Wearing a Dunce Cap

I have been wandering of late in the company of a distinct minority within the Age of Christendom. By and large it is the company I’ve kept throughout my life even if, quite often, sometimes for years on end, I’ve been socializing with the same minorities in other cultures—Persian (Mazdaism), Arab (Sufism), but also touching the Chinese (in Taoism). This walk, of late, began with Duns Scotus whom I met, in my childhood, by way of the dunce cap and, growing up, I never questioned the prevalent but mildly expressed view among my teachers in Catholic schools from lowest to highest that Scotus was a rather dim light, if not a small shadow-thrower, in the vast brilliance of St. Thomas Aquinas. Dunce cap? Worn by those who do not get it. You can make one out of some sheets of newspaper, making them into a cone. For the origin of that shape I show a fifteenth century painting of Scotus (who himself lived mostly in the blessed thirteenth century, 1266-1308); the Flemish painter was Justus van Gent (link).

Scotus belongs to the Platonic line traceable backwards by way of St. Augustine (354-430). Augustine himself was part of this minority, close to Manichaeism in youth, a gnostic view which itself has links back to Mazdaism. He lived in a time when the New Dark Age of the Roman Realm was up and running in a serious way. The Visigoths sacked Rome when he was 56 in 410 AD. Therefore his view was darker and more pessimistic than that of Aquinas (1225-1274) who lived as the light of the Renaissance began to signal its own coming with a faint rosy color beneath the horizon. And Aquinas’ great influence was Aristotle who lived just as the Old Modernism, Hellenism, was about to be launched by his pupil, Alexander the Great.  

Let me capture these distinctions in cartoon-like fashion, as it were. Plato stood in relation to Aristotle as Scotus stood to Aquinas. In Plato we see the mature philosophy of a passing religious age, in Aristotle the foreshadowing of a modern time. The same may be said of Scotus and Aquinas, with the small but not very important difference that Aquinas was 41 years older than Scotus whereas Plato was 43 years older than Aristotle. In inwardly-directed religious ages, awareness of the fallen nature of humanity is to the fore. In outwardly-directed secular ages, self-assertion rises. The feeling tone derives from the focus of attention.

So I was reading Berdyaev. He proclaims himself a Platonist, Christian existentialist, and he viewed Duns Scotus as the greatest of the Scholastics. It was the kind of statement that caught my eye, surprised me. I underlined it heavily, adding exclamation marks in the margin—the last time I had read the Russian sage some decades ago with great approval.

So here we have a minority strain of pessimism and a majority dominance of optimism—both within an almost invisibly small cluster of communities that even think about permanent transcendence. I’m still of the pessimistic camp but getting there, in age, I mean. And the odd thing is that, well past the three-score-and-ten, I am feeling optimistic now. If one goes deep enough in any direction with a kind of junk-yard-dog persistence, amazingly the light begins to dawn. I wonder. Does the light eventually dim for the really persistent optimists? If so, my intuition guided me correctly in my gloomy youth.

Two Kinds of Dualities

Among the many dualities philosophy and ordinary speech present, some are highly time-dependent, others are, you might say, are timeless, sub specie aeternitatis. To pick two on each side, potency-and-act and being-and-becoming are of the time-dependent kind. The living-and-the-dead and phenomenon-and-noumenon, belong to the timeless category. Let’s deal with these last first.

A person might think that living-and-dead are most definitely time-dependent, arguing that everything living dies and does so within time. But the odd thing is, we can’t be sure. Bodies most certainly die, but what are bodies made of? They’re made of elements. Elements do not die. What constitutes a living being is something more than organic elements, characterized by having carbon as a constituent. A corpse still has all those elements the dying person had a moment before dying. Life has fled, as we say, but until we know just what it is, we can’t say that it has disappeared. If life is a transcending force, living-and-dead are permanently here. Only the forms change.

Phenomenon-and-noumenon, the Kantian categories, meaning that which is capable of being perceived and that, behind it, which cannot, the thing-in-itself, are more obviously independent of time. They co-exist. Thus they point at a basic definition of reality.

Turning to the other side, potency-and-act, the Aristotelian categories, are embedded in time. Potency is a capacity to change. It’s a sleeping power and, when it is unfolding, becoming actual, it is transformed from invisibility to manifestation. Becoming-and-being are equivalent categories. But becoming is impossible to picture without time. Aristotle’s word for potential was dunamis, thus “capacity, possibility.” As it unfolds into act, we have dynamism, a word we derive from dunamis. We’re really dealing here with change, very much a here and now sort of thing, arising from philosophical attempts at explaining motions of sundry kinds. They do not tell us anything about the cosmos, which is always in motion too.

For me the timeless dualities produce more food for thought—because I sense that there is something beyond the here and now. The very abstract, modern formulation I most value is the duality offered by David Bohm, the physicist.† In attempts to make room for intelligence in the Cosmic Whole—but it can be extended to include life and spirit—he suggested two orders in the universe. One is conditioned, the other unconditioned. Call this duality necessity-and-freedom. Intelligence—and life, and spirit—belong to the latter. And these may be thought of as existent within the time flow as well as without.

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†I never tire of trying to sell Bohm’s wonderful book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1996, wherein the relevant passage on this subject is on pages 50-53.

Eudaimonia

It seems to be agreed among the wise that the aim of an individual life is the soul’s development. That consensus is obscured because we encounter concepts like happiness (Aristotle), salvation (Christianity), and, in modern times, individuation (Carl Jung and others). If we just look at these words casually, happiness and individuation have quite different connotations; they’re very different from each other; and so is salvation from either of these. Individuation strongly suggests a process of development, sometimes dramatic, whereby a personality often displaying contradictory, disorganized, behavior, unaware of being highly conditioned by society, differentiates itself and achieves a kind of noble coherence and autonomy.

The casual use of a word like “happiness” almost suggests nothing much. We all want to be happy—and it means different things to different people. Aristotle used a word that has a great deal more depth. He spoke of eudaimonia. The word contains eu, a very positive concept signifying affirmation, well-being, and beauty. A daimon is a spirit or a minor deity. If we understand this idea for what it once meant in the Greek, it is “beautiful soul” rather than “happiness,” and in Aristotle’s context, it was the consequence of a process as well, the process of a well-lived life. The word can but need not have a spiritual connotation. Indeed, in Aristotle’s hands, it had a secular taste—one more reason why it is easily translated as happiness.

Salvation in the Catholic context—not necessarily in sophisticated scholarly contexts but as taught to children and the public—has a heavily moralistic flavor. It is the consequence of ridding the self of sin, of minimally dying (even if not always living) in a state of grace. That the soul is spiritual is not in question in this community. Salvation is a form of securing for this soul eternal happiness through union with God. Here happiness recurs after a great battle against the fallen self and its natural downward pull.

In its simplest expression in the Protestant context, development is minimized into a single act of faith; and in some branches of Protestantism salvation is not even a process: it is decided by God through foreknowledge before we’re even born. To be sure, the Reformation was a reaction against the excessive mechanizations of the spiritual by a Church that, by the sixteenth century, had become grossly corrupt (on average). And if we examine that single act of faith carefully, studying the process that led up to it, the period that follows it, we discover here another case of abbreviation, simplification, and of crude labeling. Catholic and Protestant religiousness, viewed in detail, is identical; it is the same process that produces eudaimonia in ancient understanding and individuation in the modern, secular conceptualization.

We live our lives in what Keats called “the vale of Soul-making.” The experience is the same, no matter the times, the prevailing cosmologies, the strength or weakness of religion. Concepts concretely underpinned by matter (“this hammer”) are easy to sort, but the great spiritual facts of experience are stubbornly subjective. One man’s God is another’s the Great Unconscious, one’s salvation is another individuation—but all of us strive, ultimately (if the spark throws its light into our soul) to become beautiful demons. Does that sound weird? To transcend the words is to rise to the reality.

Pondering Potential

In the last post I mention the concept of “pure act.” When I first encountered that idea—which refers to the nature of God—I imagined a kind of pure whirling motion at infinite speed, producing infinite light. That’s what my mind produced. The problem is that young people are exposed to such ideas in a kind of foreshortened sort of way. Even when you’re told that act here isn't some kind of flailing around but actuality, thus realized potential, the human mind, even grasping the ideas (or mine at least), isn’t really satisfied. When this pairing—potentiality and actuality—is explained, you realize that all they’re really saying is that “God has all possible perfections and isn’t waiting for them to manifest.” The mad whirling then stops and only the infinite bright light remains. Perfection doesn’t produce anything graspable.

This pairing, potentiality and actuality, is at the base of Aristotle’s concept of change. An existing something can only change because it has the capability for change—but that change is not yet realized. The word Aristotle used was dunamis, literally meaning, simply, capability. That word sounds strange until we spell it dynamis. Then suddenly we realize that we use the word ourselves in various ways—dynamic, dynamism, indeed also as dynamite. Aristotle used an ordinary Greek word for capability; potential comes from its Latin equivalent. His innovation came in characterizing something existing as having both entelechy (actualized potential) and energy (capability not yet realized). Here he gave an ordinary Greek word, meaning “at work,” a specialized technical meaning. We have entelechy right now—so does my coffee cup. We also still have dynamis in which a latent force, energy, is present.

Now the interesting aspect of potential—and why God does not have potential—is that something “not yet” or “asleep” or “as yet unrealized” can be seen both positively or negatively. Positively it is future perfection, if we’re lucky; negatively it is a privation. We’re still lacking its actual manifestation. But God lacks nothing at all. God is perfection. Therefore, alas, God has no potential.

In the twentieth century, we’ve actually proved the frightening energies latent in but a small amount of matter when it is actually released. Energeia is certainly present there, in potentiam. But do spare us, great wise men, any new demonstrations of Aristotle’s concepts in daily actuality; I’d hate to see another major city somewhere frozen in unreachable entelecheia deprived of its complement of energy.

The energy within the atom—the strong force that holds the nucleus together—is an interesting example of an actual and simultaneously potential energy in matter. Aristotle’s definitions nicely fit a region of reality he tended to dismiss. Atomic theories? Aristotle shook his head. The fascinating aspects of this kind of energy is that, so far as we can determine, it need not be renewed at regular intervals—as must the energy that keeps us going. What energy really is and where it arises—those are issues one ponders out here on the border. The dictionaries, whether of philosophy or physics, tend to produce a fog of circular referencing where you meet the word as its own definition after the fourth or fifth look-up.

More Notes on Real and Nominal

One of the most ancient philosophical debates is rooted in that seemingly magical power of the human mind to form what are called universals. All humans innately understand the difference between this particular dog, let’s call him Blackie, and the concept of dog meaning that category of animal to which all dogs belong. The first is a particular dog, the other is a universal. And the debate has swirled around the actual existence of the universal. Does that all-encompassing umbrella, Dog, under which all canines belong, really, substantially exist? Apart from people? Apart from human thought? If all people disappeared, indeed if all dogs died out—if the planet were engulfed by our sun going into nova, would there still be Dog the Universal somewhere out there, somewhere in the cosmic whole?

Plato answered Yes, and his eternal forms or ideas are precisely these universals. He was therefore a realist: universals are real. Aristotle answered No, but he is viewed as a moderate realist because he said that they do exist, but only ever if instantiated. If only the earth had dogs, and the earth blew up, Dog the Universal would disappear. (I for one consider Aristotle a nominalist, but never mind.) The nominalist position holds that universals are simply concepts, thoughts in the mind, objects of language. Redness, for instance, does not exist by itself separate from red things in actual existence. These three positions might be rendered as universals before the thing, universals in the thing, and universals after the thing. The last might be rephrased universals in the head.

This subject has fascinated me for years. My own intuition is Platonic. If the distinctions we perceive out there are real, that distinction must come before its manifestation. Plato certainly thought of his forms as generative principles. Only this view produces a meaningful cosmos in my view; the nominalist position, however, is compatible with a materialistic take on reality in which pure chance is the only causative principle. And I find moderate realism incoherent: the world is either meaningful or not. You can’t stop half way between these two positions.

At the same time, I’ve always had problems with Plato’s eternal forms out there, especially if used as an explanation for universals. A tricycle is a universal. Has it been eternally in the sky? Pondering this matter some years ago, and working from the bottom up—thus looking at human creations first—it occurred to me that Plato’s forms suddenly become quite meaningful if conceived of more dynamically as divine intentions. Other universals, in turn, may be referred to as human intentions. Now intentions derive their substantial reality from the agent who has intentions. God is God and humans are immortal; therefore all intentions retain their substantial reality, whether manifested or not, because the agents remain in existence.  This, I submit, is a nice solution to the problem of universals, favoring the Platonic view.

To this I might add another note yet. There is a difference between an intention on the one hand and its perception on the other. We did not intend the dog or redness. Those universals we merely perceive. But we perceive them because someone intended them and they do actually manifest.

The above as an elaboration to the mention of Ochkam’s nominalism toward the end of yesterday’s post.

The Borderzone Within

There is a borderzone right inside us too—as there is one out there in the macrocosm—but we don’t think of it in mumbo-jumbo or in mystical terms because it is a matter of direct experience. Humanity has treated this matter in countless ways, but it is summed up by that all-too-familiar phrase, body and soul. If we use that duality as the whole, then the “borderzone” in question is really the point where body and soul meet and interact. But that interaction is so puzzling and mysterious, that we’ve dismissed it altogether, conceived of it as a point, have ignored it, have formed all kinds of fantastic theories about it, and have often simply thrown up our hands.

The modern way is to deny it. There is no soul. Enough already. We’re strictly chemistry arranged in a certain dynamic pattern—and that pattern has a kind of tenacious tendency to maintain itself, like a whirlpool does—but no more mysteriously than a whirlpool does; we call that tenacity survival. End of story.

Aristotle proposed that everything has body and soul if only we call the one matter and the other form. The combination of the two is the only real thing. He called it substance, and to this day, if we mean that something’s real, we say that it’s substantial. A consequence of this, of course, is that after our bodies fall apart, what we call “we” disappears. But Aristotle was not quite sure that intellect disappeared; he cut himself some slack, as it were. Almost to a man—and it usually is a man—our deep thinkers imagine the “high” element within us as intellectual. My explanation is that they expend most of their lives in thought; they get to know that faculty genuinely well; but, perhaps, they fail to experience other facets of their beings equally as fully—or observe them with the same care. There are other ways of being—there are other paths: action, art, and love come to mind. Thomas Aquinas, among the greatest thinkers of the medieval era, had a mystical experience shortly before he died. He stopped writing abruptly. Asked why, he answered that all that he had written until then (and it was a monumental opus, still avidly studied today) was “mere straw.” (1) I’ve always valued Aquinas’ thought—but I have valued this story as its crown. Paradoxically, perhaps, it holds a practical as well as a deeper truth.

Descartes, who, in a way, gave modern philosophical thought its original shape, carried simplification to a great height. He proposed two realities, the extended thing (call that the body) and the thinking thing (call that the soul). They were radically different; they communicated and met at one point in the body, in the pineal gland. No, this is not a tongue-in-cheek dismissal; but to get into the complexities of Descartes’ thought on the subject you have to look elsewhere (2). My point is that humanity has struggled with this subject. The borderzone within is a very mysterious aspect of reality—and this despite the fact that it is, for us, the most familiar.

It is our inability to pinpoint precisely where higher and lower meet, to describe in mechanical (or even electromechanical) terms how spirit moves matter, our inability to capture and hold the spirit that has led to the materialistic theories of life. But modern thought had its ancient analogues too—and functionally quite similar. Lucretius was one of these theorists: everything is atoms, he said. They move deterministically, but at unpredictable times they suddenly “swerve.” This accounts for what we would call mental events and the illusion of volition. But atoms that form into bodies by law and swerves, dissolve back into free atoms, ranging from coarse to superfine. All is a dance of occasionally swerving atoms. (3) Modern theories of physics are now approaching the Lucretian level. Statistical explanations of everything real are beginning to eat away even at the claim that laws of nature exist (which, of course, suggests a law-giver) to make everything a product of chance. This is what I call throwing up the hands.

I’m of a mind to see value in all of these approaches. All of them produce raw materials, all of them spin twine useful for making a meaningful cosmology—or an understanding of the self. What we need is the right loom to weave it into fabric. (4) That loom is projected, I think, by emanationist conceptions of reality. I’ve discussed these recently under the heading of “Angels: Heavenly Schematics.” There I have suggested that reality is indeed a creation of two distinct fundamentals; they interact at every level and dynamically—thus either rising toward complexity or moving away from it. Within this dynamic spiral are regions of relative equilibrium. Borderzones are spatially conceived areas where a transition is taking place— from one region to the other. They are spatially conceived because, for us, living where we live, space is a decent concept for locating activity. But let me put this projection into more visual or linear terms.

God created two kinds of realities. One of these are agents, that which we call “we”: persons; selves. The other is what we call matter—but this matter may manifest in a vast range of subtlety—thus more than just what we call matter. We live our lives in a borderzone. What do I mean by that? I mean that both a higher and subtler and a lower and coarser kind are both present in it, mixed, as it were. We are keenly aware of the lower. And, being lower, it has a greater grip on us; why that is so I’ll try to explain in a moment. But we’re also aware of the higher. It charms and draws us. The matter of that world, however is more subtle. It is invisible to us because we are still more aware of the lower region than the higher. The higher is an imaginal (but not an imaginary) world. We sometimes dismissively label it “mental,” signaling that such worlds are unreal. Yet mental creations and realities are very real for us: great myths, great music, great works of art, great structures of thought, grand tales, personal and collective memories. And also personifications like the United States of America or the Red Menace. Lady Macbeth, meet Don Quixote. There’s also our honor—produce it for me to touch if you can—and our shame. With only the slightest of careful observation, we can easily discover that most of the things that really move us, in our daily lives, are structures of the insubstantial kind—impossible to touch although, of course, they have tangible manifestations as print on paper, images on screens, or the bodies of people whose intangible attitudes, thoughts, intentions, benevolence (or lack thereof) are the source of our pleasures and our pains. The lower order, the material aspect, sometimes touches us most irritatingly too. And their disarray, as in Haiti these days, is a great source of pain.

We live our lives in tension here because we’ve entered a developmental region, a borderzone. We come from the lower and are headed upward. But because the lower is more familiar to us, has long been our home, it has more claim on us. Hence we are more aware of it. But, at the same time, we hear the call (but cannot see) a higher region. We interact with both. But after we are freed of bodies, which way shall we go? That is the question. If in some greater scheme we are on a vector, we are lucky to be in a borderzone; we’re also at risk. If we don’t develop, we won’t be able to resist the downward pull of the lower region after death; to be sure, it is the one we already inhabit now. But if we do manage to acquire new powers sufficient to continue in the higher direction, then, at the end of life, awakening to that ability, and finally seeing the higher dimension directly, without the interference of this level’s coarser materiality, we shall look back on all our works, and like Thomas Aquinas, declare them all as “mere straw.”

The Primacy of Intuition

One reason for the high profile of science in our culture—apart from supposedly fathering our technology—is that, ultimately, no metaphysical assertions are capable of demonstration. Our wealth, thanks to fossil fuels, has temporarily eased our sufferings. Hence our intuitive faculties have been distracted. The small change that science offers, and in the grand scheme of things that’s all it is, suffices for our ordinary lives.

An example of a metaphysical assertion may be drawn from the first line of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” This assertion contains several others within it. One is that God exists. Others are that matter did not always exist, that it came into being at a certain point in time (“in the beginning”), and that an agency produced it out of nothing. Contrary claims—e.g. that the universe has always existed, that were is no God, that all that is is matter, or that the universe is God, etc.—are also metaphysical assertions and hence impossible of demonstration.

What serves as an alternative to proof is reasoning, but if we look at the products of reason, we find them to be empty. They rest on abstract ideas. These, carefully defined, are linked to one another and examined for logical coherence. All we get is formulae of which the terms are suspended in the air. We can understand the ideas—toss them back and forth in play—but we cannot demonstrate that they correspond to anything real. An example? Let’s take Aristotle’s definition of substance. Substance is a duality of matter and form. But this idea requires proof of unformed matter, what Aristotle called prime matter, and of disembodied form. We cannot find such things anywhere. The unbeliever cannot be forced to admit that substance, as here defined, exists by simply being shown prime matter and forms awaiting to be actualized.

Similar problems also plague our most cherished conception, namely that everything has a cause. The problem here is that causes cannot be tidily disentangled from the flux of reality. If we don’t separate them out, however, everything that happens is caused by—well, by everything that happens. The damage to the lamp post down the street was caused by the truck that hit it. Really? What about the driver’s drunkenness? And why did the driver drink? What caused a tavern to be opened so close to the driver’s last stop? Was it the incompetence of the restaurateur who occupied that space last? Why was he incompetent? What caused the current owner to post a sign saying, “Drinks at 1/2 price 5 to 7”? We could go on and on, of course. Modern scientific thought has drifted from the old-fashioned cause and has substituted for it concepts of probability. All change is thus due to random motion; but what we call “cause” is just a way of saying that certain outcomes are much more probable than others. Cause, once the property of agencies, has now become a servant in the house of Chance.

This sort of thing has radiations. Thus the various proofs for the existence of God were built on the older conceptions of cause and motion. Taking the last first, the proof from motion relies on the a priori assertion that nothing moves unless moved by another; a first and unmoved mover is thus necessary because an infinite regress is intolerable. But an infinite regress is only intolerable if we grant the first premise (“nothing moves unless…”). If that is true, yes. Motion then has no beginning, and the presumption is that it had to have had one. Indeed, the very definition of motion has, hiding within it, the denial of infinite regress. But that’s not immediately obvious. The problem is that we cannot demonstrate the first premise. What we observe is motion in everything, down to the hydrogen atom, and below. This motion—thus the motion or energy of hydrogen’s sole electron—seems to require no “fuel” or “push” at all. Nor does it gradually dissipate. Let’s turn to causes. If causes are impossible to package or quantize or separate out from the flux, the argument for an uncaused cause, God, also falls apart. Here, too, the argument depends on the notion that discreet, serial events are accurate definitions of reality. The contrary assertion is that everything has always moved and, indeed, motion is an aspect of reality; this motion clusters in various ways and has always done so, producing what we naively call “causes.”

Notice here how abstract concepts drive the metaphysical project. In one case we have an abstract definition of motion as the temporary property of things; hence they need to acquire motion from something else. This leads to the unmoved mover and the uncaused cause. In the other case, motion is ascribed to reality from the git go, as it were. Other arguments for God’s existence rely on concepts of order, teleology, law, or self-existence versus caused-existence. In none of these cases can we discover tangible proofs for the abstractions. All we find are hints.

This then leads to my premise today: Higher knowledge requires a faculty that transcends reasoning. Reason cannot give us answers to why questions. To the extent that it does, it relies upon the quiet collusion of our intuitive faculty. We have to grant standing or status to certain abstractions—such as they cannot obtain from demonstration or from logical reasoning. We do so, when we do, because we find the abstractions “intuitively true.” This in turn means that higher truth cannot be imposed; logical demonstration can never force us—as physical demonstration can. More importantly, the knowledge obtained will depend on the development of the intuitive power within us. It cannot be acquired by the usual brute means of hard work, memorization, and exercise—as reasoning can be.

For these reasons debate on religious or spiritual subjects has no merit whatsoever. The higher life is a realm of freedom. The compulsions present there must always come from within.

Life's Origin: First Steps

When it comes to the origin of life, we seem able only to come up with two theoretical structures, possibly a third if we combine the other two. One is that life emerges from matter spontaneously by chance. The other is that God creates the living by a special act. The combination, favored in Catholicism, for example, is to picture God creating the cosmos in such a way that life is already present in it; thus at the appointed time, life will emerge from matter. Here the absolute sway of chance is mitigated if not entirely removed; it is replaced at the crucial point by an intention hidden in the very structure of physical reality.

The third solution is both elegant and subtle. It leaves science to follow its naturalistic methodology wherever it might lead without the embarrassments that the intrusive correction of Galileo occasioned for the Church. At the same time it preserves the ultimate ground of creation as an act of God.

When I look at this solution in more detail, however, it has a troubling aspect. If life is hidden somewhere inside of matter, its emergence is a change in degree rather than in kind, and I’m persuaded that life is different in kind. My reason is that life displays teleology, thus it displays purpose. The most obvious evidence of this is reproduction. It is the continuation of a very complex arrangement of matter, what might be called an extremely complex form, by an intricate step-wise method, a whole long chain of intricate processes. We do not encounter anything resembling it in inorganic nature. We do encounter various examples of simple structural changes in response to stimuli, thus the formation of crystalline forms, e.g., snowflakes, but we don’t find anything at that level in which a necessary chain of formations takes place and must take place for the end result to emerge.

Purpose is, strictly speaking, associated only with agency. I grant you that this is an intuitive finding. It takes a special effort to deny that agency is present in living entities. It is observable. To explain it away mechanistically is always possible when the entity manifests in physical form. The physical expression of agency will take place using mechanical means. But to assign agency, purpose, strictly to mechanism requires that we willfully ignore that which we really see and feel. It is literally impossible to deny that we feel purpose. It's presumptuous on our part to deny the same feeling to dogs, to plants, indeed even to cells. What we observe is a difference in awareness, not a difference in end-seeking tendency. This is the same-old, same-old battle between two ways of perceiving. I don’t want to waste time on it. But the point I’m after here is that the third solution, given above, namely that life is embedded in the cosmic whole from the start, that it permeates matter so that, in the ripeness of time, it may emerge, that solution doesn’t please me. Even when offered by Catholic thinkers, it still reminds me of panpsychism.

There is a version of this mode of thought that I find much less troubling. It is that two (or at least two) orders of reality are present in the cosmos. David Bohm, the physicist, formulated this conception as the presence in the Whole of a conditioned and an unconditioned order. You can find this idea in Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1996. Another way to put this is that an order of agencies or souls exists and so does an order of matter. There may be many other mansions in the Lord’s house as well, but here I’m pondering two. This sort of concept can be imagined as two orders that coexist and possibly also interpenetrate—and under certain circumstances the unconditioned order may, in fact, act upon the conditioned order where circumstances permit such interactions. Both, however, exist independently. As for their origin, my view is simply that if agency exists at all, its origin must be God. The unconditioned order, of course, has both consciousness and freedom; that freedom is clearly delimited, as we see from our circumstances. It isn’t, in us, omnipotence. But it has freedom as the order of matter does not.

The difference I see in this position, call it 3A for convenience, is that it keeps separate what are, in my view, two orders, separate in kind, not one rising from the other. I can thus imagine a community of spirits becoming entangled in matter, seduced by it, as it were, and, over long periods of time, building a strange intermediate world of incarnation just because it’s possible. In my science-fiction role I’ve named this chemical civilization. Thus all of life is a construct by spiritual agencies, working on their own. They don’t originate life—because they are life. But they cause it to manifest in matter, where it does not properly belong. This notion first arose in me when studying biology as a grown man with three children. It has long intrigued me because it fits in many ways that which I see displayed in biology. What it requires is that we also imagine the possibility of many grades of consciousness—upward and down. We find no difficulty imagining higher beings—we even have names form them: angels, whole choirs of them. We find it difficult to imagine spirits operating in vast choirs of their own at levels way lower than ours.

This conceptualization demands a cosmology different from the Aristotelian/Thomistic which builds its hierarchy from unformed matter to absolute act. Thus I’m challenging a tradition vastly more grown-up than I am. But I find that hierarchy difficult in spots. Since it goes on into orders of spirit, ever higher, it does not seem to have a proper justification for matter—unless it is to make sense of man. But what if man is just trespassing on matter? What if original sin has another meaning yet? What if matter has a different explanation?

Obviously there is more to say here, but these posts shouldn’t get too long.

Traditions on the Soul

As briefly sketched in the last post, we have at minimum indicators that souls can persist without a bodily substrate; the same reports also indicate that while the disembodied self is able to perceive the world through some analog of sight and hearing, it seems unable to affect the material dimension that it can see and hear. Today I want to glance briefly at humanity’s traditions concerning the soul—and how those views resonate with near-death reports.

The picture out there is the usual wondrous confusion. Within Christianity, for instance, we have conflicting view. The Apostle’s Creed specifically singles out “the resurrection of the body” just before it concludes with the final article of belief in “life everlasting.” Within Catholicism—but not exclusively in Catholicism—the focus is on the soul, not on the body-soul composite. Here we encounter the concept of purgatory, for example. At the same time the Church also asserts the resurrection of the body as a dogmatic article of faith. Souls are immortal and hence cannot be said to return to life—therefore resurrection of the body. What we encounter here is a mixing of scriptural and philosophical conceptions not satisfactorily sorted—in my opinion, anyway. The sorting, in effect, is accomplished by dividing time into two great sections; the first is the reality in which we now find ourselves; the second is another one that, curiously, begins “at the end of time,” thus at the beginning of another dispensation.

The popular Greek and the Hindu views of soul present an interesting contrast. The Greeks conceived of embodied life as the proper and, as it were, the full expression of the self. Souls survive the death of bodies but, thereafter, live as ghosts or shades; they lack something they ought to have; hence they continue to exist but in a diminished form. This view is nicely put by Homer in the Odyssey. Ulysses visits Hades and there encounters the great hero, Achilles. In conversation with the hero, Ulysses lauds him as a great prince among the dead.

“Say not a word,” [Achilles] answered, “in death’s favour; I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.” Odyssey 11.488.

In the Hindu conceptualization the soul is something permanent and eternal, indeed uncreated, a particle of divinity. Thus it pre-exists any and all of its incarnations. But its incarnations are, in effect, a form of inferior existence that selves suffer rather than enjoy; the suffering comes from ignorance. Ultimate bliss comes from successful detachment from the material realm, thus from bodies. If any karmic weight clings to the soul on its departure, it will be drawn into yet another undesirable incarnation. Where the ancient Greeks deplored the shades, the Hindus still grieve over the living.

In the Christian tradition, incidentally, Origen (185-254) also held that souls pre-existed their appearance in bodies. Not surprisingly he also denied the body’s resurrection. His views were later anathamized by the Fifth Ecumenical Council (545).

Plato’s view of soul is functionally similar to the Hindus’—but with none of the pessimistic coloration that darkens Indian cosmology. The soul is immaterial and therefore immortal (“incorruptible” in the sense that it’s indivisible); it continues after death. Aristotle—whose enormous powers of rationality, I think, caused him to lean in the direction of materialism—conceived of the genuinely real, or actual, as formed matter. Thus people are substances composed of bodies and souls, but the soul is the form of the body and the body is the matter of the soul—and if you separate these two, you don’t have anything real. This is known as the doctrine of matter-form or substance dualism. Only substances are real. Unformed matter or immaterial soul have no ontological status. They’re merely potentials—reminiscent of ghosts or shades. Aristotle, therefore, did not believe that souls survive the passing of the bodies. He did, however, indicate a vague sort of belief in the permanence of intellect. But it's best, in this context, not to confuse “intellect” with “person.”

Ancient materialists—the only two I’m able to name are Democritus (c.460-370 BC) and Lucretius (c.99-55 BC)—both held the doctrine that souls were formed of very subtle atoms. These, much like the coarser atoms that make up the body, disperse into the flux of the world on death. Hence souls do not “survive,” meaning that the clusters of fine atoms do not continue to cohere.

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In looking at these traditions in light of what we can discern of souls in the early stage (I call it the “worldly” phase) of near-death experiences, what seems evident is that the Aristotelian matter-form doctrine may not be right; the “form” seems to survive—if indeed the soul is the body’s form or constituting agency.

The conventional Greek view of “ghost” or “shade” seems mildly confirmed in that the disembodied self is incapable to acting on the world—isn’t heard when Mary or John attempt to speak to doctors, nurses, or their relatives. Experiencers report frustration when they can’t communicate. But that the “life in Hades” is indeed wretched is denied in the later phase of this experience, what I’ve called the “other-worldly” phase of NDEs—as we shall see.

The early phase certainly doesn’t contradict the Hindu view of things; the soul is still there even though the body is in its last stages of cohesion; it might go on and be reborn again. Contrarian indications are present in that, upon departure from the body, no person undergoing such an experience appears to regain memories of previous lives—while still fully possessing memories of this one. But nothing here suggests that later on such memories might not return.

That form of the Christian view which emphasizes the importance of the soul is certainly confirmed. As for the unique importance of one particular body, such that its resurrection becomes important, on that subject the near-death experience is largely silent.

Cosmic Models

When we imagine myths of the world, even one of a small part of it, the tale must match the subject. Now any one human life certainly fits the personal scale, but it cannot be viewed except in a broader context: we all live our lives embedded in history’s flow. I was a small pebble but rolled along by the enormous weather of the twentieth century. You cannot reach a moderately educated level unaware of history’s depth or nature’s incredible complexity.

Whatever the human story, it is a vast tale of great moment and scope and cannot be reduced to simple concepts. In effect reality, even the portions of it we can see, cannot be fitted to a line of logic; it requires a saga at the least. To say that much is also to admit that we cannot really know the big picture in the full. It’s damnably difficult even to know a small part of the physical world. I recall one of my incarnations and remember how little we know about something like cement—and we know a lot about it.

This by way of commentary on models of reality. The philosophical attempts that come close to being satisfying have an architectural character or depict a dynamic process, usually triadic. Monistic systems tend to be rather pathetic because they have no point.

The Aristotelian scheme, completed by Thomas Aquinas, is a static structure built up out of the duality of matter and form. These may be rendered as the potential and the actual or, in other phrasing, the virtually nonexistent (unformed matter) and absolute Being, pure form or actuality, God. “Potential” is one of those wonderfully ambiguous concepts; it exists in a way but in another “not yet.” The Thomistic system ultimately feels incoherent; it has matter but doesn’t really need it. In a cosmos where immaterial beings exist, materiality requires some kind of justification; the theory doesn’t justify it. To be coherent this philosophy requires that duality be extended upward (ever more subtle matter to match ever more exalted spirit) or spirit must be extended downward (matter is thus densified spirit).

Taoism is a triadic, dynamic system in that it provides a creative and receptive (Yang, Yin) which account for the dynamism of the Tao. As a description of reality the Tao is flawless: freedom and necessity in motion forming an unnamable third which is their origin and their expression. The Tao is the ultimate cosmic building kit. You find it hidden beneath just about every cosmology ever made. It’s there in Aristotle, Yin being matter, Yang being form. At it is, however, it requires enormous restraint simply to accept as is. People are tempted to elaborate.

Monistic systems take one or the other of the two elements of Tao and exclude the other. There is Schopenhauer’s Will—which is everything. There is materialism’s Matter—ditto.

The philosophies, however, ultimate stop short of meaning. There is no personality here—although in systems where it’s introduced, it is the Yang. The great sagas introduce meaning by way of a drama in which the two are in conflict for one or several cosmic ages. We are usually minor participants, sometimes at the center (as in Christianity). And our fates are part of the greater history of a vast heavenly turbulence.

The really effective cosmologies—such as, for instance, the fable of the Island—provide a story that goes beyond our direct experience in order to explain its intuited origins and its felt continuation beyond death, but do not attempt to lay down an absolute and final meaning for the entire process. Our inner guidance actually rejects a final explanation. Our intuition (mine anyway) says that the ultimate picture is not knowable from our perspective.