Is the Soul a Body? Objections, and Why We Picture the Soul as a Body

Orientation #

He refers back to earlier work on the first book of De Anima (“the first book, which we didn’t go through”), on Empedocles’s fragments, and to “what we mentioned before” about the word “animal” and the airy-body picture of the soul (prev. lecture). He says nothing about next time. Verified source: this episode treats Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 1. The previous class opened Question 75 and its seven articles; the next continues with the rest of the body of a.1 and the replies.

The class, in order #

1. How a Summa article is built and how to read it (“kind of like an abbreviation of what they call the quaestiones disputatae”) #

The Summa article is a cut-down quaestio disputata.

• Picture of the medieval practice: lectures Mon/Wed/Fri; on Tue/Thu/Sat the disputed points (those on which famous thinkers held opposite views) are pulled out, half the class argues affirmative, half negative; the magister then determines and must answer every objection on the losing side—or, if truth lies on both sides, both sets.
• Thomas’s Quaestiones disputatae: De veritate (he corrects himself from “bonitate”), De malo, De anima; fifteen or twenty objections each side, then the body determines.
• The Summa, written for beginners, keeps about three chief objections (occasionally four or five), a short sed contra “using authority” to make you stop and wonder, the body, then replies.
• How to read: take objections and sed contra alone, think how you would answer; then the body; then try the objections yourself; only then Thomas. He used three separate sheets when teaching. Old editions printed the answer in bold—you must guard yourself from looking at it first.
• His Summa Contra Gentiles habit: read the chapter title, think up the arguments yourself; after time away, try to recall his seven arguments, get four or five, and be “struck by the argument that I had missed”.

2. Digression: is charity a friendship? (“whether charity is is is a form of friendship”) #

Illustrates the reading method with an article from his love-and-friendship course.

• Objections (intelligible to anyone who has studied Nicomachean Ethics VIII): (a) friendship is mutual love, but charity bids us love enemies who do not love us; (b) friendship is of utility, pleasure, or virtue; if charity is friendship it must be the highest, among the virtuous—but we are told to love sinners.
• Thomas’s solution: a distinction between the primary object of friendship and a secondary object—one that could be made in philosophy “though it’s not usually made there”. Charity is primarily friendship between the saints and God, and because of that extends to everything in God’s image and likeness.
• Examples of the secondary object: taking an interest in a philosopher-friend’s children (an email from a friend asking help for his son); friends who become godfather to his son “because he’s a son of me”; Johnson visiting Boswell in Scotland, becoming persona non grata to Mrs Boswell for his sloppy habits, yet working to reconcile with her—“something he wouldn’t do if he wasn’t attached to the same thing” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson).

3. Objection 1: the soul as a moved mover (“nothing is able to move another unless it itself be moved”) #

The first objection argues from the soul as mover of the body.

1. The soul is the mover of the body (motor corporis).
2. It is not an unmoved mover, for two reasons: (a) nothing moves another unless itself moved, because nothing gives what it does not have—as the hand moving the glass, or this book pushing that book, must itself move; “what is not hot does not heat”; (b) an unmoved mover causes an eternal motion always the same way (Physics VIII), which animal motion is not—irregular, not always moving.
3. So the soul is a moved mover; every moved mover is a body; therefore the soul is a body.

• Background from De Anima I (after the proemium, the recounting and critique of predecessors): they investigated the soul through two things, first its moving the body—our first idea of life being self-motion. Not seeing how it could move without being in motion, they made it a very mobile body: Democritus’s atoms, like the particles always moving in a beam of light.
• Connected: Physics IV on place—the common Greek opinion that whatever is must be somewhere; the man on Main Street would agree. But to be contained in a place is a property of bodies; so they held that all that is is bodies or in bodies. Reason: we never think without imagining, never imagine without the continuous (length, width, depth), which is what a body is.
• More abstruse: the Pythagorean soul as a self-moving number; more probable, and the poets’ picture, an airy, ghost-like body—still a body with three dimensions.

4. The second way, knowing—and sleep as image of death (“sleep, thou ape of death”) #

The second objection comes from the soul as knower (they did not distinguish understanding from sensing; sensing is more known).

• Why the two ways: plant life is hidden. In sleep reason, sensing and moving about cease, though digestion goes on—which is hidden. Hence “dead sleep”, and the poets’ constant likening of sleep to death (Shakespeare; the Tempest scene where one brother urges the other to kill the sleeping man, already “like a dead person”). If sleep is like death and death the opposite of life, life is being thought of as exactly the two things of the first two objections.
• Empedocles (from the fragments studied earlier): the thing known must be in the knower. There is truth in this—he recognizes you again because he has your shape and colour “inside my head”; otherwise you would be a stranger each time. Empedocles’s mistake: that it is in you materially—earth, air, fire, water, love and hate, because you are composed of them.
• Objection 2 as read: all knowledge is through some likeness; there can be no likeness of a body to an incorporeal thing; so if the soul were not a body it could not know bodies.

5. Objection 3 and the sed contra (“there must be some contact between the mover and the moved”) #

• Objection 3, back to the first way: contact is needed between mover and moved; contact is only of bodies; the soul moves the body, so it is a body. Summary: objections 1 and 3 from motion, 2 from knowing—they “fit in very well” with De Anima I.
• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate VI: the soul is simple with respect to the body because it is not diffused through the space of place. Student question on “mole”: bulk, size (the class also connects “molecule”, little body); another Augustinian text Thomas often quotes—what is not great in bulk is great by being better.
• Asides: our age is “completely distracted from one thing to another” (Pierce’s biography of Solzhenitsyn sees this); a philosopher who took a speed-reading course—“you got to slow down”. The Laval dinner: de Monléon said praise Thomas Aquinas instead; De Koninck, topping him, said praise Aristotle; De Koninck’s humility was to “show you how to read Thomas” and then send you off on your own.

6. After the break: living vs. non-living (“they’ve lost their what? Harmony”) #

A resumed remark before the body: the living body is made of what is found in the non-living world; sign—when it dies you have the same materials but they have lost their harmony, organization, coordination. So the difference is a form, meaning by form not just shape but order, arrangement of the matter.

7. The body begins: the meaning of “soul” (“the first beginning of life in those things which among us live”) #

Thomas presupposes what the word means before asking its nature.

• Grammar aside: Respondeo dicendum quod / dicendum est—Thomas’s Latin is mostly third person, “very simple”; a friend got into Latin quickly reading Thomas.
• “Nature of the soul” is better than “essence” (Charles De Koninck mocked “essence”: in French it means gasoline).
• Soul = psyche, anima: the first beginning (primum principium), first cause of life in the living bodies around us—saying nothing yet about the nature of that cause. In De Anima I nobody doubts that we, or a dog, have a soul; the disagreement is what it is. Moderns ask “do I have a soul?” because they hear “soul” as a spiritual substance from the priest, “cardboard version”, which is not obvious. “Thomas is going back to where you have to begin.”
• Why its existence is obvious: (1) everyone knows some bodies are alive—the child with his dog and the stones; (2) alive means self-motion: the kicked stone that rolls is not alive; what moves when you merely step on it is. His mysterious grand-aunt’s handkerchief folded to look like a mouse, moving under her arm—it seemed alive, though it had no self-motion. The very word implies the cause of motion is within; so the existence of such a cause is obvious. Even the modern biologist who never says “soul” has an opinion about the soul in this sense.
• Sign: the common word “animal” (not a philosopher’s coinage) is named from anima, not the plant, because life in the dog is manifest (locomotion, sensing) while in a plant it is hidden—a gardener may not know for a while that a plant has died. Beatrice in Much Ado: “as sure as I have a soul” (like “as sure as two plus two is four”).

8. Life shown by two operations; the ancients could not transcend imagination (“not being able to transcend the imagination”) #

• Following De Anima I: life is most manifest in knowing and motion from place to place; the predecessors reached their opinions by investigating the cause of these—note the soul is investigated through its operations.
• Thomas: unable to transcend the imagination, they made this cause a body. The Soviet astronaut reporting “there’s no God up here” as if refuting religion; the poets’ Zeus atop Olympus—the gods had bodies. “Whatever is must be somewhere” means “whatever is is a body or in a body”.
• Even believers struggle: Boethius, De Trinitate (Thomas’s commentary, the passage he mentioned before): to think of God you must negate what you imagine, yet in negating you still imagine. His cousin Donald the philosopher trying to explain to his pious mother that God has no body—“What difference does it make anyway?” Newton’s theological writings: space as the sensorium of God, God imagined as immensity diffused through space.

9. The same failure in logic: Parmenides and Locke (“the whole what is meant by man is found in you”) #

• Plato’s Parmenides: Parmenides and Zeno examine the young Socrates (historicity unknown and unimportant). Parmenides first said explicitly that a thing cannot both be and not be—only a “two-headed mortal” would think so; the Socratic method rests on this: people do not contradict themselves directly, but what they say leads to the contradictory, and Socrates points it out—always a sign of something false. Perry Mason’s witness who contradicts himself; judges today: killing the unborn child by striking the mother is homicide, by abortion is not—“it is and is not”. Aristotle in the Ethics: with the truth all things harmonize; the false is a jigsaw piece that will not fit.
• The point for here: Socrates imagines the universal “man” as a tent or cloth spread over us all—then only part of man would be over each, yet each of us is the whole of what “man” means, an animal with reason. He cannot transcend the imagination. Likewise Locke (Essay on Human Understanding) trying to imagine the general triangle, neither equilateral, isosceles nor scalene—“it’s all and none of these”.
• Msgr Dionne: logic disposes for theology, since in logic you must learn to transcend imagination.

10. False imagination (“False imagination is the main cause of deception”) #

False imagination—imagining things other than they are—is the chief cause of deception on the side of our knowing powers. Some things can be imagined otherwise (expecting a famous person to be taller); but to try to imagine what cannot be imagined is necessarily false if you follow the image. So the average person and the poets imagine the soul as an airy body: take away length, width and depth and “you got nothing left to imagine”.

His words #

• quaestiones disputatae — disputed questions, of which a Summa article is an abbreviation; the magister “determines” in the body
• sed contra — the short authority “to make you stop and wonder”
• primary vs. secondary object of friendship — the friend himself vs. what is loved because of him
• motor corporis — the soul as mover of the body (obj. 1)
• moved mover / unmoved mover — the latter causes eternal uniform motion (Physics VIII)
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics], fourth book on place
• mole — bulk, size (Augustine’s sed contra: not diffused through space of place)
• form — “not just shape, but order, arrangement of the matter”
• Respondeo dicendum quod / dicendum est — “I answer that it ought to be said”
• nature of the soul — preferred to “essence” (gasoline in French)
• soul (psyche, anima) — “the first beginning (primum principium) or first cause of life in living bodies”, saying nothing about its nature
• self-motion — the very words imply the cause of motion is within
• transcend the imagination — needed in theology and already in logic; imagination “never imagines without the continuous”
• false imagination — imagining things other than they are; the main cause of deception on the side of the knowing powers

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 1: objections 1–3, sed contra (Augustine, De Trinitate VI), and the opening of the body up to the ancients positing a body Mentioned
• Thomas, Quaestiones disputatae De veritate, De malo, De anima; Summa Contra Gentiles (reading method)
• Thomas, article on whether charity is friendship (inferred: ST II-II q.23 a.1)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VIII (kinds of friendship); Ethics on truth harmonizing (locus not given)
• Aristotle, De Anima I (proemium, predecessors); Physics VIII (unmoved mover); Physics IV (place)
• Empedocles, fragments; Democritus; Pythagoreans (self-moving number)
• Boethius, De Trinitate, with Thomas’s commentary
• Plato, Parmenides; Locke, Essay on Human Understanding
• Boswell, Life of Johnson; Shakespeare, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing (“sleep, thou ape of death” attributed to the poets); Pierce’s biography of Solzhenitsyn; Newton’s theological writings

His questions #

• How can charity be friendship if friendship is mutual love and we must love enemies and sinners? Thomas distinguishes primary from secondary object: friendship with God extends to all in his likeness.
• How could my hand give motion to this glass if my hand was not itself in motion? It could not—nothing gives what it does not have; the premise of objection 1, “quite reasonable”.
• In sleep, what part of the soul is inactive? Reason (student), and sensing and locomotion; digestion goes on but is hidden.
• How do I recognize you again—why aren’t you a stranger every time? Because I have your shape and colour inside me; Empedocles’s truth, misread as material presence.
• How do you translate “mole”? Bulk, size.
• What’s the difference between the living and the non-living body? A form: order and arrangement of the same materials, lost at death.
• Do I have a soul—is that even a question? Not for the Greeks: soul means the first cause of life, obviously present in self-movers; the question is what it is.
• Why is the animal, not the plant, named from anima? Because life in the dog is manifest (locomotion, sensing), in the plant hidden.
• Why did the ancients make the soul a body? They could not transcend imagination, which never imagines without length, width and depth.