Semper eadem ...

Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage,

Traversé çà et là par de brillants soleils;

Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage,

Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.

Voilà que j'ai touché l'automne des idées,

Et qu'il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux

Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées,

Où l'eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.

Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve

Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme une grève

Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur?

— Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,

Et l'obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur

Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie!

...

'D'où vous vient, disiez-vous, cette tristesse étrange,

Montant comme la mer sur le roc noir et nu?'

— Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange

Vivre est un mal. C'est un secret de tous connu ...

Ascesis ...

‘The ascetic makes a virtue of a state of distress.’

‘In solitude the solitary man consumes himself, in the crowd the crowd consumes him. Now choose.’

—Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human, §76, §348)

Probably a soul-doctor would to most prescribe more solitude, that they may develop inwardness. But my prescription would say: Take two socialisation pills at mealtimes, however hard to swallow, wash them down by helloing three people, whom you do not know, and remember that your athenaeum is not a hideaway. My beloved Pascal wrote that man does not know how to stay quietly in his room (Pensée 136). I know how to do that rather well. (‘The celle welle continued waxeth swete.’*) But I do not know how to mix noisily at a party, that's the thing. Had I lived in another age, everything would be settled naturally. There were places for me then, more or less corresponding to my inner preoccupations, monasteries and hermitages and anchoritic towers.† But it seems I live in the present age, chronologically displaced, an anachronism. All the same, I know that I would make a poor monk. Yes, I would make a most excellent recluse, a withdrawn melancholy penitent summa cum laude. But that's not the same, is it? Truly, I would be too much a worldling among the monastics then, as I am too much a monastic among the worldlings now.

*Thomas à Kempis (Imitatio Christi, I.20.26). 

†Then again, ‘habyte and tonsure lytel avaylen’ (Ibid., I.17.6).

Homo totus ...

A man, as a rational animal, is a psychosomatic totality. He is not a standalone psuchē. He is not a standalone sōma. Both psuchē  and sōma are abstracted from the ousia that is a man. The danger is (and has ever been) that of concretising the abstractions, resulting in plural ousie rather than a singular ousia. (Cf. the trio of posts on G. Strawson's metaphysics below.) 

Soul-body holism was widespread in pretheoretic ancientry. We find it notably among the ancient Hebrews. The standard Hebrew word for soul in the Old Testament, nephesh, is a word for man altogether. 'The LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life — and man became a living soul [nephesh]' (Genesis 2.7). So a man's soul is his self. (And so it is also in the Koran, the Arabic nafs being cognate with the Hebrew nephesh.) The soul-body Orphism of the (prototheoretic) Greeks is probably the nearest antiquity comes to mind-machine Cartesianism. Aquinas summarises the Orphic-Platonic anthropology as follows: 'Plato claimed that a human being is not a composite of soul and body but that a human being is the soul itself using a body, just as Peter is not a composite of a human being and clothes, but rather a human being using clothes' (Summa contra gentiles, II.57). In this way we are led to a flesh-despising Gnosticism. Take Plato's Cratylus 399d-400c, wherein Socrates is playacting as etymologist (cf. Gorgias 493a, 524b, Phaedo 64a):

SOCRATES: ... Sōma may be variously interpreted, and yet more variously if a little permutation is allowed. For some say that the body is the grave (sema) of the soul which may be thought to be buried in our present life, or again the index of the soul, because the soul gives indications to (semainei) the body. Probably the Orphic poets were the inventors of the name, and they were under the impression that the soul is suffering the punishment of sin, and that the body is an enclosure or prison in which the soul is incarcerated, kept safe (sōma, sozetai), as the name sōma implies, until the penalty is paid.

Neo-Platonic philosophies of man were made normative in the west by Augustine and in the east by Gregory of Nyssa. It was the later rediscovery of Aristotle and of hylemorphism that brought about a shift to an older way of thinking, now systematised. For Aristotle (and thereafter Aquinas et al), the soul cannot be a body—it is in a body. (De anima II.2, 414a.) A man is insouled body, informed matter. And there is much to say for hylemorphism. (It is adductive, not reductive. It explains without explaining away. And so on.) But Aristotelian hylemorphism is also theory-heavy. Nevertheless, it seems the best thing we've got, comparatively.

Lately I've been reading Wolfhart Pannenberg's systematics, and here I've found a reaffirmation of my feelings. He writes: 'Of all the philosophical positions held in antiquity, only the Aristotelian approach could lead to the right conclusion' (II.184). But he goes on thereafter to name his many qualms. R.W. Jenson says much the same thing, that hylemorphism is 'a solution that is [qualifiedly] satisfactory,' but that theology has not generally 'been up to the subtlety' thereof (II.110 of his systematics).

On today's much-trumpeted neuroscientism, we are not insouled bodies (ad modum Aristotle and Aquinas) but inskulled brains. And here, again, are two ousie. It's a brain-body dualism. However, as P.M.S. Hacker notes, brains are organs, not organisms:

'It makes no sense to apply psychological predicates such as "thinks," "remembers," "perceives," "imagines," "wants," "decides," "feels happy," and so forth to the brain. It is a mistake to apply predicates that signify attributes of an animal as a living whole to its parts — a mereological fallacy. Just as it is a mistake to ascribe the property of keeping time to the fusée of an eighteenth-century table clock [...] so too it is a mistake to ascribe to a person's brain the property of thinking that it is raining or of deciding to take an umbrella' (in Human Nature: A Categorical Framework, p. 306).

Just so. And as for Pannenberg:

'Only in the field of intersubjectivity and in consequence of the awareness of the I-relativity of one's own self-consciousness can a distinction between made between body and soul. Over against the soul as the inner world of consciousness stands the body, which, like the things of the world and in distinction from the inner world of my consciousness, is there for others as well as myself. It is tempting to regard the inner world of the consciousness as the true I in distinction from the body. But this is unduly to restrict the concept of the soul as well as that of the ego. In pointing to the speaker, the word "I" always indicates the physical individuality of the speaker. If we are to view the living body as insouled inasmuch as it is living, then the term "soul" must cover more than the inner world of the consciousness. It must also include the unconscious, which is related to one's own corporeality and its history' (II.194).

Habit ...

'Alas, of all enemies, habit is perhaps the most cunning, and above all it is cunning enough never to let itself be seen, because the person who sees the habit is saved from the habit. Habit is not like other enemies that one sees and against which one aggressively defends oneself; the struggle is actually with oneself in getting to see it ... Sometimes a person becomes aware, as when a dream flashes by and is forgotten, that habit has changed him; he wants to make amends but does not know where he should go to buy new oil to rekindle his love. Then he becomes despondent, annoyed, weary of himself, weary of his love, weary of its being as paltry as it is, weary of not being able to get it changed, because unfortunately he had not in good time paid attention to eternity's change and now has even lost the capacity to endure the cure.'

—K, XVI.36.

'Of all sophists, time is the most dangerous, and of all dangerous sophists, habit is the most cunning. It is already difficult enough to realise that one changes little by little over the years, but the fraud of habit is that one is the same, unchanged, that one says the same thing, unchanged, and yet is very changed and yet says it, very changed.'

—K, XVII.315.

Homo est ...

What is a man? If we ask a chemist, he'd say, 'Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorous ...' But that is what a man is made of micro-materially. And we want to know what a man is formally. What is man's whatness (quidditas)? That's the question. The traditional answer is: animal rationale. The early-modern answer is: res cogitans. The late-modern answer is: res extensa. Thus Richard Dawkins says today that we are machines for replicating deoxyribonucleic acid. (And even then he has contradicted his dysteleological premises. Thereon we are machines for replicating that replicate DNA — we aren't really for anything.) But in reality we are not machines at all. And although 'rational animal' may not be the best possible definition, it hasn't been bettered. It's still the best we've got, after millennia. And it's everything a definitio rei is supposed to be: clear, terse, literal, positive, noncircular, and extensionally sufficient.

For Notker Labeo of St. Gall, homo est animal rationale, mortale, risus capax. For Wittgensteinians such as Sir Anthony Kenny and P.M.S. Hacker, man is most of all the talking animal, homo loquens. For the Princeton theologian Robert W. Jenson, man is more so the praying animal, be that prayer praiseful or maledictive (see vol. II of his systematics, pp. 58-9). Elsewise man is the weeping animal, the dancing animal, the smiling, blushing, ironizing animal. And to say as much is at least understandable. For brute animals do no such rationalised things, save by analogy (now more, now less remote). But these are bad definitions. Definitions are made of formal genera and species. And it is agreed that man's proximate genus is animal. But a particular proprium (e.g. talking, à la Kenny and Hacker) can't rightly be the specific difference. And likewise for selections of propria (e.g. moralising and laughing, à la Notker). We need an ontological antecedent that explains the countless consequents. Hence rationality. Homo est animal rationale—full stop. We talk, we moralise, and so on, because we are rational, (not the other way around).

But don't, say, chimpanzees also smile? No, not literally. That is, if we say 'Humans smile and chimps smile' then the verb isn't anymore univocal. Milton was right: 'Smiles from reason flow | To brute denied ...' (Paradise Lost, IX.239). The toothy grin of a chimp cannot literally be called a smile, for there is a rational intentionality present in the latter (and absent from the former). And so, however similar the bodily mechanics may be, brute grins are never more than simulacra of smiles. (Cf. the pathological risus sardonicus.) Thus Wittgenstein: 'A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face' (Philosophical Investigations: 583). To say that chimps smile is to anthropomorphise. And, no, there's nothing per se wrong with such anthropomorphising, so long as we remember that's what we're doing. From childhood up, we all of us animate inanimates (a metal tool 'groans' as it is bent from misuse); we animalise vegetables (a dry plant is 'thirsty' for water); and we humanise animals. So long as we are moving ontologically upward, it's a psychologically healthy thing to do. (If somebody moved downward, vegetablising animals, then we'd be worried.) But animating inanimates and humanising nonhumans is not something that scientists qua scientists may do (licitly). For it is no more literally(-univocally) true to say that brutes 'smile' (or whatever) than it is to say that rocks reproduce (because they break up into multiples).

Side-note: Here we have a serious bioscience problem, that of untranslatable metaphors and anthropomorphisms. Bioscientific terminology is through-and-through figural (and therefore through-and-through unscientific). Take so-called natural selection. The term selection is already a very misleading anthropomorphism. And in Darwin's Origin of Species metaphors hugely outnumber literalisms. (Therein natural selection is said to 'pick out with unerring skill,' it is 'always intently watching,' and so forth. It's practically a hands-on demiurge.) Darwinian evolution is supposed to be a nominalism and a dysteleogism, too, but there are realisms and teleogisms on every page of every book written by Darwinists. And it's worrisome that strictly literal translations aren't ever forthcoming. Is it even possible, we may ask, to reduce teleologies to efficiencies? Would such a translation be at all readable? Whenever a bioscientist tries his hand as literalist, he fails flatly, (elsewise he succeeds in drafting a reductio ad absurdum for his mechanically reductionist premises).

Summa. We are rational animals. And 'rational animal' is an infima species.

Evolutionary origins ...

Search your bookseller's catalogue for 'Evolutionary origin ...' or 'Evolution of ...' and you'll find a library of texts. Therein evolutionary psychologists use advanced pseudoscience, cutting-edge genetic fallacies, and state-of-the-art category errors to explain away anthropological phenomena. For example, in The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior we learn that religion underwent 'a process of natural selection in which it was rewarded in the evolutionary currency of reproductive success.' It was 'an adaptive answer to the conditions of living and surviving that prevailed among our prehistoric ancestors.' And in this way religion is implicated in baseness (of origin) and scepticism (vis-à-vis dogmata). So too are all human enterprises implicated. Existence is a reward for adaptiveness (not for veracity). Nonexistence is a punishment for maladaptiveness (not for falsity). And soon everything will be thus explained away in the system. The books are even now at the printing press.

But there is at least one volume more to be written before the explain-away system is complete. Forthcoming, then, is the capstone volume that will explain away explaining-away. What I would really like to read is a book on the evolutionary origin of evolutionary-origin books. I'm waiting for the evolutionary psychologists to explain away evolutionary psychology with evolutionary psychology, and thereby to implicate the science itself in baseness and scepticism. How long will they tarry? The system sighs for completion.

Sailing sternforemost ...

Hume seemed to use up most of his ink writing on the absurd conclusions that follow from empiricist premises. And he closed not by saying that empiricism is therefore false, but by saying that the world is therefore absurd. Scientists seem now to use up all their pixels writing on the absurd conclusions that follow from mathematismist premises. And they close not by saying that mathematism is therefore false, but, again, by saying that the world is therefore absurd. What absurdly backward methodology!

A mariner says to us: 'If we sail a sloop-of-war sternforemost, it will be very hard to steer, it will move slowly and awkwardly, and sooner or later it will capsize. Nevertheless, I am a sternforemostist, as are all lovers of seagoing truth.' Do we then engage the mariner as our helmsman? It seems the answer is: Yes.