The soul has been a very controversial and intriguing subject for multiple generations of philosophers, countless theories have been thought up in an attempt to explain its intellectual operation.
Thomas Aquinas, a medieval philosopher and theologian, tackles the topic of subsistence (i. e existence) of the human soul by looking into its power of cognition and scrutinizing its nature; more specifically, he studies the processes through which the soul can cognize the world that surrounds us and itself by the means of the body and the intellect. Life can be defined through its functions: movement, cognition, perception and nutrition.Aquinas attempts to unveil the secret behind the soul’s power of cognition by identifying its most relevant capacities, intellect and will. The principle of intellectual operation –or the soul for Aquinas- can cognize the nature of all bodies only if does not contain the nature of the concerned body in itself, it’s impossible to know whether something is hot if your flesh is burned, so it rules out the possibility of the soul being a body because in theory a body can not cognize another body (Question 75. Article2.
). Then a question is to be raised, can the soul cognize a nonbodily/immaterial substance?We should first understand how the soul cognizes other bodies. As the first principle of life the soul gives life to the body. When not connected to the soul, the body would only be a collection of organs enveloped by bones and covered by flesh with no intellect i. e no understanding of what is happening around us. But fortunately nature linked the soul and the body for a reason, the body offers us perception and the soul cognition.
Perception is the fundamental factor behind the formation of a concept, with the five senses experience, as in sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, constituting it (Question 76. Article 5. ). So perceiving a body is not enough for us to completely assimilate its concept. Inevitably cognition directly follows perception.
Cognition is reached through the formation of “phantasms” or mental images, which is fundamentally not enough to fully cognize a concept, which is why it’s directly followed by the process of abstraction that only the intellect can accommodate. This process forms the universal concept/knowledge in accordance with the main qualities of the concerned object/body (Question 89. Article 1. ).It is only through this procedure that we are able to differentiate between opposites such as hot and cold, soft and hard, light and darkness… So as was told before in order to trigger cognition, perception is necessary and for perception to be available, a human body is indispensable. Alone the body and the soul are practically useless, because even if a soul separate from the body actually existed it would not be able to cognize anything, and thus the soul’s operations on the body would be rendered void (Question 89.
Article 1. ).As such we can conclude that the body exists for the sake of the soul and not vice versa, i. matter exists for the sake of the form (Question 76.
Artile 5. ). So the soul gathers knowledge about bodily objects by the senses experience succeeded by a process of abstraction, however the soul itself cannot be cognized by these same senses and so the soul is unable to cognize bodies through its essence but through species. Indeed, when separated from the body i. e when the body dies the soul is deprived from perception but stays immaterial and retains intellect and will which should only function when sensory experiences are available.
Phantasms/mental images alone aren’t enough, as was said before, perception followed by a process of abstraction is imperative for cognition, however Aquinas’ ultimate conclusion is that the soul has another “unknown” mode of understanding where the soul turns to higher things rather than the body in order to cognize objects which installs doubt about all his previous statements (Question 89. Article 1. ). The soul’s capacities are nothing other than the operations belonging to the soul, which are divided into “ the vegetative, sensory, appetitive, locomotive and intellective” part.Specifically, the vegetative part which has three necessary operations, the generative capacity through which the body acquires existence, the power of growth which provides the body with the capacity to mature, and the nutritive capacity through which the body is maintained. The soul is the actuality of a body that is potentially having life, so the body that’s actually alive is therefore potentially awake.
So the body is first an actuality and then the potentiality of a second actuality.The highest nutritive power is the generative capacity (gives existence to the body), which is closely related to the sensory (Question 78. Article 3. ). And so it should be possible for the soul to have capacities that are common to the living (the senses experience), in other words the soul could have these capacities through the force of its actuality. However, only God’s power is identified by its essence.
By that I mean that if the soul were “attached” to a body not capable of having life then it would not be able to function ike it does through a living body. Therefore, the soul as the actuality of a living body is directed at a body that is actually alive. So it’s not through its substance that the soul gets its capacity but by the intermediary of a living body (Question77. Article 1. ). The human soul in itself is a nonbodily substance that has the power to cognize the bodily objects that surrounds it.
Following the first paragraph’s theory we can claim that soul only cognizes an object insofar as it is actual, so an immaterial substance like the soul is impossible to cognize.However, in question 87 Aquinas claims that the soul knows itself through itself, in other words through its presence i. e through its own actuality. So he is saying that by first cognizing a bodily object the soul recognizes its actuality, and therefore itself.
If it cognizes itself than it should be able to be able to comprehend its differences from other things, but the mind can only do that by cognizing its own nature and quiditty i. e by understanding the way it functions. And so by cognizing the mind’s presence human beings are able to acknowledge their existence (Question 87.Article 1. ).
But by following this theory we are admitting that the mind should have the ability to cognize any immaterial substance insofar as it is present, which is impossible if we apply his established theory on the power of cognition because the soul itself is not a material substance but rather an immaterial one. As was said previously the soul has two major capacities: intellect and will, insofar as they are two different capacities but are both nonbodily immaterial substances then, like the soul cognizes itself, the will is cognized through its act.We can say that the intellect and the will are interdependent, because the will pushes the soul’s capacities to act and the goods that are objects of intellect moves the will (Question 87. Article 4.
). Also, in question 88. 2 Aquinas claims that the human soul cannot reach knowledge of immaterial substances through the cognition of material things insofar as it’s an incomplete cognition because a full cognition is impossible with only the methods of subtraction and association, the process of abstraction through mental images/phantasms is necessary (Question 88. Article 2. ).
