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Moral Reason, Person and Virtue: the Aristotelian-Thomistic Perspective in the Face of Current Challenges from Neurobiology

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Moral Reason, Person and Virtue: the Aristotelian-Thomistic Perspective in the Face of Current Challenges from Neurobiology Journal of Moral Theology, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2014): 1-17 Moral Reason, Person and Virtue: The Aristotelian-Thomistic Perspective in the Face of Current Challenges from Neurobiology Martin Rhonheimer Translated by William Neu EPRESENTATIVES OF TODAY’S COGNITIVE SCIENCES and neurosciences usually consider man as a mere organism whose cognitive functions are not only regulated through the brain or, respectively, the central nervous system, but Rindeed have their home there. According to this view, it is the brain that feels, thinks, and decides. Conscience or freedom are supposed to be mere subjective epiphenomena or modes of perception of what happened before and was locked in the brain in the form of neural connections. But the idea that the brain feels, thinks, or decides is nothing other than an absolutization of a partial scientific knowledge. The part comes to be seen as the whole and in this way one loses sight of the whole which is the human person.1 Human persons are not just organisms. They are also organisms, but they cannot be re- duced to this. Modern, materialist neuro-biological reductionism is an advanced stage of the Cartesian dualism that split the substantial unity of the person into two substances. From this followed two directions, both erroneous, oscillating between spiritualistic and materialistic inter- pretations. The interpretation of spiritual phenomena as a superior form of biological structures comes from a certain tradition. In his later work, The Descent of Man, Darwin already asserts that human intelligence is distinguished from animal intelligence only in a grad- ual way, but not specifically. Everything would be a problem of the brain. Darwin argues as follows: unlike animals, the human brain is ca- pable of memorizing the sensory perceptions. Its memory is more 1 See T. Fuchs, Das Gehirn—ein Beziehungsorgan. Eine phänomenologisch- ökologische Konzeption (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2009); see also M.R. Bennet and P.M.S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 2 Martin Rhonheimer developed. Since sensory perceptions stay in the brain, man must look back, but also ahead; at the same time he reflects on these per- ceptions and compares past impulses to his social instincts. Reflect- ing on the past, he becomes capable of controlling his behavior— judging it, improving it and adapting it to the future. According to Darwin, this is the basis of human intelligence and freedom. This is how morality and the conscience are born, and so these formulate sentences like: “I shouldn’t have,” or “I should.” Darwin says that all that is caused solely by the growing volume of the brain and the re- sulting greater memory capacity.2 The reduction of man—of his conscience, his thinking, feeling and wanting—to the brain, and neuron processes within the brain, is for the moment the last step of this development. This is why it seems urgent to recover the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic perspec- tive of the corporal-spiritual unity of the human person, of practical reason and the moral virtues. CLASSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE PERSON IN THE FACE OF NEUROBIOLOGY’S CHALLENGES The classical position has no reason to fear the modern neurosci- ences. For example, the thesis that without the brain’s activity, not only is there no sensorial activity, but not even thought or spiritual consciousness, is perfectly Aristotelian; it was already known by Medieval Scholasticism, for example by Thomas Aquinas. But no neuroscientist ever proposed an argument to demonstrate that the brain’s neuron activity is a sufficient explanation for spiritual acts. Instead there are good arguments to support the contrary. That is very important for a classical kind of ethics of the virtues. As I would like to demonstrate, today’s neurosciences not only are not a danger or enemy for the classical virtue ethics; but rather they come to its aid. Obviously, the brain’s development was a decisive and absolutely necessary prerequisite for the advent of spiritual functions in pri- mates like Homo sapiens—and perhaps, starting with a certain mo- ment, it was also a consequence. But when Darwin reduced human intelligence to a greater memory capacity (because of Homo sapiens’ bigger brain), he forgot his premise for holding such a position: the fact that, as he said, we can reflect on the past and therefore think and judge in anticipation of the future: Hence after some temporary desire or passion has mastered his so- cial instincts, he reflects and compares the now weakened impres- sion with the ever present social instincts; and he then feels that 2 See C. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 680. Moral Reason, Person and Virtue 3 sense of dissatisfaction which all unsatisfied instincts leave behind them, he therefore resolves to act differently for the future—and this is conscience.… A pointer dog, if able to reflect on his past conduct, would say to himself, I ought (as we indeed say of him) to have pointed at that hare and not have yielded to the passing temptation of hunting it.3 Now, reflection is not only an index of consciousness, but also of self-consciousness. Notwithstanding how great the human brain’s capacity may be to memorize sensory perceptions and to hold them for long periods in such a way that they are available for reflexive judgment, this is not the true capacity; instead the true capacity is precisely that about which Darwin says nothing—the ability to re- flect and self-consciousness. Reflection and self-consciousness cannot simply be explained through the brain’s greater volume. No organ, nothing corporeal and linked to matter has the ability to reflect; in other words; these do not have the ability to make oneself object to him/herself. Sight cannot see itself; hearing cannot listen to itself; touch cannot touch itself. But reason can make its acts the object of its own thought—in other words reflect on them—and the will can once again want or not want what it wants (and this kind of reflection is the basis of freedom); reason can even render sensory perceptions the object of its evalua- tion.4 According to classical philosophical anthropology, reflection pre- supposes what is immaterial and is the foundation of self-awareness. The cognitive indeterminacy and openness implied in the immaterial nature of spiritual acts are diverse aspects of the root of freedom and the capacity for abstraction of what is conceptual. In other words, they are root aspects of the capacity to draw the universal from the particular, and vice versa, to consider the particular in turn in the light of the universal, in light of the “essence of things,” which then is the foundation of science, art, and culture. This particular characteristic of the spiritual, namely, the ability to reflect, is more than the mere awareness of the self, which was also experimentally observed in apes. The spiritual awareness of the self can be found at an irreducibly higher level. It is not only the ca- pacity to place oneself at a cognitive distance in the context of the surrounding world and to perceive in this sense “myself,” or my “ego,” as something different (like my image in a mirror for exam- ple—even apes can do this); but it is also the capacity to put myself in relationship with myself and not only with my reflected image, or 3 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 680. 4 Cf. M. Rhonheimer, The Perspective of Morality. Philosophical Foundations of Thomistic Virtue Ethics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 175-182. 4 Martin Rhonheimer my image in relationship with me. In other words, I can possess a mental representation of myself. Nothing makes us think that other higher primates, except for Homo sapiens, are able to do this. Exper- iments with apes seem rather to prove the contrary.5 Consequently, can the specifically human consciousness of the self, in other words self-consciousness, be traced causally to neural processes that are carried on in the brain, and thus be definitively explained through merely neurobiological categories? According to the late neurobiologist and physiologist of animals, Gerhard Neu- weiler, that is impossible. Self-awareness escapes neurobiological analysis for more than one reason.... [Because] if the concept of spirit, expressed in all the cul- tural activities, is translated into neurobiological concepts, one enters into an inescapable entanglement of conscious mental processes, of emotional worlds and of motivations and fields of unconscious forc- es that, not the least of which, are reflections of our past experiences and their emotional values. For the spiritual life and especially for man’s linguistic capacity however, it is possible “to identify some minimal condition.” Even in animals and above all in anthropoids, there would be a “thinking” and a linguistic communication; however “no biologist until now has been able to demonstrate the spirit in any animal as it is manifested even in non-linguistic modes through artifacts in human beings.” And Neuweiler concludes: “The attempt to locate self-awareness and the spirit in some part of the brain would be absurd. Nevertheless every neurobiologist agrees with the thesis that neither self- awareness nor spiritual life can exist without the prefrontal cortex.”6 In other words, neurobiology can only make some affirmations about neurobiolgical conditions and about physiological presuppositions that are necessary for spiritual and cultural activity, but it cannot reach a sufficient explanation of these phenomena. These are precisely the distinctions missing for neurobiologists like Gerhard Roth and Wolf Singer. So, for example, the latter as- serts the following (italics are mine): The only really significant difference among the brains of different mammal species is the quantitative differentiation of the cerebral cortex.
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