Amateur Metaphysics Hour

Eastern Orthodox theologian David B. Hart (Writing in the Wall Street Journal! Are we seeing the emergence here of a new “public theologian”? Look out Stanley Hauerwas!) reflects on the metaphysics of soul and body in light of the Terri Schiavo controversy (via Pontifications):

Terri Schiavo has now died, but of course the controversy surrounding her last days will persist indefinitely. Most of the issues raised as she was dying were legal and moral; but at the margins of the storm, questions of a more “metaphysical” nature were occasionally raised in public. For instance, I heard three people on the radio last week speculating on the whereabouts of her “soul.”

One opined that where consciousness has sunk below a certain minimally responsive level, the soul has already departed the body; the other two thought that the soul remains, but as a dormant prisoner of the ruined flesh, awaiting release. Their arguments, being intuitive, were of little interest. What caught my attention was the unreflective dualism to which all three clearly subscribed: The soul, they assumed, is a kind of magical essence haunting the body, a ghost in a machine.

This is in fact a peculiarly modern view of the matter, not much older than the 17th-century philosophy of Descartes. While it is now the model to which most of us habitually revert when talking about the soul–whether we believe in such things or not–it has scant basis in either Christian or Jewish tradition.

The “living soul” of Scripture is the whole corporeal and spiritual totality of a person whom the breath of God has wakened to life. Thomas Aquinas, interpreting centuries of Christian and pagan metaphysics, defined the immortal soul as the “form of the body,” the vital power animating, pervading, shaping an individual from the moment of conception, drawing all the energies of life into a unity.

This is not to deny that, for Christian tradition, the soul transcends and survives the earthly life of the body. It is only to say that the soul, rather than being a kind of “guest” within the self, is instead the underlying mystery of a life in its fullness. In it the multiplicity of experience is knit into a single continuous and developing identity. It encompasses all the dimensions of human existence: animal functions and abstract intellect, sensation and reason, emotion and reflection, flesh and spirit, natural aptitude and supernatural longing. As such, it grants us an openness to the world of which no other creature is capable, allowing us to take in reality through feeling and thought, recognition and surprise, will and desire, memory and anticipation, imagination and curiosity, delight and sorrow, invention and art.

I just want to make two quick points. First, historically, it does seem that there are theologians who have held something like a dualist doctrine of the soul, Augustine most prominently.

Secondly, I have always had trouble seeing much daylight between the supposedly “bad” Platonic-Augustinian dualism and the allegedly “good” Thomist hylomorphism (to use the philosophical term d’art). If the soul “transcends and survives the earthly life of the body,” as both Platonists/Augustinians and Thomists affirm, and that soul’s continued existence provides the essential bit of continuity between my present self and my self at the Resurrection, then what exactly is the substantive difference between the two positions?

Thomists say that the soul is the “form” of the body, but this has always seemed to me like a fudge on the Aristotelian notion of form which means something like the organizational and functional structure of a thing, not a substance that is capable of separate existence in its own right. And a dualist is by no means committed to the view that the connection between soul and body is merely haphazzard (see, e.g. Richard Swinburne’s Evolution of the Soul).

Sometimes it is said that the Thomist position affirms the goodness of the body, and, by extension, the material world, while the Platonic/Augustinian view denigrates the body as the “prison house” of the soul. But there doesn’t seem to be any necessary connection between what is the case metaphysically and the evaluative attitude we take toward the body. Or if there is, it still remains that both views affirm that the soul is the essential (and therefore presumably more important) part of me.

(Incidentally, I’m the amateur in question, not David Hart, who is no doubt much smarter than me.)