hand it seems rather harsh to say that humans can only attain happiness by knowing the all material intelligibles! Similarly, in the fifth counter-argument, this idea of human happiness as the possession of all material knowledge is hard to square with Aristotle’s attachment to the importance of the speculative contemplation of the immaterial as being foundational to human happiness. Finally, of course, according to Aquinas, the active and the passive intellects are powers of the soul ordered to the abstraction of the immaterial from the material.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: At this point we might be slightly puzzled by the progress of this question. Aquinas, by insisting that our cognitive abilities are ordered to the abstraction of form from material being, appears to be affirming that we have a certain sort of grasp on the immaterial but at the same time that we have no direct understanding of immaterial substances through themselves. After all, we have already seen that the human soul understands itself through its own act; and going right back to the beginning of the <i>summa</i>, we know that we can arrive at some knowledge of God by inference from His effects.<br /><br />In this article, Aquinas clarifies exactly what he is arguing for. In his answer, he acknowledges that the process of abstraction from material being leads to cognition of the immaterial <i>quiddity</i> of material objects; but his concern here is with <i>separated</i> immaterial substances. Such a substance (an example of which is an angel) has a nature that is entirely different from the abstracted <i>quiddity</i> of a material object; they are simply different types of thing. Therefore there is no contradiction in claiming that we can have cognition of the immaterial <i>quiddity</i> of things whilst at the same time denying that we cannot have direct cognition of separated immaterial substances. We can know that God is, by using the arguments of Ia.q2.a3, but we do not know what God is by those arguments. We can know that angels exist, as they are revealed to us; but again, we do not know their <i>quiddity</i> from our cognitive apparatus.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: As if to amplify the point made in the previous article, Aquinas turns to our knowledge of God. As God is ontologically prior to everything, we might be inclined to think that He must be the first thing that we have cognition of. But this is simply not true; our cognitive faculties are ordered to the abstraction of <i>quiddity</i> from material objects, we have no cognition of created immaterial substances and therefore, <i>a fortiori</i>, we can have no direct cognition of God. What we know of God, apart from revelation, is inferred from His creation.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>As the intellect understands things through the abstraction of material forms from the phantasms of material objects provided by the imagination, we have no direct access to an understanding of separated immaterial substance. We have to distinguish between the immaterial forms abstracted from material reality (which we can understand) and separated immaterial substances (which we cannot).</li>
<li>Our knowledge of God, the separated immaterial substance <i>par excellence</i>, is inferred indirectly from His effects in creation. Likewise, were we not to know about angels from the sources of revelation, or through their acts of power in the material world, we would simply not know about them.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-20464105658056572242013-11-10T10:57:00.000+00:002013-11-10T10:57:08.829+00:00Question 87 – How our Intellect Knows Itself and What Exists Within it.<br />
<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br />
<br />
It’s clear that we have an understanding of ourselves understanding something. But how does this type of understanding come about and what exactly is it an understanding of? When we’re not thinking, but staring vacantly into the middle distance, what do we know of ourselves?<br /><br />This question might be seen as a coda to Ia.q85, considering the intellective cognition of intellective cognition. <br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: Aquinas’s first task is to enquire into whether the intellect understands itself through its own essence. Our first task is, perhaps, to understand what this question actually means! <br /><br />We’ve seen that the intellect understands a material thing by a process of abstracting universal intelligible species from phantasms of the thing constructed by the sensory powers. The problem is that if the intellect is to understand itself, then it has to understand something that is immaterial. So we recall that the human intellect is an immaterial substance that is in potentiality to receive intelligible species. The actuality of its understanding (that is, when it actually understands something) is the very act of moving from potentiality to actuality in the reception of an intelligible species. So really all that the intellect can work with in understanding itself is its essence (in other words, what it is fundamentally, defined by its form) or its potentiality (that is, its ability to understand things) or its actuality (that is, what it understands in accumulating accidental intelligible forms). Which one is it?<br /><br />The key to Aquinas’s approach to this question is the assertion that a substance bears the same relationship to being intelligible through its essence that it bears to being actual through its essence. In the case of material things this principle is clear: we can only have cognition of something insofar as it is actual; that is, insofar as its form is actualized. Aquinas carries this principle over to the immaterial.<br /><br />Next he goes runs through some exemplar essences. God’s essence is perfect actuality, perfectly intelligible in itself; therefore God has perfect intellective understanding of all things, including Himself, through His essence. Angels are a little bit further down the scale of being. They have cognition of themselves through their essences, but they do not understand everything thereby; cognition of things other than the angel himself is supplied through impressed intelligible species supplied directly by God at the creation of the angel. When we get down to the level of humans we realize that the potentiality of the passive intellect to receive intelligible species parallels the ability of prime matter to receive form. So, considered in its essence, the human intellect only has intellective understanding in potentiality. Applying the principle that was outlined above, we deduce that the human intellect can only be understood intellectively in its act; that is, as it is actually understanding something. It is through its act that the human intellect understands itself, not through its essence.<br /><br />Aquinas goes on to identify two ways in which we have cognition of intellect. The first way, which he calls a <i>particular</i> way, occurs when any particular individual perceives himself to be having an intellective understanding. This happens when the act of the mind is in a way <i>present</i> to the person having the cognition and is an experience and knowledge available individually to anybody. On the other hand, there is a more <i>general</i> way in which we understand the mind’s cognition that is obtained through lengthy and diligent enquiry. This is the way in which we understand what is actually going on in the act of understanding; to understand this we have to discern the nature of the soul, understanding the derivation of our intellect’s light from God’s truth.<br /><br />The third objection, derived from Aristotle’s <i>de anima</i>, argues that in the understanding of immaterial things, the intellect and what is understood are the same. In other words, what is impressed on the passive intellect is the form of the thing understood, which just is the thing understood. Therefore the intellect must understand itself (being immaterial) though its own essence. One might at this point worry about infinite regress (the form of the intellect being impressed in the intellect as understanding itself) but Aquinas takes the line that Aristotle is being misunderstood in the objection. Aristotle’s dictum applies differently in those things that exist entirely without matter (separated substances like angels) to those forms that exist in matter (like the soul). For forms that exist in matter, the intelligible species that exists in the intellect is a likeness of the actual material thing through which it is understood and is not identical to it. The objection would stand if we were talking about angels having cognition of their own understanding.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: A very important part of being human is our ability to accumulate expertize. Through years of training one might become a concert pianist, or a mathematician, or a linguist, or simply a virtuous person. Expertize seems to be present in us as a sort of stable disposition; in the absence of trauma, the expert does not simply lose expertize overnight. This type of stable disposition Aquinas calls <i>habitus</i> which is often translated as “habit”, although one must be aware that the modern use of the word is somewhat different to that used by Aquinas. It is a very important concept that he will turn to throughout the <i>summa</i>. Here he asks about how we have cognition of the soul’s habits; is this cognition through their essence?<br /><br />If one thinks about the ability (in a non-native French speaker) to speak French, then one might recognize a number of stages in the development of that skill (or habit). One would at least recognize a period when the language is being learned, perhaps a period when knowledge of the language was being cemented and a period in which the speaker has become habitually as good as a native speaker. In terms of moving between potentiality and actuality one would also recognize that the absolute beginner has a potentiality to learn the language that becomes an actuality as an ability to speak the language that is itself in turn a potentiality to be actually speaking the language right now. <br /><br />So, as Aquinas says, a habit lies somewhere between being a pure potentiality (the ability to learn it) and a pure actuality (actually speaking it right now). But we recall from above (Ia.q87.a1) that nothing is understood unless it is actual; so a habit is only knowable insofar as it is actual. So we have two ways in which we have intellectual cognition of a habit. In the first way we have cognition of it as we are actually producing the act proper to the habit (actually speaking French right now). The second way parallels the second way in which we saw how the mind understands itself; though diligent enquiry into the way that habits work.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: The first two articles of this question have shown us that we have cognition of our intellect and of its habits by means of its acts rather than through essences. But there would seem to be problems with this conclusion: the object of cognition would seem to be an external thing understood in its <i>quiddity</i>, rather than the actual act by which we have cognition of it. Again, if there is cognition of something, and we have cognition of that act of cognition then we must also have cognition of this latter act and so on to infinity. Third, shouldn’t we really recognize that there’s something analogous to the common sensory power lurking behind the intellect; the things that is actually the “I” having the cognition of cognition?<br /><br />Following the pattern used in the first article, Aquinas runs through the examples of the cognition of God and of the angels before considering the cognition of human beings. What he is concerned with here is the different ways in which we should understand that the first thing to be understood about an intellect is its act of intellective understanding. When we consider the intellect of human beings we recognize that there’s a sort of trinity of things going on in an act of cognition. First of all there is the act of cognition of the external object itself, but simultaneously there is cognition of the act of this first cognition. We’re not finished yet: in these two modes of cognition there is cognition of the intellect itself, because the intellect, brought to its fullest level of actuality, precisely is the act of intellectual understanding.<br /><br />Aquinas points to a too narrow understanding of the object of the intellect as being the root of the problem with the first objection. The actual object of the intellect is being and truth; and it’s clear that the act of intellective understanding falls under these as object of cognition. The second objection falls by recognizing that we could have an infinite regress of acts of cognition, but it is a potential infinity rather than an actual infinity. In an act of cognition of an external thing, the two different things cognized (the external thing itself and the cognition of that thing) are different. A further reflection on the act of cognition, presumably initiated by the will, would be required for cognition of the act of cognition. This we can do until we have had enough, but we would get bored long before we reached infinity. Aquinas answers the third objection by pointing out that the parallel between the senses and the intellect fails because the senses involve the use of material organs; intellectual cognition is immaterial and therefore there is no need to posit something behind the intellect.<br /><br /><b>A4</b>: What about acts of the will? Do we have an intellective understanding of these? After all, it would seem that the will lies outside the scope of objects of the intellect. Aquinas points out that an act of the will is an inclination that follows upon a form that has been understood. He uses three examples to illustrate the different modes in which inclinations can exist. The form corresponding to the weight of an object inclines that object to move in a certain direction in a gravitational field, and we say that this inclination is natural to it. The form corresponding to a bowl of ripe strawberries inclines the sentient appetite to make a beeline for the cream and a spoon; the sentient desire exists in the sentient faculty. Likewise the intellectual cognition that the strawberries appear to be rather unripe leads to an act of the will to put a bit of sugar on them; this inclination exists intelligibly. So Aquinas concludes, following Aristotle, that there is a mode in which we can consider the various inclinations to exist in their corresponding faculties. So the act of willing, existing in the intellect, can be perceived in two ways: in a perception of willing something in general; but also in a perception of the nature of what is being willed.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>The intellect has cognition of itself through its act rather than through its essence. Likewise, we have intellectual cognition of our habitual abilities through their act.</li>
<li>Acts of the will exists in some sense in the intellect, as it is at the very least supplying the object of the will. As such, acts of the will are understood by the intellect.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Aquinas’s argument that we have cognition of the intellect only in act seems reasonable from the point of view of introspection. We are only aware of our intellects when they are having intellectual cognition. In those periods in which we empty our minds, in meditation perhaps, do we have cognition of our minds?</li>
<li>In the second article Aquinas does not explain in any detail the second way in which the mind has cognition of habits; he simply says that it is through diligent enquiry. The parallel with the first article suggests that this is a diligent enquiry into how habits work but one might also ask whether there is another aspect of introspection at work here. If I have an intellectual reflection on a memory of having spoken French yesterday should this be considered direct cognition of my habit of French? Or does it fit into the schema of Aquinas’s second type of cognition of habit? Perhaps my simple recollection and reflection is not sufficient to be considered cognition of the habit but rather has to be supported by further reasoning. For example, I can recall that I was speaking French yesterday, but I have to reason that this was the act of a habit (rather than divine intervention or inebriated inspiration) and that if I had the habit yesterday, then I probably have it today.</li>
<li>Aquinas’s answer to the third objection of the third article may be disappointing to those who wish to identify some sort of separate faculty of the soul that is the “I” behind the intellect. For Aquinas, the intellect is where the show stops (bearing in mind, of course, God acting as first mover of the agent intellect). The actuality of the intellect in the act of cognition is itself cognized by the intellect. Perhaps it would have been helpful for Aquinas to say more at this point on the very human activity of reflection. After all, we often think that it is this very ability to reflect on experience, in a way that unites all the faculties of the soul, which defines the “I”.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-87630932765078899602013-11-03T10:52:00.000+00:002013-11-03T10:52:13.333+00:00Question 86 – What our Intellects know in Material Things<br />
<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />After the rigours of Ia.q85, this question sweeps up a number of particular issues to do with the cognition of material things. In particular it covers the cognition of singulars, of the infinite, of contingent things and of future things. In many ways, the content of this question represents a drawing together of issues that have been presented in various places of this treatise.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: Aquinas has already argued that the active intellect abstracts the universal from the phantasms presented to it by the sentient powers, and that the resulting intelligible species are retained in the passive intellect. This means that the intellectual powers acting on their own do not have cognition of singular concrete individuals but only of their universal aspects. Here Aquinas raises this observation to the status of an article, summarizing the arguments made so far and addressing some particular objections. The major point to be made is not that we do not have cognition of singulars, but that our cognition of singulars is not by means of the intellect alone. The intellect and the sentient powers act together in the cognition of singulars, so that the intellect has direct cognition of universals but only an indirect cognition of singulars.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: Right back in Ia.q7.a4 we saw Aquinas talking about the infinite as existing. Now it is time to consider the infinite as object of cognition; so, can we have cognition of infinitely many things? Aquinas’s answer revolves around the difference between a <i>potential infinity</i> and an <i>actual infinity</i>. If you were to start counting sheep in an effort to get to sleep, you would start “one sheep, two sheep, three sheep…” potentially with no limit if the insomnia were particularly bad that evening. This is an example of a potential infinity; you can count things as far as you have time to do so without theoretical limit. But you will never be in the situation of having counted an infinite number of sheep; you never get to the point of having cognition of an actual infinity of sheep. This is Aquinas’s position: we can have cognition of an arbitrary number of things but we cannot have cognition of a completed infinity.<br /><br />The first objection claims that we can have cognition of something infinite; that is, God. Aquinas answers that there’s a subtle equivocation of language here. We would have an infinite material thing if there were no formal termination to its matter; that is, it would just go on for ever and ever. However, when we talk of God being infinite, we have to recall that His form has no connection with matter at all and therefore could not be terminated by an extent of matter. God’s form is <i>per se</i> infinite, rather than in reference to any matter. So a material infinite, if it existed, could not be known as the form is never terminated, but we can know something of the infinite God insofar as we grasp something of His form. Of course, our minds are limited in the extent to which we can grasp God’s form: in this life we can only grasp it by inference from the created order; in the next life by direct illumination by the divine essence. Still, by neither means can we comprehend that form (Ia.q12.a7).<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: This third article is a strange little affair: Aquinas asks whether we can have cognition of contingent things. That is, can we have cognition of things that are able to be and not to be? As pretty much everything we perceive in the material world is contingent one has to ask why how this question could ever arise! The point is that, when we have cognition of things, we abstract the universal from the particular and the universal is not contingent in the same way that the object of cognition is. Now Aquinas does not take a Platonic view of form: forms do not exist in some third realm but exist only as instantiated. Still, the question has some force as this vase could go out of existence but the form of the vase could still exist (but not in a material mode) in some mind that had previous perception of it, or in a different exemplar of the vase produced by the same potter.<br /><br />Aquinas argues that the sensory power has direct cognition of contingent things; we recall that the phantasm of an object of perception is still a phantasm of a particular material thing. The intellect only has an indirect cognition of a singular through the interaction of its universal knowledge of the thing with the sensory power’s individual knowledge of the thing. So our knowledge of a thing is made up of a complex of contingent stuff corresponding to the perception of the sensory powers together with cognition of universal necessary aspects of the thing in the intellect.<br /><br /><b>A4</b>: To ask whether we can have cognition of future things, as this article does, is clearly naïve, as future things have not yet happened and therefore cannot be subject to the process of abstraction from phantasms formed from an object being perceived by the senses. However we might reasonably argue that we know that the sun is going to rise tomorrow; so the future can obviously be known in some sense. The universal that we abstract from the particular is abstracted from time and may therefore contribute in some way to knowledge of future things.<br /><br />Aquinas recognises the connection with the third article concerning our knowledge of the contingent. Future things, after all, are contingent. He makes the key distinction between knowing future things <i>in themselves</i> and <i>in their causes</i>. Cognition of future things in themselves (that is, in their concrete existence) is known only to God who has an eternal intuitive vision of all time (Ia.q14.a13). However, we can know future things in their causes; through our scientific knowledge we know, to a certain extent, how the material world works and can therefore make reliable predictions about certain things (such as the sun rising tomorrow morning).<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Our cognition of singulars occurs by means of the intellect returning to the phantasms made available to it by the sentient powers.</li>
<li>We have cognition of the potentially infinite but not of the actually infinite.</li>
<li>Our cognition of contingent things occurs by a combination of the universal retained by the intellect and the particular retained by the sentient powers.</li>
<li>We can know future things in their causes but not in themselves.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Aquinas’s teaching that we do not have purely intellectual cognition of singulars is often a stumbling block for those coming anew to his theory of mind. Perhaps the aspect for newcomers to concentrate on is that Aquinas has a very precise theory about how the different parts of our cognitive powers work together; perhaps our modern notion of intellect glosses over some of the distinctions between powers that Aquinas considers essential. So, it is not that we do not have cognition of singulars, but that we have cognition of singulars in a way that involves more than just the intellect. The intellect is a very particular part of our cognitive apparatus.</li>
<li>Perhaps Aquinas is rather optimistic in the second article in suggesting that we can have cognition of a potential infinity. My experience these days is that if I learn something new, something old falls out of the other side of my head.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-62085544779980867892013-11-03T10:46:00.001+00:002013-11-03T10:46:07.711+00:00Question 85 – The Mode and Order of Intellective Understanding.<br /><b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />Having warmed up on the lower slopes of Ia.q84, it is time to ascend the Mount Everest that is Ia.q85. Aquinas has assembled the components of his theory of mind. If we were to carve a simple straight line through the theory, ignoring complications like memory then it would look something like this. The external sensory powers receive sensible species corresponding to their proper objects. The internal sensory powers assemble the data received by the external sensory powers in the expressed sensory species known as the phantasm. The active power of the intellect illuminates the phantasm and in doing so abstracts the universal intelligible species from it. The intelligible species is then impressed upon the passive power of the intellect. The expressed species of the passive intellect provides the conceptual material with which the process of intellectual reasoning begins.<br /><br />It is now time for Aquinas to throw the strongest objections that can be found at his theory and to defend his theses against them. The first three articles in particular are intellectual <i>tours de force</i>. Whilst pondering these articles the reader might wish to consider that the objection presented to Aquinas’s theory should also be presented <i>mutatis mutandis</i> to any theory of mind. After all, one of the most remarkable things about human existence is that there is a subject, an “I”, experiencing intellectual cognition of external things and able to reflect on these experiences as a cognitive act in itself. How do things that exist outside of my mind come to exist inside my mind so as to enable me to understand them? Any theory of mind worthy to present itself in the public forum should be prepared to answer the type of objections presented here.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: The first article focusses on the abstraction of intelligible species from phantasms by the active intellect. The structure of this question makes it clear that Aquinas is focussed on a number of weighty objections rather than on a new exposition of the basic theory. His main answer merely differentiates between the three levels of cognitive power that one can find in sensory cognition, in angelic intellection and in human understanding. The object of a sensory power is a form as it exists in a material object; so sensory powers only have cognition of individual concrete particulars. Angelic intellection is through immaterial species that are connatural to them (Ia.q55.a2) and therefore their intellection of material forms is in themselves and in God, without any need for abstraction from the material. Human intellection stands in the middle of these: the human intellect is immaterial and therefore for a human to have an immaterial cognition of something that is material necessarily has to involve the abstraction of form. The only candidate for the object of such abstraction is the phantasm produced by the sentient powers of the soul.<br /><br />The first objection argues that, if the intellect were to abstract the intelligible from phantasms, rather than directly from the material object, then it would not understand the material object but rather a representation of the object. Aquinas counters by making a distinction between two modes of abstraction that will enable him to identify where error might happen in the process of abstraction. The first method of abstraction involves abstracting things in relation one to another (he calls it the <i>mode of composition and division</i>); this mode allows for error when we abstract relationships that are not abstracted in reality. The second mode of abstraction (the mode of <i>simple and absolute consideration</i>) involves pulling apart things that are not abstracted in reality and considering them in absolute rather than relational terms. For example, we can consider the colour of an apple in isolation from the fact that it is the colour of <i>this apple</i>. This form of abstraction involves no error whereas the first form of abstraction, which might lead us to say for example “the colour of the apple is separated from the apple”, can involve error. <br /><br />Aquinas claims that the abstraction of intelligible species from a phantasm involves the second mode of abstraction: considering the nature of the material object which is being abstracted from, rather than any individuating principles that remain represented in the phantasm. Error can occur in abstraction when it is done in such a way as to misrepresent reality; but it does not occur simply because the mode of existence of forms of material objects in the soul is different from the mode of existence of those forms in reality. The forms of material things existing in the soul are the forms of those material things and therefore provide us with a sound basis for intellections.<br /><br />The second objection observes that material objects are, by their very definition, material; since the process of abstraction from phantasms involves abstracting the universal from the particular, taking form away from matter, then this would seem to mean that we cannot actually understand material things as we’ve removed part of their very definition from them. Aquinas replies to this distinguishing between <i>common matter</i> and <i>designated matter</i>. The former is matter considered in general and the latter is matter considered in particular; the example that Aquinas gives distinguishes between <i>flesh and bone</i> and <i>this flesh and these bones</i>. When perceiving, for example, a human being, the process of abstraction from phantasms involves abstraction from the particular designate matter of this flesh and these bones but not from the common matter of flesh and bone. We understand material objects in the fact of their materiality but abstracted from the particular designate matter out of which they are formed.<br /><br />Aquinas takes this opportunity to go further: in the case of mathematical species we can abstract even further, removing consideration of many sensible qualities. Mathematical entities are abstracted considering them only with respect to quantity, which Aquinas calls the level of <i>common intelligible matter</i>. They are thought of in isolation from<i> this</i> or <i>that</i> substance, that is they are abstracted from what is called <i>individual intelligible matter</i>. When we go beyond the mathematical, considering things like being, one, potentiality and actuality, then we go even beyond this form of abstraction considering such types of things completely in isolation from matter.<br /><br />The third objection turns to the idea that phantasms could act on the passive intellect in the same way that sensible qualities act on the corresponding organ of sense. There seems to be no need for the active intellect and for a process of abstraction if the phantasms do all the work. Aquinas identifies the key problem with this idea as the fact that phantasms exist in the material bodies that are the sense organs and that the passive intellect is purely immaterial. As the material cannot directly affect the purely immaterial, there must be an immaterial active principle (the active intellect) responsible for getting the appropriate information from the phantasms to the passive intellect. Aquinas builds on this answer in the replies to the final two objections, describing further the action of the active intellect. The active power of the active intellect illuminates the phantasms rendering them suitable for the abstraction of intelligible species by joining the power of the intellect to the powers of the sentient soul; the process of abstraction extracts the natures of the species of what is being considered without their individuating conditions and impresses them on the passive intellect. The intellect understands the object of perception by turning back to the phantasms in the context of having abstracted the <i>quiddity</i> of the object from the phantasms.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: The active intellect abstracts the quiddity of the object of cognition from phantasms presented to it by the sensory powers. The intelligible species extracted by this process of abstraction are then impressed upon the passive intellect. But if what is present in the passive intellect are intelligible species and if it is these only that the passive intellect has for the understanding of things, does this not mean that it is the intelligible species that are understood rather than the object of cognition from which these intelligible species originally arose? The arguments of the three objections are all related to this type of reasoning; and this objection is itself a variant of the objections of the first article as related to the abstraction of intelligible species from phantasms rather than directly from the object of perception. The counter position that Aquinas wishes to argue for is well laid out in the <i>sed contra</i>: just as the sensible species are that <i>by which</i> the sensory powers sense, so the intelligible species are that <i>by which</i> the intellectual powers understand the objects of cognition. In both cases, the respective species are instruments. Sensitive species are not sensed, intelligible species are not understood; sensitive species are that by which some external object is sensed, intelligible species are that by which some external object is understood.<br /><br />Aquinas advances two arguments against the position implied by the objections and gives an argument in favour of his position. In the first place, if the knowledge we have of things was purely of species that exist in the soul, then this would apply to things about which we have scientific knowledge; to Aquinas, this seems obviously wrong as scientific knowledge is about the external world. The second argument is that such a position must inevitably lapse into a radical subjectivism: “whatever seems to be the case is true”. If knowledge simply is of what is inside our heads, then whatever is inside our heads is all that gives rise to knowledge.<br /><br />In favour of his own position, Aquinas takes the lead from Aristotle’s <i>Metaphysics</i> 9. We can think of two actions: one which remains within the agent (like thinking) and one which passes into a patient (like cutting a log). Both actions stem from some form, and in both cases the form must possess some sort of likeness to the object of the action. The form of cutting is a form of cutting that log over there; the form of thinking is the form of thinking about that log over there. So the form, that is the intelligible species, of the log that we are thinking about, is precisely the form of the log and the intelligible species is a sort of likeness of the log by which we think about the log. We can, of course, reflect upon our own act of intellectual understanding. In doing so, we will understand both our act of understanding and the intelligible species by which we do that understanding of our understanding! It is in this secondary sense that we can say that intelligible species can be the direct object of intellection; but still, the primary sense of intellectual understanding is of the object for which the intelligible species provide a likeness.<br /><br />When we perceive a human being, their human-ness is apprehended in our intellects without individuating conditions; the intelligible species provide a likeness of the human-ness without there being a likeness of the individual. <br /><br />The reply to the third objection introduces the important notion of an <i>expressed species</i>. When the sensory powers receive sense impressions from some external object, the object acts upon the organs of the sensory powers. The power of the imagination then forms an expressed species (the phantasm) from what has been impressed upon the sensory powers by the external object. The same sort of thing happens in the intellect. The passive intellect is acted upon by the impression of intelligible species. It then forms an expressed species which is called the <i>concept</i> or <i>word</i>. In this way the process of intellection comes to sort of terminus connecting with our linguistic reasoning processes. The concept may be expressed in language; the uttering of a sentence connecting words represents the intellect’s process of composition and division by which we reason about things.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: Aquinas has established that the intellect comes to understand the <i>quiddity</i> of things by means of the active intellect abstracting the universal from the phantasms presented to it by the sensory powers. The question that Aquinas wishes to address in this article is whether there is some sort of ordering of universality in the intellect. So, when we are looking at a human being, is the more universal notion of <i>animal</i> in some sense prior, or posterior to the notion of the universal <i>human being</i>? <br /><br />Aquinas answer that when we think of sensory cognition, then certainly we have cognition of singulars before the intellect gets to work to give us cognition of universals. In this sense then, the cognition of what is less universal is prior to what is more universal. But when we consider the intellect as it moves from potentiality to actuality in its act of intellection, we realize that it moves from a state of incompleteness to a state of completeness the better we understand the object of cognition. The terminus of this act of intellection is <i>complete scientific knowledge</i> of the object of cognition; before we reach this state (if we do), our incomplete knowledge is still a bit murky in places. The indistinctness lies in our ability to first grasp a sort of universal whole, with all its parts considered integrally, without grasping the <i>quiddity</i> of those parts that make up the whole. Our grasp of the universal whole is less distinct but more universal than a grasp of the whole considered together with its parts. So, when we perceive something as an animal, without understanding that this animal is a rational animal, we grasp something more universal prior to coming to an understanding of a less general universal. In this sense, then, the more universal is prior in our intellects to the less universal.<br /><br />In the reply to the first objection, Aquinas identifies two ways in which we can consider universals that might confuse us when considering universals in the context of cognition. In the first way the universal is considered alongside its <i>intentionality</i>; that is, together with the fact that a particular universal has a relationship to all the things from which it could be abstracted. The universal <i>horse</i> has a relation with all actual horses, for example. If we consider universals together with their intentionality, then the more universal should be considered posterior to the less universal. Since we grasp the intentionality of a universal by repeated acts of cognition, we arrive at the scope of the less universal’s intentionality sooner than for the more universal. If, one the other hand, we consider the universal as universal without any notion of intentionality, then in nature we find two possible orderings. In the generation of things, the more universal is prior to the less universal, so that <i>animal</i> comes about before <i>human</i>. On the other hand, in the ordering of perfection actuality is prior to potentiality and therefore the perfect is prior to the imperfect and the less general prior to the more general.<br /><br /><b>A4</b>: Can we have an intellectual understanding of more than one thing at a time? It would seem that we must be able to: after all, if we’re to understand wholes that are made up of parts, and if we’re to be able to make comparisons between different things then we must be able to hold multiple things in our intellects simultaneously. Also, as the second objection puts it, there doesn’t really seem to be any good reason to deny it as a possibility.<br /><br />Aquinas thinks differently. It’s impossible for a single intellect to be brought to actuality by more than one form simultaneously, just as something cannot simultaneously be informed with the form of an apple and the form of an orange. The intellect can have intellectual understanding of many things simultaneously provided they are grouped together under some single form. This even applies to God’s intellect: He has simultaneous intellectual knowledge of everything through the single form of His substance.<br /><br />When we think of the parts of a whole, we can think indistinctly of the parts as they exist in the whole; so we think about the house and the bricks out of which it is built are grouped together in the background under the form of the house. If we think distinctly about the parts of the whole, then we lose immediate sight of the whole; if we think of a brick, we are not thinking of the house. Similarly, when we make a comparison between two things, we hold both of the things in the intellect under the form of a comparison; there’s a sort of whole composed of the two things, rather than the two things individually considered.<br /><br /><b>A5</b>: Human intellectual understanding of things in the world is progressive; there is always a passing from potentiality to actuality involved. When we apprehend something, we apprehend it in stages one aspect at a time. So, in seeing Socrates in the distance we may very well go through a process rather like this: we firstly apprehend him as being a living being and very quickly after that recognize him as a human being. On seeing the components that make up his face, we recognize this human being to be Socrates. We notice that he is wearing a white robe and that he has leather sandals on his feet. This process involves the apprehension of various <i>quiddities</i> together with a successive composition of and division between them. For example, when we apprehend that Socrates is wearing a robe and we apprehend the robe’s whiteness we compose the notions of Socrates, of white, and of robe to arrive at the conclusion that Socrates is wearing a white robe. Similarly in recognizing Socrates by seeing his face we compose the notion of human being with our notion of Socrates but divide off the notion of human being from everybody else that we recognize but Socrates. Thus, in human intellection a process of composition and division of concepts is a key part. <br /><br />This process of composition and division that humans have to go through is in marked contrast to intellectual understanding in the angels and in God. The latter do not have to gather their intellectual understanding of things from the senses and therefore do not have to put concepts together in the same way. The intellectual understanding of angels arises from forms connatural to them and infused at their creation; that of God is His very substance.<br /><br />The third objection argues that in the real world things simply are the way they are: the ball simply is white. There are no processes of composition and division in the world of things that corresponds to the intellect’s processes of composition and division. Aquinas concedes that the likeness of an external object is received in the intellect in a mode of being that is different from the mode of being of the original thing. So, it not surprising that even though there may be in the external object something that corresponds to the intellect’s composing and dividing, it is not present in the object in the same way as it is present in the intellect. However, we can still identify the composition of form and matter in the external object with the composition of a universal whole with its part in the intellect and the composition of subject and accident in the external object with the composition that corresponds to predication in the intellect. So there is a correspondence between the sorts of composites that exist in the external world with those that exist in the intellect. This correspondence is what enables us to maintain that the likeness as it exists in the intellect is faithful to the external object.<br /><br /><b>A6</b>: In his <i>de anima</i> chapter 3, Aristotle makes the astonishing claim that intellective understanding is always correct. Since it is manifestly clear that we can be mistaken about things that our intellect considers, we must enquire into what Aristotle, and Aquinas following him, means.<br /><br />Aquinas argues that we should observe the parallel with the sentient powers. The external senses, when they are not impeded, are never mistaken about their proper object. The sensory powers can still make mistakes, of course. When the sensory powers infer things about the common sensibles, for example, they can be mistaken. But these types of mistake arise because, in these cases, the proper objects of the sentient powers are not what are under consideration. When we consider the intellect, restricting attention to its proper object, that is, to the <i>quiddity</i> of things, then the same considerations apply. The intellect can make mistakes, but it makes those mistakes in composition and division. The actual process of abstraction, the proper object of the intellect, does not fail provided that the intellect is not impeded.<br /><br />Consequently and again, provided it is not impeded, the intellect cannot be mistaken about first principles and about immediate consequences of those first principles. These provide examples of things that are known immediately to the intellect in their quiddity and therefore are sure.<br /><br /><b>A7</b>: If the intellect is infallible in understanding its proper object, grasping the <i>quiddity</i> of things, does that not mean that the intellectual abilities of all humans have to be identical? After all, either one grasps the <i>quiddity</i> of something or one does not; this is something that does not admit of a greater and lesser. This seems to be in conflict with the common observation that intellectual gifts differ from person to person! <br /><br />Aquinas observes that, from one point of view, the argument is sound. We do either grasp the quiddity of something or we do not. On the other hand, form is received in matter according to the disposition of the matter; therefore a more powerful soul is received in a more suitable body. In addition, the sentient powers of the soul depend upon matter for their functioning; as they support the intellectual powers in the latter’s operations, they may do so for better or worse depending upon their fitness for purpose. Following the argument of the <i>sed contra</i>, these arguments indicate that some can think more deeply than others<i> about</i> the objects of intellection.<br /><br /><b>A8</b>: Some things appear to be indivisible, in the sense that although we may be able to conceptually divide them into parts, they themselves do not exist except as a whole. Aquinas identifies a continuum as such an indivisible thing; we may be able to conceptually break it apart into points but those points only exist in potentiality in the continuum, as it were. Similarly the human reason: we may understand it in its different powers, but it is a unity in itself. In the cognition of such indivisibles, Aquinas argues that we grasp their <i>quiddity</i> as indivisible prior to being able to think about how they may be divided into parts. On the other hand, there are some types of indivisible that we can only define in terms of privation. A point, for example, is defined as that which has no parts. For indivisibles like these, we have to grasp their <i>quiddity</i> through grasping the <i>quiddity</i> of the privations involved. Therefore we have cognition this type of indivisible posterior to having cognition of the divisible.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>The forms of material things that exist in the soul are the forms of those things and not <i>only</i> a representation of them. Therefore we have a correct understanding of reality by abstraction from phantasms because this process of abstraction involves an absolute consideration of those forms as they exist in reality.</li>
<li>When the intellect abstracts form from matter, it abstracts from this particular matter but not from matter in general. The abstraction retains the fact that the form informs matter.</li>
<li>Sensitive species are that by which some external object is sensed, intelligible species are that by which some external object is understood.</li>
<li>The expressed species of the intellect form the raw material with which we carry out the process of thinking. Our process of thinking is a complicated process of composition and division of different intelligible species in the passive intellect. We put ideas together and pull them apart repeatedly until we get something true that corresponds to reality.</li>
<li>In sensory perception we grasp the singular before the universal, but in intellectual cognition we grasp the more universal before the more particular. However, when we consider the universal in regards to its intentionality, the situation becomes more complicated. We arrive at the scope of the less universal before we arrive at the scope of the more universal; each by means of repeated acts of cognition.</li>
<li>As concerning the direct object of cognition, we can only have one object of cognition at a time. When we consider a complex object, or an object in relation to some other object, we consider them under a single form of the complex.</li>
<li>The intellect is infallible in the cognition of its proper object in a way parallel to the fact that the sensory powers are infallible in the perception of their proper objects. The proper object of the intellect is the <i>quiddity</i> of the object of perception. When we make mistakes in our intellectual understanding of things, it happens further along in the process of intellection. It happens when we make mistakes in the composition and division of the concepts expressed by the passive intellect.</li>
<li>Although the intellect is infallible with respect to its proper object, this does not mean that everybody has the same level of intellectual ability. The sensory powers depend upon material organs and therefore may be more or less able in the complex process of cognition. Different people may have different abilities with respect to the composition and division of expressed intelligible species.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Aquinas never really gives us a systematic account of where error might happen in perception and cognition. He identifies infallibility in the senses sensing their proper objects and in the intellect perceiving the <i>quiddity</i> of things, but he doesn’t tell us explicitly where and how things can go wrong. Error would seem to crop up in the way in which sensible species and intelligible species are composed and divided within the sentient and the intellective soul respectively. The interior senses can make mistakes concerning how the basic sense data is interpreted at the level of sensation; the intellect can reason falsely about the relationships between different intelligible species, coming to incorrect conclusions.</li>
<li>The fourth objection to the third article argues that we arrive at our knowledge of causes and principles through our knowledge of effects and that therefore the more particular must be prior to the more universal in our intellects. In the final paragraph of his answer, Aquinas states that this is not necessarily the case: sometimes we understand unknown effects through their causes. However, the rest of the answer seems to be rather odd; bypassing the actual objection and focussing on the various ways in which universals can be principles of things.</li>
<li>In the fourth article Aquinas denies that we can have simultaneous intellectual understanding of a multiplicity of things. Although his argument is reasonable, it’s a bit frustrating that he doesn’t say more about the mechanisms by which we do hold multiple things in mind. When performing a comparison of two things, we consider first one and then the other and then hold them both under the form of the comparison itself; but what goes on in detail in this consideration? Perhaps it would have been helpful for him to argue that when we consider a composite object (and after all, most things we consider is composite in one way or another) we can only consider them intellectually under one <i>aspect</i> at a time.</li>
<li>Aquinas flirts with the boundary between the intellectual and the linguistic (for example in the fifth article) in ways that make one wish that he had gone further. The result of the intellectual process of abstraction from phantasm is an impressed intelligible species in the passive intellect. The corresponding expressed species is the concept or word; these expressed species are then the raw material of processes of composition and division but also of the linguistic expression in words of what is inside our heads. If one were to follow through the chain of events in the process of sensation, cognition and expression one should arrive at a complete theory of how our linguistic expressions correspond to the world.</li>
<li>In the third objection to the fifth article an argument is put forward that can be developed into a powerful criticism of Aquinas’s systematic exposition of mind. In the real world things simply are the way they are: the ball simply is white. There are no processes of composition and division in the world of things that corresponds to the intellect’s processes of composition and division. The more general criticism is that we want things in the mind to be the same way (an accurate representation, perhaps) of the way that they are in the world. But to get into the mind, there has been a process of sensation, in which individual senses take apart the object of perception, only for it to be put back together by the internal senses in the phantasms. The phantasms then undergo a process of abstraction whereby various quiddities of the external object arrive in the passive intellect. A final, but on-going, process of composition and division then sticks all these <i>quiddities</i> back together again in true concepts about the external object. Don’t all these processes of taking-apart and then gluing-together come between us and the world? Perhaps the key to answer this objection is Aquinas’s claim for the infallibility of the senses in sensing their proper objects and of the intellect in abstracting the <i>quiddity</i> of things. The senses and the intellect are able to provide a faithful representation of what is out there in the external world; we are capable of error in our assessment of these data but we do have the capability to arrive at some true scientific knowledge of the world.</li>
<li>Aquinas does not tell us what could impede the intellect in the intellection of its proper object. In the case of the sentient powers, physical damage or illness could account for impediment as these involve a material organ. What might impede the immaterial intellect?</li>
</ul>
<br /><br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-34556751197035065142013-10-05T16:54:00.001+01:002013-10-05T16:54:11.794+01:00Question 84 – The Soul’s Understanding of Corporeal Things<b>Preamble</b><br /><br />Questions Ia.q82 and Ia.q83 have provided a very short introduction to the will as intellectual appetite. Aquinas promises to return to give a comprehensive treatment of the will in the context of moral science in the second part of the <i>summa</i>. For the moment, he will return to the topic of the intellect to give a fuller treatment of some of the topics that he has already broached. In some ways this structure seems a little awkward, as if there had been a break in time between the composition of the questions before and after this point. Perhaps Aquinas had had his attention drawn to some more testing objections to his theses in the interim! At this point he gives a hierarchical overview of the next few questions: he will consider the intellectual knowledge of the soul united with the body in Ia.q84-88 and separated from the body in Ia.q89. In the consideration of the soul united with the body he will consider the intellectual knowledge of corporeal things (Ia.q84-6), of the intellect itself (Ia.q87) and of immaterial substances (Ia.q88).<br /><br /><br /><b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />In starting his enquiry into the soul’s intellectual knowledge of corporeal things, Aquinas wishes, in this question, to understand the means by which it has cognition of them. He will come back to questions of the manner by which these means provide intellectual cognition and precisely what it is that we have cognition of in material things in the next two questions.<br /><br />We’re already aware of the fundamental parts of Aquinas’s Aristotelian understanding of the act of cognition: The external material object affects the external sensory organs which provide data for the internal sensory powers to construct a phantasm (that is, a sort of representation) of the external object. The active power of the intellect, through the power of illumination, abstracts intelligible species from the phantasm and these latter are impressed upon the passive intellect. In this question Aquinas returns to first principles apparently in order to provide a systematic refutation of positions counter to that of Aristotle. Aquinas sees Aristotle’s position as a mean between two extremes. On the one hand we have an extreme form of naturalism that claims that the external object of cognition directly affects the intellect in a way parallel to the way that it affects the sense organs. On the other hand we have a Platonism that sees the intelligible as being separated from the object itself; both the actual object and our intellect participate in the separated form of the thing, so that our intellectual cognition of the object is indirect.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: The first stage of Aquinas’s deeper drilling down into the acts of the soul concerns the question of whether we have cognition of corporeal things through the intellect. After all, the intellect is the part of the soul which has knowledge of universals rather than of particulars. Therefore, since corporeal bodies have a fleeting and contingent existence, it seems wrong to assign our knowledge of them to the intellect.<br /><br />Aquinas takes a quick trip through the history of the ancient philosophy of corporeal cognition, as reported by Aristotle. The earliest philosophers thought that the world consisted only of corporeal things; as these are in constant flux, our knowledge of them is correspondingly uncertain. As Heraclitus is reported to have said, “it is impossible to touch the water of a flowing river twice”; we don’t really know the river, as it is in constant change. Plato’s later approach to the question posited the separate existence of the ideas of things; these latter being what we know through the intellect. The unfortunate side effect of this theory is that we would then have no intellective understanding of particular corporeal bodies at all. Aquinas identifies the underlying problem with Plato’s approach as the belief that cognition of corporeal things involves the existence of the form of such a thing in the soul in the same way as it exists in reality. As the form of a corporeal thing must exist in the mind as a universal, Plato’s theory implies that it must exist in the same universal way in reality.<br /><br />Aquinas is, of course, going to argue for Aristotle’s view: the form of a corporeal thing is received in the intellect in a different mode of being than it exists in reality. He argues that we already see these separate modes of being in the way that whiteness can be instantiated in different ways in different bodies and also in the way that sensation receives sensible forms. Therefore the soul does have cognition of material things through the intellect, but that cognition is immaterial, universal and necessary. What is received exists in the receiver according to the mode of the receiver. <br /><br />Although corporeal things do have a fleeting and changing existence, this does not rule our having unchanging knowledge of them. Our very identification of a particular thing as a particular thing presupposes that we have identified elements of the thing that remain the same throughout change. It is of these elements that we have knowledge.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: Given that we do have knowledge of corporeal things through our intellects, do we have that understanding through the essence of the intellect? We recall Aristotle’s famous dictum from the de Anima that “the soul is in some sense all things”; our ability to have cognition of anything corporeal, and the fact that to have that cognition the forms of these things have some mode of existence within our souls together imply that our souls in some sense become what they cognize.<br /><br />Aquinas again turns to the history of the philosophy of mind, recalling the materialist and Platonic alternatives whereby the forms of corporeal things exist in their natural mode of being in the mind; either as material forms according to the materialists or as universals according to the Platonists. Aquinas points out a number of serious difficulties for the idea that material forms exist materially in the intellect, concluding that they must exist immaterially in the intellect. The intellect abstracts species from not only from matter but also from the individuating material conditions in which a corporeal body exists; in this it is more perfect than the faculty of sensation which maintains the individuating material conditions. Having concluded that the forms of cognized corporeal bodies must exist in the soul in an immaterial way, Aquinas turns to the question of whether that existence is through the essence of the soul. The problem with this idea is that if an intellect has knowledge of corporeal things through its essence, it must have knowledge of all corporeal things through its essence; the essence, as essence, is what it is and doesn’t change through the accumulation of knowledge. However, it is only God that has such knowledge of all things; they pre-exist virtually in His intellect. Hence it cannot be true that human beings have knowledge of corporeal things though their essence.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: We saw in Ia.q55.a2 that angels know things through intelligible species that are connatural to them; they are created with a natural endowment of forms through which they know. Is the same true of human beings? The stage for this question is well set by the positions represented by the third objection and the<i> sed contra</i>. The former, following Plato’s <i>Meno</i>, argues that correct knowledge can be demonstrated by someone uneducated provided that they are asked appropriate questions in the right order; this demonstrates that they must know things prior to acquiring scientific knowledge of them and must therefore possess a natural endowment of intelligible species. The latter, on the other hand, is Aristotle’s famous dictum of the <i>tabula rasa</i>; we only come to have intellectual knowledge of things though our perception of things, before that we know nothing.<br /><br />Aquinas comes down firmly in favour of Aristotle’s position. Prior to the perception of something through the senses, humans have cognition of it only in potentiality, both with respect to sensation and intellection. The senses are moved to actuality in sensing something and the intellect is moved to actuality by the process of abstraction from the sense image. The soul is not endowed with any natural intelligible species; at the start of its existence it is only in potentiality to acquire those species. Plato’s position, that the soul is created filled with species that we recall throughout our lives in the sensation and intellection of things, seems quite untenable. On the one hand it would require that we have these intelligible species within ourselves and yet have no knowledge of them prior to the apprehension of a corresponding external object (a sort of forgetting would seem to be required). On the other hand, it fails to explain the lack of knowledge someone born lacking a sense has of the corresponding sensation.<br /><br />In answer to the third objection, Aquinas points out that a well ordered interrogation will actually provide an education in the topic at hand. One proceeds from commonly known first principles and knowledge, drawing out their consequences as new knowledge.<br /><br /><b>A4</b>: If we consider sensation, we observe that sensible things existing outside the soul are the causes of the sensible species that exist in the soul. This might suggest that there should be an analogy with the intellect: surely there must be actually intelligible species existing outside the soul that cause the intelligible species in the soul? These actually intelligible external things must be forms that exist without matter (as matter individuates the thing, obscuring its universality) and therefore must be separated forms. So it would seem that the intelligible species that arrive in our intellects must either arrive from separated intelligible forms of the things themselves or must arrive from some external separated form that has already abstracted intelligible forms from concrete particulars.<br /><br />The first of these alternatives was the position of Plato who claimed the existence of separated forms participated in by the concrete particular and by the intellect simultaneously in perception. The second position is identified with Avicenna, who denied that intelligible species exist <i>per se</i> but who insisted that they pre-exist in some separated intellects which form a hierarchy culminating in the agent intellect. From this separated active intellect, the intelligible species flow into our intellects. <br /><br />Aquinas rejects Plato’s position on the nature of forms for the same reasons that Aristotle puts forward: the forms of corporeal bodies only exist naturally in their instantiation in matter: form and matter can be separated as the principles of things; they can be abstracted from each other in the process of intellection, but they do not exist naturally as different substances. But a further problem with the idea that actually intelligible forms flow into the intellect, already abstracted as it were, is that this makes the union of the soul with the material body completely superfluous; we’re left with the old idea that a human being is a soul inhabiting a body. The body itself is a principle (as matter is in combination with form) of the actually existing human being. The body, through its organs of sense, plays as essential a role to intellection as the immaterial soul.<br /><br /><b>A5</b>: The Christian synthesis between Plato and Aristotle identifies that all created things pre-exist in God’s intellect; so a reasonable question to ask in this series is whether our knowledge of material things is due to these eternal conceptions. One might expect Aquinas to deny that we have cognition of things through these eternal conceptions, given his emphasis on the role of sense perception in cognition. However, the way in which the objections are phrased alerts us to the fact that the answer is going to be more subtle that we may have expected. <br /><br />Aquinas makes a distinction between meanings of what it is to have cognition of something in something. In the first place we might use this phrase in the sense of seeing something in a mirror. In this sense, human beings in the state of their present lives do not have cognition of things in the divine conceptions; but the blessed in heaven do. The latter see God’s essence and in that essence see all things (Ia.q12.a8, but note the limits of that knowledge outlined in that article). Another sense in which may say that we have cognition of something in something is when the latter something is the principle of that cognition. As a simple analogy, we see things in the sun because the sun illuminates things for us to see. Aquinas claims, using scripture and the Christian tradition of divine illumination, that our participation in the divine conceptions is a means by which we come to know things. If we recall Ia.q79.a4, what Aquinas is saying here may become clearer: we perceive things through sensation and abstract intelligible species from the phantasms formed by the imagination. That abstraction is performed by the agent intellect which itself is moved by divine illumination; it is here that this participation in the divine conceptions occurs. So, we do not simply obtain our cognition of a thing through participation in the divine conceptions but in combination with the abstraction of intelligible species from the actual thing itself. <br /><br /><b>A6</b>: Having eliminated a number of candidates and having elucidated others, Aquinas now turns to the role of sensation in cognition. The problem that early philosophers came to recognize is that sensation and intellectual cognition are of different orders. On the one hand, the earliest of naturalist philosophers collapsed these orders into one but later on Plato argued that they differ in order: the sensory powers are inextricably linked to the use of corporeal organs and the intellectual powers are unavoidably immaterial. Aquinas identifies that Plato took the consequences of this separation of orders of the sensory and the intellectual too far in his almost complete separation of their actions. For Plato, the role of the sensory powers is to nudge the intellectual powers into action; but the latter gain their cognition of things from participation in the eternal separated forms rather than from any aspect of the sensation of the thing.<br /><br />Aristotle agreed with Plato that the interaction between the corporeal sensory order and the immaterial intellect posed a problem; if one holds that the agent must be more honourable than the patient in causality, then there will always be a problem with the material effecting cause in the immaterial. However, Aristotle insisted that the human being is a union of body and soul as matter and form and that one makes a mockery of the intimacy of this union if one separates the sensory and the intellectual to the extent that Plato does. The solution to this problem is the existence of the agent intellect; an active principle in the soul that is responsible for the abstraction of intelligible forms from phantasms for impression on the passive intellect. The phantasms constructed by the imagination from sensory input are not sufficient in themselves to impress intelligible species upon the passive intellect (as they are still associated with the material condition of the object of perception); they have to be made intelligible in actuality by the active intellect. Aquinas concludes by saying that although sensation cannot be considered to be the total and perfect cause of intellectual cognition, it is at least to be considered as the material cause of that cognition.<br /><br /><b>A7</b>: Having abstracted intelligible species from the phantasms provided by the sensory powers, one might imagine that the intellect could just go off and do its own thing. Surely intellective understanding must be through these intelligible species alone? Aquinas argues that this position is mistaken; it completely underestimates the intimacy of the union between the bodily and the spiritual in humans. When we are in the act of intellection about something concrete we return to the phantasms from which the intelligible species were abstracted; when we consider something abstract, we think about it through phantasms associated with the abstraction.<br /><br />The idea that the act of intellectual cognition involves a “turning to the phantasms” is Aristotle’s, recorded in book 3 of the <i>de anima</i>. Aquinas offers two arguments in support of this position. The first argument might strike one as being surprisingly modern: we observe that when people suffer injury to the organs associated with the power of imagination, their power to have actual intellective understanding of things is impeded even if earlier they had a thorough scientific knowledge of those things. If the power of intellection were simply associated with the intelligible species in the immaterial intellect, then this would not be so.<br /><br />The second argument is based on introspection: when we attempt an intellective understanding of something we can see for ourselves that we do this by forming phantasms that illustrate what we’re trying to understand. Similarly, when we try to explain something to someone else we use examples from which they can form phantasms to aid their understanding.<br /><br />Underlying these arguments is the principle that cognitive powers are proportioned to the things of which they have cognition. As an example, angels have a purely immaterial cognition of immaterial intelligible species implanted within them at their creation; they are not able to, nor do they have need of, turning to any phantasms abstracted from material cognition. In contrast, human cognition is of the<i> quiddity</i> or what-ness of material things existing in nature; the human intellect is intimately joined to its body and is thereby proportioned to the material. The <i>quiddity</i> of material objects is itself intimately united to particular material objects; therefore our cognition of them is though our external senses and our imaginations which form phantasms corresponding to the material objects. When we have intellectual understanding of material objects, we understand their universal aspects as instantiated in the particular; in order to inspect the universal nature of an object as existing in the particular, we have to turn to its corresponding phantasms in order to grasp the particular.<br /><br />One might at this point ask how we can ever have an understanding of the higher, immaterial things in the universe. Aquinas answers that we ascend to an understanding of the immaterial by way of inference from the material; we have no direct perception of such things, we have to use our intellectual powers to infer the traces of the immaterial left in the material.<br /><br /><b>A8</b>: The final article in this question provides a short coda on whether the intellect is impeded when the sensory power is inoperative. Aquinas’s answer that it is may seem puzzling at first from at least two points of view. Certainly, when I close my eyes my intellect certainly appears to carry on working as normal; and secondly, why is he asking this question? The answer to the first is that Aquinas is talking about the situation where the sensory power as a whole is inoperative; that is, all of the external and all of the internal sensory powers are not working! He gives the example of sleep as being a state in which this situation may occur. Aquinas’s argument is that in the situation that all of the sensory power is inoperative, we simply cannot have cognition of sensible things: neither right at the moment through direct perception nor through the imagination creating phantasms of things remembered. <br /><br />When we consider sleep, we have to realize that the sensory powers can be more or less impeded in their operation depending on the state and quality of the sleep. Correspondingly the intellect will work under such circumstances to a greater or lesser extent. Aquinas finishes the question with the observation that those who reason in their sleep will find out when they wake up that the reasoning is faulty in some matter; such a great shame!<br /><br />Having discounted sleep as a situation in which the sensory power is completely inoperative, Aquinas doesn’t then mention where we might find such a state. In fact, he will revisit this situation in Ia.q89 where he considers the cognition of a separated soul; it is in this state, where the soul is completely separated from its matter, that there is no sensory power. The consideration of the intellectual knowledge of a post-mortem soul is founded on the observations made in this article.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s <i>de anima</i> is an intellectual tour de force that should be read by anyone interested in the latter. For our purposes, the commentary on Book 3 especially provides valuable background to this and the next few questions.</li>
<li>The form of a corporeal thing is received in the intellect in a different mode of being than it exists in reality. Our cognition of material things is immaterial, universal and necessary. </li>
<li>The soul is in some sense all things (Aristotle, <i>de anima 3</i>).</li>
<li>God has knowledge of all things through His essence; but we don’t, we have to work at it.</li>
<li>We’re not even up to the standard of the intellect of the angels: they have intellectual knowledge of things through intelligible species implanted at their creation. We have to slog along abstracting these intelligible species from the things that we come across.</li>
<li>Understanding the sensory perception and intellectual cognition of human beings involves understanding the consequences of the intimate relationship between body and soul. Failure to understand the latter will lead either to idealism or to an exaggerated materialism.</li>
<li>In abstracting intelligible species from phantasms, the agent intellect is moved by divine illumination. In this sense we may say that our knowledge of creation participates in the divine idea of creation.</li>
<li>Our intellectual cognition of material things is not simply through the intelligible species abstracted from those things. We always return to the phantasms of those things in order to put the universal aspects of the object of perception into its material context.</li>
<li>The intellectual power cannot function properly in the absence of the sensory powers.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>In the third article Aquinas mentions Aristotle’s famous remark about the intellect being a <i>tabula rasa</i>, a blank slate. It’s important to realize that Aristotle is not claiming that we have no mental content prior to the perception of material objects, merely that we have no intellectual content. A misunderstanding of this point often occurs due to a failure to realize what Aristotle allots to the sentient powers as opposed to the intellectual powers. For example, he clearly recognizes what we would call animal instinct as existing in the estimative power.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-57321961852472317512013-09-15T10:00:00.002+01:002013-09-15T10:00:11.424+01:00Question 83 – Free Choice<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />Whether humans have free choice of the will and if they do, how this works, have been profound questions throughout the history of human thought. Aquinas finishes off his introduction to the will with a brief consideration of these questions.<br /><br />In contrast to many modern approaches to these questions, Aquinas’s is relatively low key and straightforward. He has done much of the heavy lifting for this question in setting up the framework in which the soul is an immaterial subsistent form which is the form of the body. In addition, questions of determinism are removed from consideration by the metaphysical system in which God acts as first cause for all secondary causes, be they deterministic or voluntary.<br /><br />Aquinas’s strategy in this question, therefore, is to start from the seemingly self-evident; in certain circumstances, we have freedom to make a choice amongst alternatives. He then works his way towards the goal of showing that this freedom of choice arises from an appetitive power of the soul and, in fact, arises specifically from freedom of the will.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: Do we actually have freedom to make choices between alternatives? After all, if we had such a freedom, then it would appear that that we would have to be unmoved movers; nothing, after all, is moving us to the particular choice. From another point of view, we can all make the simple observation that people seem to make choices that are in accord with their personalities; so perhaps our choices are actually determined by who we are as individuals.<br /><br />Aquinas’s answer is robust: of course we have freedom to choose. If we didn’t, then much of the way we think about ourselves would be rendered meaningless and many of our actions would be unintelligible if not entirely pointless. In elaborating this answer, he points to the choices that non-human animals make as being based on judgements, but on judgements that are not free; such animals do not intellectually weigh up alternatives but depend upon their sentient powers in combination with their instincts. Humans, on the other hand, make their choices among alternatives on the basis of intellectual judgements; a particular end may be inevitable for the will in some circumstances, but the means of achieving that end may be manifold and subject to intellectual judgement.<br /><br />Humans do move themselves to action though the exercise of free choice; but such freedom does not imply that what is exercising that choice is a <i>first cause</i> of that movement. God is the first cause behind all secondary causes, be they natural or voluntary; indeed it is God’s causality that makes free voluntary causes to be free. Within each thing He operates in accord with what is proper to that thing.<br /><br />In answering the objection that we make choices according to who we are, Aquinas distinguishes between how we are by birth and how we are because of subsequent developments in our personalities. He further subdivides how we are by birth into intellectual and bodily components. As far as our intellects are concerned, we do have a natural desire for our ultimate fulfilment but this is not subject to free choice (Ia.d82.a1-2); as far as our bodies are concerned, we do have natural inclinations, but these are always subject to reason. Such inclinations do not overcome the freedom of choice arising from our intellectual natures. The development of our personalities subsequent to birth, and the inclinations towards particular choices consequent upon this, is also subject to reason. We can choose to develop particular qualities or to reject them.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: Having established that we have freedom of choice in certain circumstances, Aquinas now wishes to establish how that choice arises. The actual choice of something would appear simply to be an act; but does that act arise from a power of the soul or from a habit, that is, from a sort of stable disposition to act in particular sorts of way in certain circumstances?<br /><br />The first thing that we have to recognize is that, strictly speaking, a choice is an act. However, what we’re really concerned with in this question is not the individual act itself but the principle within the soul that allows us to place that act. How come we are actually able to make these free choice acts? Aquinas identifies that such a principle can either be a power or a habit or a mixture of the two; his strategy is to eliminate the possibility of habit being involved in the ability to make a free choice.<br /><br />If the ability to make a free choice were rooted in habit, then the habit involved would either be a natural habit (i.e. a habit we are all born with) or one that we have developed. But if we look at the sorts of habits that we are born with, we soon see that they are not things that are subject to free choice; the assent to the first principles of reason, for example. On the other hand, if we look at the habits that we develop as we grow they are associated with doing things well or doing things badly (the virtues and the vices respectively, for example). Free choice in itself is indifferent to the goodness or the badness of the choice, so it is does not arise from such a habit. <br /><br />It’s important to note that Aquinas is not arguing that habit is uninvolved with our actual choices; for it clearly is. He is interested in the source and principle of the ability to make free choices; his argument in this article is that natural and developed habits, although involved in the process of making particular choices, are simply not of the same type of thing that would enable us to make a choice in the first place. Having eliminated habit as a source of the ability to make free choices, the alternative that is left is that free choice is a power of the soul.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: The next question that Aquinas has to address is that of the location of the power of free choice. It doesn’t take much reflection to realize that most of the thinking that goes to inform our free choices takes place using the cognitive powers; so why don’t we simply attribute the power of free choice to the intellect?<br /><br />In his reply to the second objection Aquinas quotes Aristotle’s <i>Nichomachean Ethics</i>: “When we have judged on the basis of deliberating, we desire in accord with the deliberation”. This view forms the basis for Aquinas’s position. The cognitive powers are certainly involved intimately in the process of making a choice, but the evaluation of the possibilities and the actual making of the choice itself are different acts that are associated with different powers. Again following Aristotle, he argues that the proper object of the act of choosing is a means to an end and as such should be considered to be a good and therefore an object of the appetitive powers. We come to a cognitive evaluation of the choices before us, but in order to choose one of them we have to desire that choice. Therefore the actual act of choice, as opposed to the evaluation of the possibilities, is down to the appetitive powers and therefore the will.<br /><br /><b>A4</b>: Is the power of free choice something distinct from the will considered simply as intellectual appetite? Do we have to think of the will as having two aspects in the same way that we discovered the intellect to be made up of the passive intellect and the agent intellect? After all, the intellectual appetite is ordered towards the desiring of apparent goods put to it by the intellect; as such it sounds as if it is a passive power. Do we need to posit a corresponding active power that makes the decisions between apparent goods?<br /><br />Aquinas argues that the appropriate analogy is not with the contrast between the passive and the agent intellects but with that between the intellect and reason within intellective understanding. Within the intellect there is a simple apprehension of things that may be taken as first principles that are then elaborated by a process of reasoning to previously unknown conclusions. In a similar fashion, a simple act of willing is an act of desire for something considered as an end. Choosing, on the other hand, is concerned with the means with which one can achieve that end. So, as far as the appetite is concerned, the end is related to the means to the end in a similar way in which the principle is related to the conclusion in cognitive matters. Therefore the will is related to the power to choose in a way similar to the relation between the intellect and reason. We have already seen (Ia.q79.a8) that intellective understanding and discursive reasoning belong to a single power. We should also, by means of this analogy, see that free choice and the will are also a single power.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>There are plenty of bad books about the freedom of the will around at the moment; many of them argue from a biological determinism that is completely unaware of the strong metaphysical assumptions that their arguments make. A good introduction to the modern free will debate, however, is Robert Kane’s <i>A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will</i>.</li>
<li>Human beings, as intellectual animals, are able to make free choices. Freedom of choice is an appetitive power which corresponds to the ability of the will to make choices between apparent goods offered to it by the intellect as means to an end.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>In the first article, Aquinas does not raise material determinism as an argument against the existence of free choice. In many modern formulations this is a key argument that would have to be met; but Aquinas has already shown that the human intellect is immaterial (even though it makes use of material bodies), so he simply does not have to meet this objection.</li>
<li>In meeting the objection in the first article that our choices are determined by the personality traits we have developed subsequent to birth, Aquinas argues that we have choice in whether to develop such traits or not. He begins to open up discussion on how our choices now may affect our choices much later on in life; in particular, a choice now may remove freedom of the will from some choice later on. Aquinas insists that we have responsibility for these choice-closing choices and therefore that our later un-free choices are still our responsibility because of this. The degree of responsibility will, of course, be in accord with the degree of freedom available to that earlier choice. Much more will be said about this topic in the second part of the <i>summa</i>.</li>
<li>At first sight, given the profundity of the question of free-will, Aquinas’s answers in this question may seem disappointingly slick. As we have remarked above, he simply doesn’t have to face the problem of material determinism, which removes much of the difficulty. However, hiding in what he has said is a significant difficulty. In order to remove the possibility that the human soul is a first mover, Aquinas argues that God is the first mover, moving the soul in accord with what is proper to something having the power of free choice. The big question is: how does that work? How does a first cause move secondary causes in accord with the latters’ natures? This question was to raise much controversy in later years!</li>
</ul>
<br /><br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-56924815273850456032013-09-08T09:40:00.003+01:002013-09-08T09:40:47.098+01:00Question 82 – The Will<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br /><br />The will is the second component of the intellectual soul; the appetite corresponding to the intellect itself. In these post-Nietzschean days in which the idea of the will to power is almost taken for granted as a self-evident truth, it is good to look back to before the disastrous late medieval ditch of nominalism and voluntarism into which philosophy fell.<br />The account that Aquinas describes will soon be seen to be quite alien to our modern sensibilities: the emotions are part of the sentient appetite; the will is under the command of the intellect. Aquinas is continuing to build up his account of what precisely is human in the human act. Considerations of the will itself (in this question) and of the freedom of the will (in the next question) are central to that account.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br /><br /><b>A1</b>: We have only just been introduced to the will as the intellectual appetite, so we only know a little bit about how it works so far. The will is the appetite corresponding to the intellect and therefore it has an inclination towards what the intellect proposes to it as a good to be desired. Even with such little material available, Aquinas wants us to ask whether there is anything that the will must necessarily desire.<br /><br />In order to answer this question we must be clear about what we mean by <i>necessity</i>. There are a number of possible meanings to the word that could apply to our question and which therefore could affect its answer. At the heart of it, necessities are things that are not able not to be; but the questions we must address concern the ways in which they are not able not to be.<br /><br />There are certain forms of necessity that follow on from the very nature of the situation at hand. For example, it is necessary that the angles of a Euclidean triangle add up to two right angles; similarly a composition that involves contraries, such as a living organism, must by the fact of those contraries decay. These two are examples of <i>natural necessities</i> (the former is a <i>formal</i> necessity and the latter a <i>material</i> necessity). <br /><br />On the other hand some necessities arise because of externalities. For example, if someone accepts a given goal or ambition, then they may find themselves forced to accept certain consequences in order to achieve that goal. This sort of necessity is called a <i>necessity of the end</i>. Similarly, some external agent may coerce someone into doing something that they may or may not otherwise wish to do. In this case, this is called a <i>necessity of coercion</i>.<br /><br />Having gone through these, which of them might apply to the will? The first type of necessity to rule out is that of coercion. We can be forced to do something, but in being forced to do it we say that we are being forced <i>against our will</i>. Something cannot be both coerced and voluntary.<br /><br />On the other hand, necessity of the end can apply to the will; if we have made a decision to try to achieve something and that achievement necessitates that certain means are required, then the inclination of the will towards those means is necessitated. (This does not prescind from the possibility that, under this necessitation, the will moves the intellect to “think again” about the overall object). Similarly, a natural necessity may apply to the will. For example, the will is by its very nature inclined towards the good as presented to it by the intellect; the absolute good, divine beatitude, will therefore incline the will by an absolute natural necessity.<br /><br /><b>A2</b>: We’ve seen in the previous article that there are some things that the will wills by necessity; such as beatitude, or a necessity of means given the desired end. A slightly more subtle question is whether, given that the will is willing something, it is willing it necessarily? After all, given that the intellect is presenting an object to the will as an apparent good and that the will by its nature inclines towards what the intellect presents to it as good, does that not mean that it has no choice in the matter?<br /><br />To answer this question, Aquinas makes an analogy with the intellect. There are certain things towards which the intellect has to give assent: it assents naturally to the first principles of reason. Then there are propositions which are true but which take some logical working out in order to demonstrate that they are true. Once the intellect has recognized that the demonstration works, it adheres to these propositions by necessity; but before it has understood the demonstration, necessity is not involved in its assent. Finally, there are propositions that are by their nature contingent; in this case the intellect does not assent to them by necessity.<br /><br />The analogy of the intellect’s first principles of reason is the will’s ultimate end of beatitude; the good absolutely speaking. One immediately sees, however, that there are many particular goods that do not have a necessary connection with beatitude: whether I get out of bed now or in five minutes time, for example. Both of these could be particular goods seen from different aspects. It is a mistake to see the good as something simple; rather it is often made up of a complex mixture and the intellect will, in many circumstances, not present a single simple end as a good to the will, but rather will present a complex of intertwined apparent goods that may or may not be consistent with one another. The will chooses which ones it inclines towards (and this, of course, leads on to questions of the freedom of the will, discussed in the next question of this treatise).<br /><br />There are particular goods that have a necessary connection to beatitude and once that connection is seen the will is necessitated towards them. However, in this life we see “as through a glass darkly” and that necessary connection may be obscured to us. For the blessed in heaven, granted an immediate vision of the divine essence, they necessarily will that beatitude and all that goes with it.<br /><br /><b>A3</b>: By now it will come as no surprise that Aquinas is interested in which is the higher power, the intellect or the will. This question is not about which is in command of which; the relationship between the intellect and the will and how they work together in the human act will come later. Here the question is about the hierarchy of being.<br /><br />Aquinas looks at this question in two ways. First of all he considers it in absolute terms and then he considers it from a relative point of view in varying circumstances. Looking at the question absolutely he concludes that the intellect is superior to the will because the object of the will, which is the desirable good, is include amongst the objects of the intellect. In this sense, the object of the intellect, that is the true, is simpler and more absolute than the object of the will.<br /><br />On the other hand when we consider the intellect and the will in action, there can be some cases in which the object of the will exists in a higher entity than the object of the intellect. What Aquinas is driving at is that the object of the intellect lies within the intellect itself and the object of the will is precisely the good thing that is willed, external to the soul. So, when someone considers God intellectually, leading their will to incline themselves towards God through love, then we can say that the love of God is greater than the cognition of God because the cognition of God is within the intellect whereas God as object of the will is God Himself! On the other hand, in considering an ordinary everyday corporeal object, the cognition of it is better than the love for it. The intellect-in-knowing-the-object is greater than the object itself.<br /><br /><b>A4</b>: We know that the intellect presents the will with an object to be desired as its end and in this way can be thought of as moving the will. Is the converse true? That is, does the will move the intellect? It does, but in a different way to the final causality with which the intellect moves the will. The will moves the intellect, and the sentient powers of the soul, as an <i>agent</i>. The idea here is presented through an analogy with kingship; in order to achieve some final goal the king orders his subordinate officers to apply their skills to ends appropriate to their abilities that contribute to the final goal. Likewise the will, which is ordered to the good, moves the intellect and the sentient powers of the soul as appropriate to the achievement of that good. We see here the beginnings of an account of the human act that will be elaborated later on in the <i>summa</i>. My intellect presents the will with the end of getting into town to do some shopping. The will moves the intellect to work out the best way of getting there and the sense of sight to read the bus timetable and so on. As we saw in the previous article, absolutely speaking the intellect is the superior power to the will. However, when we consider them in a particular human act, the intellect understands that the will wills and the will wills that the intellect understands; the good (the object of the will) is contained under the true (the object of the intellect) insofar as the good is a certain true thing that is understood and the true is contained under the good insofar as the true is a certain desired good.<br /><br /><b>A5</b>: The sentient powers are divided into the irascible and the concupiscible; is the will divided in the same way? To answer this we must return to Aquinas’s criterion for the division of powers: powers that are ordered towards some common notion cannot be divided. The sentient powers are naturally divided by the different types of object proper to each of them, but the will is ordered towards the good, under the common notion of good. There may be many different types of good but they are all under this common notion. Hence there is no division of the will into the irascible and the concupiscible.<br /><br />The first objection points out that the words irascible and concupiscible come from words to do with anger and desire respectively and it would seem that some instances of anger and desire stem from the intellective appetite and not from the sentient powers. This is an example of where we have to carefully tease apart the roles of intellect and sentience that are so intertwined in humans. The simple desire for or aversion to something is down to the will, but the concupiscence or irascibility that go along with these movements of the will are due to the sentient powers.<br /><br /><br /><b>Handy Concepts</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>The <i>will</i> is the intellectual appetite; it inclines towards those things presented to it as apparent goods by the intellect. The will can be necessitated with a necessity of means and sometimes by a necessity of the end, but the will cannot be coerced.</li>
<li>The human act is complex; the intellect presents the will with a complex of apparent goods and the will, choosing among them, can move the intellect and the sentient powers in the elucidation or the execution of the act chosen.</li>
<li>Despite the feedback loop implied by this understanding of the intellect and will, absolutely speaking the intellect is the superior power.</li>
<li>The will is not divided into irascible and concupiscible powers; these latter are restricted to the sentient powers and the corresponding passions (or emotions) reside within these.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br /><b>Difficulties</b><br /><br />
<ul>
<li>Aquinas argues that the will cannot be coerced. We would agree that we may be forced to do things against our wills, meaning that we shall do them but we do not will them. But what about the situation where the <i>will is broken</i>, under torture, for example or where the <i>will is turned</i>, as in the so-called Stockholm syndrome? Has the will been coerced in these situations to will what it would otherwise not will? In these situations we must remember that the will inclines towards what the intellect presents to it as an apparent good; if the intellect gets it wrong (in an absolute sense) it’s the fault of the intellect not of the will. These situations of apparent coercion of the will are really coercion of the intellect: by fair means or foul the intellect is persuaded to see objective evils as apparent goods and to present them to the will as goods.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2129086278343859186.post-78442686917938722682013-09-08T08:26:00.002+01:002013-09-08T08:27:31.620+01:00Question 81 – The Sentient Appetite<b>Why this Question Matters</b><br />
<br />
Aquinas has discussed the appetites from a generic point of view in the previous question; now it is time to divide these appetites into those of the sentient powers (in this question) and of the intellectual powers (in the next question). In this question we’ll see that the sentient appetite is divided into two classes, one of which is to do with desire or aversion, and the other of which concerns the impulse to overcome obstacles in the fulfilment of these basic desires. In addition, we’ll begin to see that the sentient appetite is the context within which the <i>passions</i> (or <i>emotions</i>) fit; and Aquinas will make a start on his plan of how the powers of the soul work together.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>The Thread of the Argument</b><br />
<br />
<b>A1</b>: In asking whether sensuality is a purely appetitive power, Aquinas is trying partly to answer a question concerning the use of language. We’ve already seen that the sentient appetite is the appetite corresponding to sentient apprehension; the senses apprehend something and appetite inclines the animal towards or away from that something. But the word sensuality needs to be connected with this notion of being an appetitive power. This argument is completed by the etymological observation that sensuality appears to come from the Latin for a sensual movement.<br />
<br />
<b>A2</b>: Aquinas, following an ancient tradition of Christian anthropology divides the <i>faculty</i> of sentient appetite into two <i>powers</i>, the <i>irascible</i> and the <i>concupiscible</i>. The basis for this division is that there is not simply an appetite towards or away from some object of perception, but also an inclination towards overcoming obstacles in the pursuit of or flight from that object. The first of these, the inclination towards those things that are agreeable or away from those that are harmful, is called the <i>concupiscible appetite</i>. The second, the inclination to overcome obstacles, is called the <i>irascible appetite</i>.<br />
<br />
The obvious question arises as to whether one should really consider the irascible and the concupiscible appetites as two separate powers or as different aspects of the same power. The argument in favour of recognizing them as separate is twofold. In the first place, they perform separate functions in recognizing the objects of desire (or fear) and the obstacles to the possession of (or flight from) these objects; in the second case, they seem to oppose one another in some circumstances. The arousal of passions such as anger in support of the irascible appetite can lessen the desire of the concupiscible, and <i>vice-versa.</i><br />
<br />
<b>A3</b>: We’re gradually working our way through the components that go to make up human psychology. Of course, an interesting question that Aquinas will address at length in due time, is that of how the different powers of the soul interact to make up the acts that are particular to humans. In this article he begins such an enquiry by asking whether the irascible and concupiscible appetites are under the control of reason. It’s easy to think of arguments against such as position; after all, our experience of the passions would suggest that they have an alarming tendency to go out of all control!<br />
<br />
Aquinas argues that the sentient appetites are under the control of reason in two ways. They’re under the control of the intellect with respect to what they do and under the control of the will with respect to how they go about doing things.<br />
<br />
In arguing for the first of these positions, Aquinas identifies one of the ways in which the human animal is different from non-intellectual animals. In non-human animals the sentient appetite is often moved by the estimative power, the power that determines the desirability or threat offered by a perceived object. This interaction is at a level below that of the intellect or reason. When we turn to the human animal, however, we recall that the estimative power is replaced by the cogitative power; this power interacts with reason in its estimation of an object. Therefore Humans can bring to bear the powers of discursive reasoning before the sentient appetites are deployed. The second position, that the sentient appetites are under the control of the will, follows because the appetites are ordered in a hierarchy; the will being the highest of these appetites.<br />
<br />
In his reply to the second objection, which sees the sentient appetites fighting against the will, Aquinas brings out one of his most quoted analogies. He claims that the soul rules the body like a despotic ruler, whereas the will rules the appetites as a constitutional or royal ruler. The point is that parts of the body have no alternative but to do what the soul tells them to do: a foot or hand moves when it is told to or reacts automatically in accord with the habits of the soul. The will on the other hand has to interact with sentient appetites that can, through their own powers, resist or cajole the will. There is some give and take in the control the will has over the sentient appetites but, as we see in any constitutional polity, this does not imply that the sentient powers do not obey the will.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Handy Concepts</b><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>The reference to Gregory of Nyssa in the <i>sed contra</i> of the second article is in fact to a treatise called <i>de natura hominis</i>, written around 400AD by Nemesius of Emesa.</li>
<li>In the context of the irascible appetite we see Aquinas make mention of the<i> passions</i>. He will have much more to say about these, especially in the so-called <i>Treatise on the Passions</i> in I-II.qq22-48. Briefly, there are six passions of the concupiscible appetite (joy, sadness, desire, aversion, love and hatred) and five passions in the irascible appetite (hope, despair, courage, fear and anger).</li>
<li>The third article of this question raises aspects of the question of the interaction between the intellect and the sentient appetite. There is much more to say about how the powers of the soul interact and Aquinas will focus on this issue in the <i>Treatise on The Human Act</i> in I-II.qq6-21.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
<b>Difficulties</b><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Despite Aquinas’s arguments in the first article, in English the word sensuality seems utterly lost to theology! Now it is most associated with features of the object of perception rather than moved subject. In Latin, it first appears in Tertullian (as does so much Latin theological terminology) where it means the capacity for sensation; so it appears to have done the rounds in order to end up standing for the sensitive appetite.</li>
<li>In the third article, arguing for the idea that the sentient appetites are under the control of the will, Aquinas states that “The lower appetite is not sufficient to effect movement unless the higher appetite consents”. Although he doesn’t state it, Aquinas’s analogy with constitutional rule in the reply to the second objection suggests that the consent of the higher power may often be implicit. The will doesn’t have to explicitly approve every action of the sentient appetites; rather one can see subsidiarity in the relationship.</li>
</ul>
<br />Gregory the Eremitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11652447286252910371noreply@blogger.com0