The Soul

Philosophy → Metaphysics & Philosophy of Mind → Cross-cutting concept

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Overall stakes The soul (die Seele, f.) names whatever, within a being, makes it live, feel, and think — as opposed to the inert body (der Körper, m.). German usefully distinguishes the soul (die Seele, the vital/religious register) from mind/spirit (der Geist, m. — the thinking mind, reason, but also the Hegelian “Spirit”) and from consciousness (das Bewusstsein, n.). But this concept carries a decisive stake: is the soul a substance distinct from the body (one that could survive it), a mere function of the living body, or an illusion produced by the brain? The answer bears on everything: immortality, freedom, personal identity, the status of consciousness. This is the ground of the great dualism/materialism debate.

History of the concept

Antiquity — the soul as the principle of life

• Plato (Phaedo, Phaedrus, 4th c. BCE): the soul is immortal, distinct from the body (its “prison”), and pre-existent; to know is to recollect. Challenged by Aristotle (On the Soul): the soul (psyche) is not a separate substance but the “form” of the living body, its organizing principle — it does not survive the body as an autonomous thing (except perhaps the intellect).

Modernity — dualism and its crisis

• Descartes (Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641): a radical dualism between the res cogitans (soul/thought, without extension) and the res extensa (body/matter). The soul is an immaterial thinking substance. Challenged by Spinoza (Ethics, 1677): there is only one substance; soul and body are two aspects (attributes) of the same reality — not two things. And by the problem of interaction: how could the immaterial act upon the material (Descartes’s “pineal gland” is a solution unanimously rejected)?

Contemporary — the naturalization of mind Philosophy of mind (die Philosophie des Geistes) and neuroscience tend to reduce the “soul” to brain processes. The body-mind relation is known in philosophy as the Leib-Seele problem (der Leib, m., the lived body / die Seele, the soul). Challenged by proponents of the “hard problem” of consciousness (David Chalmers, 1995): even once every neural mechanism has been explained, one still has not explained why there is any lived experience at all (what it feels like, the qualia) — a residue irreducible to the physical.

Main theses

1. The soul is a substance distinct from the body (dualism: Plato, Descartes)

• Example: the thought experiment “I can doubt my body but not my thought” (Descartes, the cogito) suggests that thought has a reality independent of the body.
• Counter-argument: clinical neurology — a brain lesion (Phineas Gage, 1848, an iron rod passing through the frontal cortex) alters personality, values, and character. If the soul were separate, how could the physical alter it to such an extent?

2. The soul is a function of the living body, not a thing (Aristotle, materialism)

• Example: the “life” of an organism is not an added ingredient but the organization of matter — just as “walking” is not a substance added to the legs but their functioning.
• Counter-argument: dualists reply that reducing consciousness to a function leaves unexplained the fact that there is something it is like to be conscious (the qualia argument, see the “hard problem”).

Symbolic / religious dimension The immortality of the soul is central to most religions (judgment, salvation). It grounds the idea that personal identity outlasts death. Counter-argument: Buddhism denies the existence of a permanent substantial self (anatta, non-self) — there is only a flux of states with no fixed soul, a thesis close to Hume’s (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739), for whom the “self” is nothing but a “bundle of perceptions.”

Critical nuance The debate is not settled. Strict Cartesian dualism is today a minority position in philosophy, but reductionist materialism runs aground on consciousness. Many intermediate positions exist (emergentism — see Emergence —, dual-aspect monism). “The soul” is perhaps, in the end, less a thing to be located than a question about what it fundamentally means to be a living, conscious subject.

Links

• Emergence
• Memory
• Personal Identity
• Consciousness
• Computer
• Philosophy