In the history of psychological and philosophical anthropology there has been a constant oscillation in this world between radical spiritualism and radical materialism. That oscillation has caused fateful disruption in human life. An astonishingly small number of thinkers have opted for a third alternative: that of totality. The majority of high-aspiring idealists among them seem to have regarded a more or less radical spiritualism as the culmination of a really worthwhile spiritual attitude, and that spiritualistic type of dualism will be the main topic of our work.
We do not for a moment doubt the good intentions of thinkers who have sought their refuge in the idea, the tenacious idea, of something they call pure spirit, that is, an independent mental quality perfectly able to do without its bodily correlate. It is undoubtedly with the greatest sincerity they have believed that the only true spirituality was to be found just in this.
We do understand perfectly man's convulsive efforts to rise above the evident impotence and helplessness of the body. His senses tell him unmistakably that bodies die. But if life does have the wonderful value we commonly ascribe to it, then survival is bound to be a most important thing. To put it briefly: his intense longing for immortality inspired man to defy every testimony of his sound physical senses. The great disruption he feared was the one that obviously threatened to cut him off inexorably from everything he held dear. So the kind of connectedness that was bound to have the strongest appeal to his heart was the one really promising to maintain his identity, put as much as ever possible of his conscious life across the gloomy Styx, the river of death and destruction.
True, if his passionate desire for immortality leads man to refute every clear testimony of his sound senses, he must expect to be criticized, by unshakable realists, for harbouring an unreasonable attitude. On the other hand, however, one should have a fair amount of sympathetic comprehension just for this kind of unreasoning. For the issue--to man--is not a negligible one. To be or not to be, that is the question!
The choice that appears to present itself to men in general, is not at all necessarily, in unambiguous terms, a choice between totality and disruption. No, it is rather, from their point of view, a question of two alternatives to disruption. Which of the two shall they consider the lesser evil?
Let us be a little more explicit regarding this dilemma facing man:
What we are all naturally eager to secure is the widest possible conservation of our personal identity. We want a certain guarantee of unbreakable connectedness in the all-important dimensions of human life and human destiny, a more or less dependable safe-conduct across the threatening abyss of total annihilation and utter meaninglessness. It is precisely with this intention--or to a considerable extent for this very reason--that many have resigned themselves to accepting a certain undeniable disconnectedness, namely the alternative to a body-mind disruption suggested from time immemorial by philosophical dualism. This is a trend we shall try to follow down through the centuries, viewing it from our most specific angle. People imagine that this is, after all, the lesser disruption; the visible death they perceive with their literal senses otherwise leaves them without any hope whatsoever. A life partly cut up would seem to be better than a life cut away altogether, body and mind.
But what is this now? Is there an inherent split right in the very conception of totality? Are there two types of totality, of which you have to choose one and leave the other? If so, then the spiritualistic dualists may still have made the worthier choice. Here, indeed, our idea of totality seems to have entered the solemn courtroom where it is destined to be put to its decisive test. For just how "whole" would our celebrated "wholeness" turn out to be at the moment when we should be bound to say about that life we had boldly characterized as whole: "It will inevitably come to a point one day where every deeper meaning, every true connection with universal and transcendental realities (if any such realities exist) is brutally and irretrievably cut off."
One thing becomes quite clear then, regarding the items we have to include in our study: there is no escape from the question of immortality. Does man have an immortal soul? Yes or no. If our totality is really total--i.e., if it includes meaningfulness in human life in the widest sense, then we seem to be in an awkward position in either case. Suppose we answer, "Yes, the soul is immortal." Then we have admitted an absolute disruption between body and mind. Suppose we answer, "No, the soul is absolutely mortal", full stop! That would, indeed be the highest degree of disruption any truly spiritual-minded creature could imagine.
So this becomes a problem of both philosophical and religious order. But who would venture to say that it does not all the time also have a foot right in the field of the psycho-physical realities with which a modern scientist has to reckon? Above all it is here a question right in the very focus of our discussion concerning the relations between the inward and the outward: Is the innermost life of man (that "something" which we have agreed to call his soul, sometimes also his mind, or his spirit) radically dependent upon, or radically in-dependent of, its phenomenal counterpart (that physiological instrument the neurologist calls a human brain)?[1]
A modern investigator of the secrets of immortality, Aloys Wenzl,[2] in his serious endeavours to obtain some clues relative to the problem of how interior contents could do without their exterior media ventures upon a speculation which must be characterized as mildly hypothetical:
There is nothing to contradict the fact that a subject could experience, see and love truth, beauty and goodness without the instrument of the brain as a means of expression, if one frees oneself from the naivety that the path accessible to our experience, even if it is itself incomprehensible, is the only one.
So he arrives at the not very uncommon conclusion that nothing can prevent us from assuming that such things as imagination and memory, thinking and feeling, are perfectly possible faculties of the "leiblose Seele" (just that "bodiless soul", once more, which is the fascinating theme of our further inquiry).
Nothing? Really, should nothing prevent us from assuming the possibility of thoughts without brains? Some, we hope, would still feel here the need of modifying that bold "nothing" a little--for instance, by adding: "nothing but the factual experiences of our whole little world through all known ages so far." And personally we are naive enough to think that that may mean "something"!
The author admits, it is true, as very probable that such memory, imagination, thinking, and feeling would have to be of a somewhat "different quality", as compared to those of our usual experience today. For, in the experiences which we have on this side of the grave, "the reality of expression" is inevitably implied (What an appropriate concession!). However, we should not forget, he thinks, that the "contents are prior to their expression".
Well, that is just the great doubtful question, isn't it?
Wenzl alleges--as a sort of circumstantial evidence of that famous "priority" of the contents--a very common occurrence in everyday life: you may have some thought or memory in abeyance at a given moment, but somehow you are not quite able to "catch" that thought off-hand, or clearly formulate the memory. They still remain just outside your conscious grasp.
They are contents of a psychic realm that transcends our consciousness, but they are!
Are they really? That is just what we have permitted ourselves to doubt. And here we can only refer to the psychological considerations recently presented. That thought or memory which you have not yet actually caught or formulated--thus giving it flesh and bones, as it were--well, it simply does NOT exist! So far, it doesn't. That it may--perhaps very soon--come into existence, that is quite another matter.
And even Wenzl freely admits: we cannot imagine any mental contents at all without at least some kind of "imagined" expression. To a very good mathematician paper and pencil may often be superfluous, it is true. Similarly a very good chess player is perhaps able to carry on a game without any literal chessboard in front of him. Nevertheless, some kind or some degree of expression, some means of exteriorization, is seen to be absolutely indispensable in every case of interior realization.
If any one should be under the queer illusion that it is a truly practicable thing to have an impression without an expression--or, generally speaking, that thinking is possible without doing--then we should like to ask him one little question: did you ever try to think of a melody without singing or playing it? We dare say that any one will find that pretty impossible (unless he should happen to be better at this bit of abstraction than Mozart and Beethoven and all the other musical geniuses of history put together).
Notice: we do not say that you have to unfold the whole dramatic beauty of your stentorian voice in order to get a consciousness of that melody you have once learnt. The faintest humming will do--or even just making the first preparatory movements towards humming. But you will have to do something. You must have some degree of expression. Otherwise the impression, the conscious feeling of that melody in your mind, will obstinately refuse to present itself.
We know for instance, that the aging Beethoven was independent of the sense of hearing for composing music. From the external physical world of sound no single tone could reach him any longer. Still his head and his heart were full of music, weren't they? Yes, but who would dare to say that there was no movement in the opposite direction--"from within and outwards"? It would be hard for anyone to maintain that Beethoven, while he played or composed during his later years, lacked expression!
And now what about the mathematical genius? Mathematicians confess their dependence upon certain holdfasts every day. It obviously does not make any difference whether they are doing differential geometry, non-Euclidian, or multi-dimensional geometry, or any other kind of geometry. In the case of dimensions the professional mathematician has to suppress the super-dimensions, simply in order to have some kind of graphic representation at all.
Even if we speak of a pure order structure, we must still give this order structure itself names and symbols, and for this we need images and language. It's possible that there are other realms in which other beings than ourselves could perceive the inner workings of reality and its meaning without spatial images and without linguistic names--we cannot. (Ibid. p. 26)
So the concession is practically universal: even the most ingenious sorcerer of human contemplation and introspection admits his dependence--psychologically speaking--on some kind of temporal and spacial representation in the form of names, signs, or graphic images, by way of actual expression. He needs this urgently, simply in order to make sure that he has really "laid hold upon" something.
How then any serious investigator can still make the jump so easily to the distant theoretical possibility of a "body-free" subject, enjoying a perfect experience of interior values, that may seem strange enough!
It is a captivating sight to watch the historical development of that headstrong spiritualistic attitude towards the body-soul relations, and towards the whole "problem" of the inward "versus" the outward. The one-sidedness of that spiritualism is almost incredible. And the immense popularity it has reached right in the midst of an outrageously materialistic age is perhaps still more incredible.
But it has also had to endure some very bad shocks sometimes. Not so much on the part of stolid materialism, strange enough. Fortunately however, there is also a third viewpoint from which man's world can be envisioned. There is a more harmonious chain of human realities, forming an unbreakable ring of massive resistance, as it were, against all partial realities. That is the indivisible ring of totality in human life.
Both one-sided spiritualism and one-sided materialism have kept bumping and bumping against the supreme reality of that ring for centuries. But each attack has only left it more unbreakable and more buoyant than before. This special book on dualism as a disruptive phenomenon in our culture is an attempt at giving a certain historical outline of that buoyant totality and of the battle it has had to fight against schisms in human thoughts and human lives.
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