Today, Joe asks Jamie something about his latest research. Specially: what is the essence of a person? This has implications beyond philosophy circles. It stretches into each of our worldview.
Jamie Dew: Hey, everybody. This is Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And this is Joe Fontenot.
Jamie: And once again, we want to welcome you to our Towel & Basin podcast.
Joe: And so, today, Jamie, you've done all this work in philosophical anthropology.
Jamie: Nerd stuff.
Joe: Nerd stuff. And I'm pretending right now I know what that means. But I do know that you have looked at what it means to be a human person.
Jamie: Yeah.
Joe: What that is. And there are all these many syllable words that go with that, but here's the real question I have for you. So what? What does that matter?
Jamie: Well, thank you very much for asking me that question. You're saying my... No, I get it. Indeed, when you hear the words philosophical anthropology, that sounds like a bundle of nerd stuff right there that can be very abstract with no real bearing on the day-to-day stuff at all. So let me just define what it is and say something real quick about why this discipline matters and really should matter to most believers. So philosophical anthropology is different from... When you hear the word just anthropology itself, typically people associate that with something like the social sciences of, say, sociology, where you're dealing with people groups or social groups. That's not what I'm referring to. I have no expertise in that whatsoever. Okay? Interesting stuff, but I don't have any expertise in it. Philosophical anthropology is the consideration of what human persons are.
Joe: Exactly.
Jamie: So it's that question you asked. So what are human persons?
Joe: So this would help us understand maybe the difference between humans and animals?
Jamie: Correct.
Joe: Okay.
Jamie: Correct. So what makes a human person distinct from, say, a whale or an elephant, aside from the physiological things, of course.
Joe: Yeah, yeah.
Jamie: But in terms of cognitive abilities, spiritual abilities, when we try to disentangle those things, we are inevitably saying something unique about human persons. Okay? So, I'm interested from the philosophical side of things about what human persons are. Okay? Now what I would say in terms of its importance is, in short, there are so many ethical and pastoral issues that pertain to how we answer that question, "What are human persons?" So, for example, our current counseling debates between, say, a biblical approach or a Nouthetic approach, if you're not familiar with what some of those bridges are, the Nouthetic approach would say, generally speaking, our psychological issues are purely spiritual issues, brain stuff, chemical stuff, and stuff of that nature is not all that important, or even doesn't matter, where if you go more of an integrated approach where you're going to include and build on and base out of the teachings of theology and scripture, but also take the clinical, psychological side of things into consideration as well.
Jamie: That whole debate that rages, for example, right now, I think in many ways it depends on how you answer this question of what human persons are. I think you can say the same thing on all the ethical issues that we deal with today. So, for example, take the transgender debates and all of the things happening with that. Is a human person some spiritual entity trapped inside some kind of physical organism? Or is the physical organism the person? You see, how you answer that question about human persons, what they are, is going to dictate what you can and cannot say about those types of issues.
Joe: Okay, so break this down real quick. Let's take the transgender concept because that's super popular. Right?
Jamie: Yep.
Joe: You go on so many people's Twitter and they got the little he, him, that little thing. And you're like, "What's the deal with the pronoun? I thought there was only two." I could see three, and then I get really confused after that. Right? But a lot of people, this is a very fundamental, serious thing, and they are really struggling with this, especially high school, younger people which... This is so normal.
Jamie: That's right.
Joe: So, break this down for me. Explain to me what you just said, the difference between a person trapped in a body kind of thing, or a person who is the bot-
Jamie: Right. Sure. So, yeah. And again, for these folks, so take for example someone that is a transgender. Okay? They're not saying, "These sexual preferences are what I desire." They're saying, "This is what I am." Whether they're right about that's another question. I'm just saying that's what they're saying to us.
Joe: That's what they're saying.
Jamie: And I think, ultimately, their ability to succeed in that message will be determined in large part by what they think a human person is. So let me walk through the basic views available to us today.
Joe: Okay.
Jamie: Okay? Roughly speaking, there are two major views that folks in the west, and I would even say even in the east, have held to. And then there's this other third view that I would advocate for today. The first view is a very common view. It's called substance dualism.
Joe: Substance dualism. Okay.
Jamie: Substance dualism. Basically, you're getting into, without getting into the weeds of metaphysics here or anything else like that, substances are things like bodies, things like souls. Okay? So a soul would be a substance and a body would be a substance. And by substance here, just for simple terms, think of it as kinds of stuff, if you will. Okay? And real entities. A spiritual entity and a physical entity. And what substance dualism is saying is, well, it's a dualism. There's a duality of substances. A body is one kind of substance and a soul is another kind of substance.
Joe: So is this kind of the gnostic idea that the body is bad, the soul is good, we're always fighting against the one to the other?
Jamie: Certainly Gnosticism is born off of that. Or I could say it this way. Gnosticism is built on that chassis, if you will. Okay?
Joe: Okay.
Jamie: Now, it's not to say that every substance dualist is a gnostic. Not at all. But Gnosticism takes that framework and really bends it in such a way that physical stuff is bad and spiritual stuff is good. Okay? So substance dualists make, I would say, two claims, basically. The first one is the one we've just described. What I'd call stuff distinction. Physical stuff, non-physical stuff, or one kind of entity and another kind of entity.
Joe: Different buckets.
Jamie: Yeah. And then the second claim that a substance dualist is going to make is what I call person soul identity. And on this claim, basically, a person, while there may indeed be two kinds of stuff, a body and a soul, per the substance dualist perspective, the person just is one of those. And in this case it would be the immaterial soul. And this is a very common view. Consider every funeral that you've ever been to. You go to Granny's funeral, for example, and the preacher stands up and says, "Granny's not here. There's her body, but she is in heaven." Okay.
Joe: Yeah.
Jamie: Now, I think that there's something right about that view. Namely, I really do think that there's a real distinction between a soul and a body, and each of those are real individual things. But do we identify the human person with the immaterial and suggest that our body is merely a container? This has been the dominant view from Plato all the way up until, I'd say, Augustan. With Augustan, there's an intermixing of this view with some other views, Aristotle's view. The Protestants have largely taken this substance dualist view. Most of our preaching assumes this today. But here's the sticky thing. The transgender community is also saying that. Think about what Caitlyn Jenner is saying. Caitlyn Jenner is saying, "I am not this body, I'm trapped inside this body."
Joe: So therefore I changed this body to be more like the inside of me.
Jamie: That's correct. So that's an example of how answering the question of what a human person is fleshes out or cashes out into very real ethical issues that we deal with today. Okay? Now, materialism is another view.
Joe: The first one was-
Jamie: Substance dualism.
Joe: Substance dualism. The second was now materialism.
Jamie: Second one's materialism. And this one, materialism, you've had materialists all the way through philosophical history and all throughout western intellectual traditions. Okay? But materialism comes in vogue roughly in the 17th century. You have the birth of modern philosophy, the birth of modern science. And I won't go into all the fun to me, but probably very boring to all of our listeners, details of the story of how this developed. But let me just say it this way. In the 17th century, there was a major push back against that substance dualist perspective. Okay? And here's basically the pushback in a nutshell.
Jamie: If it's true that bodies and souls are fundamentally different kinds of things and you are the immaterial soul, then here's the question. How do they interact with each other? Our normal understanding of causation seems to go out the window at this point. So, for example, considered two dominoes stacked up beside each other. Domino A and domino B, and domino A falls and hits domino B, and here it is, causes domino B to fall. Okay? We understand causation in this instance, right? There's a touching or a contact, and then there's a transfer of energy from one domino to the other.
Jamie: But now imagine one of the entities involved, maybe domino A is not a physical domino, it's a spiritual domino. Okay? How does domino A cause domino B to move when there's no contact and there's no transfer of energy? The substance dualist view has had, throughout its history, and I would say even to this day we still don't have any good answers to this, I'm not convinced that's a uniquely substance dualist problem though. I think materialists actually have a pretty similar problem of their own that I'll get to in a minute. But substance dualists had a terrible time answering that question. And because of that, what folks did is they just rejected substance dualism as a whole.
Joe: So the pendulum just went the complete opposite way.
Jamie: Correct. And the way it did that was by lopping off this spiritual entity to reject the existence of an immaterial soul and say, "No, it's just material bodies."
Joe: This is essentially modernism.
Jamie: Correct. In large part, the perspective of modernity, and then to some degree post-modernity as well. The post-modernity, there is no one side [crosstalk 00:10:03].
Joe: It's just all throughout.
Jamie: There's a lot of different things we could say there. But this becomes pretty much, for the most part, what most modern philosophers and most modern scientists believe about human persons now, that you're not a soul, there is no soul. You are merely a body and a brain with electrochemical physiological. Now the beauty of this approach is that man, it looks like the mind/body interaction stuff is really easy to explain because it's all physical. And now that we're all in a physical category, we know how causation happens there. So that was the advantage. And for a long time, materialists really just had the rule of the roost.
Jamie: What's happened in recent years, though, is we've really zoomed in on and focused on the nature of consciousness. So conscious experiences. And by that I don't mean consciousness in an eastern way where the yin and the yang and humming and stuff. No. When we talk about consciousness here, we're talking about specifically what we call phenomenal consciousness, the feels and the what it's likes thing. So I pick up the coffee cup and I taste the coffee. I feel the wind blow through my hair. Not my hair, because it's kind of stiff. But I feel the wind blow across my face.
Joe: I have no hair, so better than mine.
Jamie: Your beard.
Joe: Yeah, my beard.
Jamie: So it's the feels. It's the what it's likes. You and I encounter something. And materialism has a very difficult time explaining how that can happen in a purely physiological way. So, for example, if we did an MRI of your brain as you tasted a sugar cube or tasted the coffee or heard Beethoven or saw a beautiful picture of a rose or of a woman's face, there would indeed be a electrochemical storm in your brain that we could map out and we could see it happen in the MRI. But all you find there is the electrochemical storm. What you actually never find in that little electrochemical storm is the taste of coffee or the feel of the wind or the sight, the thought of joy when you see the beautiful face. Right? It's feels and what it's like. Materialism seems to have a very difficult time explaining that.
Joe: It's almost like a black and white TV to a color TV. In some sense you can take the color out of it and you've got all the same shapes, but you don't have any of the depth in some way.
Jamie: Yeah, perhaps. What I don't want to say is that materialism can't explain anything about our cognition. That absolutely can. We can map out that there are certain parts of your brain and my brain that handle certain types of things and others don't. So materialism can indeed map out a lot of our cognitive life. But specifically our conscious experiences of tastes of coffee and things like that, you just don't get that type of thing at all. And so, materialism has a hard time there. I would argue that that's really just another version of the mind/body interaction problem all over again. So that's why I said earlier I don't think it's a uniquely substance dualist problem.
Jamie: Another view is the view of Aristotle, and then appropriated and adapted by Thomas Aquinas in the medieval period. This is called hylomorphism. That's a big old fancy philosophical term, which comes from two Greek words, hyle and morphe. Hyle means matter or literally wood. That refers to the physical stuff, the material stuff. And morphe from form or essence. For Aquinas and for Aristotle, but for Aquinas, the human person is a composite of a body and a soul. So remember earlier I said I do think that the substance dualists are right in saying there's two kinds of fundamental stuff here, an immaterial soul and a material body. But also, I'm not with the substance dualist on wanting to say that the human person just is the immaterial soul.
Jamie: Seems to me, biblically speaking, and according to the theological tradition of the church, ultimately Christianity has thought of the human person as a body/soul composite. And that's precisely what Aquinas says. Aristotle says the same thing, but there are some key differences between Aristotle and Aquinas on this. I would adopt the Thomistic or the Thomas Aquinas view that we are body/soul composites. And so, what that does is it gives us the ability to account for human person in both physical and spiritual terms, which I think biblically we have to. It also may not answer the question of interaction, but it certainly at least assumes the reality of that mind/body interaction. And I think that this view gives us a much greater advantage on answering some of these counseling questions and some of these ethical questions. One of them we touched on here in this podcast. I think this better situates us to deal with those types of questions.
Joe: Okay. So let me ask you a question. If this third category, hylomorphism, it kind of answers these things better. Does it answer them better from a Christian worldview? In other words, it helps us give a more coherent picture of what we believe already to be right. You know what I mean? Like people are valuable and on and on and on. And there's life after death and so forth. Or is it something where it really handles the objections better than the others? In a fair fight, does it beat the other two?
Jamie: Yeah, good question. I would argue yes, it does both of those things. So, one of the things I argued in my doctoral dissertation was that essentially this account squares better with some of the core metaphysical teachings of the Christian faith than does the other two perspectives. So it fits our perspective better. That's one of the things that persuades me towards it. And I should pause right here and just simply say, I think... Well, let me finish this out and then I'll come back to that. Okay?
Jamie: The second thing I think it does is I think it handles some of the philosophical problems that I mentioned on the other counts better. Some of those philosophical problems are never going to go away. I should just say this. We all need a big old fat dose of epistemic humility, the ability to admit we may not ever be able to solve all these problems. Right? So, my view is going to have problems, the materialist is going to have some problems, the substance dualist is going to have some problems. I just think this has the least problems, or at least menacing problems. And so I think it does both. Fits the Christian tradition, but also handles these objections better.
Jamie: Now, let me just say this. If you differ with me on this, that, no, it can't be this hylomorphic perspective, and you are in favor of, say, a substance dualist view, okay, awesome. Look, I want to say you have wonderful historical advocates of this view and you have fully competent abled theologians and philosophers today that hold those views. That's a legit view for Christians to hold. It's one I differ with on a couple of fronts, but I still think it's a totally legit Christian view. Materialism has also had lots and lots and lots of historical, and does today, have lots and lots of contemporary advocates and defenders who are really good thinkers, but I'm less inclined to think that we can square that one up with the Christian tradition even if I think that materialism might have a better time answering some of the ethical problems than substance dualism does.
Joe: So, it sounds like you can't, not you, but it cannot really be proven, any of these, which it is necessarily. Like in some kind of objective way.
Jamie: Right.
Joe: But the third one, the hylomorphism, probably does a better job of answering more questions and leaving less.
Jamie: In my opinion.
Joe: Yeah.
Jamie: In my opinion. You certainly are going to have people that do their dead level best to make formal arguments to prove one or the other. But they don't convince everybody. And those debates are never going to go away. I suspect we'll always have advocates of each of the three views.
Joe: Sure.
Jamie: And we'll always have our critics. Right?
Joe: Yeah.
Jamie: So that's not going to go away, in my perspective. Just seems to me that this account, this Thomistic account, gives us the ability to account for the Christian faith better and answer some of these philosophical problems.
Joe: Okay. Well, let's do this then. I think we've taken a really high look at this very theoretical look at these concepts. Let's, in our next episode, break them down and take the practical elements out of them.
Jamie: Okay. Sure.
Joe: Where do we go from here?
Jamie: Sounds fun.
Joe: Where does a random pastor who is not working on his PhD, who is dealing with people's problems today go from there?
Jamie: Sounds perfect.