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.

Forgotten Bricks

It amused me to note today, again, how selective humanity is in choosing what to remember and what to emphasize. I was looking up Plato’s views on the “simplicity of the soul,” which, I’d noted, reading another post, had come to be reduced, by twists and turns, to the simplicity of intellect. Now Plato’s doctrine of the soul’s immortality, based on its unity, immateriality, lack of any parts, and its invisibility is widely known, indeed has become a kind of token. But in the very same dialogue, the Phaedo, in which this conception of the soul is artfully developed, we also get the equally fascinating doctrine that souls pre-exist their births, that life results in death but that death generates life as well—a doctrine that Socrates explains by the analogy of sleep and waking, each generating the other. Ancient intellectual structures remain forever sound, as it were, but it is nevertheless possible to mine them for just those bricks and stones that fit a current fashion in architecture—while others are left untouched in their places. With Origen (185-254 AD), among the ancients, the notion of metempsychosis was still alive until purged from Christianity in the Second Council of Constantinople held in 553. That was at least one kind of fundamental change in the way doctrines of the soul had to be built in the future.

Forms, Forms, Forms

The big disagreement between Plato and Aristotle had to do with the reality of “forms.” As Plato saw things, if we have actual trees growing all around us—and we do—there must be an immaterial and eternal pattern of the “tree” somewhere in a higher realm. The “idea” had to be there somewhere before trees could form—and its existence must be at least as real as that of the keyboard on which my fingers dance. Aristotle shook his head. He had major difficulty picturing this Warehouse of Eternal Forms hidden somewhere in eternity.

I side with Plato because I have no problem with eternal forms—nor, for that matter, with forms that originate in time. The keyboard is an example. So is the fork, the knife, or shoelaces. These latter day forms were surely not always present in that Warehouse of Eternity where Eternal Forms reside. Nonetheless, we all know what these objects are.

In philosophy this clash has produced the Realist and Nominalist schools. The first asserts that eternal forms are real; the second holds that forms are merely names (nomina in Latin). In the philosophical context forms can also be rendered as essences, meaning exactly what Plato meant by forms.

I side with Plato because, in struggling with this subject myself, in trying to understand it viscerally, really, from the gut, I hit upon the notion that the problem goes away if we think of these forms, ideas, essences, or archetypes not as things but as intentions. Eternal ideas don’t need a warehouse. They need a mind. This line of thought brings the products of nature and the products of humanity under a single roof. Both are the consequence of intentions. The tree embodies God’s intention, the shoelace a human’s. Seeing forms, eternal or otherwise, under the rubric of intention also nicely explains why the form is immaterial and invisible and yet may be manifested in matter. Thus the weird status of form in the Aristotelian conception, form independent of matter, namely as a potential and therefore suffering a kind of not-quite-real status, is put on more solid footing. Essences are created by minds. Until they manifest as substances, thus taking on materiality, they remain ideas. But ideas are real. They are invisible because the mental order is invisible.

Now those who’re reading this entry having comes from the last (“Bodies, Bodies, Bodies”) might wonder: Is this discussion at all related to bodies? Yes. Thinking of essences and their manifestation may be the explanation of bodies, be they flesh-and-blood or subtle.

If we suppose that Reality itself must be God’s creation—and without that assumption all meaning disappears, hence that’s a good start—the Platonic view suggests the process of creation. It is the same on high as it is in our own humble circle. The new arises from intentions and then develops (or evolves, if you like) into a visible actuality in which the intention takes on a body. What this means is that matter itself is necessary in order to separate, to manifest, ideas—whether they originate in human or in higher minds. God’s creation generates the very matter in which divine ideas manifest. Lesser beings, like ourselves, cannot create matter but may form it.

This general idea underlies theosophical, Neoplatonic, and related conceptions of the subtle body. The idea expresses the feeling that actuality must always involve some kind of embodiment, gross or subtle. Without such embodiment, the essence remains still entirely absorbed in God. Actuality may thus be understood as separation from (but not independence of) God. The creation must then be pictured as a kind of separation in which matter plays a crucial role. The creation is not identical with God. Why God creates is the ultimately mystery. The emanationist theory suggests an overflow of benevolence—but that is, surely, just a human conceptualization. How can the Absolute be said to overflow?

This general view of the matter has certain merits. It suggests that transcending orders above us (and possibly below us) are structured like this one, but the match between our powers and the matter in those worlds is better—so that our minds can form our bodies. It suggests that angels also have a dual character. Here I side with St. Bonaventure (who believed that all creatures, not least angels, were made of form and matter) rather than with his contemporary, St. Thomas Aquinas (who held that angels had no bodies). I like the structure because it permits me to imagine that the vast physical cosmos that we see may indeed be entirely alive—that suns may be the bodies of very high beings. This notion, I hasten to add, is not original with me at all—but pleasing because, looking out at the vastness of the visible cosmos, I’m choked by the meaningless incommensurability of that vastness unless I think that so much glory may actually have meaning.

Later: Having read this she who completes me had this comment: “For me, after having re-read this ‘unpacking,’ a very satisfying (pleasingly simple?) thought is that ‘this creation strives toward completion!’ The entire universe is EVOLVING towards the completion of God’s idea of his creation.”

Soul-Body Interaction: Is the Problem Real?

The most frequently discussed aspect of the soul-body duality has been the interaction between the two. How can an immaterial something affect a material something else, and vice versa. This discussion tends to begin with Descartes (1596-1650), but the problem is that Descartes’ views on the matter are all too frequently over-simplified and, as usually stated, turn out to be cartoons of his thought. For example: bodies are of matter, and matter is the extended thing (res extensa); soul or mind is the thinking thing (res cogitans); it has no extension. But these two realms interact one with the other by means of the pineal gland. That’s the caricature.

The statements listed are, indeed, discoverable in Descartes’ extensive writings—but so is a great deal more. Descartes was a prodigious thinker, a diligent writer; whole tribes of modern theories can claim him as their father. He did not, for instance, insist that the soul has no extension; what he said was “that extension is not the principal attribute of the soul” (quoting an enlightening article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, titled “Descartes and the Pineal Gland,” found here). Indeed, the article just referenced makes it clear that Descartes wrote about every aspects of this subject. Those who wish to cite a famous authority can search René and find chapter and verse to justify their views.

The problem, it occurs to me, may stem from a faulty conceptualization of what we mean by soul. We insist on its immateriality—and when we use that term, it largely suggests a kind of emptiness; we have a tough time imagining the immaterial. The root of that conception is anchored in common experience; we don’t see souls (forget about ghosts for a moment). In part the rooting lies in Plato’s proof for the soul’s immortality; the argument is made in Phaedo; Plato there rests his case on incorruptibility and declares that all things made of parts are subject to change, hence to corruption. Therefore the soul, which is a unity and has no parts, is incorruptible and thus also immortal.

This whole nexus of ideas is tricky, slippery. Immateriality works nicely to prove immortality. But in Greek thought, not least in Plato’s, the soul is also a form. In Aristotle we have the concept of substance, a duality of matter and form. Form shapes matter; matter manifests form. But the interaction between these two is just as nebulous in general as that between the soul and the body is in the particular. Some kind of force is implied in the very concept of the union of matter with form.

Form must compel matter to shape itself either by attraction or by some kind of positively shaping impulse. If by attraction, we might imagine a kind of complex form of gravity. Indeed Descartes himself believed that the soul exerts a force of volition which is communicated to the body by means of the pineal gland. But if a force is present, able to move at least “animal spirits,” thus another but also subtle form of energy, the pure immateriality of the soul becomes problematical. What kind of force? Magic? To avoid magic, one is tempted to see the soul as somewhat more complex, and matter-like, as possessing capacities beyond a kind of point-like presence without extension.

Not that I have any problem with that. But if we admit a soul into the arena, a soul able to exert force—and to the extent that it does also has the ability passively to experience force—at that moment the supposedly insurmountable difficulty of interaction actually disappears. Never mind the pineal gland. You might say that it was a decent stand in for some kind of point or organ where the force of soul is transmitted to the body and where, at the same time, experience reaches the soul. The contact may be extremely subtle—in comparison, for example, with a sneeze—but it must have some kind of tangible reality, suggesting that the soul does have capacity, at some minimal level, to interact with what we normally call matter. It is this sort of meditation on the subject that encourages me to propose, as I have in earlier posts, that the soul may indeed interact with the material dimension at the subatomic level. And if you have a single fixed point of interaction then, as Archimedes said, he could lift the world—and humanity can move mountains or build dams.

The Soul-Memory Nexus

If we classify philosophical conceptions of what the soul may be, we find three categories in use. I want to look at each as it relates to memory. At the end I’ll try to make clear why choosing memory as a magnifying glass makes sense. Let’s start a listing of the categories. The soul is—

A. Immortal and Uncreated. We find this conceptualization in Plato and also in Hindu thought. In both traditions, reincarnation (metempsychosis in the Greek version) is presumed to take place. If the soul is conceived as immaterial and uncreated, our inability to remember any past existence before the current incarnation becomes a problem. To reconcile the supposed status of the soul with its very limited memory calls for an explanation. A contradiction looms without one.

B. Created but Immortal. This formulation underlies Western Christian, and particularly Catholic, thought. Here the fact that we don’t remember preexistence is a virtue. Why should we if we did not exist? The evidence that memory may operate after the body is left behind (see postings on NDEs) is confirmatory. Once created, immortal—and, in the out-of-body state, still functioning.

C. Material and Perishable. The naturalistic view has no concept of an independent soul. That which we call soul is the material functioning of brain processes, a kind of input-output device. Memory is stored in tissue. Our experience of memory, tied entirely to this life, is consistent with the naturalistic view.

The problem identified in A is somewhat mitigated by the fact that some people remember previous lives. I will discuss that subject in more detail in future postings. The problem remains, however, because most people don’t have such memories. Nor do we have evidence from NDE reports that, on departure from the body, old memory streams become active and, Aha!, we now remember lives in earlier incarnations.

What is an amelioration of the problem in A becomes a problem in B. Reports of previous lives are not by any measure universal, however; thus the B position may still be correct, but it seems to require some modification. We might assume, for instance, that created souls might conceivably stay on in this dimension after one life and manage somehow to occupy new bodies. Why would they do so? It may be that they failed to achieve their purpose here. A surprisingly large proportion of those reporting previous lives lost the life that they remember in youth through violence or accidents. This option (“stay-and-go-around-again”) may even have divine sanction. In this formulation, which I’ve never encountered as a doctrine anywhere, reincarnation may be recognized as an exception, but not, as in Hinduism, as the universal rule.

Evidence of earlier lives is consistent with a conception of the soul as an independent agent, not with the naturalistic view. This last mode of thought needs to explain the evidence as something other than it is understood to be. There may be memories, but they’re not of another life, for instance. The super-psi theory is a favorite mode of explanation. For that, please see the posting under that heading.

Significance of Memory. Memory is central to our experience of duration. Any concept of life after death requires that we should remember what came before. Exactly the same rule applies to previous lives. If we don’t remember them, they might as well not have been. Another way to put this is that a third party may know with certainty that Jane Doe, now in heaven, is the same Jane Doe who lived in the twentieth century in Amherst, say. But Jane Doe herself will not know that if she doesn’t remember her days in Amherst. Ontological continuity is not the same as conscious continuity. The latter requires memory. Yet another way to put this is that if memory is discontinuous—if it ceases on death or fades away entirely after death; if it is wiped away upon birth and is not recoverable later—then the materialistic theories are functionally identical to spiritual experience. You die; with death you’re gone. A temporally delimited memory is equivalent to materialism. Applied to the concept of agency, the essence of which is consciousness, endurance in an agency requires endurance of memory. If we cannot discover where the memories of a previous existence are stored, why they are inaccessible, and how they might be recovered, the logical position is B: we were created at or around birth. I’m obviously not done with this subject.

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.

* * *

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.