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CHAPTER FIVE Approaching the Human Sensory Appetite from Below (I) ✦ Human beings are embodied souls. We have begun to explore some of the implications of this thesis for understanding the way in which emotions are composed. I want to step back now and put humans in some perspective. Aquinas holds that everything that exists can be characterized relative to a scale of being. The principle of his scale is that “the nobler a form is, the more it rises above corporeal matter, the less it is merged in matter, and the more it excels matter by its power and its operation.”1 At the top of the scale is God, namely, the perfect operation of immaterial intellectual power.2 At the bottom of the scale is elementary matter, which is “altogether material” and “capable of no operation except such as comes within the compass of the qualities which are the dispositions of matter, for instance heat, cold, moisture and dryness, rarity, density, gravity and levity.”3 Humans are situated between the two ends of the scale. We are situated, more specifically, between the angels (purely intellectual beings who are created to function without bodies) and nonhuman animals (embodied beings whose highest principle of operation is a sensory soul).4 Humans are embodied beings with sensory and other powers, but our highest principle of operation is an intellectual soul. We are created to function with bodies, but we are destined, finally , to function with resurrected bodies in a life to come. This continuum stretches above and below the human. As we have seen, it also stretches right through the human,such that some powers of the human approximate the powers of angelic beings5 and some approximate more closely the powers of nonhuman animals.6 Accordingly, some acts of humans resemble the acts of purely intellectual beings, while other human acts resemble more closely the acts of sensory beings that are without intellectual ◆ 103 ◆ powers.7 For example, acts of the immaterial intellect and will (such as deliberating and choosing) are relatively high on the scale of being, relatively angel-like, even as these acts are qualified, in a human being, by corporeality and the exercise of sensory powers. Emotions, which are a function of the sensory powers and thus have a material dimension, are lower on the scale of being, more animal-like, even as they are qualified, in a human being, by the exercise of intellectual powers.Because the intentional content of some emotions (what one has in mind while experiencing the emotions) reflects more input from the intellect than the content of other emotions, some emotions are themselves higher on the scale than others.8 Anger toward a friend who has violated a trust is higher on the scale than anger toward the fly buzzing around one’s head or the car that will not start.9 Some of us might recoil at the idea of a scale of being whose end points are defined as Aquinas defines them. We might object to the idea on theological grounds, arguing for example that this model does not allow one to capture well the notion that God is the principle of being itself, and not simply a being (albeit a perfect one) among other beings. We might object on other, metaphysical grounds, arguing for example that the notion that the same person’s intellectual powers could function at one point (during the present life) in a body and at another point (after death) without a body is incredible and perhaps unintelligible.We might object to the idea on scientific grounds, arguing that various features of the scale of being are untenable in light of certain experimental findings or the best models of biology and physics.10 We might object to the idea on ethical grounds, noting for example the ways in which the scale has been used by people in positions of power to define other people (such as women and racial or ethnic minorities) as naturally inferior specimens of the human kind. We might object also from the perspective of environmental ethics, noting the way in which the scale has created the mistaken impression among many humans that everything below them on the scale exists simply to serve their interests.11 There is something to be said for all of these objections and for many more objections that have been and could be raised in response to the particulars of Aquinas’s worldview. There is also much that could be...

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