More Reflections on the Soul, and the Mind, and our Place in the World

No proof or evidence for the tone deaf. We can only emotionally connect – or not – to transcendence, and consent or refuse consent to those responses. The emotional responses to transcendent, when not sentimental, are experiences of the sublime, or the mystical in Wittgenstein’s sense. The fact of such responses and the importance of their role in the spiritual lives of human beings are not proofs that anything beyond the ordinary is ‘real’; they are not objective evidence either. But they are a kind of subjective evidence, an intimation to weigh against the possibility that the real, for example, is nothing but what physics can study. 

   ‘There are more things in heaven and earth …than are dreamt of in your philosophy or science!’      True or false? No experiment or equation can answer that question. No experiment can prove whether one’s experience that a certain waterfall is sublime is an experience of reality or a subjective-psychological-evolutionary illusion occasioned by some otherwise meaningless collection of water molecules. What we are left with is men and women speaking and writing: ‘Wow, that waterfall is awesome”’; ‘Gee, what a sweet waterfall.’ Compare: ‘Just listened again to the fugue in G minor – no words to express how deeply beautiful that is’ Teenage rapper: ‘Well, I listened to part of it – it was so boring I couldn’t go on. No action!’ Not all responses are equal.

   

     Before modernity – science, technology, industrialism, capitalism – it was common sense that our emotional responses were more or less in harmony with reality, “believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt (C, S. Lewis)”: that, for example, Wordsworth’s joy – later expressed in the well-known poem – in beholding the daffodils by a bay disclosed something real about the daffodils and nature (beauty and more). Therefore, it also belonged to common sense that emotions needed to be educated. Before we can conceptualize the truth of beings and nature herself we need to feel the truth. Indeed, we cannot intellectually apprehend truth without first knowing it emotionally. Thus just as the ignorant teen above was tone deaf to the music of Bach, we tend to be tone deaf to nature and much of reality, including our own.

 

. . .

Different pictures of the soul, or the self, or human nature are involved here. Interestingly, how you understand yourself depends on how you understand nature, reality as a whole.

 The Capitalist Self

Autonomy and the social construction of reality. From Freud I learned about fantasies of omnipotence and primary narcissism - the world and others as extensions of self with no independent value and reality. Autonomy. What Trump does in politics – socially constructs reality to suit his egoism – has been the cultural norm for his class for centuries now. 

    The prototype was Milton’s Satan – “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”  Acknowledging value in others, in the world – which is to say, acknowledging that something outside the ego is real – limits the ego, which both defines our humanity and must be rejected at all costs by modernity. To violate a forest for profit the self first demeans it: sees it as "raw material" or "natural resources." If the Ukrainians are in Putin's way, his propaganda demeans them as "Nazis." If that vulgar traitor Trump needs to get people hating poor immigrants, he demeans them as "vermin." If a man needs to betray his wife, she gets turned in a means for his happiness that no longer performs her function. I could continue this for the rest of my life without coming to an end.

     Freud might not have described human nature as such, but it certainly seems he captured the nature of men and women in capitalist society. It is curious how philosophers labor to build ego-centered, capitalist man / woman into a metaphysical system – I don’t think that is just an accident. 

    I will end with a thought of Goethe that my students translated today. Here is the German with my translation:

Die Wahrheit widerspricht unserer Natur, der Irrtum nicht, und zwar aus einem einfachen Grunde: die Wahrheit fordert, daß wir uns für beschränkt erkennen sollen, der Irrtum schmeichelt uns, wir seien auf ein oder die andere Weise unbegrenzt.

 

Truth is unnatural for us; falsity is not – and this is for a simple reason: truth forces us to recognize our limits whereas falsity flatters us into believing that we are in some way without limits. 

 

 Human Image, World Image

Metaphysics. I define it like this: that which is beyond the reach of physics, chemistry, or biology because it is about the interpretation of the world – being, reality – as a whole, about who we are and our place in it. It is about our essential relation to other people, nature, the community, and God. What does it all mean? What do particular beings mean? What is reality itself?

 

We all have a metaphysical worldview. You will sometimes hear people say that they have no metaphysics. Well, they are mistaken. Their metaphysics is implicit in what they take for granted about the world. It is so deeply rooted in their everyday lives they are blind to it in the way some people can’t see what is right in front of their nose.

 

Phillip Sherrard. Our picture of ourselves as human beings is part of this. We far too often treat the world and each other with contempt and violence because we have a certain picture of the world. And we have that picture of the world because we have a certain picture of ourselves. That this picture of ourselves is false needs no other demonstration than to look at the fruits of that picture (You know the tree by its fruits. The most profound epistemological principle ever uttered.) To change the way we treat the world and each other – indeed ourselves – we must strive to replace the rotten pictures of ourselves and the world.

 The Self, the Soul, and Human Nature

Aristotelian analogies. The blossom, scientifically, is a means to the end of reproduction. Which means that even for science ‘purpose’ belongs to the natural realm, at least to what is alive. From a perspective within the realm of meaning, however, I hope I may be forgiven for seeing the blossom – or beauty – as the end to which a snowdrop or a daffodil strives. The potential for beauty so apparent that even I can perceive it is contained in the seed of the flower. All kinds of things may prevent the flower from reaching this end – a lawnmower, for example, or a drought. But the potential to reach blossom is essential to the flower, and what a flower is can only be apprehended by the finished product, so to speak.

       Now in this I see a strong analogy between the blossom and the human soul. For the evolutionary reductionist, our inner lives are nothing but an adaption that at one point served the end of reproduction. From within the realm of meaning, the soul is the telos or final purpose of our kind, what makes us human, our essence. From within the realm of meaning, this is the natural order of things. And it is “good, very good.” Aristotle characterized our essence by writing what might be translated as ‘human beings are animals with the potential to reason and understand’ – to grasp the essence of things from a limited point of view. But we are more than creatures blessed with the potential to reason. We are animals with the potential to be souls, and the soul, though it includes the intellect, is more.  

         I don’t care here about any metaphysical belief or theory concerning the soul: whether it is immaterial and immortal, for example, or whether it emerges from the physical body (my view). I’m referring unmetaphysically to that which can show itself in the human face. A soul is just a person insofar as they can love and be loved; insofar as they can respond to and perform acts of justice and mercy; or insofar as they can respond with joy and wonder to beauty and goodness; through the soul, life can be meaningful; we can hope, have faith, and say ‘yes’ to existence insofar as we are in touch with our souls; because we are souls, we grieve when a loved one dies or lost; suffer remorse over evil done. The soul is the self in purity, the self as it should be, stripped of all corruptions and strengthened by the virtues. To ‘lose your soul’ is to be cut off from all love for whatever is ‘other’ to the self, to be so imprisoned in a self that it finally becomes a stranger to the soul. We are, most of us, on the way to our souls; we rarely ever get there. 

As the flower needs earth, water, good weather, the right environment, and sunlight to thrive, the soul needs five connections to blossom:      

• Genuine love as a child (a loving family): Love = "wonderful that you exist"
• Recognition of itself as a soul by other souls, rather than being treated as an object (morality), a product of evolution, a psyche, an identity, or a self. [I confess: "I identify as..." seems a soulless expression to me.]
• Freedom from oppression, corrupting influences (e.g. much social media), and ignorance (a nurturing community that passes on the treasures from the past); a community based on justice, mercy, and truth.
• A place in the world, including the nature and history of that place (roots) that understands itself as part of a common humanity.
• Joy, affirming love, hope, and faith – or the grace to receive a relationship to the mystery of our being (the sacred)

 

The breaking of these essential connections uproots the soul, and the capitalist social form, at least in its present incarnation, breaks these connections as even the much more oppressive regimes in the past could not. I also think to realize our potential and find our meaning we need a lot of luck.

   In fact, I wonder if these conditions have ever been met anywhere? No wonder wherever I look - starting with myself - I see damaged souls struggling to be. That seems to be part of our nature, of part of the human condition: to have to become what we should be under adverse conditions. 

...

I am exploring the "essence" of the idea of the "soul" - not trying to find the right theory. To ask, ‘What is it?’ - What is the soul? - can mean many things, but at the most radical level it involves concept formation. To ask, ‘What is a human being, really?’ is both to ask about what makes possible sense to us in terms of the way we conceptualize ‘human being’ and to ask about the being of this phenomenon. What is it? The answer: everything meaningful that has been said, is being said, or could possibility be said about it in the future, in any form: everyday life, poetry, philosophy, science - whatever. That the answer is a limit you can always only approach, never reach. Reality transcends our ability to make sense of it (I hope). Essence is not a definition. 

.. .

Limits of Philosophy. What is a human being? What is the soul? These are metaphysical questions: science has no more or less to say about them than it does about death or birth, good or evil.

     Metaphysics – like translating a great, indeed the greatest poem ever written: Being. It can only be done from what can be revealed in finite aspects in our particular language and history. The essence of, for example, a tree is far from being definitely given by an Aristotelian definition or a logical definition with necessary and sufficient conditions, however adequate such definitions may be for thinking about reference /extension. All the good poems and stories about trees, the traditional lore about particular trees, the experience of wonder, beauty, or fear, the sense of violation when certain trees or forests are seen as nothing but a ‘natural resource’ – all this and every intelligible use of 'tree' discloses what a tree really is / can be. This is even more true of the soul, a human being. There can never be closure until the human mind is closed.

 

 

 Two Contradictory Pictures of the Self

Think for yourself and the city of Dis. It almost seems, with horrible irony, a cliché: the fully mature human being uses their own understanding to judge how to act, to live, to be. As Kant meant it, that means: accept nothing on authority; reject the authority of parents, teachers, religions, cultures, traditions, the community, the poets, the philosophers, the great books – everything is under suspicion for the mature, enlightened one who uses their own understanding, who needs good reasons, objective evidence, the best ‘rational’ (objective evidence-based) explanation, all subject to the immutable thinking-grammar of logic. If that is what is meant, then I would question whether it is compatible with maturity. It seems more the attitude of the teenager in rebellion.

      In the sense that Kant understood his slogan, I think the perfect image for it is to be found in Dante of all places – in his depiction of the city of Dis and its inhabitants (from the Inferno). Dis as a prefix means 'apart,' 'asunder,' 'away'; it has a privative or reversing force; it can be contraction of 'dives' meaning wealth; it can also refer to a Roman God of the underworld - all these meanings are in play for Dante. 

     Virgil and Dante have passed through the upper circles of Hell where the sinfulness of the various carnal sins is graphically pictured – carnal sins being the terrible addiction to things that are in themselves good (sex, food, wealth), the addiction destroying intellect and love in the person. (Intellect recognizes the true value of these goods and orders one’s life accordingly. Addiction, excessive love for food, sex, or wealth, destroys one’s capacity to love oneself genuinely, to love others, the Creation, and God.) 

      In Dis they confront sinners of a radically different nature: those who actively reject God and any idea of the Good external to their will. All Good, which is to say, all reality for these sinners must be conferred by a private/subjective act of will; nothing is intrinsically good or real. To Virgil’s astonishment, Dis is not a prison for these souls, but a fortress. All their energy is spent keeping God (love, reality, goodness) out! (I learned this from Dreyfus and Kelly, All Things Shining.) 

      Why? Milton’s Satan gives the answer: he “would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven”; “A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.” In other words, Satan will not conform himself to and love any Good, any reality, he did not create himself. But like us, angels cannot create value. The souls are damned precisely because they define themselves as “autonomous,” self-contained. They are utterly deluded in that they see themselves as little absolutes, as gods. 

   We can make a picture of our selves as autonomous, as the source of all value and reality, and thus define ourselves, others, nature, God according to what fits in with our self-image; or we can acknowledge reality and goodness are objective realities not reducible to our self-conceptions (wishes, desires, etc.) and live so as to conform our finite and fallible minds and hearts to reality, to goodness - as parents do everyday when they love and care for their children; as a gardener does when they love and care for their garden; as the language student does when they strive to understand the rules of use of the foreign language; as nurses and doctors do when they assess their patients needs; as the astronomer does when they try to solve the mysteries of the physical universe; as the philosopher does when they contemplate reality as a whole and our place in it; as the theologian does when they attempt to imagine the ungraspable essence of the Divine. In all these cases, from gardener to theologian, being a good one comes from patiently and lovingly attending to a reality that is not reducible to the self; failing is mostly caused by placing one's own self and its wishes over this patient attention to reality. In a way, the main failure is a failure of love. 

You can't be both autonomous and have the humility necessary to search for truth or to do your duty. Don't go to any autonomous doctors. Do let an autonomous teacher teach you. 

   Even the decision what to do with your life is limited by the reality of your self. I was somehow meant to teach. I was not meant to be an engineer. Teaching is a recognition of my own reality, my limits, my gifts (such as they are), my loves. And I did not create myself. The Enlightenment idea that we define our own life purposes, without qualification, makes no sense to me. 

      By making themselves into little absolutes, the autonomous exclude themselves from genuine love, settling for a narcissism that can only be counterfeit. They exclude themselves in their lack of humility from real goodness, from reality itself so as to be the final judge: this for Dante (and I think for all the monotheistic religions) is sin at its most radical. For Kant, and then in a remarkably similar spirit despite the radical differences between them, for Nietzsche, their embrace of autonomy is a function of their rejection of God, in Kant’s case at least as conceived by the great religions.

      If someone asked me whether I affirmed the value of ‘thinking for yourself’ – I would have to say: well, depends on what you mean by that. If you mean conforming your mind and heart to reality, to the truly good, then yes; if you mean what Milton’s Satan meant, then no. And sorting that distinction out is perhaps the first act of thinking for yourself.

Afterthought

Notice how the answers to questions like "What is real?" or "What is good?" or "What can I know?" depend on answers to questions like "What am I?" or "Who am I?" If I reserve to myself the right to determine what is real and good, then I have just made my self or my will to be the only thing that is good per se. I have just taken away from nature or community any intrinsic value. If my self-determination requires me as a farmer to get rich so that others won't look down on me, then I can transform the fertile, sustainable, beautiful farm that I inherited into an agrobusiness nightmare: the farm I inherited, the land, makes no claim on me, if my ego-centered suffering over how other perceive me is the standard for the real and the good. (Of course, that stupid perception and the failure to honor good farming - i.e. to honor what is good - are also responsible for the destruction of the farm.) The point is to recognize the reality of what is other to myself, to acknowledge the claims it makes on me (children!), is already to acknowledge limits to my will, things not are resistant to my will as objects of care. But your self-image, world-image, community-image, God-image (if any) - and much more - are all intertwined. 

A Further Thought on the Self or the Soul

 

I would like to return to this:

 

Western philosophy typically conceptualizes the self as a stable, controlling entity, comparable to a pilot, while Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism argue that the self is an illusion, a byproduct of our thought processes.  Modern neuroscience provides evidence that aligns with the Eastern view, revealing that the left hemisphere of the brain constantly creates narratives to interpret reality, leading to a mistaken identification with these self-narratives.

 

It’s hard to untangle sense from nonsense in this passage. The “stable, controlling entity” – part of us – for Plato was Reason, understood as the mind’s ability to see the essence of things in the fleeting, changing stream of consciousness informed as it is by a multiplicity of phenomena. Or to recognize the Good even in the social arena with its many simulacra of Good. My reason blocks out the thought of gaining something by harming another person: of gaining sexual pleasure by betraying my wife, for example. If my reason is in charge, if my mind is in conformity with the moral reality of my situation (with what is Good), then such thoughts, should they occur at all, will weigh nothing. If, however, Reason is not in charge of my self, an inner conflict could occur between Reason wanting to do what is good and appetite – aided by fantasy – wanting immediate pleasure. Or if Reason has not been developed at all in me, then I will be at the mercy of whatever desires happen to arise. These are three very different types of “self.” Or “soul” (psyche).  Plato was a Western thinker. Just one. There are a myriad of interpretations of “soul” or “self” in Western thought. To reduce this complexity to “a stable controlling entity” is silly.

   And what does it mean “the self is an illusion”? An illusion is writing this? Perhaps like my belief that “I” am writing this is like a dream? Perhaps my brain is writing it? Give me a break.

   Of course, our conscious beliefs and pictures of reality can be cut off from reality, can be pure fantasy. We can be in the grip of an ideology making us into compliant tools of the powers that be. We can be in the grip of self-gratifying fantasies that console or make us feel like we are better than someone else. Like the Buddhists, Plato believed that it was difficult to escape such “false consciousness” (Marx’ definition of ideology). To the extent that fantasy or ideology condition our picture of our “selves”, then it makes sense to say that self-image is illusory.

   But to say that all possible conceptions of self are illusions because science proves there can be no such thing as a self at all, deluded or not – that is something else entirely. I have known people in the grip of fantasy, and loved them. I have been in the grip of fantasy and prayed that I might be loved. Obviously, it is not the fantasies of the relentless ego that anyone could find loveable. If there is anything loveable in us, therefore, the illusory self can’t be the whole picture. An illusory self presupposes a self that is not illusory, a true or authentic self. I call that the soul, to distinguish it from the ego. It is what gives sense to the idea that there is something precious in human beings, that even the worst of us is a limit to our wills, can’t be shot down like vermin, for example. It is why parents love children even when the children are driven by fantasy into self-destructive lives. It is what makes the thought they we are loved by God intelligible. It gives sense to the Golden Rule: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” If all of us were just illusions, nothing by computer-like brains processing data in accordance with hardware written by a mindless nature, none of this would make sense.

   That is what we are doing: trying to make sense. When we try to make sense, we are talking about meaning. Meaning, in turn, depends on our deepest pictures of reality as a whole, which further experience may revise. Questions of meaning are not possible questions of science.

A Thought of Iris Murdoch, with Help from Ludwig Wittgenstein

Man is the creature that makes a picture of himself and then comes to resemble the picture. ~ Iris Murdoch.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course, there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

 These thoughts of Iris Murdoch and Ludwig Wittgenstein have long been in my thoughts. Liberal philosophers posit that man is a possessive individual, a covetous machine. And society gets built according to that picture and people in that society come to resemble it, taking themselves as paradigms of human nature. Christianity made a picture of us as born alienated from God, born guilty sinners deserving of Hell – as babies! (Read Dante’s Inferno or Thomas Aquinas if you don’t believe me) – and low and behold evil becomes a part of our “nature” in a way it never could have for Homer.

   But what interests me most is the fact that we must make pictures of ourselves (and Being, our place in Being) because we cannot know these things as we can know commonsensical or scientifically provable facts. Wittgenstein imagined the world as the set of all facts. ‘My Latin grammar book is on my desk,’ ‘The coffee cup the boys gave me for Father’s Day is on the book,’ ‘The book is green,’ ‘The cup is black’ – etc. ad infinitum. The facts don’t mean anything per se, taken apart from the meanings some of them have in our lives, in our world. In and of itself, the death of the girl Anne Frank on a certain date in a certain place is just as much a fact as the number of hairs on my head or fingers on my hand. As facts, they are equal. If one is more significant, it is not due to its being a fact; it is due to what it means for us. And what it means for us has nothing to do with its being a fact; it has to do with the pictures of the world and ourselves, pictures that are like the light in which we see the fact, in which the fact has meaning (or not). And these pictures differ: for the accursed Nazis, the fact was no more significant than getting rid of one more pest. For anyone whose picture of the world includes the belongingness of a common humanity, the murder of a little girl full of life is an unspeakable evil. But it is not a fact that it is either, at least not in the strict sense. (Truth is deeper than facts.)

    We don’t have a view from nowhere of Being as such. If God were somehow able to mind-meld with us and reveal the absolute truth of everything, we wouldn’t have to make pictures.  We can’t get outside of pictures of the world as such and our place in it to compare them with the world as it is unperceived, undescribed, unconceptualized, uninterpreted – and just think how many there are and have been, and how much incommensurability there is between them. We can’t. And yet we can’t make sense of our lives without some picture of the whole and our place in it. We either see the world, however vaguely or implicitly – as a limited whole interpreted in some way, or with live with absurdity. No, the absurdity becomes the picture we live by.

 

. . .

 

We make pictures of ourselves, too. Strange, since you would think we have private, privileged access to our conscious thoughts and feelings, that thus we would know these even more intimately than any fact. Only I can feel my pain or anger, my pleasures and loves. But just like the facts that make up the world for Wittgenstein, our states of mind only mean anything, perhaps only arise because of the pictures of our Selves and the world that we live by. And these can be very different. We can’t directly observe our self, soul, spirit, ego, subconscious, etc. We can measure brain states but then we just have more facts in the world without significance unless we interpret them.

   A friend sent me this not too long ago.

Western philosophy typically conceptualizes the self as a stable, controlling entity, comparable to a pilot, while Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism argue that the self is an illusion, a byproduct of our thought processes.  Modern neuroscience provides evidence that aligns with the Eastern view, revealing that the left hemisphere of the brain constantly creates narratives to interpret reality, leading to a mistaken identification with these self-narratives.  This false sense of self, which is often equated with the incessant internal dialogue, contributes significantly to human mental suffering.

There are two pictures of the self here: the so-called Western picture and the Buddhist picture. The passage asserts that science settles the matter in favor of Buddhism. So there is after all a fact of the matter? One factually true self and a slew of false or illusory pictures?

      That makes no sense at all. I have no idea how neuroscience proves anything, but assume for the sake of argument that neuroscience provides factual evidence to believe “that the left hemisphere of the brain constantly creates narratives to interpret reality.” That we create narratives – another metaphor, substituting for pictures – is obvious. That a part of our brain is active while people try to interpret reality (everything from the birth of a child to the death of a father, one’s own history and the history of one’s people, etc.) is, well, rather obvious. That’s it’s the left hemisphere – well, interesting for neuroscientists, I guess.

   But brains don’t grieve for loved who have died, feel remorse for evil done, love another human being, leap down on the track to save a stranger, betray a friend; brains don’t try to make sense of life with religion, philosophy, science, literature, or history. People do. Brains don’t interpret reality in the literal sense.

  At most at the perceptual, preconscious level brains “interpret” – though process would be a better word. Our brains receive impulses from the senses and generate conscious images before we ever interpret anything. Our brains perhaps predispose us to conceptualize in basic ways: in time and space, with cause and effect, objects relating to objects in various ways, moving in and out of spaces in one direction or the other. But at the level of self-consciousness, brains don’t interpret, unless you want to say that Romeo didn’t really fall in love with Juliet such that he could not go on living without her was really nothing but a certain empirical, measurable biochemical reaction in the brain. Certainly things were going on in Romeo’s brain as he was falling in love with Juliet and resolving to take his life when he judged her dead. That is just to say that Romeo in not a pure spirit (an angel) or a ghost. But no one could no what the measurement of the brain event meant without knowing what love means, what it is to love someone, and all the implicit interpretations of life that make such a thing intelligible. (If Romeo’s picture or human life saw love as nothing but a biological impulse planted by evolution accompanied by an illusion, he could not have fallen in love and would not have killed himself.) The passage reduces the realm of meaning to the realm of biochemistry. That is not a scientific fact but a picture of the self, one that – in contrast to Buddhism – makes no sense at all to me.

. . .

  My own picture, such as it is, is close to that of Iris Murdoch. I agree

 

that human beings are naturally selfish seems true on the evidence, whenever and wherever we look at them, in spite of a very small number of apparent exceptions. About the quality of this selfishness modern psychology has had something to tell us. The psyche is a historically determined individual relentlessly looking after itself. In some ways it resembles a machine; in order to operate it needs sources of energy, and it is predisposed to certain patterns of activity. The area of its vaunted freedom is not usually very great. One of its main pastimes is daydreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the world, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It constantly seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self. I think we can probably recognize ourselves in this rather depressing description. – Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts”

I think this is more a product of social injustice and thus unnatural human life forms than evolution. The form this ego consciousness takes in advanced capitalist societies tends to be narcissism. The idea that the self is like a thing with an unchangeable essence – an ‘identity,’ a what more than a who (I wish to have nothing to do with a person who reduces me to a man, or an American, or as “white” or any other fashionable identity) – is another particular form this narcissism takes. Be that as it may. We are capable of suspending such ego consciousness in a variety of ways: in the contemplation of great art, for example, as Schopenhauer recognized; in the doing of simple duties, as Kant recognized; when we strive for truth, strive to form our minds to something not reducible to our fantasies – even learning a language or math has this good effect; and above all in the many forms love takes – when authentic. As Murdoch wrote:

Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

I call the aspect of the self that is capable of truth, of approaching truth, the mind. I call the aspect of the self capable of love the soul. For what it’s worth.

  I will end on another thought of Iris Murdoch:

 

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.

The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.