Why the Human Soul is Immortal (and Animals are Not)

Why does the human soul persist after death whereas the souls of animals do not? In order to answer these questions clearly, we must first define what a soul is and then explore the difference between human and animal souls. To form the basis for our inquiry, we will first prove that all living things have immaterial souls that are distinct from their material bodies and that there are different kinds of souls for the different kinds of living things. Once this basis has been sufficiently laid out, we will focus specifically on whether it is possible for each kind of soul to continue to exist after death. Then of course we will determine whether it is possible for the soul not to exist after death, and by this come to our conclusion that the human soul does indeed persist after bodily death, whereas the souls of animals are destroyed.

We begin with our first question, “what is a soul?” We say that a thing has a soul insofar as it is alive. Life is manifested primarily as nutrition and growth by which something is moved by an intrinsic principle. This power is proper to all living things and is the fullest extent of life in what are called nutritive or vegetative souls (such as plants). In animals, life is also manifested in sensation and directive movement, which is why their souls are called sensitive souls. These two demarcations, vegetative and sensible, are enough to identify three ways in which the soul can be understood in relation to a living thing; viz. as form, as mover (or intrinsic efficient cause), and as end (or final cause).

Aristotle identifies the soul as the form of a living body, which is to say that the soul is what makes a living body what it is. This is not merely a definition of life, that a soul is merely what it means to be alive. Rather, the soul subsists as the actuality of a living body.¹ This means that what is potentially alive is made actually alive by its soul. This also accounts for the integrity of individual living things, as the form is what gives the material elements of a thing the status of parts of a whole.² With regard to motion, Aristotle identifies desire as the primary principle of motion and attributes this to sensible souls.³ There is also motion in the sense of nutrition and growth in vegetative souls and, for our present purpose, it is enough to mention that vegetative souls, while possessing neither a desire prompted by the senses nor the deliberation of reason, they are still inclined to motion with respect to nutrition and growth. Thus all living things are moved internally by a function or part of their souls. With regard to the end, Aristotle identifies the primary end of a living thing as the soul itself.⁴ This is simply to say that the goal of all living things is to live. Because such things are body-soul composites, they are bound to corruption and death. Hence in order to attain the end of life (no pun intended) they are generative, producing things like themselves in species, thereby continuing life specifically, though individually it dies. This necessitates a body in order for subsistence and generation to take place, albeit the body is in this regard a means to the end.⁵

By acknowledging these three roles, it might seem that the soul is some emergent property or function of material arising out of a material cause. We will consider four arguments which support this. Firstly, if the soul is the form of the body, then the soul only exists insofar as it informs the body. Therefore, it is reasonable to infer that the soul is something dependent on the body.⁶ Secondly, if souls are identified according to their activity (as a vegetative soul vegetates and a sensible soul senses) then we ought to consider them precisely to be activities and nothing more. For what we observe in living things are not souls as such, but vegetation and sensation, by which we infer that there is something other than what we observe which performs those activities. But this is an unnecessary abstraction, as we perceive nothing other than activity in a material body.⁷ Thirdly, if the soul is the principle of movement in material things, then it interacts with material. But what is immaterial is impassible and cannot interact with what is material. Therefore the soul must not be immaterial but something material. Finally, the end of a living thing is to preserve its life. But self-preservation is achieved in and through the preservation of the body. Therefore, life-as-end is not distinct from the body but is merely the integrity of the body and its functions.

Against the first argument, we should note that if we regard the form as dependent on matter as a kind of supervening quality, then we would subvert the order of substance and accidents. What is accidental to a thing is secondary to what the thing primarily is, which is its substance. When the soul is called the form of the body, it is precisely meant as the substantial form. Even though matter is a necessary part of a natural living thing, the matter is not enough to identify that thing as what it is, as we see that a plant or animal can grow and diminish over time while maintaining its individuality. But to say that a living thing's soul exists only insofar as it has matter is to put accidents prior to substance or else make matter the substantial form of the body, which is absurd. Hence, if we wish to concede that there are individual living things, then the primacy of the soul is a necessary conclusion from what is perceived.⁸

To the second argument, we can build on our first reply. We ascertain the form of a thing when we identify what it is specifically (i.e. according to a species), for matter is informed according to its species by its form. This is not merely a logical device, for to refer to a substantial form is to say that there is some active principle in that living thing which unifies the parts into a whole. Now when we observe some activity in a certain thing, we can attribute that activity in two ways; to the part in which the activity is manifested, and to the whole to which the part belongs. E.g. when a worm is prodded, we may say that there is a reaction in certain material parts of that worm, and that what we observe is the action of material apparata in response to some material stimulus. This may be true with respect to chemistry, but it is ultimately unintelligible without respect to the thing acting, viz. the worm. If we cannot account for the substantial form of the worm, then we cannot say that the worm moves, but only that the parts of the worm move. But this is an unnecessary reduction, whereas it is reasonable to attribute the movement observed within a thing to the thing itself.

To the third argument, it would indeed seem that immaterial things cannot interact with material for two reasons; viz. that what is material cannot harm or hinder what is immaterial (e.g. we cannot tie down an angel or transplant a soul) and that there is no known mechanism which would explain how such an interaction could take place. But we should not form too simple a concept of immaterial things. Some tend to think of interaction in terms of bodies responding to touch, like two rocks hitting together. But no interaction at all can be attributed to purely material causes. The rocks that one knocks together are being moved ultimately by something that does the moving. So the answer to the question, how does the immaterial interact with the material, is found in the question, “what is interaction?” Strictly speaking, “pure matter” does not act. To hold this would ultimately be to conflate material cause and efficient cause and to disregard the act-potency distinction altogether. Therefore we must concede that there is something immaterial in a living thing which is the principle of its action.

In response to the fourth argument, it should suffice to say that, having proved the existence of the soul as the substantial form of a living thing, the body is the matter which is informed by the soul, and through such the soul acts. Thus the integrity of the body is due to the soul's act, which works in and through the body as the means to preserve its proper place as form. Because preservation of life is attained through the body, it does not follow that the life of the body is the body itself.

It should now be clear what the soul is; the substantial form of a living being, as well as its active principle, accounting for its growth and sensation, with the end of subsisting itself and in generating life according to its same species. This account of the soul suffices for all animals except man, whose soul is rational in addition to the aforementioned qualities. As mentioned above, the soul (as form) informs matter to participate in a given species. According to Aristotle, a species is nothing other than some member of a genus which is distinguished by means of some difference.⁹ The essence of man is the composite of his form and (indeterminate) matter and is expressed by its definition.¹⁰ This means that the definition of man is precisely a description of his differentiation as a species within his genus. Hence we define man as “rational animal,” in the genus “animal” and differentiated from other animals by his rational intellect. This leaves us with three kinds of souls altogether; vegetative, sensible, and man's, which is called the rational soul.

As we have said, the difference between a man's soul and an animal's soul is in the intellect. So if there is a difference between sensible and rational souls in their ability to survive death, then it must be on account of the intellect. But whether the sensible soul can survive death is still to be determined. In order to understand how the material destruction of a thing can effect its substantial form, it is helpful to understand that there is a kind of hierarchy of forms, owing to their relation to the matter in which they act, as St. Thomas says:

[I]t must be considered that a gradation of forms in the order of operation corresponds to the gradation of forms in the order of existence, for an operation is an act of an agent in act. Therefore the greater perfection a form possesses with respect to conferring the act of existing, so much the greater is its power of operating. Hence more perfect forms have a greater number of operations and more diverse ones than less perfect forms (DA 9 resp.).¹¹

Thus we have varying levels of forms corresponding to different levels of perfection; material forms (such as the form of bronze), the forms of living things, the forms of sensible animals, and the rational form found in human beings.¹² So we should note that an animal has perfections according to their material being, their being alive, and their being an animal, and a man specifically has one more perfection, that of being rational.

That a being has several formal perfections does not necessitate its having several souls. As explained above, the soul is a substantial form. There can only be one substantial form of any given thing, as the substantial form is precisely what accounts for its being a substance. And a substance is something which is adjoined by accidents, the latter existing in a thing by virtue of the former (we can see an analogous relation between a predicate and its subject). But a (primary) substance cannot be predicated of another substance. So if an individual were to have many souls, he would necessarily be a conglomeration of many substances and hence would not be an individual at all, which is absurd.¹³

It should now be clear that there is a “gradation of forms in the order of operation” in living things, not on account of an accumulation of various forms, but on account of a gradation of power according to each form. For example, the sensible soul is superior to material forms, for the sensible soul not only informs matter but grows and perceives as well. And the rational soul is superior to the sensible, because the rational is able to conceive of immaterial things in the intellect, and this in addition to the powers proper to the sensible soul.

So, having given a precise account of sensible and rational souls as well as their differences, we can now explain why sensible souls cannot survive death. St. Thomas explains this in the following:

[T]hings composed of matter and form are corrupted by losing the form that gives them their act of existing. Moreover a form itself cannot be corrupted in itself (per se), but is corrupted accidentally as a result of the disintegration of the composite, inasmuch as the composite, which exists in virtue of its form, ceases to exist as a composite. This indeed, is the case if the form is one that does not have an act of existing in itself, but is merely that by which a composite exists.¹⁴

Thomas here distinguishes between a form which is the act of existing in a composite (form and matter) and a form which is its own act of existing. We can see how this plays into the question of death by resuscitating our first and fourth objections from above and adding some qualifications. If a certain soul exists only as that which informs some matter, then the soul only exists insofar as it informs the body. Therefore it is necessary that the soul is something dependent on the body, not as an emergent property but in regards to its subsistence. Such a soul subsists in composition with its matter by preserving the integrity of the composite in the matter through which it operates. Thus the disintegration of the composite in death entails the dissolution of that soul which formed the composite. Simply put, the soul of a dog informs some matter as a dog's matter. Everything the dog's soul does is done through in its matter. If you disintegrate the dog then its soul ceases to exist because there is nothing left for there to be a dog.

As noted above, the human soul differs from other animals in his intellect. Man exists as an animal by means of his body, but rationally by means of his intellect. Thomas explains:

Now if there is a form having an act of existing in itself, then that form must be incorruptible. For a thing having an act of existing (esse) does not cease to exist unless its form is separated from it. Hence if the thing having an act of existing is itself a form, it is impossible for its act of existing to be separated from it. Now it is evident that the principle by which a man understands is a form having its act of existing in itself and is not merely that by which something exists. For, as the Philosopher proves in the De anima [III, 4, 429b 3], intellection is not an act executed by any bodily organ.¹⁵

While man's soul shares with other animals the operations proper to their bodies, the operation of his soul in the intellect is distinct from his body. Though man acquires knowledge beginning with the perception of material things by means of his body, all three causes present in his soul (formal, efficient, and final) act in the intellect without the incorporation of matter. His intellect does not exist as any material thing. His act of intellection moves by an intrinsic principle, without material cooperation. And the end of his intellect is not merely the preservation of life, but the attainment of truth, which is ultimately not attained in nor attributable to his matter. Thus we can see that the rational soul does not exist by virtue of its composition with matter, but exists in its own right. Therefore when man's body dies, his soul must survive.¹⁶

1 Aristotle, De Anima in Introductory Readings in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, eds. Reeve and Miller (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 278.

2 ibid.

3 Aristotle, De Anima, 285.

4 Op. cit. 281.

5 Op. cit. 282.

6 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputate De Anima, trans. John Patrick Rowan (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1949), A 14, Obj. 1

7 Op. cit. A 12, Obj. 2

8 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, ed. Joseph Kenny (NY: Hanover House, 1957), II.xxvi.3

9 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Joe Sachs (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 1999), 998b (pg. 43).

10 Thomas Aquinas, De Ente et Essentia, trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1968), IV.iii (pg. 36).

11 Aquinas, De Anima, 9 resp.

12 ibid.

13 Aquinas, De Anima, 11 resp..

14 Op. cit. 14 resp.

15 ibid.

16 ibid.

Labor and the Human Person

Labor is not without reason and purpose. It is what St. Thomas Aquinas calls a human act. It requires conscious deliberation and is therefore a moral action. We do not labor unthinkingly, but with the intention of achieving a clear purpose: The laborer plans and makes predictions, designs and builds, troubleshoots and solves problems; in short, labor requires intelligence. This purpose, of course, is necessity. We must eat and sleep, we must stay reasonably warm and dry, we must guard against injury and disease, etc. Labor is first and foremost what man does to achieve these ends, which are the necessary prerequisites for life. In short, man labors because he has a body.

Because labor requires intelligence and is primarily for the sake of his material body, it is a peculiarly human activity; That is, he who labors is human. Furthermore, because the level of intelligence and particular intellectual gifts vary from person to person, a great deal of one's personality is manifested in his labor. Not only does each particular person approach his tasks according to his particular gifts and temperament, but the intrinsic personality of labor can be observed even in the mastery of particular crafts and disciplines: The greater the perfection of a given work, the greater its style and uniqueness. Labor is therefore not only peculiarly human, but peculiarly personal.

Unfortunately, modern labor is not only marked by a detachment from creation, but a detachment from humanity and from the human person. The modern norm has each person primarily pursue not a specific task or trade for the sake of a specific necessity, but a career (whatever it may be) for the sake of currency (the exchange commodity). This shift in labor's purpose has been adequately expounded elsewhere, but at present it is enough to note the divorce between labor and its purpose. Whether one is a pipe-fitter, a carpenter, an insurance adjuster, or a corporate accountant, the primary purpose of his labor is to make money; for without money, his material needs cannot be met. This detachment of course is only partial, as there is still a relation, albeit obscure, between his labor and his material needs. Beyond the mere fulfillment of these needs, however, there is a further obscurity of modern labor: As money is the reward of labor, so is money the means by which persons procure their material needs from others. As labor is vitally important for man's life and involves not only his relation to the world but to other persons, so has money not only become the bridge between labor and material needs, but between persons as well. The farmer need not know the persons for whom he grows his corn, and the person who buys his corn is incidental to the amount for which he buys it.

In addition to obscuring these relationships, the immediate purpose of money is quantification. Money is only useful insofar as it is countable. Whatever is exchanged for money likewise becomes quantifiable. No longer does a man expect the just reward of his labor to be precisely what he has wrought. Rather, he is compensated, while he is immediately divorced from the product of his work. Monetized labor is only useful insofar as it is countable. And so, as the laborer has been detached from his work, which is rendered replaceable, the laborer is rendered replaceable. Labor is no longer imbued with personality because labor is no longer personal.

What is, therefore, a quintessentially human activity has become absurd, because it has become inhuman.

Equality Is Real

Human beings come in all types:  Some are smarter than others, some are stronger than others, some are more attractive, some have talents that others do not, some are more massive than others, some darker-skinned, and some are so mentally and physically handicapped that they are not able to take care of themselves.  All human beings (I'll use the classic 'men' for now on) start their lives naked and helpless, they rely almost completely on their parents for almost a quarter of their lives, struggle in the world for about half of their lives, and finally end up frail and helpless again.  But because all men possess different traits from birth and are given different advantages or disadvantages throughout life, most men cannot relate to each other in many things.

By the time we reach adulthood, it is obvious to us that we cannot always "get along," probably because men cannot relate to each other and the less we can relate, the less we tend to get along.  Today there is a fierce moral imperative sweeping the world which demands that all men be treated equally.  To anyone not indoctrinated from birth with this idea, it is not very obvious that all people should be treated equally.  After all, if nobody is equal, why should they be treated as equal?  To say "all men should be treated as equal" is about as easy as saying "all cows should be treated as equal."  We eat some cows, milk some, put ribbons on some, and wear some on our backs.  If a meat cow is born a runt, he will likely be killed off.  If a milk cow is infertile, she will probably be killed off.  Going further with the comparison, even the color of a cow's skin will determine what it is good for.

But people should not be treated according to what they are good for.  They should be treated as equal, even though they do not seem equal at all.  Any argument about mutual self-interest or social contracts or the golden rule as being all-important for a stable society fall short before most of human history:  Many societies more stable than our own have used caste systems or slavery.  Social conventions do not hide plain facts:  If people are not equal, we should not pretend they are equal.  But it is a plain fact that all men are equal; not physically, but in essence.

Whatever it is that makes someone a human being, it is not smarts or brains or looks or property.  If there is something that makes someone a human being, then we all have it, period.  This thing is not at all physical, which is why one cannot have more or less of it:  One is either human or not human.  This "thing" we all have is called a "soul."  In fact, it is more accurate to say that it is what we are, or specifically, a 'soul' is 'what makes me human'.  Of course, one could not take a cow's body, insert a human soul, and voila! have a human.  Even though a soul is a defining factor of a human being, our biology is still very much a part of who we are:  We are, by virtue of our biology, part of the same "human family" and are related to each other in that sense.  My parents are in this sense a part of me and their parents in them, and so on.  My identity as a human being relies partly on being related to all other humans, so I cannot truly say that I am just a soul trapped in this body.  I am my body and my soul.  My body and soul are one, and that one thing is me.

If this soul stuff sounds too weird or ethereal to make any sense, consider how nonsensical "humanity" and "equality" become when you leave the soul out of the picture.  If it is enough to be related to other men to be called "human," then we run into problems when considering things like genetic disease or evolution or -- God forbid -- if a man is grown in a test-tube or has more than two parents or has DNA that does not come from another human.  We leave room for eugenics or ideas of master-races if some genetic groups of men can be shown to be "more evolved" or can trace their lineage through more "desirable" families in history or to origins which might suggest that their ancestors were of a more intelligent progenitor species (in which case polygenism could be shown to be very problematic indeed).  Consider simply the fact that some families are smarter than others, that most white people cannot get sickle-cell anemia, or that it is much less of a nuisance to have a penis than to have a vagina.  It is not enough to be "one of the family" to be considered equal to all other members of that family.  Anyone who grew up with his family can attest to that.

Think about the traditional theme of the Totentanz, the "Dance of Death," in which members from all levels society are depicted as being forced by Death to partake in a grim daisy-chain onward into the grave.  It was understood, even in cultures well-accustomed to a tradition of hierarchy, that all men were equal when the worldly trappings of status were stripped away.  Peasant beside merchant, king beside bishop, queen beside pauper, pope beside knight; all were brought to the same end.  To see the opposite side of this is the key to seeing the source and justification of equality:  To say that this transient body has a soul is to say that it is alive.  Each man's life is equal to the other, because being alive -- i.e. a living human being -- is the same as being alive, regardless of any external embellishment.  And this is important, because if we do not see this, we have no reason to be equal.

Christmas: The Humility of God Revealed

The mighty Savior, which the prophets foretold, is born in a cave, in Bethlehem (which means in Hebrew, “the House of Bread”).  He is laid in a manger, a food trough.

He has entered fully into the world and is immersed in our humanity. Now that he is human, He is destined to experience the variety of human misery; cold, hunger, pain, loneliness, loss, abandonment, betrayal.  The sin of Adam oppresses even Him, though He is completely without sin.  He will live a blameless life, though He will be blamed for much.

God, Master of the universe and the Source of all being, has become a child.  He is Goodness itself, but because he is now a son of Adam, he will receive the punishment of Adam’s sin and endure every kind of evil.  This baby, called Jesus, is none other than the Word of God, the One Who holds all things in existence.  In His own Person, He has restored the unity between God and man, and will do what is the perfect contradiction of the Fall of Adam.  Man, who desired to be like God, reached after the one forbidden tree.  God, Who desires to be with man, has become man, but will reach after a very different tree.  Out of pride, Adam tried to lift himself up as a god.  Out of extreme humility, God has come down so that he may be lifted up –  onto the bloody and despicable cross – and make himself the final and perfect sacrifice on our behalf.

Jesus Christ has not come to put on a show.  He was sent to accomplish a mission.  He was born a man in order to die; He will die in order to rise; and once risen, He will become an even greater man than Adam was in his innocence.

Adam was banished from paradise so that he would not eat from the Tree of Life, a fruit which he did not deserve.  Eve took down a fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Mary, the New Eve, will take down her son from the Cross, which will be for us the new Tree of Life.  Food will again be laid out on that Tree.  He will continue to come down into this desert wasteland of sin as the new manna, the “bread from heaven,” the Eucharist, so that we may remember and re-offer that same sacrifice of the Cross.

CCC 386-412

Christmas Sermons, St. Leo The Great

On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius 

Andy and The Emptiness of Social Justice, Part I: What Fifty Million Dollars Can Teach You

Andy is a sociology major.  He wants to do good.  He cares about social justice and dreams of finding a solution for societal problems, such as drug addiction and homelessness.

For his birthday, one year, Andy receives a lottery ticket as a gift.  He is hesitant, but politely accepts and finds, to his bewilderment, that it is a winning ticket.

Well, what a surprise...

Andy is now the not-so-proud recipient of $50 million, compiled through crushed hopes and desperate irresponsibility.  His friends suggest buying a Lamborghini and a beach house and his family recommends investing in biotech, yet Andy knows that, in order to balance the scales of justice, he must find a way to use this stroke of fortune to help those in need.

Tempting...

He realizes, contrary to his friends’ fantasies, that spending a limited sum of money on luxuries will ultimately result in losing both his money and his luxuries.  Due to taxes, insurance, and the inevitable amount of upkeep a mansion and a sports car would require, it would take not only a gigantic but a continuous flow of income to maintain such a lifestyle. Money is fluid, his parents tell him.

His parents’ advice is to find a way for his money to make money:  That is, if he wants to keep his fortune, he must find a way to produce a fortune.  With so much money, they say, it should be easy enough to invest it in ways that will at least maintain his wealth for the future.  Andy is a thoughtful young man, and this advice strikes him as practical, but ultimately self-serving.  He decides to conjure up a plan to use the money in a way that will benefit mankind, beyond himself, yet in a way that will last like any wise investment.

He considers a few ideas that he has entertained, in the past as only daydreams, yet now very much within his reach: 

He imagines that, were he simply to give away his whole fortune to the poor and needy, it would flow away even more quickly than if it were to be poured into a garage full of Lamborghinis; not because the poor are principally irresponsible, but because money is gone once it is spent.  $50 million could feed an entire country for a year, maybe five years, then it would be gone, and both he and the poor would be back where they started.

Perhaps, he reasons, he could build schools and start scholarships and fund free education.  Perhaps, he reasons, he reasons too much, because the schools he would build would be to empower their students.  Knowledge indeed is power, and the investment he would put into it would likely remain stable, but what kind of power is it?  Education would improve lives by providing skills which would increase chances of employment but, without the opportunity for employment, skills are useless.  He himself is educated and were it not for the grim indifference of luck, he would still be working a part-time job for which he is quite over-qualified.  Education seemed like a noble cause at first, but Andy would like to do more than create candidates for unemployment.

 

Model Employees

If education empowers, but is useless without opportunity, he must create opportunity, he thinks.  But how does one do that?  The needy are in need of a living; the poor are poor not because there is want of charity, but because they cannot support themselves.  Andy is convinced that the answer must be to create jobs.  This is a very difficult problem and he is beginning to understand why nobody else has solved the issue of poverty yet.  To create employment effectively, he must become an employer, he decides.  To become an employer, he must secure a labor-based income for his employees; to do that involves business and production.  The more Andy tries to figure out how to help people, the more his thoughts become entwined in schemes very far from his initial ideas. 

Happy little workers, working happily...

He does not want to believe that creating a business is the surest way to help those in need.  Businesses create value, but they do not generate money.  When a business makes a profit, it is because it takes in more money than its products are worth:  What is an income to one is an expenditure to another.  To create a business would only add one more competitor to the market and might ultimately disadvantage as many people as it would help. 

This much is only speculation, Andy realizes, but he discovers that, when it comes to business in general, some things are certain.  One is that the most successful businesses merely supply what is in high demand and that actually producing those things are, in practice, secondary to making a profit from them.  He also realizes that demand is not often the same as need:  The things we need, like food and clothing, are actually quite common and cheap, whereas the things we demand (i.e. want and pay for) are usually more expensive and hence encourage much business to supply.  If business is the answer, then in order to benefit those who cannot produce what they need, he must supply what others demand, so that he can turn the needy unemployed into employed demanders.

To Andy, this seems to be counter-intuitive, and his suspicion is that it seems counter-intuitive because it is counter-productive.  Why would it not be possible simply to let people produce what they need?  Why could he not somehow turn the needy directly into producers?  Perhaps, he thinks, he should figure out what it is exactly that people need.  He does not think it fair to strive only for the survival of the needy; he wants to encourage a decent quality of life for them as well.  There is certainly a global spectrum of poverty, which ranges from starving expatriates to dispossessed addicts, and even fifty million dollars will not be able to help them all.  Andy begins to become depressed by the thought of a sound fortune with nothing to spend it on.  He decides that five of those dollars can go towards a beer and he makes his way to the local pub.

Later at the pub, Andy beholds a striking revelation as he leaves a fiver on the bar in exchange for his frosty beverage.  He had not even thought of the transaction before he made it, but his new net worth has put transactions in a new light for him; he himself has no way of getting anything, whatever the need or demand, without paying for it.  He could buy virtually whatever he wants, but he still has to buy it.  Why?

Socialism: "You work, we'll decide what you need."

Andy goes for a long walk to mull over this question.  Certainly money makes getting things very easy, so long as one has money, but this is a problem for those who do not have money:  The things that one needs are almost always made for the specific purpose of selling them.  So, if one has no money, he cannot get what he needs.  His last five-dollar purchase has made Andy realize that not even he, with all of his money, can change the way this works.  Necessities cost money, which one makes through employment.  He thinks of a type of employment in which employees are given necessities directly as compensation, but this seems very disagreeable to him, almost like slavery.  Money creates a convenient flexibility of purpose; the choice of what one buys is up to the one who buys it and employers do not have to decide for their employees what they should or should not have.  Of course, employers could not give their employees anything but money anyway, because whatever an employer supplies or produces is usually not a necessity, as Andy has already noticed.  So, he figures that standard employment works best as a money cycle:  Each business sells things to its customers and gives a share of the money to its employees. 

In this money cycle, though, each kind of poverty finds its own kind of problem.  He could fly into some famine-stricken third-world village and hand out hundred-dollar bills, but the money would be useless in a place where there is nothing to buy.  He could approach the homeless in any industrialized city and hand out hundred-dollar bills, but they would likely not spend that money wisely.  He could go to either place, address the people’s needs, and buy things for them, but there are already organizations which do precisely that.  It seems to become more clear to him, but Andy feels that tapping into a money cycle is quite a roundabout way of promoting social justice.  After all his thinking, he is convinced that people should be able to produce what they need, even if the world is too complicated to let that happen now.

When beach houses don't seem like a problem...

As far as what they need, he knows that rations and a tent do not lift a man out of poverty.  He now knows too, however, that three square meals and an apartment do not make a man rich, and neither does a Lamborghini and a beach house.  He knows which of these he would prefer to have, but fifty million dollars have convinced him that the value of money is not relative (as he used to think) but arbitrary.  Money only goes as far as those who want it; that is, it is only good for buying things, but what he buys and why he buys it is up to him and, then again, sometimes it is not.  He has no control over what his money means, just as the poor have no control over what their lack of money means.  If he wants to liberate the poor (and himself) he must liberate them from that which makes them poor; and it is not money.  It is the inability to produce what they need:  It is their absolute dependence on others to supply them with what they need for a price which others determine.

Tragedy

Tragedy is not mere suffering, sadness, melancholia, depression, misfortune, grief, pain, or loss.  Suffering is an evil; it is not beautiful.  No evil is beautiful.  Pain, sickness, death, loss, misfortune, strife, betrayal, and grief are all evil. They are, in themselves, ugly.

Tragedy involves all of these things, but tragedy is beautiful.

Tragedy is beautiful because love is beautiful.

Tragedy and love are mutually inclusive.

There is no tragedy without love.  There is no love without tragedy.

Tragedy is the beauty which subsists in the presence of ugliness. It is the good which is present amidst great evil.  It is the truth which cannot be crowded out by lies.  No state of events can properly be called a “tragedy” unless its present and defining love is true enough to outlive its opposing evil.

Evil is synonymous with a lack of beauty, a lack of goodness, and a lack of truth.  The evil we experience in tragedy only reveals – exaggerates – the kernel of truth, beauty, and goodness intrinsic to love.  The evil characteristic of tragedy is a darkness which serves to amplify our experience of a light too subtle to notice under mundane circumstances.

Every relationship we have with what is beautiful and good is haunted by the mortality of the object’s beauty.  Whatever is beautiful and good in our experience can be crushed.  It can be turned into something ugly.  The source of the tragedy in this case is the relationship of the lover to what is loved.  We mourn, to some degree, the loss of that beautiful thing.  The thing, once passed, is no longer there, but our love for it, our desire to have it remain for beauty’s sake, persists. We experience the absence of it.  Our love outlives the object of our love.

How much greater the tragedy when the relationship is not between lover and beloved thing but between human lovers. 

There is not only loss but the looming inevitably of loss and being lost.  Death is certain.  Love however is not enslaved to death.

As soon as our empathy arises for something overwhelmed by evil, it is because we have already begun to love it.  “What a shame” we say in our hearts.  We, to some degree, desire that thing all but too late.

True tragedy, however, is not sympathy.  We ourselves experience the evil first-hand when we experience tragedy.  There is a difference between feeling sympathy for another’s loss and feeling grief at having lost; between feeling pity for a suffering victim and feeling remorse at having made a victim.  When we experience tragedy, we are not mere bystanders.  In tragedy, one involves himself in evil by being a lover.

Any love knows that tragedy is imminent, but love hopes. It does not merely “move on.”  When we lose someone, we do not forget for our own sake. We place our trust in the immortality of love because we ourselves experience a small taste of that immortality.

Tragedy is the most exquisite form of beauty.  It takes a refined taste to appreciate and is the deepest and most glorious beauty we can experience in this life.  But it is not possible to experience tragedy unless one wills to suffer.