SOUL – A SYNTHESIS – PART III – RECONSTRUCTION OF SOUL

“We are not our mind, we are not our body; our true identity is found in deep meditation joined with the universe.” – Eknath Easwaran.

 

 

Our last step is to reconcile the five human immaterial features – mind, will, personality, identity, and self – with the key characteristics of soul presented in the major traditions. These include:

    1.  Personhood

   2.   Indivisibility

   3.   Immutability

   4.   Platonic Ideas

5.   Subsistence

   6.   Timelessness

   7.   Connectivity to Universal Soul or Spirit

Most obviously, personality and identity seem to constitute the personhood of one of the Buddhist soul concepts, perhaps the least arguable element of man considered as soul. None of our five immaterial human features is divisible, so this part of soul theory is logically consistent as well. The identity and self are immutable and the contents of mind are the near instantiation of the Platonic Ideas. Subsistence is contained by will – Schopenauer’s thing-in-itself –  which I previously noted seems to be a visceral, unthinking self-preservation or self-affirmation.

Timelessness is a quality of the mind, that is its contents, rather than its origin in the brain. Newton’s description of the laws of physics, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata do not exist in time; they are beyond time, and the thoughts they had, and similarly the thoughts we have, are not subject to the law of entropy and hence the direction of time. The will to exist, to grow, to love are not bound by time even if our biologic structure must cease to exist eventually.

Moreover the self in some circumstances can escape time, albeit briefly in terms of physical time. Hence the advice of the Tao Te Ching, “stay at the center of the circle (the Tao) and let all things take their course,” because “if you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart you will endure forever.” Plotinus similarly notes “immortality is not survival of the personality; it is the absorption of the soul in deathless things.” The metaphor of the immortality of the soul is encompassed in a spiritual experience of connection to the timeless, immaterial quality of the cosmos – the logos – which the great thinkers called the universal soul or spirit.

Our reconstituted concept of soul then is not a substance, but the immaterial depth and spiritual capacity of man. It does not require God, religion, immortality, or the supernatural. It is the seemingly universal ability of man to reflect deeply on himself and the universe, especially universal law. It involves science, art, morality, openness, freedom, hope, brotherhood, and love. It is not the concrete in our world, but the abstract, the ephemeral. All men and all women have access to it, and it ties all of us together beyond a particular body, space, or time.

SOUL – A SYNTHESIS – PART II – HUMAN IMMATERIALITY

“My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it.” – Thomas Alva Edison.

 

Our next step is to compile a table of the human features indicative of soul scrutinized against the criteria for materiality listed in our last post (See Table 4 in Appendix). Of the eight intangible human features, only life fits all of the criteria of materiality, and thus should be rejected in a reformulation of soul. Perhaps it Is conflated with the presumed dynamic nature of the soul which may be contained in other features such as will.

Consciousness also meets several of the criteria of materiality, and is of course common among nonhuman animals. Man’s apparently unique capacity for self-consciousness seems to me an insufficient argument for immateriality, but if human consciousness of self can be united with a cosmic consciousness, that might signify an immaterial nature.

Being cuts across both material and immaterial reality so seems to be a neutral consideration, but it appears logically inconsistent to discard the characteristic of actual existence. For now it may be best to bracket being in our reconstruction.

The remaining five features – mind, will, personality, identity, and self – fail to meet even half of the criteria for materiality and thus deserve positing in our final reconstruction. They seem to be real, but cannot be directly perceived (by others); rather they are indirectly revealed by behavior of the physical body. They certainly do not occupy space and are indivisible. The main criterion of physicality they satisfy is particularity which seems a reasonably exception since it is essential to the logic of any discussion in which human immateriality is conceived as individual rather than shared.

In short, it seems that the soul can be reconstructed as the composite of these five immaterial features of man. They defy current scientific penetration, though that may change in the future. Based on this discussion and our scale in Table 4, the core of human immateriality are will and self with personality, identity and mind layered over them.

SOUL – A SYNTHESIS – PART I – IMMATERIALITY

“What is finally the most revolutionary and fruitful aspect of our present age is the relationship it has brought to light between Matter and Spirit: spirit being no longer independent of matter, or in opposition to it, but laboriously emerging from it under the attraction of God by way of synthesis and centration. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man.

For those of us who find the arguments and warrants for belief in a soul unconvincing, we now reach the point of reconstruction. We have investigated the components of human existence which soul is presumed to explain and must now reconfigure them. Since the origin of soul belief is recognition that man in particular and reality in general seem to have two manifestations – physical and immaterial – we shall differentiate them first.

Physical reality is made up of matter which science tells us is subatomic particles (possibly themselves representing multidimensional strings of energy), that are compounded in steps into atoms, molecules, complex chemicals, visible matter, planetary and stellar bodies, and galaxies. It also includes intangible elements such as light, fire, electricity, magnetic fields, and gravity, which are not immaterial per se. Finally physical reality includes life, an emergent property of some complex organic matter..

Immaterial reality includes, mathematics, natural laws, ideas, thoughts, imagination, and possibly God. How real is the immaterial? Well, no perfect circle exists in nature, but the mathematics and concept of a perfect circle seem undeniable. We trust the laws of relativity are correct, but while the universe demonstrates its validity, the laws themselves are not a material substance. Neither ink on a piece of paper nor the sound waves of the voice of a reader are a poem, yet the poem seems real. We know the science of how an object appears red, but the mental qualia of redness cannot be seen on examining the brain.

There appear to be five general criteria to distinguish the physical from the immaterial:

  1. Spatiotemporality – existence in space (extension in classical philosophy) and time.
  2. Perceptibility – detectible by human senses with or without tools
  3. Mutability – ability to change (especially to be divided)
  4. Interactivity – participation in a causal chain within the material universe
  5. Particularity – individually unique

These are self-explanatory except the last. All physical substances are unique; no two material beings are the same – no two trees, birds, cows, or people. In the case of atoms with identical structure, numerical identity is still assured – two hydrogen atoms are in fact two different entities with the same make up (except for deuterium of course). Immaterial reality involves universals – the circle is invariable and appears to have no existential beginning or end. ‘Horse’ is a universal; Secretariat is a particular, hence the ancient Chinese paradox: “a white horse is not a horse.”

To repeat, the immaterial aspects of man resulted in postulation of a human soul. If we reject the soul, we are left with the original enigma of our immateriality. The monist solves this by rejecting the immaterial aspect of the person and disregarding any philosophical significance of the illusion of immateriality. The following posts will attempt an alternative understanding.

DECONSTRUCTION OF THE SOUL – PART IV

“The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.” – Andre Malraux, La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate).

Deep within and increasingly elusive are three further intangible qualities of human beings: personality, identity, and self. There is much overlap in these, but what distinguishes them from the earlier characteristics is their roles in defining individuals.

Personality which Dagobert Runes defines as “the totality of mental traits characterizing an individual,”1 seems to be the most concrete and complex of these last three terms and has more psychological than philosophical meaning. It is also the most elastic of the intangible constituents of soul and loosely interchangeable with notions of external and internal self, for example Meister Eckhart’s inner man. Personality then is the fluid portion of the deconstructed soul.

Identity on the other had is more ontological in its meaning and so fixed – what makes a being or person the same at different times? The logician considers identity as x = x,  but this essentially never applies to existing things as at a material level, atomic and subatomic particles are constantly being removed and added, while animated beings by definition grow, change, and in the case of most animals gain and lose memories. The debates on the nature of identity are extended and complex and therefore beyond the limit of this short essay. Some philosophers deny identity at all (e.g. Hume). For our purposes, identity with respect to a human’s lifetime is best defined as physical and psychological spatiotemporal continuity. The usual theory of soul removes the physical requirement, but we will bracket that in our cataloguing of the soul.

At the very foundation of man is that quality called self – the subject side of soul – the me as opposed to the not-me in the words of William James.2 Ralph B. Winn defines it elegantly as the “metaphysical principle of unity underlying subjective experience.”3 Self is the central constituent of the soul, the sine qua non for both Eastern and Western religions and classical philosophers. But when the self is reflexively coupled to consciousness, the result self-consciousness instantiates the theory of soul. The difference for us is the choice not to treat the self as a substance per se.

This completes our deconstruction of the soul. In the next blog we will begin to reconstruct the catalogued constituents – being, vitality, consciousness, mind, will, personality, identity, and self – into a conceptual framework for thinking about the meaning of human existence.

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1 Runes, Dagobert D., Dictionary of Philosophy. Philosophical Library, New York, 1960, p. 230.

2James, William, Principles of Psychology, The Great Ideas – Volume 53, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, 1952 page 196.

3 Runes, Dagobert D., Dictionary of Philosophy. Philosophical Library, New York, 1960, p. 288.

DECONSTRUCTION OF THE SOUL – PART III

“It is us he inhabits, not the underworld, not the stars in the sky. The spirit who lives in us makes those.”- Agrippa von Nettesheim, quoted by Arthur Schopenauer in The World as Will and Idea.1

We have previously seen that being or actuality, vitality or life, and consciousness and mind are key immaterial or transcendental constituents of man and to a lesser extent other entities in the universe. Now we take up the fourth component, will. First I should clarify that I am referring to the noun – as in the referent for the adjective willful – rather than the verb referring to volition (we will discuss free will in a later section).

Will has an extensive philosophical history. Plato considers will as one of the three fundamental parts of the human soul – the other two being reason and appetite – though he refers to it as spirit as in spiritedness. Aristotle sees will as the motivating force which turns thought into action. Descartes finds will to be more extensive than intellect. Kant defines will as “the faculty of desire in so far as its inner principle of determination as the ground of its liking or predilection lies in the reason of the subject.” Locke distinguishes thought as passive while will is active. Freud repositions will in his psychological model as the ego.2

This spirited, motivating force, more extensive than intellect, the faculty of desire, and the active element underlying the ego is most richly developed in the writings of Arthur Schopenauer. He sees will as striving, impulse, instinct, interest, desire, and emotion. He asserts that we can know Kant’s thing-in-itself for ourselves by searching inside where we find the experience of striving or will. Will for Schopenauer is blind and unintelligent; his description of it seems to me a visceral, unthinking self-preservation.3 He attributes this conception of will to all of reality and decides the entire world of phenomena is objectified will. The path Schopenauer takes eventually leads to the Platonic ideas, the Upanishads and  Buddhism, aesthetics, and the tragedy of life and its suffering; but for our purpose, the key point is the place his description of will fills in understanding what lies in the abyss of human existence.

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1Schopenauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Idea, Orion Publishing Group, London, UK, 1995. ISBN 9778-0-4608-7505-9, page 27.

2Adler, Mortimer J, et. al., The Great Ideas – A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume II, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, 1952 page 1071-1076.

3Parker, DeWitt H. (editor), Schopenauer Selections, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1928, Introduction, pages ix-xxxii.

DECONSTRUCTION OF THE SOUL – PART II

“The soul is only the thinking part of the body, and with the body it passes away. When death comes, the farce is over, therefore let us take our pleasure while we can.”- Julien Offray De La Mettrie, 1709-1751; French physician and philosopher.

The third traditional feature of a soul is consciousness, perhaps the greatest mystery of human existence. In his course on consciousness1, Daniel Robinson emphasizes consciousness as sui generis or unlike anything else and requiring science not yet available. It involves a difference between mere registering of an event as a machine can do and knowledge of it. It is a raw awareness and ability to experience, and in its most advanced form, reflexiveness or knowledge of the self. These unique characteristics within otherwise unconscious nature inherently lead us to consideration of a ‘soul.’ Mind adds to simple consciousness further features such as feelings, thoughts, memories, intentions, and so forth.

Robinson notes that typical philosophy of mind favors foundational explanations for the gap between the dynamics of the nervous system and the nature of consciousness – typically some form of causal law. In pure materialism, references to experienced phenomena or qualia (e.g.  the color “red”) are just states of the brain.  There are problems with this thesis, for example causation usually involves antecedent-consequent events to be of a similar type (e.g. billiard balls striking each other) which does not apply here. It is philosophically and scientifically difficult to see how mental activities lead to physical actions that realize mental purposes, and if mind states are just ‘states of the brain,’ mental acts do not seem to be physicalistically intelligible. People act for reasons not due to causes.

Alternatively if mental activities are ontologically identical to brain states, then relevant features should be interchangeable in linguistic use (Liebniz’s criterion). However as an example all of us know the mental state of ‘pain’, but most of us know very little of the physical basis for it, and regardless of  the brain state the neuroscientist pinpoints as ‘pain,’ we would still not deny the authoritative claim of a person to be experiencing pain in the absence of the correlating brain state.

Physicalists revert to modifications: (1) anomalous monism – how mental events and processes induce physical events precludes reduction to scientific terms, (2) supervenience theory – mental states arise from and depend on physical states just as a wood table supervenes on molecules and atoms (e.g. Donald Davidson), (3) proclamations that current physics and understanding of matter is too limited to explain consciousness (e.g. Roger Penrose), (4) default to quantum physics- the brain at the quantum level is an informational system where the mental and material merge (e.g. David Bohm). However Robinson seems to believe that all variations of monism are inadequate, and intuitively we all know mental life and consciousness are fundamentally different from physical states of the brain.

Each of us must reflect deeply on this difficult area of philosophy, but it seems to me the universal history of the bodily death of others as the end of demonstrable mental activity, the consistency of neuroscientific explanation of mind states, and my direct experience of the dependence of my mental life on my physical being (brain) invariably directs me to the monist school. Nonetheless, Robinson’s intuition of the lingering gap suggests an emergent quality of the brain as consciousness which we should incorporate into our revision of the soul.

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1Daniel N. Robinson, Consciousness and Its Implications, Lectures 7-8. The Teaching Company, 2007

DECONSTRUCTION OF THE SOUL – PART I

“The soul of man is – objectively considered – essentially similar to that of all other vertebrates; it is the physiological action or function of the brain.” – Ernst Heinrich Haekel,  The Wonders of Life.

 

After careful consideration of the proofs and warrants for belief in the soul, it appears we are at a dead end; it is simply a matter of faith or opinion. Perhaps we should back up and sort out those components of ourselves that suggested the possibility of a soul in the first place and see if they can be recast them for our purposes.

The ‘immaterial’ structure of humans appears – in rough order of increasing depth: (1) being or actuality, (2) vitality or life force, (3) consciousness, (4) mind, (5) will, (6) personality, (7) identity, and (8) self. All of these deserve some explication.

Starting with ‘being,’ we can review the teachings of Aristotle – to wit, the distinction between potentiality and actuality. In theory, there could exist any number of additional persons simply by further procreation. Those humans never conceived have potentiality, but only those born achieve actuality or being. Whatever concept we substitute for the soul will involve actuality.

Next is the characteristic of ‘life’ where I will draw on the writing of Henri Bergson.1,2  In his non-dualist system, both matter and life derive from a primal substance. Non-living things are more static, do not grow, lack memory, and do not endure in the same was as living things and especially conscious life. Life contains a dynamic element, accumulates a history, and is purposeful and creative. It contains an integrating force moving in a definite direction – a kind of cosmic vitalism or principle he calls the elan vital. Berson proposes that this force is trying to free itself from the domination of matter and achieve consciousness. Through experiment (trial and error?) the elan vital has found the storage and explosive release of energy possible by animals leads to freedom, and the greatest freedom is possible in vertebrates – culminating in man. Intelligence allows manipulation of matter, but is itself composed of static concepts. When intelligence is blended with instinct the result is intuition which is more fluid and allows knowledge of Kant’s thing-in-itself. Humans have this intuition in a limited form best seen in artists. In moments of intense joy or sadness, man connects intuitively with his inner self briefly and directly. Perhaps the elan vital  manifested in man is mirrored by a dynamic element in an alternate model of the soul  .

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1Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, Random House, Inc. New York, 1944.

2 Magill, Frank. Masterpieces of World Philosophy. HarperCollins Publishers.  1990. ISBN 0-06-270051-0. Pages 477-485.

SUBJECTIVE RATIONALE FOR THE SOUL (CONT’D)

Thought experiments are another warrant for belief in a soul. One need merely imagine oneself in a different body or disembodied; would you still be you?  Consider if you were to awaken tomorrow in the year 1776, in a different country, or in the body of a celebrity. You would still likely believe yourself to be the same person you have ever been; rather something would seem to be terribly wrong with your body or the world. This is the story of Franz Kafka’s short story, The Metamorphosis, where the protagonist wakes up to find himself in the body of a giant cockroach, but still clearly believes himself to be the same person. What if you awoke tomorrow without a body and the world had disappeared, would you still be you? Descartes argues that the soul is more easily known than anything else, that is, you cannot doubt you have a mind, but you can doubt you have a body.1 Some conclude that thought experiments of this type suggest the body is analogous to clothing, and the soul (or mind) can logically be independent of the physical world.

Another suggestion of the soul is retrieval of experiences from prior lives. Dr. Brian Weiss in his book Many Lives, Many Masters, makes an intriguing case for belief in past-life experiences. While working as a traditional psychotherapist of  emotional disorders, a patient under hypnosis retrieved memories of a trauma that predated her childhood, He was skeptical but later became convinced when he was able to confirm her story with public records. He subsequently ‘regressed’ thousands of persons and claims many prior life stories could be corroborated and that often ailments responded to confronting those past-life traumas. He also claims to have received messages from ‘Masters’ or ‘super-evolved, non-physical souls’ through his subjects.2  Of course his work comes under criticism for its absence of scientific rigor and lack of peer review. As in all subjective demonstrations, there remains substantial room for skepticism.

Perhaps a final justification for belief in the soul is the fear of death and requirement of a soul to make reasonable the hope of an afterlife. We will be discussing this in our next major section, but as philosophers we must keep the horse in front of the cart, that is, we must justify the soul as a precondition to the possibility of an afterlife rather than vice versa.

In conclusion, there are multiple subjective warrants for belief in a soul, but none is convincing and even the sum total of all fails to merit the status of proof. Of course you may decide that even the weak arguments and subjective warrants for the soul or your personal faith justify belief in it. For the rest of us, perhaps alternative conceptions of the soul offer an opportunity to understand the discordance between the belief or hope in a soul and the lack of convincing support for it. We will take that up in our next blog.

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1 Adler, Mortimer J, et. al., The Great Ideas – A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume II, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, 1952 page 794.

2Weiss, Brian, Many Lives, Many Masters, 1988. ISBN 0-671-65786-0.

SUBJECTIVE RATIONALE FOR THE SOUL

“I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” – William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Speech (1950)

If the argument for the soul is so unconvincing, one wonders why anyone believes in it. The likely answer is that belief in the soul is based on personal experiences, empirical justifications, or tenets of religious faith.

A list of the subjective, yet mostly empirical justifications include:

     1.   The innocent awareness of the newborn child

     2.   Spiritual and mystical experiences

     3.   Contact with disembodied spirits

     4.   Near-death experiences

     5.   Thought experiments

     6.   Prior life accounts

I will take these in turn.

Anyone who spends focused time with a newborn is impressed with his or her raw awareness. Behind those eyes is something vital, pure, and sacred. We sense a knowing or a being without the veneer of pretense, opinion, or expectation. This apparent inner substance or self seems to outshine the undeveloped intelligence and suggests to some the child is ensouled. This is by no means proof of a soul, but it is a powerful reminder of the depth of the human being and its ‘supernatural’ quality.

We addressed spiritual and mystical experiences in a prior section (Subjective Belief in God, February 22, 2019), mainly from the standpoint of the evidence they offer for a divine being. But in fact they are also potent evidence, at least to the one experiencing them, of a transcendental aspect of one’s own existence that involves connecting the inner self with something greater or with ‘the One’. This transcendental aspect is often understood as a human soul.

Another possible justification for belief in the soul is supposed contact with a deceased person. For myself, the most powerful episode occurred shortly after the death of my father. One evening I had an inexplicable sense that he was in my midst, not as a physical sensation or vision, but nonetheless so real that I found myself wandering inside and outside my house trying to establish if he was there. I suspect these experiences are better explained in scientific or psychological terms, and they are in any case not proof of a soul, but the presumption of disembodied spirits would logically entail the existence of the soul.

Near-death experiences are another subjective warrant for non-material existence. There appears to be a consistent description of what happens at death by those revived from nearly fatal circumstances – being lifted over one’s body, travel through a tunnel followed by a bright light, reconnection to deceased relatives or friends, and a profound sense of peacefulness. These reports invite the hope that some part of the person endures after physical death, presumably the soul. However scientists suspect that chemical changes in the hypoxic brain are a better explanation.

(continued next post)

ARGUMENTS ON EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL (continued)

Richard Taylor in his introductory text on metaphysics appears to agree.2 He says that Materialists would like to maintain that psychological states such as believing or feeling are simply physical states, but “this is a vain hope.” Nonetheless any difficulties suggested  by personal or psychological predicates would apply equally to a soul as to a body. The difficulty is seeing how anything at all can deliberate, choose, repent, think, and so on. The addition of the soul simply introduces problems of connection between the two.

Taylor concedes that everyone feels somewhat that “a person cannot be a mere body,” but it is difficult or impossible to delineate what needs to be added that is not a person already. If the additional ‘thing’ is simply defined as what makes the difference between a body and a person, this begs the question, or as he says “this is about as good a way as one could find for indicating that he has no idea what he is talking about.”

David Kyle Johnson, in his lecture Do Souls Make Us Free,3 adds some scientific concerns. If the soul is postulated to cause human behavior it violates fundamental laws of science such as the law of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum. It also “violates the ‘causal closure of the physical’ which states that physical events that do have causes only have physical causes.”

Our conclusion appears to be that the long philosophical search for proof of the soul fails. On the other hand scientific research appears to be making considerable inroads into explaining those attributes of human experience and behavior that traditionally have been ascribed to the soul. We need not abandon the theory of the soul as there is no proof that it does not or cannot exist, but we do need to seek another rationale or revise our understanding of the soul in order to remain philosophically consistent. We will begin that process in the next blog by looking at subjective warrants for belief in the soul.

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1Kagan, Shelly, Yale Courses: Philosophy of Death. Lectures 3-5. YouTube.

2Taylor, Richard, Metaphysics, Prentice-Hall, Inc., New Jersey, 1974. ISBN 0-13-578468-9, pages 30-35.

3Johnson, David Kyle, The Big Questions of Philosophy. The Great Courses. Lecture 17.