Animal Psychology

Descartes proposed envisaging animal and human bodies as ‘hydraulic machines’. He held that human beings also have immaterial souls, which interact with the body using the pineal gland as a kind of joystick – he was unaware that other animals also possess a pineal gland.Footnote ⁶ The illusion that animals are mere machines has been pervasive. I recall seeing newspaper headlines roughly 20 years ago proclaiming: ‘Scientists have shown that animals are conscious,’ and thinking, ‘We knew that in the 13^th Century.’ Around the same time, as I recall, adverts promoting safe sex were shown on TV around the 9 o'clock watershed: we saw rhinoceroses copulating and swans courting, and the voice-over declared: ‘They don't have emotions, they don't make commitments; you're different.’ The advertisers must have imagined their slogan could be convincing, even though animals do have what Aquinas called passiones animae,Footnote ⁷ and some animals do bond in a fairly loyal way. Richard Dawkins seems to envisage animals as deterministic machines, but so complex are the higher animals that it is convenient to pretend that if, say, a tiger is in the room it will want to eat you.Footnote ⁸

The papers collected here show a better awareness of the psychologies of the higher animals, including their real wants, and note how, as Candace Vogler expresses it, ‘Aquinas is exquisitely sensitive to the difficulty of describing and theorizing the highest forms of animal intelligence.’ She refers to Aquinas’ classification of animals into those that lack memory, those that possess it, and those that both possess it and can be trained; while this classification is not fine-grained enough, we need not read his story in a crass way. Daniel De Haan mentions animals’ receptivity to the ‘affordances’ in their environments, and argues that Aquinas recognised nonhuman animal actions as purposeful and (in an ‘imperfect’ way) ‘voluntary’. Janice Chik Breidenbach also refers to how empirical sciences and commonsense observations support the Aristotelian-Thomistic account of the higher-level animals’ extensive range of psychological capacities, including certain modes of cognition, emotions, and voluntary movement.

For Aquinas, as for Aristotle, a living thing is not a machine. Remarkable abilities flow from the souls, i.e. the forms of life, animals possess. On the perceptive side, they – and we – possess:

• • The exterior senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight;Footnote ⁹

• • A sensus communis to coordinate data from the exterior senses;

• • An imagination to retain sense experiences;

• • An ‘estimative sense’ to grasp the significance of things and situations;

• • A ‘sense memory’ of significances, largely inherited/instinctive, that feeds into the interaction between coordinated sense-data and the estimative sense.

On the responsive side they – and we – possess:

• • Six ‘concupiscible passions’ – inbuilt likes and dislikes that translate into drives of attraction or repulsion towards perceived goods and evils, and come to rest in the enjoyment of goods, or result in being pained by evils suffered;

• • Five ‘irascible passions’ aroused by challenging situations, so that animals can meet challenges with courage born of the hope for success, or lash out with anger when afraid of some danger they despair of escaping.Footnote ¹⁰

ST, I-II, q. 13, a. 2 is illuminating: in obj. 3 Aquinas recognises that if hunting dogs pursuing a deer (i.e. through a dense forest) come to where the path divides into three, they might smell two of the three paths, and, if they don't pick up the deer's scent, will run down the third path without smelling again. In the reply Aquinas attributes this sagacity not to ‘reason’ and true choice (electio) but to a ‘natural inclination towards certain very structured processes’, an inclination granted by the Creator's art. The estimative sense enables animals to interpret their environment, but does not enable the open-endedness that reason enables.Footnote ¹¹

Daniel De Haan points out that Aquinas does not only regard animals as psychological agents; he sees them as possessing non-rational analogues of ‘enjoyment, intention, choice, deliberative consent, use, and command’, being ‘determined to a finite variety of particular goods of action and passion that are all confined to their environmental niche’. Dr De Haan points out that we need to develop Aquinas’ account of both human and non-human animals’ sensory abilities and agency in the light of recent research: we need a richer account of the ‘estimative sense’, and must take account of the ways animals become attuned to ‘affordances’. Further, there is more to learn about the phenomenology and psychology of somatic affections. Noting that Aquinas himself recognised that the investigation of the affections has lagged behind the investigation of cognition,Footnote ¹² I should agree that his account of the estimative sense and sense-memory downplays the abilities to learn and to adapt found in certain non-human animals. Aquinas could not know of the complex cognitive and social behaviour of the ape species whose ability to engage in forms of symbolic behaviour is regularly reported in the media, but it is worth noting that they exhibit symbolic behaviour under experimental conditions set up by human scientists, and that it is not linguistic in a human way.Footnote ¹³ Hence we can still ask whether even apes’ behaviour is non-rational, being (in the phrase quoted above) ‘determined to a finite variety of particular goods … [within] their environmental niche.’

The awareness that non-human animals have complex psyches has fed into discussions of the ethics of our interactions with them, and into claims that some can be part of the human political community while others form communities with rights analogous to ours.Footnote ¹⁴ If we are to evaluate such claims and engage in these discussions with conceptual clarity and without anxiety, we need to recognise what Candace Vogler points out, that Aquinas’ account of how our intellectual powers qualify the cognitive and conative powers we share with other animals, and vice versa, should make us sensitive to the difficulty of expressing really accurately ‘the ways in which the intellectual animal's mental life is … distinct from anything to be found among other animal species.’ At the same time, as Dr De Haan points out, Aquinas’ recognition of animal psychology, including his often overlooked nuanced account of the conation of non-human animals, may offer useful conceptual tools. Aquinas’ receptivity to the available knowledge of animal psychology encourages us to take on board modern discoveries in this area, and to reflect on them with philosophical care and precision.

The Acting Person as Complex Rational Animal

The foregoing implies that we need to work harder than some thinkers have done to set out clearly the precise difference between animal and human psychology, to demonstrate convincingly that this does imply that the human soul is immortal whereas animal souls are not,Footnote ¹⁵ and to bring into focus the precise dignity of human nature as such.Footnote ¹⁶ An investigation of what truly characterises human nature might fittingly begin by laying aside the idea that consciousness is a marker for the possession of humanity, not only because other animals are conscious, but also because we are not always conscious, and when we are conscious the ‘quality’ of our consciousness is highly variable.Footnote ¹⁷ Janice Chik Breidenbach's paper questions the value of consciousness as a marker for personhood; the precise concept of ‘consciousness’ seems to have scant importance for Aquinas.Footnote ¹⁸

For Aquinas, the distinctively human powers are intellect and will. Intellect is the ability to draw out universal concepts from sense-data, and to retain, organise and apply these concepts; will is the ability to be attracted by the good perceived intellectually.Footnote ¹⁹ Consciousness is not to be simplistically connected with the intellect: consciousness of intense pleasure or pain, or grave fear, may chiefly involve powers at the sensory level. Further, I am not currently conscious of most of the concepts I have acquired; nor am I fully conscious of the priorities in my will.Footnote ²⁰

The papers collected here bring out the close ‘organic’ cooperation between intellect and will, on the one hand, and the interior senses and ‘passions’, on the other. Janice Chik Breidenbach argues that Aquinas supports the claim that human beings really are animals; to recognise this is crucial for understanding his view (and, implicitly, forming our view) of human nature and rationality. As Candace Vogler points out, the interior senses that we share with the other animals are transformed when they become part of truly human nature; for example, we can play with the sense-data we retain in our imaginations, and the estimative sense becomes the ‘cogitative sense’ – one result of this is that more of our assessment of situations is learned, and less is instinctive, by comparison with the other animals.Footnote ²¹ Of course our higher powers are also transformed: while angels are typically intellectual (they rest in the possession of powerful concepts), human beings are typically rational, acquiring, connecting, disconnecting and applying concepts in reasoning processes.Footnote ²² Further, the affective powers, the will and the passiones animae, are also transformed in their interaction with each other: our will is mutable, unlike the angels’, and our ‘passions’ affect whether, as responsible beings, we perceive things as attractive or repugnant; at the same time, it is through the passions that the will effects voluntary movements. The passions are under the ‘political’, not a ‘despotic’, control of the higher powers.Footnote ²³

John Finley's paper explores an aspect of the distinction between human beings and the other animals that seems not to have received the attention it deserves. He argues for human beings having a higher degree of metaphysical unity than other animals, and points out the paradoxical result that we are more animal than they are. Human unity is manifest at the level of action and expressed in speech; and speech illustrates how bodiliness is needed for the soul's intellectual activity. Prof. Finley notes how Sokolowski's analysis presents ‘declarative speech’ as ‘reveal[ing] our unity as wholes, as beings that are most what we are in and through self-return’ – but this self-return is not of a ‘Cartesian’ kind in which introspection is primary: ‘self-return [is] only accomplished through awareness of exterior reality.’ This suggests that self-consciousness is a more significant concept than consciousness. Arguably, the rationality that is especially characteristic of human nature does enable us to reflect on ourselves, and so to ‘possess’ ourselves and to express ourselves in word and deed in a higher way than other animals can. Janice Chik Breidenbach also brings out our unity: she warns against taking the distinction between the acts of a human being, on the one hand, and truly human, freely chosen acts on the other,Footnote ²⁴ to imply a separation between our animality and our rationality.

Prof. Finley's paper also explores the apparent paradox that we, more unified than the other animals, experience more disunity, and experience it more sharply, than they do. This observation can remind us of the role of virtue, as understood by Aristotle and Aquinas, in the development of greater psychological unity and of moral integrity.Footnote ²⁵ Aquinas offers a uniquely complex account of the virtues. Besides explaining the ‘theological virtues’ (Faith, Hope and Charity) that unite us to God, he distinguishes between the humanly-acquired and the ‘infused’ (God-given) forms of the ‘cardinal’ virtues (Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Courage).Footnote ²⁶ Acquired temperance, for example, empowers us to eat and drink with a view to bodily and psychological health; ‘infused’ temperance enables us to fast and abstain in the fight against sin within a journey towards the divine Goal.Footnote ²⁷ In ST, II-II, under the headings of the theological and cardinal virtues, Aquinas identifies a panoply of other virtues, strengths of mind or character that facilitate our pursuit of human and divine happiness. We also need the ‘Gifts’ of the Holy Spirit to attune us to his guidance in making decisions on which much may hang, in cases when, as no law tells us what to do, we must depend on God's providence.Footnote ²⁸

Aquinas’ complex ‘psychology of virtue under grace’ is represented by the penultimate paper in this collection. John Love sets out Aquinas’ account of the components that contribute to truly prudent decisions. He locates this account within the relationship between God's government and the human freedom that God enlarges (rather than suppressing it), and brings out the interpenetration of acquired and infused virtue. A range of ‘subsidiary’ virtues (‘integral parts’ of Prudence) is involved in the process of making a wise decision, including sensitivity to the situations we are in, and a readiness to learn from those who are wiser and more experienced, and from the past.

By bringing out the complexity of Aquinas’ account of what is needed for but one component of a truly moral life, and the variety of ways in which we can fall short in this area, Prof. Love gives us a glimpse of how Aquinas’ portrait of the successful pursuit of happiness corresponds, in a realistic way, both to the complexity of the human psyche and to the complexity and contingencyFootnote ²⁹ of the human world within which we make our common pilgrimage. By noting our dependence on the more experienced, he helps us see Prudence as a ‘life-skill’Footnote ³⁰ needing a kind of apprenticeship.

Prof. Love hints at further lines of fruitful reflection. His section ‘Antecedent Principles, 4’, points out that the interaction among the humanly-acquired and the God-given components of a virtuous life remains a matter of debate among Thomists. Perhaps we can apply in this area, analogously, the concept Prof. Vogler employs regarding powers of soul, and see grace and nature working in a ‘transformative’ symbiosis. This symbiosis might explain why, in ST, II-II, Aquinas hardly ever distinguishes infused and acquired virtues; this seems to imply that, ideally, they interpenetrate or complement each other almost seamlessly.Footnote ³¹ It can exemplify Aquinas’ principle that God's grace, typically, does not bypass nature or render it redundant, but brings it to perfection, purifying and healing it, elevating and ennobling it; this principle in turn helps explain why Aquinas devotes so much of the Summa Theologiae to aspects of human psychology: this is the ‘material’ in which grace ‘takes flesh’. In De Virtutibus in Communi, aa. 10 & 11, Aquinas presents the infused moral virtues not only as adapting our lower appetites to the supernatural Goal to whom the Theological Virtues join us, but also as ‘embracing’ the acquired virtues (developed by the psychological mechanisms detailed in ST, I-II, qq. 51–53 & 63) so as to lift their acts up to the level of being meritorious.

Noting our dependence on those who are more experienced links to Dr De Haan's suggestion that we need to say more concerning the collaboration involved in human knowing, and (since collaboration involves language) to Prof. Finley's point that language intimately characterises human nature. To borrow Alasdair MacIntyre's phrase, we are ‘dependent rational animals’. Andrew Pinsent has pointed out that there is something missing from an account of virtue-acquisition which simply relies on habituating ourselves; we need each other – and God.Footnote ³² Two Books of Nicomachean Ethics are devoted to forms of friendship; maybe this points towards our dependence on each other not only for happiness but also for virtue.Footnote ³³ We need to say more about child development than Aristotle could, and about the way peer-pressure, law, public policy and charismatic leadership can promote or impede the development of virtue. Convinced of the value of Aquinas’ ‘psychology of virtue’ and his teaching on human law, the Aquinas Institute will support some research relating the ‘integral parts’ of Prudence to the development of regulations and public policy in our large, complex societies in which readiness to learn from others’ experience and from the past, care for the future, and caution regarding potential bad results of good policies, remain crucial.

Questions about Body and Soul

Arguably, the picture of the animal and human body as a machine, mentioned above, was reinforced when the modern atomic theory began to develop; I suspect there still lurks in many people's minds a picture of the atom as a mini-solar-system, with the implication that the laws governing the movement of electrons are as rigid as those that govern the movement of the planets. If the human body is a machine, and if the whole of human behaviour is fully explicable on the basis of this machine's extreme complexity, so that we may exorcise the Cartesian ‘ghost in the machine’,Footnote ³⁴ there is no component of the human being that can survive death. If animal and human behaviour are subject to a mechanical determinism, it arguably follows that free decision is an illusion.Footnote ³⁵

For Aristotle and Aquinas, a living thing is not a machine. A machine is the sum of its parts; each part remains what it is whether it is inside or outside the machine, and the parts are what really exist. A living thing is a single organism, more than the sum of its parts; they are what they are only while they are in the living body;Footnote ³⁶ the whole plant, animal, or human being, is what really exists. The living body does contain ‘elements’, whose varying proportions make bone, muscle, blood, etc., possible – but they are present ‘virtually’, subsumed into the ‘nature’ of bone, muscle, blood, etc.Footnote ³⁷ A microscope would not reveal lumps of earth, droplets of water, and sparks of fire, but bone or some other tissue. A living thing is a single organism because it has a soul, which is not a ghost in a machine, but a ‘form of life’ which ‘organises’ ‘materiality’Footnote ³⁸ into a living, organic, functioning body. Higher forms of life have more unity, and more powers, than lower ones; higher forms of life transcend mere materiality to a higher degree than lower ones.Footnote ³⁹ This is particularly brought out in John Finley's paper in this issue: living things are wholes in a higher way than pieces of inanimate matter. The human form of life includes abilities that break free of the limitations of materiality: we have the ability to ‘abstract’ universal concepts from the instances located and observed within space and time – this is Aquinas’ argument for the subsistence of the human soul.Footnote ⁴⁰

A mechanistic view that includes seeing the atom as a mini-solar-system relies more on half-understood diagrams in old-fashioned school text-books than on real Quantum Mechanics.Footnote ⁴¹ To envisage electrons as ‘tiny ball-bearings’ with well-defined size is misleading, and current research I am aware of is questioning whether subatomic particles should be seen as ‘corpuscles’ at all. We are a long way away from Democritus’ atoms.Footnote ⁴²

The interpretation of Quantum Mechanics has always interfaced with philosophy, and even evoked Aristotelian categories.Footnote ⁴³ Areas of fruitful research suggested to me by John Finley's reminder of the Thomist doctrine of different degrees of unity found at different levels of being include the following. Can we associate the indeterminacy of quantum ‘particles’ with the low degree of truth that goes with a low degree of being?Footnote ⁴⁴ How might the doctrine of the unity of an organism work in cases such as colonial organisms composed of many physically connected, interdependent individuals?

As Daniel De Haan says, we need to explore in more detail how sub-psychological biological systems support conscious operations. This points to questions concerning precisely how the atomic, biochemical and cellular structures of living things ‘support’ the forms of life into which they are subsumed. Is the way electrons are present within molecules, cells and organisms analogous to the ‘virtual’ presence of the elements within an Aristotelian organism?Footnote ⁴⁵ How are cells and organs present in the bodies of living things? Are Aristotle and Aquinas right when they hold that organs are what they are only while within the whole? If so, how do we understand organ transplants? Might indeterminacy at the sub-atomic level somehow translate up into the levels of spontaneity and flexibility of response we find in animals and human beings?Footnote ⁴⁶

It seems that Aristotle's and Aquinas’ view of matter and of living things is able to converse with authentic modern science.Footnote ⁴⁷ May Aquinas’ picture of higher beings possessing powers (especially of perception) that transcend materiality to higher degrees even help achieve a satisfactory account of consciousness, which ‘is arguably the central issue in current theorizing about the mind’?Footnote ⁴⁸ Of course, the very legitimacy of speaking of ‘levels of being’ needs to be defended. And if there really are levels of being among the things in the world, this encourages us to wonder at the very being of things, and whence it comes, and we are led both into a ‘metaphysical’ perspective on things, and into two of Aquinas’ famous Five Ways of demonstrating God's existence.Footnote ⁴⁹

Conversations about Evolution

The themes of the papers collected here invite us to reflect on our place in the animal kingdom, and on why it is fitting for us to be in an evolutionary relationship with other species. One reason that seems to emerge is that we inherit from pre-human animals bodily structures (including neurological structures) that are involved in truly human being and truly human thinking.

The frequency of articles on issues raised by evolution in this periodical indicates the current interest in the subject.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the conviction that Aquinas can help us ask illuminating questions, and provides us with relevant concepts, the Aquinas Institute will devote a future seminar series to such issues, and will collaborate with the next stage of the Thomistic Evolution Project.Footnote ⁵¹

For the sake of philosophical and theological reflections, a key question is whether the boundary between true humans and pre-human species is ‘fuzzy’ or well-defined. Many reflections have assumed, as Martin Lembke puts it, that ‘from an evolutionary point of view … all biological species, including Homo sapiens, have evolved gradually … speciation … is a gradual process’ so that the ‘biological parents’ of the first human beings ‘obviously belonged to the same biological species as themselves.’ Lembke concludes ‘that the decisive ontological difference (if such there were) between the first human couple and their non-human biological parents was of a non-biological sort – from which it follows that membership of a certain biological species is not a sufficient condition for being human’; he offers a ‘dualistic soul-body anthropology’.Footnote ⁵² Darwin indeed noticed how small mutations accumulate over long periods. If this were evolution's only mechanism it might well imply that the boundaries between species are fuzzy. But it would not well explain the emergence of radically new ‘body plans’ (as when new phyla evolve) nor, perhaps, the survival of existing species alongside new ones. In fact at least one mechanism does stand to explain such phenomena, and may result in new species emerging ‘ready-made’.Footnote ⁵³ Other mechanisms of inheritance that do not involve alterations in the DNA sequence are now recognised, such as epigenetics, but whether they have a role in evolution is debated. Philosophical and theological reflection needs to be informed by such discoveries.

The papers in this issue of New Blackfriars all accept a Thomist anthropology in which the rational soul is per se the form of the body. The human body has to belong to a different biological species from non-human bodies, because it is formed by, and sustains, a human soul. Aquinas worked hard to give an account of how the subsistent human soul is both directly created by God and the unique substantial form of the human being; we, today, have to work at least as hard. But if the first human beings were born of pre-human parents, then it is no harder – and no easier – to give an account of the ‘infusion’ of the human soul into the conceptus of each of them, than it is to give an account of the soul's ‘infusion’ when any new human being is conceived.Footnote ⁵⁴

All the papers in this issue recognise the distinctiveness of human rationality, which correlates with the distinctiveness of human language. As mentioned above, Daniel De Haan points out the need to explore how sub-psychological biological systems support conscious operations. We may therefore ask what physiological features make the truly human body apt to sustain a truly human soul; they almost certainly include what is needed for human language, which includes brain structure as well as larynx.Footnote ⁵⁵ But taxing questions arise, because the archaeological record has begun to suggest that a qualitatively different form of cognition emerged roughly 100,000 years ago, significantly later than the appearance of anatomically modern humans.Footnote ⁵⁶ Did a final mutation give rise to a change in brain structure so subtle that it could leave no trace in the fossil record, a change that meant that some individuals were conceived whose body would be apt to sustain a rational soul? Ian Tattersall suggests that the neural structure that made the brain ‘language-ready’, and ‘the highly-derived vocal tract necessary for the expression of modern articulate language’, had already been part of the reorganisation that resulted in the skeleton of Homo sapiens, but the qualitative shift in ‘cognitive style’ was provoked by some individuals ‘attach[ing] meanings to specific spoken sounds, starting a self-reinforcing feedback in their brains’ – he notes this was something too abrupt to be driven by natural selection.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is difficult to see how this kind of change could be passed on to offspring even by an epigenetic mechanism; the ways in which new-born humans are ‘hard-wired’ for the acquisition of language and relationships indicates that human nature is passed on by procreation. But if, at the beginning of the human race, the infusion of the rational soul exactly coincided with the conception of individuals in whom a mutation had led to a subtle change in neural structure making truly human language possible, then human nature, with the appropriate structures, could truly be inherited from these individuals.

Clearly the interaction among palaeontology, archaeology, evolutionary theory, philosophy, theology and other disciplines will remain complex, and must address further questions, such as how the ‘fittingness’ of our descent from pre-human species can balance the physical and psychological limitations that result from our evolutionary past.Footnote ⁵⁸ Aquinas’ accounts of the way the human body is well fitted to the human soul despite its inbuilt drawbacks, of animal psychology, of human rationality, of the passions of the soul, of the gifts given to the first human beings, and of Original Sin,Footnote ⁵⁹ can sensitise us to questions to ask, and offer lines of thought towards the answers we seek. Definitive answers to at least some of these questions may not be forthcoming for some time, especially while evolutionary biology continues to develop. However, in our philosophical and theological reflection on human origins we can at least begin to take account of the range of plausible scientific accounts of evolution and human origins.