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What is the Soul?

Writer's picture: Jude HuntzJude Huntz

What is the soul if not a better version of ourselves?

is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Reading, professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Roehampton, London, and an honorary fellow of St John’s College, Oxford University. His latest book is In Search of the Soul (2020).

1,200 words




What is the point of gaining the whole world if you lose your soul? Today, far fewer people are likely to catch the scriptural echoes of this question than would have been the case 50 years ago. But the question retains its urgency. We might not quite know what we mean by the soul any more, but intuitively we grasp what is meant by the loss in question – the kind of moral disorientation and collapse where what is true and good slips from sight, and we find we have wasted our lives on some specious gain that is ultimately worthless.


It used to be thought that science and technology would gain us the world. But it now looks as though they are allowing us to destroy it. The fault lies not with scientific knowledge itself, which is among humanity’s finest achievements, but with our greed and short-sightedness in exploiting that knowledge. There’s a real danger we might end up with the worst of all possible scenarios – we’ve lost the world, and lost our souls as well.

But what is the soul? The modern scientific impulse is to dispense with supposedly occult or ‘spooky’ notions such as souls and spirits, and to understand ourselves instead as wholly and completely part of the natural world, existing and operating through the same physical, chemical and biological processes that we find anywhere else in the environment.

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We need not deny the value of the scientific perspective. But there are many aspects of human experience that cannot adequately be captured in the impersonal, quantitatively based terminology of scientific enquiry. The concept of the soul might not be part of the language of science; but we immediately recognise and respond to what is meant in poetry, novels and ordinary speech, when the term ‘soul’ is used in that it alerts us to certain powerful and transformative experiences that give meaning to our lives. Such experiences include the joy that arises from loving another human being, or the exaltation when we surrender to the beauty of a great artistic or musical work, or, as in William Wordsworth’s poem ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798), the ‘serene and blessed mood’ where we feel at one with the natural world around us.


Such precious experiences depend on certain characteristic human sensibilities that we would not wish to lose at any price. In using the term ‘soul’ to refer to them, we don’t have to think of ourselves as ghostly immaterial substances. We can think of ‘soul’ as referring, instead, to a set of attributes ­­– of cognition, feeling and reflective awareness – that might depend on the biological processes that underpin them, and yet enable us to enter a world of meaning and value that transcends our biological nature.


Entering this world requires distinctively human qualities of thought and rationality. But we’re not abstract intellects, detached from the physical world, contemplating it and manipulating it from a distance. To realise what makes us most fully human, we need to pay attention to the richness and depth of the emotional responses that connect us to the world. Bringing our emotional lives into harmony with our rationally chosen goals and projects is a vital part of the healing and integration of the human soul.


In his richly evocative book The Hungry Soul (1994), the American author Leon Kass argues that all our human activities, even seemingly mundane ones, such as gathering around a table to eat, can play their part in the overall ‘perfecting of our nature’. In the more recent book Places of the Soul (3rd ed, 2014), the ecologically minded architect Christopher Day speaks of the need for humans to live, and to design and build their dwellings, in ways that harmonise with the shapes and rhythms of the natural world, providing nourishment for our deepest needs and longings.


The language of ‘soul’ found here and in many other contexts, ancient and modern, speaks ultimately of the human longing for transcendence. The object of this yearning is not well-captured in the abstract language of theological doctrine or philosophical theory. It is best approached through praxis, or how that theory is enacted. Traditional spiritual practices – the often simple acts of devotion and commitment found in rites of passage marking the birth or death of a loved one, say, or such rituals as the giving and receiving of rings – provide a powerful vehicle for the expression of such longings. Part of their power and resonance is that they operate on many levels, reaching deeper layers of moral, emotional and spiritual response than can be accessed by the intellect alone.


The search for ways to express the longing for a deeper meaning in our lives seems to be an ineradicable part of our nature, whether we identify as religious believers or not. If we were content to structure our lives wholly within a fixed and unquestioned set of parameters, we would cease to be truly human. There is something within us that is always reaching forward, that refuses to rest content with the utilitarian routines of our daily existence, and yearns for something not yet achieved that will bring healing and completion.


Not least, the idea of the soul is bound up with our search for identity or selfhood. The French philosopher René Descartes, writing in 1637, spoke of ‘this me, that is to say the soul by which I am what I am’. He went on to argue that this soul is something entirely nonphysical, but there are now very few people, given our modern knowledge of the brain and its workings, who would wish to follow him here. But even if we reject Descartes’s immaterialist account of the soul, each of us retains a strong sense of ‘this me’, this self that makes me what I am. We are all engaged in the task of trying to understand the ‘soul’ in this sense.


But this core self that we seek to understand, and whose growth and maturity we seek to foster in ourselves and encourage in others, is not a static or closed phenomenon. Each of us is on a journey, to grow and to learn, and to reach towards the best that we can become. So the terminology of ‘soul’ is not just descriptive, but is what philosophers sometimes call ‘normative’: using the language of ‘soul’ alerts us not just to the way we happen to be at present, but to the better selves we have it in our power to become.


To say we have a soul is partly to say that we humans, despite all our flaws, are fundamentally oriented towards the good. We yearn to rise above the waste and futility that can so easily drag us down and, in the transformative human experiences and practices we call ‘spiritual’, we glimpse something of transcendent value and importance that draws us forward. In responding to this call, we aim to realise our true selves, the selves we were meant to be. This is what the search for the soul amounts to; and it is here, if there is a meaning to human life, that such meaning must be sought.

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Kate Hunter
Kate Hunter
May 13, 2020

When I think of a person’s soul, I think of their happiness, their character, and the things in their life that define them and make them the person that they are. This really meshes well with the part of this post talking about the idea of the soul being bound with our search for identity or selfhood. Many people talk about “strengthening your soul” through gratitude and generosity, meditation, being in nature/wildlife, living in the present, etc. These are all things that connect you to yourself, others, and the earth. The soul isn’t about money or jobs or stress. The soul is directly linked to living in its simplest, most pure form. The soul is about that journey to your…

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Lauren Chamberlain
Lauren Chamberlain
May 11, 2020

Everyone has a soul. It may even be a real, physical thing. I think the soul is made up of all the signals in our brain, the stored memories and connections between each and every synapse. We are electric - tiny bolts of lightning that form our consciousness. There have been experiments done, long ago, that aimed to find out if the soul is a real, corporeal, physical thing. The scientist, a doctor, laid his patient on a scale shortly before they were to die of disease. They weighed them before and after death, and if I remember, found there was a difference. Unfortunately, it's an extremely slight difference, and if the soul is a physical thing, it's extremely difficult…

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s1481418
May 08, 2020

When I'm reading this article, I'm thinking about our spirit. Beside the side of science, spirit is very important in our lives. We can do most of things very well if we have good spirit(happy). In my experience, I usually listen to music, read a book, watch TV, talk to my family and friends to make myself happy. It make my life become easier. Science is pretty good too. I think that we need both of them to have a good world.

Thi Nguyen

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brianaoakley200
brianaoakley200
May 04, 2020

This is Briana Oakley I believe that our personality can not constitute our unique identity. Perhaps our soul or our spirit is the source of our identity also. Your soul is defined as one person, its the spirit and essence of a person. An example of your soul is the part of you that makes you who you are and that will live on after your death. I also believe that your identity is who you are, the way you think about yourself, the way you are viewed by the world and the characteristics that define you.

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s1502243
Apr 30, 2020

This shows how everything doesn't have to be backed up by science. The soul is much more than just a concept. It has a deeper meaning to it. The soul is what we are and what makes us human. Like this reading says, "the soul is on a journey..." as we grow older it develops more and more. Of course everyone has their own perceptions of the soul due to just personal beliefs. I really like how this writing breaks down the idea of the soul while bringing in other perspectives.

-Priscilla Cao

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