|
|
|
LECTURE IV |
INTRODUCTION
THE SEARCH FOR THE 'SELF' |
|
|
"What has soul in it differs from what has not, in that the
former displays life."
Aristotle (c. 350 B.C.E)
⌂
REMBRANDT VAN RIJN
|
|
If we are to understand the manner by which our
intellectual forbearers approached questions regarding the nature of the interaction between
the body and 'self'; it is important that we first understand the manner by which they perceived
each entity involved.
In our preceding discussion we introduced this
intangible aspect of our existence, and explored how our intellectual forbearers
considered its form. Here, we shall extend upon these concepts by attempting to
glean insight into the manner by which they regarded its properties, and the nature of their interaction with those of the body.
|
Figure I:2.1 - A
nineteenth-century postmortem photograph of an unidentified child
- the body of the child, itself, offers no apparent clue as
to the child's immediate state of being.
Photograph by Albert
Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes |
|
Despite its abiding
presence within our collective consciousness; and the degree of certainty with which it may be
anticipated - a degree afforded to no other worldly occurrence; for
mankind, the momentary event referred to as 'death' remains
but an enigma; and our most importunate questions,
confined to only its most fundamental qualities. Apart from that which concerns what becomes of an individual
beyond this moment; the most invulnerable of
these is the question of what exactly occurs within it.
To a casual observer, the
physical body of an individual appears no different in
the moment immediately following their death, than it
does in the moment immediately preceding it - a reality
easily demonstrated by the difficulty associated with
even contemporary attempts to clinically define death.
In spite of such ostensible
ambiguity, however, we remain somehow convinced that a clear distinction
does exist between these two bodies as, of these,
only one appears to us a form capable of exercising outwardly - as
movement and behavior; and inwardly - as emotion and desire; the
complex spectrum of faculties that has come to characterize a living
being; while the other, rendered somehow incapable of exercising these
faculties by the change which occurs during its moment of death; appears to
us wholly, and completely, as matter.
|
From these considerations arises an intriguing question:
By what quality is the living body
distinguished from the deceased corpse?
|
|
|
|
THE BREATH OF LIFE
|
|
|
|
If we approach this question, as in our previous
discussion, by considering those opinions propounded by our
earliest intellectual forbearers; we may begin by reviewing those
of Greek philosopher Aristotle (c. 384-322 BC). Aristotle, in
his c. 350 BC text De Anima (translated: Of the
Soul), proposed that the deceased corpse was distinguished
from the living body by the presence, or absence, of a quality he
referred to as anima - which he considered the actuality
of a body:
|
“Among
substances are by general consent reckoned bodies and
especially natural bodies; for they are the principles
of all other bodies. Of natural bodies some have life in
them, others not; by life we mean self-nutrition and
growth (with its correlative decay). It follows that
every natural body which has life in it is a substance
in the sense of a composite.
But since it is also a body of such and such a kind,
viz. having life, the body cannot be soul; the body is
the subject or matter, not what is attributed to it.
Hence the soul must be a substance in the sense of the
form of a natural body having life potentially within
it. But substance is actuality, and thus soul is the
actuality of a body as above characterized. Now the word
actuality has two senses corresponding respectively to
the possession of knowledge and the actual exercise of
knowledge. It is obvious that the soul is actuality in
the first sense, viz. that of knowledge as possessed,
for both sleeping and waking presuppose the existence of
soul, and of these waking corresponds to actual knowing,
sleeping to knowledge possessed but not employed, and,
in the history of the individual, knowledge comes before
its employment or exercise.” |
American ethnologist
Daniel Garrison Brinton
(1837-1899), in his 1896 publication The Myths of the New
World: A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of
America, observed that a similar belief existed among the
cultural traditions held by several societies that occupied
the North American continent prior to the arrival of European
colonists:
|
“The
missionary Charlevoix wrote several excellent works on
America toward the beginning of the last century, and he
is often quoted by later authors; but probably no one of
his sayings has been thus honored more frequently than
this: 'The belief [that is] best established among our
Americans is that of the immortality of the soul' [...]
Proof of Charlevoix's opinion may be derived from three
independent sources. The aboriginal languages may
be examined for terms corresponding to the word soul;
the opinions of the Indians themselves may be quoted;
and the significance of sepulchral rites as indicative
of a belief in life after death may be determined.
... the most satisfactory
is the first of these. We call the soul a
ghost or spirit, and often a shade. In these words
the breath and the shadow are the sensuous
perceptions transferred to represent the immaterial
object of our thought [...] The New England tribes
called the soul chemung, the shadow, and in Quiché
natub, in Eskimo tarnak, in Dakota nagi
express both these ideas. In Mohawk atonritz,
the soul, is from atonrion, to breathe [...] Of
course, no one need demand that a strict immateriality
be attached to these words. Such a colorless
negative abstraction never existed for them, neither
does it for us, though we delude ourselves into
believing that it does. The soul was to them the
invisible man, material as ever, but lost to the
appreciation of the senses.” |
|
Whether it was to address the
above-enumerated question that these societies first
developed this idea, or whether it was this idea that
determined how they would address this question; the belief that the
physical body is, alone, an inanimate machine, and that
life is a property of an entity or substance entirely distinct from
it; is not one that is unique solely to these traditions.
Rather, it is one which has arisen, and survived, within a mélange of geographically
and culturally diverse
human societies.
It is this idea which
appears within the Christian Bible (Genesis 2:7) -
where it is written that “... the LORD God formed the man
of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life, and the man became a living creature;”
the Jewish Tanakh (Bereshit 2:7) -
where it is written that “... HaShem G-d formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man
became a living soul;” and
the Islamic Qur'an
(Sura 15, Ayah 26-31) - where it is written that “... we created
man of clay that gives forth sound, of black mud fashioned in shape.
And the jinn We created before, of intensely hot fire. And
when your Lord said to the angels: Surely I am going to create a
mortal of the essence of black mud fashioned in shape. So when
I have made him complete and breathed into him of My spirit, fall
down making obeisance to him. So the angels made obeisance,
all of them together.”
A similar idea appears, also,
within the Vedic Upanishads
(Katha 3:3-4) - a series of texts believed to have been composed
over centuries by peoples who occupied the Indus River Valley (located
in present-day Pakistan) during the 7th Century BC. This
view, as
translated by Sri Lankan anthropologist Patrick Olivelle (b. 1942),
also holds the 'self' to be the animating element within the body,
though unlike the theories we have explored thus far, it
distinguishes between the 'self', the intellect, and the
mind:
|
|
Figure I:2.2 - A
painting depicting 'the creation of man' as it is described
in the Bible (Genesis 2:7).
Painting by Luca Giordano |
|
“Know
the self (ātman) as a rider in a chariot,
and the body (śarīra), as simply the
chariot.
Know the intellect (buddhi) as the
charioteer,
and the mind (manas), as simply the
reins.” |
Within the Huang Ti Nei Ching Su Wên
(translated: The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine);
this idea appears, albeit in a further modified form, as the
philosophical foundation which underlies the belief that all of nature is the product of two
opposing forces - Yin and
Yang; and that life arises by their confluence (the material body being Yin,
and the immaterial soul Yang):
|
“The Yellow Emperor
said: 'The principle of Yin and Yang [the male and female elements
in nature] is the basic principle of the entire universe. It
is the principle of everything in creation. It brings about
the transformation to parenthood; it is the root and source of life
and death; and it is also found within the temples of the gods [...]
Water represents Yin, and fire represents Yang.
Yang creates the air and Yin creates the flavors.
The flavors belong to the physical body. When the
body dies the ethereal spirit is restored to the air,
having thus undergone a complete metamorphosis (having
thus become naturalized ). The ethereal spirit
receives its nourishment from the air and the body
receives its nourishment from the flavors. The
ethereal spirit is created through metamorphosis, the
physical shape assumes life through breath.'” |
|
|
|
|
A BODILY EVENT
|
|
|
|
In his 1871 text Primitive Cultures, English anthropologist
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) wrote that “the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed,
in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes.”
In other words, in explicating the fundamental uniformity which pervades the philosophical theories
delineated above; Tylor proposed that it may have been partially in response to the question of death that our intellectual
forbearers first developed the idea of a 'self'; and designated this entity the executor of those qualities
which appear to distinguish the living body from the deceased corpse:
|
“It
seems as though thinking men, as yet at a low level of
culture, were deeply impressed by two groups of biological
problems. In the first place, what is it that makes
the difference between a living body and a dead one; what
causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death? In the
second place, what are those human shapes which appear in
dreams and visions? Looking at these two groups of
phenomena, the ancient savage philosophers probably made
their first step by the obvious inference that every man has
two things belonging to him, namely, a life and a phantom.
These two are evidently in close connexion with the body,
the life as enabling it to feel and think and act, the
phantom as being its image or second self; both, also, are
perceived to be things separable from the body, the life as
able to go away and leave it insensible or dead, the phantom
as appearing to people at a distance from it.
The
second step would seem also easy for savages to make, seeing
how extremely difficult civilized men have found it to
unmake. It is merely to combine the life and the
phantom. As both belong to the body, why should they
not also belong to one another, and to be manifestations of
one and the same soul? Let them then be considered as
united, and the result is that well-known conception which
may be described as an apparitional-soul, a ghost-soul.”
|
For many of our intellectual forbearers, as evidenced
by those writings and oral traditions which have survived them, the
existence of an intangible 'self', was a reality somehow immune to those threats which
doubt and observation have otherwise exacted upon similar objects of human knowledge and understanding. Throughout
history, no culture has been known to exist that did not possess such a concept, and no
culture known to exist today, is without its own - whether developed within or adopted from without. As Tylor
noted: while there is “nothing in the nature of things [...] to forbid the possibility of such existence [...]
the tribes are not found.”
Whether for those reasons described by Tylor, or for others unconsidered
thus far; this fundamental idea has had a monumental influence upon the historical development of human culture.
An influence evident in the consideration that the philosophical foundations of many of the
world's surviving religious traditions proceed from the idea that death is merely a bodily event; and that upon its
occurrence, the 'self' (occasionally referred to in English as the soul or
spirit) is liberated from its physical vessel, and permitted to continue its
existence in an altered, or ethereal, form.
|
 |
Figure I:2.3 - A
print entitled The Soul hovering over the Body
reluctantly parting with Life ... How wishfully she looks on
all she's leaving, now no longer her's.
Print by Luigi Schiavonetti |
|
|
|
|
A CENTRAL THINKING AREA
|
|
|
|
Unlike the influence this idea
has exercised upon the world's surviving religious traditions; its
influence upon the evolution of our contemporary scientific
understanding has remained far more subtle, for it is reflected not in
the subjects and theories which comprise the body of literature this
evolution has yielded; but rather, in those subjects and theories
which do not.
As US philosopher Daniel Clement Dennett
(b.1942) begrudgingly acknowledged, in his 1991 text
Consciousness Explained, “almost all researchers in cognitive
science, whether they consider themselves neuroscientists
or psychologists or artificial intelligence researchers, tend to
postpone questions about consciousness by restricting their
attention to the 'peripheral' and 'subordinate' systems of the
mind/brain, which are deemed to feed and service some dimly imagined
'center' where 'conscious thought' and 'experience' take place.”
In other words, that contemporary “theorists tend to think of perceptual
systems as providing 'input' to some central thinking arena, which in
turn provides 'control' or 'direction' to some relatively peripheral
systems governing bodily motion” - a perspective that, as Tylor noted
nearly a century before, is but the “doctrine of object-souls, turned to a new
purpose as a method of explaining the phenomena of thought.”
 |
Figure I:2.4 - A
diagram from his 1664 text Traite de l'homme (translated:
Treatise of Man), depicting the manner by which
French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) believed the visual image of an
arrow was received by the eyes, and transmitted (via the
optic nerve) to the pineal gland - which Descartes held to
be the physical location of the dimly imagined 'center'
described by Dennett - i.e. the seat of the soul.
Print by René Descartes |
To recognize this influence for ourselves, we must
return to our discussion of the interaction between the body and
'self' by first accepting - or perhaps assuming
- that behavior and movement are predetermined (albeit to varying
degrees) by acts of thought. By accepting this premise, we
will find that the interaction between these entities may be modeled by the functional arc
described by Dennett: that man first experiences his
environment by the window of his senses; contemplates these
sensations by his faculty of thought; and by these contemplations,
acts upon his environment by manipulating his physical form.
|
|
|
|
THE IDEA OF THE HOMUNCULUS
|
|
|
|
Figure I:2.5 - A
sketch depicting the consciousness model characterized
by the homunculus. This little man
receives the visual impression of a key (schlüssel);
analyzes it based upon a cache of prior experience; and then
relays the resulting information to the vocal cords -
whereupon the individual is able to then verbally
acknowledge that they recognize the object.
Sketch by Unknown Artist |
|
The model described above is referred
to, within contemporary scientific exposition, as the idea
of the homunculus for it proceeds from a view
that the human body is an inanimate machine, and the
'self' (the central processing unit referenced by Dennett) akin to a little man responsible for its operation
- the term homunculus is derived
from the diminutive form of the Latin word human.
This model, though ostensibly absent within contemporary scientific
literature, remains latent within the contemporary research
community, and owes its longevity to a convenience which it affords
those researchers whose explorations straddle the conceptual
boundary between the body and 'self' -
eliminating (or at least delaying) the necessity to
regard consciousness (wakefulness), or awareness,
as a physiological process.
To appreciate the appeal of this convenience, consider the question:
what is awareness?
THE QUESTIONS OF 'AWARENESS'
In general, man believes that he is
aware of the tangible world that surrounds him
- a belief affirmed largely by the countless textures, hues,
scents, sounds, and tastes that daily impress themselves upon his
senses. Four indomitable questions arise, however, if we attempt
to comprehend the source and nature of this awareness;
upon having recognized these impressions as simply that.
The act of sensation entails only the
dispassionate reception of such impressions, and if it were
solely by the organs of sensation that awareness of these
impressions was conferred; man would be no more aware of his
environment than a television is aware of the electromagnetic signal it
receives. From this
observation arises the first question:
How, if not by his sensations, is man aware
of his world?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Consider, further, that the tangible
world known to man is wholly limited to only those aspects which
appeal to the acuities of his senses; and that of the world of the
dolphin, who perceives sounds inaudible to the human ear; or of that of
the hummingbird, who perceives light invisible to the human eye; he
knows nothing - except what he may infer by analogy. From
this observation arises the second question:
How, if it is not by his sensations that man is
aware of his world ...
... is his world restricted to only those aspects that
appeal to the acuities of his senses?
The difficulty of addressing these questions becomes
further compounded if we consider that, in addition to the awareness man
possesses for the aspects of his world he may perceive by his senses; he
is also aware of intangible
objects - objects such as those which appear to him in his
dreams, and as objects of thought. This awareness, however,
is not conferred by any corporeal means, as direct knowledge of such
objects lies beyond the acuities of all known physical organs of
sensation. From this observation arises the third question:
How, if his world is restricted to only those
aspects that appeal to the acuities of his senses ...
... is man aware of objects conceived, and experienced,
entirely in the absence of direct sensation?
The fourth concerns the
source of awareness, and thus, lies apart from those we have
considered thus far - all of which concern, exclusively, the manner by
which this quality is experienced (i.e. its nature); and
instead, within the observation that awareness appears to be
exclusively a property of discrete forms. Though the known
universe is composed of an infinite quantity of matter; the totality of
this matter is not aware, insofar as our contemporary
understanding of this quality permits us to conclude. Yet, human
beings (and, arguably, all other forms of life) - forms composed of only
a minute proportion of this matter; appear to all be in
possession of this quality (to varying observable extents).
From this consideration arises the fourth indomitable question:
From where, within the tangible limits of the
human form, does this awareness arise?
Throughout history, it is these indomitable questions that have
proven the most elusive for those scientists who sought to identify
the distinction between the living body and the deceased corpse.
As a consequence of technological advancements made throughout the
twentieth century, these questions have come to occupy a focal point
in the highly contentious judicial debates surrounding concepts of
birth and death (i.e.
issues such as abortion, the use of artificial life support
measures, and organ donation/transplantation); and it is to
understand how our intellectual forbearers, and their progeny, have approached these questions that we shall now turn
our discussion toward these questions, and the search for the
location, within the tangible limits of the human body, of the
'self'.
In other
words, toward the search for the organ of the 'self'.
|
|
|
|
|
|
