Vallicella on hylemorphic dualism, Part II

Bill Vallicella has kindly replied to my response to his recent post on hylemorphic dualism.  The reader will recall that Bill had suggested in his original post that, given the apparent tension between hylemorphism and dualism, Aquinas’s hylemorphic dualism seems ad hoc and motivated by Christian theological concerns rather than by philosophical considerations.  I argued that this charge cannot be sustained.  Whether or not one ultimately accepts hylemorphic dualism, if one agrees that there are serious arguments both for hylemorphism and for dualism, then -- especially when we add independent metaphysical considerations such as the Scholastic principle that the way a thing acts reflects the manner in which it exists -- one should at least acknowledge that hylemorphic dualism has a philosophical rationale independent of any Christian theological concerns.  It seems Bill still disagrees, but I do not see how his latest post gives any support to his original charge.

In his latest post, Bill acknowledges that there are indeed serious arguments both for hylemorphism and (especially, in his view) for dualism, and that someone who finds both sets of arguments persuasive has motivation to try to combine them.  But he insists that the fact that one has good arguments for a position A and good arguments for a position B does not entail that one has good arguments for the combined position A + B, for there may be good reasons why A and B cannot be combined.

Now, that much is perfectly true.  It could turn out that A and B are incompatible, so that someone who has reasons for both A and B will, at the end of the day, simply have to give up one or the other and try to find out what the flaw is in the reasoning that seemed to make them both compelling.  But of course, it is also true that it may turn out that A and B are not incompatible, even if at first sight they seemed to be.  And since two true propositions cannot contradict one another, the fact that there are strong arguments for both is itself a reason to think that they are compatible.  Not an infallible reason, but still a reason, and a serious one if A and B do not manifestly contradict each other.  

Now that, I submit, is the position we are in with respect to both hylemorphism and dualism.  There is no manifest contradiction between them.  In particular there is no manifest contradiction between the claims:

1. The human soul is the substantial form of the human body 

2. The human soul carries out immaterial operations.  

True, Bill appears to think it at least very plausible that one can derive a contradiction from the conjunction of these two claims when further premises are added.  But of course, that will just raise the question of whether all of those further premises are correct, which is a disputed matter.  And as I pointed out in my previous post, there are independent philosophical considerations that make the idea of the soul as a subsistent form at least defensible.  There may be an implicit contradiction in the idea, but then again there may not be.  I don’t think there is, but the point is that whether or not there is, it is not obvious that there is.  

Hence when Bill goes on to say that “a psychological motivation is not the same as a justificatory reason” he does not capture the entirety of the philosophical situation.  Given that there are, by Bill’s own admission, serious philosophical considerations in favor of both hylemorphism and dualism, and given that there is at least no obvious contradiction between them, we do have in these facts alone a “justificatory reason” and not just a mere “psychological motivation.”  That doesn’t mean that it is by itself a decisive reason -- further argumentation would certainly be required to provide a full defense of hylemorphic dualism -- but that is not to the point.  What is to the point is that Bill had suggested that Aquinas’s view is merely an ad hoc position taken for theological rather than philosophical reasons, and I think the points just made (and those made in my previous post) show that that is not the case.  If we have good reasons for both A and B and there is no manifest contradiction between A and B, that is by itself a serious reason (even if not a decisive one) for thinking that A + B is true.  Hence it is unreasonable in that case to claim that someone who accepts A + B must be doing so for ad hoc non-philosophical reasons.

Compare the situation with general relativity and quantum mechanics.  As they stand the theories seem to conflict.  Nevertheless, physicists have for some time been trying to find a way to reconcile them, since there are strong reasons in support of each theory.  It would hardly be plausible to suggest that these physicists have merely a “psychological motivation” rather than a “justificatory reason.”  (Of course, some would respond that relativity and quantum mechanics are supported by stronger arguments than hylemorphism and dualism are.  But whether that is so or not is irrelevant.  For if it is so, that would show only that the attempt to harmonize relativity and quantum mechanics has a stronger justificatory reason than the attempt to harmonize hylemorphism and dualism does, not that the latter has merely a psychological motivation rather than a justificatory reason.)

Bill makes some further points I want to reply to.  In response to my point about the ambiguity of Aristotle’s own views, Bill writes:

[I]f the active intellect (nous poietikos) mentioned in De Anima III, v (430a) is a subsistent element of the human soul, capable of existence independent of matter, then Aquinas' position on the human soul would have been anticipated by Aristotle, and what I said, or rather suspected, about Aquinas implanting Christian notions in the foreign soil of Aristotelianism would be insupportable.  But the interpretation of De Anima III, v is a vexed and vexing matter as the material in the hyperlink Ed provided makes clear.  If, as some commentators maintain, Aristotle is discussing the divine mind and not the human mind, then it cannot be maintained that Aristotle was anticipating Aquinas.

I agree with this, but it does not conflict with what I said in my previous post.  My point was precisely that the interpretation of Aristotle’s views is a vexed matter -- that is, that it is not at all obvious that his own views on the present issue were incompatible with Aquinas’s, so that it is unreasonable to suggest that Aquinas’s views cannot be read as a natural extension of Aristotle’s.  (And even if Aristotle had clearly taken a position incompatible with Aquinas’s, that would not by itself show that Aquinas’s position could not be reconciled with hylemorphism; as all philosophers know, what a thinker thinks follows from his views and what actually does follow from his views are not always identical.  But the fact that it is not clear what Aristotle himself actually thought on the issue at hand only makes it harder to sustain the view that Aquinas was importing something foreign into Aristotelian soil.)

In response to my point that the difference between the human soul and the souls of non-human animals is, for Aquinas, that the former carry out immaterial operations and the latter do not, Bill writes:

I grant that the human soul, unlike the canine, carries out immaterial operations.  The argument is this:

a.  The human soul engages in immaterial operations
b.  Agere sequitur esse: whatever operates I-ly must be (exist) I-ly.
Therefore
c.  The human soul, qua executing immaterial operations, exists immaterially.

But how is this relevant to the issue I am raising?  Let's assume that the above argument is sound.  What it shows is that the human soul enjoys an immaterial mode of being.  But it does not show that a form of an animal body enjoys an immaterial mode of being.  It is one thing to establish that the human soul, or an element thereof, exists immaterially; quite another to show that this immaterial element is a form.  I hesitate to say that Ed is conflating these two questions.  What he might be doing is begging the question against me: he may be just assuming what I am questioning, namely, that the human soul is a form, and then taking an argument for the immateriality of the soul to be an argument for the immaterial existence of a form of the human body. 

But I was neither conflating the two questions nor begging the question against Bill.  Keep in mind that neither the passage of mine that Bill is immediately responding to in these lines nor my previous post as a whole was intended as a complete case for hylemorphic dualism.  The point was merely to respond to the specific suggestion Bill had made, viz. that there is no non-theological rationale for hylemorphic dualism.  And what I was saying was that if someone already has, on independent grounds, serious arguments for supposing that hylemorphism is true (as Bill concedes one could have), then, in that case, if one adds to the mix the three-step argument Bill summarizes above, one will also have good grounds for supposing that hylemorphic dualism is true.  So, the argument Bill summarizes is incomplete.  A more complete argument would look something like this:

A. Hylemorphism is true.

B. So the human soul is the form of the body.

C. But the human soul engages in immaterial operations.

D. And agere sequitur esse: whatever operates I-ly must be (exist) I-ly.

E. So the human soul, qua executing immaterial operations, exists immaterially.

F. So the form of the body, qua executing immaterial operations, exists immaterially. 

I say “a more complete argument” rather than “the complete argument” because I am, again, not trying to make the complete case for hylemorphic dualism here but just responding to Bill’s specific objection.  The complete case would have to involve a defense of each of the premises.  But the argument just given suffices to provide an answer Bill’s objection, because Bill concedes the premises at least for the sake of argument.  In particular, Bill concedes for the sake of argument that someone could have serious philosophical reasons for accepting A, C, and D.  But B follows from A, E follows from C and D, and F follows from B and E.  And that shows that someone who has serious philosophical reasons for accepting A, C, and D could have serious philosophical reasons for accepting F.  One can deny this, it seems to me, only if it were plausible to say either that F was manifestly self-contradictory, or that at least one of the inferences involved in this argument was manifestly fallacious.  But I don’t think either suggestion is plausible, and I doubt Bill does either. 

Note that this argument does not conflate the issues -- the case for A and the case for C will have to involve different lines of argument.  Nor does it beg the question against Bill.  The argument only assumes what Bill himself is willing to concede at least for the sake of argument.  And it shows, I think, that Bill should give up the claim that hylemorphic dualism (which is what F amounts to) could have no philosophical rationale, but only a Christian apologetic rationale.  For a philosopher who has no Christian ax to grind (nor for that matter a Jewish, Muslim, or any other purportedly revelation-based ax to grind) could accept A - F.  (Again, whether F is true -- and thus whether all of the premises that lead to it are true -- is, of course, a separate issue, which I am not trying to settle here.)

 

Bill also comments on my remarks about the Aristotelian conception of essence, in which I noted that the fact that it is of the nature of dogs to have four legs does not, for the Aristotelian, entail that every single dog will in fact have four legs.  Bill grants this but says:

In parallel with this, Ed seems to be suggesting that while it is the nature of a form to be a form of something, it does not follow that every form is a form of something. I deny the parallel.  

But that is not what I was saying.  Yes, every form is the form of something.  And the human soul, which is (for the Aristotelian) a kind of form, is the form of the human body.  But it does not follow that it must at every moment be conjoined to the human body, any more than the fact that it is in a dog’s nature to have four legs entails that it will in fact have four legs.  That is the point I was making.  A full-grown dog in its normal state will always have four legs, but there are some dogs which due to abnormal conditions (injury, genetic defect, etc.) do not have four legs.  Similarly, the human soul in its normal state will be conjoined to the body it is the form of, but there are human souls which due to abnormal conditions (death) are not conjoined to their bodies.  

Hence when Bill goes on to object that “a form is a 'principle' not capable of independent existence in the manner of a primary substance,” the trouble is that this statement is ambiguous.  It could mean that the normal, paradigmatic way in which a form exists is only as part of a primary substance, and never as a primary substance itself.  If so, the hylemorphic dualist agrees.  But it could also mean -- or at least, Bill might think it entails -- that no form of any sort can ever exist even for an instant, even in an abnormal, non-paradigmatic way, apart from the primary substance of which it is a part.  And with this the hylemorphic dualist would not agree.  Indeed, this claim simply begs the question against the hylemorphic dualist.  

For this reason the discussion of Veatch and Bergmann that follows this remark of Bill’s is not to the point.  Indeed, if anything it helps my case.  For Bergmann had no Christian theological ax to grind, and yet he took a position that Bill regards as relevantly analogous to the Thomistic view of the soul we have been discussing.  And that is just further evidence that someone could have purely philosophical reasons for taking that sort of view, and not a mere Christian apologetic motivation for taking it.   

Remember, that is the issue that I have been addressing.  It seems to me that Bill keeps shifting the focus of his arguments between two claims -- the claim that hylemorphic dualism is true, and the claim that hylemorphic dualism can have a purely philosophical, non-apologetic rationale -- and writes as if his objections to the first claim somehow establish the falsity of the second.  But they don’t.  Thus, even if Bill has presented powerful objections to the first claim (though I don’t think he has) that would be irrelevant to the second claim, which is the one at issue.

Hence when Bill concludes his post by saying: 

[Ed] has not given me a reason why I should accept argument A below over argument B: 

Argument A:  The human soul can exist apart from its body; the human soul is the form of the human body; therefore, there are forms that can exist apart from the matter they inform. 

Argument B:  The human soul can exist apart from its body; no form can exist apart from the matter it informs; therefore, the human soul is not the form of the human body. 

the trouble is that I have not been trying to convince Bill to accept argument A over argument B.  Rather, I have been trying to convince him that argument A, no less than argument B, is an argument someone could adopt on purely philosophical grounds, and not merely on Christian apologetic grounds.  And I think I have shown that that much is true.  (For those who are interested, you can find my most detailed discussion and defense of hylemorphic dualism in chapter 4 of Aquinas.)

I want to end this post by emphasizing how much I value Bill’s criticisms.  I think that the most formidable general metaphysical systems fall into three categories: the broadly Aristotelian approach, especially as developed by Scholastics like Thomists, Scotists, and Suarezians; the broadly Platonic approach, especially as developed within the Neo-Platonic tradition; and the broad rationalist-idealist approach represented by moderns like Leibniz, Bradley, Whitehead, and many others.  Needless to say, my sympathies are with the first camp.  Bill, at least as I read him, tends to sympathize more with lines of argument representative of the latter two camps (which is not to say that he is “a Platonist” or “a rationalist” or “an idealist,” full stop).  The three traditions are united in their opposition to the naturalism that dominates contemporary philosophy, which dominance is (as I see it) historically aberrant and temporary, since naturalism is the least plausible of the alternatives.  (Most naturalists think otherwise, of course.  But as it happens, most naturalists also seem to know little of the other three traditions in question except the crudest caricatures, as is obvious to any Aristotelian, Platonist, rationalist, or idealist who reads what naturalists have to say about these systems.)

Given the shallow and historically ill-informed character of so much (not all, but much) contemporary naturalist argument, each of these three anti-naturalist systems has to look mainly to the other two rival systems for serious objections.  It is in that spirit -- and because of his erudition and philosophical acumen -- that I always value Bill’s criticisms.  (Incidentally, Bill’s very helpful remarks on my ACPQ paper “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways” saved me from a foolish mistake that I had made in the original draft.) 

Argumentum ad Himmlerum

Want to be a New Atheist blogger?  It’s easy!  Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Launch an unhinged, fallacious attack on your opponent, focusing your attention on arguments he has never given.

Step 2: Studiously ignore the arguments he actually has given.

Step 3: Declare victory and exchange high fives with your fellow New Atheists, as they congratulate you for your brilliance and erudition.

Step 4: When your opponent calls attention to this farcical procedure, accuse him of making unhinged, fallacious attacks on you.  Throw in the Myers Shuffle for good measure. 

Step 5: Exchange further high fives with your fellow New Atheists.

Step 6: Repeat 1 - 5 until your disconnect from reality is complete.

If you’re looking for a model, we’ve had reason of late to look at some examples (here, here, here, and here).   And then there are Eric MacDonald’s most recent remarks on my book The Last Superstition over at his blog Choice in Dying, and Jerry Coyne’s high five.

As anyone who has actually read it knows, I do not rely on arguments from authority in The Last Superstition.  Nowhere do I say anything of the form “Authority A says P; therefore, you should believe P.”  I do not rest my case on the Bible, or tradition, or the Church, or the personal authority of any philosopher or theologian.  It is true that I refer to the decree of the first Vatican Council to the effect that the existence of God can be proved through philosophical arguments.  But I do not do so to show that there really are such arguments; naturally, I am well aware that no atheist would be impressed by that.  The point of the citation was rather simply to note that the Catholic Church rejects fideism.  It is also true that I say a little in passing about how Christian theologians would defend the veracity of Christ and thus the reliability of His teaching.  I also express the opinion that the problem of evil is most satisfactorily dealt with in the context of Christian theology.  But I explicitly declined to pursue these matters there, because they are beyond the scope of the book.  The Last Superstition is fundamentally about natural theology and natural law rather than Christianity per se.  The arguments for God, the soul, and traditional morality are all philosophical in character, intended to stand on their own, apart from any appeal to theological authority.  Again, all of this is obvious to anyone who has actually read the book. 

Nevertheless, to hear MacDonald tell it, the book is really just one long argumentum ad verecundiam.  How can he make such an absurd accusation?  New Atheist blogger style, that’s how.  He simply ignores the arguments I actually gave in the book and attacks some figments of his own fevered imagination instead.  MacDonald has it absolutely on the brain that no one who believes in God (or, perhaps, at least no Catholic) can have genuine rational grounds for doing so.  The believer simply must be in thrall to some authority, unable to think for himself.  So, like Don Quixote, that is the windmill MacDonald is going to attack, the facts be damned.   

Exhibit A: Daniel Dennett is referred to many times in my book.  At pages 250-54 I set out some philosophical criticisms of Dennett’s account of biological function.  Elsewhere I explain how Dennett misrepresents the cosmological argument and point out some difficulties with the “meme” theory he adopts from Richard Dawkins.  MacDonald ignores all of this.  Instead he fixates on some remarks made about Dennett by Tadeusz Zawidzki and Michael Ruse that I quoted in some throwaway lines in the book, and insinuates that my “critique of Dennett” lay entirely in an appeal to the authority of Zawidzki and Ruse.  Since MacDonald doesn’t bother to respond to my own actual arguments against Dennett, I’m tempted to call this a straw man fallacy.  But that may be too generous, since he doesn’t really distort my arguments against Dennett.  He just pretends they don’t exist.   

Exhibit B: I devote many pages of the book to giving careful expositions of three of Aquinas’s arguments for the existence of God and defending them against objections.  I devote even more pages to setting out and defending the metaphysical background theses on which the arguments rest.  In none of these arguments do I appeal either to Aquinas’s authority or that of the Catholic Church; I try to show that the arguments are entirely defensible on philosophical grounds that could and should be accepted even by someone who is neither a Catholic nor otherwise impressed by Aquinas.  And what does MacDonald have to say by way of rational criticism of all of this?  Nothing at all.  His “reply” consists, first, in insisting that, since I am a Catholic and Aquinas has great prestige within Catholicism, my position simply must be a mere argument from authority; and second, in a long, bizarre rant about priests who molest children, ecclesiastical bureaucracy, gays, abortion, evolution, the emperor Theodosius, and Heinrich Himmler.  (Yes, Heinrich Himmler.  No, I don’t know when MacDonald started smoking crack.)

In short, MacDonald’s response to the argumentum ad verecundiam I never gave is a shameless circumstantial ad hominem fallacy coupled with a battery of red herrings and an especially crude argumentum ad Hitlerum.  Though I guess MacDonald thinks substituting Himmler for Hitler somehow makes him less than a complete hack.

Perhaps Choice in Lying would be a better title for MacDonald’s blog.  But maybe not, because MacDonald, like the other New Atheist types we’ve been discussing recently, appears to be so very far lost in his Quixotic battle with phantoms that he may really be unaware just how disconnected from reality he is.  Perhaps his eyes just don’t register what’s there on the page in front of him; all he can ever see are the clichés he, Coyne, and other New Atheist psychotics bat around their echo chamber like Harding’s cigarette in Cuckoo’s Nest.  (Language warning on that YouTube clip for any underage readers out there.)

At least MacDonald’s screed is intelligible as the ravings of an embittered ex-believer.  Jerry Coyne’s gushing over it defies explanation.  To be sure, Coyne is not above some sophomoric fibbing of his own.  He seems awful keen on establishing a meme to the effect that I am “notorious for claiming that one can’t truly understand [the cosmological] argument without reading at least six books and seven articles, two of which of course, are by Feser himself.”  But I never said any such thing.  What I said was that “to understand the Five Ways, the modern reader needs to read something that makes [the metaphysical] background clear, that explains how modern Thomists would reply to the stock objections to the arguments, and so forth.”  And I gave my book Aquinas as an example of the sort of thing that did this job -- just as Coyne would no doubt recommend his own recent book on evolution to someone who asked him to recommend a good general introduction to that subject.  I then went on to offer some further suggestions for anyone who wanted to pursue the subject of the cosmological argument in greater depth.  But I never said one had to read all of these things before he could even understand the argument.

Still, one would think that even Coyne -- who is, as we have seen, at least a notch higher than Dawkins, Myers et al. on the intellectual honesty scale -- would be embarrassed by so pathetic a resort to the Hitler card.  Yet Coyne regards MacDonald’s multiply fallacious blather as “serious arguments” by a “serious man,” indeed “a treasure” who is “worth dozens of Fesers.”  Because, you know, a really serious reply to the Aristotelian argument from motion (say) is to compare someone who defends it to Heinrich Himmler.

Well, I don’t know what to say to that.  But I do know what to hum.

The metaphysics of Vertigo

[T]here are six people involved in every encounter: the two people as they see themselves, the two as they are seen by the other, and the two as they really are, whatever that is.

Charles Barr on Hitchcock’s Vertigo

I may be a hopeless reactionary when it comes to politics, philosophy, and theology, but I’m pretty conventional when it comes to movies.  What I think is good is pretty much what everyone else thinks is good.  Well, to a large extent, anyway.  Star Wars?  Sorry, can’t stand it.  David Lynch?  Ugh.  But Citizen Kane, Blade Runner, The Third Man, The Godfather and its first sequel, High Noon, even 2001: A Space Odyssey, ending and all -- yes, they deserve the hype.  And then there’s Vertigo.  The mystery genre may be the greatest of film genres, and Vertigo is certainly the greatest of mystery flicks.   AFI says so, so there.  (On the other hand, they put Lynch on the list.)   And as everyone knows, the reason it is the greatest mystery movie is not because of the murder, but because of the woman.

You know the plot.  (Though if you don’t, be warned that there are spoilers in the summary that follows.)  Jimmy Stewart plays John “Scottie” Ferguson, a retired police detective in San Francisco hired by his old college friend Gavin Elster to keep tabs on Elster’s wife Madeleine (played by Kim Novak), who has been behaving oddly.  Scottie suffers from acrophobia, and left the force after an incident during which his condition kept him hanging from a rooftop paralyzed in fear, and a fellow officer died trying to save him.  Madeleine also appears psychologically wounded in some other, more mysterious way.  She spends her days driving around the city revisiting the same haunts -- Mission Dolores, the art museum, the McKittrick Hotel -- all associated in one way or another with her long dead grandmother Carlotta Valdes.  Madeleine is also beautiful and elegant, and Scottie -- who for a good portion of the movie only ever views her from afar -- quickly becomes obsessed with her. 

 

As Scottie spies on her one day at Fort Point, Madeleine jumps into San Francisco Bay in an apparent suicide attempt.  Scottie comes to the rescue and is thereby enabled at last to meet her, without revealing that he has been trailing her at the behest of her husband.  It soon becomes clear that their attraction is mutual -- to the chagrin of Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), Scottie’s more down-to-earth and somewhat frumpy ex-fiancée, who clearly still carries a torch for him.  Scottie and Madeleine begin to wander the city together, though she remains alluringly distant.  Evidently possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, Madeleine fears she is descending into a suicidal madness; and when visiting Mission San Juan Bautista with Scottie, she flees up to the top of a bell tower in a panic.  Paralyzed by his acrophobia, Scottie is unable to follow her, and watches in horror as she falls to her death.

His heart broken, Scottie falls into a near-catatonic depression.  As time passes he begins to wander the city again, revisiting the places he had first spied Madeleine.  And then one day he spots Judy Barton (also played by Novak), an unsophisticated woman whose hair, clothing, and general appearance and demeanor are very different from Madeleine’s, but who nevertheless for some reason reminds Scottie of her.  He insinuates himself into Judy’s life, and we discover -- though Scottie does not -- that Judy really is the woman he knew as “Madeleine.”  She is not the true Madeleine Elster, though, but was hired by Gavin Elster to impersonate her as part of a complex murder plot.  It was the real Madeleine -- whom neither Scottie nor the audience had ever really known -- whose body Scottie had seen falling from the bell tower.  Truly in love with Scottie but unable, for obvious reasons, to reveal to him that she hadn’t really died, Judy had returned to her normal life after Elster’s plot reached its climax.  Now that Scottie has reentered her life, she hopes that he will come to love her as Judy.

Scottie, however, is still obsessed with Madeleine and tries gradually to make Judy over in her image, oblivious to the fact that Judy and the woman he thinks is dead are one and the same.  Judy is increasingly uncomfortable with Scottie’s demands, but accedes to them in the hope that he will eventually love her for who she really is.  When at last she has completely taken on the appearance of Madeleine, Scottie is able to lose himself in the illusion and the couple finds momentary happiness.  But then, on finding that Judy is in possession of a distinctive necklace that could only have come from Madeleine, Scottie suddenly realizes who she really is -- and that he has been cruelly manipulated by her and Elster.  Without revealing his discovery to her, Scottie takes Judy for a drive, and she grows suspicious as she learns that they are heading for Mission San Juan Bautista.

 

Forcing her up to the top of the bell tower, an outraged and once again heartbroken Scottie confronts Judy with what he knows.  She confesses, but also, and pleadingly, professes her love for him.  “It’s too late,” Scottie says in despair; “It’s too late, there’s no bringing her back.”  Still, he gives in to one last desperate embrace -- which is broken off when Judy is surprised by the figure of a nun who suddenly emerges from the darkness to investigate the voices she heard in the tower.  A scream, as the startled Judy slips and falls from the tower to her death -- and Scottie, now apparently cured of his acrophobia, stares down at her, having lost for a second and final time a woman he never really had or could have had.

So that’s the story.  There is much philosophical food for thought in it.  A worthy essay could be written just on the general aesthetic of the film -- on Hitchcock’s success in making a rather far-fetched story work with just the right combination of actors, geographic setting, music, pacing, and so on, down to the famous mood-setting Saul Bass title sequence.  There is also the complex psychological interplay between Scottie and Madeleine, neither of whom can reveal everything he or she knows (or thinks he knows) about the other to the other.  Scottie cannot tell Madeleine that he has been hired by her husband, has been spying on her for some time, and already “knows” much of what she reveals to him.  Madeleine cannot tell Scottie that she already knows that he “knows” all of this and that it is all part of an elaborate plot he is being made unwittingly to play a part in.  Each of them knows that Scottie has taken Madeleine out of her wet clothes after rescuing her from the bay and put her in his bed to recover -- during all of which she appeared to be unconscious -- and each of them knows the other knows it.  But neither of them can explicitly acknowledge this fact, given social proprieties, given the implications of this fact in light of their obvious mutual attraction, and given that Madeleine is (so Scottie supposes) already married to another man.  (“Theory of mind” adepts will appreciate the rich examples of second-order intentional states the story provides.)  Books like Charles Barr’s Vertigo and Dan Auiler’s Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, though not written from a philosophical point of view, have interesting things to say about such issues.

What I want to focus on here, though, is the very core of the story -- Scottie’s obsession with Madeleine.  Why do we find it plausible?  Why do we sympathize with him?  Of course, you might not find him plausible or sympathetic.  For one thing, for Scottie to pursue a romantic relationship with the woman he knows as Madeleine would (as far as he supposes) be adulterous.  But that is not to the point.  The film does not require us to sympathize with adultery.  The guilt Scottie presumably feels over his attraction to Madeleine, and her unavailability given her purportedly married status, only adds to his torment, and it is that torment -- the intensity of his longing for what he cannot have -- that the movie needs us to feel with him.

 

Still, even the most sympathetic viewer wants at times to say “Steady on, Scottie!  She’s just a woman!”  Surely only stalkers and other oddballs are capable of this much interest?  And yet Scottie is not a stalker or an oddball.  He’s good old Jimmy Stewart, and Stewart makes the role work.  And if you’ve ever been in love you understand how.  Scottie’s passion for Madeleine reflects something deep in human nature; and if it is excessive, it is an excess born of something deep in the human condition, especially in modern times. 

 

How so?  First the nature, then the condition.  In his fine chapter on romantic love in The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis distinguishes Eros from Venus.  Venus is sexual desire, which can be (even if it shouldn’t be) felt for and satisfied by any number of people.  Eros is the longing associated with being in love with someone, and no one other than that one person can satisfy it.  Obviously, Venus can and very often does exist without Eros.  Eros typically includes Venus, but it not only focuses Venus specifically on the object of romantic longing, but carries that longing to the point where Venus, along with everything else, might even sacrificed for the sake of the beloved if necessary.  Sexual release is the object of Venus; the beloved is the object of Eros.

As Lewis wisely notes, it is an error to think that Venus without Eros is per se morally suspect.  We might wish that every husband and wife felt for each other as did Tristan and Isolde, or Romeo and Juliet, or Catherine and Heathcliff; or maybe not, given the tragic ends of these couples.  Needless to say, real human life is rarely like that, and very frequently it does not even rise to the level of a more sober approximation.  Arranged marriages were common for much of human history; modern marriages for love often lose their passion and settle into routine, or at least have their ups and downs, but without the disappearance of Venus; and some people simply do not have Erotic temperaments (in the relevant sense) in the first place, but still have normal sexual desires and wish to marry.  Eros is too unstable and outside our control to think it essential to the moral use of Venus.  Sometimes mere affection (which, like Venus itself, can be felt for any number of people) has to suffice to humanize Venus.

All the same, there is a reason Eros is commonly regarded as an ideal, and is indeed often achieved at least to some extent, even if passion inevitably cools somewhat.  Like Venus, Eros is natural to us.  It functions to channel the unruly Venus in the monogamous and constructive direction that the stability of the family requires.  Of course, a respect for the moral law, fear of opprobrium, and sensitivity to the feelings of a spouse can do this too, but unlike Eros the motivations they provide can all conflict with the agent’s own inclinations, and are thus less efficacious.  A moral man will confine the gratification of his sexual appetites to the marriage bed; a man who is in love with his wife wants to confine them to the marriage bed.  Eros also brings us out of ourselves in a way Venus by itself never can, and thus raises Venus not only above the merely animal but even above the merely social.  As Lewis writes, the sheer selflessness of Eros at its most noble, and its fixation on the beloved to the exclusion of everything else, make it an especially fitting model for the sort of love we are to have for God.  (This can also make of Eros an especially tempting object of idolatry.  More on that presently.)

Eros thus makes possible what cognitive psychologist Robert Sternberg calls “consummate love.”  Sternberg’s influential “triangular theory” of love distinguishes between intimacy, commitment, and passion, and six kinds of suboptimal love, each of which involves only one or two of these elements.  Intimacy by itself involves the kind of closeness typical of friendship. Commitment by itself is characterized by Sternberg as “empty” love, a bloodless sort of thing that might suffice for an arranged marriage, at least initially.  Passion by itself amounts to mere infatuation.  What Sternberg calls “companionate love” combines commitment with the intimacy of friendship but is devoid of passion.  “Romantic love” combines passion with intimacy, as in a relationship that begins with infatuation and leads to friendship or vice versa.  “Fatuous love” combines passion and commitment, as in a marriage which was entered into suddenly on the basis of passion before true intimacy has developed.  “Consummate love,” Sternberg says, combines all three of the basic kinds of love -- commitment, the intimacy of friendship, and the passion that begins with mere infatuation but develops into something more stable.  It is difficult to achieve, but is commonly regarded as the ideal.

Eros -- which is more or less what Sternberg calls passion -- is what distinguishes this ideal not only from mere Venus, but also from a marriage which merely adds Venus to friendship and commitment.  One can have many friends and be in some way committed to many people -- to siblings, parents, children, and very close friends.  Venus itself, as we have seen, could in principle (even if for moral reasons it shouldn’t in practice) be satisfied by any number of people.  Eros alone adds to the love between a man and a woman an exclusive interest in the beloved which, as Lewis notes, is analogous to the love we are to have for God. 

 

Now when Eros is not associated with intimacy and commitment we have what Sternberg calls mere infatuation.  And when this infatuation reaches a kind of fever pitch we have what psychologist Dorothy Tennov calls “limerence,” an obsessive, ongoing romantic attraction that might be felt even for someone one does not personally know very well or even know at all.  Indeed, as Tennov observes, the more unattainable the object of this sort of attraction is, the more intense the limerence tends to become.  The lover obsesses over every piece of the beloved’s behavior as a possible sign of either returned love or rejection.  Each “sign” then becomes a source of either hope or despair.  And as with Eros and infatuation more generally, the object of limerence is idealized.  In all of this we seem to have further interesting parallels to love for God -- in the forbidding distance and perfection of love’s object, and in the alternation between hope for blissful reciprocation (compare mystical union) and the dread that one’s longing will remain forever unrequited (compare the dark night of the soul). 

 

As I have said, Eros can be an especially tempting object of idolatry.   This is only natural given the perceived perfection of the object of Erotic love, the complete sacrifice of self that one is willing to make for the beloved, and the intensity of Erotic desire and the relative, disappointing “flatness” of any love that does not include Eros as a component.  Accordingly, it is also only natural that in a culture in which religion has waned, romantic love should become a kind of substitute for religion.  That is, of course, the condition in which we find ourselves in modern Western society.  It is true that unbridled Venus has a large role on the modern stage as well, but it would, I think, be a mistake to suppose that the average post-Christian Westerner has made of her his chief idol.  She is exciting, but rather too obviously far from the true God.  Pornography may increasingly dominate our entertainments, but in the end we always want them to end in True Love.  It is Eros we worship, a nobler idol than Venus.  But still an idol.

And this brings us back to Vertigo.  Scottie’s is an Erotic love of the most rarefied sort, his obsession with Madeleine being a classic case of Tennovian limerence.  He falls hard for her well before he ever meets her, and when he does finally meet her he does not get to know her well or for long.  Her irresistible attraction lay precisely in her unattainability and mystery.  And the intensity of Scottie’s passion is plausibly seen as an instance of the post-Christian tendency to idolize Eros -- not only because the setting of the movie is modern, but to some extent for reasons internal to the story.  After Madeleine’s “first,” only apparent, death, Scottie does not merely fall into a depression; he is initially catatonic, completely unresponsive to Midge’s attempts to talk to him.  Even those of an Erotic temperament are bound to find a mental collapse of this sort over-the-top, but it is intelligible if Eros has become a kind of idol.  A desire which can find its ultimate satisfaction only in what is eternal and infinite has been entirely directed onto something finite and fragile, but something which at the same time seems as unique and irreplaceable as the proper, divine object.  When this something is seemingly lost forever, how can madness and despair not follow?

Consider also that the old religion hovers like a specter in the background of the film.  The missions Dolores and San Juan Bautista each play a crucial role in the story, in part as representative of a San Francisco and California that have now disappeared.  The nun who emerges from the shadows at the end of the film, and who is the immediate cause of Judy/Madeleine’s true, fatal fall from the tower, seems like the voice of the old faith returning to deliver judgment on Judy as accomplice to murder, on Scottie as a man willing to commit adultery, and on the pair together as having made an idol of Eros.

 

Madeleine even has a kind of pseudo-Resurrection, in the famous scene in which Judy, surrounded by an eerie green glow, emerges from the bathroom completely transformed into the dead woman.  The lovers then embrace, and time and space melt away as Scottie momentarily finds himself transported back to an earlier setting at which he had been with Madeleine.  The music written for the scene by Bernard Herrmann echoes Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and like the Liebestod it conveys a longing that reaches for divine eternity yet can end only in tragedy and death. 

 

Which it does.  Only in the end do both Scottie and Madeleine finally see each other and themselves as they really are.  This does not destroy their love, but it does reveal the price they must pay for it.  The nun gets the last word in Vertigo, literally as well as figuratively, and her words are the final word on anything, however noble, that is merely human: “God have mercy.”

Vallicella on hylemorphic dualism

Hylemorphic dualism is the approach to the mind-body problem taken by Aquinas and the Thomist tradition more generally.  (The label may have been coined by David Oderberg, who defends the view in an important paper and in his book Real Essentialism.  “Hylemorphic” is sometimes spelled “hylomorphic,” though the former spelling is arguably preferable since it is closer to the Greek root hyle.)  The view holds both that the soul is the substantial form of the living human body (that is the “hylemorphic” part) and that it is unique among the forms of material things in being subsistent, that is, capable of surviving beyond the death of the body (that is the “dualism” part).  Our friend Bill Vallicella has recently put forward the following criticism of the view:

How can a substantial form exist apart from that of which it is the form?  Is it not necessarily tied to that of which it is the form?  After all, it is so tied in the case of non-humans like Fido.  Fido is a composite the components of which cannot exist on their own.  Why should it be any different in the case of the human soul if the human soul is indeed the form of the human body? 

The problem here, in short, is that there is a tension between soul as substantial form and soul as substantial subsistent form. Ontologically, one wants to protest, a form is not the sort of entity that could be subsistent.  Necessarily, a form is a form of that of which it is the form.  But a subsistent form is possibly such as to exist apart from that of which it is the form.  These propositions cannot both be true.

I find it hard to resist the suspicion that what Aquinas has done is implanted Christian elements into the foreign soil of Aristotelianism.  Christianity requires that the soul be capable of independent existence.  But no form, by its very nature as form, is capable of independent existence.  Simply to make an exception in the case of the human soul is wholly unmotivated and ad hoc and inconsistent with hylomorphic ontology.

Naturally, since I am a hylemorphic dualist, I completely disagree with Bill here.  Let’s start with the last charge -- that hylemorphic dualism “make[s] an exception in the case of the human soul [that] is wholly unmotivated and ad hoc and inconsistent with hylomorphic ontology.”  That the view is not “unmotivated and ad hoc” is easily shown.  Bill himself would surely acknowledge that there are serious philosophical arguments for hylemorphism, even if he doesn’t accept that view himself.  He would also acknowledge that there are serious philosophical arguments for dualism, a view he is sympathetic with.  But then he should also acknowledge that someone could find both sorts of arguments convincing.  And in that case he should acknowledge that someone could have good philosophical reasons for thinking that there must be some way to combine hylemorphism and dualism. 

That, I submit, is precisely the position Aquinas finds himself in.  As an Aristotelian, he is convinced that the human soul is the form of the living human body.  It is therefore responsible for all the various human capacities -- nutrition, reproduction, growth, sensation, appetite, locomotion, intellect, and volition -- in just the way the souls of plants and non-human animals are responsible for their capacities.  But Aquinas is also convinced that our purely intellectual capacities cannot have a corporeal organ.  The reason is that he endorses philosophical arguments for the immateriality of the intellect of the sort that go back to Plato and Aristotle.  That much gives him grounds for concluding that the soul carries out immaterial operations alongside its corporeal ones.  Add to this the (independently motivated) Scholastic thesis that agere sequitur esse -- that “action follows being,” so that the way a thing acts reflects the manner in which it exists -- and we have grounds for concluding that, though the soul is the form of the body, it must in some way have a kind of subsistent immaterial existence.  The view might seem odd, but it is hardly unmotivated or ad hoc.  On the contrary, it is a natural way of trying to reconcile two theses that Bill himself would acknowledge to have serious philosophical arguments in their favor.

 

Nor, contrary to what Bill implies, is Aquinas somehow departing radically from Aristotle.  For Aristotle too was committed both to hylemorphism and to the view that the intellect is immaterial -- indeed, to the view that the active intellect is immortal.  To be sure, that does not by itself show that Aristotle’s views are identical to or entail Aquinas’s; the Averroists took Aristotle’s position in a very different direction, and contemporary commentators often find it simply puzzling.  But the reason they do -- namely, that it seems odd to say both that the soul is the form of the body and that one of its capacities is somehow separable from the body -- is similar to the reason Bill finds Aquinas’s position puzzling.  Needless to say, Aristotle had no Christian theological ax to grind; he was simply following the philosophical arguments where they led.  There is no reason to accuse Aquinas of doing anything different, and it is hardly unreasonable to suggest that the way to harmonize the various aspects of Aristotle’s position is the way Aquinas does.  That does not mean that one might not still question whether Aquinas’s position is ultimately coherent (as Bill does), or criticize it on other grounds.  But the charge that it is “wholly unmotivated and ad hoc” -- a piece of Christian apologetics with no independent philosophical rationale -- is, I think, completely unwarranted.  

Now, does Aquinas’s dualism cohere with his hylemorphism?  Bill thinks not, but here too I think he has failed to make his case.  Let’s note first that there is nothing in hylemorphism that requires that we deny that a form per se can have an existence apart from matter.  Aristotle’s opposition to Platonism might seem to rule this out, but it doesn’t.  What Aristotelianism rules out is that universals can exist both apart from their instances and apart from any mind.  But when Aquinas says that certain forms exist without matter -- the human soul, or an angel -- he is not talking about universals existing apart from matter.  Nor is he even talking about a form by itself existing apart from matter, but rather a form plus an act of existing.  Hence he is talking about concrete particulars, albeit immaterial ones.   (Aristotle himself, who knew a thing or two about hylemorphism, allowed for immaterial things -- the “Intelligences” which he took to move the heavenly spheres.)

So, there is nothing necessarily un-Aristotelian in the notion of a form without matter.  But what about the form of a material thing?  The soul is, for Aquinas, the form of the body.  So how could it possibly exist apart from the body?  Bill asks why things should be any different with human beings than they are with Fido.  But Aquinas is quite clear about the answer to that question: The difference is that the human soul carries out immaterial operations (i.e. intellectual ones) while a dog’s soul does not.  And if it operates apart from matter and agere sequitur esse, then it must subsist apart from matter.  True, it would not subsist as a complete substance since (qua form) it is only part of a complete substance.  But it would subsist as an incomplete substance, like a severed hand which subsists at least for a time apart from the body (as can be seen from the fact that the hand can be reattached).  

This last example tells us what is wrong with Bill’s further objection:

Necessarily, a form is a form of that of which it is the form.  But a subsistent form is possibly such as to exist apart from that of which it is the form.  These propositions cannot both be true.

That they can both be true can be seen when we keep in mind how Aristotelians understand concepts like necessity, possibility, essence, and the like.  Suppose we say that it follows from the nature or essence of a dog that it has four legs.  Does that mean every single dog necessarily has four legs?  No, because a given dog might have lost a leg in an accident, or failed to develop all four legs due to some genetic defect, or (if only recently conceived and still in the womb) may simply not yet have developed all four legs.  What it does mean is rather that a mature dog in its normal state will necessarily have four legs.  As Michael Thompson and Philippa Foot have emphasized, “Aristotelian categoricals” of the form S’s are F convey a norm and are not accurately represented as either existential or universal statements of the sort familiar to modern logicians.  “Dogs have four legs” is not saying “There is at least one dog, and it has four legs” and neither is it saying “For everything that is a dog, it is four legged.”  It is saying that the typical dog, the normal (mature) dog, has four legs.  

Similarly, to say “Human souls are associated with bodies” is to say that the human soul in its normal state is associated with its body, just like the human hand in its normal state is associated with its body.  But it doesn’t follow that it cannot exist apart from the body, any more than it follows that the hand (at least while its tissues are still alive) can exist apart from the body.  And again, the reason this is possible with the human soul and not with Fido’s soul is that the human soul, unlike Fido’s soul, carries out immaterial operations even when it is associated with the body.

As Gyula Klima emphasizes in his article “Man = Body + Soul: Aquinas’s Arithmetic of Human Nature,” when trying to understand Aquinas’s conception of the soul, we need to keep in mind  the more general metaphysical and semantic framework within which he is working.  In particular, we need to keep in mind his doctrine of analogical predication: 

[I]f we recognize the analogical character of the predication of the notion of being with respect to the whole and with respect to its essential parts, it should come as no surprise that body and soul in the exclusive senses of these terms are said to be one being, in the primary sense of the term, yet they can be said to be two beings in the derivative sense in which distinct parts of a whole can be said to be beings.  

To be sure, there are some things that can properly be predicated only of the composite of soul and body together, and not to either soul or body by itself:

[S]ince having power and action can attach properly only to a being in the primary sense, the problem of interaction between body and soul… cannot arise, for both the actions and the corresponding powers will still belong only to the unified whole, and not to either of the parts. 

But there is a qualification:

This has to be the case, at least, unless there is some action which can properly be said to belong only to one of them, in which case that part will also have to be regarded as a being not only in the sense in a which a part is a being, but also in the sense in which the whole is.

But this is precisely the point Aquinas makes with respect to the unique case of the human soul in his proof for its immortality… [when he argues that] understanding is the act of the intellective soul alone…

Here as elsewhere, we will fail properly to understand Aquinas unless we see how thoroughly he rejects the assumptions that inform the thinking of most modern philosophers.  As with his views on ethics and the arguments for the existence of God, so too with his views on the mind-body problem, Aquinas’s position rests on a radically different understanding of the nature of causation, substance, essence, modality, and other basic metaphysical notions.  He and other ancient and medieval philosophers aren’t merely proposing a novel move in the game being played by contemporary philosophers of various stripes.  They are challenging the game itself.