Ancients and Moderns, Soul and Body
“The soul” is mankind’s general name for everything we are and are meant to be. “The body” is our name for every obstacle, hardship, and distraction that would prevent us from becoming what we are and are meant to be. The old war between the Ancients and the Moderns turns on the fact that the Ancients understood this relation and therefore perceived the soul as man’s definition and the ultimate object of all desire, whereas the Moderns, in the name of equality, elevated the body, to the point of finally reducing the soul to nothing but a delusion of the body, and therefore an obstacle to the body’s own goals — of which there are, of course, none. Modernity: the triumph of the body, which is to say the obliteration of man as an entity with a definition and a purpose.
Bodily excitement is our nature’s enticing reminder of the soul, which is to say a call to the longest and most rewarding journey. Bodily pleasure is the siren’s call to the dead end, the comforting promise of the full stop beyond which there is nothing more to say. Everything one needs to know about the meaning of moderation, and of how it has been reconceived in modernity from a virtue to a nuisance, from an essential condition of freedom to an essential mechanism of oppression, may be found in this vital distinction and nexus, rarely given credence in today’s world, between excitement and pleasure.
The problem with Christianity, as Nietzsche justly observes, is that it often seems to resolve the tensions between body and soul by denying or denigrating the body outright. This has had an effect on human spiritual development roughly analogous to telling a man stranded on a desert island about the beauties to be found on a distant continent while simultaneously setting fire to his lifeboat. Our modern material-scientific atheism, by contrast, is analogous to providing that same man with a lifeboat while assuring him there is no mainland out there, but only an endless, fathomless, shoreless sea extending in every direction. Two errors of self-denial — the former admitting a goal but denying the means, the latter clinging to the means while denying the goal. An end without means is a quandary in need of a logical solution, but a means without an end is a self-contradiction, a logical impossibility, and therefore obscures the natural conditions of self-development more thoroughly and finally than the former error. Hence our modern deterioration into a universal immoderation that is destructive without always seeming particularly dangerous or corruptive. Corruption can only be understood in contrast to non-corruption, but where there is no natural aim, what defines corruption? Thus it is that modern self-indulgence lacks the danger of old-fashioned immorality; it is merely amoral, which is to say not an act undertaken in defiance of reason (and thereby also capable of reminding us of rational aims), but rather merely an act undertaken unaware of reason. The former: a convoluted and self-defeating quest for being — reason misdirected. The latter: nihilism, the denial of being itself — reason rejected.
So it seems we are left where we, as a civilization, began, namely with the noble and clear-headed imperfections of the Ancients: with their world of gods and mystery cults, of dialectic and the city-state, of friendship and philosophical investigation, and of divine madness and moderation as a necessary tension man must negotiate on the path to the highest actualization. Of the Socratic account of the body as both the soul’s prison and the ship the soul must pilot — two images representing not a contradiction but rather the inescapable paradox of living as fully human, which is to say as a human aspiring to become a friend of the gods.
