Soul

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The soul is the name many traditions give to the animating or immaterial aspect of a living being — that which is held to think, to feel, to give the body life, and in a great many accounts to outlast it. The English word renders the Greek psyche and the Latin anima, both of which began closer to “breath” than to anything ghostly: the soul was first what made the difference between a living body and a corpse, and only later the seat of mind and the bearer of a fate after death. The pattern is not confined to Europe. The Hebrew ruach is wind, neshamah a thing breathed into the nostrils; the Arabic nafs and ruh keep the sense of breath and moving air; the Sanskrit atman names the breath of life. Across unrelated language families the word for the self reaches first for the invisible, moving thing one cannot live without — though the deeper roots are uncertain, and the convergence may owe as much to a shared intuition as to any common ancestor.

That double sense — life-principle on one side, immortal self on the other — runs through the whole history of the idea, and traditions divide sharply over how the two relate. In Homer the word is barely psychological: psyche is what a warrior risks in battle and what slips away at death to become a shade, while the felt and acting faculties — drive, courage, deliberation — belong to thymos and its kin; to name the psyche is almost to speak of dying. Only by the sixth and fifth centuries does the word broaden to mean simply being alive, the principle shared by animals and plants alike. In Plato the soul is plainly distinct from the body, pre-existing it and surviving it, and his Phaedo argues at length for its immortality; the Republic divides it into three contending parts — reason, spirit, and appetite — that can war within a single person. Aristotle, by contrast, treated psyche as the form of a living body, less a passenger than the organization of the thing itself, and left little room for any part of it to persist alone. The Neoplatonists who followed kept the soul immortal but graded it, ranking a higher rational part above the lower powers tied to sense and appetite, and made its descent into matter and its return upward the spine of their whole cosmology.

The religious traditions inherited these distinctions and reworked them. Egyptian thought never settled on one soul at all but spoke of several aspects, no single one of which is “the soul” — among them the ka, the vital force sustained after death by offerings; the ba, nearest to the unique person, drawn as a human-headed bird that moves between tomb and afterlife; and the akh, the transfigured spirit formed when the two reunite past judgment — alongside the ren, the name that must keep being spoken, and the ib, the heart weighed against the feather of Maat. Hebrew scripture used nephesh for the living self without the sharp body–soul split that Greek thought supplied, a split that entered later Jewish and Christian writing partly through Hellenistic contact. Christianity fused the biblical living self with Greek immortality into a single created soul — and divided over its origin, whether God makes each one directly or it passes from the parents — yet held that the body returns at the resurrection, so the soul’s destiny is not escape from flesh but reunion with it. Islam draws its own line between the nafs, the accountable self that is tested and judged, and the ruh, the divine breath that gives life; the question of what becomes of either after death the encyclopedia keeps under immortality. Several Indian traditions hold instead to atman, the eternal innermost self, in the Upanishads finally identical with Brahman, carried through successive rebirths until release; certain Buddhist teaching denies any permanent soul whatever — anatta, the view that the person is a passing bundle of impermanent aggregates with no abiding core — an explicit refusal of the very premise the others share.

Western esoteric writing tends to multiply the soul rather than abolish it, distinguishing several bodies or vehicles — a subtle body between the physical and the divine — through which the soul ascends or descends; the theme is old, running from the late-antique Platonist doctrine of the soul’s vehicle into the occult revival, and it is the tradition’s own claim rather than a settled fact of the world.

What survives across these disagreements is less a shared doctrine than a shared question: whether the self that thinks and suffers is reducible to the body, or something that the body merely houses. It is the ancient root of what later philosophy would call the mind–body problem, the dispute Descartes recast as a thinking substance set against extended matter and his materialist critics answered by collapsing the two into one. The traditions answer it in incompatible ways. They agree only that the question is worth the weight they give it.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna): The Immortality of the Soul · The Egyptian Book of the Dead (Budge, 1913) · Mead — The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition (1919)

→ Related: Immortality · Reincarnation · Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Metaphysics · The One