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On The Soul

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2018

Herbert Morris
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Abstract

Discussion of the soul in this essay departs from the concept of the soul that for thousands of years has occupied the attention of philosophers and theologians and pervaded religious discourse. The author is concerned with what William James referred to as ‘the popular soul,’ the soul as it is invoked by expressions such as ‘an expansive soul,’ ‘a soulless person,’ ‘soul-mate,’ and ‘that melody touched my soul.’ Skepticism with regard to the existence of this soul is without warrant. How this soul comes into being and develops; what its essential features are; how the world, when the soul is engaged, is transformed; what its relationship is to one's conscience; its importance in a human life; its connections to purity and perfection, to silence; its survival upon death; and the perils posed today to its development and existence are the principal topics considered.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 94 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 221 - 242
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2018 

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References

1 The Ancient Egyptian concept of the soul differs markedly from this conception. An excellent relatively brief treatment of this topic can be found in the Wikipedia article ‘Ancient Egyptian Concept of the Soul’. It is also true that some philosophical perspectives treated the soul as composed of matter.

2 Principles of Psychology, vol. I, 342–350.

3 ‘And confidentially, we do not need to get rid of “the soul” itself nor do without one of our oldest, most venerable hypotheses, which the bungling naturalists tend to do, losing “the soul” as soon as they have touched on it. But the way is clear for new and refined versions of the hypothesis about the soul; in future, concepts such as the “mortal soul” and the soul as the multiplicity of the subject and the soul as the social construct of drives and emotions will claim their rightful place in science.’ Section 12 of Beyond Good and Evil. I find Nietzsche's openness to a different conception of the soul appealing, and the views set forth in this essay connect at points with Niezsche's view, but my elaboration of my views and methodology differ substantially from his treatment in Beyond Good and Evil, the work where his views on the soul are most thoroughly developed.

4 The American poet, Wallace Stevens, an avowed sceptic, provides a nice example of this in his poem, Invective Against Swans:

‘The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks

And beyond the discords of the wind.

…

And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies

Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.’

5 An elaborate and stimulating attempt to do precisely this is to be found in Dilman, Ilham, ‘Wittgenstein on the Soul’, Understanding Wittgenstein, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures Volume 7 (London: Macmillan, 1974), 162–192Google Scholar. See, too, Keats on ‘soul-making’ in his letter to his brother and sister-in-law: The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. by Rikkins, Hyde Edwards (Harvard Univrsity Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1958), 100–104Google Scholar.

6 The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories, Dover Publishers, Inc., 1993.

7 One might find it inappropriate to attribute to an infant in the earliest period of its life ‘a desire’, believing that only agents self-consciously aware of their attitude to achieve some end possess a desire. We might, then, prefer ‘drive’ or ‘instinct’ to this phase of life.

8 For illuminating observations on the concept of caring, see Frankfurt, Harry, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 80–94Google Scholar.

9 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Ln. 301–305:

‘Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up

Fostered alike by beauty and by fear:

Much favoured in my birthplace, and no less

In that beloved Vale to which erelong

We were transplanted…’

10 Stevens, Wallace in The Necessary Angel (New York: Random House, 1965)Google Scholar quotes Robert Wolseley (1685) on the transformation of objects: ‘True genius…will enter into the hardest and driest thing, enrich the most barren Soyl, and inform the meanest and most uncomely matter…the baser, the emptier, the obscurer, the fouler, and the less susceptible of Ornament the subject appears to be, the more is the Poet's Praise …who says of Homer, can fetch Light out of Smoak, Roses out of Dunghills , and give a kind of Life to the Inanimate.’ 19–20. Of course, it is not just poets who possess this ‘true genius’ of giving life to the inanimate but everyone, however modestly educated or intelligent. It comes with falling in love with the ordinary which thereby transforms its nature. Proust writes in his essay on Jean Siméon Chardin: ‘Chardin may have been someone who simply enjoyed spending time in his dining room, among the fruits and the drinking glasses, but he was a man with a sharpened awareness, whose overly intense pleasure spilled into touches of oil and eternal colors. You will yourself be a Chardin, though no doubt less great – great to the extent that you love him and become as he was – yet someone for whom, as for him, metals and stoneware will come to life, and fruits will speak.’ (See Proust, Marcel, Against Saint-Beuve and Other Essays, transl Sturrock, J. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, (1988), 122–131Google Scholar.) It remains possible that some attachments to the ordinary may also be regarded as perverse or shallow. Appraisals of attachments are elements of talk about the soul.

11 The ‘heart’ is sometimes used interchangeably with the soul. The heart, metaphorically, is taken to be the sphere of human emotional response; it differs from the soul, despite the soul's linkage to one's emotional life, because the possessor of a soul responds to its attachments as inherently valuable. No such restriction on the heart's attachments applies. One can be heart-sick through frustration of a desire for what one does not view as inherently valuable. A drop in spirits upon losing at gambling reveals the state of one's heart but not one's soul.

12 Yeats, A Dialogue of Self and Soul:

‘Fix every wandering thought upon

That quarter where all thought is done:

Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?’

13 T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, Lines 70–75:

‘I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By grace of sense, a white light still and moving.’

14 Proust, in Swann's Way writes: ‘I believe there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain the possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and returned to share our life.’ (Proust, Marcel, Swann's Way (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992) 47Google Scholar.)

15 Consider Bourdain, Anthony's comment in Kitchen Confidential: (New York: Harper Collins, 2000)Google Scholar. ‘But I frequently look back at my life, searching for that fork in the road, trying to figure out where, exactly, I went bad and became a thrill-seeking, pleasure-hunting sensualist, always looking to shock, amuse, terrify and manipulate, seeking to fill that empty space in my soul with something new.’