For Aquinas, the study of the soul is the primary avenue into the study of human nature. It is the crucial, pivotal inquiry of philosophy, providing us with self-knowledge and urging us to realize and perfect our nature in pursuit of the goods of knowledge and virtue. Aquinas subscribes to Aristotle's teaching on the appropriate order of philosophical pedagogy. The student is to begin with the propaedeutic disciplines of logic and mathematics and then move through natural philosophy to ethics and politics and on, finally, to metaphysics. Where does the study of human nature occur? It is the culminating inquiry of the philosophy of nature, which investigates substances composed of matter and form. Since soul is to body as form is to matter and form is defined in relation to its proper matter, soul must be understood in relationship to body. The study of the soul pertains to natural philosophy from its mode of defining (Commentary on the De Anima, Bk. I, lectio 1). In living things, soul is the animating, organizing, and directing principle of a body. Aristotle's approach is sometimes called "hylomorphism," from the Greek terms for form and matter. This approach differs markedly from the mind-body problem of modern and contemporary philosophy. The latter begins from the supposition that mind and body are separate substances and then proceeds to account for their interaction or from the thesis that mental events are just bodily events, that thinking can be reduced to physiological processes.

In an essay that deftly deploys Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle's De Anima to explicate Aristotle, Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam write,

The mind-body problem...starts from a focus on the special nature of mental activity--therefore from just one part of the activity of some among living beings... Aristotelian hylomorphism, by contrast, starts from a general interest in characterizing the relationship, in things of many kinds, between their organization or structure and their material composition. It deals with the beings and doings of all substances... It asks two questions in particular... How do and should we explain or describe the changes we see taking place in the world?... What is it about individuals that makes them the very things that they are?[4]

For Aquinas as for Aristotle, the study of the soul embraces all living things and investigates their natures by attending to their habitual modes of operation. Far from setting human beings in opposition to nature, it depicts them as part of nature and proceeds to underscore what is peculiar to the human species.

The study of human nature, then, presupposes some knowledge of nature in general, of its principles and causes. In the second book of his Physics, Aristotle investigates the principles or causes of nature. Most of his predecessors identify nature as the "first constituent or underlying matter," out of which natural things come to be. A common project among the earliest philosophers was to identify an element, say, water or fire, out of which all things emerge. As crude as these accounts may seem, they have the advantage of beginning with the most obvious fact about natural substances: their materiality. But how then do we distinguish different kinds of material substance from one another, say, a "cow" from a "man"? Aristotle suggests that the distinction between the two involves something more than a difference in constituent material parts. Aristotle calls that something more "shape or form." While he holds that natural substances are composites of matter and form and hence that the physicist must include both under the purview of his inquiry, he argues for the priority of form over matter. In the composite, matter is more receptive than active, whereas form is determining and actualizing. To take an example from art, a lump of clay is potentially a bust of Lincoln. It becomes an actual bust only after the sculptor has imposed a shape on it, that is, when the lump receives a determinate form. Indeed, we distinguish, identify, and name things from their forms; that is, not from the mere presence of matter, but from the specific way the matter is configured and organized. Even the lump of clay, which is potentially the bust of Lincoln, is more than mere matter; it has a certain composition, texture, color and so forth which enable us to distinguish it from bronze. Matter may indeed be that out of which things come to be, but the form supplies the reason why the material constituents develop in the way they do. The formal cause is thus intimately related to the final cause, the goal, end, or telos of the process of growth. We implicitly acknowledge the authoritative standards of these causes when we refer to a given instance of a species as immature or defective. Just as the bust of Lincoln without a nose is either incomplete or defective, so too is an apple tree that bears no fruit.

The formal cause is evident, then, both during the development of an organism, and when it is fully formed. Mature instances of species exhibit themselves as organic wholes not as heaps of unrelated parts. The parts themselves are understood in relationship to one another, that is, in the complementarity of their functions and in the way they serve the survival and flourishing of the whole. There is, moreover, a directedness to living things, which is increasingly palpable as we approach the level of the human.

To these two causes, Aristotle adds the initiating or efficient cause and the final cause. His description of the four runs thus:

In one sense a "cause" means (1) that from which, as a constituent, something is generated; for example the bronze is a cause of the statue, and the silver, of the cup... In another, it means (2) the form or the pattern, this being the formula of the essence...; for example, in the case of the octave, the ratio 2:1.... In another, it means (3) that from which change or coming to rest first begins; for example, the adviser is a cause, and the father is the cause of the baby, and, in general that which acts is a cause of that which is acted upon, and that which brings about a change is a cause of that which is being changed. Finally, it means (4) the end, and this is the final cause [that for the sake of which]; for example, walking is for the sake of health. Why does he walk? We answer, "In order to be healthy"; and having spoken thus, we think that we have given the cause. (Physics, II, 1: 1194b25-35)

Now, certain objections (most of which can be traced to early modern philosophers like Descartes, Hobbes, and Bacon, who sought to supplant Aristotle's physics) are commonly raised against the appeal to formal and final causes. We will consider three. The first objection focuses on final causality and alleges that the application of these causes to sub-human beings involves personifying nature, an unwarranted projection of properly human traits onto sub-human beings. Only human beings deliberate about ends and consciously seek to realize goals. To say that plants or snails act for the sake of ends is to ascribe conscious intention to them. The second objection starts with the assumption that all that exists is material things in motion, interacting and producing certain results. On this view, formal and final causes play no verifiable role in experience. The appeal to formal and final causes postulates the existence of "occult qualities," hidden causes that could never be verified by empirical, scientific inquiry. The third worry, which may well be implicit in the first two, is that the search for these causes is naive, superfluous, and unscientific. To focus on formal and final causes is to remain at the level of crude, unreflective common sense and to distract us from serious scientific analysis and experimentation. Besides, even if there are such causes, knowledge of them seems to add nothing substantive to what we derive from the exclusively quantitative accounts provided by the modern sciences.

By way of response, we should note first that nothing in Aristotle's description of formal and final causes eliminates the possibility of seeking explanations in terms of material causes. Indeed, his view is that a form cannot be understood apart from its material subject. Aristotle doesn't want to replace naturalistic explanations but to enlarge our sense of what it means to give such an explanation. In this sense, the second objection, the occult quality objection, is wide of the mark. The form is precisely the organization of the matter. This does not mean that the essences of material substances are transparent to human intelligence. Getting at the essence is difficult, but there is no gulf between the matter of a substance and its form. As we have already noted, the form is not some separate substance, unrelated to matter, but rather the very configuration and organization of the matter, exhibited in the process of growth and in the habitual activities of species. We come to know the essence by attending ever more carefully to the organization and activities of the substance in question. The first objection, concerning an anthropomorphic projection onto nature, also contains a kernel of truth. Final causality, for example, is most evident to us in our own consciously directed operations; indeed, the composition of form and matter is most evident to us in examples from art, where the distinction between the two causes is palpable precisely because the artist introduces from the outside a form into the matter. Thus, in the second book of the Physics, when he introduces the four causes, Aristotle begins with examples drawn from art. This is in keeping with the pedagogical principle stated in the opening of the work that we must begin with what is most evident to us and work toward what is most evident in nature (Physics, I, 1). But the fact that acting for an end is most obvious in conscious, human activity in no way diminishes the presence of final causality in dogs or apple trees. They, too, exhibit a process of development toward an end, although they are unaware of it. Not even in human development, which is directed to an end, is there an imputation of conscious choice or intention. It's not as if a 13 year old chooses to grow 3 inches over the summer.

If, finally, this view is naive, then there may well be some virtue in naiveté. Philosophy should never rest with the obvious, but it ought not to discount it either. Aristotle's approach has the advantage of fostering some level of continuity between our pre-scientific, common-sense experience of nature and our scientific inquiry into the principles and causes of nature. This pre-scientific experience is an ineliminable background for every inquiry and experiment. Can a doctor perform major surgery on a patient without an implicit acknowledgment of the proper functioning of organs like the heart and the lungs? It is a minor point, perhaps, but nonetheless true. On a larger scale, if science is to give an account of itself, of its origin and purpose, it will have to recur to the pre-scientific familiarity with nature, or else its explanation will be merely an unreflective and dogmatic description of what it does and produces, not an account of how we might come to understand and value its inquiry in the first place.

Of course, one of the primary modern motives for rejecting formal and final causes is Darwin's theory of evolution. Although he finally banished these causes, Darwin himself was deeply ambivalent about whether his theory of evolution could do without them. In their absence, it is difficult to use terms like "development" or "higher" and "lower, " terms which imply progress in the direction of what's better and higher and hence seem to involve the notion of a telos or final cause. Classical evolutionary theory wants to concentrate exclusively on antecedent material and efficient causes, whose interaction is the explanatory nexus for change within and between species. But this gives us no ground for saying that one species is higher than another, only that one species is more fit for this or that environment. For Aristotle, we may speak of one species being higher than another in terms of levels of soul; higher souls contain the powers and capacities of lower order souls and integrate them in service of whatever the highest power of the species may be. So animals have both the vegetative powers of plants and the sensitive powers proper to them, while human beings have both of these and rational powers as well. As we ascend the grades of soul, we encounter increased openness to the external world, a greater ability to interact with the world, and enhanced inwardness, a depth of activity and awareness.

Reading Assignment

Aristotle, Physics, II.

Writing Assignment

1. Reflect on Aristotle's four causes by examining examples from art and nature.

2. What is Aristotle's argument (in Physics, II, chapters 8-9) that parts of natural substances develop for the sake of an end, not merely by chance or necessity?

Suggested Reading

Leon Kass, Toward a More Natural Science. (New York: The Free Press, 1985). See especially the chapter on Darwin.

Notes

4. "Changing Aristotle's Mind," in Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, ed. A. Rorty and M. Nussbaum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 28-9.

As Aquinas notes in his commentary, the inquiry of the De Anima is pivotal in three respects (Commentary on the De Anima, Bk. I, lectio 1). First, the study of what human nature is and its proper activities is a prelude to the study of the human good in the disciplines of ethics and politics. According to Aristotle, to be a wise legislator, one must study the soul. One of the key arguments in the first book of the Ethics--the one that establishes that human happiness consists in activity of soul in accord with reason--appeals to the exercise of reason as the function peculiar to the human species. Second, metaphysics, the discipline at the pinnacle of philosophy, answers to the natural, human desire to know, an orientation which is disclosed in the study of the soul. The intellect, which is potentially all things (potens omnia), is perfected by knowing material substances and their causes. As we learn in the De Anima and as is reiterated in the opening of the Metaphysics, human beings are located at the pinnacle of the animal world, in the very middle of the cosmos. Our intellectual capacity elevates us above all other animals but the poverty of our intellect renders us inferior to the separate substances and God. Wonder is the mark of human nature, an openness to the whole. Third, in contrast to the particular sciences, which examine parts of being, metaphysics investigates being as being. Unlike physics, it is not limited to mutable beings, composed of matter and form, but ranges over all substances. The wider scope of metaphysics presupposes that non-material things exist. If only composite, material substances existed, then physics would be the fundamental and most comprehensive science. But how are we to begin to speak about immaterial things? Aquinas holds that we do so by analogy to our knowledge of the immaterial operations of our own intellects. Thus, without the knowledge, established in the De Anima, of the immateriality of the human intellect and the nature of its operation, we would not even be able to begin thinking about the nature and activity of the separate substances and God. We would not be able to study metaphysics. If the study of human nature is for Aquinas crucial to the study of philosophy, it is also central to theology. The Summa Theologiae, from which most of the material for this course is derived, is a decidedly theological text, yet in the excerpts we have included in this volume, there is virtually no argument that depends upon properly theological or revealed doctrines. Still, the guiding influence of theology is reflected in the order of proceeding. We are already familiar with the order appropriate to philosophical pedagogy, which begins from what is most evident to us and first in our experience (natural philosophy) and proceeds toward what is first in the order of nature or being (metaphysics). By beginning from God, theology reverses this order and takes as its point of departure what is first in being and last in our experience (ST, I, 2). Theology then treats the coming forth of things from God in creation and culminates in the return of all things to God through Christ and the sacraments. By far the largest segments of Aquinas's theological writings are devoted to the created order of nature, in which human nature occupies a crucial place. Before Renaissance poets called man a microcosm, Aquinas, echoing a series of venerable neo-Platonic authorities, referred to human beings as existing on the horizon of the spiritual and the material. Aquinas traces the complexity of human beings (in contrast to the simplicity of lower embodied creatures and of disembodied angels) to their being situated at the juncture of the material and the immaterial. Human beings contain the perfections of both orders (ST, I, 77, 2).

One of the advantages of beginning with Aristotle's account of nature and human nature is that we gain some familiarity with the Aristotelian vocabulary that pervades the more theological discussion in the Summa Theologiae, where he rarely pauses to explain the original context in Aristotle's own texts. Another reason is that the theological order of proceeding can mislead readers unaccustomed to Aquinas's complex pedagogical style. Since theology begins with what is prior by nature although last in our experience, the treatise on human nature begins with the soul and then turns to its union with the body (ST, I, 75-76). A reader might hastily infer from this that we could know the soul prior to, and in isolation from, the body or that we could have some sort of immediate, introspective access to the nature of the intellect. All of this is explicitly denied by Aquinas in the same treatise (ST, I, 87, 1-4), but if the differences between the philosophical and theological modes of proceeding go unnoticed, readers might come away thinking that Aquinas has more in common with Descartes than with Aristotle. Since human beings are middle creatures, they must be understood not only in relationship to what is beneath them but also to what is above them. Thus Aquinas pairs an ascending, philosophical approach that culminates with the human species as the zenith of animal life and a descending, theological approach that descends from God and the angels to man as the lowest of intellectual beings.

As creatures of open-ended wonder, human beings cannot by their own powers possess wisdom, but they can long for it and possess a portion of it. This is why Socrates calls himself a philosopher (literally a lover of wisdom) and not a sophist (one who is already wise). In modern philosophy the desire for certitude and productive power supplants the aspiration for wisdom. At the very outset of the De Anima, Aristotle notes that knowledge is desirable for two reasons: a) because of the certitude gained and b) because of the nobility of the object known. When we cannot have both, we should prefer the dim knowledge of noble objects to a certain knowledge of less dignified objects (Commentary on the De Anima, Bk. I, lectio 1).

At least for Descartes, the quest for certitude requires initially dismissing the entire order of sense and bodily experience, even my experience of myself as a body. The putting into question of the entire physical order allows the pristine intelligibility of the order of mind to come to the fore. We know ourselves better than other things and we know our intellect better than our body. The intellectual self is known immediately and transparently. Following Aristotle, and in contrast to Descartes, Aquinas urges a methodological retreat in our pursuit of self-knowledge. There is no possibility of gaining immediate, introspective access to the intellect or the soul. The route to self-knowledge is indirect, oblique. To understand the essence of any species, we must begin with the objects naturally pursued by members of the species in question, then move back from these to examine the activities, powers, and, finally, the essence. The indirect route to self-knowledge follows from the fact that the intellect is a potency made actual only by knowing things. But a power is knowable in so far as it is in act. Thus, there is no possibility of knowing the intellect until it has been actualized by knowing something other than itself.

The indirect and mediated path to knowledge of the human soul does not diminish the importance of that knowledge. Indeed, the general investigation of soul culminates with an analysis of what is proper to human souls. Thus we find Aquinas explicating in great detail Aristotle's comparison of sensation and understanding and his argument that intellect so differs from sense that it must be an immaterial power, whose operation transcends every bodily organ. Like sense, the intellect is said to be passive with respect to sensible objects. It is a potency actualized by receiving the forms of things. But there are different senses of passivity and clarification of them is crucial to a comparison of sense and intellect. Aquinas writes:

To be passive may be taken in three ways. First, in its most strict sense, when from a thing is taken something which belongs to it by virtue either of its nature, or of its proper inclination, as when ...a man becomes ill. Secondly, less strictly, a thing is said to be passive when something either suitable or unsuitable is taken away from it. And in this way not only he who is ill is said to be passive, but also he who is healed.... Thirdly, in a wide sense a thing is said to be passive, from the very fact that what is in potency to something receives that to which it was in potency without being deprived of anything. And accordingly whatever passes from potency to act may be said to be passive, even when it is perfected. And thus with us to understand is to be passive. (ST, I, 79, 2)

In its proper and first meaning, to be acted upon entails the displacement of one form by another, the destruction of the initial form by the form that emerges in the process of change. To suffer in this way is a deprivation; it involves the loss of what's proper to something, as when a man becomes ill. In a more general meaning, to suffer involves simply change of form, whether that change be suitable or unsuitable. In an even less proper sense, to suffer involves the reception of what perfects the receiver, of a form to which it is naturally in potency. Now, sensation and understanding both seem to be passivities of the last sort, the principal difference being that an excessively powerful object corrupts the sense, whereas an encounter with an inordinately intelligible object strengthens the intellect.

Wherever he discusses the immateriality of the intellect, Aquinas adduces a standard set of arguments--a) that it knows sensible things in abstraction from the here and now, that it doesn't require their actual presence to ponder them, b) that it apprehends the universal and not just the singular, e.g. not just water but what it is to be water, c) that, unlike sense, its objects are not limited to a set of contraries, that the whole of being comes under its purview, and d) that it is self-reflective; sense doesn't know or even sense that it sense, while by an act of self-appropriation the intellect is simultaneously aware of that which it knows and that it is knowing. Aquinas also spells out Aristotle's argument on behalf of the subsistence of the intellect. The conclusion follows from the coupling of the immateriality of the intellect with the premise that whatever has an operation proper to itself subsists (Commentary on the De Anima, Bk. III, lectiones 7-10 and ST, I, 75, 2).

Of course, from the vantage point of Aristotle's philosophy the separate subsistence of the intellect is troubling. Both Aquinas and Aristotle insist that, even if the intellect operates independently of bodily organs, it still needs the body to present it with an object. Here and in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas affirms the intellect's orientation toward and dependence on phantasms for every act of knowing (ST, I, 84, 7). The intellect's transcendence of the limits of material conditions in its very act of knowing sensible substances seems simultaneously to allow for the intellect's separate existence and to undercut the possibility of its knowing anything in such a disembodied state.[5] Thus does the study of soul generate seemingly insuperable philosophical difficulties. When Aquinas comes to address these issues in the Summa, he underscores their philosophical intractability (ST, I, 89, 1).[6] Their satisfactory resolution can be had only from the perspective of theology, with the revealed teachings on the resurrection of the body and the graced elevation of the intellect to the vision of God. Attention to the successes and limits of Aristotle's philosophical inquiry is instructive on two points. First, it makes clear that Aquinas's preoccupation with the question of the separate existence of the intellect is not manufactured from extraneous theological concerns. Second, we see how the careful formulation of philosophical problems sets the stage for a positive engagement of philosophy by theology.

Reading Assignment

Aristotle's De Anima; Aristotle's Metaphysics, I.1.

Writing Assignment

1. Compare Aquinas's account of human self-knowledge with that of Descartes.

2. Examine carefully one or more of the arguments for the immateriality of the intellect.

Required Reading

Aristotle's De Anima: all the selections included in the Hackett volume.

See also the passages cited in these lecture notes from the Summa Theologiae (Hackett edition).

Suggested Reading

Aquinas's Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima (Dumb Ox Press).

Notes

5. See Deborah Modrak, "The Nous-Body Problem in Aristotle," Review of Metaphysics, 44 (1991), pp. 755-74.

6. See Anton Pegis, "The Separated Soul and its Nature in St. Thomas," in St. Thomas Aquinas 1274-1974: Commemorative Studies, volume I (Toronto: PIMS, 1974), pp. 131-59.

In his treatment of human knowledge in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas spends a good deal of time combating a view that he attributes to Plato and his followers. As Aquinas sees it, Plato confuses the mode of our understanding with the mode of the being of things. Aquinas is careful to locate Plato's view within its historical context, as a response to the position of the early natural philosophers who held either that there could be no knowledge because the objects of knowledge are sensible things, always in flux, or that knowledge is a matter of the physical elements in us hooking up with the physical elements in things (ST, I, 84, 1). Wanting to save the character of knowledge as universal, immaterial, and immobile, Plato posits the existence of a separate order of Forms corresponding to our ideas. Aquinas objects that this fails to salvage knowledge of sensible things, which are singular, material, and mobile, and that it renders the union of soul and body inscrutable. What is missing in Plato is a more radical reflection on the nature of our intellectual operation and its relationship to its proper objects, the natures of sensible substances. More specifically, what is missing is the intellectual operation of abstraction performed by the agent intellect (ST, I, 84, 6). For Aquinas, the intellect is both passive, that is, receptive of sensible things, and active upon them (ST, I, 79, 2-3). Our knowledge of sensible things, which is at first vague and general, is made precise and specific by actively engaging with sensible things, by persistent questioning of them. In this way, what is potentially intelligible becomes actually intelligible.

Technically and precisely, Aquinas states that understanding is the result of the intellect's abstracting the intelligible species from the phantasm, an image of the sensible thing. The language of abstraction can be confusing, if we think of it in physical terms as a stripping away of a material surface to arrive at an intelligible or spiritual core. On this picture, the agent intellect's operation would resemble that of a construction crane, extracting the intelligible species from experience. Abstraction is no such mechanical process. It is an "active power to consider the nature of sensible things without considering their individuating conditions," that is, the conditions that pertain to them as this or that instance and not just as members of the species (ST, I, 85, 1, ad 4). Thus we can consider the nature of a cow while disregarding the fact that this cow is here before us now and has a certain color, weight and so forth. In knowing and defining natural substances, be they human beings or cows, we must include flesh and bones but not this flesh and these bones. The contrast is between signate matter, that is, the concrete matter to which we can point and common matter which is common to all the members of a species. Physics includes common but not signate matter, while mathematics, which treats of abstract forms, excludes both signate and common matter, but includes what is called intelligible matter to account for there being numerically many instances of the same form, for example, triangles, squares, etc. Abstraction thus salvages what Plato's doctrine could not: our knowledge of sensible things.

Two objections against abstraction may be considered at this juncture. First, does not abstraction involve falsity because it confuses the sensible singular with the immaterial universal? One response is that the universal corresponds to the nature of sensible singulars, a nature that is more than singular in that it is shared in by many. The deeper response is that the intellect never attributes its mode of understanding to the thing understood. It was this modal difference that eluded Plato. Second, in spite of what Aquinas says about the orientation of the mind to the sensible world, does he not in practice treat sensible singulars as mere means to universal knowledge, as starting points that are to be discarded once we have abstracted the intelligible species? Aquinas reiterates Aristotle's paradoxical expression: we both abstract from and understand in the phantasms (ST, I, 85, 1, ad 5). The locus classicus for this issue is the article which asks whether we need to attend to a phantasm in every act of knowing, even after we possess the intelligible species (ST, I, 84, 7). By way of support for Aristotle's authoritative statement that the soul understands nothing without a phantasm, Aquinas adduces two arguments. First, if this were not the case, our understanding would not be hindered by damage to bodily organs in which our sense resides. Second, from experience we see that the discovery of appropriate examples and the crafting of illuminating images is necessary for our act of understanding. Thus does the formation of phantasms, that is, appropriate examples, assist the facility of the intellect. The most important reason why we cannot sever the intellect's link to sensible singulars is the requirement of truth: the universal must correspond to the nature existing in singulars. Here we encounter once again that reflective act by which the intellect both knows and knows that it knows. In its reflection, the intellect extends to sense and judges that this singular before it is an instance of a certain natural kind. This sort of judgment occurs whenever we encounter an existing thing, which always presents itself as a "this-such," as both a singular and a bearer of a certain universal nature. There is no such thing as a bare singular. In this act, the intellect grasps the existence of the thing and exemplifies the remarkable cooperation and integration of soul and body, since the same man both knows what he senses and senses what he knows. If we reflect upon the activity of knowing sensible singulars, we can discover the experiential basis for Thomas's seemingly contradictory assertions about the human intellect, namely, that it cannot think without a phantasm and that thinking is an operation that resides in not bodily organ. In the very act of attending to sensible singulars, we apprehend them under a formality that transcends their mere particularity. As Aristotle puts it in the Metaphysics VII, every concretely existing substance is a "this," a singular, and a "such," a bearer of a universal nature. The commonplace act of judging that this singular before me is a tree reveals something not only about the thing known but also about the composite unity of the knower, who both knows what he senses and senses what he knows. In the acts of knowing and judging, we are simultaneously oriented to and independent of sense and singularity.

Here we have yet another illustration of how we come to know our own nature by reflection upon our acts of knowing other things. Thus does Aquinas accent something that Aristotle had merely noted, namely, the intellect's capacity of self-reflection and self-appropriation. With Aristotle, Aquinas describes knowledge as an identity of knower and known, but such an identity is also ascribed to sense in its relation to sensible qualities. Sense, however, does not sense that it senses. Self-reflection, then, is peculiar to the intellect. There is no private "I" or "Ego" for Aquinas, since the intellect, as a potency, is nothing until it is actualized by things. Whatever self there is emerges in the very act of knowing the other-as-other. Emphasizing the identity of knower and known underscores the knowing of the other, but not as other. For the latter, reflection on, and self-possession of, our act of knowing are necessary. This does not entail immediate introspection, but rather a mediated return to self in the very act of attending to things.

In a variety of ways, then, Aquinas underscores the intellect's natural orientation to sensible singulars. Indeed, he makes his own Aristotle's teachings a) that the intellect is a potency made actual only by its interaction with things and b) that knowledge is not by contact of knower and known or by the presence of a similitude of the latter in the former but by an identity of knower and known. Some, however, see in the role of the intelligible species as mediator between intellect and thing an anticipation of the modern suject-object dichotomy. In an article which asks whether the species is related to our intellect as what is understood or as that by which we understand (ST, I, 85, 2), Aquinas insists that the primary object of our knowledge is the nature of sensible things. The species is the means by which (quo) we know things rather than what (quod) we know. Aquinas's language might seem to imply that we first inspect the content of our consciousness and then look to the external world to confirm that the content accurately reflects external things. The most obvious problem with this procedure is that it traps us in an infinite regress. If what we encounter first is always the content of our consciousness, the way things have affected us, then the turn from the species to the world will always be frustrated by the fact that we will once again encounter an image or likeness of what exists outside us. One can see here how the view of Descartes and Locke on the temporal priority of ideas in our coming to know external things quite reasonably generates both Hume's skepticism about whether we can know the external world at all and Berkeley's claim that "to be is to be perceived" (esse est percipi).

Descartes' quest for absolute certitude engendered the peculiarly modern enterprise of philosophical justification through epistemology. The framework for the enterprise is the subject-object split. It sets a mind over here in opposition to a world over there. The question is whether we can get there from here. The task is to justify one's knowledge, to vindicate one's claims about the world in the face of skepticism about whether the mind latches onto the world at all. From the perspective of Aristotle and Aquinas, the modern approach looks awfully contrived and artificial; instead of focusing on human beings actively engaged with things in the world, it offers us an abstract mind trying desperately to find entry into the world. Moreover, reasonable doubts are always local, never global; they are formulated against a set of background assumptions that could never all at once be successfully put in question. If doubt were to become truly global, it would be fatal. At the root of the modern problematic is an assumption shared by Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, namely, that what we know first are ideas, not things.

Aquinas nowhere asserts that we know the species and then through it know the thing. In terms of temporal order, the species can be known only after we have known the thing, by a reflective act that may accompany our knowing of things. In that reflective act, we simultaneously know the thing and know that we know it. In the latter, we acknowledge that our intellect has been informed by the nature of the thing. This is congruent with Aristotle's dicta that we know activities by first knowing the objects of those activities. If Aquinas does not anticipate the modern problematic, one might still wonder whether it would not be safer to eliminate the language of species altogether. Would it not be less misleading to speak simply of an intellect and a thing, or better, of an intellect knowing a thing. Why posit the species or concept as a third thing? The response is that the concept is not a thing, but the "informed activity of the intellect as it grasps the thing." Indeed, the Latin term conceptum can have our meaning of "concept" but it can also mean "thing conceived." The latter is more in accord with Thomas's use.

Reading Assignment 

Summa Theologiae, I, 79, 84-87.

Writing Assignment

1. Reflect on the meaning and importance of Aquinas's argument that a phantasm or image is necessary for every act of human knowing.

2. Consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of Plato's account of human knowledge, as Aquinas describes it.

Suggested Reading

Aristotle, Metaphysics, VII

Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I, chapter 1 and Book II, chapters 1-8

Berkeley, A Treatise Conerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

John O'Callaghan, "The Problem of Language and Mental Representation in Aristotle and St. Thomas," The Review of Metaphysics 50 (1997), pp. 499-541.

Some have supposed that because the intellect is immaterial, it cannot be the substantial form of a material body. Instead, it is related to the body as mover to moved. This position has the apparent advantage of explaining the interaction of the soul with the body without immersing it in matter. Some who find this view congenial posit a number of souls as mediators between the body and the intellect (ST, I, 76, 3). An individual human being would be alive by the vegetative soul; animal by the sensitive soul; and man by the intellectual soul. Aquinas counters that the multiplication of souls has the awkward result of rendering any particular human being only accidentally one. "Animal" would be predicated of "man" accidentally not essentially. By contrast, Aquinas recurs to Aristotle's definition of the soul as a first actuality, giving being and unity to the body. The substantial form is derived from the highest power of the soul, which contains virtually what belongs to lower souls (ST, I, 76, 4). Being contained by and ordered to the highest power in human beings, the lower powers are not the same in human beings as they are in inferior animals. They are transformed and elevated by their participation in the intellectual soul. One substantial form, the intellectual soul, gives being and unity to the whole.

The tension, which we have noted above, between soul as form and soul as subsistent is central to the opening questions of the de homine, which begins where the commentary on the De Anima concludes. Soul as form underscores our kinship with other animals, while the soul's subsistence points to our similarity to angels. Aquinas pairs an ascending, philosophical account of humans as the pinnacle of the animal kingdom with a descending, theological account of human souls as the lowest and weakest members of the genus of intellectual substances. Since we are not disembodied intellects but rational animals, the natural genus to which we belong is the genus animal. The technical terminology for what exists in its own right is hoc aliquid. Because of the argument stated above, Aquinas holds that the soul is subsistent. In response to the objection that "this particular thing" is said not of the soul but of that which is composed of soul and body, he writes:

'This particular thing' can be taken in two senses. Firstly, for anything subsistent; secondly, for that which subsists and is complete in a specific nature...Therefore as the human soul is a part of the human species, it can be called 'this particular thing' in the first sense... but not in the second sense." (ST, I, 75, 2, ad 1)

Thus, the denomination of the soul as a hoc aliquid is a qualified, analogical use of the phrase (See also Commentary on the De Anima, Bk. II, lectio 1). Aquinas proceeds to argue that the soul is not in the same species as an angel, that its mode of knowing differs markedly from that of the angel, and, finally, that the soul itself is not in any species whatsoever, since it is but part of a composite (ST, I, 75, 7).

This returns us to Aristotle's definition of the soul as the "first act of a natural, organic body potentially having life." Aristotle follows the stipulation that in the definition of a form we must state its proper subject (Commentary on the De Anima, Bk. II, lectio 1). The definition brings technical precision to the insight that the soul is the actualizing, animating, and organizing form of the body, that we cannot understand one without the other. By "first act" Aristotle distinguishes the original act which gives being and unity to a substance from its subsequent acts, which involve the operation of its proper powers. There are thus many second acts, but only one first act. Aristotle refers to the subject of the soul as an organic body; a diversity of organs is appropriate to the complexity of operations of ensouled, living beings. Since the body is receptive of the animating soul, it is described as potentially having life. As Aquinas notes it is the same thing for matter to be united to form as it is for matter to be in act. Aristotle remarks that it is as redundant to ask whether soul and body are one as it is to ask whether an act and that of which it is the act are one.

Throughout his reflections on human nature, Aquinas highlights the marvelous union of soul and body. The remarkable consequences of that union are clear from his discussions of the human body and the passions, discussions which increase our appreciation of just how complex, rich, and supple his account is. In response to the query whether God gave the human body an apt disposition (ST, I, 91, 3), Aquinas focuses upon the "upright stature" of human beings. The consequences for our relationship to the world are telling. In animals, the senses reside primarily in the face; since our face is not turned toward the ground, our senses are not confined to performing biological functions necessary for survival: pursuing food and fending off attackers. Our senses provide avenues for higher-level interaction with nature and other human beings. We are open to and receptive of the whole: "The subtlety of sight surveys the truth of all things." Our mouths do not protrude and are not primarily suited for self-defense and procuring food. If our mouths and tongues were like those of other animals, they would "hinder speech which is the proper work of reason."

It has sometimes been suggested that Western philosophical reflection about mind is wedded to an abstract and detached model of objectivity, which crystallizes in a penchant for comparing mind exclusively to sight. Aquinas's emphasis on the embodiment of reason in speech and on touch as the most human of the senses undercuts such a model. In response to the question whether the rational soul is united to an appropriate body, he highlights the importance of the sense of touch (ST, I, 76, 5). By comparison with the bodies of other animals, the human body is infirmed, that is, less immediately equipped with powers serving the maintenance of life. Instead of a "fixed" set of bodily powers, it has reason and the hand, the organ of organs, able to craft limitless tools. Moreover, the human body is ordered to activities eclipsing that of mere survival: knowledge, communication, and love. For these, it requires an "equable complexion, a mean between contraries," giving it the ability to receive and discriminate an array of sensible qualities. Such a complexion is prominent in the sense of touch, especially in the hand, which "actually grasps and takes on the form of the thing held." There is a striking analogy here between the hand's grasping of objects and the intellect's grasping of the forms of the things.

The link between touch and intelligence and the analogy between touch and thought illustrate from yet another vantage point the remarkable union of soul and body. The intellectual soul, we should recall, is the first act of the entire body, animating and informing the whole. This has important ramifications for the sub-rational powers of the human soul. For example, the participation of the lower, sensitive powers in reason is prominent in Aquinas's examination of the passions. Since the passions reside in the sensitive rather than the intellectual appetite, it might seem they could not be subject to moral appraisal. The faulty assumption here is that of an unbridgeable gap between intellect and will, on the one hand, and the sensitive appetite, on the other. Aquinas counters with Aristotle's teaching that, while the lower appetites are not intrinsically rational, they are amenable to rational persuasion and thus may participate in reason (ST, I-II, 24, 1, ad 2). Aquinas divides the passions into concupiscible and irascible. The former (which includes love and hatred, joy and sorrow) pertains to sensible good and evil absolutely, while the latter (which encompasses hope and despair, daring and fear) has a more narrow scope: the arduous or difficult good or evil (ST, I- II, 23, 1). The restricted scope of the irascible passions indicates their auxiliary and subordinate role; they are called into action when we encounter arduous goods or onerous evils. Since they concern a restricted good, they pertain to movement alone, as in struggle or flight, not to repose. Thus the concupiscible powers are prior to the irascible and, among the concupiscible, the first is love, whose inclination to the good is the cause of all the passions (ST, I-II, 25, 2). We can see here an important consequence of Aquinas's view of desire and natural inclination as ordered to appropriate ends, as fulfilled in joyful repose.

What, at this point, can we say about the union of soul and body? On the one hand, the human body is raised up, transformed by its union with the intellectual soul. On the other hand, the union with the body and its human significance means that the soul cannot sever itself from the body. We cannot disavow our bodies without courting self-misunderstanding. Leon Kass writes: "Thinking about the body is...constraining and liberating for the thinker: constraining because it shows him the limits on the power of thought to free him from embodiment, setting limits on thought understood as a tool for mastery; liberating because it therefore frees him to wonder about the irreducibly mysterious union and concretion of mind and body that we both are and live."[7]

Any view that treats nature and the body as "raw material for human activity and for its power" contravenes the Church's teaching on the unity of the human person, whose rational soul is per se and essentialiter the form of his body.... The person by the light of reason and the support of virtue discovers in the body the anticipatory signs, the expression and the promise of the gift of self, in conformity with the wise plan of the Creator" (Veritatis Splendor, p. 66). Aquinas's conception of the dignity of the human body and of the participation of the sensitive powers in reason underscores the mysterious unity of body and soul, what the poet John Donne's calls the "subtile knot, which makes us man."[8] His poem "The Extasie," begins with a seemingly Platonic scene: two lovers lying next to one another while their souls ascend above their bodies and become one. The immateriality of the souls does not preclude their union with their bodies; in fact, that union is natural and appropriate, providing suitable vehicles for the communication of love. In Thomistic fashion, Donne proceeds to reverse the Platonic thesis of the soul trapped in the body, proposing that a disembodied soul is imprisoned. As Donne puts it,

So must pure lovers soules descend
T'affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend.
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
To'our bodies turn we then, that so
Weake men on love reveal'd may looke;
Loves mysteries in soules doe grow,
But yet the body is his booke.

If the union of the intellectual soul with a body has important ramifications for the nature of the human body, it also renders the question of the ultimate destiny of the human person nearly philosophically inscrutable. This is not to say that philosophy can say nothing positive about the possibility of life beyond the grave. We have seen Aristotle provide convincing arguments on behalf of the immateriality and subsistence of the intellect. Given the natural orientation of the intellect to sensible substances and the soul to the body, whether the intellect could know anything in a separated state is problematic. In his response to that exact question (ST, I, 89, 1), Aquinas repeatedly uses the term "difficulty." He begins with the Platonic denial that the soul is the form of the body; since on this view the soul's knowledge is not assisted but impeded by the body, there is no problem with whether a separated soul can know. But it suffers a more basic difficulty; it renders the original union of soul and body inexplicable, since that union does not seem to be for the soul's good. Aristotle's position, by contrast, accounts for union but leaves us with the problem of how the separated intellect could know anything. Aquinas suggests two modes of being and knowing: one through phantasms while united to the body and another by turning directly to intelligible species when separated from the body. He adds: "To be separated from the body is not in accord with its nature, and likewise to understand without turning to phantasms is not natural to it." In fact, the knowledge of the separated soul is "general and confused" rather than "perfect and proper." How little we can complain of Aristotle's inability to resolve the issue is clear from Aquinas's statement that the separated intellect needs supernatural assistance. It knows "by means of participated species resulting from the influence of divine light." This mode of knowing is not unnatural but rather supernatural as God is the "author of the influx both of the light of grace and the light of nature" (ST, I, 89, 1, ad 3). But even this does not alter the nature of the soul in such a way that it is no longer appropriately the form of the body: "the human soul retains its proper being when separated from the body, having an aptitude and natural inclination to be united to the body" (ST, I, 76, 1, ad 6).

Reading Assignment

Summa Theologiae, I, 75-76, 80-81, 88, 89, and 90-91 

Veritatis Splendor.

Writing Assignment

1. Reflect on the distinctiveness of the human body.

2. Reflect on the difficulties surrounding the question whether the separated soul is able to know anything.

Suggested Reading

Leon Kass, "Thinking About the Body," in Toward a More Natural Science.

Notes

7. Toward a More Natural Science (New York: Free Press, 1985), p. 295.

8. "The Extasie," in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne (New York: Modern Library, 1952), pp. 39-41.

The chief impediment to recovering Aquinas's teaching on voluntary agency is the modern celebration of freedom that stands between us and the 13th century. Freedom has inspired nearly all the great political movements of the modern world and modern philosophers have been more preoccupied with the questions of whether human beings are free and, if so, how we are to characterize that freedom. By contrast, Aquinas both devotes much less attention to the topic and develops a view of freedom that seems much too constraining to modern humanity.

Some understanding of modern conceptions of freedom is necessary if we are to uncover and appreciate the distinctive features of Aquinas's position. Just as with the question of mind and body, so too with the issue of freedom we find a basic set of options articulated very early in the modern period, in the writings of Descartes and Hobbes. The latter treats human nature and deliberation mechanistically and ends up denying the ascription of free choice to human agents. Choice is merely the last stage in deliberation, not a free rational judgment; it is always under the determining influence of antecedent passion. By underscoring the universal threat of violent death in the state of nature, Hobbes hopes to compel his audience to lay down their natural rights and submit to a Leviathan, a governor with complete power over his subjects. By contrast, Descartes separates human understanding and agency from the realm of physical causality and urges us to adopt a posture of self-determination and self-regulation of our thought. Although he does not in the Meditations develop an ethical doctrine of freedom, the description of human nature that emerges from that work suggests a position distinct from that of Hobbes.

When one compares the paucity of references to freedom in ancient philosophy with its centrality in modern philosophy, one also notes a corresponding shift in the modern period toward speaking of human beings as persons rather than as individuals with a shared human nature. Here the most important figure is undoubtedly Kant, who speaks of human persons precisely in order to distinguish them from nature. According to the Newtonian conception of nature which informs Kant's writing, nature is the realm of deterministic necessity, understood in terms of law-like generalizations and mathematical formulae. The mechanistic flow of natural causes leaves no room for freedom. To make room for freedom, to carve out a niche for properly human agency, Kant appeals to the "fact of freedom," which is at least implicitly experienced in each individual's deliberation and action. How is this so? In deliberating and acting, I must presuppose myself to be self-determining. Were I not to assume this capacity of free self-determination, I would undercut the very possibility of choosing among options that constitutes deliberation: "Now I say every being that cannot act except under the idea of freedom is just for that reason in a practical point of view really free... It must regard itself as the author of its principles independent of foreign influences" (Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals). More dramatically for Kant, the fact that in deliberating and choosing I find myself bound by a moral law is proof that I possess a rational independence from external causes. The moral law requires that, in cases where duty conflicts with inclination, I act against inclination, that is, against the deterministic realm of nature. Another crucial characteristic of the moral law is that each individual gives it to himself; only if I am self-legislating can I be autonomous and truly free. To accept a law from nature or human society or God is to act heteronomously, that is, to be enslaved to a force external to me. Our dignity consists in obeying a law we give ourselves. The rational self-determination that I discover in myself is present in each person and this is the ground of the imperative that we treat humanity as an end never merely as a means. Persons ought not to be instrumentalized; they have dignity, not price: "Man and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will, but in all his actions, whether they concern himself or other rational beings, must be always regarded at the same time as an end" (p. 271). Although Kant uses the terms "man" and "humanity," he resists grounding dignity and freedom on an anthropology or empirical study of the inclinations and propensities of human nature. To do so would be to return us to the realm of natural, causal necessity. Imperatives based on human nature could be the basis only of hypothetical imperatives (that is, commands that presuppose some contingent inclination in human beings: for example, if you want a Pepsi, you must get off the couch and go to the kitchen), not categorical imperatives (that is, commands that we must obey regardless of our inclinations: for example, do not murder).

Kant presents a powerful defense of human freedom and of the distinctive dignity of human persons. At least in one respect, with his use of the term "person," he is anticipated by medieval, Catholic thought. The notion of human beings as persons was originally coined in the course of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. When Aquinas reflects on the three-personed God, he recurs to Boethius' classic definition of a person as an "individual substance of a rational nature" (ST, I, 29, 1). He notes that individuality belongs to concretely existing substances, especially to rational substances who have "dominion over their own acts." In the created order, "person" signifies "what is most perfect in all of nature." Especially in God the term "person" connotes a) incommunicability, since the divine persons are irreducibly distinct and unrepeatable, and b) relationality, since the only possible ground for distinction in a simple divine being is the relation of origin. As we shall see, incommunicability and relationality are also characteristics of human persons, although for different reasons.

When we compare Aquinas with Kant, the chief modern proponent of depicting human beings as persons, we find some similarities. Both speak of the self-determination of rational agents and both underscore the individuality or incommunicability of persons, who are not merely parts or members of a common species. The person is a "who," not merely a "what." In both accounts, persons have a special dignity that sets them apart. These commonalities must, however, be set against quite different backgrounds. First, Aquinas nowhere sets persons in diametrical opposition to nature; instead he refers to them as individuals of a rational nature and as most perfect in nature. We stand at the pinnacle of created, embodied nature; we thus recapitulate in ourselves the whole of nature and elevate bodily nature to a participation in our rational freedom. Thus we can appropriate and direct the lower functions and capacities of nature in accord with the judgment of our reason. Second, Aquinas does not operate within the framework of a dichotomy between autonomy and heteronomy, at least in anything like Kant's formulation of the division. Aquinas would of course concur that if we are compelled by force to act or if we allow ourselves to be dominated by vicious rather than virtuous inclinations, we are no longer self-determined. But Aquinas speaks of human beings as "ruled rulers," whose self-determination is ensconced within and fostered by obedience to nature and God. The more we participate in the order established for us by God, the more free we are. This is not to be enslaved to an external and self-alienating law; it is, rather, to discover who and what we are as creatures. Indeed, to think of ourselves as utterly autonomous is to replicate the sins of pride and envy that undid the rebellious angels and our first parents.

In the whole order of embodied nature, human persons have an especially intimate relationship to the divine. The incommunicability of the person is underscored by the fact that each human soul is created immediately by God. Historically, the notion of the person as incommunicable is associated with the process of naming, whereby something stands forth as distinct from other things. We need only recall the importance of naming in the book of Genesis, for example, Adam's naming of the animals and God's renaming of Abram. If we are persons in our very origins, we are so by being called forth into existence in an especially personal way by our creator. Our very being is radically contingent, dependent on the free gift of a creator God. Our personal identity is realized not in autonomy but in being referred to the person who is our transcendent source. As Aquinas observes in his discussion of man as imago Dei, our intellect and will reflect the divine, but we are images of God not primarily in so far as we possess in a static way the capacity of judgment and choice but in so far as we are dynamically and consciously ordered to the exemplar of the image, who is both source and goal of our life. Thus community is in some sense prior to and constitutive of our individuality.

The issues of autonomy and heteronomy are addressed concisely and eloquently in John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis Splendor. To the Kantian thesis, he responds that

obedience to God is not... heteronomy, as if the moral life were subject to the will of something all-powerful, absolute, extraneous to man and intolerant of his freedom. If in fact a heteronomy of morality were to mean a denial of man's self-determination or the imposition of norms unrelated to his good, this would be... nothing but a form of alienation, contrary to divine wisdom.

The antecedent and governing truth regarding the question of human freedom is that fact of creation and of human participation, especially in the highest capacities of knowing and loving, in the order of divine providence. Instead of heteronomy, we should speak of "theonomy or participated theonomy, since man's free obedience to divine law effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in God's wisdom and providence" (p. 57).

Aquinas's account of freedom is at odds not only with the classical, liberal view of Kant, but also with the school of existentialism, whose celebration of human freedom knows no limits. This school continues the so-called humanistic reaction against the degrading determinism of science and depicts all reliance upon external standards as "bad faith," a cowardly and immoral unwillingness to embrace our radical freedom. In his Existentialism and Human Emotions, Jean-Paul Sartre traces our freedom to the absence of a God who creates and knows natures. He echoes Dostoevsky's assertion that if there is no God, all is possible (p. 22). The metaphysical doctrine of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, that at first man is nothing and that whatever he becomes is the result of his free self-fashioning. Thus we are completely responsible for who we are and cannot blame anyone--God, family, or society--or anything--nature or law--for what we have become. Authentic experience of our freedom involves anguish and the feeling of being forlorn. Thus, Sartrean existentialism is fundamentally atheistic. If there were a creator God who made us according to some blueprint, then human beings could be said to have a nature corresponding to a concept or model in the divine mind. Since there is no creator God,

man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man... is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it... Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. (p. 15)

Residual elements of Kant's conception of human dignity surface in Sartre's view that accentuating our radical self-creation evades any attempted articulation of human beings as objects possessing determinate, definable natures. Existentialism "gives man dignity" because it "does not reduce him to an object" (p. 37). The universalist tenor of Kantian ethics perdures in Sartre's insistence that in creating ourselves we are creating an image of man as he ought to be. There is a tension, however, between the universalist thrust and the view of the moral life as a work of art (pp. 23 and 42). Kant's conception of duty does not immediately invite comparisons with artistic self-creation. There is an unstated link between the two in the conception of autonomy as that which is free from all external restraint. If one gives up Kant's division between autonomy and inclination, then duty itself comes to seem an artificial imposition upon autonomy. Here Nietzsche's remark that morality and autonomy are incompatible is prophetic. And once autonomy is construed as artistic self-creation, it is impossible to predict or limit the directions it might take: heroic sacrifice for the good of humanity or delight in the destruction of the innocent or the latter for the sake of the former as Dostoevsky shows in Crime and Punishment.

We might wonder, furthermore, whether existentialism liberates us from the shackles and dilemmas of modern science; it seems rather to entrench us further in the dualisms we have inherited from Descartes. On the existentialist view, science can teach us nothing about what we are as human beings; we would lose any sense that we are animals. The body is denigrated as merely biological. We are still lost in the cosmos with no proper place and without any clear limits on our use and manipulation of nature. Instead of safeguarding human dignity, existentialism deprives us of the ability to distinguish between an appropriate stewardship of nature and arbitrary tyranny over it. Indeed, there is an uneasy alliance between the emphasis on radical self-creation and the attempt to introduce moral limits by recourse to the notion that we are creating a universal norm. As we have already noted, the compatibility of these two assertions is itself mere assertion. For Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, the denial of the existence of a creating and legislating God may well engender the aspiration for freedom understood as the raw exercise of power, exhibited in acts of spectacular destruction.

In its reaction against the degrading determinism of modern science, existentialism seems to recapture the sense of life as a drama. But its view that we are nothing but what we make of ourselves at any moment dissolves the constituting continuity of a dramatic narrative. As Sartre puts it, we are "condemned at every moment to invent man" (p. 23). If our choices involve at every moment the radical reconstruction of the self, then we are saddled with an atomistic view of human action and condemned to a paralyzing multiplication of possibilities. Habit could not be the basis of a virtuous character but only an impediment to freedom.

There is, nonetheless, a sense in which Aquinas would subscribe to the priority of existence over essence. Created natures are dependent upon their act of existence which is a gracious gift of the creator God. This does not mean that nature or essence evaporates in the face of existence; nature remains the source of the intelligibility of substances. It means simply that our existence is contingent, dependent. What Thomas's existentialism unmasks is the false notion of the ego as self-constituting and self-sustaining. In itself, the self is nothing. Recall that it is only by wedding itself to the other in knowledge and in love that we have a self at all. The fact that existentialism has given way to philosophical views that further dissipate the self, that treat it as a mere locus for the intersection of vectors of force and power, is not surprising. Having seen through the self, we encounter our nothingness. If we do not then encounter the person who is the creating and sustaining cause of our natures, we are left to the whims of our arbitrary and increasingly trivial choices.

The modern exaltation of freedom at the expense of nature and our living relationship to a personal God begins by urging upon us the Herculean task of self-legislation but ends up reducing freedom to farce. If there is nothing either external to me or within my nature in light of which I might appraise my choices, then every choice validates (and thereby trivializes) itself. If Aquinas' view of the human person stands as an inviting alternative to the modern project, this does not mean that his position can be easily understood or vindicated. Aquinas's emphatic statement that the will necessarily desires happiness (ST, I, 82, 1) sounds constraining to modern ears. According to Aquinas, the only sort of necessity that is repugnant to our voluntariness is that of force or coercion (ST, I-II, 10, 2). We are masters of our own actions by free choice of means not by determining ultimate ends for ourselves. We are who we are, ordered to goods appropriate to our nature, no matter what we may think or do. Aquinas is thus diametrically opposed to the popular view that our freedom consists in our capacity of radical self-creation. Of course, this does not mean that nature dictates one way of life for all; a variety of ways of life are compatible with the ends set for us by our nature. We can certainly act against our nature and frustrate its telos. Or we can actively, consciously, and freely appropriate natural ends and in that sense "make" them our own. In what then does our freedom consist?

Some have wanted to see in Thomas's assertion that the will moves the intellect, an inchoate acknowledgment of the autonomy of the will. Aquinas does indeed note that, while the intellect moves the will by proposing ends to it, the will moves the intellect to the exercise of its own act (ST, I, 82, 4) and is even capable of moving itself (ST, I- II, 9, 3). Aquinas distinguishes between the specification of the act, which concerns the end and falls to the intellect, and the exercise, which concerns agency and is under the control of the will. The role of the will in the exercise of intellectual acts is rightly seen as an important Augustinian contribution to Aquinas's generally Aristotelian view of human action. It allows Aquinas to reflect on the ethical conditions of our exercise of our intellectual powers in ways that Aristotle never does. Nowhere, however, does Aquinas countenance anything more than a relative, and carefully circumscribed, autonomy of the will. In fact, he derives freedom of choice from the "free judgment" of reason (ST, I, 83, 1). Every act of will is preceded by apprehension. The priority of the presentation of the good to the will underscores our dependence on an order of nature of which we are but a part. In its primordial relationship to things, the will does not act as an efficient cause moving things this way or that. Rather, the will is drawn toward goods. Of course, the will is free to resist this attraction. Still, as Yves Simon puts it, the "attraction undergone precedes the attraction freely chosen." Most defenders of Aquinas trace human freedom to the indeterminacy of reason, to its ability to consider a number of aspects of any object, its various desirable and undesirable features, and thus to revise its judgment about the goodness of any particular object.

What is common and deficient in these two approaches to human freedom is their essentially negative character. They accent the indeterminacy of intellect or will or both. Yves Simon coins the term "super-determination" as a more apt description of Aquinas's view of freedom. The indifference of judgment is rooted in the "natural super-determination of the rational appetite," which finds satisfaction not in any particular good but only in the universal good (bonum in communi). The good in common or universal good is not an abstraction or an aggregate but the supreme good containing intensively all particular goods. Thus, the will's "inexhaustible ability to transcend any particular good" arises from its "living relationship to the comprehensive good." This relationship requires that the will "invalidate the claim of any particular good" to be the ultimate good.[9] To see the advantages of construing freedom as super-determination, one might ponder the difference between a virtuous and non-virtuous, though not necessarily vicious, agent. We need to be careful here not to confuse Aquinas's conception of virtue as habit with our popular view of habit as the unreflective, mechanical, and rote performance of actions. Augustine thus speaks of sin as the "weight of habit" in his Confessions. A virtuous person will indeed possess a reliable character, but she will also act reflectively, be attuned to what is salient and peculiar in situations, and thus act in ways that could not be completely predicted, at least by those lacking the relevant virtue. With these caveats in mind, we do well to consider the following examples. Someone who lacks the virtue of courage or possesses it imperfectly is, in a situation that calls for the exercise of courage, likely to lack determination, to be torn between the options of courage and cowardice. The virtuous person by contrast will readily and with delight conform to what courage demands. Indeed, a perfectly virtuous person is incapable of knowingly acting otherwise. The question is-- Who is more free in this circumstance? The one who lacks virtue and thus has an indeterminate will? Or the virtuous whose will is super-determined?

Reading Assignment

Summa Theologiae, I, 29-30, 82-83, 93 

Kant, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals 

John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor.

Writing Assignment

1. Summarize and explain the significance of the key points of Aquinas's account of human freedom.

2. Compare Kant and Aquinas on the human person and human dignity.

Suggested Reading

Yves Simon, Freedom of Choice (Fordham University Press)

Jean-Paul Sartre,Existentialism and Human Emotions (Citadel Press).

Notes

9. Simon, Freedom of Choice (New York: Fordham University Press, 1969), pp. 97-106 and 152-158.

Having completed the videos, reading and writing assignments for the six lessons, you have the opportunity to complete a final writing assignment, 10 pages in length, typed, double spaced.

You may choose from a variety of topics and approaches.

You may select a question of interpretation; for example, what does Aquinas mean by abstraction or what is the role of the phantasm in human knowing.

Or you may wish to write a comparative essay, say, on the differences between Descartes and Aquinas over the relationship of soul and body.

Or you may choose a problem or issue, such as, whether the soul is mortal.

In any case, you will have to have to accomplish two things in the composition of the paper. First, you will have to give evidence that you have read and reflected on the relevant texts. (Even if you choose a problem oriented paper, you should weave into your argument germane passages from the texts we have read.) Second, you will have to make an argument and that means you will have to articulate a thesis in your introduction, spell out its parts in the body of the paper, and be careful to consider plausible alternatives and reasonable objections to the position you are advancing. (Even if you are writing an interpretive or comparative essay, the burden of your paper should be to demonstrate that one interpretation is superior to others or to show precisely what is at issue in a comparison of two authors and what we can learn from such a comparison.)

A final note: although you may use secondary sources, both those found in the recommended readings and those you may discover yourself, this is not required. We are more concerned that you have mastered the primary texts and can put them at the service of a philosophical argument.