And death is at your doorstep

And it will steal your innocence

But it will not steal your substance

Above is an excerpt from the song Timshel by Mumford and Sons, the folk rock band from the UK which continues to grow exponentially in adoration. Put simply, I find their music to be exceedingly brilliant. Certainly if the increasing notoriety and glowing reviews of their debut release Sigh No More are any indication, many more people–if they haven’t already–will be finding them just as inspiring as I do.

After one listen to Sigh No More I was immediately struck by how much the recording dripped with lyrical beauty, and to my surprise, unabashed spirituality. Mumford and Sons’ songs deal with a wide variance of human emotion and life issues such despair, death, doubt, love, fear and struggles with ideas of God. The song above, Timshel, is one of my favorite tracks on the album. As much as I love this song, and as much as I love the art that this band creates, when I first heard this song–specifically the line quoted above–I couldn’t help but twinge a little and think of Rene Descartes, Plato, Aristotle and the doctrine of unchanging substances.

A Little Descartes Goes Along Way
Rene Descartes, drawing on Aristotle and Plato, thought of the world as composed of substances. Bob Mesle, in his book Process-Relational Philosophy, explains that “by substances he did not mean elements like wood or metal. He was thinking of particular concrete things like a rock, a mug, a human body–or an individual human mind. Descartes is famous for his [dualistic] view that there are two kinds of substances: minds and bodies. There are two features Descartes believed all substances have in common: (1) substances exist independently of other substances. Descartes wrote, “By substance we can understand nothing else than a thing which so exists that it needs no other thing in order to exist.” (2) Substances are those unchanging realities that stand under (hence, sub/stance) their qualities and endure unchanged through the change of those qualities” (p. 44).

Plato’s Creepy Cave
As mentioned above, Descartes did not invent dualism, it is a concept that has been around since…God knows when. The pre-socratics have been onto this idea for a long time, for example Parmenides believed that reality was essentially static, or unchanging, while Heraclitus conceived of reality as being dynamic or in flux. In my opinion, one of these guys (Heraclitus) was onto something.

It was Plato who combined the Heraclitean doctrine of flux and the Parmenidean principle of reality as unchanging to show that there is a distinction between the two realms: an intelligible one grasped by the mind (by intuition and reflection) and a sensory one grasped through the senses. The former is unchanging and immaterial; the latter mutable and material. The world in which we live, according to Plato, is a world that “is a process of becoming and perishing and never really is” (Timaeus). Plato thought that for something to truly exist it must be eternal and unchanging. Plato conceived of a realm of eternal and unchangeable forms that existed independently of our changing, perishing, physical world which is but a shadow of the “real” unchanging, eternal realm. This concept is demonstrated quite clearly in Plato’s famous–albeit spooky–Allegory of the Cave.

The Static Soul
If it wasn’t apparent before, hopefully it is now abundantly clear that this ancient Greek dualistic view of reality has had a strangle hold on the way many people have viewed, and continue to view their worlds today. To me it is evident that this dualistic substance-quality view has not only crept ever so stealthily into the philosophies of the world, but has also permeated many religious understandings, Christianity in particular. Mesle writes:

Thus Descartes imported Platonic and heavenly immutability into this world of objects and human minds. Our own minds (or souls) are, for Cartesian thinkers, primary instances of things that are not relational and not dynamic processes. Cartesian dualism, like many philosophies before it, became baptized into the Christian faith and powerfully shaped the Christian view of the self in the West (p. 9).

The notion that the soul is the essence of a person or living creature, created by God, which exists the body upon death, is probably one of the most common beliefs held among all Christians. I won’t lie, this idea is pleasant and comforting. Certainly it can be read into the biblical text with relative ease. In fact it’s so easy to read the idea of an unchanging soul into the biblical text that most times people don’t think twice about it. And why should they? The problems however, if they aren’t’ abundantly clear, are manifold. Mesle explains:

This nonrelational character of Cartesian dualism, especially as combined with Christian theology, was intensified by the belief that this immaterial mental substance could not possibly arise out of nature. Since early modern philosophers and scientists envisioned the world as made out of nonexperiencing matter, it seemed clear that no natural (that is, material) process could possibly give rise to human minds/souls. The only alternative, they thought, was to assume that souls were created supernaturally by divine fiat. Consequently, human minds came to be seen as essentially unrelated to the world of nature around us (p. 9)

“Unrelated to the world of nature around us,” is an attitude that manifests itself in the worst of dualistic views. We can begin to see then, from a Christian standpoint, just how and why apocalyptic, doom and gloom, escapist, end time theologies are formed.

Becoming Over Being
It has been hard for me to let go of my eternal unchanging soul. It didn’t go quickly or quietly, but what I have ended up embracing is something far more beautiful. However, the transition was anything but easy. “Transition to what?” you may ask. For me, it was a transition to embracing becoming over being, to embracing an understanding that I am a relational dynamic bundle of changing qualities, not an insular body being occupied by an enduring mental substance. Mesle again helps with this:

Some qualities in that bundle are more persistent than others, but there is no unchanging “self,” no mental substance that endures unchanged through the changes of qualities or that exists independently of those qualities so as to remain if they were all taken away (p. 47)

Examining Descartes’ extraneous mind/body concept after stepping away from it, it’s hard to imagine how I (or anyone) could ever really pretend to discern reality in this way. David Hume is one of many thinkers who has really helped me work through what I feel to be, more and more, a necessary rejection of a substantial self that endures unchanged through change. Hume asserted that the mental self is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” Hume was an empiricist, a philosopher who insists that all knowledge of what exists must begin with experience. Slowly, I have come to see the world as an ever changing, wondrous creation. A world that is filled with living things that do not stay static, but that are forever becoming something different.

Just as Kant credited Hume with waking him up from his “dogmatic slumbers,” I too thank Hume, along with Process Philosophers and Theologians working in the tradition of A. N. Whitehead, for waking me up to a world of relational becoming. Mesle again says it better:

Plato said that the world of time “is a process of becoming and perishing and never really is” (Timaeus, cited in PR82). Plato believed that what is fully real is a realm of eternal and unchangeable forms that exists independently of the physical world. Like Descartes, Plato gave
priority to being over becoming.The realm of becoming “never really is.” Process philosophers recognize the importance of the language of being, but find deeper wisdom and greater clarity in a vision of the world as becoming, as relational process. What “never really is” is
the alleged “substance” that “stands under” all of the change, existing independently from it and enduring unchanged through all of the
change. What is are events and relationships that constitute the process of becoming and perishing. The ordinary objects that we live among, which we see, feel, and touch, as well are our minds, are simply more or less stable “societies” of such relationships and events.

Lastly, my earlier assertion that if imposed, a mind-body dualistic picture could be read into the biblical text, is something that I will continue to not deny. Thankfully, what I have come to find, and which gives me great comfort, is that reading a naturalistic, relational and becoming vision of the self, God and the world into the text seems to be far less strenuous.

Tags:Bob MesleDavid Humedescartesdualismmeta-physicsmumford & sonsphilosophyprocess philosophywhitehead