1 - Mark
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Two Questions: Sin as Irrationality and the Soul as Body's Form
So I've completed reading Feser's book on Aquinas, and I'm left with two questions. The first is pretty simple: If the intellect precedes the will and all sin is irrationality, what accounts for the fall of men and angels? Were they created with defective intellects?
The second is a bit more perplexing to me and comes from his chapter on Thomistic psychology. As useful as Feser makes hylomorphic dualism sound, I feel like I'm not understanding something basic about it. I get that the soul is the form of the body and that their connection is metaphysically necessary, but I'm still not sure what the soul does. Feser writes that, on the Thomistic view, the soul is to the body as the table is to the wood that composes it. But the forms of the tablse aren't capable of doing anything beyond just what the wood of the table can do (well, it can have other properties, such as immateriality, but it can't perform any actions etc.). I still can't seem to figure out how this view makes sense of the first-person nature of our existence (i.e. qualia).
Help here would be most appreciated.
Last edited by Mark (8/06/2015 2:37 pm)
- Scott
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Re: Two Questions: Sin as Irrationality and the Soul as Body's Form
Mark wrote:
If the intellect precedes the will and all sin is irrationality, what accounts for the fall of men and angels? Were they created with defective intellects?
Short and inadequate answer (the relation between reason and will for Aquinas is complicated): No, but they were created with intellects that were free to deliberate on this or that object, or on this or that aspect of an object. This isn't a defect of the intellect but part of its power. And if someone focuses his deliberation on the proposed benefits of disobedience to God and apprehends them as good, his will is moved accordingly.
I get that the soul is the form of the body and that their connection is metaphysically necessary, but I'm still not sure what the soul does. Feser writes that, on the Thomistic view, the soul is to the body as the table is to the wood that composes it. But the forms of the tablse aren't capable of doing anything beyond just what the wood of the table can do (well, it can have other properties, such as immateriality, but it can't perform any actions etc.). I still can't seem to figure out how this view makes sense of the first-person nature of our existence (i.e. qualia).
"What the soul does" depends on what kind of soul it is. There are different kinds, with different powers. A vegetative soul gives a substance the powers to take in nutrition and reproduce; a sensitive or animal soul adds to these the powers of sensory perception and local motion; a rational soul adds to all of these the intellect's powers of reason and abstraction. The form of a table doesn't endow a table with any of these powers, only with a certain shape and properties associated with that shape.
The advantage of this view over (modern) materialism is that it treats e.g. a human being non-reductively, as having powers that don't reduce to the powers of its parts or of the "material" of which it's composed. The advantage over (other kinds of) dualism is that it doesn't have to explain how two different "substances" (e.g. body and soul, mind and matter) manage to be conjoined and "interact."
What it doesn't do, and doesn't claim to do, is explain e.g. the nature of subjective experience and qualia merely by making reference to a "form." It simply fails to raise the specifically modern problems associated with rival views: notably, how non-sentient "matter" can somehow give rise to subjective experience, and how an independent subjective "soul" can get hooked up to a merely material "body." Those simply aren't issues for hylemorphic dualism, which takes it as an empirically verified fact that a unified substance (the "form" and "matter" of which are intellectual abstractions only) can have powers that don't just emerge from the stuff out which it's supposedly somehow assembled.
Last edited by Scott (8/05/2015 4:44 pm)
- Mark
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Re: Two Questions: Sin as Irrationality and the Soul as Body's Form
OK, that's helpful, I think I'm beginning to understand. So how then do particular forms get 'hooked up' to particular chunks of matter? Could the form of a human be coupled with what looks like a table? It seems from Feser's explanation that it absolutely could not. But since the form doesn't reduce the material, I'm having some trouble seeing how Aquinas connects particular forms with particular chunks of matter.
This is, by the way, extremely interesting to me. Studying Aquinas via Feser -- and not by, say, short explanations from professors using snippets from anthologies -- has opened up a whole new area of philsoophy that I didn't even really know existed.
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Thread Starter- Scott
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Re: Two Questions: Sin as Irrationality and the Soul as Body's Form
So how then do particular forms get 'hooked up' to particular chunks of matter?
They don't. That's why I said parenthetically that "form" and "matter" are abstractions only.
Form doesn't exist by itself, and neither does (prime) matter*. Physical substances aren't "assembled" by hooking a pre-existing form up to some pre-existing matter; everything in the physical world is already a "compound" of both. God doesn't reach into a bucket of prime matter with one hand and into a bucket of forms with the other, pull something out of each, and then stick the two together. We arrive at forms by an act of intellectual abstraction -- and, on the Thomist view, forms also subsist in the Divine Intellect as exemplars in conformity to which substances are created.
(In the non-physical world, form doesn't exist by itself either; even an angel consists of a form conjoined with an act of existence, not just a form by itself. However, because matter is the principle of individuation and angels are immaterial, there can be no more than one angel of any given form.)
That neither form nor (prime) matter exists by itself, and yet "compounds" of the two do exist, is at the heart of Aquinas's arguments for the existence of God based on our knowledge of the physical world. Ed Feser has a nice piece that addresses this subject in Neo-Scholastic Essays.
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* "Non-prime" matter has form of its own. The brass "matter" out of which a statue is made has itself the form of brass.
Last edited by Scott (8/06/2015 3:17 pm)
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Re: Two Questions: Sin as Irrationality and the Soul as Body's Form
Could the form of a human be coupled with what looks like a table?
Ordinarily, no; miraculously, yes. Through secondary causation, that won't happen. But there's no reason in principle that it couldn't be done by the direct intervention/primary causation of a God Who can, without altering the accidents of bread and wine, change their substances (and thus surely their substantial forms) into those of the body and blood of Christ.
Last edited by Scott (8/27/2015 10:26 am)
- Mark
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Re: Two Questions: Sin as Irrationality and the Soul as Body's Form
Well sure, I don't mean yo ask how God literally assembled them. I guess I'm more wondering why any given substance has the form it does and not another one. Feser says the connection is "one of metaphysical necessity," But why?
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Re: Two Questions: Sin as Irrationality and the Soul as Body's Form
I guess I'm more wondering why any given substance has the form it does and not another one.
Hmm, I'm not sure what sort of answer you're looking for here. In one sense, a cat-substance has the form of a cat and not the form of a dog because if it had the form of a dog, it would be a dog. In another sense, a cat-substance has the form of a cat and not the form of a dog because its parents were cats and it's in the nature of cats to give birth to cats rather than to dogs. Does either of those address your question?
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Re: Two Questions: Sin as Irrationality and the Soul as Body's Form
I guess I'm more wondering why any given substance has the form it does and not another one.
Hmm, I'm not sure what sort of answer you're looking for here. In one sense, a cat-substance has the form of a cat and not the form of a dog because if it had the form of a dog, it would be a dog. In another sense, a cat-substance has the form of a cat and not the form of a dog because its parents were cats and it's in the nature of cats to give birth to cats rather than to dogs. Does either of those address your question?
Both of those answers explain why a particular cat has the form it does, but I'm wondering about the form of cats generally. Why is catness expressed in the form that it is? Similarly, why do humans have an intelligent form where tables do not? Different forms have different powers, but I'm wondering about the source of those differences. I hope that question makes more sense.
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Thread Starter- Scott
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Re: Two Questions: Sin as Irrationality and the Soul as Body's Form
Why is catness expressed in the form that it is? Similarly, why do humans have an intelligent form where tables do not? Different forms have different powers, but I'm wondering about the source of those differences. I hope that question makes more sense.
Well, I'm still not sure quite what you're asking, but it still seems to me that you're coming at the question the wrong way round. The "form of a human being" has intelligence because a human being has intelligence. The human being is the substance, which is the basic reality and comes ontologically first. The human being's "form" is an intellectual abstraction from that substance; it has no independent existence and doesn't somehow confer powers on the substance (even if God uses the subsistent "form of a human being" as an exemplar for creation).
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Re: Two Questions: Sin as Irrationality and the Soul as Body's Form
Well, I'm still not sure quite what you're asking, but it still seems to me that you're coming at the question the wrong way round. The "form of a human being" has intelligence because a human being has intelligence. The human being is the substance, which is the basic reality and comes ontologically first. The human being's "form" is an intellectual abstraction from that substance; it has no independent existence and doesn't somehow confer powers on the substance (even if God uses the subsistent "form of a human being" as an exemplar for creation).
This doesn't seem right. It's precisely the other way round where I am coming from, but let's forget for now where I am coming from.
Remember that the opening poster first asked about the soul. The form of the human body is the soul. Is it right to say that the soul is an intellectual abstraction without independent existence and doesn't confer powers on the substance?
If it were true that human form is a mere intellectual abstraction without independent existence, the soul would be non-existent after death. Reading (and following) Feser, the soul is in a "radically diminished state" after death. Whatever that means, it doesn't mean "without independent existence" and it seems to mean somehow apart from the human substance.