In Lost Souls, David Weissman
offers the reader a fascinating journey through the history of philosophic
thought that traces and engages a dualism of mind/soul and body that Weissman
believes has proven ethically problematic for the West. Locating philosophy’s
anchoring metaphysic in Plato’s Good, Weissman rethinks philosophy’s path,
tracking the twists and turns of its metaphysical trajectory and marking out
the stumbling blocks of dissolving bodies, arrogant egoisms, and arid
intellectualisms it encounters along the way. Then Weissman assesses philosophy
in the light of this history, evaluating its resources for guiding appropriate
understandings of self and world and appraising the ethical implications of
philosophy’s twisted path in terms of its possibilities for the future.

In Plato, Weissman laments, the
human soul’s status is not altogether conceptually clear. On the one hand,
Plato’s Good (as the Republic’s Sun) stands in direct relation to the things it
has brought to creation in the world. It thus permits the human world of
thought a knowledge of its intelligible objects fully irradiated by truth and
reality. In principle, the Forms being imprinted in every individual soul, each
autonomous knower that fixes its gaze upon intelligible objects gains
understanding and knowledge that is as certain as it is edifying. On the other
hand, localized thought in its prison body is a fragmented shard of the ancient
"All-Soul" that directs and governs the whole of the cosmos with an
all-knowing wisdom. "Soul ascending to the Forms is, like them, eternal
and incorruptible"(11) and yet human soul, degraded as it is by singularity,
reduced to but a shadow of its former grandeur.

Here, then, arises a problem, Weissman
discloses. If singularized soul is, in its essence, a shard of full reality and
truth, if individual soul in its truest identity is one with this greater
source of all, what is it is seeks in its quest for knowledge, but knowledge of
itself? If knowledge of its intelligible objects is knowledge of self, what is
the status of the "edifying knowledge" it gains by its quest? What
distinguishes the objects of the individual knower’s gaze from the knower that
seeks knowledge of them? If intelligible objects are themselves mere shards of
All-Soul, each imprinted identically by the Forms, subjects can only be
understood to be identical to the objects of their own inquiries. Weissman is
bringing to light, albeit in altogether new terms, the old "Paradox of
Socrates" pointed out by Gregory Vlastos (The Philosophy of Socrates,
Anchor Books, 1971. 1-21).

The problem comes to be explicitly
articulated in the Neoplatonic world of ideas, when Plotinus discloses the
thinking that human minds perform as a self-directed enterprise–a
self-thinking. One is reminded of Aristotle’ gods who, as exemplary beings,
work at the noblest of activities–thinking–and direct that activity toward
the noblest of objects–themselves; philosophers are said to mirror that noble
activity.  If individual soul is in its deepest reality a shard of All-Soul, a
spark of truth and being, then the thinking that attends every perception of any
intelligible object is a perception of soul itself. The truth attained when the
Forms are perceived, the truth that brings knowledge to the individual knower,
is actually a truth identical to the individual soul’s deepest reality. Truth
is self-perception.

This metaphysical identification
of the many with the One raises many challenges for a meaningful epistemology.
Why seek knowledge at all? What exactly does individual thought add to the
edifice of knowledge? How is soul edified by that knowledge? Furthermore, the Neoplatonic
identity of subject and object of intellectual quest raises another curious
issue: where does body, itself an emanation from the One, fit into the
epistemological schema? Is Plotinus’ monism so rigorous that body’s knowledge
is also truth? For Plotinus, body is not soul, nor is it a separate principle
or entity mysteriously adjoined to soul. Space and time–the existential realm
of matter–are themselves emanations of the One. But, as space and time are
"degenerate modes" for perceiving the intelligibles, the truths the
both serves up to soul are less reliable than those known by soul alone.
Accordingly, soul seeks knowledge of intelligibles through intellectual quest
alone in order to relocate itself in the lofty realm of its origin. Body
lingers, heavy and fallen, in a lesser domain of reality, offering up a
fractured and unreliable truth to any soul foolish enough to listen.

Weissman traces the
mind-elevating, body-denigrating trend into the philosophy of René Descartes
where, he argues, the problem takes on its ethical problematicity. "Like
knows like, implying that mind inspects eternal ideas, grasping their content
without distortion when isolated from bodily acts" (16). The distinction
between opinion and knowledge, then, corresponds to the distinction between
perceiving body and knowing mind. Body’s instability renders body’s knowledge
correspondingly unstable. Only the mind can be relied upon to offer up reality
and truth.

Plato’s Good is all soul’s
(All-Soul’s) good; Descartes’ good is private. In his slippers by the fireside,
fondling his ball of wax, Descartes earns his common designation as the
"Father of modern thought." His privatized good, the cogito,
gives explicit moral and epistemological, if not metaphysical, precedence to
the mind. Concurrently, human being–for the Greeks, the rational or social
animal–is reduced to the "thinking thing"–alone, isolated,
hyper-rational, disembodied. Each mind becomes, with Descartes, a self-selected
good-in-itself in relation to which all else has but instrumental value. The
logical result of this shift in moral perspective is bared for the reader to
contemplate in all its starkness: "I can and should attend principally or
only to my prosperity and my well-being" (164).

The cogito maintains its
authority, explains Weissman, intensifying its self-concern over time, till
being and intelligibility are extracted from (Plato’s Sun-drenched) world and
relocated in the thinker’s mind. Even the god must rely upon the individual
knower to establish his existence. Kant had only to complete the modern task by
hyperbolating mind’s autonomy and power and the grandiose arrogance of
Enlightenment thought had come to full articulation.

In Lost Souls, Weissman
directs the reader toward a justified concern in regard of either extreme view
of reality–radical idealism or reductionist materialism. Mind and self are
more than the fantasies of philosophers, he asserts. On the other hand, these
aspects of our being, Weissman assures us, lose nothing of vital import with
the confirmation that their nature is exclusively physical. Mind evaporates in
the absence of body, but mind, even as a physical reality, still supports our
human undertakings, formulates our moral decisions and justifies our worldly
projects.

Weissman is concerned with the
loss of self or mind that can result when these are shown to be just another
aspect of physical being. But, more importantly, he is justifiably alarmed at
the authority that the cogito still holds over our thinking. Weissman
assures us that mind’s achievements–self and culture–remain even where psychocentrism
is denied and the bodily nature of mind is exposed.

However, in the final assessment,
one wonders if Weissman’s assurances that self and "culture" will not
be exposed to risk do not evidence that Weissman himself remains, not simply
faithful to, but somewhat nostalgic for, the metaphysical losses that Western
philosophical tradition has suffered in modernity–the tradition that elevates Western
advances as the achievements of human mind, the tradition that puts Western
civilization firmly on the Hegelian and Social Darwinist path of historical
progress toward lofty identity with the One.  Separating mind from body has led
to traditions of thought that have resulted in the exaggerated stature of mind,
thoughts, ideas, projects, and, ultimately, New World Orders and divinely
sanctioned salvational schemes. Those traditions have simultaneously intended
the denigration of body, the downplaying of non-Western suffering, and the
undervaluing of those who do not think in the "enlightened"
ways that white Westerners do. Perhaps instead of insisting that no
"magic" is required to explain the wondrous creations of the mind and
culture, we might better think how mind can barely appreciate the amazing world
of bodies, the wondrousness of tiny fingers, the unfathomable identity of
exploding stars light years away with the flesh of new-born babes.

Weissman’s new work is well worth
the philosophical journey. It raises explicitly dark issues related to modern
trends of thought that truly need more explicit exposure. I not only recommend
it not to professional philosophers, but believe it would serve nicely in the
philosophy classroom with more students in the major.

© 2004 Wendy Hamblet

Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D., Philosophy
Department, Adelphi University, New York, author of The Sacred Monstrous: A
Reflection on Violence in Human Communities (Lexington Books, 2003).

Categories: Philosophical