Body and Soul

I am more than my intelligence. I am flawed human material, and to this my intelligence is indebted as the basis without which it could not be. Intelligence is bound up with the body, and the evidence of this is that brain damage damages the integrity of the mind. If we change and grow over time, do we go to heaven as the person we end up being, or as ourselves as we were at an earlier age? Does the patient who suffers dementia go to heaven, then, in his decayed state, or as the person he was formerly? Rather than quibble, we should take up that medieval rule of thumb that the most elegant explanation is to be preferred, and conclude that yes, we die when our bodies die.

But if that is the case, then it is miraculous that we should be here at all, that there should be a confluence of events such as allows us to revel in ourselves. It would be tragic that we should be born to die, if there were not also comedy in such a situation. This is the life that God gives me? A conditional one? Couldn’t he have been more courteous? What about me?

I use comedy as a defense against depression, because I cannot bring myself fully to eliminate awareness of the tragic element in our situation, but it is useless to brood over it. Seneca remarks in his Letters to a Stoic that some people are so fearful of the prospect of death that, being unable to endure the tension of not knowing when it will come, they commit suicide. Nietzsche sings the praises of forgetfulness as editing out certain pieces of knowledge, as it were, that would inhibit us from any undertaking were we to be exposed to their recall with no intervening filter.