What would it mean to talk of a soul
solely in terms of the immanent world?
The word 'soul' has fallen into
disrepute recently. Many people see the idea of a soul as a throwback
to earlier beliefs, and consider it to have been discredited in
scientific terms. But the term, as a metaphysical reference, cannot
be disproved or eliminated, it can only be abandoned or ignored. In
an attempt to demonstrate that the term can still hold meaning, I
shall attempt to provide a definition of “soul” entirely in terms
of what Charles Taylor has called the immanent frame – the physical, natural world of matter that
we all experience.
What does 'soul' mean in a traditional
sense? Most religious traditions have a concept of the soul, and use
it to mean the immaterial part of a person – an idea that draws
upon notions of transcendence which cannot be applied without
stepping outside of the immanent frame. The soul may be associated
with our personality and experience, as in the beliefs of the
Abrahamic religions that the soul lives on in transcendent reality
after death, or it may instead be associated with the essence of a
person, such as in Dharmic traditions where by rebirth the soul
reincarnates into new living bodies. These two ideas are closely
related – both envisage the soul as the quintessence of a person,
they principally differ as to whether the memories and direct
experiences are preserved.
Thus to show that we can still use
'soul' as a meaningful term, even within the immanent frame, we must
show that there is something that can be attributed to a person that
is essential to our notions of who they are, that is ineffable, and
that also survives in some sense after death.
Perhaps the reason why the soul is
usually considered a priori excluded from the immanent frame
is that the technological successes resulting from the development of
the physical sciences has leant an artificial air of confidence to
models of reality that depend upon reductionistic principles – we
look at a body (say), and see that the smallest operating principle
is the assembly of protein molecules by the action of DNA and RNA,
and thus see biology as based around genetics. The popularity of
these kinds of viewpoint doesn't change the fact that these models
are still only representations – as Alfred Korzybski noted, “the
map is not the territory”. That the genetic mechanisms are
foundational doesn't make them fundamental – and indeed,
behavioural studies focussing solely on genetics are entirely
misleading, since genetic mechanisms merely construct organisms, they
do not literally “program” them to behave in certain ways
(although they do create a suite of possible behaviours by virtue of
the physical systems they describe).
One way of thinking abut the soul in
immanent terms is to consider that the soul is whatever is
non-physical that distinguishes two individuals. Now calling upon
terms like “non-physical” may seem to step outside of immanence,
but there are non-physical elements within the immanent frame – the
gravitational constant, the ratio pi, and the concept of time are all
immanent concepts, but none of them are physical in the sense this is
usually applied. Similarly, we are familiar with splitting up mind
and body and calling the latter 'physical' but the former 'mental'
(however misguided this dualism might be). There is an abstraction
involved – we still recognise that what we call 'mental' is
dependent upon what we call 'physical' – but we do not find it
difficult to imagine our mind as a non-physical element. Indeed, this
perspective is what makes it easy for us to believe in science
fiction scenarios involving downloading our personalities into
machines or computers, no matter how far fetched.
But a person is more than just a mind
and a body, they also create and maintain physical spaces –
bedrooms, houses, gardens, offices, cities, nations – and they
acquire and support relationships between other people, and animals
other than humans. There are numerous networks of connection between
each and every person, none of which are strictly physical. If we
agree to go swimming every Thursday, there is much involved beyond
the physical elements of the vibration of air when we talk to one
another, and the immersion of our bodies in water – there is the
nature of the discussion between us, our use of language and our
inflections or idioms, and the notion of a shared calender that
enables us to make such an agreement in the first place. These are
the subtleties of interaction between beings, the dance of life that
includes but is also more than the merely physical.
Within this subtlety of interactions we
each have our own unique identity – and this is more than the sum
of our memories and experiences. Should we suffer a terrible accident
in which our mind was addled with amnesia and our body disfigured
beyond recognition, our friends and family could still “know it was
us” from our inflections, our movements, our unique qualities.
Thus, even within the immanent frame we can still find a way to
conceive of the quintessence of a person – more than just their
identity (which is a mental state an individual possesses concerning
themselves) it is the flavour of their interaction with the
world – which can be expressed in speech, in action, in living
spaces, in habits and in myriad other ways beside. I would suggest
this is the minimum required to show a concept of an immanent soul.
This idea can be taken further. A
version of the Dharmic notion of rebirth can be expressed in immanent
terms: if each individual has a flavour of interactions which we can
attribute to an (immanent) soul, then what if two people express the
same flavour? Those two individuals can then be seen as expressions
of the same soul – of sharing the same soul. In this way, rebirth
can be cast in immanent terms not as a chain of souls, but as an
eternal cluster of souls – many expressions of the same
quintessence. We think of ourselves as individuals because our minds
naturally supply an illusion of self, but seen from another
perspective these many selves may be seen as instances of the same
patterns. In this view, our (immanent) soul has lived many times, and
will live again even after we have long since passed on.
There is even a faint trace of what the
soul means in Abrahamic traditions which can be reached within the
immanent frame. When the body dies, the soul (in the sense used here)
no longer expresses itself through that person, but continues to
assert an influence – for the person has affected the lives of
their friends, their family, and their communities. In this sense,
that soul continues to influence long after the death of the body it
once emanated from – as long as those that knew that person live
on, the immanent soul persists, and in the chain of inheritance from
parent to child and onwards, the faint breath of the souls of those
long passed continue to reverberate through time.
I do not construct this thought
experiment to show that this is all that a soul might mean – far
from it. Rather, I hope that by demonstrating that something of the
idea of a soul can still be made to work within the immanent frame
that the metaphysical beliefs people hold about souls are not as
insanely outlandish as they first appear. It seems to me a strangely arrogant belief that humanity happens to be blessed with
a suite of faculties capable of detecting all facets of what
is, and the blanket rejection of transcendence (of all kinds) amounts
to this. It's a narrow perspective, a modern variant of
geocentrism that still places our species at the centre of the
universe, albeit in an existential rather than a physical sense. It is not that this viewpoint is unreasonable, merely that
it is one perspective among many, and as such does not enjoy any
privileged position.
If I have succeeded in demonstrating
that we can make the term 'soul' have meaning even in immanent terms,
I hope it will go some way towards showing that transcendent beliefs
about souls have not been invalidated – indeed, as metaphysical
beliefs, this is essentially impossible. Stories about transcendent
souls are encrusted with the embellishments, dogmatic echoes and even
the poetry of bygone times, but none of these are explicit reasons to
reject these beliefs. As ever, we must look deep into our own selves
– into our own souls, if you will – to discover which beliefs
ring true for us.
The opening image is Soul Migration by Iranian-born artist Rassouli, which I found here. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.