Someone recently asked me: the soul ? What type of a thingamajig is that?
The soul, as type of thingamajig, is for example, when you have two different usernames, it is still you. You’re chuckling, but some people are persuaded that they live solely in their username, and if their username is bumped, there is nothing beyond that. One must absolutely not tinker with their subscription, else they have excruciating anguishes. It’s true, no one has any experience other than affective of their soul, at least during the period of your subscription, because if your soul leaves your Internet provider, then you become totally free. Plato635 already said it, so you see, hardly anything new under the sun. Plato635 is about 250.000.000 page views before AOL. Later on, JC specified that upon resurrection each of us would have a glorious username, but this would lead us to a theology of the username and we can’t see everything at once.
You cannot enter into eternity, because you have always been, and are doomed to be – eternal. You – are form, but your substance, will take on infinitely various forms, forever.
It is true that only solitude averts isolation. I am quite wary of those who feel good everywhere. I feel good nowhere, with or without people, happy or not happy, unhappy or not unhappy, all this is not of interest.
One must be unconscious to feel good and I can’t manage so. Maybe the thing is to play a reed-pipe, like Socrates before the great leap, and to not bother about anything else even though each second a thousand bits of information arrive from who knows where and relate every detail of the stupendous. So what is left? The superman!? It is a farce which only still amuses Nietzsche, and he is gone. What else? Let go of human nature to consort with the animals? Revert to the amnesic subhuman? Geez, Freud ridiculized himself with that… That is for the blockheads. No way around it, only ecstasy does the job, to rapt out of one’s self in a beaming and uninterrupted contemplation, tearing away without delay the loam from weightiness, at least foreshadowing a transfiguration.
Harvey,
Is soul the right word for what you are describing? I’ve never understood the concept of soul, but as far as I can tell, you’re describing character, or personality, embodied and standing out in their singleness. Actually, soul does connote this pretty well. I guess my problem with the term is that the term is religiously ambiguous.
One does not need faith to discover that the soul is a reality at the heart of the living. The Greeks did it as well as many other pagans. There is somehow a sort of amalgam between the words “spiritual†and “religiousâ€. “Spiritual†signifies that which is not material, and not at all “religiousâ€, this last term signifying what is “linked togetherâ€. The ancient pagans were quite capable of spiritual operations, i.e. capable of going beyond matter. Any abstraction takes us beyond the material. Say “tree†and you are beyond matter. In fact, it is precisely there that lays the transition between the animal state and that of the human being. The soul is thus a spiritual reality discovered outside of any religious revelation, and that philosophy can always discover without any faith. For that matter, it is my understanding that Christ, for example, does not explicitly reveal the existence of the human soul, but rather considers this to be acquired knowledge.
Any abstraction takes us beyond the material. Say “tree†and you are beyond matter. In fact, it is precisely there that lays the transition between the animal state and that of the human being. The soul is thus a spiritual reality discovered outside of any religious revelation, and that philosophy can always discover without any faith. For that matter, it is my understanding that Christ, for example, does not explicitly reveal the existence of the human soul, but rather considers this to be acquired knowledge.