.png)
Arguments for the Existence of
the Soul
Throughout recorded history, and probably well prior to its advent, humans have speculated as to the origins of consciousness. Many ancient philosophers arrived at the conclusion that consciousness derives from the presence of a soul: an entity that animates the body, enabling action and emotion, and providing humans with the capacity for thought and reason. In western civilization, the idea of the soul became refined in the philosophy of dualism, as elaborated by Plato in the 5th century BCE, in his works the Phaedrus, the Phaedo, and the Republic. Plato believed that the faculty which endowed humans with the capacity to feel and reason – the soul – existed independently of the body, and, indeed, the entire material world. His argument was that no property of matter could account for the human attributes of reason and emotion, and that therefore, the mechanism by which humans came to possess these attributes must be metaphysical. The soul, as Plato envisioned it, did not comprise matter, although it could interact with it. Plato believed that the dichotomy of body and soul was absolute in that the two entities were diametric opposites, and that therefore any attributes of matter would be reversed in the soul: whereas the body is changeable and ephemeral, for instance, the soul must be unchanging and eternal. He further postulated, based on personal experiences of having been limited in his philosophical and spiritual pursuits by bodily distractions such as hunger and lust, that the soul was perfect, and matter imperfect. According to the platonic model, the body therefore represents not only a vessel or dwelling place of the soul, but a corporeal prison that binds it to the inadequacies of earthly existence and hinders the expression of its essential goodness.
The idea of dualism flourished in Roman philosophy -- and later among the theologians of medieval Europe -- largely because of its compatibility with both pagan and Christian notions of the afterlife. In the classical Greco-Roman tradition, the dead were spirited away to the banks of the River Styx by Hermes (or in Rome, Mercury) acting in his role as psychopomp. Upon their arrival at the river, they would be shepherded to the further shore by the ferryman Charon, and spend eternity as bodiless shades in the black pit of Tartarus, the Plains of Asphodel, or the Elysian Fields. The idea of a human existence both non-corporeal and endless necessitates a dualistic approach to human nature; otherwise, there would be a logical contradiction in the simultaneous presence of the deceased as both disembodied shades in Hades and physical remains on Earth.
Christianity, too, with its promise of eternal life to the faithful, readily adapted the Platonic model of the soul. Augustine of Hippo endorsed dualism in the 4th century CE, as did Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century CE. The crux of their arguments in favor of a dualistic nature for mankind, like that of most philosophers before them, presupposed the existence of an afterlife. Their reasoning was simple: God had promised, via his son Jesus Christ, that all people would be judged after death and be either rewarded with an eternity of bliss, or condemned to eternal suffering. Because the judgment and subsequent experiences of bliss or suffering occur after death, when the body has ceased to function, an entity separate from the body, but part of the deceased human being, must endure death. Also favorable in the eyes of theologians was the concept of the “mortal coil” earlier espoused by Plato; the idea of the body as the prison of the soul equated death with freedom, and neatly reaffirmed Christian hopes for the eventual rapture of the faithful soul – a Christian’s ultimate release from earthly bondage to ascend to his or her rightful place in Paradise.
The dualistic perspective gained further credence through the support of the French philosopher René Descartes in the 18th century. He reinforced and elaborated on Plato’s assertion that the soul, though immaterial, could act on matter by suggesting that this exchange occurred in the mind (the organ of which had by then been established by medical science as the brain). He even identified which brain area served as the focal point for soul/brain interaction (he believed this to be the pineal gland, an assertion later proved false). Building on the writings of Augustine and Aquinas, he outlined a logical proof of the existence of the soul, based on the assumption that – as justified by Descartes in an earlier proof – God exists and is good. In the proof, the philosopher first argues the existence of matter. He writes that: A) given that God exists and is good, he cannot have the intention of deceiving humanity. B) God created humans with the capacity to discern that matter exists. C) God would not give us the capacity to logically arrive at this conclusion if it were not true. D) Therefore, matter exists.
Having proved to his satisfaction the existence of matter, he must next distinguish it from the soul. At this juncture, he deviates from the arguments laid out by his predecessors in antiquity by incorporating a new philosophical argumentative device in the form of Leibniz’s Law governing the identity of indiscernible entities, an ontological principle discovered by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The law states that no two things possessing exactly the same attributes can fail to be identical. In other words, two entities differentiated only by name should not be differentiated at all. Conversely, the law also states that no two things with different attributes can be identical, and that therefore entities with different properties should be separately classified. Both the law and its converse apply to Descartes’ proof. Descartes’ argument for the distinction of the soul from the body, and by extension from physical existence, is as follows: A) I can think with my mind[1] [which, as earlier established, derives its capacity to reason from the soul]. B) I cannot think with my body. C) Because the soul and body have distinct attributes, they are distinct entities D) Therefore, the soul must be understood separately from the body.
Arguments against the existence of the Soul
For every philosophical argument in favor of the soul, there has arisen at least one objection. Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, rejected his mentor’s dualistic thesis in favor of the theory of monism. He supposed that the part of the human being called the soul was only the name for a set of characteristics – namely reason and emotion – that were attributable to the body itself. Although he could not specifically identify from what aspect of human physiology consciousness derived, he saw no reason it should not be assumed to be material until proven otherwise. Believing that the physical desires Plato had considered so base were in fact healthy and beneficial to the human condition, Aristotle reasoned that conditions like hunger and lust provided motivation to prolong individual life and promulgate the human species. He argued that without what his mentor had identified as distractions from ideal pursuits, there would be no one left to engage in those pursuits in the first place. Therefore, Aristotle’s monism ascribed a holistic character human beings: body and soul were completely integrated, and not at all mutually antagonistic. Furthermore, since they were merely different aspects of the same entity, it was absurd to suppose that one could exist independently of the other. This last postulate caused monism to fall out of favor with many later Roman and Medieval philosophers, who believed that their religious views could not assimilate any philosophy that precluded the existence of the afterlife. It is important to note, however, that not all Christians dismiss monism as incompatible with resurrection. Some denominations, including some sects of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, believe that the promised resurrection will mean the complete remaking of saved human beings, and that there will therefore be no continuity between earthly life and heavenly existence accept the memories that the newly formed person will have.
Holism is reaffirmed by modern science, in that most human thoughts and emotions can be traced to electro-chemical impulses transmitted between neurons in the brain. Those who do not support the existence of the soul, including molecular biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins, avow that all thought and emotion is traceable to these minute signals, and that therefore that the soul is no longer necessary as a means of explaining human abilities, feelings, or actions.
In addition to the Aristotelian notion of holism, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes countered Plato by attacking the notion of immaterial existence. He argued that because existence is an exclusive property of matter, things that are not made of matter simply cannot exist, which means that the soul as Plato describes it is an absurdity.
Beyond objections to Platonic dualism, most opponents of the soul’s existence reject the arguments of Augustine and Aquinas, as the success of these arguments is tangent on the existence of human life after physical death. Therefore, in the absence of evidence proving that the human consciousness survives death, the arguments must be dismissed.
In answer to the subject of Descartes’ assertion that the mind and the body represent different entities because of the body’s lack of consciousness, holists reemphasize that the “mind” Descartes describes is merely the interplay of the earlier-mentioned electro-chemical signals and the neural cells of the all-too-physical brain.
My Own Opinion
As a Christian, I believe in the existence and immortality of the soul. The objections raised by modern neuroscience, as articulated by Dawkins, do not (in so far as I can tell) disallow the operation of immaterial “forces” in the firing of neurons. I readily concede that such forces are not necessary to explain neurological processes, but the mere fact that a thing is not necessary does not make it impossible.
As to Hobbes’ condemnation of all things immaterial, I say that he has misunderstood what Plato means by existence. Ancient Greek, like Modern English, is ill-equipped to describe any entity which exists outside of conventional understandings of time and space. The very word “existence”, as it is usually understood, implies that a thing which exists is uniformly discernible to the senses, which the soul – even if it does exist – is not.
The last logical objection to the existence of the soul, though not one raised by Hobbes or Dawkins, is the question of how a nonmaterial entity (the soul) can meaningfully interact with a material object (the body). My answer is that although I have no idea how this is possible, I am certain that it is, and can provide two testable articles of supporting evidence. The first is religious in nature, but logically derived. It comes from the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, specifically his theory of causal primes. If , as Aquinas suggests, every per se series truly represents the intervention of God in mundane events, then this proves that entities without the conventional properties of matter can and do act upon material objects.
For those who reject Aquinas’s hypothesis as to the significance of per se causal series (and I happen to be one), there is other evidence in the form of a peculiar phenomenon of human perception: the feeling of being watched. Almost all people have experienced a situation in which, having felt the sensation of being watched, they looked up to discover that they were, in fact, under observation. Sometimes, the sensation is directional, and the person under surveillance suddenly and directly meets the watcher’s gaze, without have been given any indication as to where the observer was. Although some are content to dismiss it as coincidence, no theory of modern science can adequately account for this well attested phenomenon. A stare has no physical properties whatsoever; it is merely the act of positioning the eyes so as to look in a given direction. Yet somehow, a person subject to a stare can often perceive what empirical reasoning would declare imperceptible.
For a person willing to indulge in metaphysics, the answer is simple: either the soul of the watcher contacted the soul of the watched, or interacted with his or her body to produce a sensation. In either case, the existence of the soul is affirmed.
Adam Dahmer, of Fisherville, Ky., is a senior McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. He is studying political science and Spanish.
Works Cited
Throughout recorded history, and probably well prior to its advent, humans have speculated as to the origins of consciousness. Many ancient philosophers arrived at the conclusion that consciousness derives from the presence of a soul: an entity that animates the body, enabling action and emotion, and providing humans with the capacity for thought and reason. In western civilization, the idea of the soul became refined in the philosophy of dualism, as elaborated by Plato in the 5th century BCE, in his works the Phaedrus, the Phaedo, and the Republic. Plato believed that the faculty which endowed humans with the capacity to feel and reason – the soul – existed independently of the body, and, indeed, the entire material world. His argument was that no property of matter could account for the human attributes of reason and emotion, and that therefore, the mechanism by which humans came to possess these attributes must be metaphysical. The soul, as Plato envisioned it, did not comprise matter, although it could interact with it. Plato believed that the dichotomy of body and soul was absolute in that the two entities were diametric opposites, and that therefore any attributes of matter would be reversed in the soul: whereas the body is changeable and ephemeral, for instance, the soul must be unchanging and eternal. He further postulated, based on personal experiences of having been limited in his philosophical and spiritual pursuits by bodily distractions such as hunger and lust, that the soul was perfect, and matter imperfect. According to the platonic model, the body therefore represents not only a vessel or dwelling place of the soul, but a corporeal prison that binds it to the inadequacies of earthly existence and hinders the expression of its essential goodness.
The idea of dualism flourished in Roman philosophy -- and later among the theologians of medieval Europe -- largely because of its compatibility with both pagan and Christian notions of the afterlife. In the classical Greco-Roman tradition, the dead were spirited away to the banks of the River Styx by Hermes (or in Rome, Mercury) acting in his role as psychopomp. Upon their arrival at the river, they would be shepherded to the further shore by the ferryman Charon, and spend eternity as bodiless shades in the black pit of Tartarus, the Plains of Asphodel, or the Elysian Fields. The idea of a human existence both non-corporeal and endless necessitates a dualistic approach to human nature; otherwise, there would be a logical contradiction in the simultaneous presence of the deceased as both disembodied shades in Hades and physical remains on Earth.
Christianity, too, with its promise of eternal life to the faithful, readily adapted the Platonic model of the soul. Augustine of Hippo endorsed dualism in the 4th century CE, as did Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century CE. The crux of their arguments in favor of a dualistic nature for mankind, like that of most philosophers before them, presupposed the existence of an afterlife. Their reasoning was simple: God had promised, via his son Jesus Christ, that all people would be judged after death and be either rewarded with an eternity of bliss, or condemned to eternal suffering. Because the judgment and subsequent experiences of bliss or suffering occur after death, when the body has ceased to function, an entity separate from the body, but part of the deceased human being, must endure death. Also favorable in the eyes of theologians was the concept of the “mortal coil” earlier espoused by Plato; the idea of the body as the prison of the soul equated death with freedom, and neatly reaffirmed Christian hopes for the eventual rapture of the faithful soul – a Christian’s ultimate release from earthly bondage to ascend to his or her rightful place in Paradise.
The dualistic perspective gained further credence through the support of the French philosopher René Descartes in the 18th century. He reinforced and elaborated on Plato’s assertion that the soul, though immaterial, could act on matter by suggesting that this exchange occurred in the mind (the organ of which had by then been established by medical science as the brain). He even identified which brain area served as the focal point for soul/brain interaction (he believed this to be the pineal gland, an assertion later proved false). Building on the writings of Augustine and Aquinas, he outlined a logical proof of the existence of the soul, based on the assumption that – as justified by Descartes in an earlier proof – God exists and is good. In the proof, the philosopher first argues the existence of matter. He writes that: A) given that God exists and is good, he cannot have the intention of deceiving humanity. B) God created humans with the capacity to discern that matter exists. C) God would not give us the capacity to logically arrive at this conclusion if it were not true. D) Therefore, matter exists.
Having proved to his satisfaction the existence of matter, he must next distinguish it from the soul. At this juncture, he deviates from the arguments laid out by his predecessors in antiquity by incorporating a new philosophical argumentative device in the form of Leibniz’s Law governing the identity of indiscernible entities, an ontological principle discovered by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The law states that no two things possessing exactly the same attributes can fail to be identical. In other words, two entities differentiated only by name should not be differentiated at all. Conversely, the law also states that no two things with different attributes can be identical, and that therefore entities with different properties should be separately classified. Both the law and its converse apply to Descartes’ proof. Descartes’ argument for the distinction of the soul from the body, and by extension from physical existence, is as follows: A) I can think with my mind[1] [which, as earlier established, derives its capacity to reason from the soul]. B) I cannot think with my body. C) Because the soul and body have distinct attributes, they are distinct entities D) Therefore, the soul must be understood separately from the body.
Arguments against the existence of the Soul
For every philosophical argument in favor of the soul, there has arisen at least one objection. Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, rejected his mentor’s dualistic thesis in favor of the theory of monism. He supposed that the part of the human being called the soul was only the name for a set of characteristics – namely reason and emotion – that were attributable to the body itself. Although he could not specifically identify from what aspect of human physiology consciousness derived, he saw no reason it should not be assumed to be material until proven otherwise. Believing that the physical desires Plato had considered so base were in fact healthy and beneficial to the human condition, Aristotle reasoned that conditions like hunger and lust provided motivation to prolong individual life and promulgate the human species. He argued that without what his mentor had identified as distractions from ideal pursuits, there would be no one left to engage in those pursuits in the first place. Therefore, Aristotle’s monism ascribed a holistic character human beings: body and soul were completely integrated, and not at all mutually antagonistic. Furthermore, since they were merely different aspects of the same entity, it was absurd to suppose that one could exist independently of the other. This last postulate caused monism to fall out of favor with many later Roman and Medieval philosophers, who believed that their religious views could not assimilate any philosophy that precluded the existence of the afterlife. It is important to note, however, that not all Christians dismiss monism as incompatible with resurrection. Some denominations, including some sects of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, believe that the promised resurrection will mean the complete remaking of saved human beings, and that there will therefore be no continuity between earthly life and heavenly existence accept the memories that the newly formed person will have.
Holism is reaffirmed by modern science, in that most human thoughts and emotions can be traced to electro-chemical impulses transmitted between neurons in the brain. Those who do not support the existence of the soul, including molecular biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins, avow that all thought and emotion is traceable to these minute signals, and that therefore that the soul is no longer necessary as a means of explaining human abilities, feelings, or actions.
In addition to the Aristotelian notion of holism, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes countered Plato by attacking the notion of immaterial existence. He argued that because existence is an exclusive property of matter, things that are not made of matter simply cannot exist, which means that the soul as Plato describes it is an absurdity.
Beyond objections to Platonic dualism, most opponents of the soul’s existence reject the arguments of Augustine and Aquinas, as the success of these arguments is tangent on the existence of human life after physical death. Therefore, in the absence of evidence proving that the human consciousness survives death, the arguments must be dismissed.
In answer to the subject of Descartes’ assertion that the mind and the body represent different entities because of the body’s lack of consciousness, holists reemphasize that the “mind” Descartes describes is merely the interplay of the earlier-mentioned electro-chemical signals and the neural cells of the all-too-physical brain.
My Own Opinion
As a Christian, I believe in the existence and immortality of the soul. The objections raised by modern neuroscience, as articulated by Dawkins, do not (in so far as I can tell) disallow the operation of immaterial “forces” in the firing of neurons. I readily concede that such forces are not necessary to explain neurological processes, but the mere fact that a thing is not necessary does not make it impossible.
As to Hobbes’ condemnation of all things immaterial, I say that he has misunderstood what Plato means by existence. Ancient Greek, like Modern English, is ill-equipped to describe any entity which exists outside of conventional understandings of time and space. The very word “existence”, as it is usually understood, implies that a thing which exists is uniformly discernible to the senses, which the soul – even if it does exist – is not.
The last logical objection to the existence of the soul, though not one raised by Hobbes or Dawkins, is the question of how a nonmaterial entity (the soul) can meaningfully interact with a material object (the body). My answer is that although I have no idea how this is possible, I am certain that it is, and can provide two testable articles of supporting evidence. The first is religious in nature, but logically derived. It comes from the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, specifically his theory of causal primes. If , as Aquinas suggests, every per se series truly represents the intervention of God in mundane events, then this proves that entities without the conventional properties of matter can and do act upon material objects.
For those who reject Aquinas’s hypothesis as to the significance of per se causal series (and I happen to be one), there is other evidence in the form of a peculiar phenomenon of human perception: the feeling of being watched. Almost all people have experienced a situation in which, having felt the sensation of being watched, they looked up to discover that they were, in fact, under observation. Sometimes, the sensation is directional, and the person under surveillance suddenly and directly meets the watcher’s gaze, without have been given any indication as to where the observer was. Although some are content to dismiss it as coincidence, no theory of modern science can adequately account for this well attested phenomenon. A stare has no physical properties whatsoever; it is merely the act of positioning the eyes so as to look in a given direction. Yet somehow, a person subject to a stare can often perceive what empirical reasoning would declare imperceptible.
For a person willing to indulge in metaphysics, the answer is simple: either the soul of the watcher contacted the soul of the watched, or interacted with his or her body to produce a sensation. In either case, the existence of the soul is affirmed.
Adam Dahmer, of Fisherville, Ky., is a senior McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. He is studying political science and Spanish.
Works Cited
Foster, John. The Immaterial Self: A Defence
of the Cartesian Dualist Conception of the Mind. London: Routledge, 1991.
Smythies, John R., and
Beloff, John, eds. The Case for Dualism. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1989.
Swinburne, Richard. The Evolution of the Soul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
[1]
Descartes’ exact phrase translates more accurately as “The mind is unextended,” but it is widely accepted that by this phrase he was alluding to the mind’s
capacity to think, which made it the seat of human consciousness and the body a
mere extension thereof.