A Very, Very Brief Introduction to the Soul
Because if it was any longer, it would be a Very Short Introduction
Since I’m not facing my own death by hemlock, I can’t very well begin a discussion of the soul with a beautiful story, so if that’s the approach you would like, well, I can’t recommend it enough (read the Phaedo). Neither will I begin with considering all the prior opinions of the soul, since that would take a lot more time than I have. But I also won’t simply begin with a definition from the Catechism, because while faith and divine revelation are wonderful at telling us true things, we should still seek to know true things because knowing is the sort of animals we are. You know, presuming we have a soul. Or perhaps even if we don’t, since until we consider the soul in its essence, can we really know if we have one? So now that I’ve discussed what I’m not doing, allow me to take a sudden shift that does in fact have a point.
One of my top 5 kid shows for young children is Elinor Wonders Why on PBS Kids. I love that it taught my kids to make nature observations and have nature notebooks. I love how the kids ask questions from nature and my kids copy that. But most of all, I absolutely love the episode when the little bat child (a literal bat, not Batman’s kid) finds a rock that he names Rocky and makes his new friend. But at snack time, Ari gets worried that he doesn’t know what to feed Rocky, and he begins to wonder how he can take care of his new friend. In order to discover what to do, he and his classmates observe other living things (plants, animals) to see what they do, and through these observations, the students decide the rock is not a living thing. It’s a fantastic episode that I like to suggest to my students because it’s not too far from Aristotle’s approach in De Anima.
When we ask about the soul we are asking what living things have in common.
That is to say, when we ask about the soul we are asking what living things have in common. And we first realize that there are such things as living things because, as the Laval Thomist Charles de Konick put it, “the first notion of life, that to which one must alway return, comes to us first and principally from the internal experience of living” (p. 9). We know at least in a hazy way what living is because we are alive; because each of us has the singular experience of being alive and the operations we experience as a result of that, when we see other beings perform those operations, we recognize that they too have this life in them. But experiencing that we have a soul is a very different knowledge than the knowledge of what the soul is—and it is this knowledge of its nature that I propose we dive into here at Stay at Home Summa.
So, what is it to be alive? Truly ask yourself that question. What is living? Or to be more specific: how can you tell if something is alive or dead? You can get a sense for how we know this in the Mister Rogers episode with the goldfish: even small children can see that the goldfish has died because it no longer does goldfish things, and specifically because it no longer is moving in the way we know a goldfish to move. The difference between living things and nonliving things is that living things move themselves. And yes, certainly rocks go down (and so do you), but that’s more because bodies go down due to creepy things like gravity. We fall as bodies, but we get up as human beings, I believe the saying goes.
We fall as bodies, but we get up as human beings, I believe the saying goes.
Living things move. That’s something common to all natural living things, and why I find myself frequently explaining to a small boy that in fact motorcycles don’t need to eat dinner. But there he makes an obvious mistake—it moves so it must need food, because I move and I need food. And in a way, gas is kind of like food. But, here we get to a key point—a motorcycle, unlike even a sunflower, does not have its own proper motion, motorcycles have an artificial motion. They, like rocks, are not self-movers.
To be fair, “thing that moves its own body” isn’t typically what we think of when we think of souls today. When you hear the word soul you likely think of what is in heaven, or the thing you can sell to the Devil if you’re German, or something of an existential nature. And if you aren’t thinking that the soul is the actuality of a natural body having life potentially, well, to be honest I don’t blame you (De Anima 412a19-21). Plato didn’t call it that either, if it makes you feel any better. But what Aristotle is doing here in that definition is identifying what is common to living things from sunflowers to polar bears to you and me: we are natural, we are the sort of things that can do living things, whether those things be eating or growing or reproducing or sensing or talking or loving, and we do those things because of some internal actuality that lets us do those things—and that thing is a soul.
What in the world would prompt me (well Aristotle) to claim both sunflowers and human persons and every sort of being in between have souls?
Now, you might point out that you did Catechism in A Year with Fr. Mike last year, so you’re pretty confident in saying that our soul has something to do with us getting to heaven, and it does not seem that Jesus was especially worried about sunflowers getting to Heaven, so what in the world would prompt me (well Aristotle) to claim both sunflowers and human persons and every sort of being in between have souls? This is a great question.
So by soul here, we have to make a distinction—while all living things have a soul (yes have, because we are hylomorphists who believe that you and I are each sunflower and polar bear are a soul-body composite, an issue I promise to get into in this series via a vis dualism and materialism, but not yet!), that doesn’t mean all things have the same kind of soul. After all, sunflowers eat and grow and turn towards the sun, and I do all those things and go running and hear music and feel happy and write substacks and love my family and lots of other things. And I presume polar bears eat and swim and maybe feel pleasure at eating and don’t write substacks.
All living creatures are called so because they have vital actions (self motion), and those motions terminate in the particular living being.
What is notable here is that all these actions are immanent actions (using immanent in a broader, more neo-scholastic sense than St. Thomas uses it, ht: Marie George)—they have an object to which they are directed, but it’s the creature doing the acting in which the action terminates. In plainer terms, when my sunflower grows, the sunflower itself is where the action occurs. When I see a painting, while that painting is the object I see, the terminus of my act of seeing is in me. All living creatures are called so because they have vital actions (self motion), and those motions terminate in the particular living being. So plants, whose life is objectively more hidden than other living beings, eat to sustain themselves and also to grow. And yes, I know you watched a documentary or read a book about how plants talk to each other, but that’s really a case of bad analogy, and a soapbox I am going to step off of at the moment in the object of not going down that road. So plants have these two sorts of immanent motions. But this sort of soul does not exceed the creature’s matter.
Animals have a range of powers, but what they have in common is something beyond the growth and nutrition that plants have—they have “awareness,” or sensation of the world. Their sensation might be more limited, such as the case of a sea anemone, or have a much greater extent as in the case of of this octopus leaving the ocean to hunt in tide pools. But things which can sense can also have desires, at least in some way. Clearly the octopus wants food, though perhaps not even in the way my children do. But its senses have prompted it to move to achieve the end of hunger pains and pleasure of being fed.
My children, and myself as well, are not simply limited to our sensitive appetites. We can also desire the pleasure of a good story. We can even desire food not simply as pleasurable to our senses, but we can feast.
But speaking of my children and snacks, is their desire for a “nack” any different from the octopus? In a way, no, both are prompted by their sensations to seek out food in many rather impressive ways. But, there is a key difference here: an octopus has never to my knowledge said “yum yum yum in my tum tum tum” upon eating something close to its bodyweight in blueberries. My children, and myself as well, are not simply limited to our sensitive appetites. We can also desire the pleasure of a good story. We can even desire food not simply as pleasurable to our senses, but we can feast. We can throw a party and celebrate our food, and know we are doing that. And this points to our rational powers: we can know and will things abstracted from the particular. My older children, though they are “below the age of reason” already can know in an indistinct way that all adult males are at least potentially daddies: daddy fish, daddy frog, daddy bear, daddy polar bear, and of course their own dad. They can know that a different particular instances of triangles are in fact all triangles, though perhaps they might not know this as clearly as Euclid will teach it to them.
This was a lot in a very, very short introduction. But if you want to go into more depth, let me recommend the following Thomistic Institute lectures:
For beginners, check out the Aquinas 101 episodes on the soul here!
Descartes and “The Aristotelians” on the Soul as the Life of the Body
Humans and Other Animals: Are We Rational Enough to Know the Difference?
More than a Body, More than a Mind: The Human Person in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas
And check out their other recordings as well; the Thomistic Institute is doing great work teaching all kinds of fun things.