Beowulf: Burning
in the Aftermath
Feraco
Search for Human Potential
10 January 2012
When asking about the soul’s nature, it helps
to start with basic questions… something like
“Where is it?”
Is it in your head? Heart? Pinky?
Clearly, the soul isn’t something you can grab
and rip out, Mortal Kombat-style.
But how can we be sure it exists if we can’t
find it?
To try solving this puzzle ourselves, we need
to look at what constitutes a human being.
Our first school of thought today is Monism,
which holds that everything is made out of the
same stuff – no blending between anything.
This “stuff” could be matter, could be energy,
could be thought – but whatever we’re made of is
uniform.
In other words, there’s no separation between
the “spiritual” and the “physical” – Monists
believe that everything is built from the same
blocks.
Therefore, humans are either going to be all
spiritual “stuff” or all physical “stuff.”
There are two subsets of thought that,
when combined, form the Monist school.
Think of a coin representing the
Monist spectrum, with each subset
representing one of its faces.
We’ll assign “heads” to the
Materialists, who believed that
everything is physical – the
energy/matter continuum, essentially.
In this case, “thought” would not be
something that’s “intangible” – it’s a real,
tangible electrical signal, carried from
physical neuron to physical neuron.
Since nothing is intangible – and the
soul would seem to be – the Materialists
argue we don’t have them.
There’s some disagreement among
Materialists, however, on what constitutes a
human being.
We’ll only concentrate on two sub-subsets
in the interest of time.
Eliminative Materialists take a hard line:
“thought” doesn’t exist, nor does sensation.
Everything is just an electrical event in
your brain, and all events are made of the
same “stuff”: nothing that happens brainwise is distinct.
Reductive Materialists are gentler – they
accept thought exists – but they also reduce
it to an electric event.
In any event, all Materialists basically
argue that we’re just “stuff,” and there’s no
mysterious or mystical “soul” in us because
we’re uniform and thus indivisible.
If Materialist Monists (say that five
times fast!) have the right idea – that
we’re uniform blocks of “stuff” – we
can’t be divided into bodies and souls.
Since we can’t be divided, we can’t
release anything separate when we
die.
(Also, if a soul’s not put in at birth,
a soul’s not leaving when we die.)
This, of course, doesn’t worry the
Monists much: as William Hazlitt put
it, “there was a time when we were
not: this gives us no concern – why
then should it trouble us that a time
will come when we shall cease to be?”
Since we assigned “heads” to
the Materialists, we’ll assign
“tails” to the Idealists, who
believed that the only things that
exist are minds and ideas;
anything that seems physical
instead is simply a mental
projection.
In other words, we’ll move from
being nothing but physical forms
in the Materialists’ eyes to
nothing but souls now.
This body is not a body; my eyes
aren’t being used; it’s all in my
head.
With the Materialists and Idealists
representing opposing sides of a coin, it
stands to reason that there’s a school that
grabs the whole coin.
That’s the Dualist school.
They hold that both bodies (physical
“stuff”) and souls (mental/spiritual “stuff”)
can exist, and account for our inability to
sense the soul by proposing what amounts to
a multi-plane system.
Our bodies exist in this reality/plane of
existence, while our souls exist in another
one – one that’s perfectly laid over our own
and runs at exactly the same speed.
We’re linked together in time, if not in
physical space, and we access what we can’t
see like an antenna that receives and
processes an external signal.
If you like the concept of human
beings as combinations – a fusion of
body and soul – you’re also accepting
the idea of a “double reality” (the
seen and unseen).
For that matter, you might buy into
“double reality” without being a
Dualist at heart.
You can propose that a human being
is one thing (not body and soul
components, but one whole object),
then assert that some “omni force” – a
god or gods – operates beyond your
range of sensory perception.
It affects your life, it can help you,
it can sense you – but you can’t see it.
In any case, each school of thought seeks to
address similar concerns.
Is there more to man than what can be sensed?
If there isn’t, how did we even conceive of a
“soul”?
(It’s not like anyone believes they have “secret
physical” components.)
If there is, which part is more important – body
or soul?
Which part lives your life?
Is what goes on in my head – my consciousness
and thoughts – different from my soul?
(Descartes said no – he felt that the mind and
spirit combined to form the “theatre of
consciousness and conscious experience.”)
Oddly enough, these questions go to the heart
of our earlier explorations of choice and morality.
If we’re just programmed by cells and
chemistry, are our “infinite possibilities” actually
limited – at a sub-molecular level?
(It’s the same question we considered when we
introduced the “divinely guided” artist, except
here biology, not divinity, provides the guidance.)
As you can imagine, Monists and Dualists
can’t reach common ground while considering
these matters (mainly due to the Monists’
perspective), and they don’t take too kindly to
each other.
The Monists believe that we are complex –
but uniform – beings, with our uniformity
eliminating the possibility that we possess
souls.
The Dualists believe the opposite – that
we’re divided at a metaphysical level, and that
there’s something to us that we aren’t seeing.
But even if we do have souls – if we are
living a Dualist existence – the Hazlitt quote is
still worth pondering.
After all, none of us can remember a time
before our births.
What was our soul doing before then?
Where does the river begin?
Where do we go after – if there’s anywhere
to go?
And where does the river end?
Moreover, if one does have a soul, one has to
wonder whether it can be changed (consciously
or unconsciously), damaged, etc.
At a minimum, if the soul can’t be changed,
character and personality certainly can; this
would indicate that soul and character are
separate.
If the soul can’t be changed, is it more
important than our character – our selfconstructed personas, the ones that we shift in
accordance with the experiences and
knowledge we gain throughout our lives?
Which one governs our behavior – soul or
character?
And if souls can’t be changed, why bother
being good?
Your soul’s going to be the same anyway.
Is it a matter of fearing the karmic
consequences?
Are we afraid something bad will happen to
our souls after we die regardless of whether
the soul was “responsible”?
In What is Morality?, I made the same
point about a dozen times: our morals
provide a scaffold in order to stop us from
behaving (naturally) badly.
What would have motivated that awful
“natural” behavior, however?
Our souls?
If not, why do we believe our soul’s
eventual fate depends on what we do here?
How is it any more fair to punish a soul
for something it couldn’t control than it
would be to punish someone who didn’t mean
to commit a crime?
And if there’s some meaning to our lives
at the time we die, will we have been defined
by who we are…or what we’ve done?
Jesse Lacey, Brand New’s lead vocalist,
once sang, “…I’m not scared to die / But I’m a
little bit scared of what comes after / Do I get
the gold chariot? / Do I float through the
ceiling? / Do I divide and fall apart?”
William Ernest Hocking wryly notes that
“man is the only animal that contemplates
death, and also the only animal that shows
any sign of doubt of its finality.”
Numerous cultures and theologies provide
different explanations for what death
actually is.
(One wonders why we don’t have a
“Unified Theory of Death.”)
However, it’s useful to begin with our old
logic, the Laws of the Excluded Middle and
Noncontradiction: either something lies
beyond death – regardless of what it is – or
nothing does.
For the sake of our exploration today,
we’ll consider both.
Scientifically speaking, death
represents the end of corporeal
existence.
(“Corporeal” = “Physical” –
“Corpus”  Body  Corpse.)
It seems like such a simple deal, and
to a Materialist, it is – but to others,
not so much.
Remember, if you’re a Materialist,
you don’t believe in a division between
realms – you think this is it.
This doesn’t mean that a Dualist
can’t believe this is it; it’s just that
dualism is a prerequisite belief if one
wants to believe in some sort of
afterlife or reincarnation.
As you might expect, a Monist doesn’t
think anything happens after death – or
happened before life.
This works for Idealists (who believe we’re
nothing but mental energy and projections),
as well as for Materialists.
The Idealists, after all, recognize that
death “happens,” even if they don’t believe a
physical body is actually expiring.
Instead, they simply assume death
represents the fundamental ending of a
consciousness.
A Dualist, on the other hand, operates
under the principle that there’s more to us
than meets the eye.
Again, you don’t have to believe in an
afterlife if you’re a Dualist, but a belief in
some state of being that persists after death
requires you to assume that humans are
more than sacks of meat and bones.
If you’re a Monist, can you fear
death?
Sure – there’s a push and pull
between accepting what you see as the
natural necessity of death and facing
the overwhelming terror of oblivion.
Plus, there’s always that final
possibility: what if you’re wrong?
(Would this be a good or bad thing?
If you’re a Monist, I suppose it
depends.)
If you’re a Dualist, should you fear
death?
Sure – what if you’re wrong?
Plus, who’s to say you lived well
enough to enjoy a second life even if
you’re a Dualist?
Imminent death tends to elicit a number
of different fearful reactions from people.
We may fear that, as I alluded to before,
something we did in life will come back to
haunt us.
Others may fear that nothing we do, for
good or ill, will impact our fate after death.
Still others fear death because it is a
mystery, and our minds respond oddly to
perceived dangers that aren’t fully
understood.
We may fear that the end will involve
suffering, or that nothing awaits us on the
other side.
But our greatest fear may also be the
simplest: the possibility that our deeply-held
beliefs about the end are, in fact, wrong –
and that something else, something
unanticipated, will happen instead.
The great philosopher Plato took a physicallyoriented approach to the study of death.
He argued physical objects don’t just stop
existing.
If you want to “kill” a chair, what do you do?
Breaking it up just separates it into its
components, and even burning it leaves ashes.
The chair’s been transformed into something
else, but not eradicated from existence;
whatever you started with remains.
The same thing holds true for a statue – if it
falls over, it breaks into little shards, but the
stone remains.
This, Plato asserted, is how things get
destroyed in our world – they break down into
components, but they aren’t eradicated or
erased.
Plato, a Dualist, then went on to argue that
since the soul is not substance, it cannot be
broken down into parts – and since it can’t be
broken down, it cannot be destroyed.
Plato’s thought process may hold
true for physical things – but is
everything in this world physical?
This is the sort of question that
makes a Materialist angry, as one
would insist that everything is
physical, and that it therefore makes
no sense for there to be this
mysterious thing composed of
something unknowable beyond
sensation.
If you’re not a materialist, however,
you acknowledge that there are a
variety of different “substances” in
the world.
Is the beam from my laser pointer
made from the same “stuff” as the
grass on the softball field?
However, things do exist that stop
existing.
Where does light go when you shut off its
source?
Possibly nowhere – possibly everywhere.
If I play a note on the piano, however, does
it play forever?
What if I destroy the piano?
Can the note live on without its host – its
source?
How does Plato know that the soul isn’t
made of something as transitory as a musical
note – or a physical body?
Then again, if the soul isn’t meant to
endure forever, what’s the point of having
one?
With death – as with many other things –
humanity’s questions just lead to more
questions.
We often wonder about the meaning
of life in the context of the meaning of
death.
If there’s no “beyond,” many
wonder, is there any point to the “here
and now”?
I would argue that the lack of a
“beyond” would make the good we
perform in this life even more
important; if this is all we get, why not
make it as wonderful for everyone as
possible?
William Penn phrases it better than
me: “I expect to pass through life but
once. If therefore, there be any
kindness I can show, or any good thing
I can do to any fellow being, let me do
it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I
shall not pass this way again.”
What if there’s nothing after this?
How would our lives in this “plane”
(using the Dualist system) change if
nothing lies beyond?
Is Penn’s philosophy best?
Should we instead simply throw
morality out the window and take
what we want while we can?
Does the mystery surrounding
death actually help us live better
lives?
(It depends on your view regarding
fear, I suppose – is it a positive or
negative force?)
Many theologies and cultures
account for some sort of continued
existence.
One wonders if this shared
tendency towards a reverence for an
“afterlife” is meaningful in and of
itself, or if it merely reveals
something interesting about the
human character – whatever that
interesting thing may be.
We have people who claim to have
been contacted from beyond, or to
have come back from the brink of
death.
In some cases, people insist that
they remember previous lives –
previous revolutions of the Samsara
cycle, perhaps.
But in any event, the mystery
surrounding death – the sheer enormity of
all that we don’t know – isn’t necessarily a
prescription for negative possibilities.
After all, if we don’t know whether we
continue beyond our corporeal end, we don’t
know that we can’t continue.
Perhaps that’s part of the meanings of
both life and death: that without definite
knowledge, all doors remain open to us, and
we have an opportunity to explore the
infinite possibilities of existence – and, in
turn, the infinite possibility for discovery,
both of new answers and new questions, a
billion targets at which to fling the arrows of
our selves…or souls.
We just have to hope we lived well enough
to make the adventure worth taking.