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| − | ==''Psychikos'' = mind, soul, or what? (v. 44)==
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| − | Joe, I'm curious why you seem so convinced that ''psychoikos'' here should be translated "mind"? The TWOT's entry on ''rwh'' (2131) suggests (see the last parenthetical comment) that ''pneuma'' / ''rwh'' is "the principle of man's rational and immortal life, and possesses reason, will and conscience" whereas ''psyche'' / ''npsh'' is "the seat of [man's] emotions and desires. Also, if "mind" were really meant, wouldn't [http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/words/1/1162923082-4535.html ''dianoia''] be more appropriate? Of course I realize the TWOT may be off, it seems to make a bit of an unfounded claim, I'm just asking b/c of TrailerTrash's post on [[1 Cor 15:46]]. Of course this makes me also wonder about how to read [[D&C 88:15]] where ''soul'' is the spirit and body together. My leaning is to read ''pneuma'' as referring to the higher faculties and ''psyche'' as the baser faculties of man (''npsh'' is also translated "creatures" referring to non-human animals in the creation...). [Though I'm addressing this to Joe, of course I welcome discussion/comments by anyone.] --[[User:RobertC|RobertC]] 18:18, 7 Nov 2006 (UTC)
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| − | :I chose to use "mind" over "soul" because of the apparent equivalence "spirit" and "soul" seem to have in so much discourse. Perhaps it doesn't avoid the problem because there are those who equate "spirit" and "mind" anyway. The Greek ''psyche'' (and the Hebrew ''npsh'' with it) means something like one's "being," perhaps even one's "being-in-the-world." If one's flesh is, taken in and of itself, one with the flesh of the earth, simply part of the matter unorganized, then there are two forces for a Greek or a Hebrew that suggest the something more that humans have: "spirit" and "soul." If the "spirit" is one's breath (one's speech, one's word), then the "soul" is one's situatedness in the world, one's worldliness. I think "soul" is an interesting "concept" in the OT, because there it quite clearly suggests that one should be understood as a "soul" rather than as a "self." When Paul discusses, however, the ''psychikos'' and the ''pneumatikos'', he is discussing the one who lives according to the world (I'm thinking Heidegger here again) and the one who lives according to the Spirit, which outstrips the world, inverts the world, even shatters the world. Cf. [[D&C 1:16]]: "whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol, which waxeth old and shall perish." Walking in the idolatrous way is to live according to the image of the world, to live worldishly, to live according to ''psyche''. This can summon all the meanings of the word "mind" when it is categorized as it is in modernity: the self's mind provides the logic that will crumble when the "image of this world passes away" (in Paul somewhere).
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| − | :I shouldn't mention this, but I suppose that to some extent I translate it as mind because I like Julia Kristeva's conception of intertextuality. That Paul uses ''psychikos'' suggests psychology, the study of the mind, as it is done now (and of course, in Kristeva's work explicitly). So, I think you should understand by ''psyche'' the mind, the body (not flesh, but body), the soul, etc. I hope that is clearer. --[[User:Joe Spencer|Joe Spencer]] 22:31, 7 Nov 2006 (UTC)
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| − | TT adds: I think that we face a few problems for translating these terms. The first is that our modern definitions for "soul," "mind," "body," "flesh," and "spirit" are all very different from the ancient definitions. This is further complicated by the fact that these terms don't have stable meanings in antiquity either. Indeed, in 1 Cor Paul is engaged in a dispute about the meaning of the term "psychikos." Paul is attempting to develop an antithesis between "psychikos" and "pneumatikos" in both 15:44-46 and 2:14-3:1. It appears that Paul is arguing against the Corinthians who characterized themselves as "psychikoi". In 15:44-46, Paul argues that Adam was a psychikos, so this is actually the current condition of humanity, a condition that he associates with the flesh and dust (3:1; 15:48). Paul is associating the soul with the lower realms, and the "spirit" with the upper realms and the future body (15:44). This is in contrast to popular Platonism that saw the soul as originating in the divine realm. Thus, Paul's anthropology is more eschatological than protological (as Philo and other religious Platonists might have argued).
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| − | A few other notes: the attempt to overlay Hebrew words onto the Greek runs into similar problems about translation. Since neither the Hebrew nor the Greek are stable terms, it is difficult to correlate them. Additionally, Paul's framework for talking about the body is really more in a conversation with Hellenistic conceptions of the self, inflected by his readings of Gen 2:7. Additionally, I'm not sure that a Kristevan intertextually illuminates anything here. If anything, it alerts us to the dangers of importing our own concepts onto ancient terms. The kind of intertextuality we do should be aware of the historical situatedness of language.--[[User:TrailerTrash|TrailerTrash]] 03:19, 8 Nov 2006 (UTC)
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| − | :Thanks, both of you, this helps in understanding what Paul perhaps has in mind here. Regarding [[D&C 88:15]], I realize I was sort of overlooking the possibility that the term "soul" there may not really have a direct bearing on what Paul is writing precisely b/c the KJV does not use the term soul. In fact, b/c of the KJV, does this mean we should read ''psychikos'' into "natural" in [[Mosiah 3:19]], [[D&C 67:12]], etc.?
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| − | :Also, I'm not too familiar with [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva Kristeva], has she written any biblical commentary? I'm guessing she's been cited a fair bit by post-modern commentators? I agree that understanding ancient concepts and language is important, but I think it is also interesting to think about how we understand and relate to such concepts today. If we are ''presently'' situated and trying to understand a historical text, then tracing a linguistic history to the text seems one interesting way to illuminate the text's meaning. I guess I don't believe that a "past meaning" is truly recoverable (and if it were wouldn't it be irrelevent?), so making explicit conceptual comparisons and contrasts to the past seems the only honest way to proceed, even if this only "alerts us to the dangers of importing our own concepts onto ancient terms".... --[[User:RobertC|RobertC]] 14:02, 8 Nov 2006 (UTC)
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| − | Two clarifications, perhaps. TT, if I'm reading you right, we pretty much agree on how to interpret Paul here. We certainly both agree that Paul is trying to think the ''psyche'' as the lower and the ''pneuma'' as the higher. Moreover, it is precisely because the terms (as terms) are unstable that I loosely define ''psyche'' as "being" or even "being-in-the-world." Whether one wants to call that very broad (unstable?) concept "soul" or "mind" or even "creature," what all of these terms seem to drive at in the end is one's interrelatedness in a world-complex (I use world here, not earth, for a reason).
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| − | About Kristeva. I'm not convinced there are any accidents in the development of language. I don't think one can ultimately separate psychology from Paul's discussion of ''psyche''. That is not to say at all that we are to import our own concepts onto ancient terms. It is to say that while psyche means something different from ''psyche'', the two are clearly related, and that interrelation, carefully attended to, can help a student of the scriptures now to situate the modern in relation to the ancient, and the ancient in relation to the modern. In other words, precisely because our current concepts are historically situated, we have to recognize the role of 1 Cor 15 in the historical situation: Paul is very much part of the history of our thinking the psyche. Taken this way, Paul's discussion of the ''soma psychikos'' can be read as a player in the situating of all current psychological study/discussion. I have to agree with Robert that I don't believe a past meaning is truly recoverable (I'm not sure it would be irrelevant, however, if it were recoverable). But this just means that we have to be profoundly aware of the dialectical play of our own historical situatedness and the historical situatedness of the ancient text we are considering. I'm not at all convinced that we can take an ancient text as a thing in itself, an absolute object of study.
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| − | All of that said, I think that one must pay careful attention to the word ''psyche'' in Paul and its correlation with ''kosmos'', "world." Or in the New Testament generally. The "fashion of this world passeth away," and so the ''psyche'' is to be replaced in the resurrection with the ''pneuma''.
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| − | While we're hashing out these issues... TT, I'm interested in your reading of [[1 Cor 15:46|verse 46]]. The commentary you edited had paid careful attention to the question of "first" and "afterward," but your edit effectively eliminated that question. I like all you added, but I wonder whether some of the importance of those terms hasn't been lost? How do you read that question of "priority" or "temporality" or whatever you may read into it? --[[User:Joe Spencer|Joe Spencer]] 15:12, 8 Nov 2006 (UTC)
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| − | : Joe, a few brief thoughts about your points. You're right that we do agree that Paul is making a separation between ''psyche'' and ''pneuma'', but I am disagreeing with the terms that you are picking to translate the term psyche. Perhaps you need to explain what you mean by the terms that you have used, but I think that they psychologize (mind), existialize (being-in-the-world) or mistake (creature) Paul's concerns in such a way to distort them. I think that they move too quickly to arguments about modes of existence when Paul is really talking about actual substances. To begin with, let me explain again what I think Paul is up to and then I can show why I don't think these terms accurately capture the issue. Paul here is making an argument about the hierarchy of substances. He is ranking spirit higher than soul. Many Platonists would have ranked soul higher, arguing that its origins are in the divine realm. Philo is an example of this. To repeat, this argument is about the relative "weight" of "soul" and "spirit" and their distance from God. This is sort of a chain of being kind of discussion. "Mind" doesn't get at this because implies a Cartesian world where there is a mind/body split. This simply isn't what Paul is worried about. Furthermore, "mind" connotes a cognitive aspect to psyche which is too limiting for its function in Platonism, and completely different from Paul's reading of Genesis. As for "being-in-the-world", this Hiedeggarian/Bultmanian reading may be nice theologically, but I really don't see it in this passage. Paul doesn't see the soul as the seat for the production of reality or existence in the sense that Dasein connotes. I think that "creature" also fails because for Paul psyche isn't the whole being, it is one part along with flesh and spirit. For me, all of these terms obscure more than they help to understand that Paul is engaged in an argument about kinds of substances, not just modes of existence (as your "according to the mind/according to the spirit" implies). As in ancient philosophy generally, different substances were connected to different modes of existence, but this connection gets lost in these other translations, in my view.
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| − | : As for Kristeva, I am not entirely sure what your point is. Without getting lost in a tangent of different types of "intertextuality" and their various uses for doing historical work, suffice it to say that I think that Kristeva is less useful for thinking about history than she is for thinking about modern literature. Let me also say that I am attempting to create a greater distance between our world and our language and that of Paul. My argument about historical situatedness was about exposing the gap between the first and the twenty-first centuries, so I am not clear how you can argue that your position also emphasizes historical specificity (if I'm understanding you correctly). I see you as trying to close up that gap here in a way that makes me uncomfortable. It tames Paul where I think he is strange and I think that we should keep him strange. Specifically, while 'psychology' is obviously related to 'psyche' I don't see any connection between the concerns of contemporary psychology and the concerns of Paul. Inasmuch as pscyhology sees the psyche as something which develops and sees the psyche as the locus for the formation of the subject (Freud/Lacan), or its concerns for the structures of the mind, or its concerns for mental health, I can't see where Paul would have anything to do with any of this. Contemporary psychology is not worried about whether the origins of the psyche are in the earth or the divine realms. But this is Paul's concern. Regardless of whether or not the past is fully recoverable, I feel confident is saying that modern psychology and ancient psychology are asking completely different questions.
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| − | : As for my reading of 46, I'm afraid I don't recall exactly what I had edited out and so I am not sure that I understand the impact of the question. I remember that what I eliminated was that Paul was engaged in an exegesis of Gen 1 and Gen 2 as two separate creation accounts. I don't think that this is what Paul is doing at all (even though the Rabbis and Philo both do it). Rather, I think that Paul is just reading Gen 2:7 to argue that the first body of creation is psychical and the last body of the new creation/resurrection is spiritual. --[[User:TrailerTrash|TrailerTrash]] 23:29, 8 Nov 2006 (UTC)
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| − | TT, thanks for hashing that out at length. That clarifies quite a bit. I had been misreading what you were saying (I hadn't recognized a "chain of being" sort of thing at all in what you were saying), and what you explain here makes me far more sympathetic to your arguments. I confess, at the same, that I don't see the gap between "different substances" and "different modes of existence" to be quite so great as you do, and that is probably what undergirds my readiness to translate the terms as I have. Different substances are different substances, it seems to me, precisely in their mode of existence (I may be retrojecting [[D&C 84:33]] onto Paul here, but I don't see any reason this would not be justified--speaking hermeneutically, not exegetically, that is, speaking in terms of the possibilities of Paul's text, not in terms of the impossibilities of Paul's text). In the end, I think I can only make sense of revelations like [[D&C 130|D&C 130:1]] if I do not separate the nature of a substance from its mode of existence. To separate the two too absolutely seems to me to misunderstand the nature of the priesthood (in Moses, D&C 128, etc.) and even of creation (especially in Genesis and Moses). At any rate...
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| − | As far as Kristeva goes, I think your summary here is right on the money. Kristeva's concept of intertextuality is helpful in thinking about modern literature primarily. My point in bring Kristeva in was not to say that we ought to be imposing post-modern categories on Paul, but that we ought to imposing Pauline categories on modern literature. In other words, whatever a Pauline psychology would be, we ought to situate Freud et al in Paul's terms. The gap between the first and twenty-first centuries is not to be closed so that we can read Kristeva as a foundation to Paul, but so that we can read Paul as a foundation (or anti-foundation) to Kristeva. Precisely because modern psychology is asking completely different questions, a return to Paul's earlier discussion of ''psyche'' should help us to critique modern psychology: is it asking the wrong questions, or is it misunderstanding the nature of what it is considering, etc.? I hope that is clearer.
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| − | As regards verse 46. The argument understood "first" and "afterwards" to be temporal terms that set two creations in a particular order, the creation of the spiritual body and the creation of the psychical body. If I am now understanding you, you are understanding "first" to mean that the psychical body is first in a chain that stretches from earth to heaven? Afterwards means that the spiritual body comes higher up the chain? I'm just trying to follow how you are understanding the two terms. The two Greek words could be understood either temporally or ordinally. Perhaps the exegesis should be adjusted to reflect the two possibilities as two alternative interpretations? --[[User:Joe Spencer|Joe Spencer]] 15:59, 9 Nov 2006 (UTC)
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| − | :How about the freudian term "id" in the place of "mind"? That would seem to me to get the idea across accurately. Unfortunately, in our times, I think it's the closest thing there is to a modern equivalent. I'm not sure, however, that many people know what the "id" refers to. The term "ego" might be less accurate technically, but would probably speak more to the understanding of the modern reader. It would seem a difficult thing to force this word to fit neatly into our language. The term "mind" suggests a number of things to my mind... ;-D, but none of them are the seat of my desires or passions. None of them are carnal sensual and devilish. In quite modern terminology, I would call the "heart" the seat of my desires and emotions, and the mind the seat of my reason and practicality, which does not at all match the meaning of the word that we are seeking to cast into English and seems not quit, but nearly, opposite. --[[User:Seanmcox|Seanmcox]] 18:18, 31 August 2007 (CEST)
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| − | ::Sean, I can't speak for Joe (I think he's in the process of moving and may be MIA for a while longer...), but I think ''id'' in an interesting idea to think about (though I think TT's historical concerns become esp. relevant, that it becomes too easy to start thinking that Paul thought in terms of a conscious/unconscious divide like we do...).
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| − | ::In reading a bit more about this, I think Paul might have in mind "natural man" a life which tries to govern itself rather than that which is governed by Spirit. This, I think, is actually rather consonant with the Mosiah 3 passage, living in a way that is natural in the unbridled sense. I think most modern translations actually stick with "natural," perhaps for this reason.... --[[User:RobertC|RobertC]] 20:15, 31 August 2007 (CEST)
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| − | :::That's an interesting thought. --[[User:Seanmcox|Seanmcox]] 20:31, 31 August 2007 (CEST)
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