The word “soul” is very closely linked to ideas of “mind”, agency and what it means to be human. It is not often used in Philosophy of Mind, other than pejoratively, but it is used in everyday conversation as well as in religious and spiritual contexts. There are also words such as “spirit” and “heart” which point to our inner life and something which is outside the reach of science. Having a look at its use in ordinary English conversation with its folk wisdom and how it is used in the Bible with its inspiration can be illuminating.
Despite being frequently used in general conversation, as well as in the context of religion and spirituality, “soul” is a word which is hard to define. A common view is something like “I can't say what it is but I know it when I see it”. Or “The only thing I can depend on with my body is that it will fail me. Somehow my body is mine, but it's not “me””[3]. The soul is often considered to be what makes us distinctively human, although some believe that higher animals also have souls.
On the other hand, there are some who would deny the existence of a “soul” altogether and effectively reduce human beings to the status of machines. For instance Crick wrote:
‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”
“the idea that man has a disembodied soul is as unnecessary as the old idea that there was a Life Force. This is in head-
Owen Flanagan betrays a very unscientific presupposion when he writes:
[8]
Although very popular, this belief leads to severe difficulties of consistency[9] and it is not one which is required by science or observation.
In some common expressions, “soul” is used to designate the whole person. For example, the distress signal SOS, thought to mean “Save Our Souls”, generally means that those in distress want their bodies to be saved as well. In an accident in which a number of people have died, such as a plane crash or a sinking ship, it is common to say so many “souls” were on board rather than “people”. Maybe this is to emphasise the belief that people are special, not like a cargo of animals or goods.
More often, “soul” is used to refer to the essence of a person which is instinctively thought to be different from the person or the self. For example, in these common expressions:
“Soul” can also be used to indicate the part of ourselves which feels, is phenomenally conscious, is aesthetically sensitive and has conscience. Things which no machine can do except in a metaphorical way. Examples of common expressions which convey this idea include:
[10]
and more light-
Douglas Coupland [11]
A related word which, on the surface, can have the same overtones as “soul” is the word “self”. However there is an important difference in that “soul” points outwards towards something other or something greater, such as God, other people or the human essence. On the other hand “self” points inwards and emphasises the individual and the boundary between the person and their environment.
To get a flavour of the difference between “soul” and “self”, imagine singing the words
“Then sings myself, my saviour God to Thee”
or saying the words
“Why are you cast down, O my self”. (Psalm 42)
There is also the implication here that the soul is not identical to the whole person. Otherwise it seems strange to ask one’s own soul a question, even a rhetorical one.
The ancient Greek philosophers held a variety of views about the “soul”, the main ones of which can be represented by Plato and Aristotle.
Plato believed that the soul was distinct from the body and separable from it. He said:
[12, II ]
[12, 64C].
Peter Clarke describes this as the soul being of a different substance.
[13, p150].
However, unlike Descartes, Plato considers the soul to be made of the same stuff as the body. Joel Green writes:
[14,p50].
This view was developed by Augustine and later by Descartes and it has clearly left its mark on the popular conception of the soul.
Aristotle believed that the soul was formed by, and emerged from, the way the material of the body was arranged. In a way this is analogous to the way that information is represented by material. Information can, for instance, exist as the arrangement of ink on a page, or magnetic domains on a computer disk but it is not the same as these things.
He wrote:
[ 2,414a]
[5]
In other words like a piece of paper and ink and the words written on it.
Aristotle tries to explain his understanding of the distinction between the body and the soul using the analogy of an axe. If an axe were a living thing then its body would be made of wood and metal. However, its soul would be the thing which made it an axe i.e. its capacity to chop. If it lost its ability to chop it would cease to be an axe – it would simply be wood and metal. Similarly, a dead body without a soul is no longer a person. A dead body does not function as a person functions.
For Aristotle, the body and soul are not two separate elements but are one thing. The body and the soul are not, as Plato would have it, two distinct entities, but are different parts or aspects of the same thing.
Aristotle does not allow for the possibility of the immortality of the soul. The soul is simply the Form of the body, and is not capable of existing without the body. The soul is that which makes a person a person rather than just a lump of meat. Without the body the soul cannot exist. The soul dies along with the body.[5]
However, information can be transferred from one place to another by copying and the same information can exist in different ways which raises the question of whether a soul could be similarly transferred. If the form of an axe was transferred to a different piece of wood and metal, would that be the same axe?
Aristotle identified three types of soul, only one of which was unique to humans.
In 1672, Thomas Willis made a similar distinction possibly to avoid conflict with the Roman Catholic authorities.[6]
The Aristotelian view was later taken up by Thomas Aquinas[7].
[1] Francis Crick The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search For The Soul. Scribner reprint edition. 1995. ISBN 0-
[2] Owen Flanagan, “The Problem Of The Soul: Two Visions Of Mind And How To Reconcile Them”
[3] John Ortberg, “Soul Keeping”
[4] Douglas Coupland, “The Gum Thief”
[5] Aristotle, “De Anima II”
[6] Thomas Willis, “De anima brutorum” 1672
[7] Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologica
[8] Owen Flanagan, “The Problem Of The Soul: Two Visions Of Mind And How To Reconcile Them”
[9] Keith Ward, “In defence of the soul”
[10] John Ortberg, “Soul Keeping”
[11] Douglas Coupland, “The Gum Thief”
[12] Murphy and Brown, “Did my neurons make me do it”, Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-
[13] Peter Clarke, “All in the mind?”, Lion Books 2015, ISBN 978 0 7459 5675 6
[14] Joel B. Green, “Body, Soul and Human Life”, Authentic Media, ISBN 978-