Soul

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1901, a physician named Duncan MacDougall placed dying patients, bed and all, onto an industrial-sized scale. He wanted to weigh the soul as it left the body. One patient, he claimed, lost three-fourths of an ounce, about 21.3 grams, at the moment of death. The number stuck. The science did not. But MacDougall's strange experiment touches something nearly universal. Anthropologists and psychologists have found that most humans, across cultures, believe in a soul or spirit, and distinguish it from the body and the mind. What is this immaterial thing people have insisted on for so long? Religions describe it in wildly different ways. Buddhism denies it has any permanent existence. Jainism says every plant and bacterium has one. Philosophers from Socrates to Kant have tried to define it, weigh it against reason, and ask whether it can survive death. The disagreements run deep, and they reveal as much about us as about the soul itself.

• 2. Roots Of A Word

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  The Old English word saawl is where the modern English "soul" begins. Its earliest attestations in the Oxford English Dictionary reach back to the 8th century. In the Vespasian Psalter, at 77.50, it carries the sense of self, life, or animate existence. King Alfred used it in his translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae to mean the immaterial, spiritual, or thinking part of a person, set against the physical body. The word reaches across the old Germanic languages. Old Frisian had sele, which could also mean salvation or a solemn oath. Gothic had saiwala, Old High German seula, Old Saxon seola, and Old Norse sala. The living descendants are close at hand. Dutch speakers say ziel and German speakers say Seele, both branches of the same ancient root that once meant the breath of a living thing.

• 3. The Self That Isn't

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  Buddhism takes the boldest position of all: there is no permanent self. The doctrine of anatman, not-self, sits at the foundation of the tradition. Early Buddhists were suspicious of the soul's spiritual value, rejecting the dualism of mortal body and eternal soul that Jainism proposed. That dualism, they noted, drove some ascetics to starve themselves to free the soul from its bodily prison. The Buddha placed two extremes on either side of him. Eternalists asserted the soul's immortality. Annihilationists denied it, holding that the soul dies with the body, and so prescribed self-indulgence to enjoy the senses while they lasted. He rejected both, tracing each to a craving: the desire for immortality when life is pleasant, and the desire for self-discontinuity when life turns painful. An unchanging soul, in this view, conflicts with dependent origination and the impermanence of the five aggregates. Because everything arises and dissolves, nothing is permanent, including the sense of a self. The only absolute is Shunyata, emptiness. A famous dialogue makes the point vivid. In Milinda's Questions, the Greek king Milinda asks the monk Nagasena who he is. Nagasena answers that there is no Nagasena, only a label. He points to the king's chariot and asks whether its essence is the axle, the wheels, or the frame. Milinda admits it is none of these, yet the word "chariot" still means something, naming the assembly of parts. Just so, Nagasena says, there is no Nagasena beyond the aggregates that make him. The comparison has been likened to David Hume's bundle theory.

• 4. Many Names For Breath

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  Robert Alter, the biblical translator and Hebrew scholar, rejects "soul" as a valid English rendering of the Hebrew Bible. The word, he argues, smuggles in a Christian mind-body dualism that the Hebrew text does not contain. The Hebrew terms are layered. Nefesh means living being, ruach means wind, neshamah means breath, chayah means life, and yechidah means singularity. Early Jewish belief had no immortal soul separable from the body. That idea became common only around the onset of the Common Era, driven by a growing belief in an afterlife. Kabbalah later mapped the soul onto five elements matching five worlds: nefesh tied to natural instinct, ruach to emotion, neshamah to intellect, chayah gazing at God's transcendence, and yechidah, the essence bound to God. Islam works with two words of its own. Ruh denotes the divine spirit or the breath of life, while nafs names a person's disposition. In the Quran, the soul comes in three kinds: the commanding self that is always evil and must be restrained, the accusing self of the deserters, and the tranquil self that enters paradise. Judaism preserved a paradox in the Talmud, allowing the soul to exist on physical and spiritual levels at once. Some Jewish traditions even held that the soul is housed in the luz bone, though they disagreed whether it sits at the top of the spine or at the bottom.

• 5. The Eternal And The Plural

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  In Jainism, every living being holds a soul, from a plant or bacterium to a human, and the idea forms the very basis of the religion. The soul, or jiva, has no beginning and no end. It is eternal but changes form until it attains liberation, surviving physical death. Matter, time, space, motion, and rest fall under ajiva, meaning not-soul. A jiva is either samsari, caught in the cycle of rebirths, or mukta, liberated. The same attributes belong to every soul, but in a liberated siddha they are fully manifest, while in the bound soul they show only in part. Souls that conquer wicked emotions while still in the body are called arihants. Virchand Gandhi put the Jain view plainly: "the soul lives its own life, not for the purpose of the body, but the body lives for the purpose of the soul." Shamanism multiplies the soul rather than perfecting it. Soul dualism, the belief in two or more souls, is essential to the central practice of soul flight. There is usually a body soul, linked to bodily functions and waking awareness, and a free soul, which can wander during sleep or trance. Among the Tagbanwa people of the Philippines, a person has six souls, one true free soul and five secondary ones. In Austronesian healing, illness is treated as soul loss, and the shaman cures the sick by returning the free soul that may have been stolen by an evil spirit or lost in the spirit world.

• 6. Philosophers At The Table

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  Socrates, at his defense trial, summarized his entire teaching as an exhortation to his fellow Athenians to excel in matters of the psyche, since all bodily goods depend on such excellence. The reference is Apology 30a-b. The Greek word psykhe comes from psykhein, to breathe, and the Latin anima carries the same sense, the breath that animates the living. The Greeks called being alive being "ensouled." Plato was the first thinker in antiquity to gather the soul's many functions into one coherent conception. For him the soul is the essence of a person, an incorporeal and eternal occupant that thinks even after death and is reborn in new bodies. He divided it into three parts placed in different regions of the body: logos, reason, in the head; thymos, spiritedness, near the chest; and eros, appetite, in the stomach. He compared these parts to the caste system of a state, each contributing so the whole works well. Aristotle took a different road in De Anima. He called the soul the first actuality of a naturally organized body, and argued against its separate existence. For him, body and soul were matter and form. The full actualization of an eye is to see; the full actualization of a human is to live a life in accordance with reason. He ranked natural beings in three levels, plants, animals, and people, with three degrees of soul. Whether any part of the soul survives remains contested, since the obscure fifth chapter of the third book hints that the active intellect alone is immortal.

• 7. Reason And Its Limits

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  While imprisoned, Avicenna composed his "Floating man" thought experiment to prove the substantial nature of the soul. He asked his readers to imagine themselves suspended in the air, cut off from every sensation, with no contact even with their own bodies. Even then, he argued, one would retain self-consciousness. The idea of the self, he concluded, does not logically depend on any physical thing, and the soul is a primary given, a substance. Rene Descartes later refined the same insight, saying he could abstract from all external things but not from the supposition of his own consciousness. Avicenna placed Aristotle's source of the soul in the heart. Ibn al-Nafis, an Arab physician, rejected that, arguing the soul relates to the entire body whose temperament is prepared to receive it, and defined it as nothing more than "what a human indicates by saying I." Thomas Aquinas reasoned from knowledge itself. Because the knower becomes what he knows, the soul cannot be corporeal, for then a known corporeal thing would come to be inside it. So the soul has an operation independent of any bodily organ and can exist without a body. Aquinas held the soul to be tota in toto corpore, entirely present in every single part of the body, unable to be placed in the heart or the brain alone. Immanuel Kant drew a sharp line. He identified the soul as the "I" in the strictest sense, but argued that inner experience can neither be proved nor disproved. "We cannot prove a priori the immateriality of the soul," he wrote, only that its properties cannot be recognized from materiality. In his Paralogisms of Pure Reason he charged that rational psychology mistakes the mere thought of the "I" for genuine cognition of it as an object. Since a person has no intuition of the "I" itself, the soul's true nature stays out of reach.

• 8. Weighing The Immaterial

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  Modern philosophy of mind offers three dualist accounts of how soul and body relate. Interactionism holds that physical and mental events act on each other in both directions, and humans are naturally inclined to favor it. Parallelism denies any causal link, letting mental and physical events merely coincide, each domain causing only its own kind. Epiphenomenalism allows causation in a single direction, physical to mental, and likens the mind to a bodily shadow, a passive byproduct that drives nothing. Psychology returned to the old questions in its own language. The cognitive scientist Jesse Bering and the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey argue that humans are born as soul-body dualists, inclined from the start to believe in a soul. The philosopher Steward Goetz adds that ordinary people, at all times and in all places, have believed in a distinction between soul and body. This is why MacDougall's scale still draws attention. He chose six dying patients in nursing homes, four with tuberculosis, one with diabetes, one with unspecified causes, picking conditions that left them still enough to measure. The physicist Robert L. Park later wrote that the experiments hold no scientific merit, and the psychologist Bruce Hood noted the weight loss was neither reliable nor replicable. The number 21 grams outlived the proof it was meant to be.