Death

I haven't been blogging. I have for too long been suffering from a kind of "theological aphasia" (to quote a thinker more clever than I). Well, not suffering, exactly - having an overabundance of ideas is a good thing, right? Thoughts upon thoughts, which, when grasped, lead to even more thoughts and more - never ending tangles of vines with no clear beginning, and through my studies I have learned just enough to see that I have not learned nearly enough - I have neither the tools, the time, nor the energy to harvest any fruit. (And thus I apologize in advance that I am here writing to find my problems rather to answer anything.)

But more recently, dense vegetation of thoughts upon thoughts has given way to strange expanses of a much sparser, scrubbier underbrush. I don't see any signs of disease or plague, exactly, no violence or force - yet the creativity of dense thoughts seem to be dying out, weakening, becoming thin and scrawny.

I think I know the cause - it is a very strange thing, something I never saw coming. Philosophy, it seems, is a source of death.

Strange, I know. And strange that I of all people should say such a thing. But somehow, it stands true - philosophy, among its relations to many things, stands within a strange, dark shadow.

Where do I begin to unpack this strange impression? Perhaps right from our common definitions.

Death is the separation of soul from body.

Philosophy is a separation, an abstraction (from the latin ab-straho, to cut away) of form from matter, universal from particular, an intelligible from sensible.

Other epistemologies would alter this definition, of course, but I do not wish to question how we know, but the fact of what does happen when we know, or reason very carefully - that essential principle which remains the same. There is a certain separation that goes on whereby we take an sense experience and drain its vibrant color away into an abstract ghost of its former self.

In a way, once again, this all returns to mediation vs. immediacy - to be a human being, to live a rational life, we must operate through mediation - we must distance ourselves from the world in order to make sense of it. (and what is that, anyway? sense? Really, what does meaning mean? But I will never find my way out of that labyrinth). If we didn't, we would all be infants, as Lonergan observes, unable to distinguish ourselves from any other object in the world.

But philosophy is not just an "ordinary" level of mediation - it is a reflection on a reflection on a reflection, removing itself from reality in fractal spirals. (I said reality. I don't really mean that. Reality is too ill-defined of a concept when speaking generally - perhaps I mean here experience.) This is more than a normal exercise of human reason, which stands apart from the world just enough to appreciate and understand it. Philosophy removes the intellect from the sensible experience; the soul operates as far apart from matter as it can. A gradation of death.

I have stated my case strongly, but now I must qualify: "as far apart from matter as it can." The anthropology of Aquinas is the one my mind most often slips into - the one I understand best. So according to Aquinas, an intelligible is something immaterial, and therefore must be grasped by an immaterial faculty. This is none other than human intellect, although it cannot operate except through the use of the senses to gather this information, and helps knowledge with imagination and memory. (Tangent: the soul needs the body to form images - even memories, yes? I always thought we would have only our memories when we die, even if no way to gain more knowledge until we have our bodies back. Hm. This is a problem.) We might not want to take this all the way, but at the very least, we would say that the soul is farthest removed from the body when it is focused on very abstract ideas that make little or no use of images or memories.

I will also add: emotion. The soul is farthest removed from the body when there is no emotion acting, since all emotion has a physical component.

Why do I say all emotion has a physical component but that thought does not? Really, I am cheating now, and using modern science for one thing and medieval metaphysics for the other. Maybe scientifically all thoughts need a physical platform too. But no - we must have some kind of thought, with emotion or not, that is possible without a body. Or at least such a thing is possible in angelic reason. However I am disturbed if I have just made angels to be products of pure thought. This sounds way too Kantian and Reason-worshipping to be true. Angels MUST be moved by beauty somehow - e-motion, ex-motus - "having been moved out" - love cannot be complete without this. Love is not pure agape - it is agape and eros. They don't need to have bodily emotions in the same way - but they need to have some irresistible draw to the Beautiful, whose other name is the True or the Good.

Or could it be that the farthest apart a soul can be from matter is not abstract thought, but contemplative prayer. Can I say that? I might be wrong. But many saints do have ecstatic appearances, no longer notice the passage of time, fail to notice or have control over their body, they have infused knowledge or grace (like the angels immediately intuit truth I might add), etc - it seems that God is directly touching the spirit. (This would seem to find a rough harmony with Neo-Platonism and its two flights of contemplation, of philosophy and mysticism: the goal of first being to free the soul as far as possible from the concerns of the body and even all discursive reasoning to a level of pure concept in communion with the Nous, the Intellect; the goal of the second to rise beyond this to commune in a truly apophatic and mystical way with the One Beyond All Being.)

This leads to a problem: why would God, if he intends the resurrection of the dead, only touch only the spirit and leave the body out of glorification? I am not an expert in contemplative prayer - but now I remember something else. St. Teresa of Avila does assure some of her spiritual directees that they should not be disturbed if they experience sexual pleasure during contemplation - whether this is common or rare I do not know, but the fact that such a thing exists means that the body can also participate in the pure joy that comes through contemplation, so it is, in the end, a HUMAN, EMBODIED, and not angelic experience (and therefore no longer Neo-Platonic dualism). So perhaps contemplative prayer is not, after all, a death.

Then again: it is an enormous sign of death to self. It is participation on earth in union with God - it is a death to the old self and a rising again in Christ. Is the death of crucifixion a death as well? Separation of soul and body? Certainly, our bodies are fallen, and we must separate from the sinful passions. (With Paul we often cry "Who will rescue me from this body of death?") But our souls are fallen as well - pride, the root of all sins, is primarily a spiritual evil, more grave than imprudently obeying the pull of a natural instinct. So let's not become Manichean. Perhaps then we need to alter our definition of death. We need to die to ourselves, not our bodies - we need to be separated from all that is not God.

So what have I gotten myself into?

Death: the ultimate separation of soul from body.
Death: the ultimate separation of our whole selves, soul+body, from all that is sinful in us; also, the ultimate union with God and only God though and in all things.
Death: abstraction of intelligible thought from sensible data? removing the self from experience? Philosophy?

Aphasia. Too much to say. I don't know how to express it except in these stuttering tangential pieces that do not cohere and I know they don't cohere - there must be a coherence somewhere. Perhaps the more pieces I stutter out, the more things will slowly unfold. Or perhaps not.

I will say this: I used to think that it was a coincidence that very cold, rationalistic people became philosophers (Immanuael Kant). Now I think that philosophy can make one to become that way.

This seems harsh. But when Pilate's question, rings out, so human, so disillusioned, yet so childlike, "What is truth?" philosophy would hand him a snake: "And this, then is three True: the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself," says Hegel. (A far cry from Plato and his analogy of the cave - but that will be for another post - that philosophy used to be a way of life, and trying to make it into a scientific, academic discipline seems to have neutered it and cut out its heart.)

Not philosophy alone, either - linguistics is also a death - we strip away the meanings, strip away the words, strip away the endings, all to a bare abstract skeleton of the living language - we gut it, neatly arrange its intestines, drain the excess fluid - although we never are able to view its beating heart. And the more linguists study, the less they are able to see language alive - they kill it, analyze it, whenever they come across it. (There are always so many former linguistics majors - they want to learn because they love the language alive, but they find that they cannot bear the science of its constant death.) Some of my old professors confess they no longer enjoy novels because they can't stop themselves from dissecting every sentence.

Is there an escape? Is this the way it must be? Linguistics is one thing - it is just a human science after all. But ought this to be the case in philosophy? Perhaps if your philosophy is firmly rooted in the WHOLE human person - body and soul, reason and emotion. But can philosophy, as a science, deal with emotion? Or does reason necessarily have an emotional component? Of what kind of relation? Perhaps the same relation as concepts are supported by words?

This is the huge problem in Lonergan. This is a huge problem in Kant. This is a huge problem in very many philosophers, and it is a very huge problem for me. My thoughts are dying when I try to become too philosophical - when I want to become precise and exact and pin things down in reason that is precisely when they all slip away from me and become shadows and ghosts of the reality I want to describe. I think part of it has to do with the isolation of reason from emotion - this distinction is not really human, and doesn't really describe life. Ought we really to be training ourselves to think in a way that does not confront our real experience, but only a ghost of it?

But what else ought philosophy to be? Thomas Aquinas says "Philosophers and poets are alike in being big with wonder" - well, if one thinks coldly rational, abstract thoughts all day, this kills wonder. So there are two options: either a scholar must be careful to supplement this in his life with poetry or this is not philosophy.

Is it that philosophy deals with the whole human person, as a being of body and matter, reason and emotion while using ONLY reason as a tool?
Or is it that we really can't do human philosophy if we fully separate reason from emotion, just like we can't really be human and fully separate soul from body?

The implications of this could cause major problems, I know. Classical philosophy wants to escape from the body. Phenomenology might or might not have the equipment to deal with it. Analytic philosophy assuredly does not.

I don't know if I succeeded in expressing my point, and with the continual shifting of my underlying assumptions, I'm sure I've gestured at many wrong many paths in the above… I do not mean to say that scientific thinking is evil or that we should return to a naive simplicity; philosophy is hard work, not bouquets of roses, and even if tainted with death I do not see death as the ultimate evil. I am merely trying to capture, in broad impressionistic strokes, something I think is very real, and, whatever its real name or ultimate solution may be, it is a great danger for those thinkers whose minds do not come with an "off" switch.