Take a Flying Leap

After much groundwork, we're finally getting down to the nub of the gist of crux of the matter of Feser's Immortal Souls. The penultimate chapter is called Immortality, but before diving in, let's begin with a couple of aphorisms:

For the man who lives in the modern world, it is not the soul's immortality in which it is difficult to believe, but its mere existence.

That's true. Scientism colors everything. It is the implicit metaphysic of our age, and one of its drawbacks is that its philosophic map cannot account for the mapmaker, much less the maker of mapmakers.

Nevertheless,   

We have fewer solid reasons to anticipate that there will be a tomorrow than to believe that there will be another life.

A bold statement! However, given the proper metaphysical presuppositions, this is necessarily true, even a tautology. 

In previous chapters Feser proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with geometric logic that an immaterial soul exists. Nevertheless, I am reminded of Pascal's crack that in matters of faith,

And we all have a contrary disposition, more or less, or at least we are at cross purposes with ourselves. Thus,

There are arguments of increasing validity, but, in short, no argument in any field spares us the final leap.

This I suspect has to do with reasons related to Gödel, who would say that man has access to truths that he can never prove. Amirite, Gemini?

It is possible to interpret Gödel's theorems as suggesting that there are truths about the world that are beyond the reach of human reason.

Well, that's my interpretation, and I'm sticking with it. I suspect it has to do with the difficulty of translating infinitude into finitude. 

You're onto something. Gödel's incompleteness theorems indeed highlight the tension between the finite and the infinite, particularly in the context of formal systems. 

Formal systems, like mathematical theories, are designed to generate truths within a specific domain. However, the truths they can express are limited by their finite nature. 

Gödel showed that no matter how complex a formal system, there will always be statements that are true but cannot be proven or disproven within that system. This suggests that there are truths that transcend the limitations of formalization.

That's good enough for me. 

One problem is our ambiguous nature, being that we are both corporeal and incorporeal, neither reducible to the other. If we were purely incorporeal we would be angels, but if we were purely corporeal we'd be animals. 

Dávila says that 

The soul is not in the body, but rather, the body is in the soul. But it is in the body where we feel the soul.

That's true: one way to know you have a soul is to pay attention to all the things in this world that speak to it, e.g., not just truth and beauty in general, but the particular things that light up this or that soul. It is important to follow and amplify these transcendental clues, which reveal to us who we are, precisely. 

The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls them "idiom needs" or "forces of destiny" whereby

everybody has their own idiom for life -- a blend between the psychic organization which from birth forms the self's core.... As adults, we spend our time looking for objects of interest -- human or material -- which can serve to enhance our particular idioms or styles of life -- perpetually "meeting idiom needs by securing evocatively nourishing objects."

You know -- all the little or big things that light us up on the inside. It explains why you, for example, are attracted to this blog, because you are more or less attracted to the same things I am. 

Which makes us "soulmates," in a manner of speaking, which is to say, Raccoons. Raccoons have specific "idiom needs," and here we are. Probably a less sentimental way of saying it is that we are vertical chums. The Friends of Toots recognize one another and exchange furtive glances across expanses of time and space.

There are also the people who, of course, hate the things we love. But let's keep politics out of it. Except to recall a passage from our Unknown Friend: "A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system"

can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus, a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the "class struggle."

The same goes for neo-Marxist identity politics, white privilege, feminism, the 1619 project, transgenderism, and all the rest of those distorting prismhouses. 

Back to Feser. Although he proves the immortality of the soul, I still don't buy it. Which is to say, I don't think it's a matter of reasoning our way into belief. Or, to be precise, reason is (or can be) a necessary but not sufficient reason for our belief; it grants us reason to believe, but nevertheless, no argument spares the final leap.

Into the unknown, just like that? Not exactly, because it's more of an unknown known, or known unknown:

The mystery of faith is in fact the possibility of an anticipatory perception in the absence of its content; that is, faith makes present its content by accepting it already, before the perception properly so-called (Schuon).

This "anticipatory perception" very much reminds me of Polany's tacit knowledge that guides the scientist into heretofore undiscovered vistas. Or Meno's Paradox, to the effect that man  

cannot search for what he knows -- since he knows it, there is no need to search -- nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.

But if Polanyi is correct, we already have implicit knowledge of what we're looking for, which is how we recognize it when we discover it.

But we're getting pretty far afield. We'll leave off with Feser's bottomline: "The upshot of this chapter is that the soul's immortality," "though today commonly regarded as purely theological," "can in fact be established by way of philosophical arguments."