Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 5c; Plato, Phaidon (Phaedo): Körperfeindlichkeit?; Seele -> Ding (Gefangenschaft), wenn das Sinnliche nicht mehr Ausdruck d. Geistes ist; Augustinus (Schönheit - Befreiung v. Manichäismus); Dionysius

Kurzinhalt: Phaedo ... he does not say that the body imprisons the soul, but rather that the soul imprisons herself in the body ... The decisive question is whether the body and the soul ... are taken to be opaque things juxtaposed to one another, or whether ...

Textausschnitt: 126a What, then, accounts for Plato's notorious depiction of philosophy as a liberator from the deceitful senses that imprison the soul in a body? (Fs)

The lovers of learning know that when philosophy gets hold of their soul, it is imprisoned in and clinging to the body, and that it is forced to examine other things through it as through a cage and not by itself, and that it wallows in every kind of ignorance. Philosophy sees that the worst feature of this imprisonment is that it is due to desires, so that the prisoner himself is contributing to his own incarceration most of all. As I say, the lovers of learning know that philosophy gets hold of their soul when it is in that state, then gently encourages it and tries to free it by showing them that investigation through the eyes is full of deceit, as is that through the ears and the other senses. Philosophy then persuades the soul to withdraw from the senses insofar as it is not compelled to use them and bids the soul to gather itself together by itself, to trust only itself and whatever reality, existing by itself, the soul by itself understands, and not to consider as true whatever it examines by other means, for this is different in different circumstances and is sensible and visible, whereas what the soul itself sees is intelligible and invisible. The soul of the true philosopher thinks that this deliverance must not be opposed and so keeps away from pleasures and desires and pains as far as he can ... because every pleasure and every pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together. It makes the soul corporeal, so that it believes that truth is what the body says it is. (Phaedo 82d-83d)1

127a For all the talk of the beautiful cosmos, is not Plato nevertheless a dualist in the end who relegates the material world to a ghostly unreality? Doesn't he make the imagination, eikasia, a trivial power of the soul that needs to be transcended to the purity of reason alone?2 The interpretation we have just laid out, which brings out the significance of sense experience and the supreme beauty of the physical world, is not only able to be harmonized with the passages expressing a kind of hostility toward the senses, but in fact explains them. (Fs)

127b The passage from the Phaedo, which is one of the clearest "anti-body" texts in the Platonic corpus, makes two points that are especially significant given our discussion thus far: first, he does not say that the body imprisons the soul, but rather that the soul imprisons herself in the body,3 which is what constitutes the worst feature of this predicament. Second, what characterizes this imprisonment is the inversion by which the corporeal aspect of experience is taken to be more real than the noncorporeal dimension. To put this point in the language we have been using, it amounts to saying that the expression is given priority over what is expressed. But this inversion would in fact by that very stroke eliminate the body's and thus the senses' expressive character. In other words, to take the natural world in its materiality as a positive thing in itself separate from its subordination to meaning and thus its expressiveness is to destroy it as image, to render it mute. It thus becomes dead "stuff." The world surrenders its meaning, and the soul becomes entangled in the push and pull of pleasure and pain as so many mechanistic and therefore unintelligible, noncausal, forces. Indeed, if the body is no longer "expression," then the soul is no longer that which expresses itself. It thus becomes itself a "thing," alongside the thing called "body," and of course it will necessarily be an impotent sort of thing, for what kind of corporeal force can the soul exert in comparison to bodies? It is because of this unintelligibility that Plato describes this inversion as a state of ignorance — to fail to see the world as significant already in its being is to be ignorant in the perfect sense — and it also makes clear why this is not something the body can qua body impose on the soul: to think that it can is already to assume that the body is a thing in itself over against the soul, which is to say, it is to take the state of ignorance to be the best vantage from which to see the truth of things. To a soul that sees because it knows, by contrast, the world is nothing but epiphany. (Fs) (notabene)

128a The irony now ought to be clear: owing to the paradoxical nature of image, the inversion of the body-soul relationship is deeply problematic, not (only) because it trivializes the soul, but because it subsequently trivializes the body. In other words, the absolutizing of the physical fails to accord the physical its due goodness — i.e., it empties it of the goodness it can possess only as receiving, and thus only in its subordinate station as mediator, as image. But this means that the sometimes vehement condemnations of the body's tendency to claim ascendency over the soul that we find in classical literature, both pagan and Christian, may indeed be a zealous affirmation and protection of the body's significance. The decisive question is whether the body and the soul, and thus the senses and the intellect, are taken to be opaque things juxtaposed to one another, or whether body is presented as image, and thus as an expression of spirit. One cannot insist on the body's significance without at the same time insisting on a hierarchical relationship to spirit. As we have seen, behind this question lies the even more fundamental question of whether causality is understood first and foremost in terms of goodness and beauty. As Hans Urs von Balthasar has taught us, one of the most important considerations when evaluating an intellectual epoch is the status it grants to beauty. Here we find a way in which Christianity deepens, and gives an ultimate foundation for, one of the highest truths in pagan thought. The beauty that Augustine loved late was a beauty that ran through the cosmos, a beauty that called him in sensible things to God.4 We recall that it was precisely Augustine's encounter with Neoplatonic thought — most likely Plotinus and Porphyry in Victorinus's translation — that liberated him from the flesh-condemning Manichees.5 It is not at all accidental that the liberation consisted in the discovery that spirit must be understood in nonmaterial terms, and thus not as a thing opposed to the thing called body. Only thus can the body, and therefore the material world, be expressive in the way Augustine celebrates in the Confessions. Plotinus himself, who may be notorious for passages that seem to demean the body, wrote what is one of the most passionate attacks on Gnosticism in the ancient world.6 Anyone who hates the body, he writes, blasphemes because he shows contempt for its Creator.7 It is, indeed, goodness and beauty that lie directly in the center of what we may for that very reason call Plotinus's "cosmos." But the Christian thinker who adopts and adapts this view most decisively is no doubt Dionysius the Areopagite, for whom God is cause, i.e., creator, precisely as goodness and beauty,8 and thus whose relentless via negativa takes place from beginning to end within a world whose very stones proclaim the Lord precisely in their stoneness.9 Along with Augustine, Dionysius was passed on to the great thinkers of the Middle Ages as the authority on such matters, and these thinkers can therefore be said to be arguably the most decisive formers of the Christian imagination.10 Dionysius will thus be a primary focus for us in chapter seven. (Fs) (notabene)