I picked this up after Chesterton’s Thomas Aquinas. From the distant past, when I was reading a lot of Herbert McCabe, I had heard of Turner: but this is the first time I was reading anything substantial by him.
There were some negative Amazon reviews: one complaining of Turner’s idiosyncratic use of the term “materialist”, and another complaining that the book is not as described because it covers little by way of biographical detail, instead going deep into Aquinas’s philosophy. Both reviewers also complain about Turner’s prose.
There is something to the complaints about the substance, but I thought the prose was excellent. It is the opposite of Chesterton. There are no antics to catch the reader’s attention: instead, sentence follows sentence in logical development, laying out clear lines of thought that are easy to skim.
His opening chapter, for me, evokes Thomas’s social environment even better than Chesterton. For Thomas was emphatically not a monk. By that point in European history, monasteries had become a kind of think tank/research centre. They are where the rich and powerful send their children: you can stay there and study different topics very deeply. The monastery was also an economic unit in its own right, where monks earn their keep by farming or managing lands and other endowments. Most monks may live quite contemplative lives, but some can also acquire political power by virtue of their intellectual prestige. In short, monasteries were part of the establishment.
Thomas’s parents wanted him to become a monk. But Thomas wanted to instead to be a friar, a very different thing back then. Friars wandered the streets to teach; they took a vow of poverty; they relied on begging in the busy streets of the cities, not the quiet self-sufficiency of monasteries. They were the hippy counter-communities of the day to the monk’s Oxbridge colleges.
Thomas became a Dominican friar (an organisation with only a 10 year or so history by the time Thomas joined), and he was doing his job as a trainer for junior Dominicans (think teacher-training college) when he wrote his best-known works, e.g. Summa Theologiae or Summa Contra Gentiles. These books read a bit like textbooks partly because that is what they were.
What they weren’t, however, was authoritative, at least not in Thomas’s time. For Thomas was deeply influenced by (then) newfangled theories from the Muslim world. After the split between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, Greek learning was essentially lost to Thomas’s Latin West. So it was only through translations from Muslim texts that Aquinas got to know and be influenced by Aristotle: think American hippies who got their Taoism from Japanese translations. In fact, Thomas’s positions were so controversial they were branded heretical by influential figures (including a bishop) shortly after his death.
And the content of Thomas’s thinking was indeed radical and (even now) quite different from what many people associate with Christianity. For example, as he famously says, “I am not my soul”. Rather than human beings having an immortal soul that is somehow separable to their bodies, for Thomas (as for Aristotle) the soul is that which makes the body alive. An analogy that Turner uses is that soul is the software to the body’s hardware. While it can be separately analysed, the software doesn’t occupy a different space or time: it is simply (a very complex) arrangement of the hardware.
This means that Thomas does not tell a simple, cardboard story about heaven and life after death. He rejects a story where, at death, a person’s soul simply departs from the body and lives in heaven in an immaterial form. Instead, for Thomas, life after death necessarily involves “resurrection of the body”, i.e. the person who is dead getting a new body with the same soul.
Readers familiar with science fiction or recent analytic philosophy will then notice a host of issues arising. What makes a person the same person from when they were 1 year old to 10 years old to 100 years old? Is it the continuity of memory? But then what about Derek Parfit’s split-brain example: where two bodies can each have half of the same brain, and by virtue of this have an equally legitimate claim to be the same person. And what about the possibility that you can take a 100% copy of someone and then “paste” them for dozens or hundreds or thousands of times?
Thomas/Turner’s answer is complex and likely isn’t correct in all its details. But what is striking to me is that he has an answer at all, and also a broadly reasonable answer. Thomas says that the human soul, unlike a plant’s soul or a cat’s soul is “intellectual”, it has the power of abstraction and understanding the world that is above and beyond other animals’ souls. How this power of abstraction arises is inexplicable: because a concept needs to be explained in terms of something else, and because the concept of abstraction is inherent in explanation, there are deep reasons why the power of abstraction (or intentionality) is inexplicable.
So, on Thomas’s theory, there is nothing as a matter of philosophical theory that makes cloning people impossible. With the right technology, we can clone 100 versions of Thomas. The soul being the animating principle of a body, each of these new Thomas would have his own soul. In fact, going further, if one can make a machine that has its own viewpoint and internal world, then such a machine would also have a soul.
But what would still be inexplicable (despite all the new science and technology assumed in these scenarios) is how a body (or a machine) comes to have its own viewpoint and internal world. This central aspect of human (or other intelligent being’s) existence would remain unexplained.
To this, one may reply that once we learn to build something from scratch, there is nothing more to explain: in tech jargon, if we can build something from nothing, we would have “grokked” the subject, understood its absence. To borrow a well-known quip, the best answer to “why is there something rather than nothing at all?” is “if there is nothing, you would still be complaining”! On this analysis, there would be no unanswered question about intentionality once we learn how to build another human being/intelligent machine.
But entertaining as the answer is, for Thomas this would not be an adequate response. It assumes the only valid questions to ask are questions that we are capable of finding ways of answering. But this assumption is hard to defend as a general principle. Sure, for many areas, we should not ask unanswerable questions for practical reasons of economy. But why equate legitimate and meaningful questions to only questions we know how to find an answer?
Looking at it from another angle, Popper famously argued that science must make falsifiable claims. Psychoanalysis is not a science to Popper because it is impossible to test by experiment and therefore “not even wrong”. But then there are (on their face) legitimate questions that is not in the form of how something works, e.g. what memories did a writer have in mind when she wrote a story. Why expect all legitimate questions to be reducible to “how” questions?
In general, this is Thomas/Turner’s strategy on a range of topics. For example, the nature of God is “no question-stopping, intelligible, answer”, instead it is “an answer-stopping question”.
Not everyone will be satisfied, but at least it makes an unexpectedly fresh and arresting read even in the 21st century.