The following essay is by João Pinheiro da Silva, a master’s student in philosophy at CEU Vienna.

Intentionality and Representationalism

In his study on the origins and varieties of “representation”, Peter Hacker has argued that, from its introduction in philosophical debate, “the idea of repraesentare was firmly linked with that of intentio” (Hacker 2021: 7).

Hacker’s claim is doubly supported. First, these two ideas seem to pop up in the philosophical discussion at roughly the same time and with a common origin: the Latin translations of Arab texts from Avicenna and Al-Farabi. Secondly, both concepts were tied up with each other since “medieval schoolmen … advanced the view that these faculties [of sense, memory, and imagination] represent things to the mind, and generally held that such internal representations are mental images that represent by way of likeness or similarity” (Ibid.: 5).

Hacker goes on to describe how Galileo’s legacy of distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities alongside Descartes’ idea of “representation without resemblance” (Ben-Yami 2015) gave rise to “mentalization of representations” that is still present in contemporary debate.

After all, it is a common place in the history of philosophy that Aquinas was, following Aristotle, a realist in various philosophical domains. At the same time, Aquinas helped consolidate “intentio” in the philosophical grammar. We can then pose the question: does Aquinas use of “intentio” lead him down a representationalist path?

However, throughout this process, it still seems that the idea of intentionality is linked with that of representation. Tim Crane, for example, argues for a theory of intentionality that solves “what Wittgenstein once called ‘the harmony between thought and reality’” (Crane 2011: 3) and ends up concluding that “it is hard to see how we can make any progress in even describing the phenomena, if we cannot help ourselves to the concept of representation” (Ibid.: 27-28). Crane even asserts, echoing Hacker’s point, that “appeal to the notion of representation is not supposed to be a solution to the problem of intentionality, since ‘representation’ is arguably just another word for the same phenomenon” (Ibid.).

But is this connection really necessary? Does intentionality really depend on the idea of representation?

Hacker’s analysis of the concept of representation is not meant to be exhaustive but rather proposes to trace a general philosophical trend that started in the 12th century. Thus, even though mentioning Aquinas in his list of medieval philosophers that worked on the twilight of these philosophical changes, there is no deep analysis of his account of representation or intentionality. However, Aquinas’s is an interesting case of study.

After all, it is a common place in the history of philosophy that Aquinas was, following Aristotle, a realist in various philosophical domains. At the same time, Aquinas helped consolidate “intentio” in the philosophical grammar. We can then pose the question: does Aquinas use of “intentio” lead him down a representationalist path?

Aquinas and Representationalism

In short, representationalism is the position according to which “we perceive by means of representations” (Ben-Yami 2021: 1). This formulation can take various similar forms: one can instead talk of “mental images”, “qualia”, “sense data”, “ideas” or “impressions”, for example. The heart of representationalism is the idea that there is a third party involved in perception or, to use Hacker’s own description of Crane’s representationalism, “the idea that there might be something else that explains the connection, or apparent connection, between an expectation and what fulfils it, a proposition and what makes it true, etc” (Hacker 2013: 18). That “something else” is what can be called, using the Latin jargon, a tertium quid – a “third something”, a representation that mediates perception.

So, does Aquinas pose any kind of tertium quid in his analysis of perception? We should start by considering the passage in the Summa Theologiae where Aquinas tackles the question of what is the object of the intellect. In his typically dialogical style, Aquinas starts by presenting the view of some who

have asserted that our intellectual faculties know only the impression made on them; as, for example, that sense is cognizant only of the impression made on its own organ. According to this theory, the intellect understands only its own impression, namely, the intelligible species which it has received, so that this species is what is understood (Aquinas 1920: I q. 85 a. 2; emphasis added).

Aquinas’ rejection of this position is twofold but the first objection is the most important to our present analysis:

[…] the things we understand are the objects of science; therefore, if what we understand is merely the intelligible species in the soul, it would follow that every science would not be concerned with objects outside the soul, but only with the intelligible species within the soul; thus, according to the teaching of the Platonists all science is about ideas, which they held to be actually understood (Ibid.)

Aquinas’ argument is clear: the intelligible species cannot be the object of the intellect. If that were the case, we would have to concede that the intellect is able to know only its own modifications, that the intellect only knows intelligible species, which implies that “science [scientiae – knowledge] would not be concerned with objects outside the soul”. Thus, Aquinas concludes that the human intellect has as its object the things “external” to the intellect: “The sense-objects which actuate sensitive activities—the visible, the audible, etc.—exist outside the soul; the reason being that actual sensation attains to the individual things which exist externally” (Aquinas 1951: § 375).

Aquinas thus rejects the idea that what we directly know is an “impression”, “intelligible species” or, to use the broad term, a representation. Lisska compiles a number of passages where Aquinas exposes his realist account of perception:

In the Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul, Aquinas writes: ‘the visible, the audible, exist outside the mind’ (no. 375). In his Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, he remarks: ‘so also colour does not mean the same as being seen’ (iii lec. 2). In the De Anima, Aquinas writes: ‘light cannot actuate sight according to determinate species of colour unless these colours are present to actuate sight’ (De Anima, q. 5), and in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas states: ‘sensible things are found in act outside of the soul’ (I q. 79 a. 5 ad 1). (Lisska 2016: 89)

Furthermore, even if in constant dialogue with Arab philosophers, Aquinas doesn’t seem to have a place for accounts of representation such as Avicenna’s. According to Hacker, the Persian’s use of representation was meant “to signify mental images which were allegedly employed to think of what is not present to the external senses” (Hacker 2021: 7). This cannot be the case with Aquinas, who subscribed to the peripatetic axiom according to which Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu (Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses). This gives us another reason to think of Aquinas as someone who rejected representationalism.

Intentionality: Efficient is Not Sufficient

So how does intentionality come into the Thomistic picture? Aquinas continually stresses that all knowledge implies that the thing known is somehow present in the knower. But how is that supposed to happen? Is it present as a representation?

Aquinas theory of intentionality is a response to those questions. But first, it must be clear the Thomistic account of intentionality is nested in a broadly Aristotelian metaphysics. So, when it comes to intentionality, Aquinas would indeed agree with Brentano’s definition of the concept as “direction toward an object,” as Aquinas himself defines it as “to tend toward something” (in aliquid tender) (Aquinas 1920: I-II q.12 a.1). But it would be a mistake to take directedness as the mark of intentio. After all, Aristotle’s notion of teleology makes it so that all substances are, in some way, directed towards a determinate end. Aquinas thus poses “a distinction between causal or teleological directedness, which is directly at work in all natural changes, and psychological directedness, which is the mark of intentionality in conscious beings” (Madden 2017: 10).

But again, in Aristotelian fashion, one cannot understand intentionality in terms of mere efficient or final causality. Aquinas’ formulation of knowledge as the “thing known present in the knower” rests on formal causality. Thus, following Aristotle’s hylomorphic metaphysics according to which a “a change is always the coming-to-be of a form in some quantity of matter”, Aquinas argues that the same happens with perception – and that’s where intentionality comes in.

A form can come to be in matter in two different senses. In the case of natural existence (esse naturale), a form “comes to be in a substance, e.g., the form of heat, the form of red, etc., so as to result in a physical thing bearing such a property” (Ibid.:13). But there is the special case of intentional existence (esse intentionale), where “the form of red or heat comes to be in the sense organ of a conscious organism without resulting in something that is physically (ostensibly) red or hot” (Ibid.). Forms are then capable of actualizing matter both non-intentionally and intentionally.

This is possible because intentionality is conceived in terms of formal causality. If knower and thing known are formally identical, one can grant that the object of the intention is not a representation (or any other tertium quid) but the thing itself. Perception is directed to the object, not to its representation. Commenting on sense perception, Aquinas asserts that

… a sense receives form without matter, the form having, in the sense, a different mode of being from that which it has in the object sensed. In the latter, it is a material mode of being (esse naturale), but in the sense, a cognitional and immaterial mode (esse intentionale)’ (Commentary on the Soul, § 553 in Lisska 2016: 78).

It should be clear that esse naturale and esse intentionale differ not in their nature but in the modes of exemplification of the same nature. In his study of Aquinas, Peter Geach formulates formal identity as follows: “… what makes it to be a sensation or thought of an X rather than an actual X or an actual X-ness is that X-ness here occurs in the special way called esse intentionale and not in “ordinary” way called esse naturale” (Anscombe and Geach 1961: 95). Therefore, the difference between esse naturale and esse intentionale rests not in their nature, but their mode of being. As Kretzmann puts it: “What is instantiated on my desk and in my intellect is just the same, but the two modes of instantiation are radically distinct” (Kretzmann 2001: 363). Therefore, what we think of or perceive is not a representation or “resemblance” of something, but the intentional expression of the form of the thing itself. Aquinas’ account of intentionality tears apart the “Veil of Perception” that Locke wove.

We can then understand the maxim of Aquinas’ account of perception: “the intellect in act is the intelligible in act” (Sensus in actu est sensible in actu and Intellectus in actu est intelligible in actu) (Aquinas 1920: I q. 14, a. 2), that is, what we think and what is thought are the same – formally identical.

So, in developing a theory of intentionality, Aquinas is indeed interested in explaining the “tending towards” aspect of perception. But he does so by defending a direct realist account of it. In fact, when one understands Aquinas’ theory of intentionality in its own terms, it becomes difficult to see how the idea of representation would solve the problem of “the harmony between thought and reality” in the first place. Aquinas is only able to have an account of perception that, using Geach’s words, “reaches right up to the reality” (Anscombe and Geach 1961: 95), because it is nested in an Aristotelian worldview. Once we reject an hylomorphic account of substance and reduce all causes to efficient causality, it becomes difficult to make sense of something “having of a form of another without its matter”. One can only make sense of intentionality if there is any form of identity between knower and thing known, if we directly engage with reality - if Intellectus in actu est intelligible in actu.

Aquinas and “Resemblance”

But there is still a seeming problem to a direct realist reading of Aquinas. In describing the representationalist tradition, Ben-Yami makes the point that:

From Empedocles to Descartes’ predecessors, the representation was commonly held to be in the sense organ and to resemble what it represents. It is then more naturally called image or (as in the case of feeling heat, say) reproduction of the quality of the thing perceived or felt (Ben Yami 2021: 1, emphasis added).

The term “resemble” is important here. By resorting to that idea of “resemblance”, one can build a realist view of representation: we perceive by means of representations but the representations accurately resemble the world. According to Ben-Yami (2016), Descartes is working within this tradition and deeply changing it by introducing the idea of “representation without resemblance”. But one doesn’t need to do that cartesian jump to be a representationalist.

The aforementioned seeming problem arises because, in several passages, Aquinas makes use of the term similitudo, which can be translated as “likeness” or “resemblance”. For example:

Likewise that the intellect is perfected by the intelligible object, i.e. is assimilated [assimiletur] to it, this belongs to an intellect which is sometimes in potentiality; because the fact of its being in a state of potentiality makes it differ from the intelligible object and assimilates it thereto through the intelligible species, which is the likeness of the thing understood [quae est similitudo rei intellectae], and makes it to be perfected thereby, as potentiality is perfected by act (Aquinas 1920: I q. 14 a. 2 ad 2)

What is this similitudo? Should we interpret Aquinas’ realism in the tradition of Empedocles’ realist representationalism? Again, we must understand the Aristotelian framework in which Aquinas’ philosophy is nested and read the passage in its own terms. Once we understand Aquinas account of perception as formal causality, we can understand the uses of “similitudo” in terms of formal identity. The following passage makes that clear:

The difference between knowing and non-knowing beings is that the latter have nothing but their own form; the knowing being, on the other hand, is one whose nature it is to have in addition the form of something else, for the likeness of the thing known (form) is in the knower (Summa Theologiae, I q. 14 a. 1 in Lisska 2016:34, emphasis added)

Kretzman (1993: 138) gives several more examples of “strong claims of formal identity [being] expressed in terms of ‘likenesses’”. Once we understand that knowledge is “having of a form of another without its matter” it should become clear that “similitudo” just means, for Aquinas, formal identity, not resemblance in the Empedoclean (or Cartesian) sense.

Final Remarks

We have presented a direct realist account of perception in Aquinas’ philosophy. But does Aquinas play any role, even if unknowingly, in the representationalist shift in philosophy? Maybe yes, especially when his use of concepts such as intentio or similitudo are taken out of their Aristotelian natural environment.

One of the most important things that happened during the turn from scholasticism to modern philosophy, was a massive reconsideration of Aristotelian metaphysics. In the philosophy of causation, this took the form of a significant reduction of the four Aristotelian causes to efficient causality. And even efficient causality was massively reconsidered (Clatterbaugh 1999). So, any attempt of reviving scholastic terms with the modern conceptual apparatus will always be problematic. This is what happens when trying to frame intentio in terms of efficient causality, for example.

Once this modern shift occurs, it is easy to misunderstand Aquinas and other medieval authors. As Charles Taylor, when considering the Aristotelian-Thomistic account of perception, puts it: “Once we no longer explain the way things are in terms of the species that inform them, this conception of knowledge is untenable and rapidly becomes almost unintelligible”; the “theory totally depends on the philosophy of Forms” (Taylor 1995: 3).

So, one can indeed have an account of intentionality that does not depend on or entail representationalism. There is an exception to Hacker’s rule. But that is only because Aquinas does not play by modern rules.

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