The Soul of Notre Dame

Over lunch, my coworkers said: I was actually quite sad. Yeah me too. Me too. It was sad. Intense. (In Spanish, the phrase is: Muy fuerte, muy fuerte.)

But after everyone made their emotional alliance known, someone said, “But thank God no one died.”

“True… but think of the history.”

“But like, I don’t know, imagine if a bunch of the firefighters were killed trying to save paintings.”

“I mean, maybe in some cases it’s worth it, you know? What about a Rembrandt or a Da Vinci? Also, that cathedral was almost 900 years old.”

And the conversation escalated from there. Is a building worth a life? Worth several lives? How many? If you had to choose between killing a person and burning the ten most famous paintings in history…

Meanwhile, I was thoroughly enjoying my black pizza. (Among other profound philosophical quandaries, we may ask ourselves: when and why did charcoal in food become a thing??)

But the topic of emotional attachment to physical things is one I’ve been musing over since finishing Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am A Strange Loop — which is something of a watered-down sequel to his more famous and much more dense book Gödel, Escher, Bach. (Which has been sitting on my bookshelf for almost a year and I have yet to get half way through it.)

I Am A Strange Loop is about consciousness and “the self” — in quotations because DH does not believe that the self, in fact, exists. Or rather, he does not buy into the intuitive idea of “One Body One Soul” which says that I, Katie Williams, exist in my body and you, Whoever Is Reading This, exist in your body, and when we die our Selves or Souls float up into space or heaven or haunted houses or the next karmic version of us.

(Bear with me — this will tie back to Notre Dame)

His argument is that Self-ness or Consciousness or a Soul (he uses the terms interchangeably) is not a physical thing that some übermicroscope will discover someday. Nor is it a mystical essence that defies the laws of nature. According to DH, consciousness is a pattern, like genes and thermodynamics. It is a pattern of self-reference, like a video camera pointing at the screen that projects its own video feed — which is why he also refers to consciousness as A Strange Loop.

Souls have sizes

So consciousness, according to this view, is not a magical spark endowed upon each human baby at birth and dissipated at its death. It is rather a pattern that appears in various levels of concentration throughout the physical world. Or, to put another way: There are souls of different sizes. DH invented the unit of Hunekers to crudely measure soul sizes (named after the musician James Huneker who wrote that Chopin’s études should not be played by “small-souled men”).

Maybe humans have 1,000 Hunkekers while fleas only have 1. And dogs might be somewhere between that. The size of a soul depends on the ability to perceive, abstract, and then self-represent — i.e. a flea may perceive vibrations, a dog may abstract that the sound of a bell means it will get food soon, and a person may develop an insecurity about the amount of food he eats relative to his peers. DH tries to stay away from assigning different soul sizes to different people, but does suggest that most people think that way intuitively when we say things like, “She’s not really there anymore” about an elderly person who has lost significant brain functioning.

Souls transcend bodies

Not only does DH assign levels of consciousness, he also describes how it may be distributed beyond physical bodies.

While I, Katie, may have an extremely high concentration of Katieness in my own physical body, my soul — the pattern of Katieness — also exists in anyone who has learned my signature dance move or has started wearing their sneakers without laces. Part of me has leaked out into the world. (Cue: Bob Marley.) My blogs, photographs of me and stories told about me may also contain traces of Katieness — which is why my parents or friends or other people who enjoy Katieness might be sad if they saw a picture of me ripped up on the ground or if my signature dance move was banned by international law.

But that’s a bit curious isn’t it? That people should have an emotional reaction to a torn piece of paper or the prohibition of a dance move? If the old axiom of “Things Are Just Things” is true, why do we attach meaning to inanimate objects? Are there things that are more than just things?

And now, finally, we’re back to Notre Dame!

We are sad. Even though no one died. Es muy fuerte. Not just because it is a beautiful building. But because the physical structure of the cathedral itself represents nearly 900 years of soul patterns. It manifests the consciousnesses of Kings, Popes, Saints, Napoleon, Victor Hugo, and the hundreds of millions (billions?) of people who walked, sang, worshiped, gazed, kissed, sneezed, and selfied under its arches and spires. The stained glass and the marble columns, while not Strange Loops themselves, have formed part of the consciousness patterns from all the souls who have made meaning out of them. Thus the cathedral’s partial destruction is, in some way, the destruction of some of those soul patterns. Which is why we feel it as a tragic loss, as a form of death.

The net worth of all the Gucci billionaires in the world cannot replace that. But fortunately, as the meaning-making machines that we humans are, we will manufacture new stories out of the rubble.