A-4: A Thomistic Integration

In which the A-track finally comes together

I’ve spent the last few A-track essays dialectically¹ examining Christopher Dawson’s definition of culture from his 1948 book Religion and Culture, trying to clarify the foundations of my own philosophical approach to the subject. It’s time to transition from a dialectical to a systematic approach, as I promised in the introduction. 

Where Things Stands…

Dawson defines culture as “an organized way of life which is based on a common tradition and conditioned by a common environment.” (Religion and Culture, p. 47) When he talks about an “organized way of life,” however, he seems to have in mind the life of a whole, functionally differentiated society. (Cf. ibid, p. 47) Suspicions about the organic metaphor prompted me to schematize society less as an organism and more as an orbit, echoing Newtonian mechanics.

Just as bodies exert mutual gravitational vectors which, when combined, result in the phenomena of elliptical orbits, I argued that each individual can be conceived as an orbit defined by similarly opposed “vectors,” one inclining a person toward community with others and another separating him in the insuperable solitude of personal experience. From this perspective, society “as a whole” is aggregated from the shape this orbit takes in each and every individual member of a society. Dawson’s idea of a “way of life” thus survives dialectical scrutiny not by referring to the life of some chimerical corporate being, but by referring to the individual’s life as conditioned by a given physical and communal environment.²

But an organism is alive, according to Aristotle and Schrödinger, when it apprehends and digests its environment in the process we call “metabolism,” which can often have the unintended effect of changing the environment in various ways. Aristotle expands the notion of life to include perception in general (which is, after all, a condition of digestion):³ “living is, in the authoritative sense, perceiving or thinking.” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1170a19) If this is the case, then an individual’s “way of life” refers above all to the process by which they mentally metabolize the world around them: to understand is to digest the nature of things, to act is always to act upon the things whose natures we digest. 

But how to integrate these two perspectives — that is, the notion of each individual’s interior life as an orbit defined by the opposition of transcendental and empirical inclinations and the notion of individual interior life as a process of mental metabolism? These are the fundamental fruits of our dialectical excursus, but it’s not clear how to relate them; they seem, at best, like two coordinate analogies. 

Enter the Angelic Doctor

“Not a whit. I’ve a device to make all well!” I have already cited Aristotle several times, but in the introduction I called myself an Aristotelian-Thomist. To integrate these dialectical perspectives and thereby transition to the systematic stage of inquiry, it’s time to marshal the other name in that ghastly circumlocution. 

St. Thomas Aquinas follows Aristotle in holding that the human person is a composite of matter and form (a position which, henceforth, I’ll call hylomorphism) — more specifically, the human person is a composite of body and soul.⁴ Without getting too immersed in the anthropological weeds, this means that the human person belongs both to the material order (through the body, above all through sensation) and to the immaterial order (through the soul, above all through its intellectual power). 

I think this hylomorphic account of the human person can accommodate (1) the primacy of the individual for the philosophy of culture, (2) the dual “vectors” mentioned above, and (3) the notion of mental metabolism; and if the same principle accommodates all three perspectives, then it provides us with a principle for integrating them. If I’m right, then adopting this account will be the first step on the systematic path we seek for the philosophy of culture.

Hylomorphism and Individuality

St. Thomas holds matter to be the ‘principle of individuation,’ the factor which distinguishes persons from each other: I am a human being because I have a rational soul, but I am Ben because of my particular body. (Cf. De ente et essentia, Ch. 1; and Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 29, a. 4, resp.) But elsewhere, St. Thomas also holds that because of the human person’s dependence on matter, the proper objects of the human intellect are the natures of physical things. (Cf. Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 84, a. 7, resp.) This means that both the fundamental orientation of the human intellect and the character of human individuality share a common root: matter. Conceiving of the human person as composed of matter and form, therefore, allows us to give prominence not to abstract Reason (with a capital R, a la Kant, Hegel, and the rest), but to the concrete, here-and-now individual who knows, feels, and loves. In other words, Thomistic anthropology accommodates point (1).

Hylomorphism and the “Vectors”

Now, I said above that the body-soul composite is expressed in the parallelism between our sensitive and intellectual faculties. Let’s dig a little deeper. 

According to St. Thomas, sensation is something which the entire body-soul composite does, since common experience implies that when we sense physical objects, we are in some way affected by them, and only bodies can be affected by other bodies. From this, he infers that the influence of physical things is sufficient to cause (we might even say ‘activate’) sensation in the human person. (Cf. Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 84, a. 6, resp.)

There’s a lot more implied by this than you might think. To say that sensation is activated by the physical relationship of the body to the world is to invite all the weird exigencies of space and time to dinner. All interactions in the physical world are between particular bodies, which occupy distinct spaces for discrete times. Sensation, therefore, is always of particular bodies extended in space, a fact that complicates our ability to sense them in their entirety. If that sounds rather obtuse, here’s how the philosopher Rev. Robert Sokolowski puts it: 

Consider the way in which we perceive a material object, such as a cube. I see the cube from one angle, from one perspective. I cannot see the cube from all sides at once. It is essential to the experience of a cube that the perception be partial, with only one part of the object being directly given at any moment. (Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 17) 

To sense an object, strictly speaking, doesn’t involve sensing the object so much as aspects of the object. (Cf. Aristotle, De anima, 418a7-25) We deepen our acquaintance with bodies through observing them from many angles, which necessarily takes time: this temporal side of sensation isn’t often mentioned, but it seems like an important corollary. Why? 

The particularity of sensed bodies isn’t the only complicating factor for sensation. Remember, we sense with our own bodies, which have their own location in space. Not only must we perceive a given body from a given spatial perspective, we can never perceive that body from someone else’s spatial perspective at the same time that they perceive the same body. 

Again, this sounds obtuse, but it doesn’t need to be. Suppose we’re both wandering in a museum, and we pause side-by-side at the same painting and contemplate it for a minute without moving. I see the painting from one angle during that minute, and you see it from another: I can’t spend that one minute seeing it both from my angle and from yours. We could change places after the first minute is over, of course, and spend another minute seeing the painting from each other’s former perspectives, but we can never see the painting from each other’s perspective at the same time. 

That might seem like a simple, perhaps even banal observation, but consider the implications. Sensation is like taking snapshots of the world around us, which we put together in the photo album of the imagination: we accumulate different perspectives of the world the more we experience it, and those accumulating perspectives give us a more and more accurate, if more and more complex, “image” of the world around us. But if no one can perceive the world from more than one perspective at a time, and if many people are perceiving the world all at the same time, it follows that every individual’s photo album, as it were, will differ infinitesimally from every other’s. This insuperable restriction of perspective results directly from St. Thomas’s account of sensation.

But wait, there’s more! St. Thomas also explains human emotion using the sensitive faculty: the emotions (more properly, passions) occur in the sensitive appetite. (Cf. Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, q. 22, a. 3, resp.)⁵ This in turn infuses our restricted perspective of the world with all kinds of emotional overtones. For St. Thomas, therefore, a great deal of what we might call personal experience or the internal monologue has its roots in our being physical, sensing creatures.⁶

Which prompts the question: what about the intellectual faculty? What’s that doing in the meantime? 

Intelligence is far more mystifying. St. Thomas holds that it’s a kind of spiritual insight into a thing’s essence, apart from the particularity of any and all matter. (Cf. Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 84, a. 6, resp.) Unlike sensation, which always involves the perception of specific aspects of specific bodies, intelligence is an insight into the universal character of things. A fundamental tenet for St. Thomas is that such universal insight must be immaterial, because all matter is particular, not universal. Thus unlike sensation, intelligence can’t be caused by interaction with bodies in the world. Instead, it’s caused by the mysterious influence of the “agent intellect,” which transforms a potentially understandable essence into an essence which is actually understood.⁷

While it’s a bit cryptic, the core of St. Thomas’s position on the nature of intelligence is that it involves the perception of universal essences. These essences form the heart and soul of philosophy: they allow us to reason from things seen to things unseen, and ultimately to arrive at a dim but certain knowledge of God’s existence and certain of His properties. Reason, according to St. Thomas, can only aspire to understand universal truth because of its grounding on this mysterious insight into the fundamental natures of things — and the will (what St. Thomas calls “rational appetite,” thereby echoing his idea of the emotions as “sensitive appetite”) is driven by a corresponding desire for the universal good…

Now, let’s review what we’ve said. St. Thomas’s hylomorphic account of the human person allows him to distinguish the sensitive and intellectual faculties. But as we saw, grounding the sensitive faculty in matter implies that our sensitive and emotional lives interpenetrate, together tending to diversify and individualize each and every person’s experience of the world. There’s the fragmentation “vector.” The immateriality of the intellect, meanwhile, leads to the impulse to understand oneself, the world, and the world’s causes, as well as to the desire to love other people not simply as means to be exploited, but as fellow minds with whom to pursue the truth and enjoy the good. There’s the unity “vector.” 

Thomistic anthropology, therefore, accommodates point (2).

Hylomorphism and Mental Metabolism

With what we’ve already said about St. Thomas’s conception of intelligence, we can see how he accommodates the final point. 

When Schrödinger introduces the concept of metabolism, he also uses another key word: “How does the living organism avoid decay? By eating, drinking, breathing, and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism.” (What is Life? p. 70) But pace Schrödinger, assimilation need not be restricted to plants: to digest food is in some way to transform it into oneself. All digestion, in this respect, is assimilation.

Now why do we care? 

Because for St. Thomas, when the mind understands an essence using the agent intellect, it produces a concept — and “the concept of the intellect is a likeness [similitudo] of the object conceived.” (Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 27, a. 2, resp.)

Intelligence mirrors digestion, therefore, because in both cases we assimilate something which we have apprehended. Granted, there’s a caveat: in physical metabolism, we make what we digest similar to us, while in mental metabolism, the mind becomes similar to the things it understands.⁸ But if metabolism always involves some process of assimilation between an apprehended object and an apprehending subject, then St. Thomas’s account of the intellect, which is itself grounded on his hylomorphic anthropology, also accommodates point (3).⁹

The Way Forward

If St. Thomas’s hylomorphic account of the human person accommodates what we discovered in the dialectical stage in the earlier essays of the A-track, then I see no reason not to found a systematic approach to the philosophy of culture on exactly this account.

“Now Ben,” you may be wondering, “this has been quite the walking tour through some celebrated Thomistic obscurities, but what the hell does it have to do with the philosophy of culture?”

If you’ve borne with me this far, I think I can convince you to bear with me still farther.

In Dissecting the Social Organism, I concluded with the statement about the two opposing forces of the social orbit, and I said that “to philosophize about culture is to study these forces.” But having established a kind of cardinality between my dialectical ideas in the first two essays and Thomistic anthropology, I can restate that conclusion thus: to philosophize about culture is to study the mutual interactions of the intellect and the imagination which take place within each and every individual, and which shape, in the aggregate, what we call a society’s way of life. 

Not only do the intellect and the imagination mutually affect each other in a kind of symphony of faculties — the imagination shaping how the intellect conceives the essences it understands, and the intellect directing the attention of the senses to accumulate new data to augment the images through which it “sees” essences. Through its influence on the will, the intellect also affects the world which the imagination communicates to the intellect — and to other intellects. Just as eukaryotes transformed the atmosphere of young and fiery earth into an oxygen-rich haven for carbon-based lifeforms of all shapes and sizes, our apprehension of the world ultimately changes the world we apprehend. 

Going forward, then, my systematic philosophy of culture built on Aristotelian-Thomistic principles must examine in detail (1) how external environments condition the imagination, (2) how the conditioning of the imagination affects the activity of the intellect, and (3) how the intellect’s interpretation of the world leads to various changes in the world. Consider that a roadmap for the next few essays.

(In the meantime, it’s late, and I’m dog tired of thinking about philosophy. I’m going to pour myself some scotch and finish Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.)

1. This is an annoying word. I mean it in its classical, Hellenic sense: to subject someone’s proposals to critical and logical scrutiny is to engage in dialectic. This is what Aristotle frequently does with the assertions of the pre-Socratic philosophers in his works. I don’t mean anything redolent of Hegel or Marx, in whose writings “the dialectic” assumes a dynamic, almost mystical status (hence the definite article) as the motor of historical development.

2. To the extent that any notion of a corporate way of life survives, I think we can credibly call the emergent result of every individual’s actions a society’s way of life, provided we always bear in mind that this can’t be analyzed apart from an understanding of the concrete individuals and their concrete decisions.

3. In his De Anima, Aristotle discusses the apprehensive faculties (sensation and intellection) before he discusses the motive and appetitive faculties, because the latter faculties always involve motion and appetite toward something perceived and understood.

4. This assertion, while generally true, might seem to imply that Aristotle had a fully developed understanding of the composite character of the human person which roughly corresponds to St. Thomas’s, and that all the sainted scholar had to do was trim a little paganism here and there before adopting it. I don’t think that’s true. For Aristotle, the soul is the form of the body (cf. De Anima, 412a29). According to his earlier statements in Physics, form actualizes matter. But Aristotle elsewhere holds (apparently) that the intellect is not the act of any physical organ (cf. De Anima, 430a10-25). There is a plausible interpretation of Aristotle which holds that the immortal intellect is distinct from the intellectual power of the soul: the latter exists only as long as the composite exists, i.e. as long as the matter is disposed to receive the form; when the composite dissolves (i.e. death), the intellectual power dissolves with it. This is, as far as I understand it, how the Muslim philosopher Averroes interpreted Aristotle. With the Averroist position condemned by Church authorities, St. Thomas was at great pains to give an equally possible interpretation of the text which arrives at the opposite conclusion from Averroes. I don’t think St. Thomas knowingly misrepresents Aristotle, but I do think that he interprets him rather creatively. All of this is to say, St. Thomas’s continuity with Aristotle’s hylomorphic account of the human person is not static, but dynamic and creative.

5. “Appetite” may seem like a funny word in this case. For both the sensitive and intellectual faculties, there are apprehensive and appetitive aspects: the apprehensive aspect is how each faculty comes into contact with its proper object, while the appetitive faculty is how each faculty unites itself to that proper object. Again, we could very easily get lost in the anthropological weeds.

6. Anyone who thinks St. Thomas is a spiritualizing, dogmatic rationalist should think again. There has been a large tendency among more recent Catholic philosophers and theologians to rebel against St. Thomas’s position on human individuation, deeming it far too materialistic. They want to ground human individuality on something other than our material nature. I used to be more sympathetic to this resistance than I am now. St. Thomas’s position here seems not only intelligible on the basis of sound philosophical principles, it also seems theologically appropriate in light of the Incarnation.

7. Even here, however, St. Thomas’s position is nuanced in favor of sensation: in the Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 84, a. 7, he makes the point that the human intellect must always turn to the fruits of sensation (which he, following Aristotle, calls “phantasms”). Intelligence doesn’t just begin with phantasms, it always uses them as tools — it’s as if the intellect inhabits a great skyscraper, and the phantasms are the windows through which the outside is disclosed to the mind. Thinking, no matter how lofty (cf. Ia, q. 84, a. 7, ad 3), always involves the mediating influence of phantasms. Now, St. Thomas does offer the caveat that our dependence on phantasms belongs to the soul’s mode of knowing “in this life;” as a theologian concerned with explaining how the soul can know and understand itself and the world after death, he develops a whole philosophical theory of the knowledge of the separated soul. The cogency of his theory of postmortem intelligence, however, is irrelevant for our present purposes.

8. This, I think, is what Aristotle is getting at when he makes the rather startling assertion, at the end of his consideration of both sensation and intelligence in De anima, that “the soul is in a way all existing things.” (431b20)

9. I’ll admit, this last point is a bit of a stretch. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch, only that this point could certainly use some touching up in later essays.