the simple fact that a dead body is different to a live one. — Banno

I was wondering about the visceral reaction.

The ubiquitous account is that something has left the body, implying a dualism. My point was that it is of equal validity to say that the body no longer does what it once did, avoiding the dualism. — Banno

I agree. At the risk of continuing to go in the direction you would rather the discussion not go, I will point out that this is not a modern or contemporary development. It can be found in the ancients as well, and in both roots of the Western tradition.

this is not a modern or contemporary development. — Fooloso4

Yep. Something invisible moves the trees, carries the clouds across the sky, you can feel it on your face. It enters and leaves your body as you breath. When it leaves a body permanently, the spirit is gone.

You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.

You flagg'd walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges!
You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships!
You rows of houses! you window-pierc'd façades! you roofs!
You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!
You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!
You doors and ascending steps! you arches!
You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings!
From all that has touch'd you I believe you have imparted to yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me,
From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me. — Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road, 3

I was wondering about the visceral reaction. — Fooloso4

Death is not something one experiences in the first person. Dying, perhaps, but not being dead. Contrast that with pain.

Not at all sure where this is going.

Not at all sure where this is going. — Banno

Me neither. I think it clear we do not know what happens when we die. All the rest is story telling.

Me neither. I think it clear we do not know what happens when we die. All the rest is story telling. — Fooloso4

Totally agree; there seems to be no conceivable way to rationally or empirically justify the idea that intellectual intuition can yield propositionally configured knowledge of such things.

So the only perspective is that of the viewer, looking at the corpse.

See from around PI §283 onward, especially

Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead is not the same. All our reactions are different. If someone says, “That cannot simply come from the fact that living beings move in such-and-such ways and dead ones don’t”, then I want to suggest to him that this is a case of the transition ‘from quantity to quality’.

I concur with his sentiment here, except I do not know what to make of ‘from quantity to quality’...

You've read this stuff; what's going on?

The mention of Cornford reminds me of when we discussed his views previously.

I continue to question the 'doctrinal' aspect of Cornford's argument. In regard to what is meant by: "what is meant by 'thinking' or 'reason'", that was a matter of interest at the time with many conflicting opinions,

Cornford's account of nous does not distinguish the mythical from the logos of inquiry.

thanks. I've downloaded the pdf of that book, which is much more meaningful to me now than when I tried to read it many years ago. The ideas have come alive for me in the meanwhile.

My objections are the same as back then. Any rebuttal on your part is welcome.

I don't find that account implausible, from a philosophical perspective. It also foreshadows the later 'doctrine of the rational soul' you find in Thomas. In that later form of hylomorphism, nous is what grasps the form or principles of things, while the senses perceive its material (accidental) features. — Wayfarer

These debates about the nature of the mind can get tricky. As I understand it, Greek writers will commonly use dianoia to indicate the more discursive aspect of the mind and nous to indicate the less discursive aspect of the mind, but this is not universal and nous has a wide range of meaning. Latin philosophy seems to retain the dianoia/nous distinction with ratio/intellectus, and sometimes in English we also speak about the reason as a faculty distinct from the intellect. But from my limited understanding, in all three languages this is not a hard and fast rule, and there is a blurring of lines between faculty/act/knowledge.

Further, I am sure you are familiar with the more precise subdivisions of the mind found in Indian thought. The Western tradition does not seem to be as precise, but at times increased precision does emerge. For example, in many of the Early Christian Fathers of the East 'nous' is used to represent a rather exalted non-discursive faculty, closely associated with the divine and with divine faith (pistis), and my guess is that this is a more Platonic angle.

That the crucial factor was the ability of nous (intellect) to see 'that which is truly so' (this is the origin of the appearance/reality divide in the Western tradition.) You know the story: sensible objects are transitory, subject to change and decay, and the life governed by attachment to sense-objects has a very weak footing in reality. Mathematical and geometrical knowledge (dianoia) is higher than pistis (belief concerning visible things), whilst noesis (intuitive grasp of the Forms) is higher still. That schema is summarized on the 'analogy of the divided line' from the Republic:


(Wikipedia)

In respect of nous, 'In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is the basic understanding or awareness that allows human beings to think rationally. For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals can do. For him then, discussion of nous is connected to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way, and whether people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same universal categories in the same logical ways.' Aristotelian realism is preserved in the hylomorphist philosophy of Aquinas and other scholastics. It is why I believe that the Aristotelian notion of universals is significant and that the rejection of the idea of universals is an overall loss to Western culture. (Significant, I think, that Martin Luther was harshly critical of Aquinas' regard for Aristotle.)

(About the only book I know of that spells out the 'degrees of knowledge' in modern form is Jacques Maritain's volume of that name, although it's a hugely daunting read - I've taken it out a couple of times but couldn't really make progress with it, although I think I'm in agreement with the general idea.)

I am sure you are familiar with the more precise subdivisions of the mind found in Indian thought. The Western tradition does not seem to be as precise, but at times increased precision does emerge. — Leontiskos

Bertrand Russell remarks in his entry on Pythagoras in HWP, that the Western tradition encompassed the idea of arithmetic as a kind of higher truth in a way that the oriental mysticism did not, and that this has been profoundly consequential.

I think it clear we do not know what happens when we die. All the rest is story telling. — Fooloso4

:100:

Thanks , that's great stuff. :up: I think I agree with most all of what you say, and the categorization of the different kinds of knowledge as expressed in the analogy of the divided line is a helpful aid. I am not going to comment in detail, only because I've been on TPF a bit too much in the last few days and I don't want to get enmeshed in another complex discussion. :wink:

I will say that I have been slowly reading James Stromberg's, "An Essay on Experimentum" (part 1, part 2). To put it in modern terms, it basically looks at "the problem of induction" from an Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective. In another way, it is an investigation about how the first steps along the divided line are taken. It was originally some sort of thesis or dissertation out of Laval, and is not at all polemical.

I do not know what to make of ‘from quantity to quality’... — Banno

It is not simply a matter of motion but of responsiveness.

The problem here is the same as that for reincarnation: what is it that is reincarnated? What is it that revisits an earlier time? What could it mean to say that you experience what it is like to be Lincoln? It would be Lincoln experiencing what it is like to be Lincoln. It's not that any disembodied consciousness can experience any portion of any life, since there could be nothing to say that this was Art experiencing Lincoln and not Lincoln experiencing Lincoln.

If you returned to an earlier time, it would not be as an observer, but as that participant; nothing would or could be different.

This was also a big problem for medieval Islamic and Christian mystics, as they considered the extinguishment of the "self" in divine contemplational and mystical union with God. TBH, I think they resolve it fairly well, but it's unclear to me how their solution could apply to reincarnation.

Al-Ghazali's The Niche of Lights has some good parts on this. Describing his fellow mystics:

Plurality is totally banished from them, and they become immersed in sheer singularity. Their rational faculties become so satiated that in this state they are, as it were, stunned. No room remains in them for the remembrance of any other than God, nor the remembrance of themselves. Nothing is with them but God. They become intoxicated with such an intoxication that the ruling authority of their rational faculty is overthrown. Hence, one of them [al-Hallaj] says, “I am the Real!” another [Bistami], “Glory be to me, how great is my station!” and still another, “There is nothing in my robe but God!” [also attributed to
Bistami]

But Al-Ghazail says we have to measure any experience against reason:

When this intoxication subsides, the ruling authority of the rational faculty – which is God’s balance in His earth – is given back to them. They come to know that what they experienced was not the reality of unification but that it was similar to unification. It was like the words of the lover during a state of extreme passionate love: “I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I!”

The analogy to the "unity in the way lovers are unified" became a preferred analogy in the Sufi tradition and the West (the West already had the Song of Songs to help justify this sort of union from Scripture).

In this view, any "union" is not truly "ontological." Otherwise, we would have the mystic going out of existence and then coming back into it. This is the "gappy existence problem." The problem of "who" is experiencing the mystical union, what your post gets at, is solved by positing that the self is never truly extinguished, it just appears that way phenomenologically.

But does this work for reincarnation? It seems more problematic because there isn't the "return to sobriety" afterwards. There were Christians who posited reincarnation, Origen of Alexanderia for example, but he came before the contributions of the Islamic scholars and I don't know if he deals with this.

The problem of "who" is experiencing the mystical union, what your post gets at, is solved by positing that the self is never truly extinguished, it just appears that way phenomenologically. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Solved equally well by the understanding that it never truly existed, but only appeared to exist because of identification with phenomena.

Origen of Alexanderia for example, but he came before the contributions of the Islamic scholars and I don't know if he deals with this. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As I understand it (which is probably not well) Origen never explicitly endorsed metempsychosis (to use the term popular in his milieu) but was anathematised for his doctrine of ‘the pre-existence of souls’ which implied that souls were not created by God at the time of conception but existed for an indefinite period before conception.

Pythagoras as is well-known taught metempsychosis and it is at least implicit in some of Plato’s dialogues specifically in the teaching of anamnesis.

As to ‘what it is the is re-born’, the Mahāyāna Buddhists devised the doctrine of the alayavijnana (the storehouse consciousness) which is similar in some respects to Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’. It is said to be the repository of ‘seeds’ of future actions. There’s a Buddhist scholar by the name of William Waldron who has written extensively on that. It remains a controversial doctrine within Buddhism and is not endorsed by every Buddhist school.

...responsiveness... — Fooloso4

But a corpse is viscerally different to a sleeping or comatose body. "All our reactions are different".

It's not a surprise that continuity of self is problematic for any form of spiritual understanding.

a corpse is viscerally different to a sleeping or comatose body — Banno

Think first of a living dog, then of a decomposing corpse. At the moment of death, all the living processes normally studied by the biologist rapidly disintegrate. The corpse remains subject to the same laws of physics and chemistry as the live dog, but now, with the cessation of life, we see those laws strictly in their own terms, without anything the life scientist is distinctively concerned about. The dramatic change in his descriptive language as he moves between the living and the dead tells us just about everything we need to know.

No biologist who had been speaking of the behavior of the living dog will now speak in the same way of the corpse’s “behavior.” Nor will he refer to certain physical changes in the corpse as reflexes, just as he will never mention the corpse’s responses to stimuli, or the functions of its organs, or the processes of development being undergone by the decomposing tissues.

Virtually the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the fateful transition no one will any longer think of genes as being regulated, nor will anyone refer to normal or proper chromosome functioning. No molecules will be said to guide other molecules to specific targets, and no molecules will be carrying signals, which is just as well because there will be no structures recognizing signals. Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary. — Stephen L. Talbott, The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings

Sure. So, where? What?

The theme that comes to mind is that of process philosophy - of understanding a being as a dynamic process that maintains itself in existence, as distinct from a static entity. So identity comprises the ability to maintain continuity through change. As some have noted, this has points of convergence with Buddhist philosophy which sees things in terms of process rather than static entities or the substances of traditional philosophy (i.e. as a ‘mind-stream’ rather than an ‘unchanging soul’.)

So wouldn't that give us an account in which the process stoped, as opposed to the substance of body and spirit being split asunder?

You've read this stuff; what's going on? — Banno

Do you mean the past lives research? Maybe I'm missing something, I'm not sure what your question refers to...

The theme that comes to mind is that of process philosophy - of understanding a being as a dynamic process that maintains itself in existence, as distinct from a static entity. — Wayfarer

That process view (which I personally favour) seems to offer up a picture of all beings as transient temporal phenomena, The idea of a static entity, of static identity, seems more in accordance with the naive intuitive notion of an atemporal soul.

No; PI.

The reaction might be, at least in part, biological. There are several animals that play dead and other animals that will not eat or in other ways come in contact with dead animals. In some cases it might be a fear of the dead. Disease is a common cause of death. Perhaps there is something in the DNA of some animals, including humans, an impulse to avoid dead things.

Ah, sorry, I'm a wee bit slow this morning. Is the "transition from quantity to quality" intended to say that the reaction to living, as opposed to dead, things is not merely based on the perception of, or the idea of potential, movement (movement being quantifiable) but to a feeling (?) that there are entirely different qualities manifested in living compared to dead entities? I'm not too sure about that, so I'm just musing.

Musing a bit more: is the idea that there is an instinctive feeling that something has departed in the case of the dead? The naive idea then would be thinking that if something departs it must have gone somewhere? A quality of absence in a corpse that is not felt in the case of a stone?

So wouldn't that give us an account in which the process stoped, as opposed to the substance of body and spirit being split asunder? — Banno

The processes of life will have ceased in that particular dog, certainly. But an individual is also an instance of a type although that doesn’t mean that the animating principle of the dog is a separate entity.