When I was a child I used to wish I had been born in ancient Greece, so my ideas would be new. Every time I made some novel observation, Archimedes or Aristotle or Socrates had been there.
This is what happened with my thinking about the soul. I have already offered the relatively commonplace notion, scientifically, that most of the functions of what we traditionally called a "soul" are really biochemical reactions (see here). Now, I have been observing the similarity of the effects of psychiatric medications with spiritual and psychiatric schools of thought.
A professional whose gauging of emotions is central to her work takes such things for granted. But another helping professional relies on feelings. It is much like the experience of Kant and his idealist ideas: just because he couldn't prove that anything existed, it didn't mean that he didn't walk home for lunch like clockwork.
I'd already been beaten to the popularizing punt concerning chemicals and romance (see An Affair of the Head). And I knew I had been beaten when it comes to religious experiences and the chemicals of the brain (see, for example, The God Chemical).
Yet in everyday thought and popular art, we remain mired in traditional notions and vocabulary.
Indeed, what's missing in the film Angels & Demons, is not better research on religion (the few errors are minor compared to the gaffes in The Da Vinci Code) nor greater scientific accuracy (I'm told there are whoppers concerning anti-matter), but the amplification of the struggle between Galileo and the Catholic Church (or Darwin vs. Jesus) to include a third contender, for short, Freud.
So perhaps I could interpose that some medications tend to be more, shall we say, Freudian, in their approach to healing: slow and imperceptible. Others induce dreams and reveries closer to a silent retreat under Ignatius Loyola, guiding the person through a careful and conscious introspection resembling nothing so much as an examination of conscience.
The implications are tremendous. Everything ever thought, just as life itself (let's leave that for another post, shall we?) and everything that exists, is at the core a set of chemicals.
Our solar system, for example, resembles nothing better than the atom models of our school days. The sun is the nucleus and the planets and their moons and asteroids the electrons.
And we, what are we, then, but subatomic particles?
10 comments:
For someone who has had all the advantages of an education in "Archimedes or Aristotle or Socrates", you've missed out on something.
OK, Anon, I'll bite: what have I missed?
(And, oh, hasn't everybody encountered Archimedes, Aristotle and Socrates in school?)
You've missed (or forgotten, or abandoned) the meaning of a "soul" as defined in classical thought. You've bought into the zeitgeist.
And, no, everybody hasn't encountered the great thinkers of the ages.
You're a new reader, see http://cecilieaux.blogspot.com/2008/10/save-our-souls.html
BTW, it's the first link in the post.
No, I've been a reader for several years. I know what you've said. That doesn't change my opinion - I still think you've missed something. And I still think it's a heartbreaker.
Earlier, Anon, you wrote that I missed "the meaning of a 'soul' as defined in classical thought." But, as my earlier post shows, I know perfectly well what the soul was in classical thought. I just happen to think that classical thought was incomplete and not the last word. After all, they're dead and here we are talking away.
Now you say "you've missed something," changing the terms of what this "heartbreaker" of a miss is -- and leaving it mysterious. Religionists do this sort of thing all the time: they invent unseen, unheard beings whom no one can know, not even them, but they insist "I know, trust me, don't ask questions."
Sorry, won't fly in the 21st century. Got a beef? I kick ass and take names. Oh, but you don't have one.
The 21st century isn't oh so different than any other century.
Kick Ass? - how quaint. And what difference would my name make? Even the name I use isn't my name.
Well, yes, but it can't be denied that some subatomic particles are much cuter than others.
Dear C,
Happy Father's Day.
Medications don't induce healing by changing who you are. They free up one's cerebral mechanisms to be the best they can be. So, it's truly what is already in one's soul/spirit/ mind/ emotions/body processes and how they come together that causes new, more freeing perceptual experiences.
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