Jonathan Pageau of The Symbolic World just posted a very interesting talk with British journalist Mary Harrington on identity. It touches on Artificial Intelligence. For those worried about AI, Harrington brings the issue down to the difference between computation and comprehension. But that is not the focus of this posting. More on AI (link). She brings up the Aristotelian philosophical concept of the four causes, two of which have been dropped from the scientific discourse since the Enlightenment. The issue highlights the synthetic, Platonic dualism between the material (physical) realm down here and the spiritual (immaterial, spiritual, noetic, psychological) dimension, out there This perceived dualism has dominated Western thought since at least the time of Neoplatonism, if not earlier. In these pages we contend that this dualism is not just wrong and a permanent cause for discord, but that it also destroys the understanding of the integrated universe in which both the material and the immaterial world exist both at the same place and at the same time (posts on Integrated Reality vs Dualism in the sidebar).
April 8, 2025 Jonathan Pageau: Identity After Postmodernism - with Mary Harrington.
To understand why it is a problem that the formal and the final cause have been dropped from our understanding of the universe, we have to know what they refer to.
If we imagine, say a statue being hewn from a block of marble, the causes break down as follows:
1. The material cause of the statue is the unformed block of marble. It is all potential, but no actuality. It pertains to raw universal matter.
2. The efficient cause of the statue is the process of the sculptor making the statue out of the block of raw marble. It is change from one phase of the process to the next. It pertains to form and properties of the particular statue.
Note that these causes pertain to material and form.
3. The formal cause is the idea, the plan, the design, the blueprint, the concept of the statue in the mind of the sculptor. It pertains to the specifics of the statue, to intellect and to essence.
Note that this cause is immaterial.
4. The final cause of the statue is the particular person who commissioned the statue in the first place, the person who caused the statue to come into existence.
At this point it is no wonder why reductionists had to drop the formal and the final causes. The plan and the first mover having been removed, existence is now reduced to matter and form alone.
That includes the intellect which has now become part of the efficient cause, that is, the material brain. God and the soul have dropped out of existence altogether. Leaving the existence and nature of God aside for now, ideas about what constitutes the soul differ widely from school to school.
But if we stick to Aristotelean philosophy the soul is partly material and partly immaterial and is the sum of the causes. It is matter (1. the material cause) + form (the 2. efficient cause) + the intellect (3. formal cause).
This philosophical definition means, you do not have a soul (of some unknown substance and in an undefined location), but that you are a soul. The soul animates the body. In old newspaper clippings we read that "the ship went down with all souls aboard" (read the utter nonsense Quora writes to explain this (link).
This integration of body and soul conforms to the Eastern Orthodox doctrine on the indivisibility of body and soul (Greek: ψυχή, psyche, mind, also referred to as the soul) according to which the perceived separation of body and soul in physical death has come about as a result of the fall. It is however a temporary separation, as body and soul are united at the final resurrection (1 Thessalonians 4:16-18.27 and John 5:28-29).
At which point it becomes clear why there is so much confusion in different schools about the nature and location of the soul. But as Mary Harrington explains, with the process of "living through the 16th century in reverse" it is important to clear up the misconceptions on the soul, or at least get a measure of clarity on the wide variety of ideas circulating on the concept.
Feb. 23, 2025 ARC: A philosophy of human identity in a digital age | Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, Mary Harrington.
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