Note on the soul

In my previous posts, I have spoken of the human soul as being passible and mutable. I have spoken of the passions as acting upon and affecting the soul, of the soul as becoming aware of and responding to the passions, and of souls as gaining knowledge over time, so that friends seek to have souls with identical knowledge.

I have also defined form and matter. I have made it clear that form, defined as the object of understanding, cannot be passible or mutable, and all such shifting appearances must be assigned to matter. So, it must be concluded from the foregoing that the human soul is material, and is not form at all.

This would all be perfectly well, but I am Catholic, so I’m supposed to believe church dogmas like this one:

Furthermore, with the approval of the above mentioned sacred council we reprove as erroneous and inimical to the Catholic faith every doctrine or position rashly asserting or turning to doubt that the substance of the rational or intellective soul truly and in itself is not a form of the human body, defining, so that the truth of sincere faith may be known to all, and the approach to all errors may be cut off, lest they steal in upon us, that whoever shall obstinately presume in turn to assert, define, or hold that the rational or intellective soul is not the form of the human body in itself and essentially must be regarded as a heretic. (Denzinger 902/481)

So, before the Inquisitor comes knocking, I think I should explain myself.

The Council’s words are most proper

In my posts in which I referred to the soul as mutable and passible, I was not speaking of the form of the human body. Largely because I had not thought enough about metaphysics yet, I was speaking of the human soul in accordance with a common, modern, originally Cartesian usage, which would have the soul be the inextended, thinking part of a man, as opposed to the extended, unthinking part. But, of course, both of these are mutable and passible, and therefore material.

The form of the human body, however, like all form, is immutable and impassible. And it truly deserves the name which the Council assigns to it, the rational or intellective soul; indeed, if we are speaking most properly, it deserves this name much more truly than our inextended, thinking part – which I shall hereafter, for short, call our mind. This is shown as follows.

First, the form of the human body deserves the name of rational or intellective much more truly than our mind, precisely because it is form, and therefore impassible and immutable. Our mind is not as truly rational or intellective because its natural operation may be interrupted by the passions, and it requires the passage of time and the help of organs such as the brain. None of these things belong to the formal essence of understanding; they are imperfections which belong to the material instantiation of understanding in the mind.

Second, the form of the human body deserves the name of soul much more truly than our mind, because all understand the soul to be the principle of life. Now, the form of the human body is, by definition, more truly the principle of its life than any material part of it, since it is that by which it may even be understood as living.

So, when we are speaking most properly and technically, the Council speaks truly: the rational or intellective soul truly and in itself is a form of the human body. This may not be doubted, and teaching otherwise would be rash.

Modern usage vindicated

However, the common, modern, originally Cartesian usage is not wholly improper or without reason either, and this is for three reasons.

First, because the mind is the part of us with which we reason, which is our highest operation, and is for that reason sometimes called “our life”, as for instance by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics:

life is defined, in the case of animals, by the capacity for sensation; in the case of man, by the capacity for sensation and thought. (1170a15–19)

So, insofar as thought is the life of man, his mind is the principle of his life, and may therefore be in a certain sense called his soul.

Second, because usually, taking the mind away from a man will also take away his life. Cases of living men who are wholly mindless are so rare that a philosopher may be excused in forgetting about them when treating of unrelated topics.

Third, because the mind is not a body.* Now, it is common, even in papal documents, to speak of man as being a composite of body and soul; this common formula, then, makes it very natural to speak of anything incorporeal in man as his soul, even if it is not the form of the human body.

Indeed, it seems that the word for soul has often referred to the mind, and not to the form of the human body, ever since the ancient Greeks. And there is usually no use for the distinction; but we must be careful when doing proper metaphysics, especially if we want to avoid being condemned as heretics.

However, since

• there is no law in the Church commanding us to always use the exact same words that a council uses, and
• I have made my doctrine perfectly clear in this blog post, and shown myself not to be a heretic for teaching it, and
• the modern and originally Cartesian usage really is so common, and besides, not unreasonable,

I will continue to speak of the mind as the soul whenever I please, and that will be the end of it, and I will link this post whenever I am challenged about this, or I fear confusing someone. Whenever I wish to speak of the form of the human body, I will simply use that phrase – the form of the human body – or similar phrases, such as the form of man, the human form, or the form, as context allows.

So, according to the usage that I will follow in the rest of this blog, the soul is not the form of the human body, and also, the human soul is material – though incorporeal. If you find this to be heretical, please reconsider my doctrines with more care.

* Technically, by definition it is only inextended, not incorporeal. But an inextended body would be a Euclidean point, and I have never seen anyone claim that our minds are Euclidean points. After all, why would they have a spatial location, and where would they be located?