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Do human beings have souls? Does it matter?

The journalist David Brooks has a new podcast with The Atlantic called The Permanent Questions. In a recent episode (“Do Human Beings Have Souls?”), he invited the Yale University philosopher Shelly Kagan to explain why he doesn’t believe humans have souls. (Kagan may be best known for his YouTube lecture series from his course “Death”.) Overall, while Brooks was a gracious host, he was out of his league with Kagan. Brooks arguments for the existence of a soul came down to what felt like vibes; Kagan kept acknowledging the value of soul-language to explain certain elements of the human experience, but then would show that this doesn’t necessitate a non-material thing.

Personally, I think what people have called “Atman” or “Psyche” or “Soul” or whatever is best understood as what we tend to call “consciousness” now. To be fair, I don’t think we understand consciousness like we’d like to, so that leaves it with a mysterious aura akin to what “soul” means for many people. I have written a bit about this already (see “The Christian ‘soul,’ the Hindu ‘atman,’ and the Buddhist ‘consciousness'”). And I don’t think this is incompatible with Christian teaching, since, as Kagan himself notes, early Christians affirmed the resurrection of the body because they thought that we are bodied beings, not (merely?) embodied souls. I imagine that we’re something like code. The code I am now gives way to the coding that will create and sustain me in seven minutes, seven days, seven months, and seven years, respectively. The coding that I am now is based on the coding that I was seven minutes, seven days, seven months, and seven years ago, respectively. If resurrection is an event, I would concede that the resurrected “me” of the future is different from the me of the present, but also a continuation because of a “sense” of identity, memories, network of relations, sense of body in space and time, etc. This is not a problem because I think this is the same basic relationship between 2026 me and 2016 or 2006 or 1996 or 1986 me.

The “From Nowhere to Nothing” podcast had an episode on “The Soul” recently. Joel Bouchard mentioned a thought experiment based on John Locke’s “The Prince and the Cobbler”. He said something like this: Imagine you’re a poor cobbler. You’re told that your soul could switch to the body of a prince, but you wouldn’t bring any of your own memories, emotions, etc.; you’d inherit his completely. Would you do it? Personally, I see no reason to say “yes”. If my “soul” is separate from memories, emotions, etc., then there’s nothing I can imagine that actually changes. If the soul is memories, emotions, etc., then the change matters; if it’s just some life force underlying those things, then it doesn’t matter. This is one reason why I find reincarnation mostly uncompelling. For many who believe in reincarnation, you don’t remember your past identities. You’re shaped by them (karma), but you don’t identify with them. This seems useful for justifying why one person has a good life and another has a difficult one; it seems useful for supporting the status quo. It doesn’t seem practical otherwise. Buddhism has a similar problem when it’s taught that rebirth from a previous physical form is not remembered; its strength lies when in a single life it presents the past us as making way for the present us, who is making way for the future us, because we can see the causality and we can identify with the past and future “I,” much like we identify with family and friends that we love. Insofar as “resurrection” maintains this sense of identity continuation, it seems more relevant (though this isn’t the same as saying it is “true”).

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Is San Francisco the most complicated city in America?

The travel “vlogger” Alex Hunter posted a video about San Francisco on YouTube a week ago. He titled it “The Most Complicated City in America”:

As a travel video, it does a good job of capturing what makes “the City” so “complicated”. I have a list of books about San Francisco that I want to read. Unfortunately, I don’t know of a book that tries to address this phenomenon, the phenomenon of a city that people love or hate, that means something to liberals and conservatives alike, and that often means something quite the opposite to those parties.

Those who know me know that although I haven’t lived there since 2009, I remain obsessed with San Francisco, and that fourteen years in Texas and three in Oregon don’t change my perception of the Bay Area as “home”. Whenever something like a documentary about the city becomes available, I watch it:

I’ve been intrigued by how the media has lauded the new(ish) Mayor Daniel Laurie as someone who has turned the city around from its darker post-pandemic era.

And how people are speaking of a “renaissance”:

I’ll admit that when I visited last, which was in 2023, I was taken aback by what I saw. The fentanyl epidemic was devastating, as was the level of homelessness. While I don’t know what to think about Mayor Laurie in general, I agree that crime, lack of housing, homelessness, drug addiction, and overdoses aren’t progressive values, and that progressives do their cause a disservice when they fail to recognize this. I don’t know whether wealth inequality and the invasion of Silicon Valley values, especially the commitment to investing in Artificial Intelligence and the long history of supporting social media companies, should be viewed positively. I’m skeptical of the claim that the City is having a renaissance, since I worry that it’s a renaissance for the select few. But I’m hopeful because I want that city to thrive.

As much as I want it to thrive, I want someone to write a book on the “meaning” of San Francisco. If it exists, I wish someone would let me know. If it doesn’t, I wish someone would write it!

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Simon Critchley on philosophy

I enjoy listening to the philosopher Simon Critchley, and I like reading his books. I’ve read his Mysticism, and I’m reading his Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us right now. In a recent interview for Time Sensitive with Spencer Bailey (“Simon Critchley on Giving Up the Fantasy of Mastery”), Critchley said some things about philosophy that I want to share here and bookmark for myself.

Speaking of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (as part of an interview that focused on the work of Martin Heidegger):

“Philosophy, in his view, is relearning to see the world. We know what the world is. We’re familiar with it and we’re familiar with how to orientate ourselves in the world that goes stale and rusty. So philosophy, on that view, is a kind of unlearning, making what is familiar unfamiliar, what is obvious, strange and uncanny, in order to open these deep questions.

And philosophy is that. Philosophy is… What is philosophy? Philosophy is the inverted world. It’s the world upside down. And you see the world through the spectacles of a great philosopher like Spinoza, whoever it might be, and suddenly you’re shaken by that. You think, “Wow, I could be the same as nature, which is the same as God?” And the whole thing is vibrating together?” So, the idea is that habit and custom and the traditional ways of thinking about things deaden us. What Heidegger is trying to do in his thinking, and philosophy is trying to do more in general, is to make us feel alive.”

I love this: “relearning to see the world”; “a kind of unlearning, making what is familiar unfamiliar, what is obvious, strange and uncanny”; “the inverted world”; “What…philosophy is trying to do…is to make us feel alive.” When I’ve been asked what my favorite thing about teaching is, it’s exactly that; it’s making the familiar unfamiliar (but also the unfamiliar familiar). This is welcomed by most students, though the discomfort that it can cause inevitably results in resistance from some, or a protective shutting down.

At the end of each quarter, my students have an assignment called a “Quarterly Writing Response,” where I ask them to tell me about the topic covered in class that spoke to them the most. For my “Philosophy for Human Flourishing class, several chose “What is philosophy?” They told me that when they signed up for the class, they didn’t know what it was, or they thought it was going to be irrelevant navel-gazing (my words), but then they told me how after the first lesson, they began to see it as an invitation to think deeply about their lives. One student said things like this: “Philosophy is a lifelong journey, process, and constellation that challenges us on a daily basis. It mobilizes us to evaluate ourselves and reflect on our decisions, ultimately leading us to a state of reflection, clarity, and flourishing.” Later she wrote, “Philosophy is not simply just an academic choice of study but a lifestyle.” (Here she is appealing to a definition of philosophy from Pierre Hadot that I shared.)

I tell them that in my class, at least with the philosophy we’re doing, I don’t want them to think in terms of “right” or “wrong” answers, but instead “better” or “worse”. For example, if I said, “What is the meaning of your life?” there may not be a single correct answer. I doubt there is. But there are better or worse answers. I’m sure that I’ve heard this analogy before, so my apologies to whoever originated it, but if someone answered “What is the purpose of my life?” with “To find a cure for childhood leukemia!” we would all applaud this as not the “right” answer, but a very good one. If they said, “To sit on my front lawn and count blades of grass!” we would be puzzled, maybe even concerned. This is not because it’s the “wrong” answer, but unless further context is provided, it sure doesn’t seem like a good one.

Educators like myself feel the pressure of various evaluative metrics that determine our worth and the standardized testing that sucks everything into itself. But Critchley says of philosophy what I think education needs to be, at least in some parts of the curriculum, when he said:

The great problem with Heidegger—and with philosophy as I see it—is that, philosophy’s been in business for about three thousand years, and we’ve not solved any of the basic questions. Nothing has been sorted out. There’s no agreement about justice, truth, beauty. There are different views, let’s just put it that way. And that’s its great virtue, right? It’s not that we’ve finally sorted matters out. These are open questions. What it means to be a human being is to encounter those open questions.

There’s a sense in which philosophy is radical, in the sense in which education is meant to proceed in accordance with metrics, and measurables, and data points, and things that can be indexically organized with outcomes and objectives. And philosophy is, well, no. I mean, read these books and you discover that we’re none the wiser than these people that lived two and a half thousand years ago.

This is what I love about Critchley’s philosophy and how he defined it. I like my Daniel Dennett types, my Bertrand Russell types. I do. I just don’t think like they do. I don’t necessarily like thinking about topics where the goal has to be “the right answer” (which may explain why I’ve never been good at mathematics, but I love most things in the humanities). And I can’t imagine myself teaching many topics, even AP classes, because you have to drive students toward the correct. There’s a place for that type of learning. There is. You can’t make up Algebra or physics; you can’t reinvent the date that something occurred, or ignore the conventions of established genres. But should all education be like that? No. There must be room for topics that encourage intrinsic thinking and not just instrumental thinking; there must be room for topics that have “better” or “worse” answers, and not just “right” and “wrong” ones.

(Ok, so sometimes I’ll write more than 2-3 paragraphs.)

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The Society of Biblical Literature

I’ve been a member of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) for a while now, but this year will mark the third year in a row that I won’t be attending the Annual Meeting. A friend of mine asked if I would be there, and I said no, but I promised that I would attend in 2029 when it comes back to San Antonio. Of course, that promise is contingent on many things, one of them being whether I choose to continue paying membership fees for something I do not use. SBL has become sort of like a subscription service, think Netflix, where you keep paying for it because you know you’ll use it again someday, or you hope you will! But will I?

I continue to teach biblical literature both as part of my day job (though this semester was the first time in my eleven years that I don’t teach the Bible) and as part of the Iona School of Ministry of the Diocese of West Texas of the Episcopal Church. But I’m not contributing to biblical scholarship in any way. For the foreseeable future, I have no projects or papers in the queue. It seems strange to continue as a member.

On the other hand, I do not know who future me will be. He may get an itch one day to dive deep into biblical scholarship, maybe some niche topic. He may wish to have maintained some connection to the world of academia, even if he is not part of it. Future me convinced present me, after letting my membership expire for a few weeks, to renew. But present me does not know what to do with that membership, this year at least!

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If writers write, where’s the writing?

It is said that “writers write”. If you look at how often I post to this blog, it would seem that I’m not a writer. If you look at the last time I published something, you’d arrive at a similar conclusion. My most “recent” publications, listed on the margin of this blog, include a minor editing role for Visions and Violence in the Pseudepigrapha (2021); a short article (“Teaching digital discernment to emerging generations”) in the 2020 edition of “Teaching Theology and Religion”; and a co-authored chapter with Anthony Le Donne (“Triangulating the Baptizer: A Study of John’s Various Mnemonic Impacts”) in the 2018 volume Jesus, Quo Vadis?: Entwicklungen Und Perspektiven Der Aktuellen Jesusforschung. But you’d be wrong. I’m writing, just not here, and just not things that are being published. I’ve been writing for myself, and I have some projects that I’m working on. I hope to complete two of them over the next six years, before I turn 50. I’ll say more about them later.

I don’t write this blog for an audience. I’m happy to see that people read what I post here, but I post here to keep myself writing with some regularity, to bookmark interesting ideas, and to say something about books I’ve read or podcasts I’ve heard. Because of this, I don’t feel obligated to post much. I’ve been wondering, though, whether it would be a valuable exercise to try to post here more, even if most are two or three paragraphs long on average?

I think so. I’m going to try to post here more, but I want to keep the writing brief. Let’s see how successful I am!

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Websites for practicing your Ancient Greek!

If you’re like me and you struggle to find time to keep practicing/refreshing your Ancient Greek, I have a couple of websites I’d like to recommend:

Greek.tools: This website focuses on Koine. It has places for you to practice typing Greek, flashcards, a grammar reference, tools for reading the Greek New Testament, or just parts like a daily verse or “focus passage”.

Kevilex: This website makes it so that you can “read the ancients in their own words”. It provides tools for practicing your Greek like flashcards, dictionaries, and a guide to the difficulty of each text.

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Simone Weil on friendship

In Siân Miles’ Simone Weil: An Anthology, she includes an excerpt from Weil’s essay “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” wherein Weil discussed friendship. This caught my attention as I scanned the table of contents after buying the book because friendship is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. This is likely because (1) I’m a middle aged man, and most middle aged men struggle with making new friendships; (2) I’m adding a lesson on friendship to my “Philosophy for Human Flourishing” class. For reasons unclear, I’m drawn to Weil’s philosophizing. (Maybe because it’s so theological, and I can’t escape theological thinking, even when I try? Though I know I’m not alone, as two of my favorite podcasts, Philosophy Talk [“Simone Weil”] and Past-Present-Future [“The Lives of the Philosophers: Simone Weil”], have done episodes on Weil recently!) As strange and even off-putting as her writings can be, I’m drawn to them, and I’m drawn to her understanding of friendship.

On to what Weil says: Weil defines friendship this way: “a personal and human love which is pure and which enshrines an intimation and a reflection of divine love” (p. 263). That “imitation and reflection of divine love” is rooted in two opposites that friendship somehow holds together: (1) the desire to maintain freedom with the relationship; (2) the desire for “bonds of affection which have the iron hardness of necessity” (p. 265). We understand the second one well. As children, we can’t imagine our parents seeing their relationship to us as optional; as parents, we can’t imagine seeing our relationship with our children as optional. (This may change as the child becomes an adult.) We may understand the first when dating someone, especially if it’s casual. No vows have been made. No contacts have been signed. There’s a freedom to leave whenever one party is dissatisfied.

For Weil, friendship combines both of these relational states. For this reason, she says it’s “a supernatural harmony, a union of opposites.” (p. 264) Her understanding of friendship is something like “the Chalcedonian Definition” where in Jesus Christ there is full divinity and full humanity, two (opposite?) natures, undivided. She says, “There is a harmony because there is a supernatural union between two opposites, that is to say, necessity and liberty, the two opposites God combined when he created the world and men. There is equality because each wishes to preserve the free consent both in himself and in the other.” (p. 266) As Christ is human and divine, so friendship is the will to be free of and to be necessary to the other person. Friendship is fully free, fully dependent. Again, a “union between two opposites”.

For Weil, “There is not friendship where distance is not kept and respected.” (p. 268) As I heard Rebecca Rozelle-Stone explain in the aforementioned “Philosophy Talk” episode, Weil couldn’t stand the idea of a relationship where they person was totally devoted to her in an almost idolatrous way. For Weil, to love her was to love who she is truly, not some idealized version of her. Rozelle-Stone said, representing Weil, “…we don’t want someone who’s completely enamored with or attached to us. She thought that’s true, because we don’t want that kind of constraint on another person. It shouldn’t be a kind of slavish adoration. You know, people should be able to retain their independence as persons, as unique beings.” If someone can’t see me and my frailties, then is there a relationship there, or am I taking advantage of them, capturing them? As Weil writes, “The two friends have fully consented to be two and not one…” (p. 267) because genuine friendship exists within the similarities and, maybe more importantly, the differences. “A friendship is tarnished as soon as necessity triumphs,” (p. 267) because then it’s no longer friendship, and yet “A certain reciprocity is essential in friendship.” (p. 266)

This helps us reflect on the legitimacy of what we call our friendships. Do we honor their autonomy while simultaneously recognizing a freely willed reciprocity? If so, for Weil, we have something approaching a friendship: “…pure friendship is rare.” (p. 268) Once a hierarchy is created, and someone’s need for someone else is unreciprocated, then this isn’t a friendship. “There is no friendship where there is inequality.” (p. 266)

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Brief comments on Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s “The Mattering Instinct”

Why do we want to “matter” to others? Why do we care if our life “matters,” broadly speaking? If you asked these questions, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us will be well worth your time. In short, Goldstein begins with our biological impulse to live, and for self-preservation. But as she acknowledges, many living things share this. Our human ability to rationalize and introspect leads us to eventual wonder whether or not we deserve all the selfish effort we put into self-preservation. For this reason, we seek justification, in a very basic sense, for ourselves. Or, maybe I should say, for our selfs.

This leads to a discussion of what she perceives as our four types of matterings/matterers: (1) transcenders; (2) socializers; (3) heroic strivers; and (4) competitors. Religion-centric folk can be found within the transcenders category. If you tend to find human value in God, or a teaching like imago Dei, or more specifically, a sense of calling, you’re working within a transcenders paradigm. If you’re sense of self-worth is grounded in your friends or lovers, in family, in seeking fame, in community identity, then you’re working within the socializers paradigm. If you’re life is about the pursuit and perfection of the intellect, or art, or you’re afterlife legacy, or ethical purity, you’re working within the heroic strivers paradigm. And if you find value in competing, either against others, or even against yesterday’s version of you (e.g., Kobe Bryant; somewhat who tries to beat their own time in a mile run), then you’re working within a competitor’s paradigm.

Obviously, these aren’t mutually exclusive, but it does seem that for each of us there may be a primary motivation. I’m definitely adapting the content of this book for a lesson for my “Philosophy for Human Flourishing” class in the fall. If you’ve wondered whether you matter, why certain things matter to you, whether what matters seems justified, why other people seem to be driven by things you find outrageous or even wrong (e.g., problematic or even immoral political views/activities), then you’ll get a lot from this excellent book!

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Am I flourishing?

Next year, 70% of my teaching load will be philosophy. That’s right. A combined 30% will be biblical studies and comparative religion. My newer class, “Philosophy of Human Flourishing,” has taken center stage. Human flourishing has become one of my primary interests. “What does it mean to live a ‘good life’?” has become a guiding question. But am I flourishing, personally? Am I living the life that I want my students to have?

According to the “Global Flourishing Study” put out my “The Flourishing Program” at Harvard University, the average American scores a 7.18/10 on their scale for flourishing. For comparison, the nation with the highest average in their study is Indonesia, at 8.47 (see page 12 of the linked PDF). Participants are asked to rate themselves on a scale of 1-10 with regard to the following categories: (1) Happiness & Life Satisfaction; (2) Mental & Physical Health; (3) Meaning & Purpose; (4) Character & Virtue; (5) Close Social Relationships; (6) Financial & Material Stability. Each section has two questions. I went through the list, trying to be honest about how I’m feeling right now (see this sheet), and my score was 6.58. Not great, but also taken in late June when the day to day hustle of the school year has ended, and I experience my annual existential dread as I have way too much time to think about what I’m doing with my life. I predict that if I were to take this in August, when I’m busier and more focused, my score would’ve been something like 7.33, which is better than the average American.

Speaking of the average American: we rate ourselves as doing poorly on life satisfaction, happiness, physical health, purpose, and satisfaction (subcategories of the above), doing well on meaning, character, virtue, and contentment, and drawing even on mental health. This is interesting to me, because the Pew Research Center found that 53% of Americans see other Americans as having bad morals and ethics (see “In 25-Country Survey, Americans Especially Likely to View Fellow Citizens as Morally Bad”). We see ourselves as good, but others as bad. Very Manichean of us! Unsurprisingly, I felt good about my own “character & virtue”. Maybe too good?

Most of what brought my score down can be traced back to economic concerns, which I think most Americans feel right now. That and the poor state of our social relationships, which can be captured by what Derek Thompson has called the “anti-social century,” which traces back as far as Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone. We Americans are less engaged with one another, and I’m very much participating in that trend.

I feel like those two things impact how I scored the others. It’s well known that making friends as an adult can be difficult (e.g., “Why Making Friends as an Adult is So Hard”; “Why is it so hard for adults to make friends?”). Our political divides at this stage in our nation’s history make it even harder. And I know very few people who have felt positive about the overall economy since 2020. When basic material needs are threatened, and when stabilizing friendships are missing, it makes you second guess things like your “meaning & purpose,” and “happiness & satisfaction”. It impacts “mental & physical health”.

I know the emotional boosters in my life are my wife and kid (so, those relationships), and the actual content of my career (see the aforementioned point that I get to teach philosophy, comparative religion, theory of religion, and sacred texts for a living). I take pride, ironically, in trying to be a good person. In those areas, I’m flourishing. But I do share the concerns of many Americans who see prices rise while wages fail to keep pace, who struggle to make new friends as life moves old friends away (whether figuratively, or geographically), and who feel their health and overall well-being being impacted by these realities, which in turn impacts our happiness and life satisfaction. These struggles give me a lot to ponder as I consider how to help my students find the path to a flourishing life of their own. And this leads me to ponder something that makes me morally nervous: maybe there is some correlation between economic well-being and flourishing? Maybe it’s more significant than I want to admit?

I know that there’s a debate over whether “money buys happiness” (e.g., “Can money buy happiness?”), but it does seem like money can lower stress and shame (see “More Proof That Money Can Buy Happiness [or a Life with Less Stress]”), which surely contributes to flourishing! Maybe it’s the Christian ethics in which I’ve swam most of my life (“God or Mammon”), but it seems disheartening to say, “Students, it seems like if you have friends and money, you’ll flourish, as long as you can convince yourself that you’re a good person, no matter what other Americans say about you!”

This all being said, one premise that I haven’t challenged here is whether our self reported feelings about the categories chosen by the “Global Flourishing Study” actually equates to what flourishing is/ought to be. Maybe Aristotelean eudaimonia is a better measure? Maybe we’re too hedonistic, to the point that even Epicurus would blush at our lifestyles? If so, maybe the most true measures are meaning, purpose, character, and virtue?

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Tradition or Friendship?

In year 2 of my “Philosophy for Human Flourishing” class, I want to make a few changes. For context, the class is three units. The first, “How Can Humans Flourish?” makes the case for philosophy. There’s a lesson defining philosophy, and there’s a lesson presenting Socrates’ “the unexamined life is not worth living” claim. Then, in Unit 2, the focus is “Cultivating the Good Life Communally”. The first lesson explores justice (“Do We Need Justice to Flourish?”) and the second, ethics (“Do We Need Ethics to Flourish?”). Last year, there was a third lesson that addressed the tensions of authenticity—how much should we “be ourselves” or focus on “creating ourselves” (as the existentialists may frame it) and how much should we conform to our society. While a decent lesson, I’ve decided I want to move in a different direction, but I’m torn between two options: “Do We Need Tradition to Flourish?” or “Do We Need Friendship to Flourish?”

If I teach about tradition, it will parallel Unit 1, Lesson 2, and it will cover some of what the authenticity lesson covered, in that it will ask how much of the “good life” comes from accepting and embracing the wisdom (we hope!) handed to us by established schools of thought/religions. If I teach about friendship, then it will be about…well, friendship (which is, obviously, a major part of flourishing communally).

I’m not sure which direction to go, and for logistical reasons, I need to choose one. For what it’s worth, in Unit 3 (“Cultivating the Good Life Individually”), the three lessons will focus on the place of happiness/pleasure (Epicurus. Epictetus, and Robert Nozick getting the nod), the place of “meaningfulness”mattering” (turning to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein), and an exploration of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” thought experiment.

If I go with friendship, I’ll likely start with Aristotle, then move toward some combination of Robin Dunbar and Simone Weil. If I go with tradition, I have a book edited by Massimo Pigliucci, Skye Cleary, and Daniel Kaufman titled How to Live a Good Life: A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy that I’ll lean on.

Anyone out there have any strong convictions about which subject should be addressed? Let me know in the comments!