The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
by Michael Bavidge
Return to the 13th century, and Thomas Aquinas, theologian and philosopher, wonders why human beings are not telepathic:
In the present life there are two impediments which prevent us from seeing each other's thoughts: the grossness of the body and the inscrutable secrecy of the will. The first impediment will be removed by the Resurrection, but the second will remain, and it is in the angels now. Nevertheless the brightness of the risen body will correspond to the degree of grace and glory in the mind; and so will serve as a medium for one mind to know another.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a 57, 5, ad 1.
The body and the will form an odd couple of co-defendants to be accused of blocking personal communication. It is odd that they should be bundled together and blamed for preventing us from gaining easy access to the thoughts and feelings of other people.
However, it is not the body and the will in themselves that are to blame; but the grossness of the one and the inscrutability of the other. Aquinas does not say that the body is an impenetrable shell around thought. He isn't saying that I cannot know what you are thinking because all I can see is the surface of your body and it is impossible for me to penetrate beneath it. Nor does he argue that the will constitutes a barrier of unpredictability between one person and all others. He does not say that your thoughts and feelings are forever hidden, or at best a matter of conjecture for me, because you can always decide not to let on, to hide, prevaricate or mislead.
On the contrary, he believes that at least as far as animals are concerned, human or brute, there is no communication without a medium. According to Aquinas the human mind needs the body because only through a body can the human mind acquire a world that it can come to understand. Unlike God and the angels, human beings have to learn what they know. They have to acquire knowledge and they can only do this by working away at a world which yields up its secrets reluctantly. And this is true also of the social world, the world of other people with whom we struggle to communicate. The communication of thoughts and feelings requires a body. But not a gross body. In Aquinas's opinion, telepathy between humans, if that is taken to involve communication independent of bodily activity and passivity, is impossible.
Equally there is no thought without will, that is without people who have their own preferences and make their own choices. Thoughts and intentions are not 'in' a mind accidentally, like biscuits in a box. They belong to someone. The real problem about another person's mind is not a matter of guessing what is going on inside the black box, but of being receptive to what they are capable of disclosing and willing to disclose. To be sensitive to this is to be aware of a will; but not an inscrutable will.
Unfortunately, in the fallen world, our bodies are in various ways deformed and clumsy. The key phrase Aquinas uses is very significant: per grossitiem corporis et propter voluntatem claudentem sua secreta; as are the three traditional nouns gratia, gloria and claritas, which he adopts to characterise the body and the mind, as they could be if they existed in perfect harmony. The phrase, per grossitiem corporis, translated above as the grossness of the body, does not just mean 'fat'. It refers to all sorts of clumsiness and incompetence. Equally in our present sinful state, our wills are secretive. Saint Thomas talks of the inscrutable secrecy of the will. His phrase is voluntatem claudentem sua secreta; literally: 'the will enclosing its own secrets'. This secretiveness encompasses all sorts of deviousness and perversity, which render our behaviour dark and impenetrable, our sentiments confused and obscure. If we had bodies which were not gross and wills that were not inscrutable, we would be better both at communicating our own thoughts and feelings and at understanding the thoughts and feelings of others.
Aquinas believed that, as a matter of fact, we were in that happy position in the Garden of Eden and we shall be again in Heaven. The bodies of Adam and Eve weighed less heavily on their souls, he says; their bodies had claritas: they were clear, transparent, perfect vehicles for their thoughts, feelings and intentions. And after the Resurrection, without sin, death, disease, deformity, growing old, the body will be returned to and surpass its original suppleness of expression. In those happy conditions, free from all sorts of physical and spiritual imperfections and incompetencies the body is agile and the will patent. They both exhibit a transparency of intention and a fluency of expression, which in everyday life we can aspire to, but only occasionally achieve. The grace and glory of the soul are manifest in the clarity of the body.
These theological speculations connect with familiar experience. The dancer, the athlete, the lover, in their significant movement, strive to attain grace, glory and clarity. They exhibit not just physical prowess but significant agility which manifest meaning, intention and feeling.
The connection Aquinas sees between communication and morality is not totally lost to our secular culture: goodness is open; wickedness is closed. Deceit and incompetence are two great barriers to communication. By lies and dishonesty we can disguise our true feelings and our real intentions; we can mislead people into forming false beliefs about what is going on inside us. Through inhibition we may fail to communicate our true feelings; through incompetence we may fail to manifest our intentions in our actions.
Some philosophers have been anxious to 'up the ante' on the soul, perhaps to ensure that it is spiritual, immaterial and immortal. Correspondingly they have been equally concerned to hand the body over to the physical sciences. To achieve this, they needed to drain the body of all significance and meaning. Our souls belong to a higher world; but our bodies are physical objects. All that higher stuff was siphoned off to the soul.
One consequence of this process was the generation of a set of impossible problems about 'Other Minds'. Only bodies are visible to others; they are the only phenomena. Given that they have been emptied of all significance, what could there be about them that would constitute evidence for mental states? What could a 'de-minded' body exhibit that would be evidence for the hidden presence of disembodied mind?
The appeal of telepathy depends upon this deeply entrenched 'de-minding' of the body and the alienation of the mental from the biological. Aquinas belongs to an older way of thinking which, despite its preoccupation with the supernatural, saw human understanding as a function of life. Understanding is a way of being in the world, not a way of representing the world. The human way of being-in-the-world is being alive. Human understanding consists in the acquisition, by learning animals, of knowledge of a world which is itself only potentially intelligible. Though it certainly requires interactions between the organism and its environment, it is not adequately explained by causal interactions between objects, physical or mental. Hilary Putnam, the contemporary American philosopher of mind, refers in his 1992 book Renewing Philosophy to 'the illusion of intrinsic intentionality, that is, the illusion that reference is something mysterious that exists while we think and about which nothing can be said...' (p. 165)
Aquinas would agree that 'intrinsic intentionality' cannot be a characteristic of the human mind, because the understanding and knowledge that we can acquire is possible only through social living in a shared environment.
There is an ironic lesson for us in these Thomist thoughts. Telepathy offers a short cut, which avoids entanglement with the social world. It promises a form of communication which does not depend on reading the intentional and expressive behaviour of others. Telepathy is a preternatural hacking into the mind of another. This would be possible only if the mind were a set of representations, mental or neural, which can be accessed and transferred. This model of the mind as a representational engine has dominated the Cognitive Sciences. It is elaborated, for example, in Daniel Dennett's influential Consciousness Explained . Its supporters recommend the theory on the grounds that it provides the most scientific basis for the study of mind; yet it makes possible the most questionable form of paranormal communication.
Computers can be hacked into, minds cannot. This fact alone suggests that the computer is a very poor analogy for the mind and telepathy, a sad fantasy substituted for personal communication.
The reader may also like to see Some Consequences
of Telepathy from Volume XXV, by Lord Amwell.