Summa I, Q.76 A.5: Why the Understanding Soul Is Joined to Such a Body (Touch, Reason and the Hand)

Orientation #

The recording opens with the last seconds of the previous session (“we’ve got to call it a halt. So next week we’ll go on to articles”) and the class prayer. He remarks that today, Thomas’s feast, the “regular reading” was from Hebrews but the “ultimate reading” is Wisdom 7 (verses around 7, 10, 15-16). At the end he says “let’s look at article 6,” after a short break. The previous class worked through objections on the soul as first act of an organic body and then the virtue of hope; the next continues with q.76 a.6 on union through accidental dispositions.

The class, in order #

1. Article 5 and its four objections (“suitably united to such a body as it is”) #

The point: he reads the four objections against the soul’s being suitably united to this body, giving each its plausibility.

1. Matter ought to be proportioned to form; the understanding soul is incorruptible; so it is not suitably joined to a corruptible body. “I could agree with that, couldn’t you?” Aside: Thomas on St Paul (“don’t weep like the pagans who have no hope”) allows sadness at a death for two reasons: the body is corrupting, and death is a punishment for sin, which makes you think of your own.
2. The soul is the most immaterial of forms (sign: it has an operation, understanding, and he adds willing, in which body has no share); the subtler a body the less matter it has; so the soul should be joined to the subtlest body, fire. Earth, water, air, fire go from grosser to finer; we almost think of air as immaterial. Aside: Louis de Broglie’s book La Lumière et la Matière (“Matter and Light”), like “matter and energy,” treats light as a less material matter; the objection says: better a body of light than a body of matter.
3. Form is the source of the species; from one form should not come diverse forms; the soul is one form; so it should not be united to a body of parts of unlike species.
4. What receives a more perfect form should be more perfect; the understanding soul is most perfect; other animals have clothing (the dog needs no coat), shoes (the horse) and weapons (teeth, horns, nails) naturally; so the soul should not be joined to a body lacking all these. Sed contra: the Philosopher in De Anima II: the soul is the first act of a natural organic body (“composed of tools”) having life in potency, “meaning the operations of life.”

2. Matter is for the sake of form: the three arts (“the art that uses the product”) #

The point: Thomas’s starting premise, that form is not for matter but matter for form, is shown by Aristotle’s proportion of three arts in Physics II (“Natural Hearing”).

1. In every line of industry there is the art that uses the product, the art that forms it, and the art that prepares the raw materials. His father’s company made farm wagons; steel companies and lumberyards prepared its materials; farmers used the wagons.
2. The user commands the former, and the former commands the preparer: the steel company does not tell his father how thick the steel under a wagon should be; his father tells the steel company what steel he wants. If the wagon snaps on hilly farmland with gullies, the farmer finds the defect and the maker redesigns (his father’s engineer: “we had some interesting ideas, now we’ll see if they’re any good,” testing on an experimental farm; Detroit recalling cars).
3. The reason for the command is that the use is the end of the product, and the raw materials are for the sake of the finished product. So: use is to formed product as formed product is to raw materials, and matter is for form.
4. Generally, ability is for the sake of act; matter is in ability and through form in act; so matter is for the sake of form.

3. Why the soul needs a body at all: the lowest understanding substance (“the lowest grade among understanding substances”) #

The point: the human soul is by nature the lowest of understanding substances and so must gather knowledge through senses, which need a bodily organ.

1. It does not have knowledge of the truth naturally in itself as angels do, whose minds are created “filled with forms,” like possessing all arts and sciences. Aside: his son Marcus as a boy asked why we couldn’t be born knowing everything; “you want to be born an angel?”
2. Our mind is the Philosopher’s blank tablet; it must gather from divisible things by way of the senses (Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 7, as Thomas cites him).
3. Nature does not fail in necessary things; so the understanding soul must have sensing power, the senses being at least the instrument of the active understanding.
4. Sense action is not without a bodily instrument; so the soul must be joined to a body suited to be an organ of the senses.

4. Touch, the fundamental sense, requires a mean between contraries (“the most fundamental one is the sense of touch”) #

The point: all senses are founded on touch, and the organ of touch must be a balance of hot and cold, wet and dry, which makes the body corruptible.

• Touch is in the eye, ear, tongue: stick any of them with a pen and you feel pain; it is the most necessary sense.
• The organ of touch must be a mean between contraries; too hot or too cold a body could not sense. Flesh cannot be wholly free of these (recalled from their earlier study of touch in the De Anima) but keeps a constant temperature between extremes: the ocean feels too cold, the hot shower warm, until the body adjusts and receives the temperature “as your own” and no longer perceives it. Skin pressed on the table indents and springs back: a mean between water, which holds no shape, and metal, which is permanently indented; soft vs. hard.
• Because it is a mean between contraries the body is naturally corruptible: a thing is corrupted by its contrary.
• The more the organ is reduced to equality of complexion, the more perceptive; and the understanding soul has the sensing power most completely, “because what is of the inferior is more perfect in the superior” (Dionysius). Man’s touch is more sensitive than the cat’s or dog’s with their fur.
• A student asks him to explain that principle (quia quod est inferioris). Examples: our emotions vs. the dog’s, ours richer; blood vs. sap, blood does all sap does and more; the higher friendship of virtue contains the pleasure and usefulness of the lower friendships (a courageous man is more useful than a coward) in a higher way. Student: does that determine our friendship with God in heaven? Some virtues go with us: faith and hope replaced by vision, charity more perfect there.

5. A mixed body of equal complexion (“reduced to a kind of equality”) #

The point: the body united to the understanding soul must be a mixed body, most of all reduced to equality of complexion.

• Shakespeare at the end of Julius Caesar: the enemy’s eulogy over Brutus, the elements so mixed in him that nature might say “this was a man.”
• Excess of one component makes a man like an animal: the irascible man a snarling dog, the concupiscent a pig, Samuel Johnson called a bear by friends for chopping people off in conversation.
• Student: why the word “complexion”? A combination or mixture of qualities, reduced so that no one excels. The irascible extreme (the 18-year-old on trial for stabbing his teacher eight times over a hood at school) vs. the opposite extreme of letting everyone walk over you; the mean is a balance of bodily qualities.
• Hence man has the best touch among animals, and among men those of better touch understand better; “soft flesh is well apt in the mind” (De Anima II). Thomas and Aristotle: a good imagination gives a good mathematical mind, but a good touch gives a good mind, period.
• Aside: a mentor’s talk at the school when it was smaller, “Sedeo Ergo Sum,” a reply to Descartes: ours is a visual civilization neglecting touch, which is the source of our most basic ideas: good, nature, substance, even sympathy. The Third Man (Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten): on the Ferris wheel the people below are specks, “ten thousand dollars” each, felt no more than we feel an ant we step on; humanity seen visually, at a distance.
• Four-chambered heart gives constant body temperature (two- and three-chambered hearts less so), which is very important for touch: you perceive what is hotter or colder than you.
• So the body is corruptible in order to have a good touch serving the mind. Thomas: in the original state God added a gift making the body undying; promised again after the resurrection. Aside: the body at its best around [unclear in recording; likely thirty-three].
• Student: Christ suffered most because as the perfect man he had the most perfect touch? “Precisely right”: his body most suited to reason, so most sensitive, so capable of suffering more in his passion; likewise his external senses, memory and imagination most perfect, and he the most intelligent man.

6. Reply to 1: the twofold condition of matter (“chosen in order that it might be suitable to a form”) #

The point: an incorruptible form is suitably in a corruptible body because corruptibility follows the necessity of the matter chosen for the form.

1. The evasion “man’s body before sin was incorruptible” does not suffice: it was immortal by a gift of grace (some call it preternatural), not by nature; otherwise sin could not remove it, as sin did not remove the demons’ immortality.
2. Matter has two conditions: one chosen so as to suit the form, the other following the necessity of a prior disposition. The artist chooses iron for a saw as apt to cut hard things; that the teeth dull and rust follows the necessity of matter. Wood for a house chosen for availability and workability, not because it burns; glass for a window to let light in, though it shatters as iron would not.
3. So a body of equal complexion is due to the understanding soul, and from that follows, by necessity of matter, that it is corruptible.
4. If someone says God could avoid this necessity: in the constitution of natures one considers not what God can do but what suits the natures of things (Augustine, Genesis to the letter II). God nevertheless provided a remedy against death through grace.

7. Reply to 2: why not a body of fire or light (“not to a simple element”) #

The point: a body is owed to the soul not for understanding itself but for the sensitive power, which needs an equally complexioned organ.

• The word for air or breath, “spirit,” is transferred to soul, angels and God because air is the least material matter. So why not be made of light (de Broglie again)? Because then no touch, and no body producing images from which to get basic ideas.
• So not a simple element (an extreme of dryness or heat) nor a mixed body in which fire exceeds in quantity, since fire’s excessive active power prevents equal complexion.
• Yet the equally complexioned body has a dignity: remote from the contraries, it is in some way like the celestial bodies, which were thought to have no contrariety.
• Student: he had taken “equable complexion” to mean the body’s having tools like eyes to receive the powers. He corrects: it is about the contrary qualities hot, cold, wet, dry not being in excess.
• So Aristotle would reject the Platonists’ air-like animals; Ariel in The Tempest, who can hardly sympathize with gross humans; the fairy in the other play who says you will “purge your mortal grossness” like a fire.

8. Reply to 3: diverse dispositions, not diverse species (“multiple in its what power”) #

The point: the parts of an animal are not species of a genus but diverse dispositions of one thing.

• Eye, hand, flesh, bone are not strictly in a species; the whole animal is. The soul, one in essence, is multiple in power on account of its perfection, so needs diverse dispositions in the body’s parts for diverse operations.
• Sign: more diversity of parts in perfect animals than in imperfect, and in these than in plants; the higher the soul the more diversity required.

9. Reply to 4: reason and hand instead of built-in tools (“organs of organs, tool of tools”) #

The point: because the soul grasps universals and is open to an infinity of things, nature could not fix its instincts or tools; it gave reason and hands.

• The category hexis / habitus, clothing, “outfitted,” is man’s category; other animals do not put on clothing or armor unless man does it to them.
• Why not a body with all tools built in, a ballpoint pen, knife, saw, corkscrew, screwdriver? Man’s occupations need every tool in a home. Aside on clothing for occasions: tuxedo at his son’s wedding at his daughter-in-law’s insistence; bride’s dress; policeman, soldier, priest, doctor change clothing because man is not limited as animals are.
• The soul comprehensive of universals has power toward an infinity (Shakespeare’s “large discourse”: knowing odd and even and that no odd is even, I know infinitely many numbers). So nature cannot determine natural instinct or determined instruments for it, as it can for the cat, whose claws suffice its limited life.
• In place of these, reason and hand, organ of organs, tool of tools, through which man prepares tools of infinite kinds for infinite effects.
• Anaxagoras: man is most intelligent because he has a hand; Aristotle keeps the connection but reverses it: he has a hand because he is most intelligent (a student asks for the phrasing again). The hand serves the mind: we gesture to make a point (De Koninck and European professors, whose gestures seemed comical to Americans; De Koninck toned his down); we borrow “grasp,” and Thomas’s simple apprehension, for understanding what a thing is.

10. Tools of reason; reason enslaved and reason blown up (“definitions and syllogisms and things of that sort”) #

The point (after announcing a break before article 6): reason too must make its own tools, and disorder in the soul is seen by enlarging it.

• As we must supply knives, forks, spoons, so reason must make definitions and syllogisms: definitions to understand what things are, syllogisms to know Euclid’s theorems; this is more hidden than making exterior tools. Plato’s myth of the distributor of gifts (claws to the cat, wings to the bird) who runs out before reaching man, so reason is supplied; “where were you when the brains were passed out?” Aside: the screw fell out of his glasses, tiny screwdriver, magnifying glass; rubber mats to open jars.
• Student: the definition as a tool? Thomas sometimes calls the definition a tool for understanding what something is. Teaching blank verse: “unrhymed iambic pentameter”; but what is an iamb? two syllables, accent on the second. The more theorems in the mind, the intellectual virtue; episteme is the effect of demonstration.
• Definition is like a microscope: “square” to “equilateral right-angled quadrilateral,” the same thing seen more distinctly. Socrates in the Republic blows up the just soul into the city to see disorder.
• Emotions running you: a rider thrown, foot caught, dragged along the road; reason serving excessive bodily demands is a clerk at McDonald’s at rush hour with thirty at the counter, wanting money for food, drink, sex, alcohol, drugs; more at peace with desires cut off. Shakespeare: “reason panders will”; Hamlet’s “give me that man that is not passion’s slave.”
• Thomas calls vices of the flesh childish vices: a child never corrected becomes unruly and uncontrollable, which is the enlarged picture of emotions in revolt; disciplined children are happier, as the virtuous man’s emotions are not crushed but happier. Mother Teresa without emotional hangups vs. the high-school girl threatening to jump from a building when dropped by her boyfriend. Then: “Let’s look at article 6.”

His words #

• understanding soul: his rendering of anima intellectiva [ed.: intellectual soul].
• suitably united: convenienter unita.
• composed of tools / organic body: gloss on organicum.
• Natural Hearing: [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics].
• ability: [ed.: potency]; “ability is for the sake of act.”
• blank tablet / blank page: the Philosopher’s image for the mind before knowing.
• mean between contraries: hot and cold, wet and dry; what the organ of touch must be.
• complexion: combination or mixture of qualities; equal complexion: none in excess, reduced to a mean.
• what is of the inferior is more perfect in the superior: quod est inferioris, perfectius est in superiori (Dionysius).
• preternatural gift: the name some give to immortality before sin, “more than nature.”
• twofold condition of matter: chosen for the form vs. following the necessity of a prior disposition.
• hexis / habitus: the category of clothing, “outfitted”; man’s category.
• comprehensive of universals: comprehensiva universalium; linked to “large discourse.”
• organ of organs, tool of tools: reason and hand.
• simple apprehension / simple grasping: first act of reason, understanding what a thing is.
• episteme: effect of demonstration.
• childish vices: Thomas’s name for vices of the flesh.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q.76 a.5, objections, sed contra, body and four replies (verified).
• Aristotle, De Anima II: the soul as first act of an organic body having life in potency (sed contra); soft flesh apt in mind (quoted through Thomas).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics II (three arts).
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 7; the “inferior in the superior” principle.
• Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram II.
• Wisdom 7 (feast-day reading); Hebrews (regular reading).
• Thomas’s commentary on St Paul on grief at death (no locus given).
• Aristotle, Categories (habitus); Anaxagoras on the hand.
• Shakespeare: Julius Caesar (eulogy over Brutus), The Tempest (Ariel), the fairy on “mortal grossness,” “large discourse,” “reason panders will,” Hamlet (“not passion’s slave”).
• Plato, Republic (soul and city); the myth of gifts to animals.
• Louis de Broglie, La Lumière et la Matière; the talk “Sedeo Ergo Sum”; film The Third Man.
• Samuel Johnson called a bear; Descartes.

His questions #

• Which of the three arts commands which? The using art commands the forming art, which commands the art preparing raw materials, because use is the end.
• Why is the understanding soul joined to a body at all? Because it is the lowest understanding substance, born knowing nothing, and must get ideas through senses, which need bodily organs.
• What is required for the organ of touch? A mean between contraries, hot and cold, wet and dry; hence a corruptible body.
• What does “what is of the inferior is more perfect in the superior” mean? (student) Our emotions vs. the dog’s, blood vs. sap, virtue-friendship containing pleasure and usefulness.
• Why the word “complexion”? (student) A mixture of qualities, reduced so none is excessive.
• Did Christ suffer most because of a perfect sense of touch? (student) Yes: the body most suited to reason is the most sensitive, and his senses, memory, imagination were most perfect.
• Why not make us out of light or air? Then no touch, and no body suited to producing images for the mind.
• Why hasn’t man been given a body with all the tools he needs? Because reason is open to an infinity of things, so nature gave reason and hands, tool of tools.
• How did Anaxagoras phrase it? (student) Man is most intelligent because he has a hand; Aristotle: he has a hand because most intelligent.
• What does a student need to understand “blank verse”? A definition (unrhymed iambic pentameter), and further definitions for its terms; the definition is a tool of reason.