On the Academentia Front: You Have to Read This

Bari Weiss:

If you don’t know about Brearley, it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission. (In the course of my reporting for this piece I spoke to a few Brearley parents.)

Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week. Among the lines:

On Looking Up Words

Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence is a man after my own mold:

When I encounter a new word, lengthy or not, I like to know what it means and where it comes from. I won’t necessarily use it, in writing or speech, but I’ve grown accustomed to plugging holes in my knowledge of the world. Plain speaking is essential but so, on the right occasions, are eloquence and verbal lushness. Part of linguistic effectiveness is sensitivity to context and audience. When it’s not mere showing off, deployment of obscure words adds a pleasurable texture to poetry and prose – one of many reasons we read Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne. A gifted writer commands styles and is not limited to one. In addition, what’s obscure or pretentious to you may be familiar and homely to me.

My sentiments exactly.

The blogosphere is vast, and she is deep. If the ordinary modes of human interaction have left you high and dry  in your quest for the like-minded, a little fishing in her vasty deeps should satisfy your needs.

The Joe Gould Story

Jack Kerouac, ON THE ROAD:

[…]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

Substack latest: Even Misfits Find Their 'Fit'

The Philosopher Prays for Light, not Loot

We are grateful for this quotidian bread, Lord, but it is not for it that we pray. Grant us the panem supersubstantialis, the bread supersubstantial, that nourishes the mind and heart. It is for this bread that we must beg, unable as we are to secure it by our own powers. The daily bread that nourishes the flesh we can gain for ourselves.

……………..

For the theology behind the prayer, see "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread."

Why Do I Write about Political Topics?

People are increasingly 'siloed into' their positions. I don't write to change the minds of our political enemies. Why do I write, then?

First, to arrive at the truth as best I can for my own edification and enjoyment. People like me like to figure things out and understand things. On our good days we theoreticians approach the blissful self-sufficiency of Aristotle's NOESIS NOESEOS.

Second, to provide argumentative ammo to those on our side. The choir DOES need to be preached to, so as to be fortified, and provided with tools for ideological combat.

Third, to persuade fence-sitters, people with open minds who can be nudged one way or the other.

Fourth, to let our enemies know that they will be opposed, and their lies exposed. Enough of us protesting loudly, but with wit, style and solid arguments, can have an intimidating effect on our enemies.  Winning in a war requires intimidation. To intimidate is to induce a weakening fear in the enemy.

Fifth, because I'm a natural-born scribbler who takes great pleasure from writing and re-reading what he has written. The hunt for the incisive formulation that penetrates to the heart of the matter is a source of pleasure.

Back on the Rant

During Lent I was, in a manner of speaking, hors de combat, but of my own free will. But now the happy warrior is back in the Facebook trenches doing battle with our political enemies. No leftists need apply.  Fruitful discussion is possible only on the common ground of shared attitudes, values, presuppositions, and principles. That common ground no longer exists inasmuch as the Democrat Party is now an outlet of hard leftism to such an extent that our political opponents are now political enemies.

I am afraid Carl Schmitt is right: in the political sphere the defining opposition is that of Freund und Feind, friend and enemy.

Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body

For Cyrus

Ratzinger"I believe in . . . the resurrection of the body and life everlasting." Thus ends the Apostles' Creed. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) addresses the meaning of this article of faith on pp. 347-359 of his Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius Press, 2004). The book first appeared in German in 1968 long before Ratzinger became Pope.  Herewith, some interpretive notes and commentary.

1) Despite the undeniable Platonic elements in Christianity, to which Ratzinger is sensitive, the Biblical promise of immortality pertains to the whole man, not to a separated soul. Some, Lutherans in particular, recoiling from Platonic soul-body dualism, have gone so far as to maintain that the Greek doctrine of the immortality of the soul is positively un-Christian. (347) This is going too far. It is clear, though, that on Christianity a man is not in his innermost essence a pure spirit like an angel; he is, by nature, a corporeal, embodied  being whose ultimate good is to live forever in an embodied, not an angelic, state.  'By nature' implies that we are not accidentally embodied, as on Platonism, but essentially embodied.

2) On the other hand, the idea of immortal (living) bodies, immortal animals, seems utterly absurd given what we know about the natural world, as Ratzinger admits (348).  Schopenhauer mocks this notion as immortality mit Haut und Haar, with skin and hair.  By contrast, the notion of human immortality as the immortality of a simple (metaphysically incomposite) soul substance is not absurd but defensible, even if not Christian. 

So we face a problem. Platonic dualism cannot do justice to our  unitary corporeal nature. It involves an ontological denigration of the body and of materiality in general.  The material world, however, created by God, is good, and not to be flown from in Platonic-Plotinian-gnostic fashion.  The body is not the prison-house of the soul, but something rather more positive: its necessary expression or realization.  But how on earth could the living bodies of humans live forever?

3) One solution that suggests itself  — call it the additive solution — is to add the Biblical notion of bodily resurrection to the Platonic notion of soulic immortality. When you die, soul and body separate: the soul continues to exist while the body returns to dust. ("Remember man, thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return . . .")  At the end of the world, the dead are raised and soul is reunited with its body, the same one it had on Earth, although presumably spiritualized and transformed or transfigured.  Although Ratzinger does not cite Aquinas in the stretch of text I am commenting on, the Angelic Doctor's view is additive.

On this view, (i) resurrection is resurrection of the (human) body, not of the whole man, and (ii) this resurrected body will be numerically identical to the body that lived and died on Earth. In other words, the pre-mortem and post-mortem bodies of a resurrected person are one and the same.  After the resurrection you will have the very same body that you have now. This is compatible with the resurrected body being property-wise different from the earthly body.   I take this same-body view to be the traditional view. We find it, for example, in Aquinas:

For we cannot call it resurrection unless the soul return to the same body, since resurrection is a second rising, and the same thing rises that falls; therefore resurrection regards the body which after death falls, rather than the soul which after death lives. And consequently if it is not the same body which the soul resumes, it will not be a resurrection, but rather the assuming of a new body. (1952, 952, quoted from here)

For the sake of concretion, let's assume the Aristotelian hylomorphic dualism of Aquinas according to which a human being is a composite of soul and body where the soul is the form of the body. For Aquinas, the soul continues to exist after the body ceases to exist, and resurrection is the uniting of that soul with its body, not some body or other, but its body, the same one it had on Earth, although perfected, subtilized, spiritualized, and rendered free of defects.

4) The Thomistic synthesis of the Greek and the Biblical is an uneasy one, fraught with difficulties. I'll mention just one.  On the Platonic view, salvation is salvation of the soul from the body; it is not the salvation of the whole, undivided, man.  The soul is a naturally immortal spiritual substance** that comes into its own only when freed from the evil predicament of embodiment.   Death, as separation of soul from body, is release and therefore something good.  The Biblical conception is very different: death is not good, but bad: the fitting punishment for Adam's sin. Death is not a welcome release from the material world, but the calamity of all calamities. We were intended by God to live forever in Paradise in an embodied, material form. But Adam (man) fell, and is now subject to sickness, old age, and death in a material world that is itself fallen and in which demonic agents are at play in various ways.

Now suppose you are a philosopher and a Christian who wants to find a way to accommodate man's essential corporeality. Following Aristotle, you bring Plato's Forms down to Earth where they cease to be substances in their own right and become factors in the ontological analysis of such sublunary substances (prote ousiai) as statues, horses — and humans.  Socrates, then, is not a naturally immortal soul accidentally attached to a perishable body, but a hylomorphic compound of form and (proximate) matter in which  anima forma corporis, the soul is the form of the body. 

The soul, which was a substance for Plato becomes in Aristotle a non-substantial 'principle' invoked in the analysis of genuine substances.  The I that thinks when Socrates thinks is then presumably not his soul but the whole man, the entire hylomorphic compound. That which thinks when Socrates thinks is Socrates, not the form of his body. For how could an enmattered form think?  How could it be the subject of thinking (of cogitationes in the broad Cartesian sense)? An enmattered form is a respect in which a sublunary substance is intelligible, but it is not intelligent, being merely one factor in the ontological analysis of a whole man who is the one doing the thinking.   A subject of thinking must be a substance, and on the Aristotelian analysis, the soul is not a substance but a form.

Might it be, contrary to what I have just maintained, that the soul is an enmattered form that is both intelligible and intelligent? If so, then the soul-form is what I refer to when I thoughtfully deploy the first-person singular pronoun, and not the whole man, body-cum-soul.  This seems to lead us back to the view according to which I am identical to my soul, and away from the Aristotelico-Thomist view according to which I am not identical to my soul, but identical to a composite of soul and body.

To state the problem succinctly, Thomas is an Aristotelian on Earth, but a Platonist in heaven, and he has to be both to satisfy simultaneously the exigencies of both Christianity and Aristotle. But the exigencies are in tension one with the other, a tension tantamount to contradiction. Thomas qua Christian needs a substantial soul capable of surviving bodily death, a soul that then 'waits' for its completion in the resurrection of the body.  Qua Aristotelian, however, the soul must be a form and not a substance.  The upshot is a contradictory construct: a form that is and is not a substance.  A soul-form which is not a substance but a principle when embodied,  becomes a substance on its own after death.

5) Ratzinger rejects the additive approach to resurrection. A restored body is not added to a post-mortem soul.  For "the biblical train of thought . . . presupposes the undivided unity of man." (349) Scripture speaks of "the awakening of the dead, not of bodies!" (349)  The "real heart of the faith in resurrection does not consist at all in the restoration of bodies . . . ." (349)  Man is not composed of body and soul with the soul the carrier of his immortality. If you start with that conception, then resurrection becomes the restoration of bodies, which are then added onto the souls which have been waiting  for their bodily completion. This scheme is precisely what Ratzinger is opposing. So how does he propose that we understand resurrection?

6) He speaks of a "dialogic immortality" that is an "awakening."(350) Man cannot "totally perish because he is known and loved by God." (350)  As against Platonism, there is nothing in man that is indestructible.  Man is saved from annihilation by being drawn into dialogue with the Creator. In this way the whole man, not just his soul, is awakened and brought to life.

From here on out the discussion tapers off into vagueness.  Resurrection is not a restoration of one's earthly body. The person "goes on existing because it lives in God's memory." (353)  To go on existing as a merely intentional object of someone's memory, even of God's, seems insufficient. I remember my mother, but does she live on in my memory? Such an afterlife would be a paltry thing indeed, and not just because my memories of her are both incomplete and in some respect erroneous.  The main problem is that an object of memory cannot be by being remembered be transformed from a non-living subject into a living one.  My memory cannot be constitutive of your subjectivity. But perhaps with God it is different . . . .

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*While man is not a pure spirit, the Christian worldview admits the existence of  finite pure spirits, namely angels and demons (fallen angels). Christianity is therefore not a materialist worldview: it does not hold that finite intelligence cannot occur except as physically realized or materially embodied. And of course God himself, the infinite, archetypal spirit, is a pure spirit, fully real, and fully concrete, despite being wholly immaterial.  Christianity is not materialism, but it does, in the teeth of Platonism, valorize the material world.

**An individual substance is definable as anything metaphysically capable of independent existence.