Aquinas on existence and essence
For Aquinas, one could know what a thing is but not know that the thing actually exists.
Therefore he concluded that essence, or what makes a thing what it is, is distinct from its existence.
Imagine a unicorn and we may know what makes a unicorn a unicorn, but within the definition of a unicorn, we don't find existent as part of that definition. Aquinas thinks that this fact of language has metaphysical significance.
Does this really prove that existence is a thing on par with other parts of the unicorn, such as its horn, or is language being conflated with metaphysics?
I heard this argument before for why existence and essence are distinct because if existence wasn't distinct then that thing would necessarily exist. Imagine the essence of humanity and existence being part of it if so then humanity would have always existed, but this is obviously not true so existence is distinct from essence.
Therefore he concluded that essence, or what makes a thing what it is, is distinct from its existence.
Imagine a unicorn and we may know what makes a unicorn a unicorn, but within the definition of a unicorn, we don't find existent as part of that definition. Aquinas thinks that this fact of language has metaphysical significance.
Does this really prove that existence is a thing on par with other parts of the unicorn, such as its horn, or is language being conflated with metaphysics?
I heard this argument before for why existence and essence are distinct because if existence wasn't distinct then that thing would necessarily exist. Imagine the essence of humanity and existence being part of it if so then humanity would have always existed, but this is obviously not true so existence is distinct from essence.
Comments (45)
1) things exist
2) things have existence
Aquinas thought he could argue that 2 is true and 1 is wrong but his arguments presupposes God's existence although he is trying to prove it. All his 5 ways have God's existence in the premises
The main problem was making a reference to an object that doesn't exist, how to make sense of it.
When René Descartes said: cogito ergo sum he referred that if I have awareness, then I exist, doesn’t matter at all if everything around us cheat me or is lying to me. Our world could be a fantasy or created by pure interpretation of ourselves. This is the true essence I guess. The fact of doubting about external points but not about your own awareness.
Well we’ve started talking about existence as a quality, without any concept of existence. What makes existence what it is? What is the essence of existence? Perhaps there are different senses (is the word used in different ways, Wittgenstein would ask). We can say a unicorn does not exist, but it is a fantasy (and an analogy). We could say the Bermuda Triangle doesn’t exist, but it is still an area on a map; here perhaps it’s the fantasy that we (want to?) say does or does not exist. And we could say it is something real, but then do fake watches not exist? We could say it is something tangible, but we can also say justice doesn’t exist in some places; that gravity exists. When we tell a child that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, what essentially changes? We haven’t just said he is not real, tangible, alive, certain, provable, etc. (“that man at the mall is not Santa”); the tragedy of it is that we destroy the ability for the myth to be meaningful, to be something that matters to us. So, then: does God exist? No, and yes (and so, absolutely not!). But is it always an open question? of everything? “Does that oasis exist?”, but, “Does that table exist?” Does Russell need to solve for the “object” which he can not see (@Wittgenstein), for others (and their minds) to matter to him (us)? Is existence dependent on (a certain) knowledge?
Yes, it's a good objection. It is similar to Kant's in that it questions whether existence is a predicate or not. My favorite illustration of the argument is Martin Gardner's:
[quote=Martin Gardner]Suppose I express my idea of ??a blue apple by painting a picture of five blue apples. I point my finger at it and say, "This represents five blue apples." If later I discover that blue apples really exist, I can still point to the same picture and say, "This represents five real blue apples." And if I can't discover the existence of the blue apples, I can point to the painting and say, "This represents five imaginary blue apples." In all three cases the picture is the same. The concept of five real apples does not contain one more apple than the concept of five possible apples. The idea of ??a unicorn will not get more horns just because unicorns exist in reality. In Kant's terminology, one does not add any new properties to a concept by expressing the belief that the concept corresponds to a real object external to one's mind.[/quote]
Walter!
Nice. In my view the traditional existential ethos is that existence precedes essence. Meaning we understand our existence more than our essence. In layman's term's, we do not have the essential tools available in order to fully understand the nature of our own existence, which are framed as essences (consciousness, cosmological existence, so on and so forth). Yet we do know that we exist (in some way shape or form).
So the paradox between understanding our true nature or essence and that of our existence, makes essence subordinate to existence. Logically we know that we exist but we don't know how or why we came to exist. Or came into Being... .
I can't remember but didn't Aquinas argue the opposite?
Aquinas thought existence actualizes what some thing is (form) to makes its existence in reality (essence as accidents and substances). But doesn't a form have to exist in a sense before being actualized?
Gregory!
Great question, in that so-called paradoxical view it seems like it does. In other words, if we agree that 'forms' are tantamount to the nature of our own existence (our true essence), and the fact that we don't truly understand those 'forms', our true essences, then we must turn attention to how we came into Being (or existence) for clues (theoretical physics, etc..).
In turn, that becomes a kind of segue to other existential questions, including metaphysical questions (essences) that include conscious existence. For instance, what really is consciousness(?). Self-awareness? It seems like we must first exist to logicize, yet it takes something or someone to think in order to make something else think, I think. Or, is self-awareness and consciousness itself (its essence) just a byproduct of evolutionary soup. Certainly. having self-awareness in and of itself, creates these kinds paradoxical concerns.
To me, when one speaks essences, it begs metaphysical questions, which include metaphysical languages (mathematics) used in physics to parse the true nature of (our) existence. At some point, we only possess that language to (abstractly) describe our existence. Yet living life is more than just a priori mathematics. Go figure.
Ye I think the book Frankenstein applies to all of use. We are fashioned by the gods (evolution?) in ways we really don't understand. We approach the world with love, expecting acceptance, but we find things happen to use that don't make sense (Camus's "absurd") and we become resentful and doubtful. We don't know who is to blame for the whole situation but we feel like we shouldn't be on this earth in this condition. We feel like the world owes us more. In the final analysis, we oscillate between pure idealism ("I create reality") and perfect realism ("only matter exists"). I think this dialectic is what "phenomenology" means.
I must say, either I've been away too long, or you've come a long way! Specifically, you paraphrased yet anther basic existential ethos!
Damn these self-aware sentient Beings!!#$%@? Who needs them !!!!!
Good Stuff man!
Form is what unifies some matter into a single object; it's how you can refer to something that has properties as a single thing.
Quoting Gregory
I didn't understand this. Are you saying objects can be contingent in relation to one another?
Quoting Gregory
None of his arguments do this.
Quoting Gregory
No, it only presupposes a relationship between deisgn and (our) intellects.
Quoting Gregory
No they don't.
A unicorn does not exist. :snicker:
The 5 ways of Aquinas are all different linguistic formulations of a single assumption: namely that only the highest good could complete the symmetry of the world. The fourth way doesnt even provide an argument for God but it tries to bring out an instinct that the universe cannot simply be an eternal series without the greatest good as its grounding.
In Aristotelian and Thomist (A-T) metaphysics, there's a distinction between accidental and essential properties. Essential properties are those that belong to the essence of a thing (without which the thing wouldn't be what it is), while accidental properties are those that can change without the thing becoming something else (like color, size, etc.) Beings (at least corporeal beings) are composed of matter and form. Matter provides the potentiality for a particular being, while form actualizes that potentiality and gives it a specific nature. "Esse" (existence) is the act by which something exists, whether that thing is material (composed of matter and form) or immaterial (such as angelic intelligences).
Aquinas indeed holds that forms are known by the intellect, but these forms are abstracted from the particulars sensed by the corporeal senses. It's not that the form is "what is real" and the particulars are not. Rather, the intellect knows things in a universal, abstracted manner, while the senses know them in their particularity. (The nature and reality or otherwise of universals is one of the great arguments in Western philosophy.)
When comparing Aquinas's views with later philosophical traditions, It's important to distinguish between the hylomorphic (matter-form) dualism of Aristotle/Aquinas and the substance dualism of Descartes. The former argues that every material being is a composite of matter and form, while the latter argues that a human being is composed of two distinct substances: mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensia) which seem to be separable in principle, giving rise to the well-known 'interaction problem'.
I dont see why the interaction problem would apply to Aquinas any less than to Descartes. The soul is the same for both. Aquinas has prime matter vs Descartes's particularized extentions. The difference is the act of the soul on the "body" is more complete with Aquinas. But i can still ask "HOW can the soul interact with prime matter". Matter is all matter in principle, by definition
Not true. Aquinas doesn't depict the soul as a separate substance in the way Descartes does, so there are not two types of entity involved. Beyond that, I will have to yield to someone with better knowledge of A-T than I.
You would have to convince me that Descartes said something different from Aquinas. How can soul have anything to do with body we can still ask. Descartes described a human as one substance composed of body and soul. I dont where this ghostly sense about it comes from. And a body IS prime matter. Matter just forms differently according to its source
Not so. Descartes proposes two 'substances', one purely intellectual, the other purely material.
[quote=René Descartes, SEP;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/]This conclusion in the Sixth Meditation asserts the well-known substance dualism of Descartes. That dualism leads to problems. As Princess Elisabeth, among others, asked: if mind is unextended and matter is extended, how do they interact? This problem vexed not only Descartes, who admitted to Elisabeth that he didn't have a good answer (3:694), but it also vexed Descartes' followers and other metaphysicians. It seems that, somehow, states of the mind and the body must be brought into relation, because when we decide to pick up a pencil our arm actually moves, and when light hits our eyes we experience the visible world. But how do mind and body interact? Some of Descartes' followers adopted an occasionalist position, according to which God mediates the causal relations between mind and body; mind does not affect body, and body does not affect mind, but God gives the mind appropriate sensations at the right moment, and he makes the body move by putting it into the correct brain states at a moment that corresponds to the volition to pick up the pencil. Other philosophers adopted yet other solutions, including the monism of Spinoza and the pre-established harmony of Leibniz.[/quote]
[quote=Descartes, the Mind-Body Distinction; https://iep.utm.edu/rene-descartes-mind-body-distinction-dualism/]One of the deepest and most lasting legacies of Descartes’ philosophy is his thesis that mind and body are really distinct—a thesis now called “mind-body dualism.” He reaches this conclusion by arguing that the nature of the mind (that is, a thinking, non-extended thing) is completely different from that of the body (that is, an extended, non-thinking thing), and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other. This argument gives rise to the famous problem of mind-body causal interaction still debated today.[/quote]
You're not answering my objection. Why is there a problem with interaction in either description of the human person by Aquinas and Desacrtes? The same doubt should apply to both. Should we assume a priori that soul shouldn't unite with matter? And more precisely Descartes said the human person was two substances united as if to be one
For Aquinas, the soul and body are intimately connected in such a way that the soul is the "form" of the body. This means that the body achieves its particular nature and function through the soul. There's no need for an external "bridge" for interaction since the soul and body are intrinsically intertwined.
Instead of seeing the mind and body as two separate entities that need a mechanism to interact, Aquinas views the various capacities of the soul (e.g., intellect, will) as interacting seamlessly with the body. For instance, sensory perceptions inform the intellect, which in turn can lead to bodily actions driven by the will.
So Aquinas' hylomorphic dualism doesn't suffer from the "interaction problem" because it posits a more integral relationship between soul and body than does Cartesian dualism. The soul, in the Thomistic view, isn't a separate substance from the body but its very form, making their interaction natural and intrinsic.
If you still can't see the distinction, then I'm afraid I'm unable to provide further help.
That's just a word salad. Distinctions where none are necessary. You commit the scholastics' mistake. There is body and soul, one alive spirit.
You ask a question then don't understand the answer. It's philosophy 101.
You posit something there is no answer to: a formless piece of matter needing a soul? That's the solution to the invisible interaction problem? Descartes stated things simpler but I was uniting traditions but you want to separate for doubt's sake. There is no bridge between body and soul. No need. Descartes doubted too much on this matter
You would have to convince me that you have ever read Aquinas. You are drawing conclusions based on your understanding of the Thomistic approach to the way that the intellect knows material things, yet it seems clear that you have never read Aquinas on this question.
Ive read the Summa since i was 12 years old. My point was that for Descartes held the soul and body to be held by one ego, one I, so that they are perfectly united. Sometimes he says they are two substances, but clarifies that they are in perfect union. Wayfarer was arguing that Aquinas had a more subtle explanation of this, but prime matter and extention are not different so I apply Wittgenstein here.. The soul forms the body for Aquinas while Descartes the ego is completely united by the pineal gland with all the rest of the entire body. Any differences are in language and presentation, not concept
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pineal-gland/#BodySoul
The Church rejected Descartes but it's long overdue "ecumenically" -so to speak- for Cartesians and Thomists to see each other's avenues and understand the power of their explications on philosophy, physics, and theology. The language Aquinas was used to was different from the later Descartes, who tried to write philosophy in a new language. Descartes should never have been on the Index of forbidden books however. As I said above, a Thomist will say that his arm is not his soul and in fact he will say that the soul is simple and therefore nowhere in space (and yet the body is in space). Descartes "Passions of the Mind" makes clear that the human being, for him, was a complete personality, not a divided ontological contraction, and this is dispayed in practical reason
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-ethics/
While it’s true that the description of his position in terms of other schools of though might be a matter of debate, Descartes’ dualism is a fact of his philosophy.
Quoting Gregory
Not a point you will find support for in any of the sources you’ve quoted, as far as I can discern.
‘Cogito’ is purely the functionality of the ‘res cogitans’, whereas all the motions of the body, he describes in ‘mechanical’ terms with reference to ‘animal spirits’, although as the article notes, he made important errors even in terms of what was known in his day, all of which is of course completely superseded in our say.
This question turns out to be identical to the question whether existence is possible without time, which in turn is identical to the question of whether existence is possible without the diminution of the mode in which substance appears.
This is answered by meditation, through meditation can it be revealed that existence neither needs predicates nor subjects contradicting them, that is, through meditation can negation and time be absolved, not objectively, it remains a mystery why the diminution of physical substance should have its own independent rate except teleologically for our purpose, which even if it is truly there for our/life purpose does not answer the given mystery.
The comprehension of these as the actual questions we are concerned with when it comes to existence constitutes what I call contextualism, which is the only consistent form of skepticism, which accepts no application of concepts beyond their actual context, dividing into a. the actual empirical experiences from where they originate and b. the possible experiences of imagination, and of less importance but worth mentioning: b originate in a by exhausting all other possibilities (there are non except an infinite regress (saying that imagination can come from something outside of things which has their ground in experience is itself an imagination).
It can certainly not be denied that when it comes to all we know or have witnessed, that whatever it may have been happened in conjunction to that first person perspective, and so I ask 1. does existence possibly mean something independent of it, and if so could an essence be independent of it? Would it be conceivable that an essence and an existence were coupled without it? And how on earth could they mean something without the coupling?
I have proposed answers to these and the above questions in my own writing, but will refrain from a monologue regarding them, if someone knows why these are the actual kernel around which we may have meaningful argument, and have understood why I ask these questions the way I do I would further dig into it in this thread or elsewhere.
And thanks to the threadstarter for the topic!
However, your two above entries show no discernible relevance to the topic, which specifically mentions Aquinas. The digression into Cartesian dualism compared with Aquinas’ dualism at least carried a reference to the OP.
I am new to the forum, perhaps it is a norm that if a name of a philosopher is relevant and explicitly referred to in the OP that we do not comment about the conceptual bases and nature of the post unless we include the relevant name in our response? Or at least quote a section of the OP?
This is often the better way to respond to a post, as it would make it clearer how what I wrote relate to it, though it should certainly be obvious and discernible that it relate as it stands.
"Soul-as-substantial-form is the same as ego-connected-to-body-via-pineal gland. It's just a difference of words." That's absurd. What are you talking about?! :groan:
Quoting Gregory
Quoting Gregory
Where do they say this? If you claim to have been reading the Summa since you were 12, why can't you provide any citations for your opinions?
Here is what the SEP says:
[b]In the secondary literature, one finds at least the following interpretations.
1) Descartes was a Scholastic-Aristotelian hylomorphist, who thought that the soul is not a substance but the first actuality or substantial form of the living body (Hoffman 1986, Skirry 2003).
2) He was a Platonist who became more and more extreme: “The first stage in Descartes’ writing presents a moderate Platonism; the second, a scholastic Platonism; the third, an extreme Platonism, which, following Maritain, we may also call angelism: ‘Cartesian dualism breaks man up into two complete substances, joined to another no one knows how: one the one hand, the body which is only geometric extension; on the other, the soul which is only thought—an angel inhabiting a machine and directing it by means of the pineal gland’ (Maritain 1944, p. 179). Not that there is anything very ‘moderate’ about his original position—it is only the surprising final position that can justify assigning it that title” (Voss 1994, p. 274).
3) He articulated—or came close to articulating—a trialistic distinction between three primitive categories or notions: extension (body), thought (mind) and the union of body and mind (Cottingham 1985; Cottingham 1986, ch. 5).
4) He was a dualistic interactionist, who thought that the rational soul and the body have a causal influence on each other. This is the interpretation one finds in most undergraduate textbooks (e.g., Copleston 1963, ch. 4).
5) He was a dualist who denied that causal interactions between the body and the mind are possible and therefore defended “a parallelism in which changes of definite kinds occurrent in the nerves and brains synchronize with certain mental states correlated with them” (Keeling 1963, p. 285).
6)He was, at least to a certain extent, a non-parallelist because he believed that pure actions of the soul, such as doubting, understanding, affirming, denying and willing, can occur without any corresponding or correlated physiological events taking place (Wilson 1978, p. 80; Cottingham 1986, p. 124). “The brain cannot in any way be employed in pure understanding, but only in imagining or perceiving by the senses” (AT VII:358, CSM II:248).
7) He was a dualistic occasionalist, just like his early followers Cordemoy (1666) and La Forge (1666), and thought that mental and physical events are nothing but occasions for God to act and bring about an event in the other domain (Hamilton in Reid 1895, vol. 2, p. 961 n).
8) He was an epiphenomenalist as far as the passions are concerned: he viewed them as causally ineffectual by-products of brain activity (Lyons 1980, pp. 4–5).
9) He was a supervenientist in the sense that he thought that the will is supervenient to (determined by) the body (Clarke 2003, p. 157).
10) The neurophysiology of the Treatise of man “seems fully consistent […] with a materialistic dual-aspect identity theory of mind and body” (Smith 1998, p. 70).
11) He was a skeptical idealist (Kant 1787, p. 274).
12) He was a covert materialist who hid his true opinion out of fear of the theologians (La Mettrie 1748).[/b]
So you are taking one interpretation of Descartes and since that is how other Descartes articles on SEP interpret him, you think it must be correct. Is it because it is the majority opinion?
No, it's because I believe it the most accurate view. And I don't believe any of that supports this contention:
Quoting Gregory
What citations do you want? I said that some of what Aquinas wrote on this I don't find philosophically meaningful but when you take the meat from it, you have the same Descartes, a body and soul, with different presentations of it. Am I not allowed to take what I want from Aquinas or must I accept all of it. The spiritually significant reality is the truth of body and soul. Cartesians and Thomist use to condemn each other. Maybe they can live in harmony. But the SEP list given in above post shows how distinctions can lead to skepticism
Given that this thread is filled with your claims about Aquinas and your criticisms of Aquinas, one would expect to find that you have quoted or cited Aquinas at least one time. But you haven't. Not once. Therefore I conclude that you have no idea what you are talking about, especially given how incongruous your construals and criticisms are. Carry on, then.
Well we have the body on one side with the animal spirits and imagination, and then soul on the other. Soul has ethical obligations with how it uses it's body. So this ethical duty to use soul, animal spirits, and imagination in moral coordination. would amount to a personality. Which is why I provided the SEP link on his ethics on passions and such. This is what I meant by "ego". What did you mean by it?
At issue is NOT what I mean by it, but whether Descartes
Quoting Gregory
Which he does not, as the SEP link you provided amply illustrates.
No, the issue was what you and i mean by ego. Is it the soul, body, or both. And as i said the article gives the general opinion but goes on to cite all the other interpretation. Descartes believed we own a body and soul. Animal spirits are truly ours. But alas ive repeated myself over again. I dont know how you became a moderator
"Although the mind’s status as a substantial form may seem at risk because of its meager explicit textual support, Descartes suggests that the mind a “substantial form” twice in a draft of open letter to his enemy Voetius:
Yet, if the soul is recognized as merely a substantial form, while other such forms consist in the configuration and motion of parts, this very privileged status it has compared with other forms shows that its nature is quite different from theirs (AT III 503: CSMK 207-208).
Descartes then remarks “this is confirmed by the example of the soul, which is the true substantial form of man” (AT III 508: CSMK 208). Although other passages do not make this claim explicitly, they do imply (in some sense) that the mind is a substantial form. For instance, Descartes claims in a letter to Mesland dated 9 February 1645, that the soul is “substantially united” with the human body (AT IV 166: CSMK 243). This “substantial union” was a technical term amongst the scholastics denoting the union between a substantial form and matter to form a complete substance.
Surely Descartes maintains that mind and body are two substances but in what sense, if any, can they be considered incomplete? Descartes answers this question in the Fourth Replies. He argues that a substance may be complete insofar as it is a substance but incomplete insofar as it is referred to some other substance together with which it forms yet some third substance. This can be applied to mind and body as follows: the mind insofar as it is a thinking thing is a complete substance, while the body insofar as it is an extended thing is a complete substance, but each taken individually is only an incomplete human being...
This account is repeated in the following excerpt from a letter to Regius dated December 1641:
For there you said that the body and the soul, in relation to the whole human being, are incomplete substances; and it follows from their being incomplete that what they constitute is a being through itself (that is, an ens per se; AT III 460: CSMK 200).
The technical sense of the term “being through itself” was intended to capture the fact that human beings do not require any other creature but only God’s concurrence to exist. Accordingly, a being through itself, or ens per se, is a substance. Also notice that the claim in the letter to Regius that two incomplete substances together constitute a being through itself is reminiscent of Descartes’ remarks in the Fourth Replies. This affinity between the two texts indicates that the union of mind and body results in one complete substance or being through itself. This just means that mind and body are the metaphysical parts (mind and body are incomplete substances in this respect) that constitute one, whole human being, which is a complete substance in its own right. Hence, a human being is not the result of two substances causally interacting by means of contact and motion, as Gassendi and Elizabeth supposed, but rather they bear a relation of act and potency that results in one, whole and complete substantial human being."
https://iep.utm.edu/rene-descartes-mind-body-distinction-dualism/