Faculty

FACULTY. - The proximate and immediate principle of activity in a living being. It expresses the concepts of power, energy, force, capacity.

The doctrine of the faculties, as traditional philosophy presents it, can be deduced from a fourfold order of considerations: a) the soul is not always active and conscious; it therefore presupposes the reality of forces that from a relative inertia induce it to action; b) our senses likewise act according to discontinuous rhythms; c) our actions are of a different and often discordant nature when compared with one another; d) despite this manifold and intermittent activity we experience a convergence in the unity of the principle to which we attribute every one of our spiritual, sensory, or vital actions. St. Thomas (Sum. Theol., I, q. 78, a. 4) and St. Bonaventure (I Sent., d. 3, p. 2, a. 1, q. 3 ad 3) define the faculties as "principium proximum et immediatum operationum animae." It does not follow from this definition that the faculties all reside exclusively in the soul. While it is the sole seat of the inorganic powers (intellect and will), the entire human composite is the subject of the faculties that are exercised by means of the organs (Sum. Theol., I, q. 77, a. 5 and Quaest. disput. de anima, s. 12 ad 16).

Insofar as they are powers, the faculties have an intrinsic relation or tension to act, and this act differs according to the object. The diversity of acts and objects establishes the foundation of the distinction and multiplicity of the faculties (Sum. Theol., loc. cit., s. 3), which Scotus instead places in the proper formality of the individual powers (Quodl., q. 13, n. 30). The Aristotelian classification (De anima, II, 3) admits five genera of faculties: the vegetative (θεραπτικόν), the appetitive (δεραπτικόν), the sensitive (σλοθητικόν), the locomotive (κινητικόν), the intellective (νοητικόν). The Scholastics accepted the Stagirite's classification without making any relevant modifications to it. Here is the schema of the faculties according to St. Thomas: vegetative power, tripartite into nutritive, augmentative and generative; sensitive, specified into five external senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch) and four internal ones (common sense, fantasy, estimative and memory); appetitive, which is duplicated into sensible and rational (will); locomotive or motive; intellective for cognitions that surpass the sphere of sensibility. The classifications of the faculties into active and passive, higher and lower, are intuitive, so as not to require explanation.

Once the definition is granted according to which the faculties are principles by means of which the soul operates, the necessity of establishing a distinction between the soul and the faculty is evident. Its nature, however, is controversial. Albert the Great, Thomas, Giles of Rome, Vásquez, Suárez and more generally the Thomists defend real distinction, adopting the Angelic Doctor's principle: "Cum potentia animae non sit eius essentia, oportet quod sit accidens" (Sum. Theol., I, q. 77, a. 1 ad 5). Scotus, on the other hand, with his school (probably also St. Bonaventure), in the attempt to safeguard the unity of the soul, which seems to him compromised in the opposite opinion, asserts that between the soul and the faculty there intervenes only a formal distinction (Oxon., II, d. 16). Ockham and the nominalists finally, upholding the real identity between substance and attributes, admit between soul and faculty a simple distinction of reason.

Distinct from one another, the faculties have their own hierarchy, an order of priority and dignity. Hierarchically, the vegetative faculties are subordinate and ordered to the sensitive, and these to the rational. As for priority, it can be regarded under a twofold aspect: temporal-soteric and empirical. Under the first aspect, stress is laid on the successive functional differentiation of the faculties, so that the newborn exhibits a typical predominance of the vegetative powers, to which affective and motor sensibility is soon added, while the full exercise of intelligence and will coincides with a further stage of bodily development. Under the empirical aspect, priority is considered in the sense of predominance, that is, one investigates which of the faculties holds sway in the life of the average adult. The answer is relative to the individual psychism: according to the prevalence of sensibility, intelligence or volition, there will be a directive-operative predominance of the corresponding faculty. Finally, the dignity of the powers has given rise to the Scholastic controversy between intellectualists and voluntarists. Here too the two tendencies polarize respectively around St. Thomas and Scotus. The Angelic Doctor, an Aristotelian, writes: "Si ergo intellectus et voluntas considerantur secundum se, sic intellectus eminentior invenitur" (Sum. Theol., I, q. 82, a. 3), and he proves his intellectualism both from the greater nobility of the object and from the influence that reason exercises on the will. Scotus, following in the footsteps of St. Augustine and St. Bonaventure, defends the primacy of the will, basing himself principally on the greater excellence of the love of God in comparison with the knowledge of Him and on the directive function that the will exercises over intellectual activity (Oxon., IV, d. 49, q. 4). "Non convenit in parte intellectiva hoc imperare nisi voluntati" (loc. cit., d. 14, q. 2, n. 5).

Modern philosophy, from its very outset, has rejected the Scholastic conception of the faculties. Descartes, identifying the essence of the soul with thought, annulled every distinction between it and its powers. Spinoza and the monists formally rejected the faculties. Leibniz reduced them to possibilities. The best known among the opponents of the doctrine of the faculties is Herbart, who, however, did not attack it in its classical formulation (which he declares "mythological psychology"), but rather in the form it assumed in Kant, who classifies the faculties into representative, affective and conative. Beneke too denies their reality as original and distinct psychic forces, reducing them to acquired habits.

A singular place in the modern interpretation of the faculties is reserved to the Scottish school which, starting from the analysis of psychic facts and from the observation of their multiplicity, admits a series of aptitudes or capacities, causes of the specific manifestations of conscious life. But even if, in polemic against the associationists, Reid and others vigorously affirm the existence of the faculties and of the soul, they nevertheless hold that to study the nature of the latter is not the business of psychology, which must concern itself only with the realities that we are given to know empirically, that is, operations and faculties.

Fouillée, Renouvier, Ribot, etc., insisting on the unity of psychic function, ignore the faculties in the traditional sense. Thus again, by systematic coherence, they are rejected by the positivists, who with Paulsen reduce the powers to forms of thought, and by the defenders of dynamism (v.), which identifies energy integrally with reality.

Felicissimo Timivella