November 2nd, 2026 (Continued): “Gingers.” - Karelusa
[Laughter]
“Angels.” - Table #7
“That's one of them, but that's a category.” - Bonaventure
“People will disagree with me online.” - Me
[Laughter, even from Salignac somehow.]
“Okay, those guys also suck. Maybe co-extensive, they might all be gingers.” - French Paul
“Angels?” - person
“Yes, there we go, angels are in fact persons.” - French Paul
“Animals.” - Liseuxa
“Sorry?” - French Paul
“Animals.” - Liseuxa
“Animals are not persons.” - French Paul
“No, they don't have souls.” - Liseuxa
“Correct, but I'm thinking persons that don't have souls.” - French Paul
“A person is somehow spiritual?” - Liseuxa
“I can give you a definition of a person. A person is a member of a rational species. Where in that definition is soul? So we're not going with substance, material, living, or anything around the word? How do they count on the census? So how is an animal not a soul with that definition in mind? How are humans souls by that definition? So you see how quickly if we're not careful, questions are going to proliferate. We've got to make sure we keep our distinctions up. Slow down. Usually, and in my opinion, the best way to approach these debates and genuinely interesting questions is to do a historical survey. Now, I only have so much time. I have to skip a bunch of important steps. I've tried to whittle it down to the ones I think are most important. What I'm about to do is narrow down the questions I just listed and place them under the shitoko of mostly teleological questions. What does the soul have to do with human fulfillment? Because in order for us to fully understand that question, we have to comment on what is the human, what is the human ordered towards, what gives the human that order, and then what enables that ordering to reach its goal, to be fulfilled in the first place. So what I'm going to do is spend some time on Socrates, a little more time on Plato, the most time on Aristotle, a brief comment on Plotinus, and then I'm going to tie that together and give you a systematic but brief overview of how the church, divine revealed truth, and the person of Christ takes everything that the pagans have given us and purifies it and corrects it to give us the true doctrine on human happiness. Let's begin with Socrates. Now, in separating Socrates and Plato, I'm kind of cheating because we don't have Socrates without Plato. As several of you, I hope, know, Socrates never wrote anything down, and Plato was one of his closest and brightest students, and we only have records of Socratic dialogues from the pen of Plato. So most of the time when we talk about Socrates, we're talking about Plato's Socrates. It's hard to be sure exactly what Socrates believes that Plato doesn't. It's hard to be sure what Socrates says that Plato doesn't make him say in The Dialogues. But there are at least two, I mean at least here, at least two dialogues in which we're pretty sure Socrates is speaking in his own person. Those are the Phaedo and The Apology. The Apology is possibly the foundational text of Western philosophy because you can read it as a defense of philosophy itself against the worldly pursuit of power, victory, and fame. In that dialogue, Socrates presents his vision of what the ultimate good is for the human person. According to him, the highest good of the human person is the health of the soul, the well-being of the soul, and he's got a pretty straightforward argument for why that's the case. But that argument, straightforward though it is, depends on a lot of presuppositions, most of which we share with him, so that's a win for us. If it is true that the soul is immortal, which Plato has to establish in several other dialogues, more or less successfully, if the soul is immortal, make sure we understand what that means, if upon bodily death the soul as it is persists, unchanged, if that's the case, and if nothing else about us is immortal, then it follows directly that any good we pursue that is not the soul will be lost upon death. So that's not to say that they're totally useless and worthless, they're still good. But what really matters is whether or not our soul is in a good state, because once death occurs, according to Socrates in The Apology, one of two things can be the case. Either we enter a sort of state of dreamless sleep, which is tantamount to annihilation, so nothing really matters, or the soul persists and moves on to the isles of the blessed, where the true judges who can peer into the constitution of your soul, into its desires, into its thoughts, into its moral quality, are going to be able to tell you this is what you truly deserve, because this is what you have loved, this is what you have valued. So if your soul is doing well, that judgment is going to go well for you. If your soul is doing poorly, that judgment is going to suck. Therefore, the highest good for the human person is well-being of the soul. In the Phaedo, he's got a bunch of arguments by which he attempts to establish that the soul is immortal. I'll mention only one of them, the argument from opposite principles, according to the Socratic-ish, Platonic-ish theory of forms. There are several forms which make up pairs of opposites, hot and cold, life and death. I'll use those two examples. Wherever one opposite is fully present, the other cannot enter. And if somehow the other does, the other opposite is not annihilated, it just leaves. So if cold approaches hot, hot is not annihilated, it just departs. You see what he's about to do for the soul? Because now he's going to give us sort of a proto-Aristotelian definition of soul. If the soul is that by which we have life, if it's the principle of life, then when death approaches, the soul isn't destroyed, it flees. But if it's not destroyed, that means it persists, therefore it's immortal. Kind of a sketchy argument if you really dig into it, but it's super cool as far as vibes are concerned, right? And we're working off of vibes here. That is what Socrates has to say about the soul. How do you achieve that purification? What does he say is the means whereby you obtain this highest good?...”
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