A Brief History Of The Soul (Paperback)

Chapter One

In this chapter our focus is on the two best known figures of ancient Greek philosophy: Plato (428/7–348/7 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE). There are other major philosophers in Greek thought, both before Plato and after Aristotle, and some of them hold a place of honor in the development of great future ideas, such as the hypothesis that the material world is made up of atoms, or the thesis that life evolved; but Plato and Aristotle are the most important ones in shaping the history of the soul.

Plato

Before diving into Plato's view of the soul, three important points need to be observed. First, because the central figure in Plato's dialogues is the philosopher Socrates, the question about which views are Socrates' and which are Plato's is not easy to answer, if it is answerable at all. For the sake of brevity and clarity of presentation, we will not enter the debate about this matter and we will not distinguish between Socrates' and Plato's thought. We will simply assume that Socrates' philosophical views about the soul are Plato's.

Second, we stress that Plato's treatment of the soul is philosophical in nature. It is necessary to emphasize this point because it is not uncommon in certain circles (e.g. theological; see Chapter 2) to find assertions to the effect that Plato invented the idea of the soul and, therefore, that the concept of the soul is a Greek idea. Nothing could be further removed from the truth. Belief in the existence of the soul is, as we pointed out in the Introduction, commonsensical in its nature, in the sense that it is espoused by the ordinary person. What Plato did was to philosophize about the nature of the soul in which ordinary people believe.

Third, the Greek term used in ancient philosophical texts and commonly translated as soul is psyche, a noun derived from the verb psychein, which meant to breathe. For philosophers, psyche came to stand, not for breath, but for the life of a being or for that which generates and constitutes the essential life of a being. The great philosopher and classicist A. E. Taylor offers this overview, in which he points out that psyche can involve (though this meaning is secondary) consciousness—a term that was probably coined in the seventeenth century by Ralph Cudworth, to stand for "awareness":

Consciousness is a relatively late and highly developed manifestation of the principle which the Greeks call "soul." That principle shows itself not merely in consciousness but in the whole process of nutrition and growth and the adaptation of motor response to an external stimulation. Thus consciousness is a more secondary feature of the "soul" in Greek philosophy than in most modern thought, which has never ceased to be affected by Descartes' selection of "thought" as the special characteristic of psychical life. In common language the word psyche is constantly used where we should say "life" rather than "soul," and in Greek philosophy a work "on the Psyche" means what we should call one on "the principle of life." (Taylor 1955, 75)

As we shall see in different chapters, the definition of the soul is dynamic, though Plato's view on the soul or psyche has great historical significance, coming as it does as from the first major contributor to the philosophy of the soul. As an aside, we note that the term "soul" in English today is derived from sawel/sawol in Old English, as found in the Vespasian Psalter and in Beowulf. What, then, did Plato have to say about the soul? His thoughts are many and wide-ranging in scope, and they seem to develop over time in ways that sometimes present problems of consistency. We will focus on those thoughts that comprise the core of his view and, when appropriate, we will point out the tensions among them.

We begin with the end of Socrates' life. While Socrates is in prison and not long before he drinks the hemlock that will bring about his death, his friend Crito asks him about how he would like to be buried. "Any way you like, replied Socrates, that is, if you can catch me and I don't slip through your fingers. [...] I shall remain with you [Crito and other friends] no longer, but depart to a state of heavenly happiness [...] You [the other friends] must give an assurance to Crito for me [...] that when I am dead I shall not stay, but depart and be gone" (Plato 1961: Phaedo, 115CD). From this response of Socrates to Crito's question it seems reasonable to infer that Plato believes the "person" Socrates is his soul (as opposed to his soul plus his body, or just his body).

Like most philosophers after him up until Descartes in the seventeenth century, Plato claims that the soul is that which imparts life to its body (Phaedo, 105C–D). Moreover, because the soul is that which gives life to its body and cannot acquire a property that is contrary to its essentially life-giving nature, the soul itself can never perish (Phaedo, 105DE). Plato's rationale behind this view of properties is tenuous; but, for a start, we simply note that he thought of the soul as essentially and fundamentally alive, whereas he did not think this was the case with the body. The soul is indestructible or imperishable, and thereby the soul is unlike its body and other material things, which by nature are always changing and never keep to the self-same condition (Phaedo, 79C). When a person dies, the body may perish but the soul endures. Plato argues that, because change is always from contraries (e.g., that which becomes bigger does so from that which is smaller, and that which is darker comes from that which is lighter), the soul must have come from the realm of the dead and return there after completing its life in this world, only to return once again to the realm of the living (Phaedo, 70C–72E). While belief in reincarnation may strike western secular readers as preposterous, it is interesting to take note not only of the presence of a belief in reincarnation in the ancient west (one of the best known Presocratic philosophers, Pythagoras, taught reincarnation, and reincarnation is in evidence in one of the greatest Roman epic poems, Virgil's Aeneid, Book VI), but also of its widespread adherents today, among Hindus and Buddhists. In any case, given the way Plato describes reincarnation, the soul has to be thought of as something that is distinct from the body.

The soul's recurring journey from death to life and back again entails that it is embodied more than once. This view also seems to involve a concept of the soul as a substantial individual being, as opposed to a mode of the body. In the Phaedo the idea that the soul may be just a mode of the body is considered as an objection to the SocraticPlatonic position. An interlocutor in the dialogue raises this point. Could it be that what Socrates and Plato refer to as the soul is not a substantial individual entity, but more like a harmony? One may play a stringed instrument (a lyre, for example) and produce what appears to be more than the instrument (melodious sound); yet this is not a separate substance, but a mode of the lyre. Melodious sound is the way a lyre sounds when played, and if (so the interlocutor argues) the lyre is broken, the melodious sound will end:

The body is held together at a certain tension between the extremes of hot and cold, and wet and dry, and so on, and our soul is a temperament or adjustment of these same extremes, when they are combined in just the right proportion. Well, if the soul is really an adjustment, obviously as soon as the tension of our body is lowered or increased beyond the proper point, the soul must be destroyed, divine though it is—just like any other adjustment, either in music or in any product of the arts and crafts, although in each case the physical remains last considerably longer until they are burned up or rot away. (Phaedo, 86C; Tredennick's translation)

In the dialogue, Socrates argues that the soul cannot be like the lyre and the music it makes, because the soul actually pre-exists the body; and, if the soul pre-exists the body, it is not identical with it. Socrates thereby seeks to break the analogy proposed, because the way a lyre sounds cannot exist before the lyre exists. The case for a prenatal existence of the soul, developed in detail by Plato elsewhere in the same dialogue (and in others, too), deserves a brief comment here. For example, in the Meno he argues that knowledge is recollection of what the soul was aware of before birth:

[A man] would not seek what he knows, for since he knows it there is no need of the inquiry, nor what he does not know, for in that case he does not even know what he is looking for. [...] Thus the soul, since it is immortal and has been born many times, and has seen all things both here and in the other world, has learned everything that is. So we need not be surprised if it can recall the knowledge of virtue or anything else which [...] it once possessed [...] for seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection. (Meno, 80E, 81D)

The most famous illustration of the "anything else" that is recalled by the soul involves the interrogation of a slave boy who, when prodded with the right questions, "rediscovers" a proof of the Pythagorean theorem (Meno, 85E–86A).

The Platonic case for pre-natal existence would be hard to defend today, but if it is even conceivable that the soul can pre-exist its body, then there is at least an appearance that the soul is not the body, and thus not a mere mode of the body. Another way to make Plato's case against the soul being a mere mode is to appeal to our understanding of ourselves as substantial beings existing over time. Arguably, when you love a person, you love a concrete individual. But if the person, or soul, is a mode of something else (say, a living animal body), then it appears that your beloved is a phase or a shape of his/her body. Is it plausible to believe that the object of your love is a certain aspect of that body? Isn't it more reasonable to believe that you love a substantial being and that, when your beloved dies, she is no more (at least not in this life), while her body remains? Socrates took something akin to this position and, in the Crito, he comforted his disciples, who were weeping over his immanent death, by claiming that they might bury his body, but he, Socrates, would be elsewhere. (We will return to this question when considering the work of Aristotle.)

Reincarnation means re-embodiment; and in Plato's account of the soul the material body is not only something that is ever changing, but also it is that which effectively serves as a prison for the soul, and as such is evil (Phaedrus, 250C). As we examine further Plato's view of the soul–body relationship, it is important to recognize that early philosophers were interested in the soul for more than purely theoretical reasons. They also sought to evaluate the moral and spiritual condition of the soul. According to Plato, the embodied soul is attracted by the pleasures of the body, such as those of food and drink and love-making (Phaedo, 64D). These pleasures distract the soul from its true purpose of being (what we might think of as the soul's meaning of life), which is to reason about and know (or recollect) what is true. However, Socrates says:

I suppose the soul reasons most beautifully [without the need for recollection] when none of these things gives her pain—neither hearing nor sight, nor grief nor any pleasure—when instead, bidding farewell to the body, she comes to be herself all by herself as much as possible and when, doing everything she can to avoid communing with or even being in touch with the body, she strives for what is. (Phaedo, 65C; Brann's translation)

What is are the immaterial Platonic Forms or Ideas, which are abstract objects like the concepts of justice, circularity, rationality, humanness, and so on. The soul possesses knowledge when it is focusing on these Forms and philosophizing about them and their relationships with each other. The soul is happy when it beholds the Forms directly, because what it ultimately desires more than anything else is the truth (Phaedo, 66b).

Plato seems to regard reason/intellect as that which alone constitutes the essence of soul, and tells his readers that the soul is nourished by reason and knowledge (Phaedrus, 247D). The less a soul is nourished by these, the greater its forgetfulness and resulting wrongdoing and the lower its level of re-embodiment. Thus Plato claims that

the soul that hath seen the most of being shall enter into the human babe that shall grow into a seeker after wisdom or beauty, a follower of the Muses and a lover; the next, having seen less, shall dwell in a king [...] or a warrior and ruler; the third in a statesman, a man of business, or a trader; the fourth in an athlete, or physical trainer, or physician. (Phaedrus 1961, 248D–E)

Elsewhere Plato states: "Of the men who came into the world, those who were cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have changed into the nature of women in the second generation" (Timaeus, 90E–91A). (While such a view would be labeled sexist today, we should note that Plato held a higher view of women than his contemporaries when he affirmed in the Republic that women can make ideal rulers). Furthermore, "those who've made gorging and abusing and boozings their care [...] slip into the classes of donkeys and other such beasts" (Phaedo, 81E). In the Timaeus again, Plato expresses the view that the "race of wild pedestrian animals [...] came from those who had no philosophy in any of their thoughts [...] In consequence of these habits of theirs they had their front legs and their heads resting upon the earth to which they were drawn by natural affinity" (Timaeus 1961, 91E).

Plato's position on pleasure and the body may seem to us today as too derisive, and we will not defend it; but it is worth appreciating that Plato's teacher Socrates, and probably Plato himself, were veterans of a massive war, the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) in which their side (Athens and her allies) was decisively defeated. Perhaps Plato's warnings about bodily pleasure and being prey to other sensory desires stemmed from his (and other Athenians) belief that Athens' entry into war was largely the result of a desire for worldly goods. His account on the soul definitely situates the soul as oriented toward more enduring goods than imperial wealth.

Let us consider further Plato's understanding of the soul–body relationship. We have already touched upon his view of how bodily pleasures seduce the soul away from its proper activity of contemplating the Forms. When the soul is seduced in this way, events in the body causally affect it. For example, the eating of foods, the drinking of liquids, and sexual intercourse cause the soul to experience pleasure. Plato was also aware that the soul moves its physical body when it pursues, among other things, bodily pleasures, some of which it should forego. How does the soul move the body? When discussing the concept of motion, Plato claims that that which can move itself is the most powerful and superlative kind of mover (Laws, 894D). At one point, Plato suggests defining the word "soul" as "the motion which can set itself moving" (Laws, 896A), and he thinks of the soul as "the universal cause of all change and motion" (896B) because motion in a series that has a beginning must begin with the motion of a self-mover (894E; 895B). Motion that is produced in a thing by that thing itself is most like or akin to the motion of thought (Timaeus, 89A) and, as a result, when the soul moves the body that is its vehicle (Timaeus, 69C), it is the soul that governs and the body that is governed (Laws, 896C). In short, it is our souls that move us wherever we go (Laws, 898E) and Plato seems to believe that the soul moves the body by first setting itself in motion.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Brief History of the Soulby Stewart Goetz Charles Taliaferro Copyright © 2011 by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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