Arriving at the Mind-Body Problem

Leclerc On Mind and Matter

I’m accustomed to people tuning out if I talk too much chemistry. Sometimes if I think the details of a reaction are important, I will explain them because that’s how I’m trained to think, but I’ve been told by editors and audiences alike that they lose me there. I get it. If an economist starts with the jargon, I stop following too. The weird thing about philosophy is that I’m studying it now because I felt so left behind on the secrets of the history of thought. I wanted to catch up. But I’m discovering it is the same with philosophy. When I try to explain what enigmas need untangling, people say, “Why in the world do you care about that?” Heck, I ask myself the same thing daily. On one hand, there's a need to know. On the other hand, one can function just fine through breakfast, lunch, and dinner without addressing the bigger questions. This is one reason I hate philosophy—enough to devote these years of my life chasing it.

For new readers, here is a quick explanation about what I am doing. I am Catholic, a Thomist. My background is chemistry and, later, theology. As of last year, I am researching “elements” for a doctoral dissertation, hence the Substack name. This present project is a study of Ivor Leclerc’s work. This is the fourth in a series of posts examining his thesis that the philosophy of nature was abandoned in the seventeenth century and needs to be revisited, particularly the idea of “atoms.” One of the books I am reading is The Philosophy of Nature (1986).

I’m constantly reassessing the question, “Why care?” Why care if we call them atoms or elements or something else? Why care what the smallest particles of matter are and whether they are bodies or substances or eternal or infinite in number or indivisible or infinitely divisible? Why care if matter is considered to be a (to use Leclerc’s phrase) a physical existent? Why care if Aristotelian metaphysics applies to atoms? Why care if we have a materialist view of nature? Why care if we even have a philosophy of nature at all? Yet, I do, deeply. These questions get at who we are and what our place is in the universe.

Matter and Mind

Chapter 4 of The Philosophy of Nature dives into the question of “Matter and Mind.” In the first three chapters (see series), Leclerc makes the case that the philosophy of nature was abandoned in the seventeenth century as modern science escorted in a mechanical world view. The main change was that instead of the Aristotelian view of physically existing things as matter-form composites, the mechanical view depicted matter itself as a physical existent. This, in turn, led to the idea that matter particles, i.e., atoms, move deterministically, and that everything is made up of these particles. There was no need to think much about form, so modern science became focused on motion and mechanism. Hence, a philosophy of nature involving metaphysical considerations was replaced by mechanics. In Chapter 4, Leclerc discusses René Descartes and dualism in the latter part of the seventeenth century, which led to a bifurcated view of nature. Anything non-physical was categorized as a physical existent alongside matter.

This view not only led to a complete bifurcation of the universe, but it also led to the modern philosophical mind-body problem (54). Descartes’s dualistic ontological system cast the physical as a res extensa (extended thing) and the mental as res cogitans (knowing things). The former refers to matter. The latter includes souls, minds, and spirits. This depiction of the universe fit well with the new atomism in that it relegated philosophy, metaphysics, Aristotelianism, and religion to old knowledge and made way for the new knowledge called “science.” When anyone today has the idea that “faith” and “science” are divided, it is because the philosophy of nature was abandoned to a dualism that depicts matter as a thing and soul as a thing, but this only led to the mind-body problem.

Neoplatonism and the Mind-Body Problem

If you’ve followed the faith and science conversation—it has been my life’s work for the last fifteen years—then you know that materialism and dualism are often the culprits blamed for the crisis of modern philosophy. It seems Leclerc doesn’t even consider modern philosophy as true philosophy of nature because it is more a word-game to deny any comprehensive philosophy of nature at all.

Leclerc (47-48) goes into more detail about:

1. how dualism derives from Neoplatonism.

2. how dualism is tied to the mind-body problem.

I have not put all this together before now, and this historical thread gives me a new appreciation for the current problem. Neoplatonism? Why that?

Neoplatonism is the philosophical system developed by Plotinus in the third century. He borrowed Plato’s idea of “forms” but with a more transcendental interpretation. He was a Greek philosopher, but his ideas influenced Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, particularly the thought of St. Augustine. His theory had three realms: 1) the One, which is the source of all things, 2) nous, which is the realm of pure thought or intellect, and 3) divine intelligence. In this system, the individual soul is an intermediary between the material world and the divine realm. The Renaissance of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries resuscitated Neoplatonism and, increasingly, rejected Aristotelian philosophy of nature. To examine what went wrong with modern philosophy, we must clarify why Neoplatonism is different from Plato and Aristotle’s philosophy of nature.

For Plotinus, the One is the source of all plurality of existence, in contrast to Plato who held three sources of plurality: 1) Forms, 2) matter as the recipient of Forms, and 3) the Divine. Why would one source of all plurality instead of three sources make such a critical difference? And how does the individual soul fit in here? Those are indeed my questions!

My own words here, but it seems that a single source forces a conception of the universe that cannot be composite, and that leaves little explanation for a human soul. Leclerc explains the logical procession, and I want to unpack and comment on his words, so I’ll quote him first, just one (really dense) paragraph:

In the Neoplatonic scheme the first derivative from the One is nous, “mind, intelligence, thinking.” For Plotinus, thinking is the enaction (energeia) of being, and therefore noema, “thought,” that which is known, the object of thinking (namely the plurality of Platonic Forms) is identified with being. Thus, nous is the primary being, manifesting a plurality of beings, the Forms. From nous proceeds psyche, “soul”—a universal soul which is pluralized into individual souls. The function of soul is not thinking, knowing; the function of soul is governing and ordering. The universal soul governs and orders all things, and individual souls govern and order particular things. Thus, the individual souls are individual Forms of natural things, acting in things, governing them. That is, the Forms, as souls, are the principles of agency of things, which is to say, the principles of the “being” of things. This correlation of being, form, acting, soul is a most important feature of Neoplatonism.

I see this as a linear causal chain:

the One—>nous (intellect)—>Forms (being)—>psyche (souls, plurality of being)

Where are bodies in this scheme? It is just passive stuff. If (nous) proceeds from the One, then intellect actualizes matter. In the case of living things, intellect gives life to matter. This means that what exists physically (i.e., the physical existent, as Leclerc calls it) does not proceed from the ultimate source but from nous (intellect or mind), which derives from the ultimate source.

By “plurality of being” we mean all the individual things that exist (a dog, a tree, a man). These all come from nous which ‘thinks’ the Forms. (Imagine a chef thinking about how he will create a new dish.) From nous, comes what the Greeks called psyche, which means “soul.” The soul in this context is not the same as how Aristotle refers to it as an animating force, but as a governing principle. World soul, as Forms, governs the world. Individual soul, as psyche, governs the individual. Hence, motion and life flow from and are governed by these souls. In this scheme with matter omitted, the physical body (soma) has no source of its activity except from the Form (soul). (Matter is like the ingredients on the chef’s table, except the ingredients are inert and have no powers or properties of their own.) This unidirectional procession of governance renders bodies as passive, which means that the matter of a living body can only be moved into somatic states that the soul senses. The significant step here is that sensation is not a bodily function but completely an act of the soul in which the bodily configuration forces itself on and affects the soul. The soul feels pain, senses color, and so on.

Why Aquinas (per Aristotle) Objected

Leclerc points out that Aquinas (in the thirteenth century) recognized Aristotle's objection to such a scheme in his De anima, and Aquinas thus saw the problem with Augustine's acceptance of the Neoplatonic doctrine (48). The Latin word for psyche is anima, but as I indicated above, the two words are not necessarily synonymous. Aristotle defends a different view of matter and form, known as hylemorphism. Instead of soul proceeding from mind and the One such that Platonic Forms exist independent of matter, Aristotle, following Plato but improving on the idea of Forms, described a scheme more fitting to our experience and observation. Bodies are not passive, and the soul does not sense. Matter is “formed” by the (lower case) forms and is disposed to the forms, such that matter and form work together to constitute a composite being.

In Aristotle’s framework, the body and soul function as a unity. The body can sense (hear, see, smell, taste, touch) and have somatic states that provide data to the soul, which can in turn respond and act. For humans who have rational souls with the power of intellect and will, sensory data can inform the soul, which can in turn guide the body. This is why humans can override irritation if they are hungry or tired. For Aristotle, neither matter nor form are self-subsistent as physical existents. The self-subsistent organism is alive and active as one integral organism (49). The soul is the animating principle, and the body is in potentiality to motion and sentience. Aquinas would show how this framework fits with the theology of creation. It accounts for the creation of both matter and soul.

But Aquinas Was Rejected

The mind-body problem of Descartes, then, stems from a return to Neoplatonism and a failure to adhere to Aristotelian philosophy of nature as furthered by Aquinas. The problem goes as far back as Homer, the theological poet who lived before the Presocratic philosophers. As a bit of history, the Rennaissance philosophers were repeating the move of the Presocratic philosophers. The Rennaissance, after all, was a return to Greek thought. They went back to the time before Aristotle. The Presocratic thinkers sought to avoid invoking gods and myths as the theologizing poets, such as Homer and Hesiod, in favor of more natural explanations. Hence, they are usually referred to as the first natural philosophers. But there were controversies then just as there are now, controversies that the philosophers and scientists of the seventeenth century did not seem to grapple with sufficiently.

The Greek word psyche for Homer meant “breath of life” (46); again, we see the words for ‘soul’ are used equivocally. Homer’s concept referred to the vital principle of life. Another word was used for emotion and motion, thymos. In the Platonic and Neoplatonic framework, however, there was no thymos, so the idea of motion and emotion got swept into the idea of psyche, leaving matter out. In addition, nous (intellect) was assigned in the Neoplatonic scheme to the governing soul, so rational thought among humans also was also swept under the rug of psyche. All the faculties of sense and intellect were thus unified in the soul, the Form, of the individual, leaving the body (soma), as we said, passive.

Fast forward to the seventeenth century. The idea of matter as a physical existent (as explained previously in this series) had already taken hold because the atomos of Democritus was borrowed to describe the particles of matter being discovered. When Descartes suggested that mind stands as a physical existent in contrast to matter, he could not completely adopt the Neoplatonic system and deny the importance of matter. So, he named two physical existents: 1) matter, per atomism, and 2) soul, per Neoplatonism. This dualism led to the mind-body problem. Why?

Well, the heretofore parenthetical mention of our chef illustrates the point quite well. No one goes into the kitchen assuming the ingredients are piles of inert matter without their own properties. The reason we have words like “cooking” or “chef” at all implies that we have learned how to manipulate the properties of different material bodies according to their natural functions. This is also precisely the reason we now have “science,” something I have argued for per Fr. Jaki’s thesis that science was born of Christianity for over ten years now, but the purpose of this post is not to get into that.

The mind-body problem as we know it today is that it is no longer clear to modern philosophers or scientists how the mind affects the body, or the body affects the mind. This is why we have people wondering if love is just a chemical arrangement of the brain, or if free will is an illusion, or whether artificial intelligence is conscious. Modern scholars are back to wondering how the body and mind (rather, intellect) are coordinated and united, but that is because of the unnecessary bifurcation of the universe and the human that dualism delivered. This commitment to dualism is also why, I suspect, people now tune out when a philosopher starts talking. Modern philosophy does not relate to actual experience. Don’t we all know that we are not two things but one?

So, Is Seeing a Being?

No, of course not. I was delighted to read that Leclerc invokes Aristotle's distinction between the different respects in which something can exist (45, 49-50) from Metaphysics in Book V where Aristotle gives a list of definitions (5.7.1017a7-1018a19). The difference in accidental and essential being is that an accidental attribute exists but belongs to a being that exists essentially, such as when we say a dog is brown. Brown exists as a color of the dog; it is predicated of the dog. It’s real. It exists. It’s just not a thing unto itself. Things exist essentially when the being is the figure of predication; the dog exists and is a being. The dog is a self-subsistent individual. Being brown is not. We can truly say that brown and the dog both exist, but not in the same respect. They do not have the same ontological status. The dog is a subject, and brown is an attribute.

Similarly, “mind” and “body” do not exist in the same respect either. The modern question regards the ontological status of each. In Neoplatonism, body is neither an essential nor accidental being. It contributes nothing to the individual subject but is passively moved by it. In Aristotelian hylemorphism, only the integral (matter and form) individual being exists essentially. The body is one aspect of the individual being, as is the soul, which is the form of the body. Cartesian dualism was already committed for the first time ever to the idea that matter is a physical existent, i.e., an essential being, and borrowing from Neoplatonism, the soul/mind/intelligence/sensation also became regarded as a non-physical essential being, like a spirit. With this move, it was no longer clear how body and mind operate as a unity. That is the long and short of it.

Leclerc begins and end Chapter 4 of The Philosophy of Nature with the example of seeing something red, like an apple. If the mind is the physical existent, then color is in the mind, as is sight and, for some, even the apple itself, all in the mind. What is real is only in the mind. And if matter is the physical existent, then the atoms agglomerated are all that exist. But sight is not a being, and anyone knows this, for the statement is absurd. Sight is an attribute, a function, of an individual being who senses another object. Even if we say, “I spy with my little eye something red,” we don’t mean that our body plays no role while our soul hovers out there owning red. I could go into electromagnetic radiation and how the apple truly is red and sensed by our eyes, but that is another topic.

Leclerc says this confusion born of dualism is born of both atomism and Neoplatonism and unfortunately is now “our philosophical inheritance” (56). Understanding how we got here shows why the questions are of great importance to how we view ourselves and our place in the universe.

In my studies I have encountered accusations from modern philosophers that defending Aristotelian-Thomistic thought is merely an effort to save our Catholic theology. I’ve been warned I would be shunned if I remained a loyal Thomist. I’m not worried. The defense we now must give is to save our sanity, to quote the apologist Frank Sheed. Aquinas recognized that Aristotelian natural philosophy fits with Catholic theology and devoted much of his work to demonstrate the unity. The work today is to show that Aristotelian natural philosophy and Catholic theology are also necessary to make sense of our moment in history with modern science. That is the work I want to do because—using my senses and observational skills as well as my informed intellect—I have granted assent to the commitment that truth does not contradict truth. There are no ghostly eye-monsters doing my seeing for me in my world.