Routledge History of Philosophy by John Marenbon

Author:John Marenbon
Format: epub
Published: 2015-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

On this account, people are totally dependent on God for all that they are. But the account is a very theological one. And one might wonder how Aquinas thinks of people without also thinking about God. What, for example, would he write if asked to contribute to a modern philosophical book on the nature of human beings?49

The first thing he would say is that human beings are animals. So they are, for example, capable of physical movement. And they have biological characteristics. They have the capacity to grow and reproduce. They have the need and capacity to eat. These characteristics are not, for Aquinas, optional extras which people can take up and discard while remaining people. They are essential elements in the makeup of any human being. And they are very much bound up with what is physical or material.

This line of thinking, of course, immediately sets Aquinas apart from writers who embrace a ‘dualistic’ understanding of human beings— writers like Descartes, for instance.50 For Aquinas, my body is not distinct from me because it is a different substance or thing from me. On his account, if a human being is there, then so is a human body.

For as it belongs to the very conception of ‘this human being’ that there should be this soul, flesh and bone, so it belongs to the very conception of ‘human being’ that there be soul, flesh and bone. For the substance of a species has to contain whatever belongs in general to every one of the individuals comprising that species.

(Summa theologiae, Ia, 75, 4)

Aquinas often refers to the thesis that people are essentially substances different from bodies on which they act (a view which he ascribes to Plato). But he emphatically rejects this thesis.

Plato and his followers asserted that the intellectual soul is not united to the body as form to matter, but only as mover to movable, for Plato said that the soul is in the body ‘as a sailor in a ship’. Thus the union of soul and body would only be by contact of power… But this doctrine seems not to fit the facts.

(Summa contra Gentiles, II, 57)

If our souls moved our bodies as sailors move ships, says Aquinas, my soul and my body would not be a unity. He adds that if we are souls using bodies, then we are essentially immaterial, which is not the case. We are ‘sensible and natural realities’ and cannot, therefore, be essentially immaterial.51

But this is not to say that Aquinas thinks of people as irreducibly material. He is not, in the modern sense, a philosophical ‘physicalist’.52 We have just seen that he is prepared to speak about people as having souls. And, on his account, a proper account of the human soul (anima) will deny that it is wholly material. By ‘soul’, Aquinas means something like ‘principle of life’. ‘Inquiry into the nature of the soul’, he writes, ‘presupposes an understanding of the soul as the root principle of life in living things within our experience’.

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