What is a Human Being?

Easy: it's someone who can ask what a human being is.

I realize you're just being a wisenheimer, but there may be a point buried in your japery. That is to say, the human being is always meta to anything he or she defines: there's a little bit of Gödel in everyone.

My dog cannot ask what a dog is. Not to say she doesn't know, albeit in a non-conceptual way. I say this based upon her immediate recognition of fellow dogs. She also knows a cat isn't a dog, but again, with no concept of cat. 

Back to asking what a human being is. We could probably shorten that sentence to just asking. Human beings never stop asking questions, and philosophers are even worse. 

Good philosophers, anyway. I can't find the aphorism, but Dávila says something to the effect that for science the tragedy would be to lose the answers, whereas for philosophy it would be to forget the questions. Moreover, 

To give a religious answer to the enigma of the world is a less sure sign of religiosity than to confront it with a religious question.

Asking a religious question about a scientific answer is always a good place to start -- for example, why is there something instead of nothing, and what kind of being would ask such a question? Not my dog, that's for sure. Even though she knows as well as I do that something exists. Only a human could entertain the concept of "nothing," let alone that something could come out of it. 

Just to reset, we're up to Part III of Feser's Immortal Souls, entitled What is a Human Being? It consists of three chapters, beginning with Against Cartesianism. Being that I'm already against it, Feser is preaching to the coonverted. 

Descartes is famous for his "substance dualism" whereby the mind is one kind of substance, the body another, and WTF? In other words, who knows how they interact, or how to put them back together once divorced. I have a better idea: why separate them to begin with? 

For Descartes, a human being is much like an angel imprisoned in a body, "an incorporeal or immaterial substance, with which the body is only contingently associated" (Feser). Thus the body "is no more truly a part of a person than his clothing is."

This reminds me of Christian Science, whereby "the spiritual world is the only reality and is entirely good, and that the material world, with its evil, sickness and death, is an illusion." This is just a modern version of the old Gnostic heresy, and to which the Incarnation stands as the ultimate rebuke.

Now, if Cartesianism were true, then

one would suppose that no matter how grave the damage to the body and brain, at least the most abstract of intellectual processes would be completely unaffected...

And one would be quite wrong. 

I'm getting bored.

So am I. I wonder what Schuon is up to? Maybe he can liven this party.

Cartesianism -- perhaps the most intelligent way of being unintelligent -- is the classic example of a faith which has become the dupe of the gropings of reasoning; this is a “wisdom from below” and history shows it to be deadly.

Sick burn! 

The whole of modern philosophy, including science, starts from a false conception of intelligence..., in the sense that it seeks the explanation and goal of man at a level below him, in something which could not serve to define the human creature. But in a much more general way, all rationalism -- whether direct or indirect -- is false from the sole fact that it limits the intelligence to reason or intellection to logic, or in other words cause to effect.

He even wrote a bit of doggerel about him, which probably sounds better in the original German:

Descartes opined: in the beginning was doubt --
In other words: in the beginning was the devil,
Namely error. For certainty
Is what overcomes the cunning of doubt.

Now, there is no more important question than What is a Human Being?, because if you get that wrong, then everything else follows. For example,

It should be noted that human animality is situated beneath animality as such, for animals innocently follow their immanent law and thereby enjoy a certain natural and indirect contemplation of the Divine Prototype; whereas there is decadence, corruption and subversion when man voluntarily reduces himself to his animality (Schuon).

And

indeed, nothing is more fundamentally inhuman than the “purely human,” the illusion of constructing a perfect man starting from the individual and terrestrial; whereas the human in the ideal sense draws its reason for existence and its entire content from that which transcends the individual and the earthly (ibid., emphasis mine).

Which goes to what was said above about man always being meta to anything he or she defines.

In a word, there is nothing more inhuman than humanism, by the fact that it, so to speak, decapitates man: wishing to make of him an animal which is perfect, it succeeds in turning him into a perfect animal..., since it inevitably ends by “re-barbarizing” society, while “dehumanizing” it (ibid.).

And here we are.

Humanism is the reign of horizontality, either naïve or perfidious; and since it is also -- and by that very fact -- the negation of the Absolute, it is a door open to a multitude of sham absolutes, which in addition are often negative, subversive, and destructive (ibid.).

You can say that again.

The moral ideal of humanism is inefficacious because it is subject to the tastes of the moment, or to fashion, if one wishes; for positive qualities are fully human only in connection with the will to surpass oneself, hence only in relation to what transcends us.

"In relation to what transcends us." There's that meta again. I guess we'll end with the preliminary conclusion that the proper human is meta-human, while waiting to see where Feser goes with his analysis in the next two chapters.