The Remaining Objections and Aristotle's Proof That the Soul Is the Form of the Body

Orientation #

He refers back to “the previous question” for the soul being subsistent and having being by itself (prev. lecture), and to an earlier session on Aristotle’s definition of the soul by six divisions in De Anima II (“if you were here when he did that”). The recording opens mid-way through objection 3 and ends mid-respondeo. The previous class outlined the eight articles of q.76 and began Article 1 with its opening objections.

The class, in order #

1. Objection 3: reception “according to the mode of the receiver” (“not totally immersed in the body”) #

The point: the objection argues from the way the intellect receives, and he diagnoses what all these objections miss.

• Objection 3 as read: (1) a receiving potency that is the act of a body receives forms materially and individually, because the received is in the receiver according to the mode of the receiver; (2) the form of the thing understood is received immaterially and universally, otherwise the understanding would know only singulars like the senses; therefore the understanding is not united to the body as form.
• His diagnosis: the objections do not grasp that a soul can be the form of a body and still have a power that is not in the body. Thomas will say the human soul is a form “not totally immersed in the body” — his image: something floating on the ocean, part under water, part above.
• Powers in the body (sensing, digesting, growing, reproducing, locomotion) vs. powers not in the body (understanding, the will/choosing; the act of understanding a fortiori). The body shares the soul’s existence but does not “comprehend” it completely.
• Why one is forced to this: it is the same one who senses, walks and understands. LBJ’s joke about Ford (can’t walk and chew gum) vs. the Peripatetics, whose name means “to walk around”, who must have thought and walked at once. If you walk, sense and understand at the same time, your soul is not entirely immersed in matter; yet you are not an angel, because you are sensing and walking.

2. Objections 4 and 5: power and action; the subsistent (“a form is that by which something is”) #

The point: two more objections, “all somewhat similar”, read with a forecast of Thomas’s reply.

• Objection 4, two steps: (a) a power and its action belong to the same thing, for it is the same that is able to act and that acts; the act of understanding is not of a body (from “the things said above”); so neither is the power of understanding the power of a body. (b) A power cannot be more abstract or simple than the essence from which it derives; therefore the substance that understands is not the form of the body.
• Objection 5: what has being by itself (the soul was shown subsistent in the previous question) is not united to a body as form, because a form is “that by which something is”, not “what is” — easy to see in accidental forms: health is not healthy, health is that by which the body is healthy. So the being of a form is not the form’s own being; but the understanding principle has being by itself; so it is not united as form.
• Forecast of the reply: the body shares in the soul’s existence but does not completely absorb it.
• Aside: Cymbeline, the husband deceived by the Italian villain Iachimo, whose soliloquy against womankind says “we are all bastards”; his own gloss, from a conversation with a [name unclear in recording]: we are the “illegitimate offspring of matter and the spirit”, a soul that is the form of a body yet has understanding and choice in common with the angels — “a funny creature”.

3. Objection 6: the form cannot be without its matter (“me and my clothes”) #

The point: the incorruptibility objection, and a remark on the article’s shape.

• As read: what is in something by itself is always in it; it belongs to a form by itself, not by accident but by its very essence, to be the act of matter — otherwise matter and form would not make one thing substantially but only accidentally; so a form cannot be without its own matter; but the understanding principle, being incorruptible (as shown), remains when the body corrupts; therefore it is not united to the body as form.
• Example: me and my clothes — really two things; “the clothed man” is one accidentally, not one in the strict sense.
• Aside: six objections is unusual for Thomas (usually about three, two or four). The ideal way to study: cut off the text right after the sed contra and spend a day working out how to answer them yourself.

4. Sed contra: difference is taken from the form (“the genus is to the difference”) #

The point: Aristotle’s principle from Metaphysics VIII, explained through the analogy genus : difference :: matter : form, yields that the intellect is the form of man.

• A definition has two parts, genus and difference (usually more than one difference); the genus is to the difference as matter is to form. Clay is able to be sphere or cube and is determined by the form received; a quadrilateral (contained by four straight lines) can be square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid, trapezium, determined by the differences (sides equal or unequal, angles right or acute/obtuse). So the genus is taken from what is material, the differences from what is formal.
• Two failures to understand ability: Anaxagoras, who did not understand the potency that is matter and treated matter as put together from all the forms it was in potency to (Aristotle shows the difficulties of fitting them all in); John Locke on the general idea of triangle — equilateral, isosceles [ASR: “sausage”], scalene, right-angled? “all and none of these” — because he cannot see it is actually none and able to be all. “The human mind’s inability to understand ability” — not absolutely impossible, but very difficult. Tree example: the tree is not composed of chairs, tables, doors; it is able to be all, actually none, determined to one through form.
• The argument: difference is taken from form; the constitutive difference of man is rational (rational animal; the biologist’s homo sapiens = “wise ape”, ape ≈ animal, wise ≈ rational); rational is said of man by reason of the understanding principle; therefore the understanding principle must be the form of man.
• Break taken here.

5. Respondeo: the senses of intellectus (“the understanding soul”) #

The point: in “intellectus, the principle of intellectual operation, is the form of the human body”, intellectus names the understanding soul, not the power.

• Marietti footnote: intellectus, sive intellectualis substantia — the understanding substance or soul. The students’ English text renders “intellect”, which in English names only the ability to understand, not the substance.
• Four senses of intellectus in Latin: (1) the ability to understand (reason itself); (2) a virtue/habit of that ability, which he calls in English “natural understanding” (understanding without reasoning it out), as against episteme; (3) the act of understanding (as in the first two acts of reason in logic — understanding what a thing is, understanding the true or false); (4) here, the understanding soul. English “understanding” can name the first three. Greek: Aristotle uses nous for the ability and, when distinguishing the virtues of reason in Nicomachean Ethics V — corrected to VI — for one of the virtues; asked the Greek word for the act, he offers a garbled form [prob. noēsis] and says he cannot remember.
• Mens: sometimes near-synonym of the ability to understand; in Augustine, the image of the Trinity in mente includes the will too.
• Why the distinction matters here: the power to understand is not the act of a body (sight is the act of the eye, digestion the act of a body part), but the understanding soul is the form of the body. Shakespeare’s phrase: “my understanding soul”; the feeding, sensing and understanding soul.

6. Aristotle’s demonstration: that by which a thing first operates is its form (“nothing acts except in so far as it is in act”) #

The point: Thomas repeats the De Anima II syllogism; he spends most of the time on its major premise and its reason.

• Recall of De Anima II: Aristotle first reaches the definition (first act of a natural body) through six divisions — three on the side of the soul, three on the side of the body — then demonstrates by syllogism.
• Major: that by which something first operates is the form/act of that to which the operation is attributed — as health is that by which the body is first healthy (form of the body), and science that by which the soul first knows (form of the soul). Reason: nothing acts except insofar as it is in act; so that by which something is in act is that by which it acts.
• The reason shown from natural philosophy. Eating chicken, pork, beef, fish: what they have in common with me is matter (hence chewing, acids, building into human flesh, blood, bone); but I do not quack or oink — the operations differ; if a lion ate me, what in me is able to be a lion would become a lion. So matter = that by which one is man, cow, pig only in ability; form = that by which one is actually a man, and through form one has the operations of a man. So that by which you first do something is form.
• Physics II: nature is both matter and form but more form, since by matter a thing is this natural thing only in ability, by form actually. Same in art: the Pietà in Rome is a work of art by its form, not because marble. Tie-back to genus/difference: “what does an animal do?” — you must descend to pig, chicken, lion, man, i.e. to the difference, the formal.
• Student confused by “in act”: Christmas-cookie dough is not yet tree-shaped but able to receive it; the metal cutter actually has the shape and gives it to the dough. What actually has gives to what is able to have; what is actually hot warms what is able to be hot.
• The syllogism, first figure: minor — the soul is that by which we first are nourished, sense, move locally, and likewise understand; this principle “quo primo intelligimus”, whether called intellectus sive anima intellectiva, is the middle term; major — that by which we, being bodies, first do these is the form of the body; conclusion — the understanding soul is the form of the body.
• Parallels for “not the matter”: health / form, not the body itself; a ball is first a ball by its shape, not the rubber; a killed body’s matter becomes non-living, so it is not alive by matter; the word “cat” — the letters C, A, T are the same in “act”, so it is the word “cat” by the order (form); a table by its form, not by being wood; a bowling ball rolls by its form, not its plastic — operation follows form.
• The minor is “almost the meaning of the word soul”: De Anima I surveys predecessors’ opinions — total disagreement about what the soul is, none about whether it exists; today people doubt whether we have a soul because “soul” is heard in a church context (the immortal, spiritual soul), a particular understanding that is not obvious. The Greeks meant the first beginning of life within living bodies — the dog and cat here are alive, the chairs are not; living things move themselves. Beatrice in Much Ado: “as sure Hero is innocent as that I have a soul”; “animal” itself means having a soul. Molière’s Mr. Jourdain, who has been speaking prose all his life without knowing it: the problem is only in the name.

7. Second argument: everyone experiences that he himself understands (“the very same man”) #

The point: whoever denies the soul is the form must explain how understanding is this man’s action.

• Everyone experiences within himself that he is the one who understands (“Now I understand”).
• Division from Physics V: an action is attributed to something (a) as a whole, as the doctor heals; (b) by a part, as a man sees through the eye; (c) per accidens, as “the white builds” or “the musician builds”. “Socrates understands” is attributed to him as man, essentially predicated.
• So either Socrates understands as a whole, as Plato held (man is the understanding soul) — Marietti cites Alcibiades I, where Socrates asks “am I soul, body, or composite?” and concludes soul; the argument (which he calls “kind of weak”): the user differs from the used, as I differ from my hammer; you use your body for good or ill; so you are not your body — or the understanding is some part of Socrates.
• The first cannot stand: the same man perceives himself both to understand and to sense. Example: when you have a headache or stomach pain, the one feeling the pain is the one thinking how to be rid of it — the patient pressing his beeper while the nurses talk; the urgency when you are the one in pain. Sensing is only in the body, so the one who understands is bodily; hence the body is part of man.
• Remains: the understanding soul (again intellectus scilicet anima intellectiva) by which Socrates understands is a part of Socrates and so in some way united to his body — it is me reading (my eyes tiring) and me understanding, not the computer reading for me. The class ends here.

His words #

• receiving ability / potency that can receive; “the received is in the receiver according to the mode or way of the receiver”
• ability; his rendering of power/potency [ed.: potentia]
• “not totally immersed in the body”; the soul as a form partly above the surface of the ocean
• beginning / starting point; his rendering of principium [ed.: principle]
• understanding principle / understanding substance / understanding soul; his renderings of intellectus in its fourth sense [ed.: intellectual soul]
• natural understanding; the virtue nous/intellectus, as against episteme
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• “the human mind’s inability to understand ability”
• that by which vs. what is; form as quo not quod
• “nothing acts except in so far as it is in act”
• first figure; the middle term uniting form with soul
• per accidens, “by happening”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q.76 a.1 (inferred): objections 3–6, sed contra, respondeo through the second argument (Marietti edition footnote on intellectus)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII (as cited in the sed contra)
• Aristotle, De Anima II, definition and demonstration of the soul (as restated by Thomas)
• Aristotle, Physics V, three ways an action is attributed (as cited by Thomas)
• Plato, Alcibiades I (Marietti reference; summarised)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics II, nature as matter and form, more form
• Aristotle, De Anima I, opinions of predecessors
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI (first said V), virtues of reason
• Augustine, image of the Trinity in mente
• John Locke, general idea of triangle
• Anaxagoras on matter
• Shakespeare, Cymbeline (“we are all bastards”); Much Ado About Nothing (Beatrice); “my understanding soul”
• Molière, Mr. Jourdain speaking prose
• Michelangelo’s Pietà in Rome

His questions #

• Is what we have in common with the cow, pig and chicken we eat matter or form? Matter; the operations of a man and of a chicken differ, and that is by form.
• If a lion ate me, would the lion start acting like a human being? No; what in me is able to be a lion would become a lion.
• Is the Pietà a work of art because it is marble or because of its form? Its form; likewise form is more nature than matter.
• Is the cookie cutter “in act”? Yes: it actually has the shape the dough has only in ability, and gives it.
• Is it first the word “cat” by the letters C, A, T? No — the same letters are in “act”; it is the word by the order, its form.
• Does a bowling ball roll because of what it is made of? No; it rolls by its form.
• Am I a soul, a body, or something composed of both (Plato’s question)? Plato: soul; Thomas: the same man senses and understands, so the body is part of man.
• Is it the computer reading for me and me understanding? No; it is me reading and understanding, so the understanding soul is united to my body.