ghosty
Remember, poetry is not just rhyming words, its a communication of abstract connections originating in the mind of the writer and understood in the mind of the reader.
Also, poetry imagines something obscure to intellect, reaching us on a level unfathomable to pure intellect … our innermost emotions and longings can be reached through poetry. They cannot be experienced by any other creature. No dog or ape can imagine something bigger and more wonderful than its own universe and want to know that something … namely, God.
If Man is the only creature who has fallen, he is also the only creature who aspires to regain the place from which he has fallen.
Precisely!
I use poetry only because it’s the most simple and immediate example of what the rational soul does differently, but you’ve hit on precisely what I’m getting at. Poetry, by its nature, tends to rise above the immediate, the sensory, to longings that go beyond the mere desire for a warm bed or good food. Even when poetry speaks of these things it usually does so in a manner that steps beyond casual connections and into transcendental (in terms of pure senses) realms.
I think it serves as a good illustration of the kind of thinking that humans have uniquely because most people are readily familiar with how poetry makes such leaps of connections, even if they haven’t given a lot of thought to the implications. The problem with things like “self-awareness” is that such functions could simply be an extrapolation of senses, as the more acute our sensory processes the more likely we are to identify our own personal boundaries versus the world around us. As others have mentioned, apes seem capable of doing this.
Rationality has less to do with identifying personal bounds, however, and more to do with what we do with the knowledge once we
have identified personal bounds. Koko the ape says “I am hungry” or “I am sad” versus “You’re my friend”; a human can draw connections between all of those on a level that trancends the sensory, and express them in a purely arbitrary format that itself is designed to evoke a certain response from another “I”. That is something utterly unique to humanity so far as we can tell, and it incidently fits precisely into the definition of the"immortal rational soul" given by St. Thomas Aquinas and other great theologians. Personally I think science is actually doing much to prove our own philosophers right; now if secular people would just read the Mideval Catholic philosopher/theologians rather than brushing them off as “religious nonsense”, we might actually make some significant advancements in our scientific studies and theories, IMO.
If it were possible to clone a human being, would that clone have a separate soul?
It is possible to clone a human being, and it occurs naturally every day. They’re called twins
I would say that an artificial clone has a unique soul for the same reason a twin does: they are an individual, subsisting human entity. Any time you have one of those, you have a human soul by necessity, since it’s the rational human soul that animates the human body. This is why the instant the embryo splits in the womb, you have two people instead of one, even in the case of conjoined twins.
Peace and God bless!
