SOUL
The soul – in many
traditional spiritual, philosophical,
and psychological traditions – is the incorporeal (and
immortal) essence of a person, living thing, or object. Some belief
systems (including the Abrahamic religions) argue that only human
beings have souls and therefore that among the biological organisms of the
Earth only they possess immortality and the possibility of union with
the divine. In contrast others (such as Jains) believe that all
biological organisms have souls, and others further still that even
non-biological entities (such as rivers and mountains) possess souls. This
latter belief is called animism. Anima mundi and the
Dharmic Ātman are concepts of a "world soul."
Soul can function as a
synonym for spirit, mind or self; scientific
works, in particular, often consider 'soul' as a synonym for 'mind'.
The Ancient Greeks used the same word for 'alive'
as for 'ensouled', indicating that the earliest surviving western
philosophical view believed that the soul was that which gave the body
life. The soul was considered the incorporeal or spiritual 'breath' which
animates (from the Latin,anima, cf. animal) the living
organism.
Francis M. Cornford quotes Pindar in saying
that the soul sleeps while the limbs are active, but when one is sleeping, the
soul is active and reveals in many a dream "an award of joy or sorrow
drawing near".
Erwin Rohde writes that the early
pre-Pythagorean belief was that the soul had no life when it departed from
the body, and retired into Hades with no hope of returning to a body.
It has been argued that a strict line of causality fails to
explain certain phenomenon within human experience such as free will,
which have at times been attributed to the soul.
Socrates and Plato
Plato, drawing on the words of his teacher Socrates,
considered the soul the essence of a person, being that which decides
how we behave. He considered this essence to be an incorporeal, eternal
occupant of our being. As bodies die, the soul is continually reborn in
subsequent bodies. The Platonic soul comprises three parts:
- the logos, or logistikon (mind, nous, or reason)
- the thymos, or thumetikon (emotion, or spiritedness, or masculine)
- the eros, or epithumetikon (appetitive, or desire, or feminine)
Each of these has a function in a balanced, level and peaceful
soul.
Aristotle
Aristotle defined the soul or psyche (ψυχή)
as the first actuality of a naturally organized body, but
argued against its having a separate existence from the physical body. In Aristotle's
view, the primary activity of a living thing constitutes its soul; for example,
the soul of an eye, if it were an independent organism, would be seeing (its
purpose or final cause).
The various faculties of the soul or psyche, such
as nutrition, sensation, movement, and so forth, when exercised, constitute the
"second" actuality, or fulfillment, of the capacity to be alive. A
good example is someone who falls asleep, as opposed to someone who falls dead;
the former actuality can wake up and go about their life,
while the second actuality can no longer do so. Aristotle identified three
hierarchical levels of living things: plants, animals, and people, for which
groups he identified three corresponding levels of soul, or biological
activity: the nutritive activity of growth, sustenance and reproduction which
all life shares; the self-willed motive activity and sensory faculties, which
only animals and people have in common; and finally reason, of
which people alone are capable. Aristotle treats of the soul in his work, De
Anima (On the Soul). Aristotle concludes, in the fifth chapter
of the third book of this work, that the human active intellect is immortal.
Avicenna and Ibn al-Nafis
Following Aristotle, the Persian Muslim
philosopher-physician, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Arab
philosopher Ibn al-Nafis, further elaborated on
the Aristotelian understanding of the soul and developed their own
theories on the soul. They both made a distinction between the soul and the
spirit, and in particular, the Avicennian doctrine on the nature of
the soul was influential among the Scholastics. Some of Avicenna's views
on the soul included the idea that the immortality of the soul is a consequence
of its nature, and not a purpose for it to fulfill. In his theory of "The
Ten Intellects", he viewed the human soul as the tenth and
final intellect.
While he was imprisoned, Avicenna wrote his famous
"Floating Man" thought experiment to demonstrate
human self-awareness and the substantiality of the soul. He told his
readers to imagine themselves suspended in the air, isolated from all
sensations, which includes nosensory contact with even their own bodies.
He argues that, in this scenario, one would still have self-consciousness.
He thus concludes that the idea of the self is not logically
dependent on any physical thing, and that the soul should not be seen
in relative terms, but as a primary given, asubstance. This argument was
later refined and simplified by René
Descartes in epistemic terms when he stated: "I can
abstract from the supposition of all external things, but not from the
supposition of my own consciousness."
Avicenna generally supported Aristotle's idea of the soul
originating from the heart, whereas Ibn al-Nafis rejected this idea and
instead argued that the soul "is related to the entirety and not to one or
a few organs". He further criticized Aristotle's idea that every
unique soul requires the existence of a unique source, in this case the heart.
Ibn al-Nafis concluded that "the soul is related primarily neither to the
spirit nor to any organ, but rather to the entire matter whose temperament is
prepared to receive that soul" and he defined the soul as nothing other
than "what a human indicates by saying 'I'".
Thomas Aquinas
Following Aristotle and Avicenna, St. Thomas
Aquinas understood the soul to be the first actuality of the living body.
Consequent to this, he distinguished three orders of life: plants, which feed
and grow; animals, which add sensation to the operations of plants; and humans,
which add intellect to the operations of animals.
Concerning the human soul,
his epistemological theory required that, since the knower becomes
what he knows the soul was definitely not corporeal: for, if it were
corporeal when it knew what some corporeal thing was, that thing would come to
be within it. Therefore, the soul had an operation which did not rely on a
bodily organ and therefore the soul could subsist without the body.
Furthermore, since the rational soul of human beings was a subsistent form and
not something made up of matter and form, it could not be destroyed in any
natural process. The full argument for the immortality of the
soul and Thomas's elaboration of Aristotelian theory is found in Question
75 of the Summa Theologica.
Immanuel Kant
In his discussions of rational psychology Immanuel
Kant (1724–1804) identified the soul as the "I" in the strictest
sense and that the existence of inner experience can neither be proved nor
disproved. "We cannot prove a priori the immateriality of the
soul, but rather only so much: that all properties and actions of the soul
cannot be cognized from materiality." It is from the "I", or
soul, that Kant proposes transcendental rationalization, but cautions that such
rationalization can only determine the limits of knowledge if it is to remain
practical.
James Hillman
Contemporary psychology is defined as the study
of mental processes and behavior. However, the
word "psychology" literally means "study of the
soul", and psychologist James Hillman, the founder
of archetypal psychology, has been credited with "restoring 'soul' to
its psychological sense." Although the words soul and spirit are
often viewed as synonyms, Hillman argues that they can refer to antagonistic
components of a person. Summarizing Hillman's views, author
and psychotherapist Thomas Moore associates spirit with
"afterlife, cosmic issues, idealistic values and hopes, and universal
truths", while placing soul "in the thick of things: in
the repressed, in the shadow, in the messes of life, in illness, and
in the pain and confusion of love." Hillman believes that
religion—especially monotheism and monastic faiths—and humanistic
psychology have tended to the spirit, often at the unfortunate expense of
soul. This
happens, Moore says, because to transcend the "lowly conditions of the
soul ... is to lose touch with the soul, and a split-off spirituality, with no
influence from the soul, readily falls into extremes of literalism and
destructive fanaticism."
Hillman's archetypal psychology is in many ways an attempt
to tend to the oft-neglected soul, which Hillman views as the
"self-sustaining and imagining substrate" upon which consciousness
rests, and "which makes meaning possible, [deepens] events into experiences,
is communicated in love, and has a religious concern" as well as "a
special relation with death." Departing from
the Cartesian dualism"between outer tangible reality and inner
states of mind," Hillman takes the Neoplatonic stance that
there is a "third, middle position" in which soul
resides. Archetypal psychology acknowledges this third position by
attuning to, and often accepting, the archetypes, dreams,myths, and
even psychopathologies through which soul, in Hillman's view, expresses
itself.
Philosophy of mind
For a contemporary understanding of the soul/mind and the
problem concerning its connection to the brain/body, consider the rejection
of Descartes' mind/body dualism by Gilbert
Ryle's ghost-in-the-machine argument, the tenuous unassailability of Richard Swinburne's argument
for the soul, and the advances, which have been made
in neuroscience and which are steadily uncovering the
truth/falsity of the concept of an independent soul/mind. The philosophies
of mind and of personal identity also contribute to a contemporary
understanding of the mind. The contemporary approach does not so much attack
the existence of an independent soul as render the concept less relevant. The
advances in neuroscience mainly serve to support the mind/brain identity
hypothesis, showing the extent of the correlation between mental states and
physical-brain states. The notion of soul has less explanatory power in a
western world-view which prefers the empirical explanations involving
observable and locatable elements of the brain. Even so, there remain
considerable objections to simple-identity theory. Notably, philosophers such
as Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers have argued that the
correlation between physical-brain states and mental states is not strong
enough to support identity theory. Nagel (1974) argues that no amount of
physical data is sufficient to provide the "what it is like" of
first-person experience, and Chalmers (1996) argues for an "explanatory
gap" between functions of the brain and phenomenal experience. On the
whole, brain/mind identity theory does poorly in accounting for mental
phenomena of qualia and intentionality. While neuroscience has
done much to illuminate the functioning of the brain, much of subjective
experience remains mysterious.