Arguments against Soul

[Belacqua]

First, I’d like to say: never mind the naysayers in this thread.

Thank you! They seem to be enjoying themselves a lot, and to me what they say is pure comedy. So no worries. 

 

As I’m thinking on it, perhaps, “I am” would be even more accurate than “being”, in the sense that (at least to me) it encompasses both the fact of my physical matter, as well as the fact of everything this matter is and does. It is these things and does these things because I am alive. 

That seems just right to me. While it's necessary in analyzing things to speak of matter and function in different sentences, we still need a way to say that these distinctions are created by the mind, and reality is whole. 

"I" does include my flesh and bone, every bit as much as the mental functions related to that. 

Again, it's an age-old theme in theology and philosophy -- division, while useful, is illusion. 

(And I think his way of dividing is getting Jehanne in a little bit of trouble here. He wants to limit soul to one very specific set of mental activities explained by one very specific type of physics research. The trouble isn't that he leaves out the supernatural, but that he leaves out much of what is natural about human beings.) 

Or, maybe I’m overthinking it, lol.

Overthinking is fun! Underthinking makes a person more popular, though. 

Ah, I see now. I was under the impression that the Aristotelian definition included the matter upon which the soul depends. 

This is from Wikipedia:

"Aristotle holds that the soul (psyche, ) is the form, or essence of any living thing; it is not a distinct substance from the body that it is in. It is the possession of a soul (of a specific kind) that makes an organism an organism at all, and thus that the notion of a body without a soul, or of a soul in the wrong kind of body, is simply unintelligible. [...] It is difficult to reconcile these points with the popular picture of a soul as a sort of spiritual substance "inhabiting" a body."

So any living thing includes matter, and the matter is organized according to the soul. 

I’m wondering if the word “soul”, itself, needs to be retired altogether, simply for the fact that it carries a specific religious connotation that seems difficult for a lot of people to get past.

Very much agreed! 

In conversation the newer, spooky sense seems to have won. So I'm going to be more careful in the future. 

As you know, in philosophy-talk there are lots of important words that are different from their conversational meanings, so people often have to specify. You hear things like, "this was intentional in Merleau-Ponty's sense," because we have to avoid confusion, and the thinker's name becomes short-hand for the system we're using. 

But you're right; unless I specify "soul in the sense that Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante used it," it's certain that people will read it in the newer way. 

“This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”

Always worth repeating! 

(I suspect somebody's going to call Camus a dummy now, because a heart is just a pumping muscle.) 

Defining soul or heart in this way is valuable to me because it doesn't hurry to explain too much. As I wrote with my coffee can analogy earlier on, we are practically infinite in the connections which make us, and efforts to pin down certainties "YOU ARE THIS" may well cause more stupidity than smartness.