This entry is a supplement to Not Monism and Not Dualism but Unity of Creation.
One form of dualism, strongly supported by Aristotle, is particularly attractive at first contact: the idea that things come into being when form is impressed upon substance. What’s wrong about this, and perhaps the real error underlying all dualisms, is the idea that stuff is out there in a thoroughly disorganized form and has to have order imposed upon it. This is perhaps one reason that many advocates of moral order are leery or even downright afraid of chaos and of evolutionary processes. They need to ask, “If form, order, isn’t already impressed upon substance, then when and how will it be so impressed?”
So it is that many believe that man must be specifically ensouled, perhaps at conception in the view of some modern thinkers or at quickening in the view of some Medieval thinkers. So it is that it seems impossible an evolutionary process could seek any sort of true order by unpredictable routes. Thinkers of widely different specific beliefs, such as Pope Benedict and the intelligent design theorists, agree to this extent. Those who don’t seem to believe in the reality of order, including ideological Darwinists, agree as well. This is to say they agree that true order, certainly moral order, can’t develop by ‘initially’ unguided processes. I put ‘initially’ in quotes because I would say that evolutionary processes will, so to speak, raise out of the stuff of this universe some of the abstract truths from which it was shaped and primitive forms of order will change the evolutionary processes to some extent, advanced forms of order (such as the activities of a rational creature) will change those processes still more. To be sure, the language is clumsy…
Relationships are primary in Creation and bring substance into being as if abstractions could coalesce into concrete form by the focusing power of a relationship. Again, the language is clumsy, but the idea is similar to ideas found in some philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics. Rationality in this universe is the explicit realization in mental form of some significant set of the relationships which shape the space-time structures and the matter-energy structures of this universe. A broader statement involving all of Creation is indicated when we speak of the human mind, but I’m content to speak of this universe in this context. In any case, we can draw from ourselves and the stuff and things around us no more than God used as His raw material in shaping this universe. In reality, we struggle to draw out each bucketful from an ocean that seems infinite to us, but the principle remains clear: the human mind is the sort of entity which can encapsulate the world and perhaps all of Creation.
I’ll turn to the concrete moral problems of those who feel themselves to be of a different sex than their bodies, soma and genes. There’s an article, Study In Transsexuals: Significant Genetic Link To Gender Identity, which has been bothering me in the sense that I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but it provides a somewhat extreme and controversial way to comment upon the general issue of this blog entry. First, I’ll provide a short quote:
In the largest ever genetic study of male to female transsexuals Australian researchers have found a significant genetic link between gender identity and a gene involved in testosterone action.
We must always remember that even large and tightly peer-reviewed studies of genetic relationships to traits or behaviors have sometimes proven to be non-repeatable, but I’ll take this study at face value because it’s merely a, so to speak, sexier version of similar problems raised by genetic links to juvenile delinquency, to alcoholism or drug-addiction, and so forth. Remarkably, this study found a simple genetic link for what I would have suspected to be a complex condition. At the same time, I’m not surprised that there’s a genetic link. In fact, since I began to understand modern empirical knowledge in the context of Thomistic existentialism — including Thomistic theories of moral nature, I’ve believed there to be some less than fully determined but strong dependency of our moral natures upon genes, but genes in interaction with our bodily substance and also in interaction with our environments.
Developmental processes can be very effective in this universe but don’t produce perfect results and sometimes produce some painfully botched results. This is true of the development, or evolution, of genetic/somatic lines over millions of years and is also true of the development of a particular individual. By using the word ‘botched’, I don’t mean to morally condemn those tortured by the feelings and thoughts of having a body of one sex but the ‘identity’ of the other sex, nor do I mean to dismiss or relativize the wrongness of those who encourage or accept a mutilation of a human body, the temple of God. I do mean to point to the possibility, the likelihood in my opinion, that we don’t understand what moral order really is. Nor do we have a clear idea of what human nature is, in its moral or other aspects, and we merely head towards a serious crisis of confidence by pretending we do and by speaking to our children and our neighbors as if we’re ensouled in such a way that we’re specific persons, male or female, from the instant of conception. It’s nonsense for us traditionalists to claim we understand human nature when our understanding can be in serious contradiction to empirical facts. This doesn’t mean that traditional moral conclusions are wrong. Science and mathematics are filled with examples of past generations which reached substantially correct conclusions on the basis of wrong or radically incomplete facts or tools of analysis.
Human moral nature is not a given form which is impressed upon the stuff of the human body, just as soul is not a given form which is impressed upon a fertilized egg-cell. Soul is a more general term for the form of a living creature, and it’s a form which — at least to mortal view — develops rather than being fully determined at conception or at birth or even at the end of adolescence.
Form in this universe has more the nature of growth processes. In the case of living creatures, we can say: Form, soul or moral nature, is an organic growth process.
Though our sexual identity seems so fundamental to our more complete self-identity, it’s actually a matter of development and proper development is dependent upon a certain degree of correctness in the stuff of the body, in events in the womb, and in the developmental processes which occur in the human creature itself.
We’re not born who we are. We became who we are and that process of becoming who we are can be disrupted in a variety of ways, sometimes as a result of our own actions or thoughts and sometimes as a result of factors beyond our control.
This is all very disturbing, not because of fears of a meltdown of moral order. The truth is that Creation is more a story in which the very landscape is forming and is not just a predetermined entity. Nor is Creation filled with other predetermined entities, which then simply act according to some nature impressed upon their physical stuff when they were conceived or otherwise created. We help God to shape our being by acting and thinking in certain ways, in ways that might leave us well-formed or damaged goods. The harsh reality is that we might also be born damaged goods or might be damaged by irresponsible parents or evil experiences. There’s even good reason to believe that infectious microbes can change our genes.
Moral order is present in God’s world just as much as other abstract truths, though much of that moral order would be present in the narrative flow of this universe, the narrative flow which is the story I call a world. We don’t see all those truths, mathematical or moral, but the body of humanly perceived truths has tended to grow despite the convictions of those who feel human nature and the nature of this ‘fallen’ world isn’t changing. The world is ‘fallen’ in the sense that it’s filled with sin, with sinful creatures, but we Christians and other traditionalists have only mainstream stories which explain this sinfulness in ways that are in contradiction with modern empirical knowledge. We have a handful of raw facts and some probably correct conclusions and no narrative to actually make sense of our existence or the way of the world. Still more importantly in this context: a deeper understanding of this world in its basic stuff and its narrative flow does alter the human mind which becomes an encapsulation of a bigger piece of God’s manifested truths. Surely, that changes human nature, at least if we cooperate with God in this developmental process.
Modern science should have taught us of the ultimate unity of what we call form and substance though in my way of viewing Creation, form comes first and God shaped concrete substance from manifested truths which remain present in matter and energy, in the structure of space-time, and in the particular narrative structure which is the story God is telling which we can know as a world. We explore the nature of matter and energy by way of mathematics which is very abstract and places great demands upon those who would participate in this exploration. We explore human evolution by gathering facts and then trying to make a story of all those bones and arrowheads and also telling a story about the development of moral nature in non-human animals many millions of years before the first humanoids rose to a bipedal form.
For both the raw stuff of Creation and also for human beings, form and substance are but two aspects of a created being which is a unity and not anything like form impressed upon substance, nor is there anything like soul impressed upon the stuff of the human body.