Faculties: The One and Many

If I consult my own experience, I find that my various modes of being are a unity. I think of the self as a point, this despite the fact that I distinguish at least six modalities—thought, will, intuition, memory, emotion, and sensation. These are ways of perceiving the self in action; one of the meanings of modality, derived from the word mode, is form. The self may therefore be said to be a unity that manifests in different ways or forms. As we all know, these modalities may coincide, overlay, mix, fuse, etc. Each may be more or less quiescent. When I mow the lawn I immerse myself in the mode of sensation and of willing. My thoughts wander, my emotions rest except, from time to time, when I’m pleased by the attractive swaths of green that I produce; my intuition is in neutral; my thoughts wander; sometimes they latch on to a phrase left over from the last coherent run of mentation and keeps repeating that phrase over and over again; my memories are on automatic, but since my will is focused on making the lawnmower do its thing, their presentation—the stream of consciousness that still flows beneath the phrases I might be repeating, maybe something Latin and totally irrelevant but mildly pleasing—corruptio optima pessima, say—isn’t noticed. The repeating phrase need not learned, by the way. The last one I recall was “What’s hidden in that kitchen midden” which kept my mind playing like a child because it liked the rhyme.

The poet in me insists on the unity of self, but philosophers sometimes get caught up in the conceptual game too much. We separate and label the modalities, make of each a kind of hard and distinct something. Thus we have Schopenhauer who settled on the Will and would have it be the king. In modern psychiatric practice, Feeling is everything. I haven’t traced that peculiar emphasis back to its source in some philosopher or other, but it’s probably possible. But I always chuckle when Star Trek The Next Generation’s Deanna Troi (played by Marina Sirtis), the empath, we might call her, comes out with her true-and-tested question: “How do you feel about that?” The Intellect is the favorite of the philosophical community. It is the faculty philosophers hone to a fine edge and brilliant sheen; is it any wonder then that it must be the king of the faculties? For the more poetic mind, intellect has serious limits. As a young man I used to joke, heading to the bar with my friends after obligatory classes in philosophy saying: “If I stop suddenly and my esse should roll out in front of me—then I’ll believe I have one.” Juvenile, to be sure, but I make my point.

Here we have yet another instance of the one and the many—the conceptualization of which is a very hard nut for the intellect to crack but not all that problematical for the poet. The wonder of the human soul, in fact, is this oneness with multiple modalities. In this low realm we do get weird adaptations. When I see trees adapted to peculiar terrain, plants that grow immensely tall because they try to reach the tiny bit of light available to them, when I see strange creatures that inhabit the total darkness of the deepest oceans—at times like that I’m reminded of people in whom one faculty is massively developed but others have had no chance to unfold. My admiration is thus for those who develop fully on many fronts, and in harmony. I am on record as an admirer of St. Hildegard of Bingen, an exemplar of such persons who reach high states of development often overcoming, on the way, what appear insurmountable odds.