What Is The Soul?

4 August 2004
By Jim Weller

Let’s say that the soul is the I at the center of personal being. I might have said, at the center of the experience of personal being, but that would entail consciousness – experience is not usually thought of as non-conscious. But sometimes personal being is non-conscious, or not self-aware, as when dreamlessly sleeping, for instance. Experience goes with self-awareness; but persons in being are not always self-aware, as in various states of non-consciousness. Deep meditative states and comatose states are other instances of this, aren’t they? In all those instances, though, the I is still there, or at least it is potentially, isn’t it? If it isn’t, where did it go? Whence does it return when we return to self-aware, conscious experience? No, I think what I mean by the I, the soul, is there as long as the whole person is alive – “brain-dead” persons notwithstanding.

Many people, usually children and simple-minded folk, want to believe that the I exists independently from the living body. With my definition, this would mean that personal being is distinct and separable from the living organism. Thus, the soul existed, in some sense, before the organism came into being, will continue after its death, and is potentially apart from it while it lives. This is the idea of the immortal, incorporeal soul popularized by Plato and his followers, which became standard in many quarters of Western civilization afterward until the late modern era, and is still firmly ensconced, as I’ve said, in many people’s minds.

I don’t think so. I think that personal being, and the I at its center, the soul if you will, is a consequence, an incident, a feature, or a function of the living organism, with its brain and mind, and that it is nonsensical to imagine it existing otherwise, especially before the person’s life or after death. The soul is coterminous with personal being, and the life of the person. It probably begins at some point in prenatal development, is certainly present neonatally, and ends with death. (I don’t limit the application of this discussion to human beings, incidentally, because it is obvious that some other species exhibit many characteristics of personality, whether or not we refer to them as “persons,” which I occasionally do.)

There is something else to consider, though, and that is the fact that no one is “an island.” All persons exist in society, in communities, in ecosystems involving a multitude of other living beings. No person – no self, no I – can come into being and continue to live, except interdependently, as a reflection of, and in relation with other selves, other persons, other beings. We are biologically and socially constructed and conditioned.

Thus, in a very real sense you might say, with Emerson, that there is an “oversoul” analogous with the individual soul, correlative with all of life itself – the entire biosphere in which all souls are situate – which extends physically and temporally beyond the limits of individual persons’ lives, and includes all of them, along with all their ancestors and descendants. This is what has sometimes been called the “collective unconscious.” I think that’s what Jung meant, and I think it would not be mistaken to regard it also as a collective consciousness. This is still in the realm of ecology, social psychology, and anthropology.

That is not God, though. It is a feature of life on earth. You might say it is an aspect of God’s consciousness, if you want to get metaphysical. But you can’t really talk about God in these terms. God and the soul are different subjects, in my opinion. Metaphysics is philosophy. God-talk is theology. Soul-talk is in the realm of biology, social science and the humanities.