Please join us as we work through the book “In Defense of the Soul: What it Means to Be Human” by Ric Machuga, with help from Professor of Philosophy Harrison Kleiner.
Join us Tuesdays, beginning January 17 from 4:00-4:50, in the lounge in the basement of Old Main.
What are you doing tomorrow?
Actually, I really don’t care. But I’d like to change the subject to how fascinated I am with you for being able to answer whatsoever. No other species has a concept of what the word “tomorrow” actually refers to.
Do you feel special?
And that’s not all you know, smarty-pants. What makes a triangle a triangle? “Well, my good man!” you say, “It’s three straight lines indubitably connecting. Indubitably!” and you chuckle with a mustachioed yawn through a scotch napkin. (For flavor I’m giving you the voice of a rich city snob from 1875).
But while you might think knowing what a triangle is befits any fourth-grader gibbering through a mouthload of Snack Packs – you must not ignore the importance of human rationality. We are the only species which apparently has the ability to conceptualize things such as perfect triangles. Who cares? Well, YOU should, if you’re a Materialist.
How do we explain the existence of rationalism in a material world? What does it mean to be a thoughtful creature, who can perceive of things such as “tomorrow?”
If your response was, “Well, that’s what it means to be human!” then you’re indubitably right.
Please join SHAFT this Spring as we explore materialism through the lens of the intensely cerebral ancient and medieval philosophers, peeking into the fascinating metaphysics of some of the greatest thinkers in history – Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, who propose we have “souls” that exist outside of space and time.
To acquaint us with these intriguing ideas and further our understanding, SHAFT is very honored to have the help of Professor Harrison Kleiner this Spring. Those interested in understanding how contemporary thinkers are talking about Atheism, Materialism and the Soul should join the discussion for some valuable insight.
Ric Machuga, who visited USU years ago, argues for the existence of the human soul and a higher meaning for human life than the materialist allows. These indefatigable and contemporary perspectives based on ancient philosophy are problematic for those of us who see ourselves as a function of senseless atomic machinery.
Please join us!
Your response should be, “Indubitably. I’ll keep a bespectacled eye on my pocket-watch, my good man.”
> “No other species has a concept of what the word “tomorrow” actually refers to.”
If you are going with a literal interpretation of that, about 4 billion people don’t know what the word means either. If you are asserting that animals do not have a basis for understanding the passage of time, or anticipating that events can happen in the future in some fixed interval, you are grossly mistaken. Even plants have a sense of the passage of time, based on photoperiod, which is all the passage of a day is (an arbitrary number of seconds that happens to correspond roughly to the rotation of earth and its exposure to sunlight) and numerous animals are capable of anticipating future events and have precise internal measures of time. The actual biology of temporal perception is one of the more studied mechanisms and strongly conserved among species.
Similarly, being able to identify geometric regularity is not a particularly difficult concept – we have been able to train chickens for product quality control entirely because it is so easy to express the idea of regularity of geometry to even such a primitive neural structure. You can easily train primates to sign the actual name of the shape, not just being able to identify it but able to express it in a human symbolic language.
Ignoring the ignorance of what other organisms are actually capable of, there is the false sense that because we can express an idea with our language we are somehow special for it. Are we somehow more human than ancient romans because we are able to express the value 0, perform division , and have fractional values with our language, while they could not. Linguistically they simply could not express such things. Similarly are we cognitively superior to our ancestors from simply a couple hundred years ago because we can speak of complex numbers while they could not? Certainly we could not have had most of our advancements in things like electronics without being able to express complex numbers, but that hardly makes me more human than our ancestors. Is western culture superior to Japanese culture because we have a much more realized concept of pronouns?
Did possessing literacy make slave owners more human than slaves? Was the Wild Boy of Aveyron subhuman because he lacked language? Are my infant twins? Language very much shapes cognition, that’s well understood, and different languages will actually shape cognition differently. If we are going to use the ability to express ideas with language as a determining factor for humanity than there are apparently numerous species of humans rather than one. In fact, I am likely a different species from most of you if that is the criteria, as I am thoroughly fluent in a couple of dozen different computational languages spanning 50 years of computing environments, each with fully unique concepts that someone without that breadth of language could not express. Similarly my wife would be distinct from me, as she can speak and read half a dozen eastern languages in addition to english and spanish, and a professional vernacular that describes concepts foreign to me.
The problem with intentional language is that it begins with the unsubstantiated idea that there even is such a thing, when there is little actual evidence that it is anything more than a cognitive artifact in certain cultures of people. It’s also a very poor test to differentiate human from non-human, nor more valid than the lakota who assumed they were the one true people and everyone else happened to be less than human simply because they arbitrarily decided a criteria based on themselves and assuming its absence in others. What it really demonstrates is a lack of understanding of everything considered less than human, rather than a definition of what it means to be human.
Josh – I would invite you to join our reading group to get a serious argument on the other side.
> “Josh – I would invite you to join our reading group to get a serious argument on the other side.”
I will make some effort – this is something I have jumped on out of the blue to debate with you periodically, while admittedly not being fully versed in the source material, and to properly challenge the material I should at least be familiar.
That said, man I wish this happened a couple years ago when the reading club was first proposed (over a summer I believe…). The afore referenced infant twins coupled with frequent business travel out of the valley doesn’t afford me much luxery for social outings, however intellectually stimulating. If there is a nice text book quality version of the book (i.e. one with margins that can accomidate many notations of dissent) I would at least try to participate in virtual discussions (there is a phrase that has a distinctly different meaning than it should) baring the luxery of showing up in person.
(as an aside I would ask what the university criteria for non-student participation in student clubs is, as I am merely spouse of a student rather than a student myself; my own school set a maximum ratio of student to non-student before the club had to pay facilities usage fees)
I’m ashamed to admit that I’m spitting on Machuga’s boots by presenting terribly generalized ideas above. What you want is the London Symphony Orchestra and I’m giving you a fart in a coffee can.
I like where you’re going, and the places it could take the conversation, but don’t take the above post as a call to action. Only in joining us for the reading will you have the true substance to work with.
It’s the Mona Lisa you want, and I’m only giving you this.
http://museumofbadart.org/
I’ll try to keep our progress updated here for the benefit of myself and the group, but more importantly so anyone who wants to jump in later has a bit of basic information on what we’ve covered.
Chapter 1: Humans As Rational Animals – Why Aristotle Still Matters
So Machuga is NOT arguing for a ghost-in-the-machine “Soul,” or disembodied immortal religious spirit that exists outside the body.
(This immortal, immaterial “ghost” is an aspect of Dualism, which we are not concerned with. Dualism is the philosophy of Descartes, who reasoned that reality is composed of two things: Mind and Matter. According to Dualists, or Cartesians, our Minds are divine things that exist outside the world of Matter – remember the Dualist catch-phrase “I think, therefore I Am.”)
Instead, the book is about Aristotle’s “soul,” which is initially complicated because the word Soul is so loaded. Aristotle’s definition is entirely different from other meanings throughout history (such as ghosts and immortal persons).
According to Machuga, Aristotelian “souls” are rationally consistent with modern science (including evolutionary biology) and grounded in three premises:
So the following are the three different positions that relate the material human body to the existence of a person.
The purpose of this reading is to investigate what that ‘something else’ is according to Aristotle, a la Machuga.
It is important to note that this ‘something else’ does not require any kind of supernatural being(s), and it can be consistent with either non-religious or religious views of life (mortal and immortal).
Chapter 2: Getting it Right from the Start
Form, Shape and the Meaning of Things
As Biology can study of beings qua life, and Physics can study of beings qua matter, Ontology is the study of beings qua being - or the study of what it means for things to exist.
Ontology studies questions like:
What is the Soul?
Is Consciousness merely a physical property of the brain?
Do we have Free Will?
Ontology is a branch of Metaphysics, which investigates things that don’t necessarily exist but still have a major effect in the world, such as the number 4. The number 4 is said not to exist, but to subsist.
Hylomorphism is Aristotle’s combination of Hyle (stuff, matter) and Morph (form).
It is important to note that this Form is not the same as Shape or content. If you have a hammer, and a child asks you, “What’s that?” Even if you were to provide the best blueprint imaginable about what it physically was, down to its chemical makeup and electro-conductivity, you wouldn’t be telling the child anything about what the hammer actually is for – what a hammer really means.
So there is no real scientific way (such as physics, chemistry) to describe this sort of meaning that is inherent in an object or a word.
So, the major theme of the book is that Aristotle’s “soul” is in the body the same way the meaning is within words. We do not have souls, we are souls.
(a note: these premises might be objectionable in some way, but we would ask that until the full argument is presented we simply try to understand them rather than present counter-arguments)
Chapter 3: Dividing Nature at Its Joints
The Difference Between Plants, Animals and Humans
Remember, Aristotle’s “soul” is simply the abilities that make something alive – not anything immortal, god-given, or a “ghost” form.
Humans are capable of self-knowledge, which sets us apart from plants and animals. We are in a class of our own because of this ability. The next chapters also address this classification in relation to evolutionary biology.
Chapter 4: Objective Differences in Perspective
Form Versus Shape
Remember, “Form” is the meaning within things, whereas “Shape” is their material content.
For example, when we look at these two words, though they consist of different material shapes, the information or form we can see in them remains the same:
RED
Red
Science is concerned with shape, and Aristotle’s ontology is concerned with meaning.
When we classify humans as having the ability to reason, and we say that chimps, dogs, birds and flowers don’t have this ability, it is a matter of perspective rather than clashing claims.
Dividing nature into things that can reason, things that are sentient, things that are just alive, and things which are inanimate are called ontological classes. These are simply the ways we know things to be different than one another.
Even though through evolutionary biology we know that there is a continuum between species, from single-celled organisms to mankind, we can still classify things according to what we know about their abilities.