In Search of the Soul

A Philosophical Essay

John Cottingham

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691234038, 9780691174426
• eBook ISBN: 9780691197586
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia etica e morale

How our beliefs about the soul have developed through the ages, and why an understanding of it still matters today

The concept of the soul has been a recurring area of exploration since ancient times. What do we mean when we talk about finding our soul, how do we know we have one, and does it hold any relevance in today's scientifically and technologically dominated society? From Socrates and Augustine to Darwin and Freud, In Search of the Soul takes readers on a concise, accessible journey into the origins of the soul in Western philosophy and culture, and examines how the idea has developed throughout history to the present. Touching on literature, music, art, and theology, John Cottingham illustrates how, far from being redundant in contemporary times, the soul attunes us to the importance of meaning and value, and experience and growth. A better understanding of the soul might help all of us better understand what it is to be human.

Cottingham delves into the evolution of our thoughts about the soul through landmark works—including those of Aristotle, Plato, and Descartes. He considers the nature of consciousness and subjective experience, and discusses the psychoanalytic view that large parts of the human psyche are hidden from direct conscious awareness. He also reflects on the mysterious and universal longing for transcendence that is an indelible part of our human makeup. Looking at the soul's many dimensions—historical, moral, psychological, and spiritual—Cottingham makes a case for how it exerts a powerful pull on all of us.

In Search of the Soul is a testimony to how the soul remains a profoundly significant aspect of human flourishing.

1

Humanity in Quest of the Soul

WAGNER. Alas, poor slave! See how poverty jests in his nakedness! I know the villain’s out of service, and so hungry, that I know he would give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton, though it were blood-raw.

CLOWN. Not so neither: I had need to have it well roasted, and good sauce to it, if I pay so dear, I can tell you.

—CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, DOCTOR FAUSTUS

The Risk of Loss

In the legend dramatized by Marlowe and later retold by Goethe, Faust makes a disastrous bargain: he gains a great deal of power and pleasure but loses everything that truly matters. Anyone who thinks that the badness of the bargain hinges entirely on whether there really is an afterlife has failed to grasp much of the deeper significance of the story. It’s perhaps unlikely that a dramatist today would write a play about selling one’s soul, but even though the word “soul” may be less commonly found than it used to be, the underlying idea is very far from obsolete. Philip Pullman’s acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials describes a world where people have “daemons,” which take the form of animals who closely accompany them everywhere. In childhood, people’s daemons have the ability to change their shapes frequently, becoming, for example, cats or birds or monkeys, but in adolescence the daemons “settle” into a single shape. The daemon is closely linked to the life and distinctive personality of each character, and even a temporary separation of people from their daemons causes intense distress. In the course of the story, some of the characters fall into the hands of evil experimenters who use a hideous process called “intercision”: a silver guillotine is employed to sever permanently the lifelong connection between a person and his or her daemon. The result is a listless, demoralized individual, bereft of energy and will, already well on the way to dying.¹

It does not take any great leap to understand Pullman’s concept of the daemon as a kind of imaginative representation of the soul, or at least as having something in common with what people mean by that difficult term. Losing your daemon is about the worst thing that can happen to you, depriving your life of its distinctive rhythm and its moral centre. No price, one feels, would be sufficient recompense for losing one’s daemon, and (as the “intercision” episode implicitly conveys) no scientific or technological project, no matter what benefits it promised, could justify depriving someone of his or her daemon. Pullman’s attitude towards religion is ambivalent (he certainly targets its powerful institutional manifestations), but it is not hard to detect religious overtones in his portrayal of the preciousness and vital importance of one’s daemon, calling to mind the question posed in the gospels: “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”²

But what does it really mean to lose one’s soul? Outside the realm of fantasy fiction, can we today still take seriously the idea of the soul as something we are in danger of losing, or perhaps have already lost? Many of the most influential thinkers of modernity seem to have thought so. T. S. Eliot, that great prophet of the modern age, watched the seething crowds flowing over London Bridge and declared: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”³ The line deliberately echoes Dante’s vision of the lost souls in Hell, severed from their earthly bodies, just as Eliot’s unfortunate city dwellers seem to be severed from their souls. Herded together, condemned to a repetitive existence that is messy and pointless, “distracted from distraction by distraction,”⁴ they seem to lack any moral purpose, as listless and demoralized as Pullman’s tragic victims whose daemons have been forcibly sliced off. And yet all this, Eliot implies, is accepted by most people as quite normal: no one seems to have noticed that anything is amiss. A century before Eliot, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote:

A person can go on living fairly well, seem to be a human being, be occupied with temporal matters, marry, have children, be honoured and esteemed, yet it may not be detected that in a deeper sense this person lacks a self.… The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.⁵

Instead of “soul,” Kierkegaard talks of the “self,” or sometimes of the “spirit,” but he seems to be speaking of much the same momentous threat as the danger of losing one’s soul. Those who “mortgage themselves to the world,” he says, may achieve all kinds of temporal success, but “spiritually speaking they do not exist—they have no self.”⁶ Even though it can happen imperceptibly, without anyone noticing, the loss of the self is, for Kierkegaard, a catastrophic moral collapse and amounts to nothing less than “sickness unto death.” Putting this in theistic terms, Kierkegaard says that in losing my self I am losing that which makes me conscious of “existing before God.”⁷ The remark comes in Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death, the title of which recalls the gospel story of Lazarus, whose sickness was indeed fatal and who had to be summoned back from the tomb by Christ.⁸ Kierkegaard’s implicit suggestion seems to be that the plight of one who has lost his or her very self is even graver than this, unless redeemed by renewed consciousness of God.

Though these reflections of Kierkegaard have a strongly theistic, and indeed Christian, stamp, the idea of the self or soul as the precious and fragile moral core of one’s being, something that can be irretrievably lost, does not have to be expressed in explicitly religious, let alone Christian, terms. Several centuries before Christ, Socrates reproached his Athenian accusers for being overly concerned with things like money and reputation, but not having the faintest concern for the virtuous conduct of their lives, or the improvement of the most precious part of themselves—their souls.⁹ And in some of the later Hellenistic philosophers, the terms “care of the soul” and “care of the self” are closely linked.¹⁰ By the time of the Christian gospels, this linkage is well established, so that the saying quoted earlier from Mark’s gospel (“What doth it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul?”) appears in Luke as “What shall it profit a man if he gains the world and loses himself ?”¹¹

Lives, we know, can go well or badly. People can be more or less successful, more or less lucky, and advantaged or disadvantaged in many different ways, by birth or geography, or economic circumstances, or physical health. And sometimes such external circumstances can crush someone so completely that no worthwhile human capacities can unfold. But for those able to enjoy at least a basic modicum of health and physical security, there will always be, beyond questions about fortune or misfortune, wealth or poverty, a further more fundamental question about the moral core of their being—the “soul” or self that defines each individual. Have they found themselves, are they at peace with themselves, or have they wasted their lives, pursuing illusory goods at the cost of losing their very souls?

These brief opening remarks have ranged from the fourth century BC through to the time of Christ, and on down to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and beyond, and it may seem to be moving much too swiftly to assume that ideas from such disparate historical periods can be grouped together. But the essentials of the human condition have not significantly altered in what is, on an evolutionary timescale, the tiniest blink of an eye. Indeed, however often we are told that this or that technical or scientific development has “altered human life beyond recognition,” the existential predicament that confronts human beings is fundamentally the same as it has always been:

The troubles of our proud and angry dust

Are from eternity, and shall not fail.¹²

To be sure, these “troubles” may manifest themselves under various guises—as threats to our psychological equilibrium and identity (Pullman), as spiritual and existential anguish (Kierkegaard), as the risk of neglecting the most precious part of ourselves (Socrates). But there is a common thread, insofar as the task of finding or recovering that vital part of ourselves that has been called the “soul” is a task that transcends any given historical circumstance and is inseparable from the human condition. Beyond the imperatives of securing the wherewithal to keep ourselves alive and physically secure, to be human is to be subject to a deeper demand, the requirement to seek, and to find, our true identity. This will not be a merely factual task, like determining our genetic profile; it will involve measuring what we have so far made of our lives against what they are capable of becoming. The demand is inescapable, no matter how much we may try to stop our ears to it. And in the way we finally respond to it we will either find ourselves or lose ourselves.

Dimensions of Soul

It should already be apparent that the notion of a “soul” is an elusive one, and that questions about “finding the soul” may be understood in a number of ways, including the existential, the psychological, the spiritual, the religious, and the moral. In the chapters that follow, we shall hope to explore some of these dimensions, though it may not be feasible or desirable to fully separate them or disentangle them. Such separating—such “analysis” or breaking down—can often be of great value in philosophy if we are to have some kind of conceptual map of the terrain to be crossed, but it is arguable that those distinctive and crucially important characteristics of human beings grouped under the label “soul” a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword and Acknowledgements
• 1. Humanity in Quest of the Soul
• 2. The Evolution of the Soul
• 3. Soul, Science, and Subjectivity
• 4. The Partly Hidden Soul
• 5. The Soul and the Transcendent
• Bibliography
• Index