On the Immortality of the Soul

[Blue_Horizon]

As we touched upon earlier, is a change in form. The living man becomes dead flesh, which is flesh only equivocally (on Aquinas’s account). The human substance becomes some dead-flesh sort of substance, which has a different form from the human substance. The human form persists, but where there was substantial change, there is also a new form.

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PT I think you have missed the issue I am observing. You have previously agreed going from Man to DSoul is a substantial change? Yet the form remains the same.

The soul in Man is exactly the same as that in its disembodied state isn’t it?
It now seems to me that the substantial change that is death is different from Aristotle’s.
With Aristotle, at the level of the body,yes, one form is lost, another is gained.The former human body loses its organisation and other forms take over (decomposition).
But in so far as the soul is concerned there is no change, it is allegedly immortal afterall!
And we say there has been a change in substance (Man is different from DSoul) - yet the form is apparantly the same in both.

Yes, it is based on the idea that if the form of man has an immaterial act, then material dissolution of the substance cannot dissolve it fully. That hardly seems “more like an assertion than solid logic.” The upshot of arguments for the immateriality of the intellect just is that material dissolution does not (fully) dissolve the intellect.

PT I suggest this is only “obvious” because of unaddressed cultural/christian assumptions at work and not because of solid reason/logic. You so easily discount the fact that the inventor of this alleged fact (immaterial acts of reason) himself did not hold to the immortality of the soul that you opine logically follows. I don’t understand why you overlook this problematic so easily?

 

[Linusthe2nd]

L2 not quite sure why you felt the need to quote The CE. You will have to excuse me if I consider its take on Aquinas with a grain of salt - esp on the topic of susbatnce where there seem to be as many contrary interpretations of Aquinas as there are of Aristotle.

The only reason I mentioned the CE was wrt the ambiguous phrase “incomplete substance” where even this publication accepts there are difficulties.
*"[The body] exists only as determined by a form; and if that form is not a human soul, then the “body” is not a human body. It is in this sense that the Scholastic phrase “incomplete substance”, applied to body and soul alike, is to be understood. Though strictly speaking self-contradictory, the phrase expresses in a convenient form the abiding reciprocity of relation between these two “principles of substantial being”. *

Therefore it makes no sense to speak of the disembodied soul as “an incomplete substance”. It is in fact a complete substance (a lone soul), if it were incomplete it would not exist. What is really meant by this phrase is that in Man the soul is a co principle of Man substance. Hence body is also an incomplete substance in Man. And in death the Body no longer exists. How can it, it is an incomplete substance. It is just an aggregation of organic chemicals.

Also, as prev stated, I do not believe Aquinas is well interpretted by use of this phrase as it is a Suarezian modification/interpretation.

L2 I am not arguing about anything wrt “incomplete substance” other than trying to work out what PT is really meaning by this poorly chosen phrase. I would argue that nothing of Aquinas can be helpfully learnt by it, only Suarez.

WRT Porphery’s Tree and the placement of Man and the Disembodied Soul my ongoing research yet confirms me in my original position:

“Man” is clearly an incorporeal substance. The Disembodied Soul is clearly an Incorporeal Substance. There is only a problem when one tries to treat the Soul in the abstract (ie as the same “form” which is what I believe you are really doing.) and implode the distinctions in each different state.
*“In the system of classification and definition shown in the Arbor Porphyriana, man is a substance, corporeal, living, sentient, and rational.” *(CE)

As I say I am still getting m head around how there can be a substantial change without a change in form (which contradicts Aristotle, as does the assumption that immaterial ops imply immortality):
To that end it seems to me if we start out seeing the rational soul as a complete and existing substance in itself…then it is not hard to see how we can then further define the existence of a completely different substance (“Man”) whereby this original substance is but a co-principle along with matter. This understanding would mean we cannot properly speak of a “human soul” except in Man. A disembodied soul is in no way human. Of course this incorporeal form is potentially the soul of Man in a way that an angel form is not. In that sense a disembodied soul might be said to be a “human soul” (and also because of “history” - it once animated a Man) but these are not univocal predications it seems to me.
It is hard to come to this understanding of the matter because we don’t start out as disembodied souls, we start out as Men. Yet, when we read the SCG it becomes very clear that Aquinas, ontologically, starts out with the intellective soul as a lower emanation from God after the pure intellective form (angels). God/angels/intellective-souls is Aquinas’s logical progresssion and unfolding in SCG. Very interesting.

Why should we fret?
We shouldn’t. But if people are going to try and use the light of other people’s reason (whether Aristotle or Aquinas) to shine a little more light on some of the more non-intuitive truths of Faith then lets be sure those thinkers are not being used and abused - let alone whether their views are better or worse with age.

I wouldn’t ever say that Suarz has nothing to offer of metaphysical truth, but I think Thomas is more certain and reliable - at least the Church thinks so. In regard to death, what remains of the man after death is a different substance than what existed in life. It is now a non-living substance, that seems a substaintial difference to me. The same with the soul. In life it is the substantial form of the man, its proper mode of existence. In death, it exists in a mode not proper to it. That is why Thomas referred to it as an incomplete substance. If you insist on treating it as a substance in the sense of belonging neatly into some category of substance, you will be at odds with the reality. The disembodied soul will never fit neatly into any category - yet it is a thing that exists, as you and I and all of us will some day find out.

Linus2nd

 

[polytropos]

PT I think you have missed the issue I am observing. You have previously agreed going from Man to DSoul is a substantial change? Yet the form remains the same.

I am not sure what I said previously. But since Aquinas thinks that a living man has a human soul and that there is a form of dead flesh (which is only equivocally flesh), there is a natural interpretation of saying that in death, there is substantial change, involving a change of form. The human substance becomes dead flesh, and its form changes from a human soul to that of dead flesh.

On top of that, the human soul persists and remains the same. But it is no longer the form of the now-dead body.

But in so far as the soul is concerned there is no change, it is allegedly immortal afterall!

It’s the same soul in terms of identity, and it can’t be destroyed. That does not necessarily imply that there is no formal change. (As we’ve discussed, there are certain acts which a disembodied soul cannot perform qua disembodied.) It just implies that the form is still a human soul.

PT I suggest this is only “obvious” because of unaddressed cultural/christian assumptions at work and not because of solid reason/logic. You so easily discount the fact that the inventor of this alleged fact (immaterial acts of reason) himself did not hold to the immortality of the soul that you opine logically follows. I don’t understand why you overlook this problematic so easily?

How have I overlooked it? As I have said several times, Aristotle could not conceive of disembodied souls because he lacked an essence/existence distinction. Aristotle was an “existential redundancy theorist.” For instance, he says:

[O]ne man and a man are the same things, and existent man and a man are the same thing, and the doubling of the words in “one man” and “one existent man” does not give any new meaning (it is clear that they are not separated in coming to be or ceasing to be). (Metaphysics, Book Gamma, quoted in Barry Miller’s The Fullness of Being)

Aquinas of course does not accept this. That is the point of his famous argument in De Ente et Essentia. With a theory of acts of existence, the continued existence of a form with an immaterial act is not problematic. I am not “discounting” or “overlooking” the issue at all. On the contrary, this only seems to be a prima facie difficulty if we take Aristotle and Aquinas to have the same position on predications of existence, which is patently ahistorical.