ghost and machine

... our mechanistic paradigms trap much of our thinking about mind and body within an absurd dilemma: we must believe either in a ghost mysteriously animating a machine or in a machine miraculously generating a ghost. Premodern thought allowed for a far less restricted range of conceptual possibilities.

In Western philosophical tradition, for instance, neither Platonists, nor Aristotelians, nor Stoics, nor any of the Christian metaphysicians of late antiquity or the Middle Ages could have conceived of matter as something independent of "spirit" or of spirit as something simply superadded to matter in living beings. Certainly none of them thought of either the body or the cosmos as a machine merely organized by a rational force from beyond itself. Rather, they saw matter as being always already informed by indwelling rational causes, and thus open to - and in fact directed toward - mind. Nor did Platonists or Aristotelians or Christians conceive of spirit as being immaterial in a purely privative sense, in the way that a vacuum is not aerial or a vapor is not a solid. If anything, they understood spirit as being more substantial, more actual, more "supereminently" real than matter, and as in fact being the pervasive reality in which matter had to participate in order to be anything at all. The quandary produced by early modern dualism - the notorious "interaction problem" of how an immaterial reality could have an effect upon a purely material thing - was no quandary at all, because no school conceived of the interaction between a souls and body as a purely extrinsic physical alliance between to disparate kinds of substance. The material order is only, it was assumed, an ontologically diminished or constricted effect of the fuller actuality of the spiritual order. And this is why it is nearly impossible to find an ancient or mediaeval school of thought whose concept of the relation of soul and body was anything like a relation between two wholly independent kinds of substance: the ghost and the machine...

In Platonic tradition, the soul was not conceived of merely as a pure intellect presiding over the automaton of the body. The soul was seen as the body's life, spiritual and organic at once, comprising the appetites and passions no less than rational intellkect, while the body was seen as a material reflection of a rational and ideal order. Matter was not simply the inert and opaque matter of mechanistic thought but rather a mirror of eternal splendors and verities, truly (if defectively) predisposed to the light of spirit. For the Aristotelian tradition, the human soul was the "form of the body," the very essence and nature of a human being's whole rational and animal organism, the formal and vital power animating, pervading, and shaping every person, drawing all the energies of life into a living unity. For Stoic tradition as well, the indwelling mind or "logos" of each person was also the rational and living integrity of the body, and was a particular instance of the universal logos that animates, shapes, and guides the whole cosmos. For pagans, Hellenistic Jews, and Christians alike, the soul was the source and immanent entelechy of corporeal life, encompassing every dimension of human existence: animal functions and abstract intellect, sensation and reason, emotion and ratiocination, flesh and spirit, natural aptitude and supernatural longing. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, spoke of the soul not only as intellect but also a gathering and formative natural power, progressively developing all of a person's faculties, physical and mental, over the entire course of a life....

- David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss