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4.0 out of 5 stars
A valuable book on a little know period of western philosophy, May 10, 2009
This review is from: Life's Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Hardcover)
This is a book of wonderful piece of scholarship that provides details on a little known period of western philosophy: the junction between medieval and modern philosophy and more specifically between late medieval Aristotelism and Descartes philosophy. However, I have to admit that despite the wealth of information provided my expectations based on the book's title and the notice on the jacket have not been completely met.
Des Chene shows that when we read scholastic philosophy we read it from the viewpoint of modern philosophy and the mechanistic revolution that consider the soul as a thinking substance in relation to immortality, unity of the intellect and free will. Scholastic on the other hand considers that "the study of the soul is the study of the living" (p. 2). Late scholastic was guided by two objectives: the first one was the establishment of a science of life and the second one was "to demonstrate, by reasoned arguments, the immateriality and immortality of the human soul, while at the same time refuting suggestion that body and soul are not substantially one"(p.6). While trying to establish these principles through various commentaries of Aristotle's De Anima and Physics these late Aristotelian authors stumbled on difficult questions such as how the soul can be distinguished from its powers and the divisibility of the soul of higher animals. From there we can see the fist cracks in scholastic Thomism appearing. The Aristotelians studied in Des Chene's book "denied that the body is a mere instrument of the soul", and "rejected as well property dualism that makes the soul a substance distinct from the body" (p. 9). They believe that all living thing acquire life through a common principle or power that they call the soul and that determine properties exhibited by creatures, such as vegetation, sensation, appetition, locomotion, generation, etc. "We now agree with Descartes in holding that living things do not live by virtues of power absent from or irreducible to those of non living things. But the presence in the animate world of variety, which Aristotelians emphasized and Descartes ignored, together with the generation of like by like, is the primary fact upon which the theory is founded" (p. 43).
Having established the theoretical framework, Des Chene goes on with the review of the constrains put on it by Christian theology and the controversies that started in the early sixteenth century, and more precisely with the publication of works by Cajetanus and Pomponazzi (1516) following the Lateran Council (1513) which decided that a number of propositions regarding the soul had to be held as principles of faith. A flurry of little known philosophers and theologians took part in these controversies such as Bartolomeo Spina, Gaspar Contarini, Augustino Nifo and Crisostomo Javelli. Philosophers and theologians were but in the difficult position of having to demonstrate that there is no contradiction between Aristotle and Christian theology and Toletus played an important role in that process : the soul is one, spiritual and not matter, rational and includes the senses and the vital powers. She is created immediately by God and is the substantial form of the body. She endures eternally (p. 47-8).
The second part of the book is devoted to defining the soul and Des Chene shows that the first requirement for defining the soul is defining life itself. Then he goes on by establishing that "Toletus, Suarez, and the rest do try to demonstrate that the soul is a substantial form, and not merely a combination of "temperament" or elemental qualities. This is the position known as anti-reductionism. It is consistent with holding that, except for human beings, living things are a kind of corporeal substance" (p. 66). Here a long discussion on actus, potentia and other elements of Aristotle's psychology follows and Des Chene remarks that "it is hardly an exaggeration to say that each word in Aristotle's definition became a site of contention, a "point of heresy" dividing one school from the other" (p. 68). I will make no attempt at summarizing the debate whose objective is to define the soul as the substantial form of the body. The task requires the demonstration that the soul is not an accident of the body, nor a temperament or complexion of accident, but a substance. Then remains the task of defining the nature of that substance. Unfortunately for us there are many different ways these different tasks can be accomplished and then combined and I will jump to one of the main conclusions: "In Suarez, especially it is clear that the essence of the soul lies not in what it does, or what it is for, but in its place in the order of being, characterized by its "transcendental habitude" toward matter. Descartes' definition of the soul as a thinking thing not only shifted the weight of definition back toward the powers of the soul; his insistence that in the nature of the human soul there is nothing that tends toward matter, no habitude toward matter, would seem to remove the one difference among the created spiritual substances - humans and angels- acknowledge by both him and Aristotelians. Between the human and the divine, moreover, the only difference, it would seem, is that between the infinite and the finite" (pp. 112-3).
The third part of the book tackles the question of the soul's powers and the soul's parts. It starts by reviewing all the distinctions that can be made in the soul's powers: active and passive, immanent and "transeunt", intrinsic and extrinsic in relation to the soul main activities: living, sensing and thinking. Then it goes into the question of nutrition, growth and generation. As Des Chene says: "the soul that emerges from these arguments is a curious thing". "There can be no immediate access to the soul's nature, not even by reflection on its own operations, though the power of reflection is used, as by Descartes to prove the immateriality of the soul". "The unity of the soul, in the order of reason in Aristotelian psychology, comes much nearer the end than the beginning" (pp. 150-1).
Part four shows how late scholastic tried to save the unity of the soul in the face of the multiple contradictions that emerge when one tries to merge Aristotle's psychology with Christian theology. From five kinds of potentiae (nutritive, sensitive, appetitive, locomotive and intellective) Aristotle derives three kinds of souls: souls that have the nutritive power only, souls that have nutritive, sensitive appetitive, and perhaps locomotive powers, and the human soul that has all five powers. As a result living things are divided in three summa genera: plants, animals and humans. Christian theologians are facing a contradiction: According to Aristotle the soul must be divisible while it must retain its unity in Christian theological terms. Solving this problem require defining the nature of the divisibility of the soul. They have defined three kinds of divisibility: metaphysical or physical, virtual parts (powers and virtues), quantitative or integral (pp. 173-176). But most thinkers hold that rational souls are not divisible. Then came the idea that `the entire soul is the entire body; and entirely in each part" (p. 191), a position that Descartes adopted. However that position is not without difficulties. "The first is that the powers of an animal or human do not manifest themselves equally in all part of the body". "The second difficulty is that something simple, like the soul, cannot be joined with something complex" (p. 192). Here the question of the divisibility of the soul resurfaces. The entire soul cannot be the entire body according to the different powers in her. Some powers are confined to particular organs. As a result, the tripartite division of the soul become a distinction in reason with little metaphysical consequence (p. 199). "Of the three parts of the Aristotelian soul, the vegetative is the part whose divisibility is sustained best by experience and by argument. Sensation, or rather sensitive species (...) are divisible at best per accidens because they inhere in material organs" (p. 200).
After reading Marleen Rozermond's Descartes's Dualism I was looking for a book that would describe how western philosophers understood the Aristotelian concept of soul before Descartes mechanist revolution and Mr. Des Chene's book looked like a good candidate. Unfortunately, although the book is a masterpiece of scholarship, too often it gets lost in details and loose sight of the big picture. It is mainly due to the structure of the book. Mr Des Chene has chosen to study the soul concept in relation to a number of issues: definition of life, soul as form, soul as principle, sensing and thinking, the powers of the soul and the tripartite soul in the context of Christian philosophy. The result is that it become impossible to characterise the systems of the different authors such as the Coimbran School (Petrus Fonseca and Emmanuel de Goes), Suarez, Franciscus Totelus, Rodericus de Arriaga, Petrus Hutrtado de Mendoza, and others. Considering the small amount of literature existing for most of these authors, it would have been useful to give a brief introduction on most of them. Suarez's system is relatively well known and fortunately I had read Courtine's "Suarez et le système de la métaphysique" (not mentioned by Des Chene) and Gilson's "Etude sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien" (mentioned by Des Chene). However, even after reading Mr Des Chene's book carefully a pen in the hand I was unable to reconstruct the system of Toletus who appears to be one of the most important authors of that period. More information on the chronology also would have been useful. By the time of Toletus and Suarez, Thomas de Aquinas' system was already...
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