The Soul and the Machine

Thomistic Psychology and Technological Environments

Author: Brian Kemple

ABSTRACT: A primer in Thomistic faculty psychology, this essay explains habits as ways the human being holds itself toward objects, cognitively and cathectically, over time. Against reductionist accounts of addiction and behavior, it interprets technology as an extension of psychic faculties, and proposes that technological environments shape moral and intellectual self-determination.

I am writing this primer for two reasons: first, to give a succinct introduction to the ideas of Thomistic psychology for those unfamiliar with the Aristotelian-Scholastic doctrines (by which term, “doctrine”, I simply mean something like “a systematic teaching about a specific topic”).  Second, I wish to organize such an introduction to demonstrate how this particular doctrine of the psyche not only can illuminate our relationship with technology, specifically understood as constituting extensions of that psyche’s faculties, but is necessary.  While such an introduction to Thomistic psychology is likely to raise far more questions than it answers, it should nevertheless give some credence to my claim of its necessity—for as Aquinas paraphrases Aristotle, “A small mistake in the beginning becomes great in the end”,^[1] and misunderstanding the relation between the human psyche and its technological environments is no small mistake.

Consequently, I do not here intend to defend the Thomistic doctrine against the doctrines of any other schools—be those of Platonists, other Scholastic thinkers, moderns, ultramoderns (i.e., those commonly but inaccurately called “postmoderns”), materialists, etc.—though it may, as an exposition, provide some defense nonetheless, for most of the common objections to the Thomistic conception of what it means to be human are rooted in misunderstandings.
We will realize this primer’s goal in two parts: first, lengthier (and perhaps somewhat less exciting), providing an exposition of the psyche as understood by St. Thomas and his followers.  Second, and in a fashion that is more searching than it is demonstrative, by carrying out a series of considerations concerning how technology relates to this soul.

1. An Overview of the Thomistic Psyche

What does it mean to be human?  Rigorous and systematic pursuit of this question has proven unpopular in an age of shallow learning—rather, we have fallen back on fragmentary studies that dissect the human person into parts and study those in isolation, leaving the meaning of the whole to the domain of opinion.^[2]  Seen superficially and in the short term, this seems to many a satisfactory approach.  After all why should we need to ask about what we are essentially, ourselves?  Isn’t our experience itself—being ourselves—the only real means to answer the question, anyway?  “Who are you to tell me what I am, as the one having these experiences, which experiences you are not having, since you are not me?”  Though likely given in more specific (and often more acerbic) language, such are nevertheless familiar-sounding objections to us all, no doubt.

But of course, the mere fact that we have undergone something or have done something does not mean we have understood either that which has happened to us or that which we ourselves have done.  Were “being the one who experiences” sufficient for understanding, every psychologist and every therapist would be out of a job—or rather, would never have become professionals in the field in the first place, for the field would not likely exist at all, if we all understood ourselves perfectly well.  Gaining an actual understanding of any object requires a conscious effort, not merely to have perceived some phenomenon (whether from an outsider’s perspective or from one’s own experiential undergoing), but to be able to explain it.^[3]  And the ability to explain some phenomenon to its fullest—not just of our experience of it but of what it is in itself—requires not only an awareness of its existence but a grasp of its causes.

Here, in these pages, we aim to sketch in an outline an explanation of some of the causes of what it means to be human.[4]  This same causal approach typified the Scholastic thinking which was carried out in the Aristotelian tradition.  By contrast, modern approaches typically take a more descriptive approach.  Such a descriptive approach can be very useful for skimming the surface of topics quickly and broadly, and for finding ideas that fit within some preconceived framework—it is, by contrast to the Scholastic approach, far mor expedient.  But it nevertheless fails to attain great depths or ever truly to provide fully-resolved, fully-intelligible explanation of that which it describes.^[5]  To our own contrary end, namely of giving a causal explanation—and before turning to the discussion of the human being and the causes thereof—let us briefly exposit some causal principles in general.

1.1. Causes in the Aristotelian Tradition

In his Φυσικὴἀκρόασις (Physics or Natural Hearing), Book II, Aristotle discusses four causes—the agent, formal, material, and final—as that through which we come to understand nature.  However, these are most easily explained through the example of an artifact, such as a chair: the agent is the carpenter, “being-a-chair” is the formal, wood is the material, and “having-a-place-to-sit” is the final.  Without all four of these causes, which intersect at the effect, the chair would not come to be at all.  I suspect that, for most of you, these are at least somewhat familiar, and with a little reflection they seem at least useful for organizing our understanding of things we encounter.

Of course, many diverse relations between these four kinds of cause occur, and many subtleties need to be explained if we wish truly to understand such relations.  We will not get bogged down in all the many nuances here, which may fill (and have filled) volumes.  Rather, we wish to focus on two of these causes, as most pertinent for our understanding of the nature and existence of human beings: namely, the formal and material.

For explaining these, it is crucial we disabuse ourselves of a prevalent modern presupposition about the meaning of the term “matter”.  For, by this term—ὕλη in Greek (“hyle”)—Aristotle did not mean “what has mass while at rest” or “what takes up space by having volume”, although he did mean something somewhat related.  In other words, we tend today to think of matter as the stuff that is all around us.  Indeed, many living today think that there is nothing other that exists at all other than matter in this sense, such that anything else we encounter in our experience is mere fiction, which is to say, illusion.  Contrariwise, some others think that matter is one thing, and spirit or soul or the mind or the psyche are something entirely other; as though there are two planes of existence, one physical and another spiritual.^[6]  Because the apparent “illusions” of the materialist are so prevalent—for reason of which prevalence the dualist adheres to a non-material principle of existence—the materialist ends up behaving as a de facto dualist nonetheless.  But Aristotle (and those who follow him truly) held to no such dualism, despite his distinction of the principles of form and matter.

Rather, he held “matter” to be the receptive and potential principle of everything we see in the corporeal world.  As such, it is always correlative with form, which is the active and intelligible principle.  Thus, we talk about “being-a-chair” and wood as the formal and material principles of the chair—but it is not as though wood is simply raw, unformed matter, compressed under the actuality of “being-a-chair”.  Rather, wood possesses a relative receptivity to the form of chair.  It also possesses a relative receptivity to the form of ash.  But we have to note that wood itself always has some other form: as lumber, as logs, as a tree, or yes even as a chair.  Though receptive of change—that is, of some other form—the wood always has some determinate and articulable way of being in itself, such that is this rather than that.^[7]  It is in consequence of this determinate way of being’s incompleteness that the wooden being can yet receive other forms; such determination is never complete.  We understand what each determination is, therefore, when we grasp the form—and we grasp the matter by understanding the relativities to which that formally-constituted being remains in potency.

Worthy of note, keeping to our chair example, we can distinguish within one and the same chair a multitude of particular forms.  For instance, a shaker-style dining chair will typically have four legs, two back posts with two ears, two cross rails, one top rail, a seat, and an apron.  Even though these parts may be separate before they are assembled, and though we may refer to them by these names as separate (e.g., “hand me the top rail”), they are not really parts of the chair until they are assembled and until they are integrated into the whole chair—that which has the form of chair as such, that which dictates the right organization of all its parts—then the parts do not really constitute a chair, and indeed, they are not yet even actually but only potentially parts.

Now, we might say that this “being a chair” by which the parts become parts in actuality and not just in potentiality is only something imposed by us, that is, by our human intentions.  That it is a chair and not, say, a door-stopper—this depends upon convention or intention, does it not?  After all, we can use chairs to stop doors.  But this kind of stipulation—that this object we have created out of wood pieces shaped as rails, a seat, etc., is for this or that purpose—does not make the object suitable for any such purpose whatsoever.  Arguably, there are better door-stoppers (small and therefore less-obtrusive rubber triangles, for instance) than chairs, and this is because of the intrinsic constitution of both that door-stopper and of the chair and, indeed, the reason that we have doors at all (to let things in and/or out).  The chair, notably, is much better suited for sitting on than the rubber door-stopper.  And so while it’s “being-a-chair” does depend upon our intentions and use, it nevertheless has a form of its own which makes it suitable or unsuitable to be used for this or that purpose.^[8]

Thus, when we ask the question, “What does it mean to be human?” we are not asking primarily about anything like final causality (though it is related), nor “self-expression”, nor efficient causality (while parents and God may be necessary for us to exist, they do not answer the question “what?”) nor, certainly, are we asking, “What makes you feel good?”  Rather, we are quite certainly asking about this formal cause: about the ways in which we determinately exist as certain wholes, which disposes us for a certain range of actions—just as the action of the chair is to be sturdy for sitting, and the door-stopper is to be adept at stopping the door.

Of course, we are material, as well.  We have flesh and bones, eyes and noses, brains and nerves, feet and hands.  Thus we see here a multiplicity of forms: that of flesh, that of bone, of eyes, hands, fingers, fingernails, etc.  Each is susceptible to change in its own way, following its particular formal actuality: the finger bends, the hand grasps; the flesh can be pressed and adjust its shape accordingly (to a point), just as the eye can receive light (within a range).  Suitability for action follows form—both actions received and actions performed (1.4 below will elaborate on this point).

But is there one form which belongs to, constitutes, distinguishes, and organizes the whole of the human being?

1.2. The Soul: Basic Organizing Principle

Aristotle answers this question unequivocally in the affirmative, in Book II of his ΠερὶΨυχῆς(“Peri Psuches” or On the Soul—often referenced by its Latin title, De anima).  But Aristotle states that such a form—the soul or psyche—can be found not only in human beings, but in all living things.  Perhaps this makes Aristotle sound as though he believes in a kind of mystical force that permeates the universe—a kind of panpsychism, or at least pan-zoöpsychism, an Emersonian “oversoul”.  To the contrary, the Stagirite observes a universal truth: that all material things are what they are because they have forms, and, in living things, we see these forms having a kind of actuality distinct from the kind found in non-living things.  For unlike the inorganic, all living things immanently organize themselves towards action.  Non-living things have an intrinsic ordering or organization, no doubt; but it comes to them wholly from extrinsic causes.  Their formal causes are inert, disposing those entities only to continue being what they are, and to be resistant to certain forces.

To help see this more clearly, consider the difference between your hand as it is now—presumably, attached to your arm, which is attached to your shoulder, and so on—and your hand were it to be cut clean off with the single stroke of a sharp blade.  At the precise moment of severance, it would still be recognizably a hand: a palm, fingers, thumb, knuckles, fingernails, etc.  It would even still be recognizably your hand (and thus probably cause a particular kind of horror, since it is your hand but not attached to your body).^[9]  But barring some quick interventions, it will begin to look less and less like your hand, the longer you leave it severed.  The process of decay—which is to say, the process of ceasing to live—sets in almost immediately.  It sets in because the hand no longer shares in the form of the whole body, and, as such, it no longer is what a hand is.^[10]  The rest of you goes on (provided you staunch the loss of blood and suffer no infection) much the same; but your hand ceases to be what it was.  In other words, it must be attached to the body in order to be a hand—because it is only through such attachment that it can do what a hand does.^[11]

Here we touch on a more difficult point: what does a hand do?  Many things, of course—the biological dispositions of our hands (four fingers and an opposable thumb!) have been connected to all the distinctive technological advances achieved by human beings, after all—sometimes, even, with the suggestion that the disposition of the hand explains our differentiation from all other animals.  We will avoid the more nuanced discussion about the capacities of our extremities (as well as the somewhat absurd theory that thumbs alone separate us essentially from non-human animals), and simply say that a hand strives to do what the body needs it to do: to touch, grasp, push, and pull, in an innumerable number of combinations of postural orientations of the digits with varying degrees of pressure or deftness.

Quite important for our considerations, we should take note of the fact that the hand never does this posturing alone.  Always, at the very least, it requires the connection of muscles and fibers that run through the arm to the brain (to say nothing of the circulatory and nervous systems); and most importantly, when we are using the hand for the tasks that are most clearly human—things like caressing a loved one’s cheek or writing a letter—we typically perform these manual tasks^[12] with our eyes and our brains and perhaps even more, as well.  The hand can be understood as a kind of integrated instrument that functions properly within the context of the whole.  To perform these functions, it needs to be materially disposed in the right way.  Break your fingers and it becomes much more difficult to do with your hand what you wish your hand to do.^[13]

This subordination to the purposes of the whole includes every part of the body: the feet, legs, arms, eyes, ears, tongue, liver, lungs, heart, and even the brain.^[14]  That is, even the most principal and apparently essential parts (just as the seat of a chair) are subordinated to the whole, which whole is irreducible, not only to any one of the parts but even the sum of all the parts.^[15]  None of these parts are wholly for the sake of the other parts.  Even the most principal-seeming parts, that is, exist nevertheless for the sake of the whole.  Our brains and our hearts may be what drive the rest of our organs—but they, too, are driven by a purpose not their own.

Very broadly, we can identify this purpose of the whole as “living”.  Of course, looking at not only our own lives but those of plants and animals, we can see that living unfolds in a wide range of diverse actions: breathing, sleeping, eating, reproducing, perceiving, thinking, desiring, avoiding, hating, loving, and so on and on.  How are we to make sense of all these different actions as belonging to one whole?  We can look at the living-whole, I believe, in two principal ways: either in terms of its ends or in terms of its foundations.  Discernment of the ends is very important, particularly for questions of morality (not only our own ends, but the ends of other things as well) and for distinguishing one form or one pattern of life from another.  Contrariwise, identification of the foundations helps us to distinguish what it means to be alive in distinction from not-being-alive.

Turning in this latter direction, therefore—that of foundations—let us ask: what shows life to us most clearly?  According to what Thomas Aquinas says, “Life is shown most clearly by two operations, namely cognition and motion.”^[16]  Notably, each of the above-listed actions (breathing, perceiving, etc.) is either one or the other, or some combination of the two.  Now, the modern or ultramodern might say we know life not by either of these, but by feeling—meaning by this either the experience of exterior sensory stimulus or the cathectic^[17] experience of some internal passion.  I do believe that there exists a primordial element to our experience consisting in neither cognition of external objects nor self-induced motion; nevertheless, whatever this element is, it most certainly is not clear.  Moreover, it seems that all such subjective experience depends upon at least one or the other of cognition and motion.  Thus, cognition and self-motion are truly the most-manifestly evident signs of life; we can describe the former in ourselves and in non-human animals, and we can identify self-motion even in creatures bereft of mind.^[18]  Yet, just as the whole which is the human being is reducible neither to any one of its bodily parts nor even to the sum thereof, so too living is irreducible to any number of actions of life—whether of sense, motion, cognition, cathexis, or any other we might identify.  We must recognize, instead, that the human being is a whole, identifiable only as a whole, even as we rightly attribute certain particular actions to certain particular parts of that whole.

Consequently, Aquinas argues that the principle of living—the soul—is not something corporeal: that is, something extended in material dimensions as possessing a directly-sensible presence.^[19]  It is important to stress that he is not positing a dualistic actuality, such that our souls are one thing and our bodies another; but rather, that the soul is the act of the body.  Thus, St. Thomas is demonstrating for us that there is an act of the body, irreducible to the bodily, which can only be inferred from the bodily actions we can observe through our senses.  Though it may surprise us, we can make precisely the same claim as concerns the chair.  You can see all manner of attributes that indicate something to be a chair, and you can even intend to use one as a chair—but upon sitting on it, discover it is not a chair, but only a convincing fake used as a prop, at expense to your posterior.  That something is a chair requires a certain inference beyond the sensible—the “chairness” of the chair is something beyond even the aggregation of its parts; and the senses alone will not tell us.  We might therefore be mistaken about the human being, too: just as CGI representations or animatronics or even LLM GPT technologies might make us believe we are confronting a human being through a screen, text, or even simulacra of voice.  And yet, both as respects the chair and the human being, we can be mistaken only because we can also be correct: we can misidentify the human only because there is a human to identify, and there is only a human to identify because some principle makes the human to be a singular and identifiable whole.

1.3. Faculties, Actions, Objects

The next several sections will focus on summarizing rather than expositing the Thomistic doctrine.  To begin with, we must clarify three points:

First: it is a general taxonomic principle of Aristotelian psychology that the faculties of the soul are distinguished by their typifying actions, and their typifying actions are distinguished by the objects of those actions.^[20]  Put in other words, there are no acts without objects, and there are no faculties without acts.  That we distinguish one from the other—as faculties really distinct from one another—depends, therefore, on our distinguishing the objects.  If we lack the requisite faculty, we cannot perform the action, and if we cannot perform the action, we cannot obtain the object.  A man born truly blind will never see color—and that he can obtain any awareness of it at all follows solely from his possession of an intellect, which may comprise generically even objects that we cannot experience specifically.

Second: what is meant here by “object” requires some precision.  The signification of this word in contemporary English is quite opposed to how it was used in the time of Thomas Aquinas, and in the several centuries both before and after him.  The term “object” is an English transliteration of the Latin obiectum, which comes from the preposition, ob-, meaning “against”, and the passive participial form iactum, from iacere, meaning, “to throw”.  Thus, the object is that which is “thrown against”.  Something becomes an object only by this “being thrown against”.  Thrown against what, we must ask?  Looking at how the word was used: against the faculties of some subjective being.  Most typically, it was used in reference to cognitive faculties.  Crucially, objects are divided in many different ways, and first I want to draw attention to the division of stimulative and terminative.  That is, the “being-thrown” of the object can be considered either insofar as it moves some faculty to act, and thus stimulates it; or is that-towards-which a faculty moves itself, and thus terminates its operation (see the following section on active and passive powers).^[21]

Third: the term “faculty” is used here throughout to translate the Latin potentia.  Often, this will be rendered in English by the transliteration of “potency” or its close relative, “power”.  Because these English words have broader uses, we instead use “faculty”, the etymology of which signifies a very similar conception, albeit one with a greater sense of ability or even ease (being closely related to “facility”).  By this connection, we intend to signify the naturalness of our faculties (whereas some “powers” may be very unnatural).  Some faculties are exercised through the organs of the body, while others belong to the soul as such and are not intrinsically dependent upon the body, though they may be extrinsically dependent upon it (much in the way that your body is extrinsically dependent upon food—indeed, the “nutritive” is regarded as a faculty, too).  That there is posited an intrinsic independence of certain faculties or actions belonging to the soul, however, does not entail a dualistic separation of the soul from the body, but only that there exist certain faculties of the soul which cannot be reduced to any organ or even the aggregate functioning of organs.

Thus, to recapitulate quickly, our faculties or powers are distinguished by the ways in which they operate (or their kinds of act) with respect to different objects.  Without any one of these three—faculty, act, and object—the operation does not occur.  There are two primary ways in which operations occur with respect to objects: the active and passive.  Let us now turn to these.

1.4. Active and Passive Faculties

That is: we can distinguish between faculties in terms of their own activity being active or passive.^[22]  All our faculties are either one or the other, although certain complexities will be observed with respect to the intellect in particular.  But first, let us define each:

A passive faculty is one that is not in act until the object somehow acts upon it.  This does not mean that the organ of a corporeal faculty is not somehow actual before being acted upon; but only that the act of the faculty is only in potency.  For instance, we cannot actually see without light, even though we have eyes.  So too, we cannot hear in the absence of vibrations, or smell in the absence of particles to which our olfactory receptors are sensitive.  We cannot desire in the absence of goods—at least cognitively present to us—and we cannot think in the absence of formal objects of cognition (that is, “meanings”, understood either as intelligible or laden with contextual-reference to oneself).  Such objects of cognition as motivating the passive faculties are referred to as “stimulative”.

Conversely, an active faculty is one that, while it may yet be dependent upon reception of some object through some other passive faculty, is capable of acting from itself.  My capacity for motion, for instance, does not require that something act upon me first, in order that that specific motive faculty be put into act—that is, while I might be “moved” to act for the sake of something I have seen, these are two clearly distinct acts: since I may see something and not move.  So too, our desires depend upon some previous cognitive actuality, initiated by the sensory encounter with something that moves our passive faculties, but the actual desiring itself stems from our own act (as not every act of seeing something elicits in us any given cathectic reaction).  Such an object as that-towards-which our active faculties move is named “terminative”.^[23]

So too, we can see that our active faculties often result in new actualities coming to the passive: as moving ourselves, we come into sensory contact with many other phenomena.  Thus, there is a continually-unfolding dynamism in our lives between moving and being-moved, of receiving act and causing act.  Between these, I would provisionally suggest, there exists a certain proper and proportional ratio: our passivities should be moved by the right stimulative objects to the right degree, and our activities should be towards the right terminative objects for the right reasons—and in most of us, the objects with which we are engaged by both faculties will require a certain balance.  It is not good, in other words, for most men or women to be either too passive or too active.

1.5. Cognitive and Cathectic Faculties

Another critical distinction of faculties found in the Aristotelian-Thomistic approach is that between cognitive and cathectic^[24] faculties; or, as they are ordinarily called, apprehensive (from the fact that they are ordered [ad-] towards grasping [prehendere] objects) and appetitive (from being ordered towards seeking [petere] objects).^[25]  Cognitive and cathectic faculties always operate, too, in a kind of mutual or reciprocal dynamism: for cognitive operation is desirable, and all our desires follow upon some cognition.

To enumerate all the cognitive faculties: these include the exterior senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—which lattermost is a genus of many more-particular senses);^[26] the integrating sense,^[27] which is in one way related to the exterior (bringing together the diverse objects of external sensation into something of a whole) and another way, to the interior (granting us a kind of object for our properly perceptual operations), and thus stands as a kind of midway point; the interior senses (what we may call the simple retentive, the pattern retentive—which two faculties are essentially passive—and the cogitative, which is active);^[28] and the intellect, which—although it is one faculty—has both a certain kind of “passive” capacity (in a highly-qualified sense) and its own proper activities (apprehension, judgment, and inference).^[29]

Conversely, the cathectic faculties are fewer in number: for we have two lower faculties of appetite, namely the concupiscible and the irascible—the former of which desires union with certain physical goods, while the latter desires the destruction or overcoming of obstacles that stand between the self and union with some good;^[30] and one higher, namely the will, or the desire for the good insofar as it has been cognitively grasped by the intellect.^[31]  Both of the lower faculties likewise require some antecedent cognitive grasp and judgment.  To quote Spalding et al.:^[32]

…human emotions arise in the complex interplay among the appetitive and cognitive powers, at both the sensory and intellectual levels.  Because the sensory powers, both appetitive and cognitive, are tightly tied to physical processes, human emotions have important physical components.  However, because the intellectual powers rise to some extent above the physical processes (e.g., it is unclear how to account for a desire for truth on a purely physical process basis), human emotions also involve complex social and cultural effects.

Obviously, this already presents a great deal of complexity, to have so many faculties as mutually-effective parts of a whole.  That is, when we consider that their operations are not merely hypostatically juxtaposed or segmented into distinct domains, but radically intertwined, we begin to see that they all exist in a complex web, where the acts of any one of them may affect all the others.  Correctly distinguishing each from the others helps us better to understand the human person if and only if we can subsequently see how they are interrelated as parts of the whole.

1.6. Objects: Particular & Universal, Material & Formal

Now, yet another important distinction must be made: namely, between two different kinds of objects, or, we might say, two different aspects of objects commonly involved in human operations—the particular and the universal.  The particular exists under conditions of materiality and in the context of corporeality; perceived through the senses and desired or avoided by the lower cathexes.  The universal belongs instead to relations provenating from the intellect and the will.

Thus, we can look at one thing—say, a human being—and recognize it as both particular and universal.  If I look at a woman (“Lisa”), I see both the particular individual and all manner of things I know as universals: human, female, pale, green(-eyed), brown(-haired), etc.  I know her also under certain relational characters which are specific to myself but which are also universalizable: beloved, having-known-for-x-number-of-years, shared sense of humor, etc.  Or, we might say, I know that particular “under” those universals—“under” because they have broader extent than merely the particular.  I might also have certain attractions or revulsions; some might be very strongly associated with or attached to the particular (as we tend to feel in physical desires for a specific person)—others may follow an awareness of some applicable universal (as those which characterize a personality, such as the sense of humor).  These attractions, revulsions, and judgments of both the particular and the universal are not layered atop one another in a hypostatic structure, but coalesce in the one object.

This brings to light another distinction of objects common to the Latin Age: namely between material and formal.  This distinction is similar to but nevertheless not precisely the same as that between the particular and the universal.  To clarify: the distinction between universal and particular objects concerns the relation as it provenates^[33] from distinct faculties, whereas the distinction between formal and material objects concerns the specific way in which the object terminates that relation.  The formal object constitutes the precisely-cognized dimension related to the faculty, whereas the material object constitutes the “this-something” in which that formal object is judged to exist.  For instance, on my desk at this moment, directly before me, there is a book with a red cover.  The particular red is the formal object of my vision, and the surface(s) in which that red is found are the material.  “Book” is the universally-conceived object found in this particular instance.  “Book” is therefore also the formal object of my intellectual consideration, and “this-book” the material object in which that formal object of the intellect is found (not to mention the formal object of “red” of my vision, as well).

Notably, however, that formal object can be found not only in this or that particular book, but in the creatively-imagined book, as well—even a book not yet written; moreover, it can be found in a certain respect in a collection of books, too.  Furthermore and finally, there are certain formal objects of our cognition (and thus in a remote way of our cathexes, too) that are not ever particulars in the proper sense of substantial particulars: beings essentially constituted by relations, that is—such as governments, marriages, friendships, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes here, systems.

Regarded in terms of these relations, we see how befuddlingly complex can become our relations to other objects in the world.  One and the same object may stimulate the exterior and interior senses, the intellect, and be regarded as desirable seen with respect to some particulars, revulsive to others, and, depending on the present orientation of the intellect, either desirable or revulsive to the will.

1.7. Habits as the Reflexion of Act

Before turning to the second major section of this article, allow me here to expound on one final consideration: namely, that of habit.^[34]  We in the twenty-first century unfortunately tend to think of “habit” in terms of a stimulus-response feedback-reinforcement loop, and thus, under the auspices of “automaticity”.  In other words, habits are regarded as automatic behaviors learned by some sort of repetition correlated with reward or punishment.^[35]  This mechanistic reduction helps to explain phenomena such as muscle memory, tics, and biochemical addictions—to a point.  It utterly fails to grasp the deeper truth, however, which is to say that these habits exist not merely in the body (including the brain), but that they exist as ways of holding-towards.

Indeed, the word “habit” comes from the Latin habitus, the past-participle form of habere, “to have, hold, possess”.  As the Scholastics conceived them, drawing upon Aristotle, habits were ways that the whole living being held itself: either as one part holds in respect to another within the whole or as the whole holds, through its parts, to some external object.  Thus, we can identify the habit as proximately in each faculty and remotely in the whole.  To take a mundane example, if I have a habit of opening the door for my significant other, I will indeed move to do so without deliberation when the opportunity presents itself; unless, perhaps, I am otherwise cognitively preoccupied—for instance, with a complex philosophical question^[36]—or if I were cathectically disaffected (distraught, upset, angry, etc.).

What we see in this mundane example, indeed, is something highly complex.  The habit concerns how I hold myself towards a plurality of objects (significant other, door-to-be-opened) in relation both to one another and in relation to myself.  Simultaneously, that habit exists within an internal web of habits.  For instance: how readily, how often, am I given to abstract philosophical speculation to the point of ignoring the corporeal world in which I am moving?  How easily-disaffected am I?  Am I prone to disaffections which override my concern for chivalrous behavior?  And so on and on.  While frequency of repetition does strengthen or weaken the dispositions of both faculties (specifically those by which I attend to objects under all their different aspects of particularity, universality, formality, and materiality, both cognoscitively and cathectically considered), and of the whole, because I am human, there remains always an indeterminacy of the habit considered precisely with respect to how I hold myself.  This belongs uniquely to the human being—while other living beings have an indeterminacy in their habitual determination, the human being alone can truly be said to hold itself.

This capacity for self-determination, singular among living creatures in the human being, stems from our intellectual capacity: whereby we not only recognize that there are objects, but that the objects we recognize are irreducible to their objectivity.  Thus, all the activities that occur in our soul—both those belonging to passive and active faculties—may result in the formation of habits, but these reflexive developments are not total or whole.  This always-present indeterminacy given the specific nature of our higher faculties will prove quite important, going forward.

2. Technology and the Soul

For let us at long last ask: what does all this about the soul and its faculties have to do with technology?  In a word (to echo Heidegger): everything.  Defining technology and illuminating its relationship with the human person is, of course, one of the chief purposes pursued by the Humanitas Technica project generally.  We cannot expect to resolve that pursuit in this relatively article.  Rather, what I propose to put forward in the remaining pages is a kind of dialectical heuristic, drawing upon not only Thomistic psychology, but also the work of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, the Marshall and Eric McLuhan, and their commentators and colleagues, neuroscience, information and communication theories, and semiotics.  Much of what I say will be suggestive and is not intended as apodictic.

The hope, by this heuristic, is to indicate where we have gone wrong in our understanding.  For we have, indeed, gone wrong: indicated by the fears, chaos, and confusion manifestly evident today in how our relationship with technology is apparently unfolding.  The question is where have we erred.  Some may point to the industrial revolution; others, to the advent of electricity, or the grid, or the prevailing of information theory and cybernetics.  Some might point further back: the printing press, writing, or even the advent of language itself—let us climb back down into pre-linguistic animality!^[37]

But this, too, is the wrong way of asking the question.  The where of our erring is not some point in time, some moment at which a particular technology was first developed or its use widely adopted.  The where, I would insist, exists “in” our own minds.  It is crucial, however, to emphasize at the outset that this act of locating the error intends a metaphorical significance.  I am not speaking of the brain.

Rather, I am speaking of the mind as something shaped—habituated, we might say—by the relations it forms, both as recipient of the world and as the source from which provenate all our thoughts, and by which we communicate with one another.  Thus, the “location” of the mind is not restrained to the individual, but rather permeates all the specifically-human relationships, both the cognitive and the cathectic, by which we constitute the world of our common and communicable experiences—to recall Heidegger’s claim, technology consists primarily in our own way of thinking, our own habits of revealing.^[38]  From this perspective, we can understand the error concerning technology to most profoundly concern how it affects the mind in its relations to the world—and even in its relations within itself.^[39]  I do not know any thinker who saw this more acutely in his time than Marshall McLuhan; though, as we will also attempt to show, his insight did not penetrate deeply enough into the facultative constitution of the world of human experience.

2.1. Technology as Extension

That is, McLuhan saw that every technology constitutes, in a certain way, a medium between the human being and the world inhabited by the human being.^[40]  Such a medium need not be one of specifically-human communication (though technologies producing such media do, indeed, dominate the twenty-first century), but only anything through which we extend our natural capacities.  As he writes in the first chapter of Understanding Media:^[41]

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.  This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

In this way, the scythe introduces a new medium through which we view wheat: the “manageable scale” of a field becomes larger if we may harvest it faster.  So too, the paved road changes not only how we interpret the possibilities of driving our cars or riding our bikes, but so too how we interpret the whole environment where it appears: a clean, well-paved road shows us human life, the investment of resources, the intention for some form of human society—extending at the very least the possible number and distance of persons who enter into our individual “ambits”.

But what is it, precisely, that is being extended?  When we consider any interaction between ourselves and the corporeal world, these necessarily take place through some organ.  The eyes are the organ of sight, which faculty seems extended by the telescope (to see things too far) and the microscope (to see things too small).  But is it the faculty, or the eye, which is extended?  Could it perhaps be the object which is somehow changed first and foremost, altering the act, changing the habits, and thereby differently-disposing the faculty?

The legs are the principal organ of our natural faculty for locomotion.  Are these extended by the bicycle, the skateboard, the train, the automobile?  Or is it locomotion itself which is thus extended?  In this case, it seems clearer that it is the faculty rather than the organ.  One’s legs receive no change to their operation of ambulation by sitting in a car (for operating pedals is a different kind of motion, involving different muscles than does walking).  So too, an eye—though it receives light in different degrees through the modulation of a lens—does not see any differently by the extension of such devices.  Rather, it is the faculty for seeing that is extended.^[42]  But it also seems that, by some technologies at least, the object is extended as well—perhaps in a way quite artificial.  A lens might gather together light more efficiently; but an infrared detector might render as-though-visible what is unrealizable to the naked eye.  Such is an “extension” given by the James Webb Telescope, for instance.

But what do we mean, precisely, by “extend”?  The etymology of the word is instructive… but only minimally: tendere, to be towards, and ex– out of or from.  By a technological extension, we alter the reach that a faculty has respecting its object—or, again perhaps, the reach that an object has into a faculty.  In order that this be properly understood as an extension of the faculty, we have to recognize that the extension can only respect the formal object.  Thus, the extension of sight concerns light and its differentiation (color).  The extension of hearing concerns auditory vibrations and their frequencies.  Similarly, the extension of locomotion concerns places of rest (that is, not merely the absence of motion but a placement of that which is moved fitting to its own nature).

Of course, as noted above: the relation between any given faculty and its object, as actual, always entails a complex web of relations—specifically, a web of sign-relations.  I cannot relate to any formal object except that also there be present to me some material object as well—even if only as imagined.  Moreover, while I might relate to that object on a principally-particular level, I am human, and therefore, related to it at least implicitly and potentially on a universal one, as well.  McLuhan noted well, therefore, that the extension of any one faculty alters the ratio of all the faculties: as we become more visually-attuned, we become less attuned to all the other senses; the more tactile we are, the less visual and auditory (though it seems the tactile might work in closer cohesion with the olfactory and gustatory senses).

But what happens, precisely, when we consider the ratios not only of the exterior senses, but the interior, as well?   When we see with the eye, it is not only the faculty of sight that is active and therefore not the only faculty which may be extended.  Can one technology extend two faculties simultaneously, through the same action?  To answer these questions more fully would require a deeper investigation of the interior senses—for their operations and formal objects are perhaps not immediately clear to us.  Perception,^[43] indeed, is a highly-complex manifold of operations, often overlapping, often moving faster than we can recognize except by careful, precise, and extended reflection.  Provisionally, we may identify the formal objects (keeping in mind that some are stimulative and others terminative) of each faculty (mentioned above in 1.5) as:

Integrating sense: the sensible object as a whole.

Simple retention: the retention of sensible specifications as abstracted from context.

Pattern retention: the retention of diverse ‘intentions’—that is, the complex of relations between objects and the self—precisely as having happened in the past (and thus abstracted from the present).

Cogitative: judgments concerning the particular objects affected through discerning the ‘intentions’ constituting the objective environment.  We could also name this object the operative good (or correctness about the operative good) of the animal.

Now, in fact, the realities of these faculties’ functions are far more complex than signified through this simplified presentation.^[44]  It is important however to note that this fourfold division of faculties and their objects underlies all the operations which we might further identify.  The integrating sense, in presenting the sensible object as a whole, provides the material object from which the two retentive faculties may receive their formal objects; and presents the material objects in which the cogitative may locate its terminative formal object.  Further of note, the cogitative seems to be the “driving” force behind the operations of the other faculties—not that it causes them to be in act, but it draws upon their retentions and presentations to make its evaluations.^[45]

Efforts to identify specific operations or faculties with electro-chemical activity in distinct regions in the brain have found various correlations.  Such correlations, viewed through too narrow a lens, may arouse undue excitement at the apparent discovery of specific ways in which technology might extend our neurological functions.  Yet the actuality of such correlations, I would argue, obscures rather than reveals the functional reality of the faculties in question—very often resulting in the conflation of faculty and organ.^[46]

Thus while we might recognize that memorative functions, for instance—the retention of both simple phenomena (irrespective of context) and of complex patterns (always contextualized by the relation of parts to one another and to the individual as relating itself to the objects both cognitively and cathectically)—can be localized to a certain extent within the brain, we can also recognize that a whole complex web of neurological activities seems to be triggered by any act of remembering.^[47]  This web seems active, moreover, in all perceptual experience itself.  Whereas the faculties of external sensation are more strictly constrained with respect to their objects and therefore have a kind of relative independence of one another, perceptual objectivization concerns wholes in such a manner that, extending any one operation of perception and thus altering the ratios between the faculties may be profoundly (if not obviously) disorienting for the human being as a whole.  So intimate are the interconnections of neurological activity that any effort to identify singularly locate diverse functions with either highly-specific or even broadly-demarcated regions of the brain—even the left-right hemispheric divide—have proven misguided.^[48]

We must then raise the question as to how these faculties are extended by technology.  This is a question to which the answers will unfold over the course of the whole seminar.

2.2. Technology as Modulation

This unfolding can be assisted, however, by another conception of technology—more than merely implicit, I believe, in the work of McLuhan, but not as fully explicit or emphatic as his insistence upon its function as extension: namely, technology’s function as modulation.  McLuhan seems to express this idea, to at least a certain extent, in his concept of media as being either hot or cool.  Yet I think here we may drive at something more fundamental than this distinction—seeing the “temperature” of a medium’s effect on its audience as a metaphor for modality or modulation.

To begin making this explicit, let us ask what precisely it is that we mean by “modulation”.  Here, I draw heavily upon Scholasticism, in which mode was precisely distinguished from species.^[49]  In current common parlance, we distinguish the how from the what.  This, in other words, is a distinction between not only intensity and identity, but also between manner and nature.  The truth that manner consists in something more than a quantitatively-expressible intensity might be obscured by the “empiriometric preference” of our intellectual environment.^[50]  I would direct readers’ attention, however, to the grammatical function of adverbs.  We may say that something “was done quickly”, for instance, and think of this “quickness” in terms of how much time we count before it was accomplished.  But is that the extent of what “quickly” signifies?  By context, it may also include a signification “hastily” or “without thinking”; it might mean “smartly” or “efficiently” or “without fuss”.

It would be a distraction to here go into the issues of linguistic signification—grammatical structures, supposition, and the like—but suffice it to say that even the simplest of adverbs carries with itself meanings far beyond some quantitative or quantitatively-reducible signification.

To suggest another example where we might see this quantitative irreducibility of the modal—more broadly but perhaps (with a little reflection) quite obviously—we might consider differences in how people think: say, the typical (though not absolute) differences in male versus female considerations.  The formal objects regarded by the sexes do not differ—in any primary sense, at least.  If the formal objects do differ, that difference is secondary, coming into being only consequent to different modalities of thinking between the sexes.  In other words, a man and a woman looking at the same material object may have present to them, in essential possibility, all the same formal objects; but even if considering that material object under the same formality, they will likely be thinking of it in different modes.  If they do look at the material object under different formal objectivities, this would seem to follow from that different modality in the operations of thinking.

Precisely how things are differentiated by modality is the wanting subject of a lengthy treatise.  Suffice it to say for our purposes here that, while extension of our faculties through certain technologies does allow us the discovery of new “whats”, their primary effect seems instead to be on the modality of our faculties’ operations.  Put otherwise, technology never reveals to us new formal objects.  It only changes how we relate to those formal objects—though perhaps drastically.  This seems signified by McLuhan’s maxim that “the medium is the message”; as well as by the (borrowed from Churchill) assertion of John Culkin, SJ, in his review of Understanding Media, that “we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us”.  This reflexive shaping does not alter the what of us (unlike our shaping of the tools)—that is, it does not change our essential nature—but rather our habits, or, we might say, the modes by which we hold ourselves through these habits.

Consider an example: news of a tragedy.  It has long been recognized that such news draws attention more easily, compared to other items.  But the ability to televise a tragedy—live, especially—often results in eyes glued to screens.  The distance disappears.  The formal object is the same, but the prevalence of the material object increases: it becomes “hot”, in McLuhan’s sense (at least, with television in the modern, high-definition format we have today compared to the low-definition format of the 1960s).  In the digital age, this has taken on a new dimension: for tragedies now can be captured by anyone.  The presentations of one and the same material object are manifold.  Perspective is multiplied greatly.  The attention to the tragedy, with this in mind, shifts in fact to a more active role in attempting to disclose the precise reality of the object in question.  The particular media may be hot, but the whole context is cool—and the opportunity for participation is endless.  Users do not simply sit and wait for the latest news to come in from official channels; they search it out; they look for connections; they dive in.  Where viewers subject to a strictly-televised narrative about far-away events would be primarily passive, and thus attuned through faculties better at receptivity but lesser at retention, active investigatory users seemingly retain certain patterns better, but at the same time become far less receptive.  Attention becomes narrowed by the reflexive habits of action as modulated through the technological medium.

Where extension seemingly describes the alteration of relations we form with the formal objects of particular faculties, modulation seems rather to describe the alteration of the whole of our habituated bearing towards those objects.

2.3. Experience and Technology

Finally, in an effort to bring this primer to a close (which certainly is not a resolution of the ideas it has attempted to broach), allow a few words on the relationship between technology and experience.

We hear the term “experience” thrown around constantly; we speak of experience all the time—my experience, your experience, an experience.  But what do we actually mean by the term?  Is it an object or an event?  Is it something that happens only to a human being, or to any animal, or to any living being?  Can the unliving “have an experience”?  Why do we say have an experience, for that matter?  Is it a possession?

To come at these questions from a different angle: often, “experience” will be correlated either directly or partially with the notion of “consciousness”.  When we speak of our experience or experiences (already a question-provoking contrast between the singular and plural!) we do indeed tend to mean something present to our consciousness.  Yet it is often claimed, or at least suggested, that many objects or events pass into our experience—affecting us somehow—that are not precisely contained within our explicit consciousness as such, meaning a state of awareness of oneself and one’s objective world: whether it be “subconscious” or “unconscious”, or otherwise modified by a prefix (and thus still defined or determined in and by relation to the consciousness).^[51]

Reflected in this concern of experience with the individual consciousness is the “turn inwards” characteristic of the age of psychoanalysis, in the age of the “psychological person”.  In other words, while individual self-awareness has always been a part of human experience, the focus of the ultramodern human being has been on the individual self, on “being-the-one-who-experiences”.  It is in this self that our commitments are founded and held as concluded.  In the words of Carl Trueman (summarizing and commenting on Philip Rieff), the political-, religious-, and economic-based forms of life which anteceded the psychological gave to their people something outside the self as primary:^[52]

All of them found their purpose and well-being by being committed to something outside themselves.  In the world of psychological man, however, the commitment is first and foremost to the self and is inwardly directed.  Thus, the order is reversed.  Outward institutions become in effect the servants of the individual and her sense of inner well-being.

Indeed—“inner experience” today is given such an unquestioned priority that it seems presumed as principal for the meaning of any given situation.  “Reality” is judged less by things themselves and much more by how the individual perceives, understands, and reacts to them.

A little reflection upon this “inward turn” of our late-modern world shows this institutional reversal quite clearly; especially in the contemporary technological environment.  That is, individualistic conceptions having already been disseminated throughout late-modernity, we see our technology having reciprocally developed in and with this individualistic paradigm—both structured by its presuppositions and simultaneously intensifying it.^[53]  We see this manifestly in the dividedness of digital life: spouses sitting next to one another, night after night spent on their phones, inhabiting the same physical space but entirely different electronic worlds; seeing the same material objects through different perspectives, cobbling together different partial pictures.  Physical proximity no longer determines the primary possibilities for a shared consciousness.

Simultaneously, and perhaps what appears somewhat paradoxical, the networked digital environment of the internet affects a kind of ideological diaspora resultant in a new communal shaping of identity: such that, for instance, the left/right political spectrum characteristic of the televisual environment is dissolved, and now, increasingly, one sees the digitally-immersed minds attaching themselves not only to various political “tribes”, but nomadic tribes, collecting and discarding different ideas along the way.^[54]  The “cybernetically-extended” consciousness of the individual, adhering (though not likely for long) to one or another digital tribe, has a kind of “discarnate” experience.

Or does it?

The term “experience” derives from the Latin experimentum (from which also our “experiment”), itself constituted from two elements: ex-, out of or from; and peritus, tried, tested.  Experience, then, is what results from some trial or test—indeed, a trial or test conducted within our own living.  Always in an experience, then, there is a dynamism between what is done (the action) and to whom it matters that it is done—even if that “to whom” is the very agent of the action.  This dynamism was expressed in the schools of phenomenology, particularly in the distinction raised by Edmund Husserl between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, commonly understood to signify the “objective content” of experience and the “subjective dimension” or “lived experience”, respectively.  Yet these terms (and the far-from-perfect English translations) yet fall short of that dynamism’s essential unity.

I believe attaining this unity is what many strive after, but fall short of, in their efforts to identify experience (by whatever relations) with consciousness.  But the term “consciousness” points ineptly at the experiential reality; etymologically, it prioritizes scientificknowledge (scientia).  Although this etymology has submerged in the term’s actual contemporary use, one nevertheless finds a kind of prioritization of the subject precisely as psychological, that is, as an entity constituted by thoughts and emotions in contradistinction to the corporeal.  In other words, most people regard the “conscious” self as something radically distinct from the body.  This disconnect appears in the way we talk about our bodies: not as parts of the whole, but as possessions and, quite often, as possessions that are not ideal, that are somehow uncooperative.  We form a habit unfounded in reality through our linguistic tendencies of discrimination to treat as dissociable the psychological self from the bodily being.

Experience, thereby, is misattributed to a part rather than the whole.  To be clear, we should not make the opposite mistake: as though to think that experience belongs properly to an “unsouled body”, or to mere clusters of neurological patterning.  But neither should we hypostatically divide the body from its form, i.e., its soul.  This is why earlier (1.2) the soul’s essential nature—as basic organizing principle of the living body—was expounded on at some length.  The constituents of experience—both the “objective content” and the “subjective dimension”—are constituted by different actualizations: changes, that is, from a state of potency to one of actuality.  These actualizations, with repeated frequency, instantiate habits, and habits—as stated above (1.7)—are rooted always in the soul; and, since the soul permeates the body, the body too is shaped by those habits and thus those experiences.  Experience thus appears to have an intrinsic essential coherence with the whole of the human person—even when the constituent events or objects or even technological extensions of particular faculties are somehow at odds either with one another or with the nature of the human being, or distortive of the proper ratios.^[55]

The medium is the message, says McLuhan.  But to be a message, there must be a recipient; and the message is what it is, at least in part, because of what the recipient is and how the message is interpreted.  If we are to understand the message, we need to understand the structures and habits of interpretation.

3. Synthesis: Technology and Habit

We can identify technology’s causal relations in two directions: in respect to the external world, upon which it has transitive effects; and in respect to the psychology of the users, upon whom it causes an immanent alteration.  In effecting the external world, it operates as an instrument of efficient causes by extending our natural capacities, making them more powerful, faster, and precise.  As the most visible dimension of technological causality, this external-efficacy is, of course, that which most people notice and discuss.  But the effects upon the human person are more profound, lasting, and deserve closer scrutiny.  Technology, that is, does not change our natures nor can it directly alter the operations of our intellectual capacity, that is, the operations of understanding and willing.  However, by shaping the presentation of objects—the medium being the message—it exercises a specifying causality upon our perceptual faculties and thus modulates and even determines many aspects of our experience by shaping the habits of our internal sense faculties.  These habits then structure the manner in which we undertake our operations: not only those of individual understanding and willing, but of perceiving, communicating, and ordering our own efficient causality upon the world (the exercise of τεχνή, that is).

For this reason, focusing on the relationship between human beings and technology as primarily one of problems and solutions traps us in a vicious cycle.  Presupposing that technological difficulties arise from particular malfunctions or discrete disorders within a system disposes us to look for technological solutions: to find new instruments for patching up the harms wrought by the old.  Thus we find the new instruments to create further problems and, within this presupposition, demand yet further new innovations—endlessly.  Each solution generates new problems of equal or greater complexity.  This myopic view of technology’s influence obscures that the difficulty of technology is not any one problem or even series of problems, but the disproportioning effects of its use.  To be human requires living through technological mediation—such is inescapable.  But the reflexive effect of technology, as a medium that alters our relation to the world, must be properly proportioned to our faculties, habits, acts, and objects.  Without such a proportioning, it ceases to serve human flourishing and instead begins reordering human activity to technological rather than human ends.

As technologies grow more complex and powerful, their influence becomes increasingly diffuse and pervasive.  Simple tools may be adopted or set aside with relative ease, their use remaining largely a matter of individual choice.  Complex technological environments, by contrast, integrate themselves into the fabric of social life—and today, few persons can subsist outside such technological environments.  They reshape our norms of communication, expectations of availability, the rhythms of work and rest, and even the tacit structures within which we seek meaning (religion, education, friendship, relations between the sexes, etc.).  Thus, technological use is no longer primarily a personal decision but a necessary element of participation in the social world integral to human experience.  We cannot place responsibility, therefore, solely upon individual users; it demands instead that each individual take up his or her responsibility as a member of a community, of mutually-participated practices that communicate thoughtfully about the nature of technology and identify better how each individual’s use has an effect on social relationality.

This effect of the individual upon social relations further reveals the importance of habit and especially of how habit is the central locus of technological mediation and its effects.  Habits, that is, are not mere repetitions or routines of action, but rather stable dispositions through which the human being holds himself toward reality.  They order our attention and our memory, hold us towards objects as desirable or aversive, and render easy or difficult the cooperative operation of our faculties.  Because technology modifies the presentation of objects to our faculties and the patterns by which those objects are encountered, it inevitably modulates habit.  Over time, such modulation necessarily reshapes not only individual comportment but also the social relations through which habits are reinforced and transmitted.  Technological environments thus play a decisive role in the formation of a shared cultural posture toward the world—one that may either sustain or erode the conditions under which understanding remains possible.

If the analyses presented here are correct, then technology cannot be adequately understood, evaluated, or developed apart from its role in shaping habit.  The question that must guide our engagement with technological environments is therefore not how to maximize their efficiency or novelty, nor how to use them to resolve the problems they create, but how to subordinate their modulations of experience to the formation and re-formation of rightly ordered habits.  Only when technology is integrated into human life in this way—serving the proportionate exercise of our faculties and the integrity of our shared experience—can it become a genuine instrument of human flourishing rather than a force that displaces our good with our conformity.

[1] 1252/56: De ente et essentia, proem.: “Parvus error in principio magnus est in fine.”
[2] Cf. Spalding et al. 2019: The Human Person: What Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas Offer Modern Psychology, 2: “Any current student of psychology, at the end of their studies, knows that there is no coherent, understandable picture of psychology as a single discipline.”
[3] Cf. Paul Tournier 1955: Le personnage et la personne, in the English translation by Edwin Hudson, The Meaning of Persons, 22: “We become fully conscious only of what we are able to express to someone else.  We may already have had a certain inner intuition about it, but it must remain vague so long as it is unformulated.”
[4] For more in-depth overview, see Brennan 1941: Thomistic Psychology: A Philosophic Analysis of the Nature of Man and Spalding et al. 2019: The Human Person: What Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas Offer Modern Psychology.  One could also survey Brennan’s 1937: General Psychology and Gannon’s 1954: Psychology: The Unity of Human Behavior: An Introduction to General Psychology to survey Thomist studies in the modern idioscopic science of psychology.  Gannon also published, posthumously, a general history of psychology’s development which is most useful in both distinguishing the common philosophical errors inherited by modern psychologists and in situating the need for semiotics in the study of the human mind, 1991: Shaping Psychology: How We Got Where We’re Going.
[5] Cf. Peirce 1877: “The Fixation of Belief” in EP.1: 109-23 for a relevant discussion.  Peirce here distinguishes four different methods through which people commonly determine their beliefs.  The modern philosophical descriptive approach accords with what he calls the “a priori”; the Scholastic causal approach with what he calls the “scientific”.  I wrote a commentary on this piece which can be found here, 2019: “C.S. Peirce on Science and Belief”.
[6] Without going into details, because so much of our experience consists in dealing with phenomena that cannot be reduced to the material, materialists always and invariably operate as de facto dualists.
[7] We can also distinguish this determination in terms of its source: as between cherry and pine, oak and maple, etc.
[8] As one might suppose, this suitability has an intrinsic importance for the study of technological artifacts not only in terms of what they are but for evaluating whether they are good in themselves.  One thinks here of McLuhan’s 1964: Understanding Media, 31: “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”
[9] Does this have implications for the claims of transhumanism?  That is, the sense of horror at our natural, proportionate, principally-determined limbs being severed not as punishment for crimes or through accidents but through the deliberate intention to modify, enhance, or improve our corporeal functioning ought to raise serious questions.  For an interesting reading on this topic, consider Steven J. Jensen 2013: “The Roots of Transhumanism” in Thomas Aquinas: The Teacher of Humanity, 162-85.
[10] We can explain this in part, of course, by mechanical processes: lacking the continual sources of renewal provided through the flow of blood, the cells deteriorate, no longer hold together, and are broken down by atmospheric conditions.  But it should be noted that this is a kind of purely negative explanation—none of this explains why the hand is a hand, or what a hand does, and so on.
[11] Of course, there are mechanical causes involved, such that we could artificially sustain the “handness” of the hand strictly as inert, even detached from the body—but notably, only by replicating the kind of actuality that it shares in with the rest of the body.  Also worthy of note is that, no matter how perfect the match between organ donor and organ recipient, there is always some degree of transplant rejection.
[12] The English word “manual” deriving from the Latin manus, “hand”.
[13] As I am writing this, in fact, I am doing so with a sprained right wrist—which of itself does not directly impact my ability to type, but since I am wearing a brace to prevent further injury, has made the activity of typing somewhat less familiar-feeling and therefore less convenient.  More difficult are actions like pouring a heavy pitcher of water or picking up something heavy in a straight vertical motion.  The ligaments lack their proper integrity and, as such, cannot retain the tension suitable for gripping.
[14] Another point on which I will not here dwell, but the “neuroreductivism” that so many people today take for granted as an obvious truth—that “you are your brain”—leads to countless misunderstandings of what it is to be human.  A good critical evaluation of this hypothesis can be found in Alva Noë’s 2009: Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness.  We are necessarily, that is, engaged in a complex and dynamic web of intentional relations irreducible to ourselves.
[15] Yet another interesting point this raises: the formal cause clearly and necessarily has a connection to the final cause.  Cf. Pierre Marie Emonet 1994: L’âme humaine expliqueé aux simples, in the English translation, The Greatest Marvel of Nature, 6-7: “If the rose composes, gathers together, the body that belongs to it, it is in order at least to come to blossom and spread abroad its perfume.  The bird composes its body for flight and song.  Why does the human soul give its body this architecture?  Or we can ask: What attracts the human zygote at the moment of its genesis?  What specific operations does that cell prepare in fashioning the organs of the outer senses and, in the brain, the tools of the inner senses?  All of these instruments, so delicately arranged!  One of the answers [to the question of why is our body composed by itself as it is—one of the answers] will be: If the human soul gives itself the body it has, it is not only in order to be born to itself; it is to be born to all that is, by the reception into it of all things.  At the same time, the soul gives itself its body in order to let it, the soul, emerge from itself toward things, giving them its love.  Knowledge and love—this is why the human soul gives itself its organs and keeps them together; this is the soul’s ultimate raison d’être.”
[16] 1266-68: ST Ia, q.75, a.1, c.: “Vita autem maxime manifestatur duplici operae, scilicet cognitionis et motus.”  This article should be read in its entirety to get a foundational understanding of the soul in Thomistic psychology.  Cf Aristotle c.330bc: ΠερὶΨυχῆς, book 3, c.3, 427a 18ff.
[17] Cf. Deely 2015: “Cognitive and cathectic dimensions of semiosis” in Cognitive Semiotics 8.1: 19-38.  The use taken up here of the term “cathectic” and its root, “cathexis”, originates in the definition given it by Parsons and Shils in 1951: Toward a General Theory of Action, 10n13: “the term cathexis is broader in its reference than the term affect; it is affect plus object.  It is object-oriented affect.  It involves attaching affective significance to an object”.  I prefer this term for its inherent incorporation of the intentional dimension of our affective states; the dualistic severance of affect from object exacerbates the common opinion (articulated for instance by Hume) that passions (or “emotions”) are “original experiences”—dissociated from their objects in principle and only incidentally related to them.  I take this to be a grave error, but will not dwell on it here.  See 1.5 below for a little more on cognitive and cathectic faculties in general.
[18] For more on this point of self-motion, see Aristotle c.330bc: ΠερὶΨυχῆς, book 2, c.2, 414a12f; Aquinas 1268: In de anima, lib.2, lec.4, n.271-275; Poinsot 1635: Philosophiae Naturalis Quarta Pars, q.1, a.2 [R.III.21b 10–28a 19].
[19] 1266-68: ST Ia, q.75, a.1, in passim but especially in c.: “Manifestum est enim quod esse principium vitae, vel vivens, non convenit corpori ex hoc quod est corpus, alioquin omne corpus esset vivens, aut principium vitae.  Convenit igitur alicui curpori quod sit vivens, vel etiam principium vitae, per hoc quod est tale corpus.  Quod autem est actu tale, habet hoc ab aliquo principio quod dicitur actus eius.  Anima igitur, quae est primum principium vitae, non est corpus, sed corporis actus, sicut calor, qui est principium calefactionis, non est corpus, sed quidam corporis actus.” – “For it is manifest that to be a principle of life, or of living, does not belong to a body from the mere fact that it is a body, otherwise every body would be living, or a principle of life.  Therefore it belongs to some body that it is living, or that it is a principle of life, through the fact that it is such a body.  Now that it is actually such a body, it has from some principle which is said to be the act of it.  Therefor the soul, which is the first principle of life, is not a body, but the act of a body, as heat, which is the principle of heating, is not a body, but a certain act of a body.”
[20] Cf. 1266-68: ST Ia, q.77, a.3.
[21] For a brief primer on this specific point concerning the terms “object”, “objective”, and “objectivity”, read this on the Peripatetic Periodical: https://lyceum.institute/peripatetic-periodical/2023/10/27/on-the-meanings-of-object-objective-and-objectivity/.  One could also read Deely 2009: Purely Objective Reality, p.1-15.
[22] Cf. 1266-68: ST Ia, q.77, a.3; ibid, q.78, a.1.
[23] Cf. Poinsot 1632: Tractatus de Signis, 166-92 [R.I.670a9–679b5].  Cf. Deely 1985: “Editorial Afterword” to the TDS, p.467-68.
[24] Cf. Deely 2015: “Cognitive and cathectic dimensions of semiosis” in Cognitive Semiotics 8.1: 19-38.  The use taken up here of the term “cathectic” and its root, “cathexis”, originates in the definition given it by Parsons and Shils in 1951: Toward a General Theory of Action, 10n13: “the term cathexis is broader in its reference than the term affect; it is affect plus object.  It is object-oriented affect.  It involves attaching affective significance to an object”.  I prefer this term for its inherent incorporation of the intentional dimension of our affective states; the dualistic severance of affect from object exacerbates the common opinion (articulated for instance by Hume) that passions (or “emotions”) are “original experiences”—dissociated from their objects in principle and only incidentally related to them.  I take this to be a grave error, but will not dwell on it here. 
[25] To explain the use here of “cognitive”: the Latin verb cognoscere is one Aquinas often uses to indicate a broader senses of awareness respecting an object, in contradistinction to scire, which he reserves for “knowledge” properly speaking.  Cf. 1266-68: ST Ia, q.78, a.1, c. and ad.3-4 for discussion of the apprehensive and appetitive distinction.
[26] 1266-68: ST Ia, q.78, a.3.
[27] Commonly called the sensus communis in the Latin Age tradition.  The English transliteration would mislead us.  It was called the “common sense” because it underlies all the external senses.  By calling it the “integrating sense”, we indicate its most essential operation.  Cf. Kemple 2022: Introduction to Philosophical Principles, 131-32.
[28] I.e., the vires imaginativa, memorativa, and cogitativa.  See 1266-68: ST Ia, q.78, a.4.
[29] Explored at length through 1266-68: ST Ia, q.79, qq.84-89.
[30] 1266-68: ST Ia, qq.80-81.
[31] Ibid, q.82-83.
[32] Spalding et al. 2019: The Human Person: What Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas Offer modern Psychology, 83.
[33] A word introduced by John Deely in 2010: Semiotic Animal, xiii: “Here too, perhaps, is the place to mention a neologism introduced into my analysis from the Latin semiotic of John Poinsot, namely, the English verb-form provenate.  This verb in English derives from the Latin infinitive ‘provenire’, to come or issue forth, appear, arise, be produced; its closest relative in existing English being the noun-form ‘provenance’ (‘where something originated or was nurtured in its early existence’).  Hence, as will appear, a relation provenates from its fundament only contingently in ens reale restrictively conceived, but necessarily when the fundament is a psychological state.”  This too justifies the use of the terms cathectic and cathexis rather than affect and affective.
[34] Thomas Aquinas gives a focused discussion of habit in 1269-70: ST Ia-IIae, q.49-54, and an extended discussion of virtuous (q.55-67) and vicious habits (q.71-89).  Notably, most of this lattermost discussion is undertaken in the context of “sin”, which may be understood as disordering and self-diminishing behavior.  Cf. Sullivan 2021: Habits and Holiness: Ethics, Theology, and Biospsychology.
[35] Understood to consist primarily in processes accomplished through a complex series of neurological structures collectively referred to as the basal ganglia.  The details are highly technical; suffice it here to say only that these structures exhibit a plasticity with respect both to the promotion and inhibition of action: if subject repeatedly to the same inputs and producing consistently the same outputs, the structures become more ready and less resistant to communicating according to the same pattern in the future.
[36] An instance which unfortunately can be easily misinterpreted!  “No dear, I am not upset with you—just thinking about whether there remains some existent virtual relation provenating from the remote fundament given the destruction of the proximate.”
[37] In the first part of his 1926-43: Joseph and His Brothers, Thomas Mann waxes reflective on the phrase, “From the days of Set”—a phrase of Egyptian antiquity to point to an event in time somehow immemorial; too distant in the past to ascribe any definition duration having passed between it and the present.  As Mann voices (partially through ruminations scribed to Joseph), p.18: “Wherever I look, I think of the words: and the origin of all things, when I come to search for it, pales away into the days of Set”.  Any beginning in chronological inquiry, that is, must make an arbitrary point of departure—for each moment in recorded time is preceded by others, other happenings, whether recorded or not.
[38] 1950: Die Frage nach der Technik, 13/12: “We are questioning concerning technology, and we have arrived now at aletheia, at revealing.  What has the essence of technology to do with revealing?  The answer: everything.  For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing.  Bringing-forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning—causality—and rules them throughout.  Within its domain belong end and means, belongs instrumentality.  Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology.  If we inquire, step by step, into what technology, represented as means, actually is, then we shall arrive at revealing.  The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing.”
[39] Here, precisely, we open the door to an issue upon which this paper only touches: namely, the vast field of endless inquiry and insight prompted by Peircean semiotics—for these relations are most especially constituted by signs, and a deeper understanding of the semiotic structure of human experience will ultimately prove necessary to reconciling the technologically-saturated world of the present day and the human mind.
[40] 1964: Understanding Media, 25: “Before the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that that medium is the message.  The message, it seemed, was the ‘content,’ as people used to ask what a painting was about.  Yet they never though to ask what a melody was about, nor what a house or a dress was about.  In such matters, people retained some sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity.  But in the electric age this integral idea of structure and configuration has become so prevalent that educational theory has taken up the matter.  Instead of working with specialized ‘problems’ in arithmetic, the structural approach now follows the line of force in the field of number and has small children meditating about number theory and ‘sets.’
“Cardinal Newman said of Napoleon, ‘He understood the grammar of gunpowder.’  Napoleon had paid some attention to other media as well, especially the semaphore telegram that gave him a great advantage over his enemies.  He is on record for saying that ‘Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.’”  McLuhan goes on in a similar “mosaic” trajectory, illustrating through diverse examples the realization of universal technological mediation of experience.
[41] 1964: Understanding Media, 19.
[42] Thus, although they may not present to us an accurate “literal representation”, in the sense of capturing photovisible light as exists in itself, instruments such as the James Webb Telescope—and electron microscopes—are indeed extensions of our sight.  But they cannot be understood simply as extensions.  This, too, is a metaphor.
[43] The term “perception” imperfectly conveys the Scholastic Latin interpretations of Aristotle’s φαντασία(phantasia), which recognized in the Stagirite’s use both a generic reference to all the internal senses and a specific (namely, the vis imaginativa).  Indeed, distinction here is demanded: for the whole reality of sense, perception, and imagination (considered both broadly and specifically) is quite easily turned into a muddle.  One point which ought to be stressed however—a complex point common to Scholastic philosophy, issuing from their understanding of natural philosophy (physics)—is that some cognitive faculties, precisely insofar as they are corporeal, are better at receiving and others better at retaining.  These two acts are in an inverse proportion to one another: the more easily something receives, the less readily does it retain, and vice versa.
Another point worth of mentioning: John Poinsot (cit. infra) gives to the operations of internal sensation the generic name of phantasiari.  Building upon the Greek phantasia, this term indicates that the operations of these faculties are not limited to the kind of sense-perceptual operations of which we most-readily think in hearing the term “perception”.  Unfortunately, there exists no clean translation into the English language for phantasiari, and attempting to render it intelligible by any term other than “perception” would seemingly call for a neologism.
[44] I have written on this elsewhere, in a still-as-yet provisional manner; see Kemple 2022: Introduction to Philosophical Principles, 129-37 and 254-80.  The texts of Aquinas concerning the internal sensorium are concentrated in his 1266-68: ST Ia, q.78, a.4, his 1265: Quaestio disputatae de Anima, and his 1268: Sententia libra de Anima, but also to be found scattered throughout his other works as well, including especially the 1259/65: Summa Contra Gentiles and the 1256-59: Quaestiones disputatae de Veritate.  John Poinsot insightfully gives his own commentary in 1635: Philosophiae Naturalis Quarta Pars, q.8, “De sensibus internis”.
[45] On account of this evaluative function, the Scholastics termed the faculty the vis aestimativa in non-human animals; having in their lives a more limited function by lacking intellectual insight.  That is, we may identify the principal (though far from exclusive) function of the cogitative/estimative faculty to consist in evaluating whether objects are beneficial, harmful, or neutral.  Cf. Deely 2007: Intentionality and Semiotics.
[46] As was revealed in the 1999 experiment performed by Mriganka Sur et al. and has since been repeatedly demonstrated (if ludicrously-overhyped in pop-psychology and self-help markets), neuroplasticity shows the brain to be an incredibly nimble organ, capable of undergoing considerable alterations to continue performing diverse operations despite damage having been done to it.  Were specific regions of the brain exclusively designated for these operations, there would be no possibility of such neuroplastic reconfiguration.
[47] For instance, recalling a sensation reactivates regions of the brain in which the original sensory experience was encoded.  Cf. Nyberg et al. 2000: “Reactivation of encoding-related brain activity during memory retrieval” in PNAS 97.20: 11120-24 [DOI: 10.1073/pnas.97.20.11120].
[48] Cf. De Haan 2019: “McGilchrist’s hemispheric homunculi” in Religion, Brain & Behavior, 9.4: 368-79 [DOI: 10/1080/2153599X.2019.1604417]; Corballis and Häberling 2017: “The Many sides of Hemispheric Asymmetry: A Selective Review and Outlook” in Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 23: 710-18 [DOI: 10.1017/S1355617717000376].  It seems just this unfortunate point that often diverts the otherwise insightful points of McLuhan and Powers in c.1974-89: Global Village.
[49] One such example can be found in 1266-68: ST Ia, q.45, a.7.
[50] Jacques Maritain describes the modern scientific paradigm of knowledge as “empiriological”, that is, as “beyond sense, and imagination.  Its realm is a paradoxical realm of the supra-imaginable.  For all that, it does not tend to being in itself, but to a symbolic meta-morphic or meta-sensory grasping of the observable and the measurable.” (1949: “On Human Knowledge” in The Range of Reason, 5).  This may be subdivided into the “empirioschematic”, in which the “empirical content 9in this case the observable in general may call for a purely experimental form and rule of explanation”, which is “characteristic of the non-mathematical, or at least non-mathematicized, sciences of observation” and the “empiriometric”, in which the “empirical content (in this case the measurable) may receive its form and its rule of explanation from mathematics.” (1959: The Degrees of Knowledge, 148-49).  When this latter gains a kind of preeminent status among all the sciences, and is that by which all others are judged for their accuracy and validity, we become blind to the real differences of kinds and the modal differences of intensity and manner, except inasmuch as they are reducible to something measurable.
[51] Notably, the state described as conscious undoubtedly admits of varying degrees; and even, as Peirce has noted, our apparent unconsciousness (achieved in sleep) is probably far less unconscious than we assume in truth—that is, doubtless some somatic awareness of the environment exists, lest we would never wake up by loud noises or sensations or the like.
[52] 2020: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 58 (ebook).
[53] Including, e.g., the way in which we have been “datafied”: cf. McLuhan and Powers 1974-89: Global Village, 89: “The computer, working at the speed of light through a myriad of communication devices, will produce tailor-made products and services for potential buyers who have already presignaled their preference through the database, whether it be a perfectly adjusted insurance/investment program or a dream vacation.”  Our algorithms already do this, somewhat imperfectly; but as LLM technologies become more sophisticated and are integrated into web-services platforms, the sorting of this data will likely improve markedly; even to the point of potentially producing physical products themselves which are tailor-made for the individual.  This possibility represents an automated τεχνή hostile to human ποιἠσις.
[54] Cf. 1976-89: Global Village, 94: “As man succeeds in translating his central nervous system into electronic circuitry, he stands on the threshold of outering his consciousness into the computer.”  See also Wachs 2015: The New Science of Communication, 170: “As McLuhan predicted, electric technology retrieves the tribe and obsolesces private perspective.  Cyberspace is a space that is constituted by the interaction between entities sharing and communicating data with one another” and Kemple 2019: “Leaving the Global Village”.  The nomadic tribes often splinter and fragment, branching off into different ephemeral groups.  The alt-right begets the dissident right; effective altruism begets effective accelerationism; etc.
[55] It is worth reflecting upon the claim of McGilchrist that experiential unity is exhibited (let us say, to give a charitable interpretation) at the lowest levels of neurocognitive-correlated activity; 2011: The Master and His Emissary, 225: “Experience is not just a stitching together, at the topmost level, of [a] ‘patchwork’ of functions.  Experience is already coherent in its wholeness at very low levels in the brain, and what higher levels do is not to put together bits (left-hemisphere fashion) but to permit the growth of a unified whole (right hemisphere fashion).  There are known to be highly complex, and complexly interconnected, cortico-subcortical loops involving the basal ganglia, deep-lying nuclei in the brain, way below the corpus callosum, which, as we understand more about them, we realize increasingly are involved, not just in motor co-ordination, as we used to think, but in both the segregation and integration of motor, affective and cognitive functions.”  Ibid, 226: “Experience that is completely ‘fused’ or unified in its automatic recruitment of cognitive, emotional and motor aspects of being, and which is experienced at the highest phenomenological level as an integrated phenomenon, with thoughts about the uselessness of carrying on living, feelings of deep sadness and gestures of despair, is already coherently constituted (and ‘ready to go’) at this low level in the tree of consciousness… Experiential wholes, that are completely coherent across all realms, and affect us at the most conscious as well as unconscious levels, are already present well below consciousness.”  Note, however, that in this latter text, McGilchrist ascribes the unity of experience to automatic processes; while such may be true of the material constituents of experience, I would argue that the formal constitution, particularly in talking about experience as specifically-human, involves something more.