Persons: Problem or Solution?

Time only for a brief foundation... 

I'm reading a book called Brahman and Person -- actually a posthumous compilation of essays -- by a Catholic priest named Richard De Smet, who lived in India and became a scholar of Vedanta. It's pretty dense and specialized, seemingly written more for a Hindu than western audience. In short, a bit of a slog, but not without its moments.

I have an interest in the subject, because I suppose I would have called myself a Vedantin until I found a better way, one that included me. For as De Smet writes, although Vedanta speaks of a "self," it is

never a soul in the Aristotelian sense of the word.... it is never to be taken in that comprehensive sense in which the classical Christian thinkers understood the human person as a bearer of spiritual and corporal potentialities and activities, but rather, in the Cartesian sense of a thinking ego, without any natural connection with the body it appears to ensoul.

This is a slightly different subject, but for our money, the transition from the classical/Scholastic to the modern Cartesian view of man was a huge step backward from which we not only haven't recovered, but which continues to yield its partial, contradictory, absurd, and at times frankly perverse fruits. 

This dualistic approach has, by definition, no possibility of making any integral sense, but it seems we're stuck with it for the foreseeable future -- mind and body alienated from one another and locked in mortal combat. Like the feminist war on men, if these bitter hags win, they lose. Likewise, if the mind prevails over the body (or vice versa), we (meaning persons) all lose.

For example, the notion that one sex can actually be the other can only be affirmed in a dualistic, Cartesian metaphysic in which body and mind are detached from one another. But in reality, sex is fractally encoded in everything, from the skin, muscle, bone, cell, and on down.

Anyway, the Vedantic dualism of spirit and matter renders the human person "a temporary appearance," such that its "understanding of man ultimately does away with man himself!"

D'oh!

Now, although I take ideas seriously, I'm not one of those eggheads who take fellow eggheads particularly seriously -- as if, for example, the typical American circa 1776 went around quoting John Locke, any more than the typical LGBTQ activist brings up Descartes in order to ground their sociopolitical demands in an adequate philosophical principle. 

When humans behave irrationally -- and no one ever went broke betting on the irrationality of human beings -- it's generally not because they're in thrall to some intellectual, rather, because they're in thrall to fallen human nature. 

Thus, when humans are greedy, or larcenous, or envious,-- or gluttonous, power-mad, violent, deceitful, blasphemous, idolatrous, etc. -- we needn't reach for some deep explanation, as if these aberrations need to be pinned on some wacky pinhead.

Rather, the ideas of this or that intellectual are only appealing because they legitimize what people want to do anyway. For example, Marxism appeals to people because it legitimizes their envy and their will to power. If those trends didn't already exist in humans, there would be no "hook." No one needs to teach people to be "progressives," for they are born that way. Rather, it is necessary to transcend progressivism in order to mature beyond it.

For example, a good start is to teach these spiritually untutored human beastlings the Ten Commandments. And then, once they've internalized these -- supposing they've managed to stop lying, stealing, murdering, and envying -- then move on to an even higher teaching -- the Sermon on the Mount -- calling for an interior transformation that goes beyond the merely negative and exterior proscriptions of the Commandments. First outward behavior, then the heart.

Out of time. To be continued...