The Soul: A Vintage Concept

William Blake, The Soul Hovering Over the Body, Reluctantly Parting with Life, from “The Grave,” a poem by Robert Blair, engraving by Luigi Schiavonetti, 1813.

The title of this essay does not sound original, and it wasn’t intended to be. Not all philosophy essays have original titles. There is an old tradition of philosophical treatises written by different authors in different times and in different places, yet named the same. Thus, there is a series of treatises with the title On the Soul, which began in ancient Greece and continued through the medieval scholastics and the Renaissance into modern European philosophy. It is to this series—represented by Aristotle, Tertullian, St. Augustine, Avicenna, La Mettrie, and other authors from centuries past—that I would like to contribute. I really mean this: rather than arguing for something particularly new, I invite you to look back at a tradition that now seems to be completely out of date.

The idea of the soul (ψυχὴ, anima, Seele, âme) was inherited by philosophy from ancient religions, and is as old as early animistic beliefs. Appropriated by Christian theology, soul is one of those hybrid concepts through which philosophy mediates between religion and science; it adjusts religious contents to a scientific worldview and data, which is not an easy task. With the unfolding of the project of the Enlightenment, which entailed a full secularization of philosophy, the ancient genre of treatises on the soul waned, not least because the idea of the soul lost its academic status and gave way to more positivist legacies, such as the “psyche” of psychology, seemingly cleared of all metaphysical and theological vestiges.

Why write an essay on the soul today? Who would ever bother to read it? We live in a world of triumphant materialism, where old concepts like this don’t seem to refer to anything in reality, and are just left to gather dust in the archives. “Now comes mundus corpus,” as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it.1 Bodies move to the foreground—earthly, gendered, racialized, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, dead and undead, struggling, migrating, mutating, decomposing, on the verge of extinction. To be a body means to have a place, to move in space, to transform in time, to interact, to possess weight, and so on. As bodies, we know what is up and what is down, what is left and what is right, but also what is wrong and what is right, what is good and what is bad. We can figure out what is, what is not, and what ought to be. We do not need an immaterial soul to conceive the difference between pleasure and pain, production and destruction, growth and decay. Experiences of embodiment and finite existence in specific environments constitute our horizon of understanding the world and making sense of things.

Soul is a vintage concept. It can be interpreted as a metaphor, but a metaphor for what? For a form of life? For a self? For that which makes every something what it is? For consciousness, or the unconscious? For the divine, or the human? For the social, or the intimate? For the intensity of affects, experience, and passions? In the history of philosophy, as well as in various religious doctrines, the soul has traditionally been opposed to the body. We should not forget, however, that opposition is a type of relation. One can think of it dogmatically, privileging one term over the other, but also dialectically, as a complex match.

Soul, anima, is what animates things. The ensouled body is a living being, that’s it. But the simpler this match appears to be, the more difficult it really is, for to be alive also means to be mortal. What is not alive cannot die. It is precisely mortality—being exposed to death—that defines a body as living, that is, ensouled. Meanwhile the soul is considered immortal. It is believed to be what remains when the body dies. Religions still reserve a place for the soul in the afterlife: in heaven, in hell, in limbo, in new incarnations, etc. There can be different answers to the questions about where the soul comes from and where it goes after the death of the body, but what most religious approaches have in common is the idea that souls are somehow separable from individual bodies and can exist apart from them, like Christian souls united in God, or the souls of some Indigenous groups embodied in their totem animals.

Philosophical conceptions of the soul might have similar premises, but the question tends to shift toward essence: What is soul? What is it made of? Does it consist of anything? Does it have a place, move in space, transform in time, interact, or have weight? Where does it reside? Maybe in one of the organs of the body—in the brain, or the heart, or the stomach maybe? We can go as far as wondering: Is soul itself a body? If so, which kind of body is it? From a religious standpoint, such inquiries might sound heretical to varying degrees. The reason for this is that they arise at the border between theology and the positive sciences. At this border, the question of the soul is basically translated into the question of the body. Unlike souls, bodies seem obvious at first sight. However, if we ask ourselves, in the old philosophical way: What is a body?—this concept turns out to be no less controversial than that of the soul. Think about desire, which is structured in a way that it keeps missing its object. I believe that I can see and smell and touch some body, but is this possibility real? “No, this body is taboo, please touch some other body,” it says, and my soul breaks.

The evidence for the body is challenged by Nietzsche, whose writings set the framework for the “body turn” in continental philosophy:

Granted that the “soul” is an attractive and mysterious idea which philosophers have rightly abandoned only with reluctance—perhaps that which they have since learned to put in its place is even more attractive, even more mysterious. The human body, in which the most distant and most recent past of all organic development again becomes living and corporeal, through which and over and beyond which a tremendous inaudible stream seems to flow: the body is a more astonishing idea than the old “soul.”2

According to Nietzsche, we strongly believe in the reality of bodies, and it is this belief that must be undermined in the first place, so that we can see the matrix of the will to power behind it.

Since the old days, when souls were considered more real by virtue of their being immune to destruction and death, the idea of reality has changed dramatically. Now we ascertain the material reality of bodies precisely on the basis of their destructibility. There is something desperate but also deeply melancholic in this attitude, inscribed in the modern paradigm of knowledge, which culminates in the destruction of some body—human, nonhuman, planetary, one’s own—in order to make sure it is real. This includes the techno-capitalist annihilation of nature—the annihilation of the diversity of natural bodies, which is never absolute. What remains of these bodies are not souls, but waste, dumps, and landfills—irreducible material residues that tend to evolve into other forms of life. And yet it is here, in this junkyard of dying bodies, that I want to look for a living soul.

Even in today’s secular culture and philosophy after the death of God, which melancholically accounts for the corporeality of the world, the idea of the soul, despite being overshadowed by the manifestation of bodies, does not disappear. It persists in disguise, here and there, under different names—in cognitive science, computer science, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. I believe that the advantage of philosophical concepts is that they never really go completely out of date. They can be dumped, but they can also be recycled and put to new use. You find some old stuff, dust it off, and bring it to the table, so that everybody can see that it is actually good, beautiful, and just what you need.

This is an excerpt from the manuscript On the Soul: Notes from the Platonic Underground.