In an age of philosophical skepticism and advanced neuroscience, many people think
about the soul in the way they think about fairies or Santa Claus.
The soul, some say, is a pious fiction or ingenuous spiritualism.
The whole notion seems primitive and ethereal.
But as we will see, there are few things so terribly real as the human soul.
In this video, we'll revisit some of the insights from the last video, teasing
out implications and advancing insights a bit further.
This theme is hugely important, but it's very easy to get wrong.
With so much materialistic and dualistic thinking on offer,
it's easy for false notions to breed misunderstanding.
But by returning to the thought of St. Thomas,
we can regain a common sense that sheds light on the contemporary.
So let's begin with this claim:
The soul is the form of the body.
While this sounds relatively benign and uninteresting, the implications are huge.
This is to say that the soul makes a human person to be what it is.
A human person, according to the Aristotelian definition, is a rational animal.
Now, that's not to say that a man is equal parts reason and animal,
or equal parts spirit and matter.
Instead, it's better to think of man as an embodied soul or an ensouled body.
Man is one thing, a composite of body and soul,
and the soul is what gives shape to the person
and coordinates the matter to be that of a human person.
As Aristotle once observed, we need not ask if the soul and the body are one
as neither do we ask if wax and its shape are one.
That being said, the body and soul aren't exactly on equal footing.
The soul is primary and it gives unity to the whole.
The soul exists by virtue of itself and the body by virtue of the soul.
This is why we say that the soul--the form--actualizes the body--the matter.
The soul makes the man to be a man
and makes the matter of a man to be the matter of a man.
So by contrast, if we had matter formerly pertaining to a man, like a corpse
or a severed hand, it wouldn't make sense to refer to it as properly human matter.
Since the soul isn't present to the matter, it's just a corpse or a severed hand, not
a human body or a human hand.
Again, given that the soul is the form of the body, it follows that the whole soul is
in the whole body and in each part is entire.
Since the soul is united to the body as its form, it must necessarily be in the whole
body and in each part thereof.
There's no dividing up the soul or parceling out the soul.
Soul in the Latin is anima, from which we get the word animate.
So at the risk of redundancy, we can say that the soul animates the body.
Again, not like a motor or something extrinsic, but as its very life.
The soul makes the body to be an actually living human person who performs acts proper
to a human person.
As Aristotle defined it, "The soul is the first act of an organized body having life
potentially within it."
The soul is just the baseline of human actuality.
It is the actuality presupposed by the further actuality of the soul's powers and the acts
of those powers.
This makes sense of how Aristotle goes about discovering the soul.
He starts with the observation that certain things perform certain actions that set them
apart from nonliving beings.
There's sensing and desiring, moving, understanding, and willing.
When we see these acts, we reason back to faculties capable of these acts and then back
to a seat of these acts.
This then, he says, is what we mean by the soul.
So if a thing is doing actions proper to a living thing, then it is a living
thing and therefore it is ensouled.
It's as simple as that.
St. Thomas goes on to argue that a living thing can have only one soul.
Again, this doesn't sound like the most revolutionary point,
but in St. Thomas's day, it was quite controversial.
Recall, a soul is just what makes a thing to be alive.
It follows that on Saint Thomas's understanding, plants and animals have souls.
We call these vegetative and sensory souls respectively.
Now some, in fact, most thinkers at St. Thomas's time, thought that a lower
soul could coexist with a higher soul in the same substance.
So animals on this reading would have both vegetative and sensory souls
and man would have vegetative, sensory, and rational souls.
Against this, Saint Thomas insisted that man has only one soul, a rational soul, and that
the powers of the lower souls are present only virtually.
The reason for this is simple.
A soul is a form, and a form is what makes a thing to be what it is.
It is the source of substantial unity and coordinated activity.
Therefore, there can only be one soul present in any living thing.
St. Thomas cites an argument taken from St. Augustine to this effect.
He observes that when one operation of the soul is intense,
it impedes other operations of the soul.
So for instance, when you're starving, it's impossible to think straight
or you can be so engrossed in thought that you forget where you are,
as happened to St Thomas himself.
Basically, one activity can divert our attention from another.
If, as others claim, the different souls all operated independently, we wouldn't observe
this phenomenon.
And yet we do.
So it stands to reason there's only one soul.
In the end, the claim is as simple as it is astonishing.
A soul is not a ghost in a machine or a mere emergent property.
It is not an occult claim or a material reduction.
Rather, it issues from a perennial observation: what separates the living from the non-living?
And here, the soul makes sense of our experience of life,
for it accounts for the fact that this thing is alive.
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