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CRITIQUE OF KANT ON THE HUMAN SOUL

Paul Gerard Horrigan, Ph.D., 2017.

Kant on the Human Soul

Kant’s transcendental idealism attacked the Cartesian-inspired rationalist psychology still


prevalent during his time, which had affirmed the substantiality of the human soul, a conclusion
departing from the cogito.1 In the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason
(Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781, second edition 1787) he maintains that the human soul is one
of the three ideas of pure reason (soul, world, God), having a regulative and not constitutive
function in knowledge as they never can have content rooted in sensible experience, not being
open to sensible intuition, and are rather the supreme models of unification that serve to regulate
the mind (“[a] The totality of our internal experience is unified into the idea of soul or permanent
substantial subject, which is the object of psychology ; [b] The totality of our external experience
is unified into the idea of world or totality of causally linked phenomena, which is the object of
cosmology ; [c] The totality of all objects of thought, unifying both internal and external
experience, is unified into the idea of God, a unification of all that is thinkable, which is the
object of rational theology. This is how Kant transforms the Cartesian innate ideas into pure

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“Kant conceives rational psychology as proceding on Cartesian lines and as arguing from the I think to the soul as
a simple substance which is permanent in the sense that it remains self-identical in time; that is, throughout all
accidental changes. In his view rational psychology must proceed a priori; for it is not an empirical science. Hence it
starts from the a priori condition of experience, the unity of apperception. ‘I think is thus the only text of rational
psychology, from which it must develop its whole system.’(I. KANT, Critique of Pure Reason, B, 401; A, 343).
“If we bear in mind the contents of the last chapter, it is easy to see what line Kant’s criticism will take. It is a
necessary condition for the possibility of experience that I think should be capable of accompanying all one’s
representations. But the ego as a necessary condition for experience is not given in experience: it is a transcendental
ego, not the empiricial ego. Hence while it is psychologically possible to think of it as a unitary substance, the
application of categories such as substance and unity cannot yield knowledge in this context. For this cognitive
function lies in their application to phenomena, not to noumena. We can argue to the conclusion that the
transcendental ego, as a logical subject, is a necessary condition of experience, in the sense that experience is
unintelligible unless objects, to be objects, must be related to the unity of apperception; but we cannot argue to the
existence of the transcendental ego as a substance. For this involves a misuse of categories such as existence,
substance and unity. Scientific knowledge is bounded by the world of phenomena…
“According to Kant, rational psychology contains a fundamental paralogism; that is, a logically fallacious
syllogism. This syllogism can be expressed as follows: ‘That which cannot be thought otherwise than as subject,
does not exist otherwise than as subject and is therefore substance ; Now a thinking being, considered simply as
such, cannot be thought otherwise than as subject ; Therefore it exists only as such, that is, as substance.’(B, 410-11;
cf. A, 348).
“That this syllogism is a paralogism follows from the fact that it contains four terms. That is to say, the middle
term, ‘that which cannot be thought otherwise than as subject’, is understood in one sense in the major and in
another sense in the minor premiss. In the major premiss the reference is to objects of thought in general, including
objects of intuition. And it is true that the category of substance applies to an object which is given, or can be given,
in intuition, and which can be thought only as subject, in the sense of that which cannot be thought as a predicate.
But in the minor premiss that which cannot be thought otherwise than as subject is understood in relation to self-
consciousness as the form of thought, not in relation to the object of intuition. And it by no means follows that the
category of substance can be applied to a subject in this sense. For the ego of pure self-consciousness is not given in
intuition, and so it is not a candidate, so to speak, for the application of the category.”(F. COPLESTON, A History of
Philosophy, book, 2, vol. 6, Image Doubleday, New York, 1985, pp. 284-285).

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forms – empty moulds, without content – of pure reason.”2). For Kant, the mind, striving for a
higher, supreme synthesis and unification in the ideas of pure reason than in the one arrived at in
the Transcendental Analytic, nevertheless, is working without content rooted in sensible
experience, and all attempts at a theoretical affirmation of the real existence and knowledge of
the human soul, the world, and God result in erroneous paralogisms, antinomies, and
contradictory reasonings.3 Kant in the Trascendental Dialectic endeavors to show that the
synthetic a priori judgments that make scientific judgments possible apply only to things that
appear (phenomena) and not to things-in-themselves or noumena. The goal of the
Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason would be to expose the transcendental
illusion of metaphysics that purports to go beyond the limits of sensible experience, wherein the
counterparts of the ideas of pure reason (soul, world, and God) are asserted to necessarily exist,
are theoretically knowable, as traditional rationalist psychology, cosmology and natural theology
would have us maintain. “Secondo Kant, gli argomenti con cui la ragione cerca di provare che
l’anima è una sostanza, che è semplice, razionale, ecc., sono sillogismi che peccano contro la
regola secondo la quale non si può mutare la supposizione del termine medio: sono paralogismi.
Si veda, per esempio, l’argomento: ciò che può essere pensato solo come soggetto è una
sostanza; ma l’io pensante può essere pensato solo come soggetto. Quindi l’io pensante è una
sostanza. È chiaro che in questo sillogismo il termine «soggetto» ha nelle due premesse

2
J. DE TORRE, The Humanism of Modern Philosophy, Southeast Asian Science Foundation, Manila, 1989, p. 119.
3
For Kant, “the mind does not accept its limitations and is not content to conceive merely the existence of things-in-
themselves. It seeks to conceive their nature – or, in other words, to fit them into the Categories that determine the
ways of its thinking. But these Categories are only applicable to and valid for things, not as they are in themselves,
but as they appear to us through sense-experience.
“Furthermore, the mind is driven by its nature to synthesize and unify whatever it deals with. Science does this
by reducing sensible phenomena to terms of the Categories, and thus understanding them. But the mind does not
stop here. It attempts to unify into higher all-embracing unities the syntheses introduced by the Categories. In so
doing it operates on a new level, above that of the understanding – the level, as Kant calls it, of pure reason, and the
absolute and ultimate unities it tries to establish are terms Ideas of Pure Reason.
“The Soul, the Universe, and God. Since our world displays three aspects – a thinking and perceiving subject,
which perceives and thinks under certain a priori forms of intuition and categories of thought; a world of
phenomena intuited and known under these forms and categories; and, finally, just the existence of objects of
thought in general – reason will strive to introduce absolute unity into each of these factors. So it is that we find
reason in search of a soul, as the unifying ground of the activities of the mind; of a universe of simple indivisible
substances causally and reciprocally interconnected, as the unifying ground of phenomena; and of a Supreme Being
or First Cause as the unifying ground of all thinking subjects and all objects of thought. But such unifying grounds
and explanations cannot be found within the activities of thought, in the manifold of phenomena or the field of
objects in general, of which they are supposed to be the least common denominators. Hence reason, in its work of
higher synthesis, tends to project into the realm of things-in-themselves the ultimate unities it tries to produce in
experience and tends to regard them as ideas corresponding to ultimate entities existing outside the realm of
experience altogether.
“This projection, however, is even more illegitimate than the tendency of the mind to apply the Categories
beyond the realm of sense-perception. The Categories, at least, are displayed in and supported by the sensible world,
but experience exhibits no such unities as reason is endeavoring to establish. On the contrary, the experienced world
conspicuously lacks them, and the mere fact that reason must try to accomplish these all-embracing syntheses is no
guarantee that they actually exist beyond experience. Nor is there any warrant for believing that more unity prevails
among things-in-themselves than reason can introduce into the experienced world.
“The Ideas of Pure Reason are then purely ideals, and, recognized as such, they are useful lines along which to
proceed in seeking to introduce the maximum unity possible into the work of the Categories on the sensible
manifold. But as ideals supposed to be realized outside the sphere of the understanding and of experience in a world
of things-in-themselves they are unjustifiable and unfruitful.”(B. A. G. FULLER, A History of Philosophy, Henry
Holt, New York, 1957, pp. 232-233)

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significato diverso: nella maggiore indica l’io noumenico, trascendente; nella minore indica l’io
fenomenico, trascendentale; quindi il sillogismo è errato, fallace.”4 “Secondo Kant, la psicologia
si fonda su un paralogisma, cioè su un argomento errato, in base al quale, passando dall’ordine
logico a quello ontologico, si trasforma la funzione unificatrice dell’io penso in una sostanza
pensante semplice, indipendente dall’esperienza e immortale.”5

For Kant, “the entire structure of rational psychology is built upon a crumbling
foundation. The typical case is the argument used to prove the substantiality of the soul. Kant
throws it into the following syllogistic form, in order to reveal the fundamental fallacy of the
ambiguous middle that underlies all psychological proofs: ‘That which cannot be thought
otherwise than as subject does not exist otherwise than as subject, and is therefore substance ; A
thinking being, considered merely as such, cannot be thought otherwise than as subject ;
Therefore it exists also only as subject, that is, as substance.’6 The logical defect in the syllogism
is that it contains four terms. In the major, ‘subject-that-is-thought’ is an objective designation
for an intuitively given, permanent substratum, to which the category of substance applies. In the
minor, however, ‘subject-that-is-thought’ means only the consciousness of the ‘I’ that thinks.
This is a non-intuitive awareness and, taken by itself, has only subjective weight. Even if it were
capable of an objective meaning, there would be no reason for applying to the thinking subject
the category of substance, since there is no observable element of permanence in mere
consciousness of my thinking process. To this extent, Kant accepts Hume’s account of the self.
The other arguments in rational psychology make a similar shift from objective categories to
merely formal, subjective notes.”7 “The rational psychology Kant has in mind is one that would
deduce conclusions a priori from the cogito. The psychology that attempts to draw knowledge
out of the thinking subject runs into a series of ‘paralogisms.’8 One of these, to take but a single
example from the four Kant discusses, the ‘paralogism of substantiality,’ consists in positing the
soul as a simple substance, which is, of course, what Descartes did in substantializing the cogito.
What is wrong with this is simply that the notion of substance is not supposed to be itself the
subject of an intuition, but only to serve as a unifying function. The cogito, declares Kant, cannot
be for itself the subject of an intuition, whatever Descartes may have thought. We know only an
empirical consciousness, entirely dominated by the form of time, attaining only to the knowledge
of successive phenomena, and a pure consciousness, which is only a logical subject, the pure
function of transcendental unification, not a thing, therefore not the object of an intuition of a
thing-in-itself. Thus neither the materialist nor the spiritualist philosophies are right in asserting,
respectively, that there is no soul or that there is a substantial soul, for neither has a legitimate
basis for making such assertions. The soul remains an idea, of which it is impossible to know
whether it exists or not; in any event, the reason is led to it necessarily, and there is nothing about
it that suggests that it is impossible for it to exist.9”10 While Hume’s phenomenalism reduces the
human soul to “a bundle of perceptions,” Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft reduces the human
soul to a pure idea of reason having the regulative function of unifying all one’s internal

4
B. MONDIN, Corso di storia della filosofia, vol. 2, Massimo, Milan, 1993, pp. 345-346.
5
P. DE VECCHI and F. SACCHI, Compendio di storia della filosofia, vol. 2, Bignami, Milan, 1993, p. 213.
6
I. KANT, Critique of Pure Reason, B 410-411.
7
J. COLLINS, A History of Modern European Philosophy, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1954, pp. 494-495.
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Kant uses this term to describe the effort to draw a conclusion from a principle like the soul, world, or God which
is in fact devoid of content, representing as they do only formal functions.
9
Cf. I. KANT, Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Dialectic,” Book II, Part 1, A 342, B 400ff.
10
É. GILSON and T. LANGAN, Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Kant, Random House, New York, 1964, p. 431.

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experience. “Philosophical psychology before the time of Kant was not a mere description of the
acts of consciousness. This psychology also offered a metaphysics of the soul and recognized in
the soul a true substance. Descartes spoke of a res; Leibniz, of an active monad. In like manner
Wolff and his school accepted the substantiality of the soul and demonstrated it by a series of
regressive conclusions, starting with the accidents and progressing to a real being in which they
inhere. Besides the substantiality of the soul, others attempted to prove its incorruptibility, its
immateriality, and its immortality. In all these attributes we can discover the true core of the
human person. And this person, at least so they thought, constitutes properly speaking the ego,
the subject of human activities.

“Only the English empiricists had called these doctrines into question. To Locke,
substance is an ‘I-do-not-know-what’; and to Hume the soul is only ‘a bundle of perceptions.’ To
Kant the soul is no longer a substance. He considered the demonstration of its substantiality as a
paralogism or false conclusion. This paralogism is based on a use of four terms within a
syllogism, because the ‘ego’ in the argument had two meanings. The proof that was customarily
employed for the substantiality of the soul ran as follows: Whatever is an absolute subject and
cannot be used as the predicate of judgments is a substance. The absolute subject of all our
judgments is the ego. The ego is therefore a substance. The ego, that is, the subject of all our
judgments is, however, according to Kant, the transcendental ego of our transcendental
apperception. As a result, it merely signifies a purely logical quantity. The conclusion, however,
conceives this logical quantity directly as an ontological, as a metaphysical reality. Herein lies
the fallacy of the argument (B 348 ff).”11

Howard Caygill writes that, for Kant, “the search for thinking substance or ‘the absolute
subject’ of ‘I think’ – ‘the sole text of rational psychology’ (CPR A 343/B 401) – is bound to be
disappointing. It assumes that the subject of ‘I think’ may be an object of knowledge, and
consequently extends the categories beyond their legitimate limits. Thus the soul is treated as if it
were a substance, as if it were simple, numerically identical and (in the A edition of CPR)
capable of standing in a relation to all possible objects in space. Although there are differences
between the 1781 (A) and 1787 (B) editions, the basic argument is not materially altered: both
maintain that the substantiality, identity and simplicity of the soul rests on a paralogism, or a
formally fallacious syllogism.

“The first statement of rational psychology criticized in CPR infers from the premises
that the absolute subject is substance and that I, as thinking being, ‘am the absolute subject of all
my possible judgements’ (CPR A 348/B 406) the conclusion that ‘Therefore I, as thinking being
(soul) am substance’ (ibid.). The paralogism here lies in assuming that the ‘I’ which
accompanies thought is substance; Kant claims, on the contrary, that ‘beyond this logical
meaning of the “I”, we have no knowledge of the subject in itself, which as substratum underlies
this “I”, as it does all thoughts’ (CPR A 350). The second claim of rational psychology, that the
thinking I is simple, is criticized for illegitimately transforming the ‘formal proposition of
apperception’ into a thinking subject: ‘through the “I”, I always entertain the thought of an
absolute, but logical, unity of the subject (simplicity). It does not, however, follow that I thereby
know the actual simplicity of my subject’ (CPR A 356). With the third paralogism of personality,
the identity of the soul is once again ‘only a formal condition of my thoughts and their
11
J. HIRSCHBERGER, The History of Philosophy, vol. 2, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1959, pp. 299-300.

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coherence, and in no way proves the numerical identity of my subject’ (CPR A 363). To infer
thus an identical subject is illegitimately to convert the premise of the formal condition of
thought into a substantive. Finally, the claim that the soul is in necessary relation to objects in
space once again confuses the ‘I think’ as a condition of thinking with the operation of a thinking
substance.”12

Answer to Kant on the Human Soul: Jacques Maritain on the Existence, Spirituality
and Immortality of the Human Soul

Jacques Maritain explains the existence, spirituality and immortality of the human soul in
the fifth chapter of his The Range of Reason as follows: “The Existence of the Human Soul. It is
of this immortality, and of the way in which the Scholastics established its rational certainty, that
I should now like to speak. We must of course realize that we have a soul before we can discuss
whether it is immortal. How does St. Thomas Aquinas proceed in this matter?

“He observes first that man has an activity, the activity of the intellect, which is in itself
immaterial. The activity of the intellect is immaterial because the proportionate or ‘connatural’
object of the human intellect is not, like the object of the senses, a particular and limited category
of things, or rather a particular and limited category of the qualitative properties of things. The
proportionate or ‘connatural’ object of the intellect is the nature of the sense-perceivable things
considered in an all-embracing manner, whatever the sense concerned may be. It is not only – as
for sight – color or the colored thing (which absorbs and reflects such or such rays of light) nor –
as for hearing – sound or the sound-source; it is the whole universe and texture of sense-
perceivable reality which can be known by the intellect, because the intellect does not stop at
qualities, but pierces beyond, and proceeds to look at essence (that which a thing is). This very
fact is a proof of the spirituality, or complete immateriality of our intellect; for every activity in
which matter plays an intrinsic part is limited to a given category of material objects, as is the
case for the senses, which perceive only those properties which are able to act upon their
physical organs.

“There is already, in fact, a certain immateriality in sense-knowledge; knowledge, as


such, is an immaterial activity, because when I am in the act of knowing, I become, or am, the
very thing that I know, a thing other than myself, insofar as it is other than myself. And how can
I be, or become, other than myself, if it is not in a supra-subjective or immaterial manner? Sense-
knowledge is a very poor kind of knowledge; insofar as it is knowledge, it is immaterial, but it is
an immaterial activity intrinsically conditioned by, and dependent upon, the material functioning
of the sense-organs. Sense-knowledge is the immaterial achievement, the immaterial actuation
and product of a living bodily organ; and its very object is also something half material, half
immaterial, I mean a physical quality intentionally or immaterially present in the medium by
which it acts on the sense-organ (something comparable to the manner in which a painter’s idea
is immaterially present in his paint-brush).

“But with intellectual knowledge we have to do with an activity which is in itself


completely immaterial. The human intellect is able to know whatever participates in being and
truth; the whole universe can be inscribed in it; this means that, in order to be known, the object
12
H. CAYGILL, A Kant Dictionary, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995, pp. 339-340.

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known by the intellect has been stripped of any existential condition of materiality. This rose,
which I see, has contours; but Being, of which I am thinking, is more spacious than space. The
object of the intellect is universal, for instance that universal or de-individualized object which is
apprehended in the idea of man, of animal, of atom; the object of the intellect is a universal
which remains what it is while being identified with an infinity of individuals. And this is only
possible because things, in order to become objects of the mind, have been entirely separated
from their material existence. To this it must be added that the operation of our intellect does not
stop at the knowledge of the nature of sense-perceivable things; it goes further; it knows by
analogy the spiritual natures; it extends to the realm of merely possible things; its field has
infinite magnitude.

“Thus, the objects known by the human intellect, taken not as things existing in
themselves, but precisely as objects determining the intellect and united with it, are purely
immaterial.

“Furthermore, just as the condition of the object is immaterial, so is the condition of the
act which bears upon it, and is determined or specified by it. The object of the human intellect is,
as such, purely immaterial; the act of the human intellect is also purely immaterial.

“And, moreover, if the act of the intellectual power is purely immaterial, that power itself
is also purely immaterial. In man, this thinking animal, the intellect is a purely spiritual power.
Doubtless it depends upon the body, upon the conditions of the brain. Its activity can be
disturbed or hindered by a physical disorder, by an outburst of anger, by a drink or a narcotic.
But this dependence is an extrinsic one. It exists because our intelligence cannot act without the
joint activity of the memory and the imagination, of the internal senses and external senses, all of
which are organic powers residing in some material organ, in some special part of the body. As
for the intellect itself, it is not intrinsically dependent upon the body since its activity is
immaterial; the human intellect does not reside in any special part of the body. It is not contained
by the body, but rather contains it. It uses the brain, since the organs of the internal senses are in
the brain; yet the brain is not an organ of the intelligence; there is no part of the organism whose
act is intellectual operation. The intellect has no organ.

“Finally, since intellectual power is spiritual, or purely immaterial in itself, its first
substantial root, the subsisting principle from which this power proceeds and which acts through
its instrumentality, is also spiritual.

“So much for the spirituality of the intellect. Now, thought or the operation of the
intellect is an act and emanation of man as a unity; and when I think, it is not only my intellect
which thinks: it is I, my own self. And my own self is a bodily self; it involves matter; it is not a
spiritual or purely immaterial subject. The body is an essential part of man. The intellect is not
the whole man.

“The substantial root of the intellect, which must be as immaterial as the intellect, is only
a part, albeit an essential part, of man’s substance.

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“But man is not an aggregate, a juxtaposition of two substances; man is a natural whole, a
single being, a single substance.

“Consequently, we must conclude that the essence or substance of man is single, but that
this single substance itself is a compound, the components of which are the body…or rather
matter, of which the body is made, and the spiritual principle, one of the powers of which is the
intellect. Matter – in the Aristotelian sense of prime matter, or of that root potentiality which is
the common stuff of all corporeal substance – matter, substantially united with the spiritual
principle of the intellect, is ontologically molded, shaped from within and in the innermost
depths of being, by this spiritual principle as by a substantial and vital impulse, in order to
constitute that body of ours…

“That is the Scholastic notion of the human soul. The human soul, which is the root
principle of the intellectual power, is the first principle of life of the human body, and the
substantial form, the entelechy, of that body. And the human soul is not only a substantial form
or entelechy, as are the souls of plants and animals according to the biological philosophy of
Aristotle; the human soul is also a spirit, a spiritual substance able to exist apart from matter,
since the human soul is the root principle of a spiritual power, the act of which is intrinsically
independent of matter. The human soul is both a soul and a spirit, and it is its very substantiality,
subsistence and existence, which are communicated to the whole human substance, in order to
make human substance be what it is, and to make it subsist and exist. Each element of the human
body is human, exists as such, by virtue of the immaterial existence of the human soul. Our
body, our hands, our eyes exist by virtue of the existence of our soul.

“The immaterial soul is the first substantial root not only of the intellect, but of all that
which, in us, is spiritual activity; and it is also the first substantial root of all our other living
activities. It would be inconceivable that a non-spiritual soul, that kind of soul which is not a
spirit and cannot exist without informing matter – namely, the souls of plants and animals in
Aristotelian biology – should possess a power or faculty superior to its own degree in being, that
is, immaterial, or act through a supra-material instrumentality independent of any corporeal
organ and physical structure. But when it is a question of a spirit which is a soul, or of a spiritual
soul, as the human soul is, then it is perfectly conceivable that such a soul should have, aside
from immaterial or spiritual faculties, other powers and activities which are organic and material,
and which, relating to the union between soul and body, pertain to a level of being inferior to that
of the spirit.

“The Spirituality of the Human Soul. Thus, the very way in which the Scholastics arrived
at the existence of the human soul also established its spirituality. Just as the intellect is spiritual,
that is to say intrinsically independent of matter in its operation and in its nature, so also, and for
the same reason, the human soul, the substantial root of the intellect, is spiritual, that is,
intrinsically independent of matter in its nature and in its existence; it does not live by the body,
the body lives by it. The human soul is a spiritual substance which, by its substantial union with
matter, gives existence and countenance to the body.

“That is my second point. As we have seen, the Scholastics demonstrated it by a


metaphysical analysis of the intellect’s operation, carefully distinguished from the operation of

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the senses. They adduced, of course, much other evidence in support of their demonstration. In
their consideration of the intellect, they observed, for instance, that the latter is capable of perfect
reflection, that is, of coming back entirely upon itself – not in the manner of a sheet of paper, half
of which can be folded on the other half, but in a complete manner, so that it can grasp its whole
operation and penetrate it by knowledge, and can contain itself and its own principle, the existing
self, in its own knowing activity, a perfect reflection of self-containing of which any material
agent, extended in space and time, essentially incapable. Here we are confronted with that
phenomenon of self-knowledge, of prise de conscience or becoming aware of oneself, which is a
privilege of the spirit, as Hegel (after St. Augustine) was to emphasize, and which plays so
tremendous a part in the history of humanity and the development of its spiritual energies…

“The Immortality of the Human Soul. The third point follows immediately from the
second. The immortality of the human soul is an immediate corollary of its spirituality. A soul
which is spiritual in itself, intrinsically independent of matter in its nature and existence, cannot
cease existing. A spirit – that is, a ‘form’ which needs nothing other than itself (save the influx of
the Prime Cause) to exercise existence – once existing cannot cease existing. A spiritual soul
cannot be corrupted, since it possesses no matter; it cannot be disintegrated, since it has no
substantial parts; it cannot lose its individual unity, since it is self-subsisting, nor its internal
energy, since it contains within itself all the sources of its energies. The human soul cannot die.
Once it exists, it cannot disappear; it will necessarily exist forever, endure without end.

“Thus, philosophic reason, put to work by a great metaphysician like Thomas Aquinas, is
able to prove the immortality of the soul in a demonstrative manner. Of course, this
demonstration implies a vast and articulate network of metaphysical insights, notions and
principles (relating to essence and nature, substance, act and potency, matter and form, operation,
etc.) the validity of which is necessarily presupposed. We can appreciate fully the strength of the
Scholastic demonstration only if we realize the significance and full validity of the metaphysical
notions involved. If modern times feel at a loss in the face of metaphysical knowledge, I fancy
that it is not metaphysical knowledge which is to blame, but rather modern times and the
weakening of reason they have experienced.”13

Étienne Gilson on the Consequences of Scotus’s Formalism on the Demonstrability


of the Immortality of the Human Soul

Scotus’s formalism had an immense influence on the essentialism of Suarez, and both
Scotus and Suarez influenced the rationalist essentialism of Leibniz and Wolff, these latter two
rationalists in turn having influenced the essentialism and formalism of Kant, especially during
the first half of his life. Étienne Gilson critiques the formalism of Duns Scotus as regards the
demonstrability of the immortality of the human soul as follows: “But why did Thomas Aquinas
maintain that the human soul, besides being the form of the body, is a substance in its own right?
This cannot be said of all forms. Not only the forms of minerals or of plants, but even the forms,
or souls, of most living beings are so tied up with their matter that, when for any reason the
composite disintegrates, the form ceases to be. These are the material forms, properly so called.
How do we know that the human soul is not one of these?

13
J. MARITAIN, The Range of Reason, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1952, pp. 54-60.

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“This is the moment when the consideration of intellectual knowledge, its cause and its
nature, becomes of paramount importance. To all external appearances, there is no reason that
the human soul should not be considered a common material form – that is, a form whose
existence endures as long as does the composite of matter and form of which it is a constitutive
element. Man has a body, and his soul is the form of his body; why should his destiny be
different from that of the other living beings whose structure is the same?

“This would be true if the human soul did not perform at least one operation besides
informing and animating the matter of its body. It knows; it exercises intellectual knowledge. As
such, it is truly an ‘intellectual substance.’ Now, to have intellectual knowledge is to be able to
become, and to be, other beings in an immaterial way. We we see a stone, the sight of it does not
turn us into a stony substance. If sense perception produced such an effect, we would not know
the stone, we would be it; we would be literally ‘petrified.’ This is still more true of intellectual
knowledge. For our intellect to know is to become the known thing by assimilating only its form,
not its matter, and this assimilation is made possible by the operation called intellectual
abstraction. Obviously, to know material objects in an immaterial way is an operation in which
corporeal matter has no share. This is the fundamental fact upon which the whole development
of metaphysical wisdom ultimately rests – namely, that there is intellectual knowledge and that
the very possibility of such knowledge presupposes the existence of an order of immaterial
subjects, knowing powers, and operations. Intelligibility and knowledge are inseparable from
immateriality.

“How this can be done is another problem. We are here concerned only with the fact that
this takes place. Now the argument of Thomas Aquinas is that only an immaterial substance can
perform immaterial operations and produce the kind of immaterial objects we call ‘concepts.’
The intelletual soul of man, then, must be an intellectual substance, a self-subsisting immaterial
reality endowed with its own essence and its own act of being. Such is not the case with material
forms – that is, those forms whose only function is to actuate a certain matter. The form of a
material substance is the act of a certain quantity of matter which it turns into a body; it is
nothing more; for this reason, the act of being of such a form belongs to the whole substance,
although it comes to matter from the form. In the case of man, on the contrary, to be (esse) is,
first and foremost, the act of the intellectual soul, and it is through the actuality of this
intellectual substance that it becomes the act of the body. This is what Thomas Aquinas intends
to express in saying that the human soul is a forma absoluta non dependens a materia – that is, a
pure form, not mixed with matter, which owes this privilege to its natural immateriality, itself an
effect of its resemblance and proximity to God in the universal hierarchy of beings. For this
reason, the human soul has an act of being of its own, which is not true of the other forms of
corporeal beings: habet esse per se quod non habent aliae formae corporales. Now to say this is
exactly the same as to say that, because the human soul is a substance in its own right, there is in
it a composition of what the human soul is and of its own act of being…14

“The immortality of the human soul. Few questions have raised more problems in the
minds of the commentators of Saint Thomas Aquinas because, having neglected one of the
essential data of the problem, they have placed themselves in a position in which it becomes

14
In I Sent., d. 8, q. 5, a. 2 (ed. P. Madonnet, pp. 229-230).

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impossible for them to understand its solution. Having eliminated the notion of being, which is
the cornerstone of the doctrine, they cannot help getting lost in most of its parts.

“In the writings of Thomas Aquinas himself there is really no distinct problem of the
immortality of the human soul. Assuredly, there always comes a moment when the question has
to be expressly asked, but when it comes, the problem has already received its answer. This is
visible in the Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II. After first demonstrating that, among the
intellectual substances, there is something in act and something in potency (chapter 53), and then
that to be composed of act and potency is not necessarily the same as to be composed of matter
and form (chapter 54), Thomas proceeds straightway to prove that ‘intellectual substances’ are
incorruptible (chapter 55). For if ‘intellectual substances’ are incorruptible, since the human soul
is an intellectual substance, it is incorruptible. Only an illusion of perspective can make us
imagine that there is any difference between the case of the separate intellectual substances, or
angels, and that of the nonseparate intellectual substances, human souls.

“The principle from which Thomas Aquinas deduced the incorruptibility of the
intellectual substances in general is their immateriality. Of its own nature, corporeal matter is
divisible, because it has quantity and is extended in space, having partes extra partes. The
decomposition or disintegration of the human body is therefore possible; in fact, it always takes
place sooner or later, and this event is called death. In the case of a being composed of soul and
body, such as man is, the disintegration of the body entails that of the being. Man dies when his
body dies, but the death of man is not that of his soul. As an intellectual substance, the human
soul is the proper receiver of an act of being. Having its own act of being, it itself is a being
properly so called (habens esse). This act of being belongs immediately to the soul – that is, not
through any intermediary, but primo et per se. Now that which belongs to something by itself,
and as the proper perfection of its nature, belongs to it necessarily, always and as a property
inseparable from it. This conclusion follows necessarily and it cannot be deduced in simpler
words than those of Thomas Aquinas himself: ‘It has been shown above that every intellectual
substance is incorruptible; now the soul of man is an intellectual substance, as has been shown;
hence the human soul is incorruptible.’15

“Thomas Aquinas accumulated many other arguments in favor of this all-important


conclusion. Most of them stress the incorporeal nature of understanding and of its act, and rightly
so. For if it is agreed that the soul exercises such an incorporeal operation, its existence as an
incorporeal nature is thereby established and its immortality is possible; but its immortality is
more than possible, it is certain, if this immaterial substance is actuated by an act of being of its
own.

“The reason the proofs of the immortality of the soul seem difficult to understand is that
all are tied up with the mysterious element hidden in the notion of esse. Some object that if the
soul is composed of essence and of an act of being, as indeed is the case, then it is not simple and
there is no reason why this composite should not be exposed to disintegration in the same way as
the composite of body and soul. But this objection overlooks the fact that what is at stake is the
immortality of the soul itself. In the case of man, soul and body enter the constitution of his
essence, so much so that, as is often said, man is neither his soul nor his body but the unity of
15
Summa Contra Gentiles, II, c. 79, #2.

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both. This is the reason that when the human body ceases to be actuated by its soul it
disintegrates and man himself likewise ceases to be. But the act of being does not enter the
composition of the essence of the soul as if its function were to make it to be a soul; its effect is
not to make it to be a soul, it is to cause the essence of the soul to be a being. Hence a soul is a
composite inasmuch as it is a substance, because, unless it had its own esse, it would not be a
being; but within this substance, the essence itself is simple, because, being immaterial and
having no parts, it cannot disintegrate. An ever-recurring illusion causes us to imagine that, in
being, essence is compounded with another essence, which is that of the act of being (esse); but
that which causes a thing to be does not cause it to be that which it is. It does not complicate its
essence, and if that which the act of being causes to be happens to be simple, then, of itself, the
being at stake is safe against the very possibility of decomposition.

“By far the worse obstacle to an understanding of the doctrine, however, remains the
impossibility of imagining the act of being. And, because it is not imaginable, many infer that it
is not intelligible. One does not need to go out of the school of Saint Thomas himself to find
philosophers and theologians who are convinced that the doctrine of the Master becomes vastly
improved if we eliminate from it this cumbersome and somewhat queer notion.

“Historical experience shows that such is not the case, and the problem of the immortality
of the soul provides an excellent proving ground in this respect. For instance…John Duns
Scotus. He never wasted any time refuting the Thomistic notion of esse. Scotus simply had no
use for it. In fact, he could not find in it any meaning. To him, entity (essentia) was reality itself.
If no cause has made it actually to exist, then it was only a possible; but after it had been made to
exist by some efficient cause, no act of being could add anything more to it. In Scotus’ own
words: ‘That an entity could be posited outside its cause without, by the same token, having the
being whereby it is an entity: this, to me is a contradiction.’16 In short, a thing cannot be made to
be twice, even by adding to it a so-called act of being.

“There would be no point in arguing the case. This is a problem in the interpretation of
the first principle. A Thomist feels inclined to think that Scotus is blind, but a Scotist wonders if
Thomas is not seeing double. Many differences between the two theologians follow from this
first one, but the only one we are now concerned with is its impact on the problem of the
immortality of the human soul.

“Since there is no act of being in the doctrine of Duns Scotus, what is going to happen to
the immortality of the soul? Simply this: it will cease to be demonstrable and will become a
matter of faith. As Christians, Scotus says, we believe that there will be for us a future life; we
therefore implicitly believe that the soul is immortal; we believe it, but we cannot prove it. And,
indeed, we say that the human soul is the form of its body, so that the substance ‘man’ is the
unity of matter and form. When this unity disintegrates on the death of the body, its elements
also disintegrate. This is visible in the case of the body. Before death, it was the body of a man;
after death, there is no man left of whom this piece of matter can be said to be the body. On the
other hand, if the nature of the soul is to be the form of a body, it cannot continue to be after it
has no body to inform. Hence if the form of the body survives its body, the fact is hardly less

16
É. GILSON, Jean Duns Scot. Introduction à ses positions fondamentales, p. 468.

11
miraculous than the subsistence of the eucharistic accidents after bread and wine have ceased to
exist.

“Duns Scotus himself does not go that far. He does not consider the survival of the soul
as a natural impossibility. On the contrary, he thinks that there are probable arguments in its
favor, which are even more probable than those in favor of the contrary conclusion; let us say
that the immortality of the soul is a high probability, but it is not a certitude. In the last analysis,
the immortality of the human soul is absolutely certain on the strength of religious faith alone. In
the doctrine of Duns Scotus, this first conclusion entails a second one: we cannot know that the
human soul is a substance in its own right, directly created in itself and for itself by God. And,
indeed, since the soul is not a complete substance endowed with an act of being of its own and
able to subsist apart from the complete substance, ‘man,’ it does not require to be created in
itself. Man, not the human soul, is the substance; man, not the soul, provides a distinct object for
the creative power of God.

“The decisive part played in this problem by the notion of esse, or act of being, is not a
historical construction; it is a fact. In the Summa Theologiae, I, q. 75, a. 6, Thomas proves that,
since the soul has an act of being of its own, it cannot be corrupted in consequence of the
corruption of another substance, be it even man. ‘That which has esse through itself cannot be
either generated or corrupted except through itself.’ For the same reason, such a soul cannot
come to be by way of generation (because no creature can cause actual existence), it can only be
created by God. Conversely, such a soul cannot cease to be by way of natural corruption. In
order to lose its act of being, it must be annihilated by God, for only He Who gave the soul
existence can take existence away from it. Naturally, as a Christian theologian, Duns Scotus
subscribed to all these conclusions no less firmly than Thomas. According to him, too, the soul
was a distinct substance, immediately created by God and able to subsist apart from its body.
Only, since he could not admit that the soul had an act of being of its own, the immortality of the
soul remained for him an object, not of knowledge, but of faith: sed haec propositio credita est et
non per rationem naturalem nota.17”18

17
É. GILSON, Jean Duns Scot, p. 487.
18
É. GILSON, Elements of Christian Philosophy, Mentor-Omega, New York, 1963, pp. 226-227, 230-234.

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