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Thomistic Animalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Animalism, according to its strongest proponents, is the view that human beings are ‘essentially or most fundamentally animals’. Specifically, ‘we are essentially animals if we couldn't possibly exist without being animals’ (Olson 2008). Although contemporary animalism offers an account superior to its Lockean competitors, Olson's ‘biological approach’ has certain limitations, particularly in its denial of any psychological continuity whatsoever as either necessary or sufficient for individual persistence through time. I propose a number of amendments towards a Thomistic variety of animalism that avoids these difficulties. Although prone to misinterpretation, animalism understood properly is compatible with Aquinas's theory of subsistent intellect. Against recent challenges, I defend the view that Thomistic animalism not only is intelligible, but is indeed crucial for understanding Aquinas's view of human nature and rationality.
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- Copyright © 2019 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
Footnotes
1
Acknowledgments are owed especially to Richard Conrad, OP and the Aquinas Institute at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, at which early versions of this paper were presented in 2016 and 2017. Thanks also to Raphael Mary Salzillo, OP, Peter Hunter, OP, John Berkman, Edward Hadas, and Michael Breidenbach for helpful comments, and to the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, for research funding in support of this article's completion.
References
2 Contemporary defenders of the view, besides Olson, include M.R. Ayers, Stephan Blatti, W.R. Carter, P.M.S. Hacker, David Hershenov, J.L. Mackie, Trenton Merricks, Paul Snowdon, Peter van Inwagen. and David Wiggins.
3 Olson, Eric, ‘An Argument for Animalism’, in Van Inwagen, Peter and Zimmerman, Dean, eds., Metaphysics: the Big Questions, 2nd rev. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), p. 349Google Scholar.
4 Ibid, p. 353.
5 See, for instance, Baker, Lynne Rudder, Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The Metaphysics of Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Shoemaker, Sydney, ‘Functionalism and Personal Identity?’ Noûs, 38 (2004): 525-533CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Snowdon explains, ‘Either our mental states are over and above the physical states but somehow emerge in their context, or the mental states are somehow constituted by the physical states. This means that no general constituents are required to be present in some animals, by the joint thoughts that we are animals and we are mentally endowed, about which there is some reason to suppose no animals possess. Such a problem only arises if it is held that our mental processes demand an immaterial component which, for some reason or other, it is thought is not involved in (any) animals. This means that we do not need to engage with the current debate about the mind/body problem. Whether rightly or wrongly, I…adopt an anti-dualist framework’ (Snowdon, Paul, Persons, Animals, Ourselves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Such conceptual isolation does have associated costs: e.g., one who adopts a position on human nature that situates itself so far outside of the mainstream discussion may find that one is therefore ignored or accused of incomprehensibility, on account that the terms of the mainstream debate are rejected outright.
8 Olson, Eric, The Human Animal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 4Google Scholar.
9 Eric Olson, ‘An Argument for Animalism’, p. 349.
10 The astrophysicist Carl Sagan's defense of material reductionism has resounded in the popular culture via Sagan's infamous proclamation, paraphrased by W. Norris Clarke: ‘I, Carl Sagan, am nothing but a collection of atoms bearing the name, “Carl Sagan”’ (Clarke, Norris, The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), p. 68Google Scholar.
11 Churchland, Patricia, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).
12 For more on the issue of human exceptionalism within an animalist account, see Breidenbach, Janice Chik, ‘Action, Animacy, and Substance Causation’, in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science, eds. Simpson, William, Koons, Robert, Teh, Nicholas (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 235-260Google Scholar.
13 Alston, Contra William, ‘How to think about divine action’, in Hebblewaite, Brian and Henderson, Edward (eds.), Divine Action: Studies Inspired by the Philosophical Theology of Austin Farrer (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990)Google Scholar; and Alston, , Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Quaestio Disputata de Anima, a. 13. McDermott, Timothy, Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 133Google Scholar.
15 J. Chik Breidenbach, ‘Action, Animacy, and Substance Causation’.
16 The term ‘action’ has been used by contemporary philosophers to have a particular significance of something basic, to which intentionality may be added: hence, e.g. the terms ‘intentional action’ vs. ‘non-intentional action’. I use the term here as Aristotle does: in his writings he never discusses the concept of intention or intentional actions. Rather, his term is hekousion, or the voluntary, which is decidedly not the same thing as the intentional. The voluntary is a concept pertaining to movements that he attributes to non-human animals as well as to the distinctly human concept of choice.
17 Perhaps the best illustration of this claim is found in empirical studies on animal learning. Research on intelligent species, particularly animals who live in complex social groups, suggests distinctive forms of group behavior that is learned and taught over generations (rather than existing as innate capacities), within a species-culture unique to specific locales.
18 Thanks to Peter Hunter for proposing this alternative.
19 For Descartes, animal bodies are machines, and he describes such machines in precisely the same language used to comprehend the body in which a thinking substance might also reside: ‘I might regard a man's body as a kind of mechanism that is outfitted with and composed of bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin in such a way that, even if no mind existed in it, the man's body would still exhibit all the same motions that are in it now except for those motions that proceed either from a command of the will or, consequently, from the mind’ (Descartes, René, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, tr. Cress, Donald (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 101Google Scholar).
20 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, tr. Donald Cress, p. 97.
21 In connection with these ideas, one might also note a Cartesian ‘arithmetic’ concerning human action and its relation to non-human animals: such is typical of a view adopted by later philosophers of action known as causalists, such as Donald Davidson. The Cartesian view construes human action as consisting of a rational or intellectual element, specific to human beings, plus the material mechanism that is proper to non-human animals. So human action is equivalent to mere animal mechanism plus some contribution from a rational mind. If the original Cartesian view strikes us as dubious, then we should have good reason to doubt the intelligibility of its application to our present question, of how persons are related to animals.
22 Aquinas, Quaestio Disputata de Anima, a. 1, ad. 14. Timothy McDermott, Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings, p. 191. Precisely how to understand a dead body is a matter beyond the scope of this essay, but Hershenov, offers a worthwhile examination of the question in ‘Do Dead Bodies Pose a Problem for Biological Approaches to Personal Identity?’, Mind 114: 453 (2005), pp. 31-59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Aquinas's remark cited above is compatible with Hershenov's eliminativist approach to dead bodies, since Aquinas denies, with Hershenov, that we are ‘identical to a body that will continue to exist after our deaths’ (p. 57).
23 Eric Olson, ‘An Argument for Animalism’, p. 350.
24 Arguably, Boethius introduces this view, affirmed later by Aquinas, in defining ‘person’ as ‘an individual substance of a rational nature’ (Liber de Persona et Duabus Naturis, III).
25 And, characteristically, those who argue that we are ‘essentially persons’ reject the claim that we are animals: e.g. Shoemaker and Baker.
26 Snowdon remarks, ‘It is this contrast that sets the philosophical imagination free to devise strongly unbodily accounts of persons’ (Persons, Animals, Ourselves, p. 11). Although this seems correct, it is surely possible to have an account of incorporeal persons that rejects the Lockean distinction where corporeal persons are concerned.
27 Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, Peter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), II.xxvii.9, p. 335Google Scholar.
28 Paul Snowdon, Persons, Animals, Ourselves, p. 39.
29 For these reasons, Christopher Hughes argues that Aquinas rejects contemporary personalism.
30 I expand on this point later in this section.
31 McDermott, Timothy, Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 95-96Google Scholar.
32 For clarity, I include the passage quoted in full here: ‘So this word body sometimes means a thing of a form such that it can occupy three dimensions, but stopping there: in other words the form produces no further perfection, so that anything extra lies outside the meaning of body so understood; and in this sense body names a component and material part of animals, with its animating soul lying outside the meaning of body so defined and supervening upon it, so that the animal is made up of two component parts, body and soul. But the same word body sometimes means a thing of a form such that it can occupy three dimensions, whatever form that be, whether producing further perfections or not; and in this sense body names a genus that includes animals, since now there is nothing in animal that isn't already implicit in body. For the animating soul isn't a different form from the one enabling the thing to occupy three dimensions, and when we said body is anything of a form such that it can occupy three dimensions we were meaning whatever form that be: be it an animal soul, or stone-ness, or anything else. And in this way the animal form was implicit in the form of the body, body being its genus’ (Ibid, italics mine).
33 Hughes, Christopher, Aquinas on Being, Goodness, and God (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 144CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 The distinction is interchangeable with ‘man’ vs. ‘persons’. Locke's express purpose in this regard is to provide an argument against the Thomistic-Aristotelian definition of man as ‘a rational animal’. He does so by asking whether a hypothetical rational parrot should force us to conclude, absurdly, that such a bird is in fact human. Since none would, he concludes that man should not be defined as ‘a rational animal’. However, his argument here appears to rely on a classic logical fallacy of assuming that the proposition ‘A is B’ is equivalent to the proposition ‘B is A’. The claim, ‘Man is a rational animal’ nowhere implies that ‘All rational animals are men.’ Therefore, this part of Locke's argument cannot succeed in impugning the Thomistic-Aristotelian definition.
35 See, for instance, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 6 and q. 18, a. 9.
36 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 18, a. 9. The account is corroborated by In Sent. II.24.3.2: ‘the genus moris begins where the reign of the will is first found.’
37 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Christopher Rowe, with philosophical introduction and commentary by Sarah Broadie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), Book VI.
38 On an Aristotelian-Thomistic account, it is impossible to understand action as consisting of bodily movements of a specific type (i.e., intentional or voluntary movements) without recognizing that such movements are at once both physical and psychological in quality. But this is a view that contradicts a prevalent contemporary account of agency known as the causal theory of action, which assumes that action is a performance made by human beings alone: for it necessarily consists of a mere bodily movement plus some condition of rational mind. So, according to this post-Cartesian account, human action is equivalent to mere animal mechanism plus some contribution from a rational mind.
39 Aquinas, Quaestio Disputata de Anima, a. 1, sed contra. McDermott, Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings, p. 186.
40 Aquinas, Quaestio Disputata de Anima, a. 1, ad 4. McDermott, Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings, p. 190.
41 Aquinas, Quaestio Disputata de Anima, a. 1, ad 1. McDermott, Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings, p. 190.
42 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 3, Respondeo. McDermott, Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings, p. 148.
43 Aquinas, Quaestio Disputata de Anima, a.1, ad 11. McDermott, Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings, p. 191.
44 Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, 2, 77. McDermott, Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings, p. 152.
45 Eric Olson, ‘An Argument for Animalism’, p. 7.
46 Aquinas, Commentary on the Book of Sentences, Book III.
47 He writes: ‘Therefore the vegetative soul, which comes first, when the embryo lives the life of a plant, is corrupted, and is succeeded by a more perfect soul which is both nutritive and sensitive, and then the embryo lives an animal life; and when this is corrupted it is succeeded by the rational soul introduced from without: although the preceding souls were produced by the virtue in the semen’ (Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 89).
48 Christopher Hughes, Aquinas on Being, Goodness, and God, p. 149.
49 This is in fact the solution proposed by Snowdon (Persons, Animals, Ourselves, pp. 201-237).