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form and act of this intellect, but it had two subjects, or possessors,
namely the receptive intellect and the phantasm of an individual
human. Thus, the receptive intellect is linked to us by its form by
means of the phantasms; so that when the receptive intellect
understands, an individual human being understands. But this
account, says Aquinas, is empty (U 63 4).
Of the three reasons which Aquinas gives to prove the futility of
the Averroist position, the following is the most persuasive. It is true,
Aquinas says, that one item may have more than one subject or
possessor. A wall s looking red to me may be the very same event as
my seeing the redness of the wall. The same event is thus, as it were,
an item in my history and an item in the history of the wall. So there
is no objection in principle to the idea that a species may be both a
form of the receptive intellect and something which belongs to the
phantasms. But that would not make the human being, whose
phantasms these are, be an intelligent subject.
The link between the receptive intellect and the human being,
who is the possessor of the phantasms whose species are in the
receptive intellect, is the same as the link between the coloured
wall and the faculty of sight which has an impression of that
colour. But the wall does not see, but is seen; it would follow
therefore that the human being is not the thinker, but that its
phantasms are thought of by the receptive intellect.
(U 65)4
The answer to the question what makes my thoughts mine cannot,
then, be that their intellectual content is embodied in mental images
which are the products of my body. Instead, Aquinas says, the
124 Aquinas on Mind
thoughts I think are my thoughts because the soul which thinks them
is the form of my body.
But is Aquinas own answer in the end very different from the
Averroist one he rejects? He maintains that the soul can exist, and
think, without the body. But, given the general Aristotelian
hylomorphic theory to which he is committed, if X is the form of Y,
then operations of X are operations of Y. Of course Aquinas denied
that thinking is the operation of any bodily organ, and in that he is
correct, if we are using organ in the sense in which the eye is the
organ of sight. But though thinking is not the operation of any
bodily organ, it is the activity of a body, namely the thinking
human being. That is to say, the manifestations, expressions, of my
thoughts are the movements of my body, just as in general the
manifestation of my knowledge of a language such as English
consists in the movements of my speaking lips, my reading eyes, my
writing fingers, my acting limbs. Hence it is not enough to say that
my thoughts are my thoughts because the soul which thinks them is
the form of my body: it is necessary to spell out the way in which
my body expresses the thoughts if the thoughts expressed are to be
my thoughts.
But are there not unexpressed thoughts, the thoughts which pass
through our minds in private, unvoiced, thinking? Indeed there are,
and we may well ask: what is it that makes these thoughts my
thoughts? It may seem unhelpful, though it is true, to reply: they are
thoughts which, if they were expressed, would be expressed by me.
To make this answer seem less vacuous, and to convince ourselves
that even in this case the criterion for the possessor is still bodily, we
should reflect on cases of alleged telepathy or thought-reading. This
is not meant to endorse the hypothesis that there are genuine such
phenomena; it is meant to be a concession for the sake of argument
to those who want to take a highly spiritualist view of the mind.
Even in such a case, I will show, the criterion for the possessor of the
thought is bodily and not spiritual.
Suppose that at a thought-reading session, or seance, the
thought-reader or medium says Someone in this room is thinking
of Eustace . Here, ex hypothesi, the occurrence of the thought has
been ascertained by means other than normal bodily
communication. Even here, the way we would seek to decide
whether what the thought-reader claimed was true would involve
appeal to bodily criteria. What settles the matter is whose hand
goes up, whose voice confesses to the private thought. And whose
Self-knowledge 125
the hand is, whose the voice is, is determined by looking to see
whose body is involved.
Let there be no misunderstanding here. It is not being suggested
that it is by observing actual or conjecturing hypothetical
movements of my own body that I decide which thoughts are my
own thoughts. Aquinas is indeed right that we perceive , that is to
say, know without any intermediary, what we are thinking. The
question Are these thoughts my thoughts? is not one which is
always absurd: one might put the question, perhaps in disgust, in
reading vapid outpourings in a long-lost adolescent diary found
when cleaning out a cupboard. But there is no state of mind in
which I know that certain thoughts are currently being thought,
and wonder whose thoughts there are, mine or someone else s. It is
not by bodily criteria that I know which thoughts are mine, or know
what I am thinking, because it is not by any criteria at all that I
know these matters. But what it is that I know, when I know that
certain thoughts are mine, is the same thing that other people know
when they know what I am thinking; and what I know, and what
they know, are something to which the bodily criteria are necessarily
relevant.
Let us sum up, then, the residual, unresolved, difficulty which
vitiates Aquinas account of self-knowledge. It is correct, as Aquinas
often says (for example, at S 1, 75, 6), that my thoughts are my
thoughts because they are operations of the form of my body. But
the only account which he gives of the way in which my body is
involved in the operation of the intellect is his account of the way in
which the phantasms are involved in our present life, at every level,
in the exercise of thought. It is only by reifying the intellect, by treating
form as something separable from matter, that he is able to avoid the
Averroist account of the relation between intellect and imagination
which, as he rightly says, is empty.
Question eighty-seven, on self-knowledge, is the last question of
the Summa which a philosophical student of Aquinas psychology
needs to study in detail. The remaining questions take us into areas
dominated by Aquinas theological presuppositions. Thus, the
opening of question eighty-eight is not such as to whet the appetite
of a modern reader. The question is devoted to the way in which the
human soul knows immaterial substances; and the first issue raised
is whether the human soul, in this life, is able to understand, in
themselves, the immaterial substances we call angels . Few nowadays,
even among orthodox Christians, appear to believe in the literal
126 Aquinas on Mind
existence of spiritual creatures of a superhuman kind; and it may
seem of little interest to ask how human beings could come to the
knowledge of such beings if there were any.
In fact, as we read through the text, we discover that the direction
of the argument is itself highly agnostic. St Thomas did indeed
believe in angels, on the basis of various biblical passages; but in this
question his only invocation of Scripture is to cite Wisdom 9, 16
( Who can discover what is in the heavens? ) in support of the
conclusion that angels cannot be known by human inquiry. The
purpose of the three articles of the question is to reject the attempts
of various philosophers to attribute to the embodied human soul
something which might be called knowledge of immaterial
substances .
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