Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.18

M. We will pass over Dicaearchus, with his contemporary and fellow-disciple Aristoxenus, both indeed men of learning. One of them seems never even to have been affected with grief, as he could not perceive that he had a soul; while the other is so pleased with his musical compositions that he endeavors to show an analogy between them and souls. 

 

Now, we may understand harmony to arise from the intervals of sounds, whose various compositions occasion many harmonies; but I do not see how a disposition of members, and the figure of a body without a soul, can occasion harmony. He had better, learned as he is, leave these speculations to his master Aristotle, and follow his own trade as a musician. Good advice is given him in that Greek proverb,

 

“Apply your talents where you best are skilled.”

 

I will have nothing at all to do with that fortuitous concourse of individual light and round bodies, notwithstanding Democritus insists on their being warm and having breath, that is to say, life. 

 

But this soul, which is compounded of either of the four principles from which we assert that all things are derived, is of inflamed air, as seems particularly to have been the opinion of Panaetius, and must necessarily mount upward; for air and fire have no tendency downward, but always ascend; so should they be dissipated that must be at some distance from the earth. 

 

But should they remain, and preserve their original state, it is clearer still that they must be carried heavenward, and this gross and concrete air, which is nearest the earth, must be divided and broken by them; for the soul is warmer, or rather hotter, than that air, which I just now called gross and concrete: and this may be made evident from this consideration—that our bodies, being compounded of the earthy class of principles, grow warm by the heat of the soul.

 

Cicero now briefly returns to the theories of some earlier thinkers, keeping in mind how a consideration of the intelligible, in which the human soul by definition participates, draws into question any claim that the heart, or the brain, or the blood can in themselves account for what we call human life. 

 

Whenever someone tells me, with a great confidence in what he calls “science”, that his identity is nothing more than the firing of nerve cells, I immediately duck for cover. I don’t do this because I am an expert in neurobiology, but because I can see that his judgment depends upon the very consciousness he so vehemently denies.

 

It is much the same as when folks refute free will, while using their own free will to choose to refute it. 

 

It also reminds me of a conference I once attended, where a presenter offered a thoughtful argument for why our lives should rely on faith alone, at the exclusion of reason. When I asked if it seemed contradictory to use reason to deny reason, I was simply told that my faith was not yet “sufficiently mature” for me to understand. 

 

“Yes, but you’re asking me to understand that what you say does not need to be understood. Perhaps I am missing something, but that sounds like trying to have it both ways.”

 

“That’s because you don’t have enough faith.”

 

Jesus wept, though he apparently didn’t have any knowledge of what he was doing. 

 

So when someone like Dicaearchus claims that he doesn’t have a soul, even as he lives, breathes, and ponders that point, or that he doesn’t have feelings at the moment that he is feeling, I can only shrug. 

 

And when someone like Aristoxenus claims that the parts define the whole, even as the whole defines the parts, my head spins around and around.

 

Stick to what you know best, Cicero suggests, and don’t assume that what you don’t know works by a weak analogy to what you do know. Be a brilliant musician, by all means, while understanding that the music is but one aspect of this life, not the totality of this life. 

 

If you have at all wandered about in the world of academia, you have, for example, met a Democritus: “Everything is reducible to tiny particles, and though we don’t really know how they work, that is surely all that can exist. I know this because all I study is tiny particles.”

 

Show me how to ride a horse by giving me a recipe to bake a cake. 

 

The mind, that pinnacle of the human soul, can contemplate, however poorly, those particles, and so it has the power to rise above those particles. As St. Thomas taught me, a thing cannot receive what it already contains. 

 

Consciousness has something more to it than a random conglomeration of bits and pieces of matter; yet this is the new cosmology of our age, preached by the new prophets like Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, or Bill Nye, the Science Guy. 

 

I’ll take a Mr. Rogers over a Bill Nye on any day. 

 

Mr. Rogers may not have known the difference between a muon and a gluon, but he knew the difference between love and hate. This was because he nurtured his soul, something that can always, without exception, rise up to the highest highs, and is never subject to the law of gravity. 

Written in 3/1996