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.

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 Plato the soul is plainly distinct from the body, pre-existing it and surviving it, and his Phaedo argues at length for its immortality; Aristotle, by contrast, treated psyche as the form of a living body, less a passenger than the organization of the thing itself. 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 — among them the ka, the ba, and the akh — each with its own role in death and the life beyond. 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 and Islam came to teach that each person bears a single created soul, judged after death and destined for reward or punishment; several Indian traditions hold instead to ātman, a self carried through successive rebirths, while certain Buddhist teaching denies any permanent soul whatever, an explicit refusal of the 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 late-antique Platonism into the occult revival.

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. 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: Nous · Free Will · Emanation · Neoplatonism · Hell