Consciousness and Rankings in the Labyrinth
Assessing the social hierarchies of spirituality and materialism
Ancient Greek thinkers drew a peculiar distinction between pneuma and psyche. Both were identified with air or with the breath of life, and sometimes with fire (as in Stoicism) and later with motion and the ether (Aristotle), although psyche was related more to soul or the individual self while pneuma was associated with spirit, the self’s animating force. Hellenic doctors posited a vital neuma that runs through the arteries and controls our movements, flowing from the psychic neuma in the brain.
I submit, though, that the ancients were wrestling inadvertently with what philosophers today would call, following David Chalmers’ analysis, the hard and the easier problems of explaining how consciousness and the human mind fit into the objective world. The easier problems are those tackled today in cognitive science, of how the mind works and how its faculties hang together. The harder problem is figuring out the nature of consciousness or subjectivity itself, given that the real world is fundamentally natural and physical.
This is why the ancients intuited that our mental qualities were associated with intangible elements such as air, fire, or the ether, because consciousness seems insubstantial, immaterial, and ghostlike compared to the many things in the outer world that are often made up of sturdier elements. “Qualia” refers to this ghostlike appearance of mental states, when they’re perceived through introspection. So the spirit or “pneuma” has to do with the evident ghostly nature (or perhaps supernature) of consciousness. In so far as all mental states have degrees of consciousness, the soul or “psyche” would be the mind or personality that’s infused with qualia.
Spiritual Hierarchies
With that interpretation in mind, the historic religious or “spiritual” hierarchies take on a different complexion. Take, for example, the Gnostic’s divisions between the hylics, psychics, and pneumatics, between those who are bound by matter; those who dwell within matter but begin to see the difference between the illusions and traps of physicality and the promise of the higher reality of pneuma; and those who are free from those illusions and…
