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  • Aquinas on the Union of Body and Soul
  • Gyula Klima

1. Introduction: Hylomorphism “between” Dualism and Materialism

Recently, an increasing number of authors in the current literature on the philosophy of mind have hailed Aristotelian hylomorphism as promising a viable passage between the flesh-mangling Scylla of dualism, tearing body and soul apart, and the soulless abyss of the Charybdis of materialism, sinking us into the depths of senseless, cold matter. I, for one, am guilty as charged, on at least two counts, on account of two papers (Klima 2007, 2009). But one could also cite any number of “analytical Thomists” or even other contemporary philosophers of mind who are flirting with hylomorphism precisely for this reason— namely, its promise to overcome the apparent impasse between materialism (in its various modern guises of physicalism, emergentism, property dualism, etc.) and dualism (substance dualism), plain and simple. So, hylomorphism is coming back and not necessarily as just “a sinister Catholic plot” (to use Howard Robinson’s happy phrase dropped in a conversation) but as a genuine theoretical alternative in contemporary philosophy of mind. However, as is the case with every major conceptual framework, hylomorphism, too, comes in many shades and colors. In this paper, I will attempt to give a more-detailed-than-usual account of Aquinas’s version of the hylomorphic union of body and soul.1

But before focusing on what is specific in Aquinas’s account, we should settle the main points of agreement among those who have worked and nowadays work within a hylomorphist framework, despite all their finer differences.

So, to start with the apparently obvious, all hylomorphists agree that all material substances are composed of matter and form. I say that this simple claim is merely apparently obvious, for although it is just a mere explication of the meaning of the term— providing the meanings of the two Greek terms [End Page 31] involved in it by means of more familiar English terms— when it comes to taking a serious look at the meanings of the English terms themselves, we may find the explanation actually more baffling than what it is supposed to explain. For what is this composition? And what are the things composed? What is matter? What is form? And what are the material substances they compose?

Well, finally, it seems we have a question that is easy to answer: material substances are just the things we stumble upon in our ordinary experience, like rocks, rivers, trees, cats, dogs, horses, or humans. But what sense can we make of the claim that these things are composed of—that is, put together from— form and matter? Aren’t living things put together from their limbs or organs, and those from tissues, and those from cells, and those from molecules, and those from atoms, which is the sort of composition they share even with nonliving things, just as they share with them the lower levels of composition from subatomic particles, at which level we may soon reach the limits of our knowledge (well, my knowledge for sure) but perhaps not the ultimate limit of lower levels of organization until we reach the absolutely elementary constituents of absolutely everything there is in this universe?

Actually, one way of making sense of hylomorphism is by pointing out that the composition of matter and form is a kind of composition that is radically different from the types of composition listed previously, although hylomorphism is absolutely compatible with these types of composition, provided they are understood in a certain way. For there is a certain type of understanding of the composition of the complex structures of material substances from basic particles through various levels of organization up to the complexity of living things that is definitely incompatible with hylomorphism— namely, interpreting this multilevel organization of material substances in terms of metaphysical atomism.

For on the atomistic interpretation, this multilevel organization is just the putting together of whatever our actual physics deems to be the most basic particles and what our atomistic metaphysics will accordingly regard as the primary entities (the basic building blocks of reality) while regarding everything else as just a combination— an organized, structured collection of these primary...

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