The material and immaterial duality: a re-enchanting partialist resurrection of Descartes along with the rise of the attaching, detachable and re-attachable souls

To preface this important topic, and as provision of an informed and illuminating ongoing and scholarly accumulating dialogue, Dr. Saniotis provides us with an integral understanding, framework and scaffolding, for a dualism of the body [conceptually inclusive of the brain] with theoretical and practical utility, and ample explanatory power for this ambitious yet essential topic and inquiry:

Inspired by Cox’s model and understanding of the body, Saniotis asserts his positioning of a dualism localising the body “as an aspect which connects the material and immaterial elements of human beings.”¹

It is upon this foregrounding that propels my dualism as the understanding and appreciation of the intimately interconnected dual realities of materiality and subjective experience, naturally with the locus site as the individual (‘body’ or ‘bodily form‘). There is the materiality of the individual form, and the immateriality of subjectivity embedded in the material form. To paraphrase, the locus site of immaterial subjective experience is the individual’s material form.

It follows then, surpassing reductionist crude materialism, that we can formulate, or discover in an unfolding, enchanted religious conceptions regarding the sacrosanctness of this dualism such as attribution of the subjective component as the soul itself.

Fore-mostly, before delving into some natures of this above sacrosanctness in dualism(s), the concept of crude materialism may need a timely elaboration herein. Imperatively, Crossley posits that the ‘mental’ is not fully reducible to the ‘physical’². Studying the ‘physical’ may give us insights into the ‘mental’ – or – subjectivity of an agent, but does not fully disclose its holistic properties. Thus, on some level, they are two separate distinctive realms and faculties, yet connected. Crude materialism thus erroneously asserts, in a reductionist manner, the full disclosure of the mental by the physical. For example, meaning and experience cannot be fully explained by the material-physical. E.g. a dopamine release in the brain to be explained fully, must match-up with an internalised state, of say, pleasure or happiness, relying on subjective consciousness. Thus, with the above evidence, we legitimately categorically in taxonomy and as descriptive of real-world phenomena, separate the faculties of immaterial, consciousness, mental from material, physical, body and brain. Having provided foundational evidence on this above, I turn again to Crossley, in regards to the inherent social implicating factor to our experiences as human agents, who also makes a twofold clever, nuanced disclosure of his positioning and argumentation he subsequently substantiates:

“[P]hysical and mental descriptions belong to two distinct discursive registers which cannot be mapped neatly on to one another. Underlying this, however, is a deeper argument that the mental and social life human agents is a whole which is greater than the sum of its atomised physical parts”³

The social aspect to our experience is paramount to internalised states and is inseverable in the holistic human nature of subjectivity; this is most often indelibly entangled with language and linguistic based cognition. Indeed, we learn language socially and intersubjectively. For example, we need an internalised, subjective conception of a physical phenomenon, based on intersubjective categorical, linguistic signifiers extraneous and exogenous, to be ‘matching-up’ to its physical action, that are learned through taxonomic reinforcements. Thus, we categorically in taxonomy separate the faculties of immaterial, consciousness, mental from material, physical, body and brain. In summing up this topic of the irreducibility of the ‘mental’ to the ‘physical’ quoting Durkheim is apt in the following paraphrasing:

“[R]epresentational life is not inherent in the intrinsic nature of nervous matter, since in part it exists by its own force and has its own particular manner of being”.⁴

Now, back to religious sacrosanctness of dualism(s), Christian conceptions of the soul seem to attach a metaphysical spirit-realm to human beings as a separate and perhaps unchanging entity – or representing the “true” person and as independent of the body, yet “requiring the substance of the body to make an individual”.⁵

Whilst I commend the conception that a soul, might for many people, be a linguistic conceptual reference to a perceived innermost part of someone’s being. However, a soul that could exist independent of the body may be, particularly to atheists, stretching our imagination⁶. In acknowledging the potential existence of an ethereal soul which can simultaneously attach to individual bio-materiality at conception, detaching the body at death and/or re-attaching to the body after death, and be a true representation of a person’s individual personality, to me, the body seems to be the site and condition of a maximum freedom, so long as the body enjoys political, social and health freedom.

Before scholarly proceeding I think it is apt to theorise around the imperative conception of the collective unconscious from which I will integrate after extensively defining its meaning and scope in human action. After, I will integrate its meaning and action into my theory of transcendental surplus power accruals⁷, inspired, partially, by the concept of production of surplus in economics, and surplus value extraction in Marxian analysis of the inner workings of, and latent to, the capitalist mode of production.

A surplus in economics can be used to denote an excess of any good or product beyond that which may be demanded in a local economy, or when the iterative production of any good or product is above a person, group or economy’s basic needs.

For Marx, “[s]urplus value is defined…as the difference between the value that living labor creates in production and value paid by the capitalist to the worker in the form of wages”⁸.

Let us work with four interrelated definitions of the collective conscious. let us examine these definitions more from lay perspectives to technical jargon-laden perspectives. Firstly, from the Oxford Dictionary Languages yielded from a simple Google search:

“([I]n Jungian psychology) the part of the unconscious mind which is derived from ancestral memory and experience and is common to all humankind, as distinct from the individual’s unconscious”⁹

Furthermore, on the collective unconscious, from the Introducing Jung book which is a digestible exposition of Jung’s work utilizing narratives embellished by drawings, it is (also) constituted by Jung’s psychological notions of archetypes¹⁰ and instincts¹¹:

Archetypes are “innate, unconscious modes of understanding which regulate our perception itself”…and that these memories that call upon “a collective fund of archaic images and symbols”:¹² Archetypes are:

“inherited, innate and a priori modes of perception, linked to the instincts, which regulate perception itself. The archetypes are primordial ideas, common to all mankind [womankind, non-binarykind], and they express only through archetypal images. They are charged with emotion and function autonomously from the unconscious”¹³

Further to this on Jungian archetypes:

“Jung believed that…archetypes are influenced by evolutionary pressures [my emphasis added] and manifest in the behaviors and experiences of individuals’ He first introduced the concept of primordial images, which he later referred to as archetypes, to explain this idea”¹⁴

Instincts are:

“impulses which carry out actions from necessity, and they have a biological quality, similar to the homing instinct in birds. Instincts determine our actions.”¹⁵

On both archetypes and instincts:

“instincts determine our actions, so the archetypes determine our mode of apprehension. Both instincts and archetypes are collective because they are concerned with universal, inherited contents beyond the personal and the individual and they correlate with each other”¹⁶

From the International Association of Analytical Psychology:

“The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche¹⁷ which can be negatively distinguished from the personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition”¹⁸

From my social sciences dictionary:

“The psychologist Carl Gustav JUNG distinguished between the personal unconscious, formed through the repression of the impulses, experiences, and wishes of daily life, and the collective unconscious of deep-seated, inherited personality structures—in Jung’s view a kind of “racial memory”—that reproduced age-old life patterns and forms of behavior. For Jung, the collective unconscious is composed of archetypes—basic situational, behavioral, and imaginative elements that provide the continuity of human existence. These are represented in condensed form, he argued, in mythology and religion”¹⁹

Having briefly foregrounded The rise of the attaching, detachable, and re-attachable soul, as differing from a soul solely dependent on a material figuration, i.e. the body, might be traceable to the religious formulations, particularly, in Islam and Christianity; evolutionary pressures within the collective unconscious (Jung) through the actions and praxis of faith and prayer, may have been producing a surplus-power directed to, and manifesting in, a rise of the attaching, detachable and re-attachable souls as ethereal beings with an intra-coded individual personality blueprint of consciousness, with one capacity thereof to exist and live without the body. To clarify, this is a human religious invention and innovation through intelligently deploying faith, belief, prayer, holy reification, law and morality divination, and compassion, all with their ensuing surplus-power properties to manifest – through latent evolutionary pressures in the collective unconscious and personal subconsciousness – this kind of ethereal – attaching, detachable, and re-attachable – soul-consciousness.

To my mind, the Descartes formulation that the duality of the body and soul (where the soul is subjective experience itself) also does work and has intellectual torque: where “the soul [is] equivalent to the mind”.²⁰ Supplementing Descartes is the mirroring and congruent dualist understanding of the Abrahamic religions viewing humans as “bimorphic, composed of matter and spirit”²¹.

Please see the self-taught polymath prophet-like sensation Paul Chek’s metaphorical, ontological and inductive formulations in understanding of the soul, which are congruent with and extensional to my philosophising in relation to the soul:²²²³

In this universe at least, I am convinced of a determinist²⁴ materialist primacy: i.e. that a change in the material form will elicit a congruent change in the individual’s subjectivity, in the pre-determined, yet perpetually unfolding, chain of cause and effect. The embodied immaterial will may direct a change in materiality, but it is only when the materiality has been changed, that a different consciousness is effected. This is probably a deeply personal and subjective ideology, but I hope it gives the reader a valid perspectival insight. It is not just a truth, but also a mind technology for excavating truth and meaning. Further to this, to consciously and intently change the matter, in order to positively bring about a congruous type of subjectivity, lends us more predictive power over first and second nature. First nature can be understood as representing “that historical epoch that preceded the development of humanity’s transformative powers”²⁵. Contrastingly, second nature can be denoted as “the characteristically human sociocultural world”²⁶.

On this, taking into consideration flux of individuals’ subjectivities as an inherent law of the natural world, how would an orthodox Christian explain the ongoing changes in subjectivity against an alleged static soul as the spiritual ‘DNA’ or ‘fingerprint’ (identifier) of a person? How would they reconcile their views on free-will, in which a person must freely choose to serve God as the master of existence, in the face of the scientific evidence of deterministic cause and effect? Would sinners (all people) who have not achieved redemption be so blamed when they are not freely choosing their destinies?

In this vein, not dissimilar, and with notional parallelism, in quoting Saniotis, “[a]n interesting aspect of Judaism is that the soul’s existence is not dependent on the body, since it existed in eternity with God”²⁷ as a putative foundational tenet thereof. Prima facie, this may seem to fall into the above intellectual trap of modernity’s penchant for non-corporeal, disembodied philosophising. I would like to make a pertinent distinction: the ethereal, disembodied soul is a human creation, not God’s, insofar as humans may have putatively forged God – not so much a creator as such, but as a moral arbiter. Thus, a free will of any given individual, in a parallel universe, may partly feed into our deterministic universe, connected through the collective unconscious, wherein the freely chosen personality can coalesce into a consciousness with the chosen-essence of that individual as ethereal-being. On some of these themes, see:

Psychosis & Mind, Determinism & Free Will, and Parallel Universes in the Multiverse?

Herein, I have challenged the orthodox Christian, Judaic and Islamic positions on attaching, detaching and re-attaching of an ethereal soul in primacy as God’s creation, when it is likely at the least that human religious action has culminated in both God and ethereal souls. Broadly speaking, I give primacy to humanity as authoring the spirit realm, not a preceding omnipotent deity. I have also sought to (post)modernise the Cartesian model proffered by Descartes, as outlined above. However, for most individuals, I would contest Descartes’ notion that the material could exist without a corresponding mind/subjectivity²⁸; perhaps it could be the case that some small number of material individuals, could be or have been, subjected to a banishment of the soul and thus be a mere automaton. Given the religious praxis of many peoples, it could well be true that ethereal beings exist and have a consciousness without a material body: an ethereal consciousness. Whilst materialism and immaterialism are fundamentally different from each other, it is only the mind that could exist independent of the body, and not vice versa, unless we posit the existence of soulless material individuals. Furthermore, as a general rule, matter without some kind of corresponding awareness, may not or very minimally exist, in our universe. I would like to invoke and adapt Berry’s synthesis:

“[T]he universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects”²⁹

Atoms, if we consider them material individuals consisting of electrons, a nucleus and enclosing space within the electron orbit, and according to Berry’s law of subjectivity quoted above, may have some kind of very ‘primitive’ awareness.

Mind-experimentally, casting aside the notions of the attaching, detaching and re-attaching soul(s), I do embrace a kind of soft monism, which acknowledges the inseparability of materiality and subjective consciousness.

I am especially interested in taking agency, through ongoing engaged study, over material changes, as it relates to morality and social justice. Through better insights into materiality and in making conscious choices in making changes to material forms, we take an agency over subjective experience, carefully altruistically manipulating the material form, to achieve higher consciousness, and continually maximising the temporal net positive aspects of sentience through the enactment of new, continually better and more sophisticated inalienable individual and collective rights (neo-utilitarianism). Or to use the Hegelian term, the conception of the unfurling of (greater) freedom, but not necessarily ever achieving an absolute freedom.

Furthermore, the Descartes’ dualist model postulates the mutually interactive nature of the body and mind, wherein “each distinct substance [acts] on the other”.³⁰

In this universe, at least, I would contest the idea that subjectivity as the soul has some agency in affecting the material form in which it is embedded. In the face of deterministic cause and effect, wherein transformations of or changes in materiality are solely responsible for changes to subjectivity in a congruence, there is the primacy of materialism or “materialist-centric” in evolution of individuals and their relations to space and energy; individuals can themselves enclose space as co-constituents along with matter. This is a case in point, at least, and leaves much for further scholarly investigation, enquiry, and elaboration.

Intellectual challenging contender candidates and rivalries of the creed of determinism can consist of quantum indeterminacy; incompleteness theorem; the infinite indivisibility of matter; and ontological incompleteness³¹. Firstly, quantum indeterminacy³² should not be conflated with a quantum indeterminism³³ . Cause and effect determinism of the universe we inhabit as a thesis, is not challenged by indeterminacy: indeterminacy posits and encloses merely that knowledge is relative to an individual, the individual agent as experimentor affects the experiment, and we can only ever have a partialist understanding of the world we live in. Furthermore, the putative infinite nature of matter in its indivisibility, may coincide and coexist quite happily within and through a strict lawfulness in cause and effect, even if we cannot comprehend the chains of cause and effect in its entirety. The ontological incompleteness idea need not be contrarian to determinism but rather is a law within determinism, bolstering and buttressing determinism, and working in a side-ways fashion at times, to acknowledge the evolutionary phenomenon of emergence – cause and effect chains have selected for bio-evolutionary emergence, seeking more complex and more self-aware forms, to subjectively relieve incompleteness. This seems a teleology of nature, with its occurrence a result of determinism cause and effect.

To Descartes’ mind, the intermediary between the mind and body, in humans, was a prime function of the pineal gland. The pineal gland was probably chosen by Descartes (as a physician), in this way, due to his knowledge of its primal location residing just above the brain-stem as a part of the brain.³⁴ If this holds true, or is a partial truth, this function is existing contemporaneously with the other evolved functional mechanism, as secreting melatonin linking to the circadian rhythm process(es), assisting in homeostasis.

To make an intelligent (reflexive) change in the material world is to elicit subsequent (yet synchronous) positive subjective experience. Changing the material world for the better is predicated on changing material configurations and interrelationships in the economy as well as in our human relationships to animals: a change in materiality is a concurrent change in consciousness. Thus, materialist science and philosophy is the study and theorising of objective material phenomena and ultimately to implement desired change in materiality, always for eliciting more humane and enjoyable subjective consciousness of individuals who/which are sentient.

We could even go a step further, whilst not compulsory, but to allege that subjectivity is an epiphenomenon³⁵ of material forms. We can also envisage multiple or all material forms as they are organised and patterned together in configurations or interrelationships. These interactions are governed by the law of cause and effect, in a perpetual flux.

These discourses on the primacy of materiality reality may enhance our agency to deploy reflexivity in making positive changes to our world, whether they be social, political, economic or scientific.

Related to understanding co-causing material changes, Marx made a social science, a pillar of which was to conceive of society as materialist with the driving force of change being that of class conflict.

Without denying the utility of understanding material realities and how they should change, at times, as is humane, spiritual and enchanting, we can say there are immaterial aspects to human beings, that resist quantifiability.

Switching between materialist and immaterialist theory requires we pay attention to the nuance of theory and discourse to construct different kinds of knowledges, deploying the most humane theory in a given context.

In this world, sentient individuals have a partialist (not absolutist) consciousness, which means their subjectivity / souls are ontologically incomplete (Žižek), and consequently they seek more complex and higher forms as a way to mitigate or continually partially alleviate soul-incompleteness alienation. This may seem, prima facie, at least on some level, incongruent and/or clashing with the implicit Christian notion of the soul as complete, probably especially so if they receive redemption for their sins.

What do orthodox Christians and Descartes have in common?

One area in which I disagree with both, is positioning the soul as something which is human-centric and an exclusive privilege of human beings. The fact that we evolved from primates means, to my way of thinking, that the soul pre-dated our taxonomic categorisation of homosapien as a species. Furthermore, Descartes seemed to have missed the reality that “[n]early all vertebrate species posses a pineal gland”³⁶, which is at odds with his ‘finding’ of souls only belonging to humans. I believe that anything with a subjective consciousness has a soul: or better formulated, subjective consciousness across a whole plethora of species, with or without pineal glands, have souls because they have subjective experience! Moreover, in reiteration, subjectivity is the soul. The intermediary between materiality and the soul, is not the pineal gland (which may enhance or expedite certain kinds of consciousness), but is rather a condition of materiality itself. Perhaps non-human creatures may be governed by reincarnation without yet accruing attachable, detachable, and/or re-attachable souls.

To summarise, I would like to introduce my elucidating concept of In-Form-ism. Again, this is, at the least, a valid perspective that has, begets and generates a truth. This ideological philosophy attempts at nothing less than uniting the individual (material) form with and encasing the immaterial Will of Power³⁷ / subjectivity / soul. Further to this philosophical machination is in allowing us to see how materiality of the individual form informs us of the subjectivity of any individual under examination. I use this word informing in two ways that I allege are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

1. In studying an individual’s material form, it allows us, not as a totality, to partially excavate and bring to consciousness aspects to that individual’s subjective experience; and
2. The ideological positioning of that subjectivity as residing in the form.

To sum up, for a religious and spiritual formulation, we have the The Holy Function of the Divine In-form-ed Subject.

Thanks for reading!

Post Script Addendum:

A critical engagement with Nietzsche’s expansive meta-theoretical explanatory edifice of human and animal behaviour, and perhaps for all of existence—Will to Power, will be the subject of another enquiring blog post. But briefly hereafter are some interesting definitions and/or formulations thereon. The Will to Power:

1. as a “psychological principle of…behaviour that every being seeks to extend its sphere of action and influence: to consolidate itself”³⁸;

2. “[a]s a limited thesis about the motivation of certain actions”³⁹;

3. “[a]s a grand metaphysical thesis about the workings of the universe”⁴⁰

Bibliography

Berry, T and Swimme, B 1992, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era–a Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos, HarperSanFrancisco, https://thomasberry.org/quotes/

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Crossley, N 2001, ‘All in the brain? A popular false start’ [chapter 3], The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire, Sage, London, pp. 22-37.

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Gane, L and Piero, 2008, Introducing Nietzsche: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London.

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Saniotis, A 2012, ‘Attaining Transcendence: Transhumanism, the Body, and the Abrahamic Religions’, The Body and Religion: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, Special edition volume. Ed.s David Cave and Rebecca Sachs Norris, Brill, pp. 155-167.

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Footnotes

1. Saniotis, A 2012, ‘Attaining Transcendence: Transhumanism, the Body, and the Abrahamic Religions’, The Body and Religion: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, Special edition volume. Ed.s David Cave and Rebecca Sachs Norris, Brill, p. 155. ↩︎
2. See Crossley, N 2001, ‘All in the brain? A popular false start’ [chapter 3], The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire, Sage, London, p. 22. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Durkheim, E 1974 [1898], ‘Individual and Collective Representations’, Sociology and Philosophy, Free Press, New York. ↩︎
5. See Encyclopedia Britannica, ‘soul, religion and philosophy’, https://www.britannica.com/topic/soul-religion-and-philosophy ↩︎
6. Note, I can currently imagine an ethereal being or beings. However, I would posit that the body is the ultimate site of individual freedom, and expression of that freedom. By ‘ethereal beings’ I mean disembodied yet conscious beings who “are entities that exist outside of our own realm while being capable of coexisting within it. They are also theorized to be composed of unordinary matter’, see ‘Ethereal being’, https://parapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Ethereal_Being#:~:text=Ethereal%20Beings%20are%20entities%20that,be%20composed%20of%20unordinary%20matter. ↩︎
7. This is related to Žižek’s notion of ‘the potential excess existing within reality’, see Kul-Want, C and Piero, 2011, Introducing Žižek: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London, p. 117. ↩︎
8. Vygodsky, V 2014, ‘Surplus Value’, Internet Archive (marxists.org), last accessed 21 January 2025, https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygodsky/unknown/surplus_value.htm#:~:text=Surplus%20value%20is%20defined%20by,in%20the%20form%20of%20wages. ↩︎
9. By the Oxford Languages Dictionary, the collective unconscious is (in Jungian psychology) the part of the unconscious mind which is derived from ancestral memory and experience and is common to all humankind, as distinct from the individual’s unconscious”, https://www.google.com/search?q=define+the+collective+unconscious&rlz=1C1GIGM_enAU511AU514&oq=define+the+collective+unconscious&aqs=chrome..69i57.4927j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 ; in orthodox Jungian theory, the collective unconscious is where the archetypes and instincts reside see Hyde, M and McGuinness M 2008, Introducing Jung: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London, p. 59. ↩︎
10. p. 59 ↩︎
11. p. 59 ↩︎
12. p. 59 ↩︎
13. Hyde, M and McGuinness M 2008, ‘Little Dictionary’, Introducing Jung: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London, p. 172. ↩︎
14. ‘Jungian archetypes, Wikipedia, last accessed 21 January 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes#:~:text=Jung%20believed%20that%20these%20archetypes,archetypes%2C%20to%20explain%20this%20idea. ↩︎
15. Ibid, p. 59 ↩︎
16. Ibid. ↩︎
17. By the term psyche, Jung means “the whole of our being, conscious and unconscious”, Hyde, M and McGuinness M 2008, ‘Little Dictionary’, Introducing Jung: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London, p. 76 ↩︎
18. Boechat, W ‘The Collective Unconscious’, International Association For Analytical Psychology, last accessed 21 January 2025, https://iaap.org/jung-analytical-psychology/short-articles-on-analytical-psychology/the-collective-unconscious-2/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20collective%20unconscious%20is%20a,is%20not%20a%20personal%20acquisition. ↩︎
19. Calhoun, C (ed) 2002, Dictionary of the Social Sciences, Oxford University Press, New York, p. 78. ↩︎
20. See Encyclopedia Britannica, ‘soul, religion and philosophy’, https://www.britannica.com/topic/soul-religion-and-philosophy ↩︎
21. Saniotis, A 2012, ‘Attaining Transcendence: Transhumanism, the Body, and the Abrahamic Religions’, The Body and Religion: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, Special edition volume. Ed.s David Cave and Rebecca Sachs Norris, Brill, p. 158. ↩︎
22. Chek, P 31 May 2004, ‘What Is The Soul?’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEcsol4duYQ&t=138s ↩︎
23. Before Skool, 29 March 2024, ‘What is the Soul? – Paul Chek’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqQSrrUReds ↩︎
24. Determinism as conceptualised as the lawful, uninterrupted, chain of cause and effect. ↩︎
25. Rosewarne, S 1997, ‘Marxism, the second contradiction, and socialist ecology’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 115. ↩︎
26. Strydom, P 2021, ‘First and Second Nature’, Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes, Springer Nature Link, London, p. 39. ↩︎
27. Saniotis, A 2012, ‘Attaining Transcendence: Transhumanism, the Body, and the Abrahamic Religions’, The Body and Religion: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, Special edition volume. Ed.s David Cave and Rebecca Sachs Norris, Brill, p. 159. ↩︎
28. See Thibaut, F March 2018, ‘The mind-body Cartesian dualism and psychiatry’, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, Vol. 20, No. 1, p. 3. ↩︎
29. https://thomasberry.org/quotes/ ↩︎
30. See Encyclopedia Britannica, ‘soul, religion and philosophy’, https://www.britannica.com/topic/soul-religion-and-philosophy ↩︎
31. Žižek threads together his concept of the incompleteness in both being and the material world from quantum physics, namely from Heisenberg and Bohr who apparently “insist that…incompleteness of our knowledge of quantum reality points to a strange incompleteness of quantum reality”, see Kul-Want, C and Piero, 2011, Introducing Žižek: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London, p. 169. Note that Žižek finds a scope for freedom in the unfinished and unfinish-able aspects to reality, see p. 172. ↩︎
32. Indeterminacy: “the state of not being measured, counted, or clearly known”, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/indeterminacy ↩︎
33. Indeterminism: “the doctrine that not all events are wholly determined by antecedent causes”, https://www.google.com/search?q=indeterminism&rlz=1C1GIGM_enAU511AU514&oq=indeterminism&aqs=chrome..69i57.1888j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 ↩︎
34. Wikipedia, ‘Pineal gland’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland ↩︎
35. Epiphenomenon, can be defined as “a secondary effect or bi-product” (Oxford Languages Dictionary). ↩︎
36. Wikipedia, ‘Pineal gland’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland ↩︎
37. In tutoring, Dr. Saniotis made an adaptation of Nietzsche’s Will to Power acknowledging that with the Will of Power is not a power-quest as something to be attained in the future, but is inherently already embodied within the subject. Integral to both contexts, I argue, that maximisation of power is an inherent property thereto. Also, I have added an extra layer to intra-theorising ‘Will of Power’, as reflective of cause and effect determinism, as conforming to our deterministic universe, not something as chosen or “freely willed”. I acknowledge that free choices in indeterminate universes may be influencing our deterministic universe, perhaps through chosen personality essences in a preceding universe or universes, and/or the inter-universal collective unconscious. ↩︎
38. Gane, L and Piero, 2008, Introducing Nietzsche: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London, p. 85. ↩︎
39. Solomon, R 2000, ‘Nietzsche—Perspectivism and the Will to Power’, in Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition Course Guidebook, 3rd edn, The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, pp. 258. ↩︎
40. Ibid. ↩︎