Rediscovering Human Beings, Part 1
Today's entry was written by Edward Feser. Please note the views expressed here are those of the author, not necessarily of The BioLogos Foundation. You can read more about what we believe here.
Note: In yesterdays’ post, Fuller Seminary scholar Joel B. Green laid out some of the challenges to familiar concepts of the soul posed by both contemporary science and careful attention to the Scriptures. Today and tomorrow, philosopher Edward Feser—who comes at the issue from a Catholic tradition assumed in some circles to be uniformly and “simply” dualist in its thinking about the essence of humanity as created by God—presents exactly the kind of sophisticated approach to thinking about “human being” that Green suggests must be forthcoming. Feser affirms both the embodied and incorporeal aspects of our experience without suggesting that they are radically separated or two different “substances.” In part one, below, Feser lays out an argument for the immaterial character of abstract or conceptual thought, and suggests that we have lost sight of the way classical philosophers understood humans to be a seamless unity of the material and the immaterial.
Everyday experience tells us that a human being is the sort of thing that eats, sleeps, grows, reproduces, sees, hears, walks, feels, loves, hates, speaks, thinks, and chooses. Aristotle’s way of summing up this homely truth was to say that we are by nature rational animals. That we are animals is thus something we hardly needed Darwin to tell us. It is obvious from the fact that, like other animals, we have stomachs and skin, eyeballs and ears, limbs and teeth, muscles, brains, and the other organs necessary to carry out the activities in question. Like dogs and cats, apes and eels, we are essentially bodily creatures.Yet it doesn’t follow that we are mere animals, and our rationality is what sets us apart from the rest of the genus. Indeed, for Aristotle, and for Aquinas after him, rationality is unlike our other capacities in having an essentially immaterial and non-bodily aspect. The reason has to do with our capacity to form abstract concepts, which underlies all our other distinctively rational activities. It is because you can grasp what it is to be a man -- not just this particular man or that one, but any possible man, man as a universal -- that you can go on to form judgments like the judgment that all men are mortal, can reason from that judgment together with the judgment that Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal, and so forth.
There are several arguments that establish that this capacity for abstract thought cannot in principle be reduced to or otherwise entirely explained in terms of brain activity, even if brain activity is part of the story.
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