Eyes of Meat

July 5th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Bettenson, Henry, Boundary, Embodiment, Evolution, God |

Bettenson, in Early Christian Fathers (1969: pp.70-71), citing Irenaeus, cites the composition of humankind (man) as consisting of three elements. These are flesh, soul, and spirit. In this formulation, flesh is the material body, spirit is the ineffable unified absolute, possibly identified with God, and soul is the individualising entity placed midway between flesh and spirit. Soul is therefore connected to the Absolute Unity of Being represented by spirit, but is also connected to the earth-bound and limited vehicle of embodiment and the flesh.

A modern interpretation of this trinity might play out the various parts in terms of body, mind, and world. In this revisiting, the flesh of the body is acknowledged as possessing certain affordances, certain sensorimotor means of accessing, exploring, and processing the data of the world. This body (including the physical brain) is the product of an evolutionary history and of an ongoing imperative to operate as a ‘medium sized object moving at medium speed’, and as such it has developed a range of abilities appropriate to that imperative.

The world, to the extent that we are able to say anything at all about it, exists not only within the limits of the senses but also far outside of those limits. Whilst the comprehensible scale at which the body operates is medium sized, say within a scale that runs from ants to mountains, the scale of the world (or universe) stretches from the Planck length to the limits of cosmic expansion. Similar extensions of scale beyond the range of human ken exist in all dimensions of sensory experience, and indeed outside of sensory experience completely, and in many ways define the distinction between body and world. Also, the extent to which the body can know the world is not only limited by the affordances of the body, but is also partly constructed by those affordances. Kant claimed that space and time, for example, were not properties of the world at large, but were frameworks which were placed upon the world by our attempts to understand it. This idea of a negotiated relationship between self and world finds full fruition in the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics. Whatever world is then, it is certain that only a tiny portion of it is directly available to human sensory engagement. We may no longer refer to the entirety of this great disembodied unknowable as God, but there is still a sense that the world is that which is beyond the boundaries of the self in every sense.

Lying between these two concepts, the materially limited instrumental body and incomprehensibly disembodied world, is the mind: an interface between the mechanism of knowing and the source of all knowledge. With one foot in the animal kingdom and the other in the plenum of angels, the mind stares into the ineffable void with eyes made of meat. The ideas and feelings which make humankind what it is, our lauded consciousness, must be a product of this confabulatory poise.

Bettenson, Henry. - Early Christian Fathers. Oxford University Press. 1969.