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The difference between the Cartesian mind and the scholastic intellect.

The question

Aquinas worked with a distinction between matter and form, while the Moderns thought in terms of a distinction between body and mind. Was the alleged revolution against Scholaticism perhaps less dramatic than it is made out to be? Maybe all that changed were the words, and that the two distinctions amounted to more or less the same thing? The deflating proposition would be that the human form in the thought of Aquinas became the human mind in the thinking of Moderns like Descartes and Locke. Is there anything in this?

Distractions

The terminology Aquinas uses, and indeed the positions he defends, are confusing. I have tried to explain the notion of form and its ramifications elsewhere, but perhaps the key point in fangling out how the early Modern conception of body and mind related to the Scholastic distinction between matter and form is that the human being had just the one form, and that this form was equated by Aquinas with the soul.

"[T]he human soul ... is called the intellect or the mind" (Aquinas, ST, Q.75 Art 2)

This is in spite of Aquinas' talk of several apparently different forms and several apparently different souls. The human being, as a living thing, was held to have a nutritive soul - the sort of soul possessed by plants; and because the human being was an animal also, s/he was held to posses a sensitive soul (the sort of soul possessed by animals); and because the human being was not merely an animal but an animal with unique powers (ie, one that could think), s/he was held to have an intellectual soul. But though there were in a sense these three souls possessed by the human being, they were, Aquinas considered, all rolled into one. ("...[T]he sensitive soul, the intellectual soul and the nutritive soul are in man numerically one and the same soul." Summa Theologica, q.76 Art 3, Pegis edition, p.305)

(I don't want to sound dismissive: one can see broadly how it is sensible to think of the human soul as carrying the functions of all three souls together.)

Let us not be distracted either by the fact that Aquinas speaks of the intellectual soul as having two components, or aspects, or functions: the agent intellect and the receptive intellect. These are not to be understood as two different components of the intellectual form (which is the one and only form of the human being). They are best thought of as two different roles that the intellectual form performs.

Finally, we note that what is called the 'intellectual soul' is also sometimes referred to as the rational soul.

Power v. Space

One striking difference between intellectual soul (ie the human soul or form, remember) and mind was this. The intellectual soul for Aquinas seems to have been essentially a power, a power which when exercised brought about understanding; whereas the mind, for the early Moderns, was essentially a kind of arena which accommodated quasi-objects (namely 'ideas'). (The great thing about 'ideas' was that they stood for things other than themselves. They were representations.)

The scope of 'understanding'

I say that for Aquinas the distinctive power of the human form was its bringing about 'understanding': but it's crucial to note that the understanding which the human (intellectual) form conjured didn't cover all the things that 'understanding' covers today; and even when it was applied in the same contexts didn't mean quite what the early Moderns meant...

'Understanding' for us today covers a spectrum of things, some of which we are happy to think of as not exclusively human. For example, we are happy to think of a dog as understanding that danger threatens. But the intellectual form for Aquinas was what made the human being different from a non-human animal (or 'brute'), and the 'understanding' Aquinas thought of it as bringing was limited to the sort of understanding that was distinctive of human beings. Aquinas seems to have thought that it was the kind of understanding which goes with being able to speak. (See Kenny p. 41 ff.)

How Understanding was understood by Aquinas

Aquinas takes it that thinking involves dealing with categories. How do you 'acquire' or 'gain acces to' categories and so put yourself in a position to think? Well the category an individual thing belongs to is given by its form.

That is, Aquinas assumes that each individual thing has a form, and it is in virtue of this form that the individual thing belongs to a certain category (it is the form of an individual animal the makes it the sort of animal that it is - eg an individual belonging to the category horse.)

So the question he addresses is how, as a thinking person, you somehow 'gain access' to an individual thing's form.

It is acquiring such access that Aquinas regards as 'understanding'.

How understanding was understood by the early Moderns

How does this compare with the perspective of early Modern science?

The ruling system of ideas called corpuscularianism maintained that everything was made up of small particles. The forces between these corpuscles were supposed to hold the whole collection together, and the properties of the corpuscles were thought to give rise to the properties possessed by the thing as a whole.

The internal structure of the individual thing was determined by the interplay of the forces acting between the component particles.

Where does that leave 'understanding'?

The early Moderns cannot think of understanding as accessing or sharing in an individual thing's form, because form has gone.

(The noun 'understanding' becomes the name for the mind, as they conceived of it.)

But what of the verb? How do the early Moderns conceive of the 'act' of understanding?

Understanding is having the relevant idea. Understanding a word, the context in which 'understanding' occurs most often in Locke's Essay, is a matter for Locke of having the idea it stands for. and in general, "these words 'to be in the understanding' ... signify to be understood." (And for Locke whatever is in the understanding is an idea.) Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I Chapter II Section 5; and Book II Chapter 1 Section 1.

The early Modern mind plays no role in accounting for the internal structure of a material thing.

If we understand one key aspect of the notion of a form as that which endows matter (prima materia) with organisation therefore we see one key change as Thomism (as science) is displaced: organisation or structure is not put down to form but to the play of physical forces. These forces had nothing to do with the early Modern notion of mind which carried nothing therefore of the organisational or structural role carried by the earlier form.

It has been stated summarily that the decisive step taken by the early Moderns in conceiving of mentality was to draw a line between things of which the human being was conscious and things of which s/he was not. The mind for the early Moderns was the quasi space in which were located all, and only, items of consciousness; whereas the Scholastics had drawn the line between things that involved categories and things which did not. This seems to be to be an unhappy summary because it simplifies away other differnces, implying that there was the conception of the Modern mind on both sides of the divide, and all that happened was that the boundaries around it were drawn differently. In fact a whole conceptual framework changed, involving prima materia, form and intellect on the one side and corpuscularianism, 'ideas' and the Modern mind as an arena of mental representations on the other.

Summary

So the key differences are:

The early Modern mind plays no role in accounting for the internal structure of a material thing, but for the Thomist form this is a central role.

The early modern mind is a space whereas the Thomist intellect is more like a power.

Thomist intellectual powers have to do with handling categories but the early Modern mind contains ideas of a much wider variety of kinds.

For Thomas understanding is accessing forms; for the early moderns it is possessing ideas.

For Thomas the intellect is that which handles categories. for the early Moderns the mind was a container for all and only those things of which a person is 'conscious'.

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