11.2 What Can Be Said of Intellectual Substances in General? (SCG 2,47–55)
11.2 What Can Be Said of Intellectual Substances in General? (SCG 2,47–55)
Given that there are created intellectual substances (whether angelic or human), what must they have in common?7 This is the question to which SCG 2,47–55 is devoted, and Aquinas deals with it by pretty much saying what I reported him as holding in chapters 7 and 8 concerning human knowledge and will. So in SCG 2,47–55 we find Aquinas defending these theses:
1. SCG 2,47: Intellectual substances have will (they are volentes).
2. SCG 2,48: Intellectual substances have freedom of choice in acting (liberi arbitrii in agendo).
3. SCG 2,49: An intellectual substance is not something bodily (non sit corpus).
4. SCG 2,50: Intellectual substances are immaterial (immateriales).
5. SCG 2,51: An intellectual substance is not a material form ( forma materialis).
6. SCG 2,52: Created intellectual things are not simple as God is since what they are does not guarantee that they exist (their esse and their quod est are distinct).
7. SCG 2,53: Created intellectual things contain a distinction of act and potency.
8. SCG 2,54: Our ability to distinguish between what something is and that it exists is not equivalent to our ability to distinguish between something’s form and its matter, and the form/matter distinction is inapplicable to created immaterial things.
9. SCG 2,55: Intellectual substances are incorruptible (incorruptibiles).
Given what I said about Aquinas on will in chapter 8, you will not be surprised by thesis 1 in this list, and you will not be surprised to find him saying that things with intellect focus on goods to which they are attracted, which means that they have will, considered as desire in action. I cannot be drawn to anything unless I have some understanding of it, even a wrong understanding, and to understand, rightly or wrongly, always involves some kind of reaction for or against. So, it would seem, to know is to be related to things considered as desirable or undesirable, which seems to entail that knowledge involves will. To be sure, I can know that 2 + 2 = 4 without having any desires at all with respect to this fact. Yet it makes sense to say that beings with knowledge (which itself results from paying attention and which is also something one can choose to ignore) may react to what they know with delight or aversion. This is what Aquinas means when he says that if something has knowledge or understanding (intellectus), it must have will. For Aquinas, will is what exists in something only because the thing is intellectual and can act on its desires in ways that express what it is rather than what is forced on it. So we find Aquinas adding: “The form understood, through which the intellectual substance acts, proceeds from the intellect itself as a thing conceived …. Intellectual substances, then, move themselves to act, as having mastery of their own action. It therefore follows that they are endowed with will.”8
11.2.2 Freedom of Choice (SCG 2,48)
Much the same point is what lies behind the position of SCG 2,48, though this time it is expressed with reference to freedom of choice (liberum arbitrium).
In many of his writings Aquinas distinguishes between will (voluntas) and freedom of choice (liberum arbitrium). Things with freedom of choice, he thinks, are voluntary agents and, therefore, have voluntas. Yet Aquinas also thinks that voluntary agents are not always making discrete decisions concerning some particular good to be obtained. When I run to catch a bus I am aiming or willing to get on the bus. But I am also performing a number of distinct actions as I leap forward placing one foot in front of the other many times over, and I might not be paying special attention to any of them considered as distinct actions. I am aiming to get on the bus, but I need not be discretely choosing each of the movements of my legs as I do so. If I were to do that, I would probably miss the bus. Yet, Aquinas thinks, we can make distinct choices based on what we take to be desirable and based on what we think will enable us to obtain what we desire. And, to have this ability is to have what Aquinas calls liberum arbitrium, which we might think of as choosing on the basis of reason.
Aquinas holds that people with intellect can figure out how to get what they want and act on the way they have been thinking. So he takes liberum arbitrium to be part of what any voluntary agent must possess. Intellectual substances, he says, “are endowed with freedom of choice in acting.” He continues: “That they act by judgment is evident from the fact that through their intellectual cognition they judge of things to be done. And they must have freedom if, as just shown, they have control over their own action. Therefore, these substances in acting have freedom of choice.”9 Aquinas goes on to say:
So far as matters of action are concerned, whatever things possess judgment that is not determined to one thing by nature are of necessity endowed with freedom of choice. And such are all intellectual beings. For the intellect apprehends not only this or that good, but good itself, as common to all things. Now, the intellect, through the form apprehended, moves the will; and in all things mover and moved must be proportionate to one another. It follows that the will of an intellectual substance will not be determined by nature to anything except the good as common to all things. So it is possible for the will to be inclined toward anything whatever that is presented to it under the aspect of good, there being no natural determination to the contrary to prevent it. Therefore, all intellectual beings have a free will, resulting from the judgment of the intellect. And this means that they have freedom of choice, which is defined as the free judgment of reason.10
Here Aquinas is arguing that, while we cannot but desire goodness in general, we can distinguish between goods and opt for some of them as opposed to others. He thinks that desire or appetite is fixed in certain directions in what lacks intellect. He thinks, for example, that nonhuman animals act by instinct coupled with sense perception—that, for example, cats will, all things being equal, naturally run after mice that catch their attention.11 But he also maintains that intellectual beings can recognize that there are different goods at which they might aim. Suppose that I like fried chicken, which I take to be something good and, therefore desirable. Do I have to gobble up fried chicken as automatically as a cat might pounce on a mouse? Well, Aquinas would reply, that will depend on other things I like and might also recognize as within my grasp. Suppose that I like to have low cholesterol. In that case, I might think twice about eating fried chicken. Or suppose that I want my beloved, who is a vegetarian, to approve of me. Then again, I might refrain from fried chicken. So, Aquinas holds, intellectual beings have freedom of choice because they can recognize that there are different goods that can compete for their attention as they act. This freedom of choice, in Aquinas’s view, depends on the ability to understand how different things can be thought of as good.
In SCG 2,49 Aquinas notes that bodies contain what they are in quantitative fashion. He means, for example, that a plant or a cat is a material thing with physical dimensions. Yet he goes on to say: “An intellect does not, in terms of any quantitative commensuration, comprehend a thing understood, since by its whole self it understands and encompasses both whole and part, things great in quantity and things small. Therefore, no intelligent substance is a body.”12 Here we have Aquinas articulating a position of his that I noted in chapter 7: that knowledge comes about as forms are received immaterially. This position runs throughout SCG 2,49, so I shall not dwell on it now, though I shall return to it before the end of this chapter.
11.2.4 Immateriality (SCG 2,50)
Aquinas takes it to follow from the reasoning of SCG 2,49 that intellectual substances are immaterial. As I have noted, however, he thinks that people can be thought to have intellect, though he does not think that people are immaterial. So, what is Aquinas driving at in SCG 2,50?
He seems to be assuming that there is a distinction between what has intellect and what intellect is as active, and he is focusing on what intellect is as active whether or not intellect might be ascribed to what can be thought of as having a body as well as having intellect. So, given what he has argued in SCG 2,49, Aquinas says that, if no intelligent substance is a body, “such a substance is not composed of matter and form” and is, therefore, immaterial.13 Aquinas agrees that something with intellect that also happens to be a composite of matter and form will understand things in the same way that something that is essentially corporeal does. But he does not think that the intellect in something that is composed of matter and form is, therefore, something material. Or, as he puts it: “Forms are not received in the intellect as in matter or a material thing. Clearly, then, intelligent substances are immaterial, even as they are incorporeal, too.”14
Here, I should note, Aquinas is effectively rejecting some opposite positions that philosophers over many centuries have defended concerning the nature of human beings. Some of them (Plato and Descartes are outstanding and distinguished examples) have held that people are essentially thinking and incorporeal things.15 Descartes, of course, lived long after Aquinas, and it is Plato whom Aquinas targets in the SCG as wrongly thinking that we are essentially immaterial beings. Yet Descartes is a classic source for the view that people are essentially intellectual and nonmaterial. As I have noted, though, many philosophers have argued that people are entirely physical and that knowledge or understanding is nothing but a physical process to be investigated and reported on as we might, say, investigate and report on what is going on with a piece of cheese as it becomes moldy.16 In SCG 2,50 Aquinas is implying that something might be essentially corporeal while having an immaterial component. As I will soon show, Aquinas takes human beings to be both essentially corporeal and things with a subsisting part that is not material because it is intellective.
11.2.5 Intellectual Substance and Material Form (SCG 2,51)
By “material form” Aquinas means form as depending on matter because it is the form of something material. He would say that in the case of a dog, the substantial form of caninity exists in it as the material thing that it essentially is. For Aquinas, for a dog to cease to be canine would amount to it ceasing to exist. In this sense, he thinks, caninity in a dog depends on matter or material configuration. Yet, Aquinas reasons, if an intellectual substance acts through itself, it cannot be a form that depends for its existence on matter. It must be something subsisting (existing as a thing in itself) immaterially. This is the thesis of SCG 2,51, in which we find Aquinas saying:
Forms dependent in being on matter do not themselves have being properly, but being properly belongs to the composites through their forms. Consequently, if intellectual substances were forms of this kind, it would follow that they have material being, just as they would if they were composed of matter and form. … Forms that do not subsist through themselves cannot act through themselves; rather the composites act through them. Hence, if intellectual natures were forms of this sort, it would follow that they do not themselves understand, but that it is the things composed of them and matter which understand. And thus, an intelligent being would be composed of matter and form; which is impossible, as we have just shown [see SCG 2,50].17
Notice that Aquinas is here considering what must be true of any created intellect. Having previously argued that a created intellect must have will and freedom of choice, and having suggested that a created intellect is not a body but something immaterial, he is now claiming that a created intellect must exist in its own right as something nonmaterial.
11.2.6 Created Forms as Not Divine (SCG 2,52)
Given his teaching on divine simplicity, Aquinas has to say that created intellects are not such that their essence is to exist. And this is what we find him saying in SCG 2,52. Aquinas has agreed that created intellects are not corporeal, not composites of form and matter, and not things that exist in matter as material forms do. In SCG 2,52 he is noting that, though created intellects share in God’s simplicity to some extent, they are still creatures who derive their being from God and are not, therefore, pure Being Itself (ipsum esse subsistens), as Aquinas takes God to be. He writes: “Now, we have shown in Book 1 that God is his own subsisting being [see SCG 1,22]. Hence, nothing beside him can be its own being. Of necessity, therefore, in every substance beside him the substance itself is other than its being.”18
11.2.7 Act and Potency (SCG 2,53)
The logic of SCG 2,53 is similar to that of SCG 2,52. In SCG 1 Aquinas argues that only God is pure being, so in SCG 2,52 he concludes that created substances are not pure being, not such that what they are entails that they exist. Since in SCG 1 Aquinas has argued that only God lacks potentiality, he argues in SCG 2,53 that created intellects have act and potency, that they exist but are potentially nonexistent.
11.2.8 Substance, Being, Form, and Matter (SCG 2,54)
As I have shown, Aquinas thinks that we can speak of there being composition of substance (substantia) and being (esse) in all creatures that have substantial forms. I have also shown that he thinks that some creatures have composition of form ( forma) and matter (materia). In SCG 2,54 Aquinas is concerned to stress that the substance/being distinction is different from the form/matter distinction.
Why does he bother to emphasize that at this stage in the SCG? I presume that he does so because he was saying in SCG 2,53 that there is act and potency in created intellects and because he does not want his reader to assume that the fact that this is so means that intellectual creatures have composition of matter and form. He seems to want to stress that, though created intellects are potentially nonexistent, this does not entail that they have composition of matter and form. In his own words:
Composition of act and potency has greater extension than that of form and matter. Thus matter and form divide [sc. render composite] natural substance, while potentiality and act divide common being [sc. all that has being but is not being itself]. Accordingly, whatever follows upon potentiality and act, as such, is common to both material and immaterial created substances. … Yet all that is proper to matter and form, as such, as to be generated and to be corrupted, and the like, are proper to material substances and in no way belong to immaterial created substances.19
The last sentence here is clearly intended by Aquinas as linking on to what he immediately goes on to say in SCG 2,55.
11.2.9 Created Intellects as Incorruptible (SCG 2,55)
If created intellects do not have matter and form, then they cannot perish in the course of nature as material things do, which is Aquinas’s thesis in SCG 2,55. “From what has just been said,” he observes, “it is clearly shown that every intellectual substance is incorruptible.”20 Aquinas takes perishing by corruption to be a material process. So, he claims again and again in SCG 2,55, created intellects cannot perish by corruption. All of his arguments in this chapter hammer home the point that if something is not material, it cannot perish as material things do and for the reasons that they do.
You might say that a thing might cease to exist in that God might withdraw his creative action from it, and Aquinas concedes that there is a possibility worth noting here. He says: “There is no potency with respect to their non-being [sc. the non-being of intellects] except in the first agent, inasmuch as it lies within God’s power not to pour being into them (non influere eis esse).”21 Strictly speaking, this remark of Aquinas only says that, for example, God might never have created me, considered as having intellect. But it might be taken as recognizing that God has power to make me cease to exist, and that this reading is correct seems clear from what Aquinas goes on to say. For, having asserted what I have just quoted him as saying, he claims that God would not take from things that which is “proper to their natures” (quod est proprium naturis earum), which seems to imply that God could do this. However, such “decreation” of something that exists would not amount to the thing perishing by being corruptible, and, as I have now explained, Aquinas denies that created intellectual things can perish by physical corruption. In short, Aquinas’s view is that, while a car can squash a cat, nothing can demolish that which is not material.