162. Notes - in your living and in your dying

162. 10 July 2019

       Mid-afternoon. You had a late birthday lunch with Gayle today and gave her a full grocery bag of paperbacks you brought up from Linda for which Gayle was most appreciative. Tomorrow, you have lunch with Fritz at Bob Evans and then for supper your Class of Sixty meets in old Uptown Westerville. Let's get back to the Stanford Encyclopedia's "Ancient Theories of the Soul" and Miss Havisham. This is an extension from Note 159. - Amorella

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3. Plato's Theories of Soul

". . . There is thus some reason to think that the philosophical theories in question are best interpreted as working with, and on, the relatively non-theoretical notion of the soul that by the end of the fifth century has come to be embedded in ordinary language. In what follows our main concern will be to characterize some of the theories in question. But we should also attend, wherever this seems appropriate and helpful, to ways in which familiarity with the ordinary notion of the soul might enable us better to understand why a theory or an argument proceeds the way it does. In addition, we should note ways in which philosophical theories might seem to clarify and further articulate the ordinary notion. We begin with Plato, and with a question that is intimately tied up with the ordinary notion of the soul as it developed from the Homeric poems onwards, namely whether a person's soul does indeed survive the person's death." 

Selected and edited From: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,  Ancient Theory of Souls

         What is your comment, Miss Havisham? - Amorella

       The concept that the person's soul survives physical death is easily accepted as a metaphysical fact by one such as myself. My perspective is that the soul 'survives' because it exists and always has as far as human beings are concerned. The spiritual heartanmind is protected and comforted by the spiritual soul until the spiritual heartanmind is 'matured', as it were, to move beyond the spiritual soul. The spiritual heartanmind is thus freed to exist in a spiritual world with other like spiritually matured heartsanminds in the absence of souls. This is what I know through 'observation', as it were. This is known beyond a human notion. - mh 

       Anticipating orndorff's question, this spiritual place without souls but with human-like heartsanminds is. Souls refer to it as a 'nesting' but Miss Havisham is too polite to use the word because it might appear negative to living heartsansoulsanminds (human spirits). Basically, in analogous form, human-like heartsanminds (individually and communal) no longer need the protection and comfort provided by the soul. Spiritually, they are human with retention of their own matured spiritual centers (personalities) existing within a communal state for their own protection and comfort. No human spirit survives alone. The psychological need to feel 'protection' and 'comfort' is an unconditional human behavior. This is a rule. - Amorella

       

       Thank you for the intervention, Amorella. - mh

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       1619 hours. Thank you both. This is clarification that helps me understand my sense of self better. It is both limiting and delimiting. I don't have to believe either one of you. These are black or blue words on the white table, for me to observe and consider. I am comfortable with this format. On to the next section in "Ancient Theories of Soul".

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3.1 The Phaedo's Theory of Soul

". . . Th[is] argument leaves room for the idea that souls are not forms, but are nevertheless intelligible, partless and imperishable. In fact, in framing the argument in the way he does Plato furnishes the conceptual framework needed for saying that body and soul differ in kind, the one being perceptible and perishable, the other being intelligible and exempt from destruction.    

. . . As things are, the psychological theory of the Phaedo assigns Socrates' contemplation \directly to his soul, but leaves his desire for food curiously remote from it, apparently taking ‘bodily’ desire (for instance) to be related to the soul in much the same way in which the operations involved in (say) metabolism and growth are so related. (Those too take place only because his body is ensouled.) It is plausible, though not certain, that Plato felt the force of this problem. It is, in any case, resolved by the new theory of soul that the Republic presents." 

Selected and Edited From: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,  Ancient Theory of Souls

      Give this concept on the soul a go, Miss Havisham. - Amorella

       I agree in principle that souls are not forms and that they are intelligible and imperishable in their own right; that is, without an enfolded human heartanmind. The soul also cannot exempt the basic human conditions, i.e. wont of protection, comfort, and desire in terms of being similar to metabolism and growth. - mh

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       1825 hours. The above seems reasonable enough without the heavy weights of Socratic and Platonic philosophy. For me, these points are beginning to be a solidification for a stretch and stitch of metaphysical environs between the physical heartansoulanmind and the outreaches of limitation of Miss Havisham (clutching my heartanmind) within her metaphysical grasp.  

       Later. - Amorella

       2143 hours. I started rethinking about how reasonable Miss Havisham and your comments are today and this causes me to overthink and wonder if this is all a put on, a self-deception, not by you, Amorella, or by Miss Havisham. Self-trickery. I don't know how to prevent this. It is an existentialist's nightmare. If this is also a part of the basic human condition, which I think it is, how can one ever know who one is, either alive or dead. People are what they think. But there are plenty of cases to show what people thought they were, they were not. Leaders have flatterers to contend with, everyone has friends and enemies who have their own biases. It seems that these sorts of circumstances would be worse when was is nothing but a heartansoulanmind. Does thinking make something so? It appears to for some people. Philosophy helps me contend with this sort of self-deception. How does one know she or he is authentic? Or, anyone else is, for that matter?

       Protection and comfort. Do you understand, Mr. Orndorff? Souls are intelligible. Human hearts and minds are also intelligible, otherwise there would be no moral sense, no keel to hold you front and center, to have a past, a present and a future. One follows her or his heart and mind, the keel and the rudder. To do this one must discover and consciously know who one is at the very present moment it matters most. The soul is the GPS that holds the heart on one side and the mind on the other. When one knows she or he has a decision to follow and this person can do no other. Then and only then does one know who she or he is. This is true in the living sense as well as in the spiritual. - mh

       You know her words are true, orndorff, because you and many others have experienced them in your living and in your dying. - Amorella

       2222 hours. Such is this moment like no other in my heart and mind. Thank you both for providing me with such intimate kindness and understanding. The sudden humility is all my own. 

       Post. - Amorella