In a 2015 video, I facetiously argued that, based on his own philosophical assumptions, Dr. Richard Dawkins does not actually exist. Of course, I firmly believe he does. But, my point was that, given his view of the universe, in which things are merely interacting aggregates of subatomic particles, there is no place for substantial unities above the level of whatever ultimate particles compose the cosmos.

A substantial unity is a thing whose entire nature is the same throughout. Every part of it has the same nature. The nature of my foot or stomach is not “foot” or “stomach,” but “human,” since my entire being shares the same human nature.

I will demonstrate that human beings are substantial unities. Only then can one rationally discuss whether we, as living substances, have spiritual and immortal souls. Since it is materialists who primarily reject the human spiritual soul, I shall address my comments primarily to their objections.

Cartesian Catastrophe

Sixteenth century philosopher, René Descartes, grafted a spiritualist view of the human person onto a materialist-mechanistic view of the human body. Typically understood as maintaining that mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensa) are two entirely distinct entities, this doctrine raises grave problems for any rational explanation of soul and body interaction. Such a radical distinction between mind and body is referred to as extreme dualism. Historically, this extreme dualism led to diverse philosophies such as transcendental idealism and positivism.

The Aristotelian-Thomistic view of man’s nature rejects Cartesian dualism. I shall offer arguments for the hylomorphic (matter/form) nature of man, which simultaneously refute (1) Cartesian extreme dualism and (2) the atomistic view (like Dawkins).

Why Man is a Single Substance

Basic metaphysics reveals that, just as non-being cannot beget being, activity (being, as proceeding from something) must manifest nature (the way something exists).

The standard argument for an organism’s substantial unity is that, since all its parts act for the good of the whole, rather than just merely for themselves, it must be because they are in fact parts of a whole. The function of a stomach or foot is not to care for itself, but rather to serve the good of the whole organism. Indeed, the liver “sacrifices” itself detoxifying all the poisons we ingest, for example, alcohol – even to the point of its own destruction. The intelligibility of a part, as a part, cannot be understood except that it is part of a whole.

“Actions for the sake of the whole” are manifested through multiple levels in the case of reproduction and development of organisms, for example, a human being.

At the moment of conception, the newly formed, single-celled zygote contains all the organs needed to keep this new, unbelievably-tiny human being alive. At the same time, all the genetic material within the zygote is co-acting so as to govern its development in precisely such fashion as to produce the next stages together with all the changes which will still entail each organ serving the whole of the organism at that later stage of life. Finally, this whole process, at each and every stage of its development is ordering all its parts to the production of the adult human being, in which, again, all of his organs will be acting for the sake of his being a complete and functioning living adult human being. Thus, at every moment in his development, the internal forces at work within the human organism are acting to assure the survival and function of the organism as a whole – both in the moment at hand, at every subsequent stage in its development, and simultaneously – from the first moment of its existence – to assure the well-being of the entire adult human being.

While the above argues forcefully for the human organism’s substantial unity, even more striking evidence abounds for that unity as we wholistically experience our personal interaction with the physical world.

Direct experience of the world tells us that “incoming” data are flooding our consciousness -- data that presents itself as a direct encounter with physical reality. We experience this through our five external senses of hearing, tasting, smelling, touching and seeing.

These sense data represent “incoming fire” from the various external senses – which we receive and unify into a total sensible experience of a real physical world filled with unified objects, such as an attacking vicious canine. The oneness of our own being is manifest in the unity of our experience as the subject being physically mauled.

But it does not end there. We also react to the world by marshalling all our various powers of thought and will and motor skills to react to the incoming data in a manner largely under our control and directed by our will commanding various mental and physical acts. We react to the world with our whole being, all parts acting together to produce a unified reaction to the external data. Thus, we respond with all the various powers of our being – mental and material – to drive this attacking canine away. Not away from just our mind, or hand, of foot, or whatever part of the body is most directly involved – but from our entire being, all parts being simultaneously engaged to bring all our various spiritual, mental, and physical parts and powers into the action of defending our whole selves against this viciously attacking dog.

This is not the mere internal images or ideas of Cartesian thought thinking itself, but the lived experience of a self -- unified in mind and body, experiencing external reality as a whole and reacting as a whole to engage and repel a dangerous external attacker.

That is the reason why everyone is so instinctively certain that he but a single being, with both mind and body, existing as a unified substance interacting with a real physical world.

Some reason for the unity of the whole self must be posited. Such a reason, according to Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, would be the substantial form, or soul, which animates the entire organism to be and to act as a single substantial unity.

In response to all this, the materialist might still object that everything I have described could just as well be explained in purely atomistic terms – as responses of complex biochemical systems to external stimuli. But the key to refuting that claim is the simplicity of the experience of wholeness that permeates the entire sequence of experiences described above.

“Wholeness” of Experience Reveals Immateriality, But Not Spirituality, of the Soul

Metaphysical materialism cannot explain how cognition unifies, in a single simple act, what, physically, is extended in space and multiple in parts. The essential insight, as I more fully explain in another Strange Notions article, is that purely physical things can never apprehend the “wholeness” of an experience for the simple reason that physical representations are always extended in space. They always “image” something by having one part represent one part of the object and another part represent another part – with no single part representing (apprehending) the whole.

The most obvious example is a TV screen on which an image of an object is presented – one pixel at a time by hundreds of thousands of pixels – each one digitally “on” or “off,” but with no single pixel “seeing” the whole. The screen sees nothing. But, a living, sensing dog looking at the screen can see the image of another whole dog and bark at it. Why? Because the dog, unlike purely material things such as a TV screen, has something not extended in space, which enables it to apprehend the image as a single whole. Specifically, the dog has immaterial sense powers.

That is why machines sense nothing -- and no computer will ever understand the synthetic wholeness expressed in the intellectual judgment, “Cogito, ergo sum.” An aggregate of mere physical parts can never experience anything as a whole. Yet, that is precisely what can be done by animals and men. Even a dog, which has no spiritual soul, perceives another dog as a whole. Still, I am not saying that this “immateriality” in cognition is the same thing as “strict immateriality,” that is, spirituality. But, I am saying that what is immaterial is neither extended nor locatable in space.

Some modern materialists are puzzled by “qualia,” properties of experience that are not physically detectable, yet subjectively real. But anything genuinely physical must be locatable in space. Either qualia are locatable or not. If they are, then they are merely material. If not, then immaterial things exist. But clearly, experiences of “wholes” are not locatable in space, as shown above. Genuine immateriality is real – and physical reality cannot account for it, since non-being cannot account for being. What is locatable in space cannot account for what is not locatable. The reality of experiences of wholes is incompatible with a purely atomistic metaphysics.

What is clear in the example given earlier is that we experience as a whole both the incoming sensory data of the various cognitive faculties as well as our unified cognitive and motor response to that same data -- as in that hypothetical confrontation with a vicious dog. Since (1) solely an immaterial principle can apprehend such “wholes” and (2) the entire cognitive and motor acts of the person are apprehended as a functioning whole in such situations, it follows that an immaterial principle, which is what we know on reflection as the “self,” is at the very center of our functional operations as a human being confronted by, and reacting to, the external physical world.

This principle, which unifies (1) the activity of the sense organs, (2) sensation itself, and (3) all the intellectual activities of man into a functional whole, must not only be immaterial, but must account for the living human organism acting and being as such a whole, since we immediately experience both (1) the passive awareness of external objects acting upon us and (2) our personal direction of our coordinated faculties in active response to such objects. Since mere atomistic material components lack all immateriality, atomistic explanations fail to explain adequately the unifying and immaterial aspects of human cognitive and physical interaction with the world.

Because we experience sense objects under their proper material conditions, that is, as with particular height, width, color, shape, and so forth, it follows that the soul has at least some activities intrinsically dependent on matter and using material organs – thereby manifesting that it is not simply the pure mind or spirit that Descartes’ extreme dualism alleges.

Aristotle’s doctrine of hylomorphism maintains that various types of things are composed of form and matter, where (1) form specifies the matter to be the kind of thing that it is and (2) matter quantifies and individuates the form into a particular instance of the form. Aristotle attributes human acts, such as described above, to the form of the substance – the substantial form, which he also calls the soul. The soul is the unifying life principle of all organisms.

From the points made above, it should now be evident that (1) atomism is false, because it fails to account for the immateriality of cognition, and (2) extreme dualism is false, because it fails to note the dependence of sense experience on matter. Since the extreme alternatives of atomism and extreme dualism are both false, hylomorphism becomes the intermediate default position, which must be the true doctrine.

Spiritual Nature of Intellectual Acts

Nonetheless, the human intellect manifests other operations demonstrably totally independent of matter – actions such as self-reflection, understanding, judging, and reasoning. Since lack of space prevents explanation of why all these acts are strictly immaterial, I shall present just one argument, based upon the radical difference between the image and concept.

Eighteenth century Scotch sceptic, David Hume, failed to grasp the essential difference between the image and the concept. Hume maintained that all we know are sense impressions. What we take to be external sense experience he describes as vivid and lively sense impressions. Ideas are taken from memory or imagination and are less vivid. All knowledge remains at the sensory level. So, too, for modern materialists, all knowledge, whether direct sensation or “intellectual” ideas, is merely sensory in nature, and thus essentially mere neural activity and patterns ultimately based in the brain. Ideas or concepts are not qualitatively superior to sense impressions or images. Sensism reigns supreme.

But for Aristotelian-Thomistic classical philosophy, image and concept (idea) are radically distinct entities. Sense impressions or images are either mere neural patterns or dependent on them. In any event, being radically immersed in matter, they are expressed under conditions of time and space. This means that they are always singular, particular, concrete, and having material qualities, such as shape, color, size, and so forth, which make them imaginable. Thus, one can imagine a horse or triangle, but always with a particular shape, color, size, and so forth. Recall, this was how we knew that the immateriality of sense knowledge was not actually spiritual in nature, since its object was always under the conditions of matter, and therefore, did not exhibit total independence of matter.

On the contrary, the universal concept or idea utterly transcends all material conditions. Thus, horseness or triangularity is not even imaginable. Because universal concepts must apply to each and every possible concrete actualization, they can express the concrete physical characteristics of none of them. Thus, “triangularity” must express every possible triangle’s essence – be they obtuse, acute, or isosceles. That is why idealized sculptures of something like “triangularity” never express every single possible triangle, but only some idealized, but concrete, representation of the concept. So, too, there is no concrete ideal of “horseness,” since it must express the essence of every possible concrete horse. Indeed, some concepts are directly of spiritual entities which inherently cannot be physically expressed, such as justice, beauty, truth, oneness, and so forth.

The fact that the human intellect can form such spiritual entities, demonstrates the spirituality of the human soul, since the less perfect cannot produce the more perfect.

Nominalists claim that no such universals exist, but are rather merely names for multiple associated things. Yet, ultimately, there is no way to know which items should share the same predicate unless one already sees what is common in nature to them. More strikingly, no matter how we form them, the irreducible difference between image and concept remains evident as shown above.

And yet, if universal concepts reveal the spiritual powers of man, how is it that animals seem to recognize the common qualities of sense objects, as when the wolf knows all sheep? Such knowledge is not that of a universal concept, but merely a “common image,” whereby similar sensible qualities are perceived as similar in a singular image. It does not prove universal understanding of the nature involved, but merely a response to sensible similarities through the common image. The fact that an animal responds in a common way is no more impressive than that a computer can be programmed to respond to similar sensible objects, since (1) the computer knows nothing and (2) the human understanding of the universal concept remains radically incommensurable with mere knowledge of an image. My article on ape-language studies explains this entire subject in far greater detail than is possible in this short piece. Suffice it to note that for a cat to know the common image of a mouse has far more utility than would be the intellectual understanding of the internal essence – even though a human biologist would prefer the latter.

Because sense knowledge is always dependent on the individualizing, concretizing nature of matter, nothing spiritual is evinced by the animal kingdom. But, the fact that man can form and understand universal concepts free of all such conditions of matter reveals the spiritual nature of human intellectual operations, and thereby, the spiritual nature of the human soul. Since the human soul is free and independent of matter, it must have existence independent of matter as well. Therefore, the separation of that spiritual soul from the material body at death does not entail the end of life for the human person. Man dies, but his spiritual soul is immortal.

Since some operations of the soul are dependent on matter and some are clearly independent of matter, it follows that the human soul is a hylemorphic principle – neither totally separated from the human substance in life, nor yet so existentially dependent upon that composite substance as to be destroyed at death.

Unlike extreme Cartesian dualism, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical psychology recognizes the intrinsic relation of the human soul to the whole of man’s being. The fact that the soul integrates both material sensation and spiritual intellection in the same psychic human acts shows that it must be, not a totally separated spirit during life, but rather the substantial form of the living human being. Yet, that substantial form is a hylemorphic principle whose spiritual operations and nature enable it to survive the death of the whole man so as to assure immortal life for the human person.

Whether that form is reunited to a material principle through a resurrection process belongs to the science of theology rather than philosophy. Still, the natural ordination of the form to matter suggests the possibility of a future resurrection.

In today's Catholic Church, Platonism and Aristotelianism are often considered equal. It is a dangerous error that hails all the way back to the first neo-Platonists in the third century. Simply put, the true description of reality, rightly recognized by the Catholic Church, is that account given by Aristotle (not Plato!) and confirmed by Thomas Aquinas.

But too many Catholics speak of Plato and Aristotle together, as if their metaphysics are identical. They are in fact nowhere near this. And when this error of conflation was combined with the the Enlightenment and the Reformation, the byproduct was a surge in atheism.

These two sixteenth century forces staged a joint revolt against the metaphysics of Aristotle. And the overly close association of Plato and Aristotle was and continues to be a major piece of the puzzle: in our day, Plato is either falsely held to be Aristotle’s equal, or even his philosophical better.

Even among Catholics, it hasn't been articulated commonly, plainly, or clearly enough: to abandon Aristotelian metaphysics and ethics is to veer toward atheism. Aristotelianism alone accounts for the close causal interaction of formal reality—"being qua being" or existence as it really is—and our day-to-day material lives. Platonism flatly rejects such an interaction.

Often, well-intentioned Catholic theologians have been all too ready to consider Plato a practical Aristotelian simply because St. Augustine was a sort of Platonist. (In fact, he was the precise sort—a neo-Platonist—who popularized the conflation. But more on that later.)

At present, suffice to affirm that Plato was not any sort of Aristotelian, proto- or otherwise, except in the very most mechanical sense: Plato first posited “form” and “matter,” and from there said perfectly opposite things (compared against Aristotle) about them. In fact, Plato divorced form from matter. The divorce of form and matter comprises the position of anti-realism to which the Modern world has predictably returned—following the anti-Aristotelian metaphysics of the two forces of Modernism, what I call “Prot-Enlight,” and also the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (the perfect vindication of both the Reformation and the Enlightenment).

And this is in turn due largely to the unhappy fact that neither ancient thinker, Plato nor Aristotle, has been studied with any consistent degree of seriousness, anytime following the Late Middle Ages.

Neo-Platonists and Straussians

As mentioned above, the first historical which equated Platonism with Aristotelianism were the neo-Platonists, who were the contemporaries (and in some cases, collaborators) of the Church Fathers, like Saint Augustine. Rather than emphasizing all of the plain errors in Plato's metaphysics, corrected by Aristotle, the neo-Platonists, especially those at Alexandria, highly exaggerated the few likenesses between Plato's and Aristotle's ontologies.

In other words, neo-Platonism generally regards Plato as an Aristotelian and vice versa. This falsity influenced many students in the early Roman empire, and continues to do so.

One factor that partly excuses neo-Platonism's false equivocation between Plato and Aristotle was the widespread disappearance and general unavailability of Aristotelian texts during this period (the third through the sixth century A.D.). The neo-Platonists wrongly but honestly assumed that Plato's student, Aristotle, had incorporated more of his teacher's system into his own metaphysics than he actually had. Where there existed a hole in Aristotelian scholarship, the neo-Platonists assumed (wrongly, most of the time) that Aristotle probably agreed with his teacher Plato.

And this is understandable enough.

But in today's academy, there is no longer any excuse for this equivocation. In any of today's colleges and universities willing to give Plato or Aristotle a read at all, which is far too few, the influence of cultish twentieth century thinker Leo Strauss prevails. What Strauss and the Straussians did to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle was to re-bundle them, as neo-Platonism had, into a “package deal.” The Plato and Aristotle package.

And since none of the Straussians gave a sufficiently close or accurate read to either Plato or Aristotle, they tend(ed) to buy the neo-Platonist myth of the close lineage between the two metaphysics. (For whatever reason, Straussians studying the Medieval period in philosophy tend to focus on neo-Platonic-inclined Arab scholars like al-Farabi or Avicena instead of Aristotelian-leaning Averroes or Thomas Aquinas. And this tends to re-solidify the wrong impression inaugurated by the neo-Platonists.) The Straussians have not helped matters.

Prot-Enlight and Immanuel Kant

Naturally, it would require a much longer, drier article to enumerate fully all of the parties involved in the phenomenon of falsely aligning Plato and Aristotle—and what motivated each of these parties. Instead, what merits our attention is the Modern world, where the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant “undid” most of the corrections Aristotle made to Plato's thinking.

Long after the neo-Platonists, but long before the Straussians, two distinct sixteenth century groups wanted not necessarily to characterize Aristotle as a Platonist (or vice versa) but rather to kill Aristotelianism outright. In the main, Aristotelianism stands for reality’s incipient freedom and morality, its intelligibility, and its teleology. These three prongs not coincidentally characterize the Catholic view of reality. The Protestant reformers and the Enlightenment secularists wanted to depart from Aristotelianism for quite differing, even opposite, reasons.

But they shared at least one common goal: to unyoke the Modern world from the “thralldom” of Rome. Doing so involved the development of a Prot-Enlight ontology which viewed man’s nature as unfree (determinism), nature as unintelligible, and reality as purposeless (random or “non-teleological”). Perhaps a follow-up article, explaining how each they achieved this, and how a German philosopher would vindicate both 150 years later, is warranted.

That German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, vindicated both the Enlightenment and the Reformation by returning (in non-Platonic language) to Plato’s divorce of matter and form. In other words, what is knowable about this world constitutes practical knowledge, but is unimportant; what is knowable about reality constitutes pure knowledge, is important, but unknowable from this world. Such Kantianism falsely claimed to justify the overturn of Aristotle. Even into our age, this claim has fooled most of the world.

Jacques Maritain and the Way Forward

To date, the clearest and most definite argument put forth against the equation of Platonism with Aristotelianism was that of twentieth century Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Maritain appraised Plato’s metaphysics as both vastly important for its undeniable contributions to the truth, and yet vastly wrong where it became too specific. (Plato was certainly the “big picture thinker” par excellence!) Such specific calculations about reality required Aristotle’s corrective hand, Maritain reasons.¹

The only metaphysics sufficient to explain this intuitive truth of existence would have to be capable of positing a much closer causal connection between ideal reality—what Plato called the “really real”—and our material existence. Aristotle’s did this, and Thomas Aquinas’ perfected upon it by use of the concept of analogia.

The practical aspect of Maritain’s philosophy, aside from its bright distinction between Plato and Aristotle, was its popularity among non-philosopher Catholics.  Readers of Maritain among the Catholic laity are able, en masse, to understand, from a truly Aristotelian perspective, just

how are we to explain the relationship between [material] things and their forms? Plato replied by calling them likenesses or participations of the forms. But these terms, which later will receive in Scholasticism a profound significance, are in Plato’s system nothing more than metaphors devoid of any strictly intelligible content…[which is] a pregnant conception which, in Aristotle’s hands, was to be purged of all internal contradiction, but which, as presented by Plato, seems self-contradictory…

By rightly pointing out the self-contradiction in Plato’s metaphysics of divorce—divorce between the world and meaning, between material objects and their forms, between reality and semblance—Maritain points us away from Kant, and back to the truth—that is, back to Aristotle and St. Thomas.

Conclusion

When the world embraces anti-realism, a divorce between form and matter, Aristotelian realism is abandoned and atheism naturally follows. The view of a rational, causal, meaningful universe requiring a God drops away…and you wind up with irrational, anti-philosophical worldviews, like the self-contradictory scientism of Laurence Krauss.

Now, this is truly a "strange notion," that the apparent winning philosophy has lost. In the hearts and minds of the West, the philosophia perennis has been passed over in favor of dozens of differing strains of Modernist alternatives over the last five centuries. In truth, only part of this blame can be attributed to the usual suspect one finds beneath popular falsities and behind the executioners of priests and philosophers: old-fashioned, prophet-slaying mobbishness.

In this particular case, the killers and deniers of the truth have been aided—and in that sense exculpated—by confused Modern philosophers themselves, who ought to know better, and who long ago popularized the supposed "closeness" of Plato and Aristotle.