11.5 Reflecting on SCG 2,46–101
11.5 Reflecting on SCG 2,46–101
If you start with the assumption that only material things exist, you will obviously have to reject almost everything Aquinas says in SCG 2,46–101.58 And if you think that you can prove that nothing nonmaterial exists, then you will take yourself to have good reason to suppose that SCG 2,46–101 is seriously wrongheaded since its arguments assume the possibility of there being immaterial intellects. So if a rigidly materialistic account of reality is all that we can safely rely on when thinking about what exists, Aquinas is just wasting his time in SCG 2 while trying to think about what intellect is in general and how it is that intellect can be ascribed to people and to angels. That is because lying behind everything he writes in SCG 2,46–101 is the supposition that not all that exists is material.
For Aquinas, that not all that exists is material is not a supposition or assumption. It is something that he takes himself to have established in his SCG arguments for the existence of God. And if you think that these arguments have merit, then you will come with an open mind to SCG 2,46–101 since you will not think that it is absurd to suppose that something can exist while not being physical or material. On the other hand, however, you might, while accepting that God exists as wholly immaterial, wonder whether Aquinas’s SCG account of immateriality in human beings makes sense. And you might wonder whether Aquinas has given us grounds to believe in the existence of angels.
If we do not embrace a totally materialistic account of what people are, then we might be prepared to say that people are souls or selves attached to bodies (1) because they understand and think, (2) because thinking is not a bodily process, and (3) because we are our souls. Plato seems to have been of this view. And so have many philosophers since his time. I have already referred to Descartes as thinking that we are essentially incorporeal things, and defenders of Descartes on the distinction of mind and body remain to this day.59 And, you might think, if Descartes’s position on mind and body is defensible, then there is much to be said for what Aquinas argues concerning the human soul.
Yet I do not think that this conclusion would be true since Aquinas does not think that I am my soul. He thinks that my soul is but a part of me and that I am a composite of body and soul.60 Aquinas’s position on soul and body in people seems to be at odds with what Plato and Descartes defend—this being commonly referred to nowadays as “substance dualism.” For Aquinas, I am not two distinct substances. He certainly speaks of my soul as subsisting. But he does not take it to be a substance. He takes it to be a part of me that is not something physical operating in a physical way. As for my body, Aquinas thinks that in the absence of my soul my body is not a human being, not a human substance.
You may, perhaps, think that arguments in favor of substance dualism are so many nails in the coffin of Aquinas’s position on soul and body in people. Yet some of them seem to me to be good arguments.
Substance dualists typically maintain that it is ludicrous to suppose that mental events can be straightforwardly reduced to physical events since they are not empirically observable, since, for example, no empirical investigation can capture the occurrence of a thought. And this conclusion strikes me as correct. It certainly makes sense to say that one can see people thinking since their bodily behavior is often a good guide to what they are believing, surmising, expecting, doubting, and so on. Yet it also seems hard to disprove that people can know what they are thinking in having certain particular thoughts that they have. And it also seems hard to show that a person’s privileged access to his or her thoughts is something empirically observable. I can take you to be morally disreputable without indicating so by what I say or do. And even if what I say or do indicates that I take you to be morally disreputable, my saying or doing here only indicates what I am actually thinking.
Understanding and thinking is often said to be what brains do. But statements like “My brain understands” or “My brain thinks” seem pretty weird. It is people, not brains, who think and understand, even if thinking and understanding depend on having a brain. Also, of course, it seems hard to believe that an examination of a living human brain is going to enable the examiner to conclude “This one is thinking that Paris is nicer than New York” or “That one is thinking that Wales is full of memories for me,” and so on. In what sense can any brain state be thought to be numerically identical with any thought? The sentence “The present that I passed on to Paul is the same as the present that I received from Mary and wanted to get rid of” makes sense because we can say what it is that I wanted to get rid of. Yet can we make sense of “My recognizing that bats are mammals is the same as process X in my brain”? The question that cries out for answer here is “The same what?” and I do not see what answer can be given to this question.61 You might say that the correct reply to the question is “Same thing.” But “thing” does not specify what something is. We are not given any answer to the question “What is X?” if it is just said that X is a thing. Everything, you might say, is a thing.
Yet one can concede that there are mental events not reducible to physical ones without arguing that people are essentially immaterial. If you look around you, you will find people to be physical things because they have bodies. And if you find them to be that, then you will be agreeing with Aquinas. So you will not suppose that people are purely immaterial things. On the other hand you may think that there is more to people than can be described in an empirical account of them. And if you think that, then you might suppose that people are pretty unique in that they operate at both a material and an immaterial level, which Aquinas also takes to be the case. You might suppose that there can be no connection between what is material and what is not material. But why so? Aquinas would say that there can be a causal connection between what is immaterial and what is material. You will reject this thesis if you think that all causation has to amount to one material thing bringing about a change in another material thing. But why suppose that? Has this thesis been demonstrated to be true?
Aquinas obviously thinks that the thesis has not been demonstrated because of what he takes himself to have argued concerning the existence and nature of God. Yet he would also contest the thesis on the basis of his view of understanding as amounting to the reception of form immaterially—something that I explained and discussed a bit in chapter 7. Let me now, however, say a little more on that view.
Aquinas is quite clear that people are not immaterial substances. Yet he is also clear that understanding is a nonbodily operation. What he has in mind here can be illustrated by an example.
Someone wearing blue eyeglasses fails to see what someone wearing colorless ones sees since such a person cannot, for example, distinguish between white and pale blue. Someone who can distinguish all colors cannot be looking through glasses that are colored. Similarly, thinks Aquinas, a being that can, at least in principle, understand all bodily things cannot itself possess the nature of any bodily thing—meaning that understanding is not a bodily function of a bodily thing. Yes, thinks Aquinas, something bodily (a cow, say) can possess its nature bodily, and must, indeed, do so. But he also thinks that we could never understand (be informed by) every bodily nature if understanding amounted to having any bodily nature in the way that bodily things naturally possess it. Aquinas’s position, as I said in chapter 7, is that we understand what something is by having its form in mind. He thinks, for example, that the nature signified by the word “cow” exists in a cow naturally because it is a cow; yet he also thinks that it exists in me as I understand what a cow is.
As Herbert McCabe says:
This doctrine will be totally misunderstood if it is not recognized that it is intended to be obvious. It is not a description of a process by which we understand, if there is any such process. It is a platitude; it says “What I have in mind when I know the nature of a cow is the nature of a cow and nothing else.” Now in case someone says “But if the nature you have in your mind is that of a cow, surely your mind must be a cow—for to have the nature of an X simply means to be an X,” St Thomas merely replies that to understand the nature of a cow is to have this nature precisely without being a cow, and this is what is made clear by saying that one has the nature in mind.62
The platitude to which McCabe here refers does, indeed, seem to be a platitude. So understanding what something is would seem obviously to have that something in one in a nonmaterial way, which favors Aquinas’s account of intellect in SCG 2,46–101. One might think of our minds as physical things in which concepts or understandings are lodged. Or, again, one might think of them as physical objects that perform certain physical functions. On this basis one might say that we understand what something is because we have a likeness or picture of it in mind in some physical sense. Yet as McCabe goes on to observe:
One of the characteristic things about a picture is that it is first of all something in its own right—a piece of canvas or wood—and then it resembles something. Now it is just the things that the picture has in its own right that must be forbidden to the picture in the mind. If it were a picture on wood, it would not serve to distinguish a cow from a cow painted on wood; if it were made of cast iron, it would not help to tell a cow from a cast iron lawn-cow. There is no mental stuff that the picture could be made of—it must have everything the cow has and nothing else. It cannot resemble a cow because anything except the sheer resemblance will be an alien element like wood or cast iron. It must be simply everything that a cow has and nothing else. And what is this except to be the nature of the cow?63
So, perhaps, what Aquinas says about immaterial human intellect is not entirely off-beam. And, taken as part of his account of what people are, it steers a delicate balance between concluding that we are wholly immaterial or wholly physical. Substance dualists will say that we are wholly immaterial, which seems patently false since we are human beings and since human beings exist as living objects in the spatiotemporal world. Hardheaded materialists will say that we are nothing but what is physical, which also seems false since it is hard to believe that thoughts are always physically detectable or identical with brain processes, and since understanding what something is cannot be a physical operation at all. Aquinas on the other hand positively affirms that people are essentially material things without thereby concluding that they are nothing but what is material, that there is nothing in them but that which can be thought of as entirely physical. So maybe his position on soul and body in people at least preserves something of the best in dualistic accounts of people and of material accounts of what people are.
Aquinas’s SCG arguments on angels and angelic intellects, though, are perhaps somewhat implausible. Aquinas believed in angels independently of philosophical arguments because of his reading of the Bible. But you might well find his nonbiblically based arguments for the existence of angels in SCG 2,91–92 less than conclusive.
Consider the three arguments I highlighted earlier in this chapter.
The first one seems dubious since, even if intellect is not necessarily united to body, it does not follow that there are angelic intellects not united to bodies.
The second argument moves too quickly from the idea that intellects exist as subsisting to the conclusion that there are intellects that are created intellects not united to bodies.
The third argument rests on the idea that God could not create without making a world containing wholly immaterial things. Yet, while one might agree that if God wills to confer being on creatures as manifesting the being of God, who is able to create anything that can be thought to exist, it does not seem obvious that God must create angels so as to fill the gap between people, considered as partly immaterial, and God, considered as wholly immaterial while being that which exists of necessity because it is uncreated.
One might, of course, want to say that God, considered as Being Itself, might want to create as much as could possibly reflect him considered as such. And, unless you think that everything that could exist has to be something material, it seems true enough that wholly immaterial beings created by God could be part of a created world. But I do not see why God, as able to create all that can be, has to create all that can be. As I have shown, Aquinas does not think that God has to create at all. So the third argument for angels that I have noted can hardly suppose otherwise and must, I think, be understood as a probable argument based on some notion of what it would be fitting for God to produce if he wants to pour forth being into things of many possible kinds. But I do not find the argument definitively to establish that there have to be angelic intellects. You, of course, might think differently.