Aborting Aristotle

 

St. Thomas Aquinas is the most important Catholic philosopher.  His work was so important that during the Council of Trent, his Summa Theologiae was placed on the altar along with the Bible as the guiding documents for the philosophy of Catholicism.

To understand much of St. Thomas' ideas, you have to understand the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.  In Aristotle, St. Thomas found a philosophical grounding to the rational component of Christian thought.  One of the things I admire about St. Thomas is that he does not reference Aristotle as some kind of appeal to authority.  Instead, he sees that Aristotle argues St. Thomas' own positions effectively and so employs those arguments in his writing.  Joseph Pieper made clear that St. Thomas never quoted Aristotle simply to impress his readers with Aristotle's name.  He would quote Aristotle, when he thought Aristotle made a good argument.

Particularly, St. Thomas adopted much of Aristotle's metaphysics.  Metaphysics is that area of philosophy that deals with the question of what exists.  While this may sound like something that is high-falutin and unimportant to every day life, nothing could be further from the truth.  Your metaphysics will radically affect how you live.

For example, does God exist?  That is a metaphysical question.  If you see that He does, you will live a very different life than if you believe that He does not.  It is the difference between a life that is guided and governed by a good, loving, and rational Supreme Being or living in a random, purposeless, and indifferent universe.  As you can see, metaphysics matters.

This includes the questions about what this material world actually is.  Plato, Aristotle's teacher, believed that this material world was unimportant.  It was almost like what Buddhists believe that the material world is an illusion.  The goal, for the Platonist, is to rise above material things and contemplate the only real things that exist: immaterial Forms.  Why did Plato come to this conclusion?

There are many reasons.  But essentially, he saw that material things always change.  This is true.  There is nothing in this material world that stays the same.  Even the chair I am sitting in now is slowly disintegrating so that in ten million years it will be dust.  Because of this, Plato said that you could never know anything about a material thing, because it is constantly changing, it is never the same thing.  However, you can know things that don't change.  The laws of triangularity, for example, never change (e.g. the interior angles of a triangle will always equal 180 degrees).  He concluded that you could only know things like this that do not change.  And because you could know them, they had to be real.  In fact, they had to be the only real things.

Aristotle disagreed with Plato.  He did not think that the material world was unimportant.  Aristotle said that all material substances are a composite of form and matter.  All the material things in this world are composed of matter that have been shaped into some kind of form.  Together, the form and matter give us a substance.

With this in mind, Aristotle could say that would could know material things, because when we talk about my chair, we are talking about the form of the chair being expressed in this particular material.  Even as the material changes and even breaks down a bit, it is still a chair because the form gives it a unity.  It is not a random heap of changing material components.  The form makes it clear that this substance is a chair.

To be clear, Aristotle understood that the distinction between form and matter is a conceptual distinction.  It is a distinction that Aristotle makes so that we can understand how the form and the matter work together.  But, for the most part, they do not exist separately.  There is no matter that exists except in some kind of form.  The form of the chair does not exist in some idealized state, even when the chair completely disintegrates.

If that is confusing, think about words.  You can see a clear distinction between the material of a word (either printed out or stated out loud) and its meaning.  However, when you see or hear a word, the material component is always with the immaterial meaning.  It is an odd fact of the mind that once you know how to read, you cannot NOT read words when you see them.  The words you are reading now are not random pixelated matter.  Nor are they immaterial ideas.  They are material pixels and immaterial meanings together.

Okay, if you've stayed with me thus far, I thank you for your patience.  Why are we taking such a long digression into Aristotelian metaphysics?

Because Aristotle shows me a flaw in a common abortion slogan.

Too often I hear poor arguments that try to justify abortion.  One of them is something to the effect of "The life of a woman is more valuable than a clump of cells."

The implication is that you have on the one hand a fully formed human person with rights and innate value and on the other hand you have an undifferentiated material heap.

The key is this word "clump."  A "clump" implies something that is random in nature that really has no unity or specific form.  Think about when you have used this term in your life.  Maybe you made a clump of dirt, or garbage, or dirty clothes.  For the clothes, they may have some things in common in that they are all clothes, but they do not have a unity.  They are some t-shirts, a couple pairs of socks, along with your favorite hoodie.  But all of those are different substances with their own form that simply happen to be in proximity to each other.  But the clump is not really its own substance, its own being.

A clump of cells implies that there is no unity.  You have random things that are their own substance that are placed in proximity to each other.

But this is incorrect.

Recently I cam across a statement by a biologist who worked on embryos.  This person wrote "I used to work in a cell culture lab where we maintained actual clumps of cells.  A clump of cells is a disorganized, un-unified, non-developing mass of cells.  They are growing in size, but not developing.  The main difference between a clump of cells and an embryo is that the embryo is a whole human organism with goal oriented growth and development.  Clumps of cells don't do that."

The point is that a true "clump" of cells may grow.  But they don't develop in a unity.  To the naked eye, an embryo may look like a clump, just as to the naked eye an cloud may look like an elephant.  But in this case, the looks are deceiving.  The embryo will grow in a directed unity.  This is because the "clump" is not its own substance because it has no form to give it unity.  The embryo is its own substance because it has a form that gives it unity.

It is as incorrect to call the embryo a "clump" of cells as it would be to call me a "clump" of cells.  To be clear, a fully grown human and a human embryo are in different stages of development.  But we both have the same essential form of humanity that gives our substance a unity as we change.  We all experience this.  You have changed so much over the years, particularly in your material appearance.  But through it all you are still you.  That is because your form gives you a unity that makes you you through all your changes.

And you have had this form since the moment of conception.

So next time someone talks about aborting a clump of cells, keep in mind that when they say this they are also aborting the wisdom of Aristotle.