My musings on theology, philosophy, history, literature, poetry, and religion -
Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity ~ Albert Einstein
This may have to be a weekly thing. (I see that this shall be a perpetual battle.)
In the morning, I finished rereading Barkman's chapter on Myth and had some decisive moments of insight and understanding. The main thing I need to taxonomize here is the various ways to understand the different facets of the faculty of imagination. The idea is gradually coming into more focus than it ever has, but I still find the conceptual edges needlessly blurred, not with the concepts themselves, but with the way Lewis uses them to explain his own imaginative experience and balancing this with Barkman's sometimes jarring corrections of the incorrect way Lewis had sometimes used these concepts. For example, there's an overlap between Coleridge's Primary Imagination and Aristotle's Deliberative Imagination. Even now, I cannot quite describe the rest. I forget whether Coleridge's Secondary Imagination overlaps with fancy and whether fancy is Aristotelian or Romantic. This could be cleared up in a moment but I don't have Barkman's dissertation on hand.
Re-read the precipitation of what the causes of the Peloponnesian War were in Thucydides. After watching a YouTube video from Sadler on what it means to be 'well read', I learned some encouraging advice on 'pacing' in my reading. It's not how much you read that should be the measure; the pacing is what matters most. I find it vexing that I had forgotten this, since I already learned this from Lewis Carroll's Symbolic Logic, and even from Craig's metaphor of the tortoise. I record it here for no other reason than that it happened. I could be a Sterne and meander more, but I desist. But to conclude, I can't quite make up my mind yet on whether Athens violated the 30 years Peace Treaty in allying itself with the Corcyraeans against the Corinthians (allies of Sparta). Corcyra was neutral with Athens and Corcyra was asking for Athens to be their ally to preempt an aggressing Corinth. So, unless I'm missing some fine print in the treatise, I can't see how Athens isn't expediently exploiting a loophole that the treaty isn't explicit about. The only thing that complicates matters is that Corcyra insulted Corinth's honor and Corcyra belonged to Corinth so Corinth had every right to reclaim a recalcitrant Corcyra. And it only makes sense that a wayward Corcyra would see Corinth's aggression only in terms of oppression since their aggression was contrary to Corcyraean aspirations, like a child seeing a parent's anger as oppression because of similar reasons. Nevertheless, it all seems to hinge on whether the Corcyraeans were right as to whether war between Sparta (the ally of Corinth) and Athens is inevitable. If it was, then it is more expedient for Athens to side with Corcyra. But this foreign policy is further complicated by the fact that this expediency is only a consideration in the first place because Athens had already worried and irritated Sparta because of the former's expansionistic policies! So, yes, war was inevitable, but only because Athens was already the expansionistic aggressor, prompting Sparta to take the necessary measures to protect itself against Athenian expansion. Siding with Corinth would have been counterproductive and ultimately self-defeating. Corinth would have eventually betrayed Athens, already an ally of Sparta, which didn't take kindly to Athenian expansion, which then would have led to Corcyra adopting the geopolitical strategy it did.
Was faithful with my War and Peace readings (about halfway through now). Serial publications are definitely what best explain tomes. The only way to consume them is to take small bites daily unless you're sick in bed or have the skills to trek entire countries in a day's walk. I'm finding the readings a bit tedious. Nothing revelatory or glorious or numinous or jaw-dropping, just a constant reminder that the quality of the descriptions comes from the pen of Tolstoy and a constant expectation that the love affairs betwixt the characters will either end in tragedy or some 'complex good' (in the Lewisian sense). I'm finding that Levin (Anna Karenina) is much the same as Pierre and that Vronsky and Prince Andrei are very similar. This humanizes Tolstoy a bit and, to me, constrains the excessive praise heaped upon his imagination. I begin to see how these love affairs will ultimately come to. Natasha will end up with Pierre after initially choosing Andrei (just as Kitty eventually ended up with Levin after initially choosing Vronsky), and Nikolai will probably end up with Maria, though I'm not sure what Tolstoy will do with Sonya to make that happen.
The other characters are charming in their own way and the resultant effect of the whole upon my imagination is pleasing, it is a species of that pleasure that delights in seeing how unique personalities are interconnected in a causal web that is too big and complex to be taken in as a whole. So, you're moving around the dynamic mass almost like a spirit, which enlivens it and lends to it a donegality that is nearly palpable. It's hard to put into words but I think modern folks will begin to see what I mean. It has affinities with the way the camera works in a cinematic experience. It can move and relocate across time and space while the events themselves can take on a crisp visualization that gives off its own sensuousness conjured and enjoyed only while the imagination is in motion so that while Tolstoy is transporting you from some domestic quarrel to a battlefield, I sense myself moving in the sky from the quaint roof of some Russian home, through the wet and misty clouds, over the tops of some forest, hearing the rustling of the leaves as the wind carries me to my narrative destination, racing through a screen of gun powder from a recently exploded cannonball, the faint murmur of war cries and suffering and bloodshed swelling into the loud horror and confusion and bustle of the battle itself, and then Tolstoy pulling me in to focus on one character's thoughts and actions within the entire imaginative context of that departure, flight, and arrival. That is perhaps the distinct impression that Tolstoy's genius has on my imagination. The more often the geographic departures, the more distinct and vivid the imaginative effect.
After some domestic duties, I think I dipped into Perelandra for no reason. As a species of world-making, Perelandra is positively delightful and gorgeous and peaceful and warm and luscious and pleasurable. It is a world where all the pleasures are finetuned to all the details of our expectations, known or unknown. It is like a celestial vacation to a tropical island that is everything you wanted it to be and yet there are pleasures there beyond the number that satisfies beyond what you were expecting, or what you could have expected. I find myself returning to it again and again, more for the planetary descriptions than for the plot, and then if it's for the plot, it's oftentimes for the sake of the descriptions.
I'm going to start keeping a random diary if for no other reason than just to chronicle my thoughts for chronicling's sake. The stuff below I wrote over the course of a week. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I can be more terse and to the point, which is what the diaries I've read are wont to do. I also have the hunch that it is good exercise. I know I'm not supposed to write with the aim of polishing a style, but I can't help but think that if I continue to write, to give form to what would otherwise be nebulous, formless, ghostly, evanescent and foggy is a pleasure unto itself, but I think it's reasonable to expect that doing this daily would contribute toward developing a style, wouldn't it? My problem is that I do too much reading and not enough writing. I feel Schopenhauer's disgust, hot on the back of my neck! Read, boy! Anyways, I'll see where this goes, and I will say that future diary entries will tend to be much shorter, as they should be.
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I think I've polished off Linford's anti-Lorentzianism and I'm about ready to post my response. Ultimately, responses like these are professionally useless, as I can't take into account all the citations Linford has, which may or may not make mince meat out of any of my points. I think I may come out on top in the spots that matter, though, because I was able to make use of some sources that I'm very confident Linford hasn't taken notice of. I don't say this to engage in polemical one-upsmanship, but just to emphasize the virtue of adding something to the conversation, whether there be a rejoinder or not. My response should be done by next week. I still have to understand York Time to my satisfaction. I can't quite reach that point yet. The mathematics is still a bit opaque to me, and I can't see, yet, how this appeal to York Time isn't either a mathematical trick that awaits a clever unmasking or a philosophical gaffe that isn't taking into account distinctions that have already been tediously made. Sometimes it sounds like the infinite number of intervals involved are unequal, in which case, it's irrelevant; but, at other times, it looks like another, tired application of empirical indistinguishability by mere manipulation of a Hamiltonian. To dive into details would be an impertinence, in this context.
I continue to wade through Boswell's Life of Johnson. I can't tell whether my sense of being underwhelmed is due to my own dullness and stupidity or whether I find Johnson himself (who I'm supposed to find endearing and lovable, even if only from a distance) a bore, or whether I'm dull and stupid because I find Johnson a bore! Boswell seems to want to paint Johnson as someone who salts all conversation with witticisms, comedic anecdotes, and off-the-cuff literary insights, that astonish because of both their insightfulness and because of the fact that it seems like Johnson is yawning and uninterested while making them, almost like a bored medical diagnostician making titanic breakthroughs on impenetrable cases but giving the impression of going through the motions involved in something as banal as reading the morning newspaper over a cup of coffee. The debates seem staged and when Boswell stacks descriptions of Johnson's rare genius on top of each other, when I actually get to the anecdote that is supposed to illustrate that genius, I get something that is a bit humdrum. I seriously doubt my reaction is like Tolstoy's reaction to Shakespeare, so I fear I'm the dullard. Time will tell if I'll change upon repeated readings or by the time I finish the book.
I was excited to dive into Plutarch's Lives, inspired by some whimsical sources! I remember being intrigued by Pierre casually grabbing it off of Prince Andrew's shelves in War and Peace (or was it Caesar's Commentaries?). I can't remember if the memory is veridical, but the image of Pierre doing that in the context of casual conversation with Prince Andrew was charming to me for some reason. Then, when thumbing through Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, it is mentioned that the Lives was among his favorite books to read for pleasure. Just the thought of reading this classic for pleasure was enough to thrill, especially during this time of image-rich shallowness and illiterate taste. The first Life was that of Romulus and Remus; I need to read it again, as Plutarch stacks detail upon detail, and I begin to despise my intellectual upbringing for only bestowing upon me a mind of mediocre metal. It might also be Dryden's 17th century style mediating the English for me, but I'm fond of the style when it waxes philosophical; the moment it shifts to pure narrative, and the diction veers into the poetic, my mind looses its way in how the author describes, charmed by the vividness of a metaphor for too long to be taken away, in a timely way, by the flow of thought as a whole, and landing in a place I'm not sure I'm supposed to be in, judging by my memory of where I thought I should be when I began the rumination. The same thing afflicts me as I carefully wade through Thucydides The History of the Peloponnesian War. I find myself getting lost in the details. Secondary sources are doing a little to help, but they mostly confound my solitary interpretations and make my unassisted readings seem like unreliable drafts, rather than unalloyed pleasures.
Working my through C.S. Lewis's All My Road Before Me; I'm struck about how similar his style is to my own, though I tend to agree with Michael Ward (I think it was him) who said that the diaries are predominated by excessive tedium: prosaic accounts of the people met that day, occasional sneering accounts of dull conversations, a somewhat repetitive-sounding series of descriptions of nature during his very frequent jaunts through the countryside. What always rouses my attention is the colorful accounts of his philosophical conversations and his ubiquitous revelations about his reactions to his insatiable reading habits. I find myself always looking up the books he says he's reading, and being that they're always obscure, I'm constantly being pleasantly surprised by how charming they are. Unfortunately, I find myself filled with envy by how much time seems available to Lewis for such voluminous reading. I hesitate to say this because there are some diary entries that make it sound like his life is dominated by the constant intrusion of various domestic duties. Sometimes Lewis's assessments of books are sweeping in their generality and sometimes dismissive to the point of being almost unbelievable. He says he found nothing new in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, just 'what the ordinary egoist has always believed and acted on'(!) Because of my respect for Lewis's intellect, I sincerely hope that lurking underneath this sweeping denunciation is a more careful critique, and I expect there might be. I'm not so stupid as as to expect this in the context of terse tidbits in a diary. I mention it because it provokes my incredulity to a degree that I find mildly irritating.
I have to confront the monster that is Space, Time, and Deity (Samuel Alexander) for my overall thesis to be worth anything. It is dreadful to think about the fact that a paper wholly dependent on secondary sources is almost worthless the person attempting an original contribution to a subject. I almost feel the hot breath of Schopenhauer in my ear accosting me for my insincerity and tearing to ribbons my ostentatious sentences for being dolled up to make it look like I'm an authority when I'm not. But then I'm stuck, once again, in the possibility of being entangled in Glaucon's dilemma. What partially consoles me is the fact that it applies to pretty much everyone in pretty much everything they say about pretty much everything: do we prefer being original and honest, but seeming ostentatious and insincere; or, being ostentatious and insincere, but seeming original and honest? To be frank, capturing German-inspired idealism, British idealism, seems to be a dragon I can't completely slay without seeming to, unfortunately. I genuinely wonder how philosophers find the time to either master an issue or deceive themselves into feeling that they have. The eyes that range over any manuscript are inevitably going to confront the eyes of a specialist; and no one has time to be a specialist on all the topics ranged over by a manuscript. There is an unconquerable paradox hemorrhaging here. Are all efforts of publication instances of unavoidable hubris, insurmountable ambition, or wanton exercises of self-deception? Does the overall theme of publication require a tectonic shift in the spirit in which they should be interacted with? Perhaps the success of a publication lies more in the spirit in which they are read, rather than the sufficiency of the topic we expect an author to deliver. I put Alexander in the same bucket as Bradley and all the other British idealists of the time (perhaps even a Whitehead), whose prose are gusts of sawdust in my eyes. I can't, in good faith, use Alexander's contemplation/enjoyment distinction only because I read that Lewis appreciated it in Surprised by Joy. I have to read Alexander and decide for myself and appreciate the wider context within which that distinction has a meaning. There is no other way. I will say that I have my work of Coleridgean synthesis cut out for me. Staring at me from the abyss is this lurking suspicion that Heidegger has done away with this festering subject/object distinction, but I'm not sure how else to understand Alexander's enjoyment/contemplation distinction without the subject/object distinction, so I'm not sure what the resulting synthesis will look like when kairos bids me to synthesize. I hope the synthesis will involve me keeping the subject/object distinction in a sense that could be salvaged by Heidegger's phenomenology. But we'll see.
It's strange that, as I read Space, Time, and Deity, Alexander begins the book by detailing the relationship between philosophy and empirical science, making philosophy distinct, not by the method it uses, but by the domain it investigates. This exact dichotomy between method and subject matter I had chosen to use, independently, but I made the interrelationship a little more nuanced than Alexander (this, in a draft I had concocted on scientism that never saw the light of day).
Read an SEP entry on Fichte: this is a philosopher I have neglected to acquaint myself with in my life. I had always placed him as merely one of a trio of German Idealists to make sense of a historical accounting for a philosophical movement and, once again, I am humbled by my embarrassing lack of knowledge of the history of philosophy and philosophers. I'm entering the 'dark wood' of my 'life's journey'; the 'right way' may not be 'lost' in the sense of not knowing the way, but of seeing that the way involves a trek much more arduous and difficult than I had imagined. I see Fichte is in the category of 'cantankerous genius', who may fall victim to being fascinating, not for his 'system', but for the psychological genius that produced it, his legacy might involve a perpetual warding off of the 'personal heresy'.
Yesterday I forgot to mention that I am once again struggling with my absolute detestation of A.N. Wilson's dreadful biography of C.S. Lewis, an obnoxious exercise of disingenuous bullshit, an obvious attempt to smear someone because he serves as the symbolic conduit for the system Wilson has come to despise in a period of his life he conceitedly discerns to be an epoch of his own silly enlightenment when, in reality, it is a headlong plunge into the darkness of his own tragic self-deception. There is lots of material for the psychoanalyst here and the level of obliviousness on Wilson's part would be staggeringly tragic if it weren't so insufferably irritating. Wilson comes across as the know-it-all, 'I've-figured-it-all-out', latte-sipping, self-appointed iconoclast of what he sees as all our pet theories of the ways he thinks Lewis has been idolized by the alleged evangelical conceptualization of him, going way too far (inappropriately so) in trying to describe a Lewis that is vindictive, immature, cartoonishly conniving, lecherous, emotionally stunted, petty, and unscholarly. What is so annoying about this hatchet job is how Wilson's screed, while masked by engaging prose, is itself vindictive, immature, and cartoonishly conniving, maybe not lecherous, but definitely emotionally stunted, petty, and unscholarly. I discern the seeds of hope in my unsanctified indignation that a future biographer of Wilson does the same to him so he can see (posthumously) the same damage he did to Lewis done to himself.
My dreams are either becoming odder lately or I've become more aware of how odd they have always been. The temptation to begin a dream log is stronger than ever. I am going back and forth on the reasons for it. My vanity repels me and I give up the idea because I know that fuel can only burn for so long and the project will be doomed to premature death (vanity because all that motivates me in that context is the outlandish fantasy of it being discovered posthumously by a group of brilliant dream analysts, who publish their findings and research, making me famous, a prospect I won't be able to enjoy even if the impossible were to happen - vanity is amplified again by the ridiculous idea that I only consider the fantasy outlandish so that if I were discovered posthumously, the brilliant dream analysts could see that my dream chronicles weren't driven by fantastic conceit, but arose out of a psychological mixture of grounded realism and introspective caution and self-censure, thus improving the likelihood of my warm and awed posthumous, reception). Alas! After all of that needless wind, I've lost my desire to record the dream.
Recently read a somewhat congenial review of Craig's God and Abstract Objects, the criticisms, though, came off as sneering at times, and the more sneering they were, the more I became thunderstruck at how inept they were.
Just found out from Michard Ward that what C.S. Lewis meant by Maleldil is 'Lord of the Sign', another proof that semiotics seems indispensable to understanding Desire as a sign and how the Argument from Desire for God's existence might more accurately be called a Semiotic Argument from Desire for God's existence. I'm still confident that if I conceptualize semiotics phenomenologically, in some neo-Heideggerian way, I can distinguish my approach from Evan's project of conceptualizing Natural Theology in terms of Natural Signs, though I may still want to reference his approach for pruning purposes.
I can apply the above to something else Ward helpfully points out and which I've seen in other places, that all of the visible is a sign of the invisible, which gets into transposition, reality being sarcremental, and all that jazz. Desire is going to be aroused by Something in the visible world, and it'll be aroused by virtue of the fact that that Something is mediated by signs, and those signs will be interpreted in a way that arouses Desire, where the act of interpretation can't be understood without talking about the nature, role, and powers of the imagination. So, all of these conceps, which were once disparate and opaque to me, are now coming together into a satisfying, synthetic unity. It seems like all the different, perennial binaries (will vs. representation, numinous vs. non-numinous, sensible vs. supersensible, numinal vs. phenomenal, Dionysian vs. Apollonian, Religious vs. Aesthetic/Ethical, looking at vs. looking along, Enjoyment vs. Contemplation, et al.) are merely nuanced conceptual markers for hooking onto different properties of Desire's semotic structure. And if Peirce is to be perferred to de Saussure (and we can more fully unpack Peirce when we read Walker Percy's meditations on the Semotic), then Desire's semiotic structure, as a whole, signifies God. What further enriches this imaginative investigation is that God Himself, when conceived conceptually, is mediated by signs and so is constituted by its own semiotic structure. Thus, there are two semiotic structures, one constituting Desire and one constituting God (I'll put 'Desire' and 'God' in italics when they are functioning as semiotic structures, and not as Things that such structures are signifying), and both of these structures have, as their signifieds, either aspects of God (when that structure constitutes Desire) or the extra-conceptual reality of the Triune God as revealed in the Bible (when that structure constitutes God).
I notice something disingenuous about the ubiquitous advice to forget about originality and to write what you want to write as clearly as possible, whereupon it is then promised that originality will come unbidden once forgotten. This idea I've found in Russell, Chesterton, Lewis, Orwell, and even Einstein. It's disingenuous to a certain degree because they don't all completely forget about originality in all respects at all! I forget the passage in Bruce Edwards's collection on Lewis, but one of the contributors has a whole chapter on how Lewis consciously imbued his prose with rhetorical force, and did this tactfully, to engineer a particular effect on his audience. How does complete self-forgetfulness achieve that?
I wonder if you can use Heidegger's critique of technology to explain C.S. Lewis's technological ineptness?
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I'm stopping here for fear of the reader suffering death by hodgepodge.
Though not as often among Protestants, there’s a view about the nature of the human soul that sometimes comes up in theological contexts: I’ll refer to it here as Thomistic hylomorphism, or TH for short. In this blog post1, I’m going to explain why I don’t believe in TH. Cards on the table: I’m partial to substance dualism because I think it’s a much more reasonable view. However, I find TH so implausible that if substance dualism were not an option, I’d be a physicalist about human beings instead. No doubt, once I’ve done my best to faithfully summarize TH and offered my reasons for rejecting it, if there are any Thomists who read this, they’ll say that I didn’t understand and/or accurately represent it. I’ve learned that this sort of thing can’t be avoided with certain kinds of thinkers. Thomists, like others who subscribe to grand and elaborate self-contained philosophical systems, seem to believe that understanding their view entails agreeing with it. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide what to think.
First, I’m going to explain what the view that I’m criticizing is. Be warned – it is not, by my lights, at all intuitive or amenable to brief explanation. In fact, explaining and understanding what the view is even supposed to be requires a lot of set-up on the front end. This is going to be an unusually long blog post because of that fact. And yes, in my view, that is already a red flag: any initially unintuitive view that requires a bunch of philosophical framing beforehand bears the greater burden of justification. That’s generally the case whenever the thing you’re arguing for only works if you accept it as a conceptual piece of some broader framework. In this case, that broader framework is an all-encompassing Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysical worldview, itself highly controversial; TH is a conceptual piece of that system. If you don’t already view the world that way then it makes no sense for you to accept TH. So, if you’re already bored and also not a Thomist, you can stop reading here. If you think you already totally understand TH2 but still want to hear my reasons for rejecting it, skip to section 3. If you don’t want to be a physicalist but also have worries about substance dualism, skip to the last section.
2. What is Thomistic Hylomorphism?
2.1 Matter, Form, and Substance
TH is essentially the Aristotelian view about the nature of material objects. However, as many may already know, Thomas Aquinas came along in the 13th century and picked up a bunch of Aristotle’s philosophy, attempting to synthesize it with Christian theology. I’m interested here in the doctrine as advanced by Aquinas, specifically as it concerns the nature of human persons. It’s fine for our purposes to think of TH as basically equivalent to Aristotle’s view, except that Aquinas adds the claim that the soul can survive the death of the body - something Aristotle apparently would have denied.
TH holds that material objects are composite substances made up of both matter and form. Matter is the “stuff” that objects are composed of. For example, a statue is made out of bronze or stone, a ship is made out of wood, and so on. Form, in this case, is the way in which the matter that makes up the object is arranged. A statue of Abraham Lincoln is the object that it is because the stone it is made out of is arranged in some determinate way - i.e. in the shape of Lincoln. The stone has to have some principle of arrangement in order to be a statue of Lincoln. Without this form, there is no statue of Lincoln. We get substances whenever form informs matter. What is meant by “form” in the case of the statue is relatively straightforward. However, what “form” is with regard to living beings – particularly human beings – is going to be more complicated and controversial.
Now, there’s an important caveat: I used a statue to demonstrate the notion of a form/matter composite. I did that because it’s easier to understand as a primer. Properly speaking, though, Aquinas would have denied that statues are true substances. This is because Aquinas holds that true substances (if composed of parts) must exhibit a certain sort of unity among their parts such that they inherently tend towards some common function or telos. To see what I mean, take a look at the following clarification from Edward Feser (a Thomist philosopher who’s given the best summary of TH that I’ve ever read):
“…consider a liana vine – the kind of vine Tarzan likes to swing on… A hammock that Tarzan might construct from living liana vines is a kind of artifact, and not a natural object. The parts of the liana vine have an inherent tendency to function together to allow the vine to exhibit the growth patterns it does, to take in water and nutrients, and so forth. By contrast, the parts of the hammock – the liana vines themselves – have no inherent tendency to function together as a hammock. Rather, they must be arranged by Tarzan to do so, and left to their own devices – that is to say, without pruning, occasional rearrangement, and the like – they will tend to grow the way they otherwise would have had Tarzan not interfered with them, including in ways that will impede their performance as a hammock. Their natural tendency is to be liana-like and not hammock-like; the hammock-like function they perform after Tarzan ties them together is extrinsic or imposed from outside, while the liana-like functions are intrinsic to them… A liana vine is, accordingly, a true substance, as Aristotelian philosophers understand substance. A hammock is not a true substance, precisely because it does not qua hammock have a substantial form – an intrinsic principle [form] by which it operates as it characteristically does… In general, true substances are typically natural objects, whereas artifacts are typically not true substances. A dog, a tree, and water would be true substances, because each has a substantial form or intrinsic principle by which it behaves in the characteristic ways it does.”
-From “Aquinas on the Human Soul” by Edward Feser, p. 90
So, statues aren’t true substances – okay. Nevertheless, the arrangement of the statue isa form and that statue iscomposed of matter. It’s just that the arrangement in this case isn’t what Thomists would call a substantial form, since it doesn’t arrange the parts in such a way that they intrinsically tend toward a common function (machines and artifacts, on the other hand, have parts that tend towards a common function, but the parts do not so tend intrinsically; rather, the arrangement is externally imposed on the parts by humans). So, forms that intrinsically arrange, organize or account for a substance’s operating as it characteristically does are special – they’re called substantial forms. True substances are the objects “informed” by a substantial form.
Now there’s just one other piece of the puzzle that needs to be in place before we can (try to) understand what TH means for the human soul. It’s this: a thing’s having a particular substantial form means that it has properties and causal powers that are not reducible to properties and causal powers had by its parts or by the mere sum of its parts. For example, consider water: it is made up of hydrogen and oxygen molecules. But water has properties and causal powers that hydrogen and oxygen molecules do not have: e.g. drinkability, wetness, the causal power to dissolve things, and so on. A hammer, on the other hand, just seems to exhibit the properties and causal powers of its constituent parts (e.g. the elements that make up wood and/or metal), like mass and solidity. Water is a true substance but a hammer isn’t.
2.2 Human Being and Soul
Now we’re finally ready to talk about human beings and their souls.
First, a human being is a particular kind of substance. What makes her the particular sort of substance that she is – rational animal – is her having the substantial form that she has. That substantial form informs the matter of her body, and because she has that particular substantial form, she also exhibits (in normal circumstances) the properties and causal powers characteristic of rational animals. The human soul, according to the Thomist, just is the substantialform of the human being. Now, that’s a bit more carefully phrased than the usual Thomist one-liner which goes, “the soul is the form of the body”. We must be careful here, though. Feser, our TH representative, denies the following: “The human soul is the substantial form of a substance which is entirely bodily or corporeal.”This mistaken thought, he thinks, underlies a common objection to TH, according to which the form of an entirely material substance cannot survive the destruction of the object it informs (e.g. stones, trees, non-rational animals). In the case of a stone, say, it’s easy to see why this is so: the form of a stone is just its shape, or the arrangement of its constituent parts. Arrangements as such aren’t real things which exist in addition to the things they’re arrangements of. So, when the things that they were arrangements of are destroyed, they do not persist. The human soul, however, as the substantial form of rational animal, is supposed to be different. Or better yet, Feser might say, the substance itself (rational animal) is different: it’s different in virtue of the kind of substance that it is. Namely, as a substance which has both corporeal and incorporeal operations, causal powers, and properties. Thus, says Feser, it is a substance that is neither wholly material or immaterial, and the substantial form (soul) of such a substance is such that it can persist even after the destruction of the component (material body) that allows it to manifest its corporeal operations, causal powers, and properties. Even when this physical component is separated from the substance, the substance (and therefore its form) persists, says Feser, in virtue of its incorporeal operations, causal powers, and properties. It just becomes a reduced/damaged substance in the sense that it is unable to actualize certain (corporeal) potentialities typically characteristic of it under normal, healthy circumstances. The substantial form does not exist on its own even after death, since it does not cease to inform something: there is still a substance – that substance is simply no longer manifesting its corporeal potentialities.
And that is how Edward Feser characterizes TH. However, other Thomists say different things. So before I proceed to my criticism, I’m going to list some of the other ways in which Thomists sometimes characterize the soul, or the form of the body. I’ve seen all of the following:
Soul as:
-Organizational pattern
-The principle of animation
-Structuring principle
-The blueprint
-The unifying center of all vital activities in the body
Maybe those help you understand the view a bit better. As far as I can tell, they don’t add much to what Feser already gave us, though maybe they sound cooler.
To help me show you why I think Feser gives the best summary of TH, as well as why I think some of the less careful formulations of TH out there (like the kind you may have heard from YouTube or from a priest or something) fail in a much more obvious way, consider the following quotations from a couple of other Thomist philosophers:
First,
“The human soul is not just the ‘form of the body’ as it seems to be for Aristotle, but a form plus, a spirit and a form, a spirit which does indeed operate as a form within the body but also transcends it with higher operations of its own.”
-From Person and Being by Norris Clarke, p. 35
And next,
“The job of an anima (Aquinas’s word for soul) is to animate non-living physical stuff into a living organism. Hence, for Aquinas, trees and squirrels have souls every bit as much as humans do. As far as what plays this sort of animating role, Aquinas had a proposal that biologists continue to find plausible today. What distinguishes an organism from a pile of dead physical bits is its organization. Living things are highly structured entities – structured at many different levels. At each level of organization new properties and abilities emerge. So on Aquinas’s view, a human soul is simply the overarching structure, configuration or organization that arranges our fundamental physical bits at various different levels such that we are able to carry out the characteristically human range of vital activities. It’s sort of like a blueprint for how to assemble a human, except that it’s a blueprint present within each of us.”
-From “My Soul Is Not Me: Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature and the Afterlife” by Adam Wood
You might have noticed that these characterizations seem pretty different from one another, as well as from Feser’s characterization. That is going to be relevant in just a moment.
3. Why I Reject TH
3.1. Worldview Woes
It’s finally time for me to explain why I reject TH. The first reason is something I already touched on in the introduction: I simply do not subscribe to a broadly Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics, and I don’t know of any convincing reasons why I should. TH is just a feature of that sort of worldview, and conceptually depends on it. There are other metaphysical posits consistent with my worldview commitments (including the theological ones) that I find much more plausible. I just find the whole Aristotelian/Thomistic system unnecessarily exotic and arcane.3 The world itself is weird, yes. But that weirdness is much better accounted for by other less wacky metaphysical posits. If I have to choose between two models that account for the same data and both seem to be internally inconsistent, I’m always going with the more commonsensical one.
3.2 Faulty Forms
Now, I summarized above some of the things that Thomists will say about the notion of form. But what is a form, really? I can understand what a form is if forms are just arrangements or ways of being organized. Obviously material objects are arranged in certain ways, and obviously some of those ways of being arranged give rise to very special phenomena, like plant and animal life. And indeed, Thomists agree that all arrangements are forms, though they’ll add that not all forms are arrangements. Some Thomists, like Adam Wood (see quote above), do seem to be saying that the human soul, too, just is the “overarching structure, configuration or organization” of the material body.4 But such Thomists leave themselves open to an easy objection: forms which are merely arrangements of matter cannot survive the destruction of the objects that they inform, since such arrangements cannot exist separately from those objects. Try to imagine the shape of a particular statue existing without the statue5 and you’ll see that this makes no sense: arrangements aren’t something else in addition to the things they’re arrangements of.
Instead then, whatever soul is, and in whatever sense it is a form, it must be other than or more than a mere arrangement. The quote from Norris Clarke (above) suggests he thinks that the soul is not less than an arrangement or principle of organization, but it is also more than that: it is an arrangement and a spirit that “operates” (which involves affecting things?). I find this bewildering. Arrangements are abstract concepts, not things that really exist concretely. A spirit, if not a mere arrangement, or principle, or blueprint, etc., would have to be the sort of thing that really exists concretely.6 But then it is nonsense to say that the same object could be both an abstract principle and a concrete existent. It is like saying that a cat could be a law, or that an angel could be a shape. These belong to totally distinct conceptual categories. Since the soul’s being both concrete and abstract is off the table, maybe what Norris meant is that there’s an immaterial, spiritual concrete object which causes the material of the body to be arranged in a way that allows it to carry out its characteristic function(s), without its being strictly identical to that arrangement. That I could understand. But such a view, notice, is tantamount to substance dualism: we have two distinct concrete entities each with their own properties (incorporeal spirit and corporeal body), and they are in a causal relationship. The body can be destroyed and yet the spirit persist because they are straightforwardly not the same object. Clarke might refuse to call this “substance” dualism, since Thomists are only willing to apply that term if certain pre-specified metaphysical conditions are met, but that’s just semantics. Cartesians will be quite happy to call any concrete existent which bears its own properties and can affect and be affected, a substance. A similar objection will arise later, when we look at Feser’s better account of TH.
A dilemma of sorts has been proposed: either the soul is a concrete object or it isn’t. The law of excluded middle tells us it must be one or the other: it can’t be both. If it isn’t a concrete object, it must be some sort of abstract thing. Nothing could be both a concrete object and an abstract thing. That’s just a category confusion. So if the soul is not a concrete object, it must be abstract. If it is abstract, then it doesn’t really exist in its own right. At best, it is a mere arrangement, which is not something else that exists in addition to the object that it’s an arrangement of. Thus, if the soul were abstract, there’s no sense in which it could persist after the destruction of the body that it informs. On the other hand, if the soul is a concrete object, then we have a view that ends up only being semantically distinct from a kind of substance dualism.
4. Feser for the Win?
Feser is better on this. His way of formulating form seems to avoid both kinds of error, since he is careful to note that the soul does not exist on its own after the destruction of the body: it is still the form of some existing concrete substance. Nonetheless, it does look like Feser would have to accept one of the two horns of the dilemma. Which? It seems like he wouldn’t want to go with the soul’s being a concrete object, for much the same reasons Clarke wouldn’t: this leaves us with a view only semantically distinct from something much like a Cartesian-style dualism, so long as we think the body is a concrete object in its own right. Note: we should think that, since the body continues to exist on its own after death (that is, the very same physical stuff continues to exist as a corpse, and it doesn’t get replaced with other physical stuff).7 Nor could he say that it’s both concrete and abstract, since that’s a heinous category confusion. It looks like Feser has to say that the soul is in some sense abstract. And he can, in fact, say that without running into the same problem that Wood does: on Wood’s account, it sounds like the soul loses or is separated from the thing that it informs (the body) at death. But then it can’t exist separately from the object that it was a form of. Feser agrees: “Consider first that the soul, being a kind of form, cannot by itself and without qualification either subsist or constitute anything, because a form qua form exists only together with the substance of which it is the form.”8 So, he straightforwardly denies that the soul is separated from the thing it’s a form of at death. Instead, the human being simply becomes a reduced/damaged substance that is no longer capable of manifesting certain of its corporeal operations.
Better, but I still can’t get there, for two reasons.
4.1 “Form” is Uninformative
The first is that we simply still haven’t been given an intelligible story about what the soul is supposed to be. It’s not a mere arrangement of matter, but it’s also more than that without being concrete. It’s a principle of organization, a blueprint, it’s what makes a rational animal the substance it is, and so on. I get it, but this only tells us the conceptual role that the notion of substantial form is supposed to play in the Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics: we haven’t been told anything about what substantial form is, if it isn’t just an arrangement. Now arguably there are other concepts with this feature that I’d accept: causation is a good example. Causation is mainly just a conceptual category.9 Fair enough. Even so, causation has a lot more going for it than substantial form. First, no one needs a lengthy philosophical exposition before they can understand what causation is: it’s intuitively clear, and everyone already believes in it. Indeed, our concept of causation just comes pre-installed. Even those few odd philosophers who claim not to believe in it, still do any time they descend from their ivory towers and inhabit the real world. Cause-and-effect is ubiquitous in pretty much all human affairs: e.g. it underpins science, we appeal to it in understanding moral responsibility, and we invoke it constantly in our ordinary everyday lives (Ouch! I stepped on a Lego and it hurt). The moral of the story here: if we can’t say anything more about causation over and above what its conceptual role is, so be it. We’re wed to it.
Thomistic substantial form, on the other hand… not so much. A little mystery in one’s worldview here and there may be a healthy sign: we are very much finite in our understanding, after all. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t default to mystery unless it’s necessary to vindicate some more deeply-held convictions that we have, like causation or vital theological doctrines.10 Mystery is something that we should seek to minimize when possible in worldview-building.11 Nothing about the notion of Thomistic substantial form – or indeed the whole Aristotelian/Thomistic system – is necessary to vindicate some other, more fundamental convictions (that I have, anyways). As an alternative, I find substance dualism an attractive candidate, since it can explain our deeply held convictions about identity-over-time plus the theological conviction that we survive our deaths. And I think it can do this without leaving as much unexplained as TH.
4.2 A Material Dilemma
Now I’ll explain my other reason. It starts with another fun dilemma.
Feser holds that even after the substantial form becomes separated from the material component of the human being, it continues to inform some substance that persists. The dilemma presents itself: after death, and prior to being united again to some matter, either the soul is the substantial form of something entirely immaterial or it isn’t. Feser wants to say that it’s the form of a substance with both corporeal and incorporeal operations, etc.; but let’s leave that to the side for a moment. Either the substance itself is entirely immaterial once separated from the physical component, or it isn’t. It can’t be partially material – it is no longer united to any matter. Being material requires being at least partly12 constituted by matter. So, it must be entirely immaterial. Thus, after death, the substantial form becomes the form of a concrete immaterial object with no material component(s). Feser is on board too: “…the material side of this substance is completely gone, so that we do have a form without matter, even if it is not exactly a form existing apart from any substance.”13
Now, here’s an extremely plausible principle to follow up with: Immaterial objects cannot have material properties. Unextended objects can’t have mass, height, velocity, etc. Thoughts can’t be hard or soft (literally speaking). But notice, whatever we want to say about the whole human substance, this immaterial concrete object which persists after death cannot be identical to the corporeal body. We must have at least two distinct concrete objects, since the material properties that the substance manifested before death couldn’t have inhered in the immaterial concrete object that goes on existing after death. And thus, the human being, even if we want to call it one substance, must have at least two metaphysically distinct parts, each with their own set of properties that inhere in one and not the other, and which plausibly causally interact with one another. This sounds a lot like substance dualism to me, even if the Thomist would refuse to call it that.14 In fact, here’s a characterization of substance that Feser himself gives us, early on in his essay: “Substances, in general, just are the sorts of things which exist in themselves rather than inhering in anything else, and which are the subjects of those attributes which do of their nature inhere in something else.”15 If we accept that characterization – and why shouldn’t we? – then our two distinct concrete objects even get to count as substances in this case. Substance dualists will certainly be happy to refer to them as such, anyways. So it seems Feser is either wrong or just a confused substance dualist.
This looks bad for TH, unless Thomists are okay with TH basically being a version of substance dualism. Still, here’s a difference that holds even if my argument goes through: there’s a substantial form which we can refer to as the “soul” on TH, whereas substance dualism proper lacks this. The “soul”, for a substance dualist, just is the immaterial concrete component of a human being; the notion of form isn’t invoked at all. My take on this difference is that there’s no reason to retain the notion of substantial form here unless we’re already committed to it on separate metaphysical grounds. The immaterial concrete component can do all the theoretical work we want it to do without the superfluous appeal to substantial form. It can persist after death, account for personal identity over time, and much more! Just be a substance dualist. And that does it. I’ve explained why I think Aquinas gets the soul wrong.
A brief comment on the semantics here, as I wrap up: It seems to me that if anything deserves to be called the soul on the account I’m saying Feser is committed to, it would be this immaterial concrete object. It is much closer to what ordinary people have in mind when they use that word. Let’s allow ourselves to call it that for a moment. Why not? Now even if we retain the notion of substantial form and call that the “soul”, after death it turns out that the “soul” becomes the form of the soul. The soul is then the substantial form of the soul. So, we’d have two souls on this view, or one soul (substantial form) and one spirit (concrete immaterial object) and sometimes a body as well! I say it isn’t worth it – just be a substance dualist.16
5. Debunking Bad Arguments Against Substance Dualism
I’ve noticed a growing resistance to substance dualism among some Christians in recent years. I’m not really sure about the source, though it’s been suggested to me that it may have started with the over-interpreted ideas of a few public intellectual preacher types. Perhaps the new Christian materialists – who are definitely not Thomists – are also making cultural waves. Whatever the source, I want to address a couple of the worries I’ve been hearing about substance dualism. All such worries amount to, as far as I can tell, are just misunderstandings of the view. This suggests that those who have them haven’t thought very carefully.
First of all, substance dualism isn’t Gnosticism. There’s no Dogmatics of Substance Dualism bookout there which claims that the body is a filthy, dirty, disgusting animalistic prison from which we should desire liberation. Substance dualists can, and do, think that embodiment is a good thing. Indeed, they obviously can, and do, insist that embodiment is a constitutive condition of our flourishing; we are not complete without it. Oh, and Christian substance dualists don’t have any problem affirming the Doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body.17 In sum, being separated from your body is a real drag.
Second, what about the worry that substance dualism makes us somehow too distinct from our body, even though it really seems like we’re really vitally linked to these bodies that we have, to that face we see in the mirror? Yes, substance dualism says that we have an immaterial component with which we are more fundamentally identified with. That, we think, must be the case if we are to survive death. However, there are a couple of things I want to say which I think show this isn’t a problem at all. First, I can say – taking a page from the Thomist’s book – that our souls cause our bodies to be arranged in the characteristic ways that they are. If God had united my soul to a different material body in early infancy, say, then it may still have ended up looking and feeling just like this body I have now, because it was at least partly my soul that caused this body to grow in the characteristic ways that it did. That constitutes a really tight, intimate connection between body and soul, it seems to me. Next, I just want to point out something that’s sad but true. You may feel intimately identified with the reflection you see in the mirror (and in some sense, of course, you are). But we know that there are people out there who get into accidents and lose parts of their bodies, or who end up unrecognizably disfigured. In such cases, they are still exactly the same people that they were before, despite radical alterations in the reflections they see staring back at them.
Maybe it really is what’s on the inside that counts the most.
This is just a blog post for now, but I’ll probably try and turn it into a published paper sometime in the near future. So, please don’t steal my ideas and publish them first.
This is unlikely if you haven’t done much more than just watching a few YouTube videos about Aquinas on the soul, or something like that. It’s quite a complex view.
In charity: maybe Wood would tell us he isn’t saying that and is saying instead what Feser’s saying. In any case, assume this is what he’s saying for present purposes so that we can see why such a view wouldn’t work.
I am invoking a fairly straightforward metaphysical category here: concrete objects are non-abstract “really existing” things which can both causally affect and be causally affected. Abstracta, even if they exist in some Platonic sense (Thomists deny that, by the way!) don’t exist concretely, nor can they enter into causal relations. Some things we call “arrangements” are in fact concrete (e.g. Edible Arrangements) but that’s another, more colloquial use of the word.
In fact, this consideration poses a more general threat to Aristotelian metaphysics. For more on that, see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/suppl1.html
Though accounts about the nature of causation have been given which seem to me much more informative than what the Thomists tell us about substantial form.
Think about all the absurd views we could justify if we made mystery a desirable feature of our philosophical theories (e.g. all religions are somehow true. When they seem to contradict one another, they really don’t, even though it’s just a mystery how not).
Notice that the Thomist will still have to contend with the old “interaction problem” that substance dualism faces, since they seem to have an immaterial concrete object causally interacting with matter.
I’d like to thank a couple of friends who I discussed these ideas with before writing everything down: Hannah Akin, Kolten Ellis and Matthew DaMore. Especially Matthew DaMore, though, who got me onto Feser.
About Scriptural warrant for philosophical doctrines in general: as with so many other philosophical problems that are relevant for Christians, I think that the data of Bible frequently underdetermines the answer(s). It is a mistake to think that Scripture contains every answer to every question we care about or to think that it is a philosophical treatise. When it does require definite philosophical commitments of us (e.g. God exists, selfishness is bad, there’s life after death), that’s the exception, not the rule. Don’t get me wrong – those matters it does require such definite commitment on are of first-rate centrality to our lives. All this said, See WLC’s Defenders series on Christian anthropology under references for a case that if Scripture weighs in favor of any particular view of the soul, it weighs in favor of substance dualism.
