The "I" and Aquinas

by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen
St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate,
insisted that although sensorial images, (phantasms in the jargon of scholas-
ticism, symbols in a more contemporary English usage), accompany every
act of intellection, they operate in a peculiarly negative fashion in metaphysi-
cal discourse.
l
Metaphysical reasoning, even though it aims at concluding to
truths about those principles that need not exist in matter and motion,
nevertheless is human and hence follows the pattern proper to man's entire
cognitive life. The metaphysician, as do all men, uses phantasm symbols, but
he must deny that that which he is talking about-namely, being-is or
exists as it is presented to him in the image.
2
A negation of any positive
representational function in the phantasm includes, of course, the concep-
tual content presented therein. A striking example of this teaching is found
in St. Thomas' doctrine on substance. Although first philosophy separates
substance from any necessary link with matter and motion-substances can
be in matter but do not have to be in matter-nonetheless, the only proper
concept of substance available to an intellect whose act is proportioned to
the scope of material things, is that of a material substance.
3
Our concepts
are properly those of material essences.
4
Therefore, the metaphysician must
drop the concept, not in the sense of suppressing it but of holding it before
his mind and then negating it. Borrowing a trick from Heidegger, this can be
visualized in the following way: phantasm/ concept; ~ ~
Were the concept erased, the judgment would be meaningless because we
literally would not know what we were talking about. Negated in its modus
sign(ficandi,5 the concept in its use in judgment is retained: it still points to
the truth affirmed." The typical judgment in metaphysics yields no vision
whatsoever. Metaphysics walks in darkness but in a darkness lit by lamps of
truth.
If my language here is highly metaphorical, that language is deliberately
metaphorical because both philosophy and psychology necessarily incarnate
themselves in language and language is more than highly metaphorical. The
imagery of "depth" taken from the psychology using the same name
illustrates the point in question. The word "depth" is obviously metaphorical
and suggests spatiality: shallow, deep, deeper, the deepest- the depth! The
word can trick us into thinking that human intellection is comparable to the
waters of a well clear at the surface: conscious rationality; and murky at the
47
48 Ethical Wisdom East and/ or West
bottom, hence largely unknown because unclear. An inspection of the
conception reveals its metaphorical character. Intellection is not spatial and
cannot be understood properly as though it were either a well or an ocean or,
to change my own metaphor, an artichoke composed of "layers" of mean-
ings. In a profound, hence metaphorical, sense, we cannot escape the
metaphor. Cognition is an act in which all the meanings proper to spoken or
imagined discourse are simultaneously present in the very literal statement
itselP We cannot go "behind" or "below" the literal in order to find what
exists in "the depths," as though the depths were somehow tucked beneath
conscious rationality. Granted that we have to talk about and conceive
intellection in this fashion, metaphysical surgery insists that we distinguish
truth from our manner of understanding it.
The example of "depth" was chosen deliberately because it leads to the
topic of the "ego" with which this paper is properly concerned. A depth is
unseen whereas a surface is seen. Classical Freudianism may have been
guilty of a late rationalist propensity to understand understanding in terms
of visuality, to cognize cognition as though it were "taking a look." Such
Peeping Tom epistemology proceeds from the prejudice that postulates an
already fully conscious ego, an "I," "behind" thought. This "1" or ego,
understood to be a kind of substantive root of consciousness, Descartes'
"thinking substance," takes in the world at a glance. Underneath this
conscious clarity there lurks the basement of the human spirit, the refuse of
the unconscious which can only be sorted out by psychiatric plumbers of the
sewers of the psyche. My imagery exaggerates but it does so in order to
heighten the highly metaphorical approach to many issues through which
both psychology and philosophy come into relation with one another.
Extremely revealing in St. Thomas Aquinas' entire approach to the
symbiosis of intellection and sensation, of spirit and flesh, is the total
absence of any rationalist ego which is presumed to precede cognition and
from which cognition is presumed to proceed. To him, man is there before
he knows. The soul is there. The powers of the soul are there. But no ego is
there at all. The treatises on knowledge which stud the writings of the
Common Doctor obviate this remarkable hiatus: there is absolutely no
theory about an ego understood to be somehow constitutive of human
rationality or consciousness or personhood. This is not documented because
that which is simply absent cannot be documented, nor is it denied because
that which is not even talked about cannot be denied. A commonplace we
discover in Thomistic scholarship is a fully developed theory according to
which man's intellect in act, reflecting totally upon itself in act, comes to
know-in exercised or lived act-the existence of the soul, a non-scientific or
non-essential knowledge, a wholly existential and hence incommunicably
personal But an ego? The only significant Thomistic passages
The "I" and Aquinas 49
dealing with an ego are those which comment on the Exodus passages in
which God gives His Name as "Ego sum qui sum."9 Yet, even here, the
darkness of the via negationis envelopes the Divine Revelation in inscrutable
mystery. The "1 Am Being" suggests a subject of infinite existence, a duality
of subject and predicate. This duality in judgment according to which we
think about God must be denied to be Him.lo Subsisting Existence does not
pertain to a Divine Ego. The Thomistic esse can never be a subject of
anything, much less of "itself." 11 When Esse subsists, God, the entire
dichotomy between subject and object, possessor and possessed, disappears.
The composing character of judgment reflects the composed character of
beings, but this breaks down when men predicate attributes to God. God is
not a vast "Eye" (as on the Masonic symbol which decorates the U.S. dollar
bill) peering out at the world. In a word: God is not a substantive Ego in
Aquinas because God is not any kind of a substantive. Granting that the
medieval Latin of Aquinas tends to absorb the personal pronoun into the
verb, it nonetheless seems astonishing that a thinker of the immense prestige
of Aquinas was serenely unconcerned with a problem considered to be a
reality by the far greater number of modern and contemporary philosophers
and psychologists. Not the last and final a priori of Kant, the ego just is
nothing at all for St. Thomas Aquinas.
Jean Paul Sartre pointed out that the Cartesian cogito as known postu-
lates a second cogito knowing the first and that this regression involves the
impossibility of an infinite series of egos knowing egos. 11 Sartre speaks of a
pre-cogito which knows the Cartesian cogito and this pre-cogito is pure
intending consciousness, intending both subjects and objects: not "I know a
dog" but "there is knowing of a dog." Sartre was on to something but should
he be right, he must be wrong somewhere along the line. For if pre-reflective
consciousness intends the reflective Cartesian cogito, if the pour soi intends
the en soi, it follows that this primordial situation can be known only
because reflective consciousness subsequently intends pre-reflective con-
sciousness. The pre-cogito is known to be a pre-cogito by being converted
into an objectified cogito. But if this be true, then it follows that the pre-
cogito is not the original phenomenological datum of experience which
intends a world but is itself intended by the second cogito which it
presumably intends. In fact, both cogitos are constructs, entia rationis.
Fundamental philosophical options are at stake. If the jumping-off point
for all philosophy is deduced transcendentally or reduced phenomenologi-
cally, the idealist option has been chosen. If that same jumping-off point
must be, first, the diveboard upon which I am both in being and in
knowledge, then the posture of metaphysical realism has been chosen. If an
intending consciousness, a pre-cognitive ego, intends the conscious ego but
is known so to intend only by the second or intended ego, then it follows that
50 Ethical Wisdom East and/or West
the first principle is second, not first. The contradiction, on realist grounds,
is patent: the first is known to be first by the second which is putatively
grounded by the first. This peeping at peepings involving still further peeping
at peepings is a long series of stares at stares in the mirrors of an epistemo-
logical fun-house for a non-critical Thomist.
If pre-reflective consciousness is already constituted as a concomitant
knowing of one's own knowing, as Sartre contends, then the pre-cogito is no
cogito at all. Sartre seems dimly aware of a cluster of truths articulated
centuries earlier by St. Thomas but Sartre's unexorcized Cartenianism
prevented his exploiting them.
Intentionality is the key to the issue: either an ego intends the other or an
ego is constituted in the act of becoming the other as other. For St. Thomas,
self-consciousness is a dimension of a spiritual act; it follows that "self" is
simply nothing outside of an act of consciousness and to be conscious is to
be conscious of an other. Consciousness, in Thomistic terms, is always
relational and the term of the relation is the other. Intentionality in S1.
Thomas is not precisely what it is in contemporary phenomenological
psychology although the parentage of the latter doctrine is clearly traceable
back to Aquinas through HUsserl's dependence on Brentano. Jacques
Maritain sketched this history in broad terms in his The Degrees of
Knowledge.
14
The reluctance of the school of HUsserl to grant an indepen-
dent existence to the intended object (even though it is evident that the
object, unless it be mind-dependent, is always intended as existing or as
possibly existing, the latter being reducible to the former.) 15 can be read in
terms of the long tradition of German idealism; it can also be read in terms
of a reluctance to take metaphysical risks where none are needed. In any
case, S1. Thomas' theory of knowing insists on an identity, but a non-
physical identity, between knower and known.
16
The reasoning is a com-
monplace in the Thomistic tradition: unless I am identically what I know,
then what I know is a likeness of the real and not the real. It follows that I
would not know that the likeness was a likeness because in order to know
that a likeness is a likeness I must compare it with an original.
St. Thomas often approaches the issues from the angle of the essence-esse
relationship. 17 Given that esse is not identically essence, it follows that any
essence can exist in more than one individually existing unit and in more
than one order of being: that is, that which exists concreted in matter and in
space-time can exist as well in the timeless universality of the conceptual
order where it acquires the second intention of predicability.lx Were this not
so, a man could not function for a moment in his waking life: he could not
predicate the common nature "door" of this concrete door and it is unlikely
that he could even get out of his bedroom in the morning. Whether
intentional identity proves a real distinction between being and essence or
The "I" and Aquinas
51
whether intentional identity follows from a previous demonstration of the
real distinction is a metaphysical question from which I abstract in this
essay. Be that as it may, the only alternative to intentional identity is some
form of Suarezianism or mediated realism a fa Descartes, alternatives, that
is, within an overarching realist philosophy.
A theory according to which the self-same "x" that exists in the real now
exists in knowing, and a theory insisting on an existential diversity within an
essential community is by no means self-evident, nor is it easy to convey to
unsuspecting students or to adherents of inferior philosophies. It does,
however, seem to follow from any reflection on the data of our immediate
grasp of things as they are. All theories departing from this immediate
datum do so only because the knower, now conceived as an independent
ego, abstracts himself, or, better still, separates himself from things as they
are experienced before he makes such an abstraction. The burden of proof
rests with these men who make the abstraction: they must tell the philoso-
phical community why they are constrained to do so!
Intentional existence, as understood by St. Thomas, is a thoroughly
relational act.
19
Like all relations, the act terminates and that term is "the
other as other," scire est esse aliud in quantum afiud est. If knowing is
structurally a "being-other-as-other," then my knowing of myself knowing is
thoroughly a function of an activity that is not ego-directed but other-
directed. The situation is not equivalent to a waking up of a hitherto
dormant ego but of an active constituting of the ego in the very act of
knowing the other. In Aquinas' own language, the intellect-in becoming
the other-expresses to itself its own conformity to the real. 10 The produc-
tion of the verbum is one wi'th concomitant knowing, knowing in exercised
act: this knowing in exercised act is the ego. This "ego" is simply spiritual
existence totally open to itself in its very becoming what is not "itself" but an
"other." 22 "I" truly know and the "I" knowing is thus a dimension of
knowing-being.
23
I have called this "I" "The Man Within," the man to whom we talk even to
ourselves. Ego is alter ego. Anybody can try this out on himself: you do not
understand until you "say" or "express" what you know and this "ixpres-
sion" is to "yourself" in actually knowing. The "yourself" is a function of the
reflective phase of intellection. There simply exists no ego until there is an
other known by the ego. This alter ego-Rimbaud's "I Is An Other"-is the
mask of the spirit, but unlike ordinary material masks this face has no face
behind it, no face in the sense of an already molded and subsisting substance
or inhering accident. The Thomistic ego is neither substance nor, strictly
speaking, accident in the order of intentionality. When the alter ego haunts
us as undesirable and unlovely, we try to get rid of it: recall Joseph Conrad's
The Secret Sharer in which a young captain of a square-rigged sailing ship
52 Ethical Wisdom East and! or West
shelters his "double," a merchant ship officer like himself but accused of a
crime. The captain lets him escape by swimming to shore by sailing his vessel
perilously close to land; his immense relief upon purging himself of The
Secret Sharer reflects the cleaning out of the stable of the spirit by any man
who would exorcize his own ego. This exorcism, however. always produces a
new ego as man continues to converse with himself. To know is to
communicate, ultimately to communicate with a "self" constituted by the
very act of intellection. Expressed in another way, we' might say that there
simply is no "self" at all until there is "an other" which is known.
In technical Thomistic jargon. the "self" emerges when the intellect in
total reflection knows that what it is intentionally, its own form or structure.
has being in a thing.24 Predication in judgment is the logical expression of
this noetic taking-in-hand of an act by itself through total intellectual
reflection."5 The prolongation of this act terminates in the existential and
concomitant knowledge of the soul in act.'h But ego is neither intellect nor
soul nor intellection of the other. Ego is total reflection and hence knowing
my (only now is there a "my" in act, a "my" not as thing) own relation to the
real. In reflecting, the intellect knows its relation to the thing because the act
of the intellect stands revealed to itself. This self-revelation through becom-
ing the other is the ego. As expressed by the author in an earlier work:
This intentional 'doing' which is the act of knowing is ... self-
conscious, open to its own being. This openness of knowledge to itself,
this awareness man's intellect possesses in judgment of its own-being-
related-to-a-thing, is intellectual reflection.27
bgO understood as the "self" knowing is a phase of the intellect's reflection
upon itself in act, a phase of knowing that the known is known truly by me:
ego is a function of the truth as known.
If the Thomistic ego, understood as a consciousness of a self, is a moment
in an act pivoting on itself in its capture of the real, a pivoting which is one
with the capture, then the absence of any articulated theory of the cogito in
St. Thomas is intelligible both philosophically and historically. But this
intelligibility heightens rather than diminishes the set of problems centering
around the ego. Returning to the considerations raised about metaphor and
the use of the negative judgment in metaphysics with which this study began,
we might well ask ourselves the following question: Why has modern
philosophy since Descartes posited the ego as a primordial first principle, as
a critical or factual given? Granted that the ego has passed through a
bewildering series of transmogrifications from the Transcendental Ego of
Kant to the pre-conscious cogito of Sartre, one ineluctable truth stands out:
the critical posture insists on commencing our common venture of philoso-
Tht' "j" and Aquinas 53
phy from an ego which is either taken as an evident datum, deduced
transcendentally, or reduced phenomenologically. Thomistic epistemology
is capahle of explaining what happened, thus validating: Plato's dictum
according to which superior insights can explain inferior ones.
If acts are properly cognized in judgment and if states or things are
properly cognized in simply understanding,n then it follows that all activi-
ties arc conceptualized as though they were things. "Walking" is not a thing
that walks yet we can properly affirm that "Walking is good exercise." We
take an act and suhsequently conceptualize it as though it were a thing and
thus subject it to predications.
29
What is first grasped as act in judgment
("He walks") is now distended into the conceptualization, "walking."
"Walking" and "running" and all such material acts, when functioning as
subjects of judgments, are treated as though they were substances. But the
proper concept of substance, as indicated earlier, is that of material
substance. When the metaphysician commences to reason about spiritual
acts the issue is complicated enormously hecause he has no proper concept
of anything spiritual,30 even though his conceptualizing of the material is
itself a spiritual activity. It follows that he must treat spiritual acts as though
they were things whenever he obliquely conceptualizes them. Considering
them as things is conceptualizing them, a la{uerza, as material substantives.
The ego, once conceptualized as an ego, is thought of as though it were
simply "there." a given. a frozen absolute out of which thoughts can emerge
and within whose gaze things can be swept. The metaphorical analogy with
the physical eye is patent. The eye is always there in the head whether it sees
or not. whether it he closed in sleep or watchful when awake. E!io: I: Eye-
all coalesce in a symbolic collage which tricks the philosopher into thinking
that he is talking about some thing, admittedly spiritual (except by the
Marxists) but understood by all in terms of material substantiality. Sartre is
dead right in his insistence that the Cartesian cogito is already an object once
thought of as the cogito and every object requires that it be intended. But, as
indicated, an intending consciousness prior to an intended is itself, presum-
ahly, being thought by Sartre, H llsserl, etc. Hence, this consciousness is
not prior but posterior.
In conclusion, cognition is of the other and that other is heing. Ego is
concomitant awareness that I Am Other. There is no ego without an other,
but although the "other" is there in being (or in the being of knowing), the
ego is never "there" any more than spiritual activities arc ever "there." Men,
not egos, are "there." My ego, my "myself-ness" Ini mi.lmidad-is my
history and not "my" suhstantiality or my personhood. but an exploration of
that thesis will require another study.
University of Dallas
Irving, Texas
54 Ethical Wisdom East and/or West
NOTES
I. Thomas Aquinas, In Lihrum Boethii de Trinitate, Q. VI. a. I et 2. All citations refer to the
works of Aquinas unless otherwise noted.
2. For typical texts, cf.: In Lihrum Boethii de Trinitate, Q. V .. a. I; Summa Theologiae, I, Q.
3, a. 4; De Potentia Dei. Q. 7, a. 2 5; Scriptum Super Libros Sententiarum, In I Sent., D. 8, Q.
I. a. I; D. 22, Q. I, a. 3. Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 14; I. 2X; Compendium Theologiae, c. 2.
3. In Lihrull1 Boelhii de Trinitale, Q. 5, a. 3; Summa Theologiae, I. Q. 75, a. 3.
4. Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 85, a. I et 2.
5. Cf.: In Boelhii de Trinilale, Q. 5, a. 3; Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 3, a. 4: De Potentia Dei,
Q. VII, a. 4: In I Senl., D. 8, Q. I. a. I; Compendium Theologiae, c. 2.
6. William J. Hill, Knowing the Unknown God (New York: Philosophical Library, 1971),
esp. pp. 111-145.
7. The statement in the text follows from the act-potency, predicate-subject structure of
judgment. The author if this paper has argued that the unity of judgment is guaranteed by the
unicity of species, the determining principle of the judgment; the being (esse verum) of the
judgment is the very existing of the predicate in the subject within that ens rationis which is the
act in question. All meanings, both symbolic and rational, hence, exist in the one indivisible act
itself. There is no point in hunting "above" or "below" the cognitive act. "Above" and "below"
are spatial metaphors, pos;ibly inevitable, which, strictly speaking, do not apply to the
psychosomatic unity of human cognition in judgment.
8. The most celebrated text from S1. Thomas is De Veritate, Q. I. a. 9; the classical exegesis
done on this text was written by: Charles Boyer, S.J., "The Meaning of a Text of St. Thomas,"
Gregorianum, V, pp. 424-43; reprinted in: Peter Hoenen, S.J .. Realill" and Judgment Accord-
ing 10 St. Thomas, tr. by Henry F. Tiblier, S.J. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952), pp.
293-310.
9. Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 13, a. I; In J Sententiarum, D. 22, Q. I: De Divinis nominibus,
C. l, l. I et 3.
10. In Boethii de Trinitate, c. l, 1--2; cf., my textual study: Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, "The
Concept of Existence and the Structure of Judgment: A Thomistic Paradox," The Thomisl, V.
41, July. 1977, N. 3.
II. Ihid.
12. Jean Paul Sartre, "La Transcendance de l'ego: Esquisse d'une description phenomenolo-
gique," Recherches philosophiques. V. 6, 1936-37; L'Etre et Ie Neant: Essai d'ontologie
ph(;nomenologique (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1943), pp. 18-22.
13. Cf. n. 8; typical Thomistic texts on the rationality of knowledge are: In I Sententiarum,
D. 19, Q. 5, a. I, c. et ad 7; Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 58, a. 7; Summa Contra Gentiles, I, c. 59;
De lv/alo, XVI.
14. Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge; trans. under supervision of Gerald B.
Phelan (]'I; ew York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959), pp. 100-117.
15. Francis Parker. "Realist Epistemology," in The Relurn to Reason, ed. by J. Wild
(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953).
16. E.g., De Veritale, Q. II, a. 2; Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 85, a. I et 2.
17. De Ente et l:ssentia, c. 3.
18. Ibid.
19. E.g., Summa Conlra Gentiles, I, c. 53.
20. De Veritate, Q. I, a. 9.
21. E.g., Summa TheoloRiae, I, Q. 34; a. I; I, Q. 85, a. 2; Summa Contra Gentiles, I, c. 53; IV,
c. II; Q. Quodlibet, V. 9; In EvanRelius Joannis, c. 1; De Potentia Dei, Q. 7, a. 9 at 10; De
Veritate, Q. 4, a. 2 et ad 5; Conpendium Theologiae, c. 85.
The "/" and Aquinas ss
22. Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 16. a. 2; In I Senlenliarum, D. 19, Q. 5, a. I, ad 7; De Veritate,
Q. I, a. 3 et 9; Summa Conlra Gentiles, I, c. 59; De Anima, 3, I. II; cf., the extremely perceptive
commentary of: Thomas de Vio Caietani, In S. T., I, Q. 16, a. 2, ed. Leonina n. I. t. IV, p. 209.
23. In scholastic terminology the issue can be put in the following technical fashion:
knowledge in signified act is the act of being-other-as-other, direct consciousness; knowledge in
exercised act is the very doing of that knowing which doing. because spiritual and now totally
reflected upon itself. knows its own relation to the real. The ego or self-consciousness,
consciousness of scIf is, hence, simply spiritual activity taking "itself" in hand and measuring its
own conformity to the real: cf., Summa Theologiae, I, Q. g7, a. 3.
24. 111 I Sel1tel1tianrwl1. D. 19, Q. 5, a. I, c. et ad 7; Summa COl1tra Gel7liles. I, c. 59; De
Malo, XVI. fl. ad 19.
25. Summa lheologiae, I, Q. 14, a. 14; I. Q. 85, a. 4 c. et ad 4; I, Q. 85, a. 5, ad 1; Summa
Conlra Gentiles, I, c. 18; 1,18; I, c. 65; De Potenlia Dei, Q. 9, a. 5; De Veritate, Q. 8, a. 14 C et ad
6.
26. E.g., De Veritate, Q. I, a. 9; Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 84, a. 7.
27. Cf. n. 7, pp. 147-148.
n. E.g., In Boethii de Trinitate, Q. 5, a. 3: Summa IheoloRiae, I, Q. 14, a. 14; Q. 16, a. 2; Q.
58, a. 2; Summa Contra Gentiles. I, c. 48; I, c. 57; De Veritate, II I, a. 14.
29. In Boethii de Hebdomadihus, I. 1-2 cf. n. 10.
30. Summa TheoloRiae, I, Q. 84, a. 3; De Veritate, Q. 10, a. 2, ad 7.