Competing Acceptance [Flash Fiction]

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Mind is certainly void of any tactility as is also the human soul–and I reassert herein the tangibility of both mind and soul irrespective of either having no tactility. Tactility, we must remember, is not the sole verifier of the real. I am not going to play ping-pong between the idea of soul and the idea of mind. It is important to note that neither soul nor mind can be touched in the way a body can be, or a rock, or any thing that has this ability to be known through the senses; but then neither does freedom nor love have this tactility, although both are tangible and have their effects that we feel, as we say, language sometimes limited in how it expresses experience, limited in how it expresses our emotions, our thoughts, our perceptions, the extensions of these in one or another of the others, each mutually reciprocal in human experience.

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Mind has not been located by psychologists any more than soul has been by theologians. Once more, each is tangible, yes; yet, both are non-tactile. This is crucial. Tangibility is not dependent on tactility, and we do know things without the evidence that phenomenology could bear, and apart from epistemological investigation. We can experience each of them, though. Nonetheless, mind has come to surpass soul in believability. The former has virtually universal acceptance; the latter a great deal of hesitation in accepting the idea, or varying degrees of incredulity in any discussion of its existence.

The French resolve the mind/soul distinction in one term, a clustered idea of a soul-mind/mind-soul contingency. The French say l’ame (circumflex over the ‘a’) for both. In this way, the French language has framed them as contingent entities, mutual, if not interchangeable. There is duality present in the French; there is dichotomy, if we understand dichotomy as bi-relational yet separate, or with some divergence. How is it that we have to insist on a hierarchy for two things that should not have been a dichotomy to begin with; we do have in English a dichotomy where the French understand duality.

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For greater human understanding, we must set our linguistic experiences of things in the world or things in human interaction or things of mind and soul as we have herein done so far, as well as how we express them, in a forum of competing acceptance with other linguistic experiences and how they are expressed.

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