That’s the closest I’ve ssen here to how I view it as a concept: maybe “the integrative force of the symbolic and the physical; that which, though not sentience itself, allows for the bringing together of thought and the body in sentience.” So, not the mind, not the body, not awareness, but that “organizing principle” unique in its specific expression to each individual that facilitates and coordinates the interaction of “mind” and “body”, such that the potential for human freedom results.
Another way you could put this is that which allows for a sustainable marriage of the finite and the infinite in human form.
EDIT: To answer the OP question: no, we don’t have souls, souls have us. The soul, being the organizing principle of subjectivity, is prior to the subject.
it isn’t prinarily a set of scientific arguments designed to disprove contemporary religious claims. Democritus was writing in.the 5th century BC. In the East too ,Charvaka was promoting a materialist conception of the Universe before the Bhudda.
The point isn’t to deny the soul. The point is to identify how we can best flourish in the most plausible version of reality that we can construct.
It is interesting to compare the idea of soul and self as a basis for understanding the natue of subjective experience. Both may be seem as arbitrary and temporary to a large extent.
In some philosophy perspectives, especially idealism, soul was seen as the primary aspect of experience and life. It is important to compare the idea of soul with mind, especially as mind is often linked, if not seen as caused by brain.
To some extent, the idea of soul may be seen as a romantic forerunner to the idea of mind, but the big question may be about what soul represents in human understanding. There is world soul and individual soul. It may involve the interface between body and mind, but all of these concepts are rather blurry and terms, especially soul, may be extremely ambiguous.
It seems to me given that subjects are also objects insofar as we are embodied in – parts of – nature, the aspect of ourselves we call “soul” is also an embodied aspect of nature, or as Spinoza says immanent instead of transcendent (i.e. monism, not dualism); therefore, each self-reflective, unique worldline through 4-d spacetime – embodied subject – may reasonably be conceived of as a “soul” that is metaphysically immanent to physical reality: a permanent / conserved feature of – record embedded in – the structure of the/a block universe (or Tegmark’s “MUH”).
That reminds me of a riff by Hegel on the deficiencies of “metaphysics” as understood by Kant and his predecessors.
This metaphysic was not free or objective thinking. Instead of letting the object freely and spontaneously expound its own characteristics, metaphysic pre-supposed it ready-made. If any one wishes to know what free thought means, he must go to Greek philosophy: for Scholasticism, like these metaphysical systems, accepted its facts, and accepted them as a dogma from the authority of the Church. We moderns, too, by our whole up-bringing, have been initiated into ideas which it is extremely difficult to overstep, on account of their far-reaching significance. But the ancient philosophers were in a different position. They were men who lived wholly in the perceptions of the senses, and who, after their rejection of mythology and its fancies, pre-supposed nothing but the heaven above and the earth around. In these material, non-metaphysical surroundings, thought is free and enjoys its own privacy,—cleared of everything material, and thoroughly at home. This feeling that we are all our own is characteristic of free thought—of that voyage into the open, where nothing is below us or above us, and we stand in solitude with ourselves alone.
Hegel, G. W. F.. Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (p. 81) translated by William Wallace.
What would be taken as proof for the existence of the soul? I know how to prove the existence of chairs, for example. I show you a chair. If you cannot show me a soul because a soul is non-physical, then, by definition, if you were to show me a soul, you have not shown me a soul because souls are not showable. That is, you cannot prove the non-physical by empirical proof because that which is empirical is physical.
If you can’t offer me criteria for how I might be able to prove the soul, then the problem isn’t an inability satisfy the criteria, but it’s in arriving at criteria. If you can’t tell me what the criteria are that define “proof,” then your question asking for proof is incoherent as undefined.
On the other hand, if by proof, you mean something scientific and you then say that souls are non-physical and cannot be subject to scientific proof, then the answer is no, you can’t prove the soul.
That would mean there are no souls to the extent that science is the only means of proof and only if it stands reasonable to hold that lack of proof is grounds for denying existence.
Insofar that I’m tempted by “soul” that’s pretty much what I mean.
It’s the whole of the person as they really are. We can come to see a soul through deep interpersonal relationships, but that doesn’t mean we know what it is.
And by all metricsstandards I can think of it’s not eternal. Hence my materialism.
Thoughts, ideas etc are non-organic in nature. You cannot touch a thought or an idea. In so far as the latest neuroscience goes they cannot be strongly mapped to the brain directly. In effect thoughts are non-physical even though they originate in a physical substrate such as the brain. So the proof that thoughts exists are in the way they manifest in the world through action and medium of transmission such as writing, art and various other types communication.
Proof of the soul would then be indirect proof in how it interacts with the physical. This is a challenging task indeed proving a mysterious force such as a soul or spirit acting on the physical realm.
But if thoughts, ideas (non-physical, intangible) can be measured by the impact they have on the physical then I don’t see why we cannot infer the same thing with souls.
Having said that are thoughts and ideas truly immaterial in the sense that they wouldn’t exist without brains ? Perhaps a topic for another thread.
There’s a philosophical distinction made between sempirternal being ‘of infinite duration’ but still temporal in nature, and eternal as ‘outside of time’.
Intelligibles such as forms and geometric and arithemetical truths are said to be ‘true in all possible worlds’ but this is not necessarily the same thing as ‘always existing’ or ‘enduring’ in the sense of being permanent and unchangeable in a material sense.
I don’t think either of these constitutes a dismissal of the Forms. The Parmenides subjects the theory to a series of difficulties, but warns that abandoning Forms would make dialectic impossible (135b–c). And the Sophist seems less to reject Forms than to challenge a conception of them as wholly separate and inert, developing instead an account of their interrelation. In both cases, Plato appears to be working through the implications of the theory rather than abandoning it.
For those interested, there is an excellent online edition of Plato’s dialogues at The Platonic Foundation. The relevant passages are to be found in Parmenides130a–134e and Sophist248a–249d, with the latter discussion continuing through 251d–259e.
Exactly. Well said.