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[ 1 0 ] SOU L AND THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE HUMAN PERSON* As human beings we are animal and organic,but we also carry out spiritual activities.We are not only animals; there is a spiritual side to us that becomes manifest in what we do.The spiritual activities of human beings stem from our reason and the kind of freedom that reason makes possible. The difficulty of recognizing spiritual life What do we mean when we say that human beings have a spiritual dimension ?We mean that in some of our activities we go beyond or transcend material conditions.We go beyond the restrictions of space and time and the kind of causality that is proper to material things.We do things that cannot be explained materially.To speak adequately about ourselves, we must use categories diVerent from those used to speak about matter. It seems intuitively obvious that human beings enjoy such a spiritual dimension in their lives, that we are more than material and animal beings. In our contemporary culture,however,to claim that we have a spiritual dimension is controversial,because much of our culture takes it for granted that we are simply material things. It assumes that anything that seems spiritual will sooner or later be explained away as the working out of material bodies and forces.Nothing spiritual has yet in fact been explained away in that manner, *Permission to reprint granted by: The National Catholic Bioethics Center, 6399 Drexel Road, Philadelphia, PA 19151, 215–877–2660 (v); 215–877–2688 (f); visit www.ncbcenter.org.  but the culture assumes that it inevitably will be, that everything spiritual will be boiled down to the material.1 Such a reduction of the spiritual to the material, such a denial of the spiritual, is carried out in three lines of argument. First, our rational activities , both our knowledge and our willing, are said to be reducible to neurological processes; the mind and the will are to be reduced to the brain and nervous system.The mental and spiritual dimensions of man are reduced to biology.The neuroscientist William H. Calvin says, for example, at the end of one of his analyses of the brain,“None of this explains how the neurons accomplish these functions . . . but I hope that the foregoing explains why brain researchers expect to find the mind in the brain.”2 Second, our neurological processes and all the rest of our bodily activities are explained as the eVect of molecular biology; they all come from the chemical structure of cells and the activity of the DNA working in the cells of our bodies.The biology of our bodies is reduced to the chemistry and physics of our cells.The logic,therefore,is that the spiritual is reduced to the biological, and the biological to the chemical. The third line of argument against the spiritual dimension of man lies in  the human person 1.The much discussed book by Edward O.Wilson, Consilience:The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998), attempts to give a comprehensive explanation of the human person and society in terms of the evolution of matter; human beings are said to be “organic machines” (p. 82). A typical passage is the following:“As late as 1970 most scientists thought the concept of mind a topic best left to philosophers. Now the issue has been joined where it belongs, at the juncture of biology and psychology. With the aid of powerful new techniques, researchers have shifted the frame of discourse to a new way of thinking, expressed in the language of nerve cells, neurotransmitters , hormone surges, and recurrent neural networks.The cutting edge of the endeavor is cognitive neuroscience . . .” (p. 99).Three other widely noted books expressing a reductive understanding of man are: Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis:The Scientific Search for the Soul (NewYork: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994); Paul M. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul:A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press, 1995); and Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy:Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986).There are many works being published now about the brain and human activity.The works of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio are especially interesting philosophically and less reductive; see Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (NewYork: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), and The Feeling ofWhat Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace, 1999...

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