An Existential Account of the Soul

Part I

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I FIND IT IMMENSELY unsettling that human beings could be so exalted and yet so denigrated by the same culture—that is, the culture of the contemporary West. This culture holds every single life as infinitely valuable, even endowed with sacred rights, but lacks the justification for this sanctity. Thus, there is simultaneously a great value and an absence of value placed on each individual. We love our lives more than anything, but with this comes a tremendous fear of death. With a little questioning it is not hard to discern that this fear results from an absolutist notion of our own deaths: we believe that death is an end—an annihilation.

The human soul is considered to be nothing but a vast system of biological processes. Some processes of the brain are so powerful, it is said, that consciousness has arisen from them. This phenomenon is greater than the sum of its parts, but is also, in a seemingly magical way, reducible to them. This is the natural prejudice of almost everyone living in our age. We have a difficult time assenting to any notions other than the ones modern natural science is capable of presenting to us. Yet, no matter how enlightened we have become, we are still haunted by the specter of death. Our knowledge seems incapable of comforting us. On the contrary, death has comes to be a finality so grim that we cling to this life at almost any cost. 

This attitude is usually balanced, however, by a strange and sudden half-Christian/half-Platonic belief when we are inevitably forced to encounter death directly. When a loved one dies, it is almost impossible to bear and our otherwise pervasive materialism lapses. We temporarily become born again believers in the face of death. Our loved one must be transported to a blissful realm where they will await the arrival of those who mourn. It is, with good reason, offensive to question the grieving. But I have found it impossible not to note that this talk of belief in the soul and its future bliss tends to fade as soon as the grief subsides.

This process is understandable. Death is without a doubt the most dreadful thing one can face. Without this myth to comfort us, would we not be lonely and desperate creatures tossed into a cruel world? Would not the persistence of this myth, and of humanity's seeming inability to inhabit a world without it, in some way point toward the truth of this immortality?

WHEN TRACED BACK to the Greek, the word “soul” (psykhḗ) ultimately means “life”—not in the sterile, biological sense, but as the essence and aspiration of human existence. Our soul is what brings us to life in every sense of the word. The soul not only separates the living from the dead, but the merely living from the truly alive. Today we have abandoned this conception of the soul, and yet complain that everything feels “soulless.” But without a belief in the soul, how can human aspiration remain?

We recognize this desire in the countless admonitions to “Live life to the fullest,” or “Live your best life.” There are also more arcane phrases, such as, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” or “ That you may have life and have it more abundantly.” It may be easy for some to write these sayings off as platitudes. But with just a little reflection, it becomes apparent that the inner need for an abundant life is a “fact of life.” While in theory, we can claim that there is no inner principle called the soul, we find it impossible to live as if this were the case and are constantly called back to this inner thing that will not leave us alone. 

But what is this life, this soul? The modern instinct is to dismiss it as a quaint analogy for the self—which again, is a mere material phenomenon. These same instincts also tell us that any talk of “beautiful” or “good” souls is simply a sublimation of what is at root a concourse of firing synapses in the brain. This reduction of all value to biology would be fine if humanity could actually live up to the very low standard of self-preservation. But on the contrary, our life is precious to us; and if we have a good soul, the life of our loved ones is doubly so. Moreover, if our soul is beautiful, then perhaps we may even die for those we do not know. The desire to survive is often defeated by this higher life we seek to live. 

We are told that a deep-seated instinct for survival has somehow brought beauty into the world from primal lust and that self-sacrificial love came into being from an instinctual desire for herd preservation. If this was the case, our knowledge of instinctual drives would surely shatter the “illusion” of the sublime. Yet, the more we convince ourselves of this reductionist view; the more we seem to long for a sublime that transcends sublimation.  

I AM CONVINCED that this degraded view of human nature can only be sustained when the interior life of a person is rejected or ignored. Unlike other animals, we are beings that have an intimate knowledge of our own existence. This existence is more than merely our interactions with the material world, but as it is said, “Every human is a cosmos.” Such a notion would be impossible if the inner life was simply a mechanistic biological process. Even if it could account for most of human existence, a second thing—the soul—would be required to look back upon it to understand it in the way we do. But beyond the fact that this inner complexity can be described in great detail, it more importantly can be felt deeply. Yet because the soul cannot be seen on the surface of a person, we find it easy to reject—despite its effects being manifest in everything we do.

It is not without reason, I believe, that the myth of the soul’s existence beyond death cannot be set aside. When a loved one dies, two contrary impulses affect the mourner. On the one hand, there is a great sense of separation as if we have died with them; on the other, the unmistakable feeling that the departed are really quite near. The lived inner experience of these two contrary impulses and the abiding character of the myth seem to reveal to us a deeply personal aspect of the soul. We must either resign ourselves to the belief that this experience is a series of imaginary images in our brains provoked by animal instinct, or hold that a person, far from being an isolated individual, is made up of those he or she loves the most. It is not enough that those who die live on within us, but we also long to live on with them. Why then is it not reasonable to hold that we shall live on and that this relationship too will never die?