[How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2000]
Intentionality in the doctrine of Aquinas does not require consciousness, but it does require acting to create meaning instead of just thinking. This view is shared by the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, J.J. Gibson, and the pragmatists. We sniff, move our eyes, cup an ear, and move our fingers to manipulate an object in order to optimize our relation to it for our immediate purpose. Merleau-Ponty called this dynamic action the search for maximum grip, which is the optimization of the relation of the self to the world by positioning the sense receptors toward the object intended. His conception is equivalent to Aquinas’ assimilation. [page 28]
This is true enough, but we should take caution and remember that Aquinas was a priest who daily handled sacred objects, including the most sacred of all — the Body of Christ. To reach out into the world and accept our relationship to the Body of Christ, even to chew Him and swallow Him, is certainly to assimilate but the meanings which result aren’t private, not as defined in modern dictionaries.
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48, 1913 Webster:
1. Belonging to, or concerning, an individual person, company, or interest; peculiar to one’s self; unconnected with others; personal; one’s own; not public; not general; separate; as, a man’s private opinion; private property; a private purse; private expenses or interests; a private secretary. [1913 Webster]
2. Sequestered from company or observation; appropriated to an individual; secret; secluded; lonely; solitary; as, a private room or apartment; private prayer. [1913 Webster]
The life of Aquinas revolved around the Blessed Sacrament and the act of Communion by which the believer ingested the Body of Christ. This is not an activity of isolation but rather one of coming into a true communion with Christ and with all those others who are also coming into that communion. We learn a little more about the attitude of Aquinas when we read the first two verses of Devoutly I Adore You, Hidden Deity, the poem he wrote to be prayed when he elevated the host at the altar:
Devoutly, I adore You, hidden Deity,
Under these appearances concealed.
To You my heart surrenders self
For, seeing You, all else must yield.Sight and touch and taste here fail;
Hearing only can be believed.
I trust what God’s own Son has said.
Truth from truth is best received.…
[The Aquinas Prayer Book: The Prayers and Hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas, translated and edited by Robert Anderson and Johann Moser, Sophia Institute Press]
When we realize that Aquinas was a Catholic priest devoted to the Blessed Sacrament, it doesn’t argue against Professor Freeman’s profound understanding of Thomistic teachings on moral intention — it sets them in an infinitely richer context.
It all begins, even on the natural level, with that active perception so well-described by Professor Freeman, that active reaching out into the world which is acting as much as seeing and hearing and smelling. That active perception is part of a shaping of our minds to correspond to our environments or even the entire universe. And those acts then smoothly lead to external responses as we adjust our behaviors to also correspond to our environments or the entire universe. It’s when we refuse to act our proper and natural role as intentional beings, when we refuse to actively engage the world, that we sink into privacy as understood in the modern world. Even a non-believer who acts his proper role as an intentional creature will reach out to find a world unified and complete and coherent, a world overflowing with meaning.