Ranga Sitaram
29th January 2023
The common man in the ancient times thought and talked about the soul (psuche) based on their lay understanding of the topic without much of an elaborate philosophical theory. People understood the soul as the source of life and as the essential difference between living and non-living things. Ancient Greek literature, especially from Homer, suggests the common folk and mythical view of the soul as a shadowy specter (Irwin, 1999). According to the Homeric tradition, the body had importance for life that death loses. Death separates the soul from the body rendering it without the vibrancy it had earlier. The ancient Greeks considered the soul as having the personality it bore during life, which continues to survive outside the body after death.
Heraclitus and the soul as Fire
Heraclitus (Graham, 2021; Adamso, 2014) associated the soul with Fire as it was the most fundamental substance in the universe for him. According to Heraclitus, the soul maintains the person’s identity and participates in ongoing change. Because of his notion of the soul as strongly connected to individual identity, Heraclitus believed that reflecting on the soul is akin to an inquiry into himself (Irwin, 1999). He maintained that we are misled to associate the soul with the senses. Heraclitus held that examining the soul is an attempt at understanding the cosmic reason, i.e., logos that orders the kosmos (Irwin, 1999, 200).
Democritus and the soul atoms
Democritus, an Atomist like Heraclitus, proposed that the soul is made of matter. Unlike Heraclitus, who had proposed Fire as the primary substance of the soul, Democritus held that atoms make up the soul. He reasoned that the soul is the basis of our thinking and action. He proposed that the soul contains smaller and smoother atoms than the body. Any stimulus from the external world that impinges on us sets the soul atoms in motion to assist in thinking and desiring that moves our body into action. This process is not unlike a stone hitting a pond of water, thus moving it into ripples (Irwin, 1999, 201).
The soul plays an essential part in Democritus’ ethics. The purpose of life, according to Democritus, was to be happy. Happiness is hard to attain when the soul atoms move in an agitated and berserk manner. For the soul atoms to be tranquil, we need to develop moderation in our habits and behavior, which will induce the soul atoms to be in their least agitated state, leading us to lead a calm and contented life.
There were criticisms of this Atomistic view of the soul in ancient philosophy. One major criticism was that the above theory needed to explain how different and specific thoughts, desires, decisions, and actions emerge from the movement of a collection of soul atoms. Aristotle opposed Democritus’ view that except for the movement of the atoms, the outcome of the thoughts and decisions was not real (Irwin, 1999, 201), which implies the unreal nature of these outcomes. According to Aristotle, thoughts and decisions belong to the formal and final causes of his four-fold causality theory (Shields, 2022).
Socrates and the soul in ethics
Socrates had a very different conception of the soul from all those who preceded him. Socrates believed that the soul dictates who we are and gives us our identity. The state of one’s soul but not the body, dictates one’s quality of life, a view in obvious contrast to the traditional Greek view of the soul, which placed the body as the essential characteristic of an individual. A physically strong individual is valiant in battle and good in life. Furthermore, while the Homeric view of the soul equated the separation of the soul from the body at death to the ultimate misfortunate that could befall an individual, Socrates maintained this being a desirable end point of life (Irwin, 1999; Nails, 2022).
According to Plato’s account of him in the Apology, Socrates held that the body and the senses constantly misguide us with their apparent illusions and aberrant perception. Senses are faulty as they allow for the opposing perception of the same object as two contradictory beliefs. As senses lead to misjudgment of the world, they can never lead to true knowledge but only false beliefs. They mislead us from understanding the truth while the soul can access true understanding, which is achieved through reason and contemplation. Further, the senses induce us to ever more bodily pleasures that, when taken to excess, prevent us from contemplation and true happiness. While Socrates did not discount the need for bodily well-being, he was very critical of the hedonistic way of life, which constantly attracts us to ephemeral pleasures that do not give us the good life.
Despite Socrates’ importance of the soul for human ethics, he did not have a theory of the soul and even rejected the need for such conceptualization. Socrates urged the people to place greater importance about their selves and not on their material possessions (Irwin, 1999, 202). He held that no other aspect of life was as important as our care for the soul. According to him, we benefit by developing a good soul; in corollary, our evil souls harm us.
In contemporary philosophy (Nails, 2022), it is not entirely clear how strongly the Greeks believed in the afterlife in the fifth century and prior to it. In Plato’s middle-period work, Phaedo, Socrates is said to have argued for the immortality of the soul, which was not accepted by the interlocutors who believed that the soul is made of matter and hence is destroyed by death. Further, Socrates is said to have asserted that the soul still retained its power and wisdom after death.
While the traditional Greek view of death was that it was the worst thing that could happen to the body and soul, for Socrates (according to Plato’s Apology), on the other hand, death relieved the individual of bodily pleasures. It moved him into the attainment of the pure soul. Although it is not entirely clear what Socrates thought about death, the Apology suggests that there were many ways in which he could have thought about death. On one account, Socrates thought of death as a dreamless sleep for eternity. Hence, given that we are unaware of our death, it is not to be feared. On the other hand, if the soul moves to Hades, the underworld after death, that was also something to be looked forward to, according to Socrates, because it is where one could continue the practice of contemplation. Socrates viewed the states of being alive and dead as sequentially followed by one another, which means that the soul continues its existence from one state to the other by separating from one animate body and returning to another (Nails, 2022). Thus, Socrates viewed death as a positive outcome and not to be mourned, in stark contrast to the traditional Greek view.
Plato and Dualism
Plato directly challenged the traditional Greek view that the soul gets destroyed after death with the Affinity Argument (Nails, 2022). He proposed that there are two kinds of things in the world: things made of matter, hence perceptible to the senses, and things not made of matter and hence not given to sense perception but grasped only by thought and intelligible. The former is given to dissolution and destruction after death, while the latter is exempt. The two mutually exclusive categories form living things such as human beings. According to the dualist conception of Plato, death destroys the body. At the same time, the soul is intelligible and exemplified in the Platonic concept of Forms such as beauty, justice, and equality (Nails, 2022). With this conceptual framework, Plato suggested that the soul has properties of thinking and reasoning, while the body can only perceive the world through the senses. Hence, the soul has intellectual properties of reason and wisdom, while the body is agitated and distracted by desire. In Plato’s theory of Dualism, the soul makes the person – his identity, while the body is the container of the soul. The soul, stuck in the body during life, is released from this entombment in death.
In Plato’s conception of the soul, it is not just important to be virtuous by doing good; it is even more vital that we understand why such actions are virtuous. Understanding the above comes through reason and contemplation, which forms the basis of the eternal truth of moral living. Thus, the soul, which is central to contemplation, is the one that participates in the contemplation of the everlasting truths and hence is itself undying.
This eternal nature of the soul is portrayed in Plato’s Phaedo through the character of Socrates. In this scene, Socrates is in prison, sentenced to death, waiting to drink Hemlock while his companions are saddened by his impending death. However, Socrates reminds them that his identity is not his body but his soul, which lasts even after his death, and that they should not mourn his death (Nails, 2022).
Plato provided three arguments for the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo. Plato encapsulated these arguments in his conception of Forms, which are immaterial things with three distinctive properties: Forms are eternal, indivisible, and unchanging. As souls are immaterial things, Plato considered them to be Forms. Hence, it follows that souls are eternal and cannot be destroyed. Souls are also indivisible and unchanging, following the properties of Forms.
In the Phaedo (103b-106e), Plato provides a rather elaborate and complicated argument why souls are eternal and cannot be eliminated. This argument is based on the necessary distinction between things and their properties. For example, a kitchen utensil has properties or states, such as being hot or cold, depending on whether it is heated. The property hot or cold itself cannot become the opposite property, i.e., hot cannot become cold or cold cannot become hot, which are contrary to each other. In other words, according to Plato, contrary properties cannot transform themselves from one to the other. Apart from the above, an object that implies a contrary property will not take on the contrary property; e.g., Fire implies the property of hot, and hence it will not assume the property of cold, and hence the contraries hot cannot co-exist. Following the above, the immaterial soul makes a material body alive and carries the property of life. The contrary property of life is death. Hence, when death takes over the body, the soul should depart or be destroyed because contrary properties do not co-exist. According to Plato, then, as an immaterial thing, the soul cannot be destroyed; hence, the soul should depart from the body when death takes over the body.
Aristotle’s Hylomorphism of the soul
Aristotle differed from the Dualists (e.g., Plato), who believed in the material body and immaterial soul. He also differed from the Materialists (e.g., Atomists and the Stoics), who believed that the soul is made of matter. Aristotle conceived the soul as representing the body’s function (Shields, 2022). This concept was named Hylomorphism, which is formed from two Greek words, hyle meaning matter and morphe meaning shape or form. According to Aristotle, a human is an integrated whole of soul and matter. Bodies need souls to be alive, and souls need bodies to exist—death eliminates both the body and the soul.
While Plato considered the soul an immaterial entity that leaves a body after its death and inhabits another body through reincarnation, Aristotle’s concept of Hylomorphism was incompatible with this idea, as souls and bodies were considered inseparable in life and perished in death. According to Aristotle, as the functional capability of each type of living being is different from another, so is each type of soul coupled with a specific type of body. While plant souls are capable of nutritive and reproductive functions while the plant is stationary, animal souls are enabled for mobility, sense perception, and interaction. Human souls, according to Aristotle, allow for many such functions but are also capable of rational thought. Aristotle argued that it is inconceivable for the soul to possess immorality and be capable of reincarnation because that would lead human bodies to have a plant or other animal souls and vice versa, all of which we do not normally encounter in nature. Aristotle’s conception of the soul breaks away from the traditional Greek conception of the soul and his predecessors, including Plato. Aristotle thought of the soul as the capability imparted to the body to perform its actions. The body and the soul are two sides of the same coin. If the soul encapsulates the body’s capacities, the body implements the capacities with the matter. However, without the soul, the body would be just a mass of matter without the capacities that the soul imparts to it. That was the inseparable conception of the soul that Aristotle proposed.
Aristotle defined the soul as the First Actuality of a living body. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle distinguished potentiality and actuality in three different levels. If we take the human capacity for knowing as an example, then according to Aristotle, we could have the following three levels:
- Potentiality: A person has a capacity for knowing. For example, I have the potential to know the route from Memphis to Nashville.
- First Actuality: A person has the capacity to know, but he/she may not be applying that capacity now. As an example, I know how to swim, but I’m not currently swimming.
- Second Actuality: A person has a capacity for knowing and is currently engaged in that activity. For example, an individual knows how to read and write and is currently involved in that activity.
From the preceding, the soul is the First Actuality of a living body and is organized to function in the world as it does, whether the living being is a human, an animal, or a plant. An analogy that is appropriate to understand Aristotle’s conception of the soul is the Axe Analogy, which asks, if an axe had a soul, what would it be? It is important to note that if we describe the axe by its material properties (i.e., wooden stick with a sharp metallic blade at the end), it would only be sufficient if we include its function (i.e., as a tool to chop wood). However, as an axe is an inanimate object, it is not to be misunderstood to have a soul, as the analogy only serves to illuminate Aristotle’s Hylomorphic conception of the soul.
The Epicureans and soul atoms
As Atomists, Epicureans believed that the soul is made of atoms and called such atoms soul atoms. According to this belief, a soulless body is unconscious and inert (Konstan, 2022). After death, the soul atoms disperse and can no longer support consciousness and life.
Epicureans distinguished between the soul’s role in rational judgment and sensations. Epicureans considered the soul atoms concentrated in the chest to be the seat of higher intellectual thought. In contrast, the soul atoms spread out in sensory organs, and other body parts were responsible for pain and sensory experience. Epicureans held that internal changes such as emotions, pain, sensations, and movements are all caused by the soul, which is itself an internal body. They saw no reason for our body to be affected by any other cause than another body. Hence, they thought of the soul as another body made of material things, namely the soul atoms. Interactions between the soul atoms bring about changes in our bodies. For the Epicureans, an immaterial soul cannot have any causal influence on the material body. The material soul can only move the material body.
As believed by the Epicureans, the material basis of the soul led them to reason that the soul does not persist after death, as all matter disintegrates after death. Hence, sensation, action, and intellectual thought cannot proceed without the soul’s atoms. Further, as pain and pleasure as products of sensation are absent after death, punishments in the afterlife and all the sadness and regret are no longer existent.
The material basis of the soul in Epicureanism has another implication. As the soul is made of matter, all sensations, perceptions, and thoughts are physical events and are ¨embodied¨ in the sense that they happen within the body and to the body. None of the so-called ¨mental events¨ is purely so and devoid of matter’s involvement (Konstan, 2022). Hence, abstract concepts such as good and bad, beautiful and ugly, and just and unjust are guidelines for life as conceived by man and not given to us a priori.
Epicureans believed that man’s primary goal in life is peace of mind and happiness that could only be achieved by freeing oneself from physical pain and mental anguish. Epicureans held that man develops a fear of death and afterlife punishments that result in anxiety and sorrow, leading to unreasonable desires (Konstan, 2022). Epicureans believed in training to correct deeply ingrained habits, including avoiding involvement in politics, eliminating the belief of god’s involvement in human affairs and the fear of god, avoiding bad habits in marriage and sex, and most importantly, developing friendship, which they believed was essential to good life. Epicureans believed that such habits would help eliminate fears and desires to attain physical and mental fulfillment and peace of mind.
The Stoics and the inseparable soul
Like the Epicureans, the Hellenistic Stoics also believed in the soul’s material nature. However, unlike the Epicureans, the Stoics held that the soul takes on the form of the human body. In this regard, they differed from Aristotle’s notion that the soul is an immaterial entity. They questioned Aristotle: if the immaterial soul and the material body separate in death, how can an immaterial entity separate from a material entity? We can separate objects based on color, but we cannot separate the color and other such properties from the objects themselves. According to the Stoics, properties like color are immaterial Forms, and hence they cannot be separated from matter. Similarly, the soul cannot be separated from the body.
The Stoic conception of the soul as a material entity is centered on their notion of pneuma or breath (Baltzly, 2019). Pneuma fills the body and endows it with different qualities and abilities. The Stoics held a monistic conception of the soul, in that although there are different abilities or faculties of the soul, all faculties are controlled by a commanding faculty associated with the sense organs. Hence, all senses, thoughts, intellectual pursuits, and actions are functions of the commanding faculty of the soul. According to the Stoics, volitional judgment can give assent or reject sensorial or rational impressions in higher animals, such as humans. To provide assent to a sensory impression is to consider the sense data as true and otherwise as false. In the Stoical conception, such judgments are what the soul does.
In stark contrast to the Epicureans, the Stoics believed that pleasures, such as love and passion, and emotions, such as fear and anger, were caused by faulty senses and mistaken judgments (Baltzly, 2019). A person of moral and intellectual perfection would not fall prey to the senses. The lay phrase ¨stoic calm¨ is a person’s mental state immune to personal suffering.
Like the Epicureans, the Stoics considered philosophy as a way of life. Unlike some other ancient philosophers, they did not look at philosophy as an exciting pastime or even knowledge (Baltzly, 2019). To the Stoics, philosophy is a life practice that benefits the practitioner. They believed that the Stoical practice changes one’s worldview and improves life. Aspects of Epicurean and Stoical philosophies were later absorbed into Christianity.
The Hellenistic philosophers, including the Stoics, based their ethics on Aristotle’s principles of teleology by which the goal in life is specified, and then the method to achieve the goal follows from their philosophical view. For the Epicureans, happiness was the goal in lif and was attained through the pursuit of pleasure and the elimination of pain. For the Stoics, happiness was achieved by understanding and pursuing genuine goodness. The Stoics believed that goodness comes from the benefits human practice brings to the individual under all circumstances. Hence, goodness is not conditional or contingent on entities or events but independent of them. For example, money is not always beneficial to the possessor as he may use it to buy substances (such as alcohol or drugs) that may be harmful to his life. The Stoics held that good things were human qualities such as wisdom, courage, and moderation.
Conclusion
Discussions and theorizing about the soul continued after the Hellenistic period and the Stoics. Later philosophers renewed interest in Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories and developed new theories of the soul. Christian theologians and philosophers were greatly influenced by the ancient theories of the soul and adapted them into their teachings and practices.
References
- Irwin, Terence (ed.), “Classical Philosophy”, Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Graham, Daniel W., “Heraclitus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
- Adamso, Peter., “Classical Philosophy”, Oxford University Press, 2014.
- Shields, Christopher, “Aristotle”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
- Nails, Debra and S. Sara Monoson, “Socrates”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
- Konstan, David, “Epicurus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.).
Baltzly, Dirk, “Stoicism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta
Eclectic Musings by Ranga Sitaram 