That the soul is the form of the body, and yet subsists by itself, seems at first glance to tear apart hylomorphism; but Saint Thomas does not tear, but rather embroiders, with the thread of the loom of Physics, with which Aristotle wove the movement of living beings. The soul does not detach itself in thought as one who betrays, but as one who joyfully completes a journey; for in reality it offers itself in a double figure, as that which animates the flesh and that which remains when the flesh falls away.
If this seems impossible, it is because it is viewed as a logical demonstration, not as an image that captures fire; a vast fire, no doubt—so vast as to be imperceptible in its transcendence—which cannot be seen, according to Lezama. It is no coincidence that Bantu ontology (Dikenga) is culminated by the image of fire, which is Kalunga coming from water; because Bantu cosmology is not resolved in contradictions, but in the structure of the real, as the realization of Being.
It is not contradictions that inhabit these objects, which we call form, substance, soul, or Being or Entity; they are visibilities, incarnations of an understanding that is conceptual in its aestheticism, as another rationality; resolved then as figurative concepts, which he said were beyond Reason when they were closer to it. In Lezama, poetry is not ornament but ontology, the image does not represent but reveals a possibility of being; and so too, in Tomás, the soul that subsists is not a heresy against hylomorphism but an elevation of the image itself.
Lezama spoke of “the image as the overcoming of abstract logic”; Emerson did not see a set of causes; for Emerson it was a book of signs, and for him and Peirce and Thoreau, the world was real in this intuition. Beauty is not an adornment, but an objective form of presence, which is ambiguous in its relativity, but consistent; that is why it is a relative objectivity, not as fragility, but as fullness conditioned by its realization.
What thought achieves is not the Absolute, but what is said with sufficient resonance to contain it; and the objects of thought—like poetic signs—are not empty, but neither are they absolute in that sense; rather, they are firm enough to withstand the passage of interpretation, like a tree that stands upright without ceasing to move. In this dance, philosophy is twinned with poetry, and Saint Thomas—who never wanted to be a poet—was one with acceptance; because when he said that the soul subsists, he said more than could be said, and in doing so, he did it well, in silence.
Similarly, when Peirce asserts that logic is born of aesthetics, he introduces a profound form of objectivity, one that recognizes that the world is given to us not as a corpse, but as a flowering, upon its transmutations. Then Pythagoras and Aristotle—like Plato, Thomas, Emerson, Peirce, and Lezama Lima—converge as in an image; not in the doctrines on which they differ, but in their conception of thought as a living function of the world.
For the real is not attained by opposition but by resonance, not by fixation but by aesthetic confidence; and what Thomas preserves in his apparent contradiction is inherited by Peirce when he places logic at the service of beauty. What both say, each in his own way, is that the true cannot be separated from the living; because all form subsists in the illumination of the body, which is the glorious moment when chaos reveals its form.
