What Happened to the Soul?

anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physical finite planet is either mad or an economist we don't want to focus politics on the notion that involves the rejection of principles around which a large majority of our fellow citizens we are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think it was a piece in the papers not very long ago by quite well-known team in America who do neuroimaging and applications in moral values and they found that by suppressing activity in the right temporary parietal region they caused the failure to understand the nature of moral judgments they set up a scenario of grace hoping to put sugar in her friends coffee but actually by mistake putting poison in and she died in the other scenario grace intended to poison her friend but put sugar in and the friend lived in the normal state we probably think it was worse to intend to poison but the good ol left hemisphere on its own thought in the in what is basically an autistic way that the outcome was the important measure but then these neuroscience I won't mention their names to spare them their blushes here and finished up by saying if something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation it'll be hard to argue people have or need or so so is the concept of the soul a redundant idea now that science has made us see it as a superstition or are we actually turning our backs on something very important simply because we can't satisfy demands for precision and proof and in fact I'll be making a category mistake was I going to ask today two questions what use is the soul as an idea and and I think I have an answer to that I think it has use and I'm also going to ask if so what might the soul be like and about that I'm afraid I am less certain I expect a lot of us would sympathize with the soldier of more reform of Blenheim who was reportedly heard praying Oh God if the beer God saved myself if I have a soul nowadays it's become a kind of embarrassment to talk about so and yet until now it has been central to most cultures the word has disappeared and language is an aspect of reality if it's true as Vidkun Stein said that philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language making something disappear by language could bewitch us into thinking it didn't exist let's think in simple terms can this word be substituted well it seems to me to place the person in the widest context the context outside the confines of immediate time and space and even to involve an idea of destiny so for example a fellow's great lines it is the cause it is the cause my soul let me not name it to you chase stars it would be difficult to replace that with it is the cause it is the cause my mind my brain my emotions it seems that the concept has a meaning which we can't exactly say what it is but as I say says the human being in a broad context not the narrow context of where we're encountering the person and it seems to have this idea of of a destiny and so one gets the idea of Keats's that the world is a veil of soul making what did he mean he didn't mean that we grow up intellectually he didn't mean that we got better at being moral citizens he didn't mean that something happened to our heart exactly he meant something bigger and deeper so it is our sense of the spiritual something like our moral sense well it certainly has something of that but it goes beyond it doesn't it there's a rather marvelous moment in a play of Iris Murdoch called above the gods the character says in a way goodness and truth seem to come out of the depths of the soul and when we really know something we feel we've always known it it also it's terribly distant farther than any star we are sort of stretched out it's like beyond the world not in the clouds or in heaven but a light that shows the world this world as it really is but they put me in mind she was a plate honest of Plato's speaking of philosophy in the seventh letter he says for philosophy doesn't admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge but after much converse about the matter and a life lived together suddenly a light as it were is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another and thereafter sustains itself so thinking and moral reasoning are part of it but what both those passages seem to suggest to me is there is something deeper more transcendent over which we have less power so easy to do with emotion that's another possible idea because after all we say soulful often means with emotion you could say somebody's unhappy you could say this is sadness and in a way that's right depending on what we mean the case of depression and so on is not really sadness is it perhaps a soul sickness psychiatrists after all the word means soul doctors and in German there was the idea that doctors were ministering to des Eila which is a hard thing to define but that's the point we need a word that's hard to define because if you define it will probably miss the point altogether well let's get a little bit less defined it could be sort of imagination something like that and indeed again it often involves imagination but it surely is other than that and goes beyond it and thus plenty of imagination which is not in the service of the soul at all in a book called logos of the soul by a follower of young called Krista to talking about Jung's idea of the soul he comments a person who spent his life in a Cell may have enriched and deepened his soul and this wouldn't mean or over that you spent his time accumulating fantasies or writing learning treatises it's probably more imaginative in the word way that Wordsworth uses the idea become a living soul there are overlaps there okay it's not any of those things precisely but could it be a something that stands over against our embodied existence well I think there's two things wrong with that the one that's that it's not a thing and the other is that it's not over against our embodied existence like matter according to whitehead and baths on the soul seems to me to be processed more process than the thing we come back to the phrase a veil of soul making perhaps not all souls are equal perhaps we have to grow ourselves perhaps souls can be so thwarted that they're almost extinguished and many people who've talked about the soul have used imagery of fire or water which are things that are more like energy processes for example Eckhart's finkel i'm a little smart the scintilla anime the soul spark which comes from corresponds to and reaches out again to the divine a potentiality in other words something in the process of happening a latent function that needs to be nourished to grow and expand nowadays it's not popular to say that there is a value to suffering but it is part of the experience of suffering sometimes that it does deepen one's sense of what it means to be alive a parrot that I liked very much from henry vaughan well he had a collection of poems in fact called the selects insulins which means the spark the sparking Flint the Flint from which the spark comes it comes from the heart and is the spark that is involved in and nourished by suffering then I think of that phrase of Wordsworth after his brother was drowned in the epic of any I think it was a deep distress have humanized my soul and sinking of water one would think of the down the flow of life which is not far from a kind of world soul really and the flow that is in Heraclitus where everything is flow at the heart I'm very fond of a number of films by Andrei Tarkovsky one of them I'm thinking of is Solaris if you think you've seen Solaris because you saw a terrible American film made in the 1990s you haven't you need to see the Russian film made and I think 1974 and which is I think one of the most moving and philosophically fascinating films ever made and it really shows somebody through the imagination of somebody that loves them and through their being imagined and through their experience of suffering actually growing a soul and coming to life so there there's a sort of resonance that brings this soul to life between the two characters Chris and Hani in that story and I think that's a good image of how we grow a soul if we do grow so in this resonant area but we need to have a sort of disposition and perhaps that is the soul a disposition that's both wrapped and reflective and makes a living process possible that opens a space and here James Hillman another disciple if you like of Young says the soul is less an object of knowledge than it is a way of knowing the object a way of knowing knowledge itself so it's not really a thing it's a disposition the manner an attitude a way of being and a process it isn't contrary to the body although when in the past it was conceived one died this so was the thing that was left over as it were and I'm at the college at Oxford of which I'm lucky enough to be a a condom fellow it's called All Souls it's actually full name is all souls of the faithful departed but it is a that is the idea of the soul as what's left of people and once they've died of course that is a very rich idea and I'm not dismissing it but it does rather lead to the idea that time something separate from the body incidentally those who don't like the college take great pleasure in pointing out that the French for all sales college is college day more but and once again victim Stein put his finger on it when he said the human body is the best picture of the human soul and the soul is intangible perhaps but is still embodied and in every culture images of breath force or motion in Greek Numa and suka ideas of breath and the same ideas existing in Hebrew the words I believe Rua and nephesh which are words for so which are derived from the idea of breath and without that the soul becomes something rather nebulous without that embodied nature it becomes terribly tenuous and it reminds me of Hadrian's description of his Soler's and Nimmi Olive Aguilar bland doula that poor little wavering vague end and sort of smooth little creature that slips away out of your mind so it's important to remember that the soul is embodied and it's deep also in instincts and the intuitions which is probably one of the ways where Myra contacted and when shouldn't try to cut those out of the idea of the soul in order to make it Noble there was in the Nazi eras you know great festivals of the burnings of books and Freud's books were among those that were consigned to the flames those who threw the books into the fire were enjoined to chant the following words in defiance of the soul corroding glorification of instinctual life and in the name of the nobility of the human soul I commit to the flames the writings of Sigmund Freud CS purse an American 19th century philosopher who was also a logician and a mathematician and who I very much admire wrote in the in an article which became a lecture and was beautifully entitled detached ideas on vitally important topics it is the instinct the sentiments that make the substance of the soul cognition is only its surface its locus of contact with what is external to it the eyes are we say the windows of the soul we see somebody's so in their eyes and in portraiture too there is a sense of contact with us oh and we can't quite get away can we from this idea I don't see why we should because it's very deep in us that something comes out of the eyes not just goes into it it's present in almost every culture and in every language what I quite like is the Hasidic idea of soul in which there are two distinct souls and they remind me somewhat of a couple of hemispheres I once described one is the animal soul which is all about self preservation and self enhancement and the other is a divine soul which is driven by the desire to reconnect with its source and our lives are the story of the interplay of these two souls they're not side by side by the way but they're sort of nested so that the divine soul is inside the animal so which is inside the body the soul is not the same as the body but it's not opposed to it either we need to go to people like Goethe and Blake to be able to understand that opposites don't have to eliminate one another in particular I like very much Goethe's idea that we find the infinite not by turning our backs on the finite but through the finite we find the general not by turning our backs on the particular but through the particular and that these are false dichotomies in other in fact in in in the Hasidic tradition the nature of cetera which is essentially the created world is the synthesis of everything and it's opposite for if they didn't possess the power of synthesis there would be no energy and anything this is rather like the idea and Heraclitus of harmony a two poles that are held in tension and out of which the richness of existence occurs so somehow it's something there that is in the world but not in the world that is in contact with something other but is also imminent here in the world and I like that because the idea of creation is to create relationship and so that this other nurse needs to be accessible it in the div night divine needs to be both transcendent and imminent at the same time I come back to that phrase in Iris Murdoch a light that shows the world this world as it really is the soul is what makes the world authentic it's what is really in touch with experience she also says it's terribly distant rather than any star we're sort of stretched out so it has that element of other nurse but it's brought together and so it's indefinable but not remote entire - a dowse we're thinking we might say we are steeped in soul he has this wonderful expression by means of all created things without exception the diviner sails us penetrates us and molds us we imagine it as distant and inaccessible whereas in fact we live steeped in it's burning layers so how do we contact this thing that is other well we need to make an effort we need to put ourselves in the disposition to understand it we're not going to understand it at all if we stand there and resistant to the idea and waiting for it to to sort of turn up as something credible to us and I'm reminded here of a joke which a Jewish friend told me and about a rabbi who's very poor but very spiritual and his life would be very much more comfortable if he had some money and he prays to God please let me win the lottery and his prayer never seems to be answered one day he's a prayer and God says to him look Samuel meet me halfway buy a ticket and III sort of feel there's a deep spiritual truth in that that we only get there if we are prepared to buy a ticket and so often we can say what it isn't and Hillman in in a work called suicide and the soul says the soul is a deliberately ambiguous concept resisting all definition in the same manner as do all ultimate symbols which provide the route and metaphors for the systems of human thought mind matter nature gravity time energy and God all four into this category so spirituality is often about not name because knowing means you've got it wrong it can't be defined it's not a concept it's a symbol not wholly of our making rabindranath tagore it talks about the ways in which one can understand the small wisdom is like water in a glass clear transparent pure the great wisdom is like the water in the sea dark mysterious impenetrable so as jung says there may be a danger of wanting to understand the meaning and by doing so over valuing the content which is subjected to a sort of intellectual analysis and interpretation so that the essentially symbolic character can no longer do its work and what goes missing is meaning and value for the subject so there's a sort of danger in my terms of the left hemisphere having to collapse too quickly into something familiar what is it precisely leaving therefore no place for the intuited and the implicit through which all great ideas in art in religion and in our lives are communicated making things more explicit doesn't actually make them easier to understand it means we understand something other then what it is that we're seeking to know sometimes things can speak very loud to us through rituals through a mythos which is not a fiction but is just another kind of truth from Lagos that one arrives at by sequential reasoning metaphor is a way to deal with the apathetic they say he who knows doesn't tell and he who tells doesn't know so how are we to approach this one is to take the idea of depth which I've mentioned once or twice here is Berlin Isaiah Berlin on depth the notion of depth is something with which philosophers seldom deal nevertheless it is one of the most important categories we use although I attempt to describe what profundity consists in as soon as I speak it becomes quite clear that no matter how long I speak new chasms open no matter what I say I always have to leave three dots at the end I'm forced to use language which is in principle not only today but forever inadequate for purpose you have no formula that will by deduction lead you to all the vistas open by profound sayings in this way it is something like the sublime except instead of the sublime without it is the sublime within and these two things surely correspond to one another which is why we feel our soul as we say expands in a sublime landscape the vastness of the view speaks to us internally and sometimes we encounter this also in more mundane aspect if you like of life or at least more familiar aspects of life such as a life of love and through those that we love in fact in a secular age one of the ways in which we can really understand that there is something beyond that we call the soul may be through arrows at its finest at its greatest young again interpreted by Hillman says that this is what makes meaning possible and deepens events into experience and which is communicated in love and there's a very nice piece of neuropsychological research recently and by Frederic semanko which suggested people who are happy or call themselves happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are enduring chronic adversity in other words they are stressed although their report happiness and it's people who have connections between nurses in their life that give it meaning that report being satisfied it's something deep but it's also something very hard to bring into focus it's that which grounds but is itself unseen like the eye the eye sees but we don't see the eye it is the ground of our seeing an attention again which makes the world what it is is an aspect of consciousness not a function of it the spiritual is often in the places where we're not looking directly but in the background the in-between Bonhoeffer calls it a kind of Cantus firmus using an idea from polyphonic music the melody as it were to reach all the other melodies provide the counterpoint and he makes the point that if that element in our life the spiritual is kept going as the Cantus firmus we can depart as far as we like away from that into the world the actual world a concrete world the material the fleshly the emotional the everyday without losing something I'm talking very much about the soul in general but what about each of our individual souls how do we square the idea of soul of something sort of generic and something particular well it seems to me that the whole of creation is about the making of things particular out of things that are whole and in the Gerty in' way they're not necessarily opposed to one another they may be aspects of one another individualization is part of creation achieving and unfolding into complexity that is not in the world so light now we need both quanta and qualia we need particles as well as waves we need individuals as well as flow and so is that which seems to me not to be in any way opposed to material existence but transcends it it's not separate from the material in there in the way that a wave is not separate from the water and yet the form the force field the thing that shapes it the thing in which it's instantiated is something concrete and not concrete at the same time and I would see this as an aspect really if you asked me my personal opinion and that's all I can give I would say there's something in the idea of pantheism the idea that there is multiplicity and unity without denying either and without delimiting the concept of the divine in the way that pantheism does so to wrap up a phrase of the American philosopher Eugene gamblin we think more than we can say we feel more than we can think we live more than we can feel and there's much else besides and perhaps the soul is what we mean when we reflect on that much else besides if the soul is to some extent dispositional ones yes you have knowledge one's view of what knowledge is for what experience is what it means then that maybe it's or a prerequisite for really understanding what the soul well I'm only speaking of course inevitably from from experience but it seems to me that if the so records with anything it occurred with an attitude a disposition a certain kind of attention to the world and it can be very much evoked by certain experiences with with music for example for me with the natural world with with love and friendship and with with things that I feel resonate with what that is and what I tried to say was that none of the terms that we might be you know liable to substitute for it really does the job you

Channel: RSA

Views: 52,270

Rating: 4.8553672 out of 5

Keywords: the, rsa, Iain McGilchrist, RSA, The RSA, Jonathan Rowson, Spirituality (Literary Genre), religion, the soul, soul

Id: pWme5Jea7p4

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 09 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/davethecamel]

No and nothing.

Good lecture.

[u/ryologic]

I would like to read a transcript of this, so I can extract the meaning from the big words.