Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
You've served me well, old friend, borne many a burden, and conducted me over many a pons asinorum. Your exuberance and animal spirits have caused me trouble, but they have also broadened and deepened my soul's experience.
I too have served you well with my counsels and warnings. More than once have I saved your ass, or was it mine? I've reined you in as you have let me ride. But now it is time to say goodbye as you return to the earth and I to the sky.
On 4 December of last year, a Substack entry of mine entitled Care of Body and Soul occasioned a comment by Tony Flood to which I replied on 10 December in Body, Soul, Self. Today, 25 June 2023 Tony responds to my response in a piece entitled Man's "True Self": A Reply to Critics.
Now at the moment I do not have the time or the energy to examine Tony's article in detail. But in the last few days I have been reading Hans Urs von Balthasar who has illuminating things to say on the topic. So for now I will simply add to the mix by referring Tony and anyone who is interested to Chapter 2 ("Flesh and Spirit") of Part III of Balthasar's Prayer (Ignatius Press, 1986) which includes the line "scripture itself seems to legitimize the adoption and christening of Hellenic terms at the very outset, especially in the Pauline use of 'flesh' (sarx) and 'spirit' (pneuma, nous)." (pp. 260-61)
Are you the driver of your vehicle or merely a passenger? Who is in control of route and destination? Body or soul? Which is just along for the ride?
Tony Flood writes:
Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question.
Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a "less-than-true" or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man's self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year.Also interested in knowing whether there's anything you want to share from your retreat.
(A) I am (identical to) a substance the form of which is my soul and the matter of which is my body. Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body.(P) I am (identical to) a purely mental substance that contingently possesses a living human body.
To care properly for the first, live each day as if it will be your last. To care properly for the second, live each day as if your supply of days is infinite. (Adapted from Evagrius Ponticus.)
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The mortalist body-abuser is one puzzling hombre.
Christopher Hitchens loved to drink and he loved to smoke and he knew that the synergistic effects of drinking like a fish and smoking like a chimney could lead, as it did in the case of Humphrey Bogart, to an untimely shuffling off of the mortal coil. (Hamlet's soliloquy, Act 3, Scene 1) You would think that someone who was utterly convinced that he was nothing more than an animated body, a clever land mammal, would want to take care of his body. Hitchens was not suicidal. He loved to write and he had writing projects planned out. He died of cancer of the esophagus at age 62 in 2011. Those of us who champion free speech miss him greatly and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world.
People think they have plenty of time. But it's later than you think. The Reaper Man is sharpening his scythe as we scribblers sharpen our pencils.
In his last book, Mortality, the late Christopher Hitchens writes, "I don't have a body, I am a body." (86) He goes on to observe that he has "consciously and regularly acted as if this was not true." It is a curious fact that mortalists are among the worst abusers of the fleshly vehicle. But that is not my theme.
Is a person just his body? The meditation is best conducted in the first person: Am I just my body? Am I identical to my body? Am I numerically one and the same with my body, where body includes brain? Am I such that, whatever is true of my body is true of me, and vice versa? Let's start with some 'Moorean facts,' some undeniable platitudes.
1. I am not now identical to a dead body, a corpse. No doubt there is a dead body in my future, one with my name on it. But that lifeless object won't be me. I will never become a corpse. I will never be buried or cremated. Indeed, I cannot be buried or cremated. I am not now, never have been, and never will be identical to a dead body. For when the corpse with my name on it comes to exist, I will have ceased to exist; and when I cease to exist, it will have come to exist.
'My' corpse is the corpse that will come into existence when I cease to exist, or, if mortalism is false, when I am separated from my body. Strictly speaking, no corpse is my corpse: hence the scare quotes around 'my' in the preceding sentence. But I can speak strictly of my body: my body is the body that is either identical to me, or is related to me in some 'looser' way.
2. I am obviously not identical to a dead body. And I have just argued that I will never become identical to a dead body. Am I then identical to a living body? Not if the following syllogism is sound: My living body will become a dead body; I will never become a dead body; therefore, I am not identical to a living body.
This argument assumes that if x = y, then whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa. Little is self-evident, but surely this principle, known in the trade as the Indiscernibility of Identicals, is self-evident. There is something true of my living body now that is not true of me now, namely, 'will become a dead body.' Therefore, I am not now identical to a living body. And since the only living body I could be identical to if I were identical to a living body would be my living body, I am not identical to my living body. Of course, I have a living body in some sense of 'have'; the point is that I am not identical to my living body.
Putting (1) and (2) together: I am neither identical to a dead body nor to a living body. Contra Hitchens, I am not a body.
3. Consider now the following rather more plausible identity claim: I am (identically) a self-conscious animal. Let's unpack this. I am a living human animal that says 'I' and means it; I am a thinker of I-thoughts, an example of which is the thought *I am just a self-conscious animal.* I am self-aware: aware of myself as an object, both as a physical object, a body, through the five outer senses, and their instrumental extensions, and as a psychological object, a mind, through inner sense or introspection. I examine my conscience. I evaluate morally my actions and my failures to act. I study my emotions, how they arise, how they subside, which of them are dominant, and so on. Both my body and my mind are objects for me as subject. As such a self-aware animal, I am aware of being different from my body. In some sense I must be different from my body (and from my mind) if they are to be my objects, where 'my objects' means 'objects for me as subject.' Why?
Well, is it not self-evident that if x is aware of y, then x cannot be strictly identical to y? If x = y, then there is no 'distance' between subject and object. There is no 'distance' such as would allow for the thing to become an object for a subject. In a rock, no duality of subject-object can arise: no rock is self-aware. In a man this duality does arise. No rock objectifies itself, and by the same token, no part of a rock is the subject for which the rest of the rock is an actual or potential object. But I objectify myself, both my body and my psyche. I ascertain objective facts about myself: weight, pulse rate, blood pressure; I note that consumption of media dreck can induce a pointless anger; I observe that I feel an aversion to unpunctual people, etc. Who is the subject for whom I am the object? Who is the knower of the known self? I am both subject and object. And yet this identity harbors a curious duality.
What is the nature of this duality? What is the nature of the 'distance' within me that makes possible my becoming an object to myself? It is obviously not a spatial or temporal distance. We may call it a transcendental difference since it is a necessary condition of the possibility of self-objectification. I cannot be an object for myself, as I plainly am, without this transcendental difference.
At this point one will be tempted to reify one or both of the terms of the duality and make of the transcendental duality/difference an ontological duality/difference. Am I a composiite of two substances, a thinking substance (res cogitans) and an extended substance (res extensa)? That way Cartesian substance dualism. I won't now say anything further about the ontologization of the transcendental difference. I will however insist that there is at least a transcendental difference within me between subject and object.
We can sum that up by saying that I am transcendentally different from the psychophysical complex that bears the name 'BV.' If so, I am not identical to the psychophysical complex that bears my name and wears my clothes.
Now if you were paying attention you noticed that I made an inferential move the validity of which demands scrutiny. I moved from
a) I am aware of being different from my body
to
b) I am different from my body.
A materialist is bound to resist this inference. He will ask how we know that the awareness mentioned in (a) is veridical. Only if it is, is the inference sound. He will suggest that it is possible that I have an non-veridical, an illusory, awareness of being different from my body. I can't credit that suggestion, however. It cannot be an illusion that I am different from anything I take as object of awareness including any body parts such my brain or any part of my brain. That is a primary and indubitable givenness. Awareness is by its very nature awareness of something: it implies a difference between that which is aware, the subject of awareness, and the object of awareness. Without that difference there could be no awareness of anything. If the self-aware subject were identical to that object which is its animal body, then the subject would not be aware of the body.
4. Will you say that the body is aware of itself? Then I will ask you which part of the body is the subject of awareness. Is it the brain, or a proper part of the brain? When I am aware of my weight or the cut on my arm, is it the brain or some proper part of the brain that is aware of these things? This makes no sense. My brain is no more the subject of awareness than my eye glasses are. My glasses don't see the wound; I see the wound by the instrumentality of the glasses. Similarly, my brain doesn't see the wound; I see the wound by the instrumentality of the brain (and the visual cortex, and the optic nerves, and the glasses, etc.) The fact that my visual awareness is causally dependent on my having a functioning brain does not show that my brain or any part of it is the subject of awareness. I am not identical to my brain or to any bodily thing.
5. Who or what asks the question: Am I identical to this body here? Does the body ask this question? Some proper part of the body such as the brain? Some proper part of this proper part? How could anything physical ask a question?
"Look, there are are certain physical objects that ask themselves whether they are identical to the physical objects they are, and entertain the (illusory) thought that they are not identical to the physical objects they are."
This little materialist speech is absurd by my lights since no physical object — as we are given to understand 'physical object' by physics — could do such a thing. If you insist that some physical objects can, then you have inflated 'physical' so that it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'
So with all due respect to the late Mr. Hitchens, brilliant talker about ideas whose depth he never plumbed, I think there are very good reasons to deny that one is identically one's body.
Further questions: If I am not identical to any physical thing, can it be inferred that I am identical to some spiritual thing? If I am not identical to my body or any part thereof, do I then have a body, and what exactly does that mean?
"I ain't got no bod . . . y."