uppose, for whatever reason, you believed all humans were evil. Every
interaction, you'd say, is merely transactional. They lie, cheat, and
steal constantly. If not for the fear of punishment, people would just
slaughter each other. We'd have wars, injustice, crime, and an endless
series of crises. In that case, it might be a hard sell to convince you
that anyone has a soul. If humans have souls, they do a great job of
concealing it.
Now, just in time for Christmas, a new book (Immortal Souls: A Treatise On Human Nature, Editiones Scholasticae, 2024; 544 pages) claims to have proved, by reinterpreting the philosophical writings of Aristotle and the medieval religious scholar Thomas Aquinas, that humans do in fact have souls. And not only souls, but immortal ones that survive forever after death. The author, Edward Feser, says humans are unique—only humans, not animals, have free will and a soul—and there's a Supreme Being behind all of it who's going to punish the sinners and reward the faithful.
The ideas in the book represent what a religious scholar in the Middle Ages would believe. The author mostly recognizes that these pre-scientific arguments wouldn't be convincing today. While Aquinas is considered mainly a religious figure, the influence of Aristotle on science was enormous and continues today.
What is a soul, and where can I buy one?
What is a soul, anyway? Most of this is in Part IV, and Feser recognizes that ‘soul’ has so many different meanings as to be almost useless as a concept. According to Aquinas, a soul is that which thinks and to which virtue and vice are attributable. It is what moves the body and that which is saved or damned after death.
Even though a person doesn't become a rational being until well after birth (if ever), Feser says the embryo is directed toward developing a brain and becoming rational; therefore it must have a substantial form appropriate to that, i.e. a soul. In the Cartesian dualist model, he says, we'd have to say there is no soul until the rational powers were exercised. But, Feser says, the fertilized egg must have one, because the soul is what gives form to the body. This deviates from Aquinas, who said the soul was not present at conception.
That illustrates the challenges in this approach: you start with something that's not only unmeasurable but may or may not even exist (depending how it's defined) and then speculate as to its properties. Depending on who does the arguing, you can come up with opposite conclusions.
What happens after death?
Feser says the mind is not like a computer program, but something immaterial and irreducible. From this, according to the Feser's interpretation, because you are ‘rational’, your rational powers and your ‘will’ continue after death.
Feser calls death a “full body amputation,” which is obviously a pretty serious bit of surgery. According to Aquinas, the body (while alive) exists for the purpose of moving the soul toward perfection. After death it can no longer change, as its will is now fixed forever.
Aquinas said that after death, only the desires the person thinks are most worthy continue, and they remain unalterably fixed. This means if the person's will is fixed on God, he is saved; if not, he is damned. Thomists call it a ‘fatal choice.’ Once you're dead, you can never change your mind; the soul is unchangeable after death, so being alive is quite valuable because it gives you a moral choice that angels don't have.
Brains . . . brains . . . brains
This means that even if you somehow got resurrected, your will would still be fixed at the point it was at when you died. So, for instance, if you happened to be thinking a lot about brains, that obsession would be permanent, since you can no longer reason. You'd be almost like a zombie. (I should point out that this is my interpretation, not the author's.) But your will would be fixed, meaning you would no longer have free will.
In some ways, Feser says, you'd be more like an angel, which also has a fixed will and therefore no free will. Aquinas said that angels have no sense organs, so they don't use logic, but instead grasp ideas without putting concepts together into thoughts. This is because they're purely non-corporeal, which means they don't reason, so they're incapable of changing their minds. By contrast, animals don't have an intellect, so they don't survive after death at all.
That might not sound too appealing: you could only do intellectual tasks for all eternity (like doing math problems, I suppose, or reminiscing about when you were alive); you'd be blind, deaf and dumb, you could only communicate by telepathy, and there's no hope of reincarnation. There could be more to it, of course, maybe something involving harps, but that's as specific as Aquinas ever got, and no one else has been able to make much progress on that idea. In modern terms that means these ideas were unproductive—a conceptual dead end, so to speak—but they were very influential in their time.
It is not clear whether Feser thinks a person would retain their memories which, as we now know, are encoded in the synapses of the physical brain. This is the same problem encountered by early Buddhism, where nothing of the personality is reinstantiated at reincarnation, including memories and personality; since this obviously takes away much of reincarnation's appeal, Buddhism later revised this to make it more palatable, but how it might work was always unclear.
The spirit of the deceased has no ‘extension’, which means it has no length, width, or height. Ghosts would therefore require divine assistance to remain in an extended form so they can be seen or heard; or, Feser says, they could be demons, whatever that might be.
What did Aquinas have against animals?
Feser says that conceptualization, by which he means language, is essential for intellect, so dogs don't have it. Dogs don't reason and they don't entertain propositions about humans.
I don't know about dogs, but birds certainly do. One day I came home from work to find a dead tree lying across my driveway, preventing me from getting into my garage. There were about twenty birds sitting nearby who watched me intently as if to see what I would do. They clearly expected me to use one of those noisy human tools to cut up the tree as they had seen me do before, and looked distinctly disappointed and flew off when I simply went around the tree and went inside through the back door. Clearly they'd formed a hypothesis about me and used it to reason what my behavior would be. The idea that a human has the power to cut down a tree must be impressive to birds, for whom a tree probably seems indestructible.
Feser says animals have no intellect, which means they can't reason from concepts. Later Feser hedges and says what animals don't have is language that lets them reason using abstract concepts, and so are unable to argue. Perhaps he should listen to crows sometime. Arguing is practically their day job. Who can say what they're really arguing about? Some fine point of epistemology, perhaps? Whether humans, those poor creatures cursed with the tragic inability to fly, have souls? Heated debates about how dark matter could possibly be dark and yet not make annoying cawing sounds?
I, Carrot
A spirit level, used to measure whether a spirit is level
Aquinas differed with Augustine by saying the mind cannot know anything at all, not even itself, without sensory experience. There is no such a thing as introspection. We know we exist only because we know we act. In fact, we now know the brain creates the concept of self in exactly the same way as it creates the concept of every other person you know. You have a concept of Ben Affleck and one of your dog in your head, maybe not as complex as your concept of yourself, but just as real. And that is really what you interact with, using your body as a tool.
Feser tries a reductio ad absurdum by saying if the experience of having a self is an illusion, then the non-experience of having a self could also be an illusion. But this argument makes no sense. You can't have an illusory non-experience. He also argues that the scientific claim that the concept of self is manufactured in the brain is wrong. The very act of calling it “your” brain, he says, proves his point.
Feser's argument, which I call the “I, Carrot” theory, is that the attributes of a carrot such as its “orangeness” cannot be transferred from one carrot to another carrot. By this he means that the self, like a carrot's orangeness, is an essential attribute of a person and impossible to explain in terms of brain function. Your corporeal and incorporeal existence, like a plane ticket, are non-transferable and non-refundable. In Aristotelian terms that makes it a “substance.” And so he argues vigorously, using Aristotle's concept of hyelomorphism, that it is.
Hyelomorphism
Hyelomorphism was Aristotle's idea that matter is a composite of ‘prime matter’ and ‘substantial form.’ Prime matter is the pure potentiality to receive substantial form. Matter is passive and indeterminate, while form is active and determining. If something were pure form it would not exist at all. If it lacked form, it would be nothing but potential. Without potential, there could be no substantial change.
To make his case, Feser must reject Cartesian dualism and scientific materialism. He realizes this is an uphill battle, but says quantum mechanics is closer to hyelomorphism than mechanical philosophy is. He says physicist Werner Heisenberg agreed when he compared Aristotle's idea of ‘potentia’ and ‘form’ to our concept of energy and matter. Philosopher Robert Koons, who used Aristotle to argue for the existence of God, calls this ‘quantum hyelomorphism.’
An example is how a photon can readily “flit back and forth between wave-like and particle-like manifestations in a way that a cow cannot readily flit back and forth between cow-like and hamburger-like manifestations” because photons are closer to prime matter than cows are. This cow-hamburger duality is an interesting concept that physicists might wish to examine: a good example of how a result depends on the observer. But the distinction between prime matter and substantial form has long been abandoned by science as vague and inadequate.
The real villain in this book is the ‘reductionist‘ viewpoint. Feser claims that biology's search for mechanisms is not in fact an example of reductionism but vindicates Aristotelian hyelomorphism. He often uses the term ‘irreducible,’ which is a favorite of creationists. There are metaphysical problems with this term, but that's outside the scope of this article, which focuses on what we're really interested in: angels, which we humans collect for use as Christmas tree decorations. (Since they have no free will they must comply, but at least we put them at the top, well above the sparkly reindeer.)
It goes without saying that these pre-scientific views are not accepted by modern science: not so much because they're false, but because they don't have any definite meaning (e.g., how does ‘incorporeal’ differ from ‘abstract’ or even ‘non-existent’), so we can't build on them. Despite Feser's attempts to refute modern neuroscience, ‘irreducibility of the intellect’ is now known to be false: there are dozens of brain regions, each of which serves an important function (spatial memory formation, emotional valence detection, facial recognition, and so on). There are genuine mysteries about how to explain internality of the ‘self’, but neither Aquinas nor modern philosophers have a handle on them. Neither does science, which is possibly too influenced by the eliminativism that Feser criticizes at length. However, as fascinating as Aquinas's thinking may be, the idea that the intellect is an indivisible, “simple” thing and therefore immaterial and non-physical seems to be a case of reasoning backwards from the desired conclusion.
Considering the bleakness of the afterlife depicted here, where we have to do math problems for the next 311 trillion years without so much as a single pencil, maybe that's just as well.
dec 18 2024, 9:16 am. updated dec 19 2024
