Do You Have a Soul?

That is Socrates talking in Phaedo, Plato’s account of the last conversation of Socrates’ life. If the soul is immortal, then surely Socrates is right.  Indeed, if the soul is immortal, it is hard to imagine how that could be wrong.

In the phrase “if the soul is immortal,” one might think that it is the “if” which is the point of discussion.  But, as it turns out, the “if” isn’t the problem at all.  The problem these days is the word “soul.”

We talked about this book in one of my reading groups (The Grecian Urn Seminar). The room was sharply divided on whether there is such a thing as a soul.  Socrates spends a lot of time in the dialogue proving that your soul existed before you were born and will continue to exist after you are dead.  But, in order to figure out the life-span of the soul, it is obviously first necessary to believe in the existence of the thing itself.

The soul is not much in fashion in intellectual circles these days.  What is the soul?

To hear the chatter in the academic world, the soul is dead.  With the extraordinary advances in brain imaging, people have become quite confident that our brains are making decisions before we are even conscious that these decisions are being made.  There is incredible confidence that the day is not far off when we will have cracked the code and we will be able to predict what you will think by watching your brain at work. Note: that is not “predict what you will do,” but “predict what you will think.” Free will has died.  Your thoughts are just neuro-physical-chemical reactions in the lump of cells we call your brain.

Having shown that there is no free will, that you are just a lump of flesh falsely thinking it is making decisions, there is no need for and no room for the soul anymore. Once we can observe your thoughts as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen, what is left for the soul to do?

Ah, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The strange thing about the soul which has been destroyed by modern research is that it bears almost zero resemblance to the soul as discussed by Paul or Augustine or Aquinas or…well, by anyone who ever took the soul seriously.  Nobody who ever believed the soul was real and important would be the least bit troubled by all that research on the brain. 

Now I understand that modern scientists and philosophers are all far too cool and hip to actually go read a theology book and take the argument seriously and think about it for five minutes before they rush out to declare the soul is done and gone.  But, surely all the cool kids could at least read Plato.  Right? 

And, further, is not one part of us body, and the rest of us soul?
To be sure.
And to which class may we say that the body is more alike and akin?
Clearly to the seen: no one can doubt that.
And is the soul seen or not seen?
Not by man, Socrates.
And by “seen” and “not seen” is meant by us that which is or is not visible to the eye of man?
Yes, to the eye of man.
And what do we say of the soul? is that seen or not seen?
Not seen.
Unseen then?
Yes.
Then the soul is more like to the unseen, and the body to the seen?
That is most certain, Socrates.
And were we not saying long ago that the soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses)—were we not saying that the soul too is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard when under their influence?
Very true.
But when returning into herself she reflects; then she passes into the realm of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom?
That is well and truly said, Socrates, he replied.

The soul is by definition the part of man which is unseen.  By definition.  So, if someone wants to come along as talk about all the things we can now see, that discussion is by definition not about the soul at all. 

To repeat what should have been obvious: by definition, the existence of the soul cannot be disproven by any physical means. 

The mistake being made here is, to be honest, a bit shocking.  Consider the argument: “we cannot prove the existence of the soul, therefore the soul does not exist.”  Obviously faulty logic.  How about “I cannot reason out why the soul needs to exist, therefore the soul doesn’t exist”?  Or, “I cannot provide a precise definition of the soul, therefore there is no such thing”?  Or…well, you get the idea.  These are all just variations on a theme.

Imagine we define the soul as the unseen and unseeable part of a human, the divine spark in the image of God, that part of a human which longs for God or Heaven or immortality or truth.  The soul is, in other words, the essence of the person, the immortal part of the person, the only part of the person that really makes a person a person instead of merely a hunk of decaying flesh.  Such a soul would not even be fully describable in human language; it is something that transcends the physical realm that we can sense. 

Now, defining the soul that way does not prove that it exists.  But, if that is what a soul is, then it cannot be proven to exist. It would only be discoverable by faith.

And recall, the argument “If something can only be discoverable by faith, then it does not exist” is not a reasonable or logical argument.

Incredibly, Socrates provided a description of all those in the modern age convinced that they have proven the soul does not exist:

the soul which has been polluted, and is impure at the time of her departure, and is the companion and servant of the body always, and is in love with and fascinated by the body and by the desires and pleasures of the body, until she is led to believe that the truth only exists in a bodily form, which a man may touch and see and taste and use for the purposes of his lusts—the soul, I mean, accustomed to hate and fear and avoid the intellectual principle, which to the bodily eye is dark and invisible, and can be attained only by philosophy

That passage is pretty funny when you think about it.  Feel free to use it the next time someone tells you that all truth exists only in a bodily form in the realm of things we can observe.