To avoid all quibbling over the term man in the title, be it clarified right away that this stands here for person or the human per se. No emphasis on gender.
Soul is a squishy term, it has no correspondence in science, so no experiment is possible to prove its existence or locus, or prove its presence or effects.
And it’s best definition may come through inference. Such as in: the sum total of a person is more than the sum of its measurable parts. The inference is that the total includes additional “element” that is neither a discrete part nor the glue that holds it all together. Instead it is the meaning that springs from what it means that a person is alive. When a person dies all the parts are still there, but they lost their meaning, because they no longer serve a function, even if quick transfer to another living body may give one or another part a new, very different meaning again. For, to whoever’s new mind the old part would be subsumed, it would execute entirely different commands, intents and dreams.
The part that immediately loses all functionality and cannot be transposed, at least not as of yet, is the brain, the body part in which modern man may most likely locate the soul, for, here we assume awareness, consciousness, knowledge and feeling, those four, which would constitute meaning and humanness.
We know now that humans are not the only ones to possess those four abilities, individually or in their totality. But we would claim to have more of each of them. Should we, then, also claim a monopoly on the soul?
This is tricky territory. White men disputed that women could have a soul, or slaves, or black men. To dispute that animals could have a soul may fall into the same sense of entitlement leading to the same fallacy. But if we define soul not by who doesn’t have one (a rock, an automobile, a robot?) but what the concept of soul offers, we may be on more fertile ground.
Because of my severe doubts on the possibility of an afterlife, at least in any biological sense beyond remembrance by our kin or of our DNA which may live forth beyond our death, let’s also not talk about the soul as a survivor of death or the soul leaving a body to live elsewhere.
Instead, I prefer to think of the soul as a great proxy to what we are beyond the sum of physical parts. Foremost, soul would be more than consciousness, awareness, knowledge and feeling, even more than the sum of those four. Soul would be not a function of our mind even though it would have a lot to do with it, and with placing ourselves in the universe and amidst humanity.
Humanity, in all of history, is the unlikely event of humans evolving during the millennia it took to shape us into what we are, against all odds. The soul may well be the vessel in which our DNA bubbles into some kind of preconsciousness of our collective history. Like the baby chicken supposedly is born with a sense of the danger emanating from a bird of prey. Collective pain, hope and triumph lives in us not only in the mutations that shaped our bodies and minds but possibly also in a subconscious awareness of ourselves as a species. It’s locus could be called soul.
The universe as the totality of everything is so infinitely much larger than us and so infinitely older than us that it is in us as an imprint, a preexisting “knowledge” that manifests itself as an echo, a reverberation and resonance. It surely has formed us and while it allows us to capture ever more refined glimpses of it, it captures our emotions and senses far beyond whatever knowledge we may be able to gain of it. The universes concrete manifestations such as day and night, the seasons and aging routinely overwhelm us with longings, sadness, desire and inspiration that we can’t explain and that seem to come simply from being within it.
Every time we take the time to observe the waning of the day, the change in the sounds of nature, we can feel a small bit of death. Conversely the rising sun in the morning the unfolding of another day like birth lifts the spirit and the soul, providing the power and confidence to face and enjoy what it will bring. Every being seems to share this.
The passing seasons evoke the same emotions in an even bigger way, so powerfully so, that they feel like the reverberations of the stars; something humans have believed long before they knew much at all about the stars, or what a universe would be. We may still be way off from any real knowledge of the universe and how it unfolded in the 13.7 billions of years of its existence, or of what, precisely, it is made of and how it got to be to what we can perceive today. Which, of course is not a certain point in time at all, considering how long the images of the far away places travel before they reach us and how many different times we can glimpse all at once.
In this vexing kaleidoscope of being and existence, in which hardly anything is what it seems to be, ephemeral terms like dark matter, premonition or soul can be useful. Soul is, at the very least, a very useful placeholder when we speak about life and ourselves as players in its big theater.
That is my take on soul this 2nd of August in the year 2019 while evening settles over the Jefferson Forest after day in which absence of the usual routine allowed me to “dangle” my soul a bit.
