joyful» I’m pretty positive by nature, goofy and ecstatic, and it shows when I feel comfortable sensitive» in the social and psychological sense, I pick up on a lot and am acutely aware a total aesthete» I love the subtleties of experience and art competitive» thrown into any game or challenge, I’ll almost always rise to the occasion perfectionist» high standards and am loathe to make mistakes guarded» discouragement and disappointment raise a lot of caution and barriers within me curious» I was a very curious kid, but I think I have become jaded with age, school, and social conditioning
For the OP, I interpret essence as “identity.” I don’t believe in a metaphysical soul, but I am keenly aware of spirit.
Spirit and soul are meaningful to me as abstractions, signifying an essential form to things and times.
I don’t think one should put too much stock in defining his nature once and for all. One’s nature (spirit) is proved in the arc of her life.
Essential Emerson:
Plus, as I see it, a person’s nature is really bound up with his/her body. This is something I’ve said before:
The body is not just a vehicle. It is what makes perception - and all of experience - possible. We do not become who we are as isolated whisps of consciousness. We are not merely attached to or hosted by the body, but the body is in fact part of what makes us -us. You are you because of your biological idiosyncrasies, because you are sighted, because you have a nervous system, because of the way you feel pleasure, and of course because of the way you feel pain. One does not enter the body like a corporeal suit. The complex and spirited consciousness emerges necessarily as one embodied. The soul, or the spirit, exists in the momentum of a person and his impact.
While this sentence above may mean ‘in this lifetime’, what is interesting is the momentum of a person in relation to other people and how can that be measured? The momentum of a person is very relevant in terms of all of their assets and how they use them, whether simply now or into infinity.
See, here you are asking the old question, of differentiating the old triad, Being, essence, existence, which was laid down by Arab philosophers, where the essence, is layered meaning for the Soul. Aristoteles took it up in De Anima, it is a prefigured notion, just as self knowledge later, a developmental successor to a more ‘scientific way’ of looking at it.
You are asking the question of requiring levels of knowledge to correlate with each other, in this case old textual ideas such as the soul, with developing ‘scientific’ ways of thinking about them.
We may be much more alike then different, except in contexts where it is more advantageous to differentiate.
It is kind of like a Moebious Strip, where you’d never know where the essential and the real meet, because it’s hard to see it unless the ends are separated in the first place.
It only means “in this lifetime” by default since I’m not aware of any additional lifetimes. The question of lasting influence is still very interesting to me. A person’s influence is broadly the continued affect he/she has on others, even after death, like an afterimage: an impression of a vivid sensation (especially a visual image) retained after the stimulus has ceased.
You had to go there with a Mobius Strip, didn’t you? Now why does the old triad have to be differentiated? One is not enough? Once I recover from this headache caused by Mobius, onto De Anima by Aristotle.
I’d rather sidestep the pomp and circumstance of a formal debate, but if you want to make a bold argument in a new thread - I’ll happily counter at will.
I’m like the ocean - ever changing, ebbing, flowing, wild, serene, much deep within and much observable above me. I contain much and much contains me. lol
