Some Els, such as Elanguesce (Essay One)

I have always found it interesting how certain words are near neighbors in the dictionary. For example, the words felicide (killing a cat) and felicific (producing happiness) are next to each other in the OED. Who could have imagined that? Today I discovered two more that are fascinating: elanguesce and elan-vital. My fascination with these latter two comes not from the fact that they both are catch-words of famous philosophers (Kant [1724-1804] and Bergson [1859-1941]), but that the latter detested the philosophy of the former. You can't stand to be with the other in life, so you are right next to the other in death. The purpose of this and the next essay is to define both of these terms, to enflesh them a bit, so that they may become living parts of your conversation.

Let's begin, however, with a mention of other words occurring in the vicinity of elanguesce and elan-vital. Who else lives on the block? Well, we have elance, an obsolete word for "launch, cast, or throw;" then there is eland, which takes us into the world of large Southern African antelopes. The Taurotragus oryx is the common eland; the T. derbianus is the giant eland, even though the common is sometimes larger than the giant. We could go far afield by getting lost in the word Taurotragus (the tragelaph was a creature identified in medieval times, a combination of the he-goat--tragos-- and deer--elaphos), but I refuse to go there. Then, there is elanet, a species of kite (bird, that is). After skipping over elanguesce and elan vital, we come to elephine (resembling the stag, deer), elaphure (a species of reddish-tawny deer), elapid (resembling a venomous colubrid snake of the family Elapidae--can't you see how so much of this just invites further research??) and elapidate (to rid a place of stones). Can't you imagine saying to your general contractor, "Hubert, before you build the house, you must first clear the brush and elapidate the ground...."? So many inviting avenues have to be ignored so that we can get to our words.

Elanguesce

I love to pronounce the word elanguesce. It rolls around your tongue with such pleasure that you don't need to eat chocoloate or drink wine to feel delight. All the OED tells us is that it is, in Kantian philosophy, "the gradual loss of by the soul of its powers." In fact, this tells you almost nothing, and so I propose to take you further into the heart of that most fearful book, the 1787 (2nd ed.; 1st ed. was 1781) Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, "CPR"), where Kant introduced the term. I am indebted to Prof. Charles Thomas Powell of UNC for his 1985 article "Kant, Elanguescence and Degrees of Reality," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (46), 199ff. for some of what follows. Powell tells us that part of Kant's design in CPR was to:

"show the indemonstrability of both God's existence and the immortality of the soul," 199.

He does so by taking aim at the "rational psychologists," whose proofs for the permanence of the soul rest in large part on the notion of the soul's simplicity/undividedness. Since, according to these philosophers (and Kant singles out Moses Mendelssohn for special mention), the soul is simple (integral), it cannot be "broken up." But what Mendelssohn tries to show is that there might be a second way to take immortality away from the soul--the soul might suddenly vanish or disappear and be gone. Through a complex argument Mendelssohn tries to show that nothing in fact simply vanishes: change from one state to another does requre alteration over time, since change is continuous (201). Thus, the rationalists argue that since the soul is simple and cannot disappear suddenly, it is immortal.

Well, that didn't sit well with the philosopher from Konigsberg. He thought about the matter a great deal, and came up with the argument, which really isn't that sophisticated once you think about it for a moment, that there is another possibility. In his words:

"Mendelssohn failed, however, to observe that even if we admit the simple nature of the soul, namely, that it contains no manifold of constituents external to one another, and therefore no extensive quantity, we yet cannot deny to it, any more than to any other existence, intensive quantity, that is, a degree of reality in respect of all its faculties, nay, in respect of all that constitutes its existence, and that this degree of reality may diminish through all the infinitely many smaller degrees. In this manner the supposed substance..may be changed into nothing, not indeed by dissolution, but by gradual loss (remissio) of its powers, and so, ...by elanguescence," CPR, 2nd ed., p. 414.

It would take a Kantian scholar to go through his language in detail--telling us about "extensive quantities" and "intensive quantities," but suffice it to say for our purposes that he is simply positing a way that the soul might fade away, despite the fact that it is simple/undivided.

Is this anything more than a linguistic game? First of all, we really don't know if there is a soul and what makes up the soul. Of course, Kant was standing in a philosophical tradition stretching back to Plato's Phaedo, which talked about the immortality of the soul. He, thus, is not plowing new ground--he accepts Plato's characterization of the soul without question (i.e., he accepts the sou's "simplicity"--though this seems to me to be pretty much up for grabs. What is "simple" about the soul, if, indeed, it exists?). But since he wants to criticize traditional proofs of the existence of God and put his "proof" on an ethical rather than a metaphysical basis, he also wants to eliminate any metaphysical proof for the eternity of the soul. So, he suggests elanguescence as the way that a simple thing like the soul might not have eternal existence. I think that this suggestion, when you really think about it, is one that any high-schooler could have made. Once someone has invented dimmers for lights, the various forms of disappearance, including elanguescence, is on all of our minds.

Conclusion--on Philosophy in Our Day

Maybe that is why philosophy in our day has withdrawn into an impenetrable world of jargon. It basically is embarrassed, embarrassed at how simple its concepts truly are and how indemonstrable its basic and subsequent points are. If philosophy really came to grips with the fact that it is built on suppositions that can neither be shown to be true or false and that its basic principles could be invented over a cup of tea, then it would have to face the fact that it belongs not really in universities but in coffee shops, in the assembly line, in every place where people wonder about life. This, however, philosophy can't do, and so it cloaks itself into smaller and smaller worlds of irrelevance.

I need one more essay to describe the "elan vital."

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