Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 227 - Stayin’ Alive - Thirteenth Century Psychology.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Stayin' Alive 13th Century Psychology. Unlike Bill Clinton, George Clinton, who founded the 1970s funk bands Parliament and Funkadelic, and is no relation as far as I'm aware, would probably have made a terrible scholastic philosopher. A more natural place for Clinton in the history of philosophy would have been late ancient Neoplatonism, as we can see from the fact that Parliament recorded a song called Everything is on the One. Still, Clinton had the appropriate qualifications to teach at a medieval university. He did, after all, bear the title Dr. Funkenstein. And it would have been a lot of fun to see the medieval arts masters devoting a disputed question to the definitions offered in the 1970 Funkadelic song, What is Soul? We find in Aristotle that soul is the form of the body that has life potentially, they might have said. But to the contrary, it is stated on the album Maggot Brain that soul is a ham-hawk in your cornflakes. In fact, medieval theories of soul were never quite that funky, but they are liable to strike us as odd nonetheless unless we have a thorough understanding of the sources that influenced those theories, which fortunately, we do. As we've been seeing, 13th century philosophers had access to an unprecedented range of texts, which came down to them from very different traditions. Reading a treatise on the soul from the early part of this century can be a bit like attending a Parliament Funkadelic concert. There are plenty of ideas on display, but the overall impression is rather chaotic. One of the most sophisticated authors of the time was William of Auvergne. He wrote a lengthy treatise on soul, which tries to reconcile traditional Augustinian ideas with material from Aristotle and Evasenna. One scholar has commented that the upshot is, To the extent that this is a fair judgment, it's not because William of Auvergne or other 13th century philosophers were slavishly following their sources without noticing the contradictions between them. They were selective and discriminating in their use of previous material and willing to criticize some of their most influential predecessors. William stresses at the outset of his treatise that he will not simply rely on the authority of Aristotle. Later, he says pointedly that one must often disagree with Aristotle, even if his views should be welcomed when they turn out to be true. When it came to the question, what is soul?, one particular problem was as obvious as a ham-hawk sitting in a bowl of cornflakes. Aristotle had indeed defined the soul as the form of the body, or as the body's perfection, using the Greek term entelecheia. He went on to present the soul as a set of faculties, most of which are exercised through the body. This makes a certain amount of sense if you think of soul, first and foremost, as a principle of life. It meant that Aristotle could ascribe souls to plants and animals, as well as humans, plants leading a life restricted to the functions of nutrition and reproduction, and animals displaying the further capacities of self-motion and sensation. If the soul is the body's form though, then doesn't it depend on the body for its continued existence? If so, then the prospects look pretty dim for a key tenet of Christianity, the survival of soul following the death of the body. Of course, it wasn't only Christians, and, while we're in a 1970s mood, the Bee Gees, who had a vested interest in staying alive. In late antiquity, Plotinus had criticized Aristotle's definition of soul precisely on the grounds that it would make soul dependent on body. Following Plato, he saw the soul as a substance in its own right, which is immaterial and has only a temporary relationship to the body. Christians could find the same attitude in ancient religious authorities like Augustine. On the other hand, Christians had reasons not to go too far in a Platonizing direction. Their religion centered on the incarnation of God, and was committed to the eventual resurrection of the body in paradise, so it was awkward to admit that the body is nothing but an incidental and unwelcome accretion onto the soul. The upshot is that medieval authors didn't just have an exegetical problem about what to do with Aristotle's definition of soul, they had a philosophical problem, how to preserve the human soul's exalted status as an immaterial substance while still saying that one human person is a union of soul and body. Nor was that the only problem they faced. I've just said that for Aristotle, the soul has a whole range of different powers, ranging from the lowly faculty of nutrition, which we share even with plants, to the distinctively human capacity for intellectual thought. How then to show that there is unity, this time not between soul and body, but within the soul itself? If your distinctively human part is your intellect, it might seem that your lower powers would be incidental to you, no part of who or what you really are. One might even wonder whether humans have a plurality of souls, one for thinking, a second for the functions we share with animals, and a third soul for the functions we share with plants. All of which relates to the aforementioned question of the afterlife. The lower powers of nutrition, reproduction, sensation, and self-motion can only be exercised through the body. Upon the death of our bodies, then, will we become purely intellectual beings? And if we were really intellectual beings right along, what would be the point of our taking bodies again at the resurrection? I've already mentioned the obvious authority figures of Aristotle and Augustine. But in discussions of the soul, it was a different author who, like the mothership descending from the rafters every night during the P-Funk Earth Tour, took center stage. This was Avicenna. We saw last time how Averroes's ideas provided an inspiration and foil for authors writing about physics in the first half of the 13th century. In psychology, that is, the study of soul, from the Greek συχη meaning soul, Avicenna may have been even more influential, to the point that his importance at first outstripped that of Aristotle. The earliest example of this tendency is in a work on the soul by Dominicus Gundesalvi, one of the translators who worked at Toledo in the 12th century. He quotes liberally from Avicenna while making only sparing use of Aristotle. Moving forward into the 13th century, we find something similar with the Oxford arts master John Blund, who did not die until 1248, but was already lecturing on Aristotle around the turn of the century. He too turned to Avicenna for help in understanding the soul. Friend of the podcast, Doug Hasse, has written that if Blund's writing on the soul reflects actual classroom discussion, then the textbook must have been Avicenna's on the soul, and not Aristotle's. John Blund recognizes the challenge presented by Aristotle's original definition of soul as the form of the body, and he embraces Avicenna's solution. Namely that the soul does exercise its powers through the body, but its relation to body is merely accidental. Blund connects this to a methodological question. Which branch of philosophy studies the soul? Insofar as the soul is studied through its incidental relation to the body, it falls under the purview of physics. But, insofar as one studies the soul in itself, one is doing metaphysics. Then comes a remark that may overturn our expectations about medieval philosophy, though these expectations have been overturned so often by now that they are as dizzy as the stage manager at a parliament funkydellic show. Blund asks whether the soul isn't a subject studied in theology. Yes, he replies, but only as concerns the soul's reward and punishment. The question of what soul is actually has nothing to do with theology. What we discover when we tackle the properly philosophical issue of the soul's nature, then, is that it is incorporeal. Blund shows this with a proof that indirectly goes all the way back to a dialogue of Plato's, the Phaedo. This just goes to show that whatever happens to your soul, at least your best arguments may live on well after your death. Like Plato, Blund argues that if soul is the principle of life, then being alive is intrinsic to soul. So, it is no more susceptible to death than a triangle is susceptible to having angles that fail to add up to 180 degrees. As an immaterial thing, the soul is not just immortal, but also simple, notwithstanding its numerous faculties which form a unity within it the way that species are unified within a single genus. On the other hand, only the rational aspect of the soul survives after the body's death, since it is the aspect whose power can be exercised without using the body at all. At this point, we might wonder when the theologians are going to burst through the door insisting that they want to have a say after all. They may complain that Blund is making the soul sound very much like God. It is simple, immaterial, and eternal. So how is it that the rational soul falls short of divinity? Blund doesn't consider this question as such, but he would have a good answer ready. Even though the soul is simple in comparison to the body, it is in some sense composed out of multiple aspects. Blund applies to soul a distinction taken from Boethius, contrasting being or substance in itself to the particular nature or essence that belongs to that substance. For instance, it is one thing for me simply to be, and another for me to be a human. A soul too exists as a substance, which takes on a nature, in this case the nature-appropriate two souls. To this minimal extent, it fails to be completely one. This idea that even an immaterial substance like the soul may be constituted from more than one thing is going to play a major role in 13th century psychology. For instance, Aquinas will say that it is thanks to this sort of composition that angels are distinct from God. Only God alone is perfectly simple, pure being with no qualifications or specifications added. Earlier in the century, the same basic idea is often expressed with the apparently rather paradoxical claim that incorporeal things are made of both form and matter. Obviously, the matter of something like a soul or an angel cannot be like the crude matter of bodies, but even an angel or soul does have matter. Here we can detect the influence of another thinker from the Islamic world, in this case a Jewish one, the 11th century philosopher Ibn Gabirol. He put forward a doctrine that attracted both admiration and condemnation from Latin medieval thinkers. We know his theory under the name of Universal Hylomorphism. This sounds a bit like it could be a parliament funkadelic song. I mean, they released one track called Funkentelehi, which in turn sounds like it could be Aristotle's description for the soul of a German radio operator. But in fact, Ibn Gabirol just wanted to say that everything, apart of course from God himself, is composed from both matter and form. Among other advantages, this would ensure that only God is perfectly simple. Where John Blund flirted with Ibn Gabirol's idea, and other authors, such as Philip the Chancellor and Roger Bacon, embraced it outright, it was firmly rejected by William of Auvergne. He was a dominant figure on the philosophical scene until his death in 1249, serving as the Bishop of Paris beginning in 1228. Towards the end of his life, he wrote a lengthy treatise on the soul, which he included as part of an even more massive treatise collecting his thoughts on a range of theological topics. As this context suggests, he does not follow John Blund in confining himself to a philosophical as opposed to theological treatment of soul. For instance, he immediately announces in a prologue that the natural philosopher cannot know that the soul is created in God's image, a belief that had inspired Augustine's treatment of the human mind in On the Trinity. William borrows heavily from Augustine, but Avicenna remains a powerful influence here too. One of William's borrowings from Avicenna is precisely to insist that soul is substantial rather than being only an accidental form of the body. In a phrase that will appear in other medieval treatments of soul, William states that the soul is a hok aliquid, or this something, Aristotle's expression for an independent and self-subsisting individual. It was for this very reason that other thinkers made soul a compound of matter and form, to ensure that it is a this something. But William thinks soul is a special kind of individual, which is free from matter. To prove this, he again makes use of Avicenna. He argues that if soul is capable of thinking about a simple and immaterial object of the understanding, then it must itself be simple and immaterial. This already rings Avicenna's bells, but the more obvious debt to Avicenna comes when William tells us to imagine a human in mid-air without anything available to his senses. This is Avicenna's famous Flying Man thought experiment, although William draws from it a slightly different conclusion. Avicenna asked us to recognize that the Flying Man would be directly aware of himself and his own existence even without any sensory input. By contrast, William simply observes that the Flying Man will be capable of thinking. It is apparently only by noticing that he is thinking that the Flying Man knows that he exists. Thus, William drops, or at least fails to emphasize, Avicenna's innovative proposal that every human soul has permanent self-awareness that is more fundamental than any act of thinking or sensation. Having said that, William lays great emphasis on the soul's guaranteed knowledge of itself. In a passage that evokes Augustine while also prefiguring a rather famous bit of Descartes' Meditations, William argues that the soul could never know that it does not exist, because the soul's knowing anything presupposes that it does exist. To deny the existence of soul and the impressively functional human body, moreover, would be like seeing an expertly steered ship and denying that it has a helmsman. To his credit, William anticipates the objection that may leap to mind for the modern reader. Some machines are capable of very impressive functions despite being lifeless and thus evidently having no souls. Using the example of a water clock, William says that this is no counterargument at all, because human intervention is needed to set up the machine and keep it functioning properly. He also singles out for criticism Alexander of Aphrodisias, the most important late antique commentator on Aristotle. William is appalled by Alexander's suggestion that the soul could somehow emerge from, and hence depend on, the physical states of the body. This must be wrong, because the soul is superior to the body and the better can never be generated by the worse. Besides, William adds, the soul is a substance, so it cannot just be an accidental side-effect of bodily composition. Whereas Alexander appears only as a whipping boy, Avicenna seems to provoke a more mixed response. Not only does William like Avicenna's idea that the soul has guaranteed access to itself, he also agrees with John Blund and Avicenna that the soul's relation to body is purely incidental. In fact, the body is nothing but an external tool for the body, like a musician's instrument or like a house or even prison in which the soul finds itself for now, but can eventually leave. On the other hand, William keeps an eye on the doctrine of the resurrection, insisting that humanity consists in both body and soul, not only the soul. He also chastises Avicenna for saying that the soul needs the body in order to be singled out as the individual soul that it is, and continues to depend on the body for this individuating function during its earthly life. William is further annoyed by Avicenna's idea that the soul is given to the body by an intellectual celestial being distinct from God, the so-called giver of forms. No, it is God himself who creates each soul directly, as an individual substance which is already differentiated from other souls. One interesting stretch of William's treatise concerns the question of how exactly, and when exactly, the soul comes to be in the body. William is particularly concerned with the advent of the rational soul, since it is only upon its arrival that the embryo can really said to be a human. This happens not at conception, but on the 46th day of the pregnancy. Prior to that, the lower soul parts may already be present, which causes William's some concern along the lines mentioned earlier. If the developing infant can have a vegetative or animal soul without the rational soul, then do these souls remain distinct throughout the human's life? If so, then each of us is walking around with two or even three souls. Perhaps George Clinton has that much soul, but for the rest of us it seems quite unlikely. William's solution to this problem, if you can really call it a solution, comes in the shape of a metaphor. When God finally gives the rational soul to the embryo, the lower souls are absorbed into it, like dimmer lights being swallowed up in a much brighter light. While this isn't particularly persuasive, William does make the more telling point that we cannot just say that there's a distinct soul for each power or faculty that a person possesses. Within sensation alone, there are five powers—sight, hearing, and so on—but no one would say that sensation involves five souls. Just as one and the same person can fulfill various governmental offices, so one soul can be responsible for various functions. If you'd prefer a groovier example, just think of how George Clinton was able to be the presiding genius for both Parliament and Funkadelic. William levels one more criticism at the previous tradition, which is worth mentioning because of the resonance it will have later on. He observes that the rational soul has not only an intellectual power, but also a power of choice—what Augustine called the will. Yet Aristotle and his followers in the Islamic world paid little or no attention to this crucial human capacity. William even seems to say that the will can operate independently of the judgments of intellect. This would make him an early proponent of what has come to be called voluntarism. And by the end of this series of podcasts on medieval philosophy, no one will be able to accuse us of paying too little attention to this. But here, we are leaving the study of the soul and getting into the area of ethics, a terrain I'll be exploring in a couple of weeks. Next time, though, I will progress to another science—metaphysics. We'll be talking about William of Auvers' contemporary Philip the Chancellor, among other authors, and learning about another pivotal medieval theory, the doctrine of transcendentals. And speaking of transcendent, let me close with one more tribute to Dr. Funkenstein, the disco fiend with the monster sound, George Clinton. If you've got faults, defects, or shortcomings like arthritis, rheumatism, or migraines, whatever part of your body it is, I want you to lay it on your podcast listening device and let the vibes flow through. Because philosophy not only moves, it can remove, dig? The desired effect is what you get when you improve your interplanetary funkstmanship and your knowledge of the history of philosophy without any gaps.