J
John_Martin
Guest
Well, materially, yes, every choice seems ordered to what appears to be good.
So your statement that choices come from motives also seems true, even for humans.
A “motive” would be a “force”, a “mover”.
An interesting thing about the “eye” (and the images forming in the brain from it). There is not a red light shining out of the eye to reflect back in order to see what is red. Red does not pre-exist in the eye, but the eye has potential for any color vibration of wavelengths of the visible spectrum, yet no pre-determined color present. So, it sees and forms images of any color passing through the lens.
It is similar with the soul. It is not a material reality and has no predisposition to know anything, any “body”, specifically, because if it did, then that would be like a filter or like the red light coming from the eye. Only what it was programmed to know could it know, just as the eye would only see red if it were built to shine a red light to enable its seeing.
If we were sitting at PC’s side by side and typing, I would sense two sets of hands with my eyes (yours and mine), With my sight the hands would look similar, and if all I had were sight for sensing, I could not say, these are mine and those are yours. It is actually through reason, over time, that a soul comes to reason that it moves this body, and another soul (yours) would recognize it is moving that body, but not this body.
The soul is not part of material contingent reality, but is like an “onlooker” at material reality. And it happens that its window into material contingent reality is a specific sensitive body that it can move so as to “observe and use for understanding”. But the actual understanding does not dwell in the material body at all (to include the conscious thought). The material body is totally passive (moved by external material causes, and moved to physical actions by the soul’s powers - the will). The soul moves the body often in experimentation, to learn if what it know about material reality is truth or not. It moves the thoughts to form images of possibilities or the hands and feet to enact the possibilities. When the mouth speaks to another body’s ears, the soul is experimenting, in a way, to see if the other body has a soul that will know things from the symbols of the words that were moved to come out the mouth, waiting to see if movement happens in the other body and reply words return to its own body for sensing and knowing about the other body. I often talk to my dog, Sadie, this way, to see if somehow she understands me. And I receive no feedback - her soul does not move her body to indicate the knowing of what I asked her.
The thing is, the soul is not in the world as a moved object. Material reality cannot touch the soul, cannot perceive it, cannot harm it. If someone were to threaten or shoot me, they are shooting a body they perceive in proximity to themselves. And, while my soul knows the event, it is only my body that is wounded or killed. Only causation occurs in my body. My soul looks on, perhaps in a kind of sorrow because it has come to grow fond of knowing through this body. But now it continues separated from its instrument of knowing in material interaction.
I am not sure where I am going with this right now, but somehow want to indicate that our freedom is not freedom in the sense of altering material contingency. Material causation and perhaps a kind of determinism is real. But we have our knowing and moving component (soul) apart from the material happenings, for mainly doing non-material things (understanding and willing - knowing and loving), even though we effect these materially at present via our bodies.
