Philosophy: Mind, Soul, Consciousness, Body - Part 3

So what is the soul actually?

Mysticism has had a very interesting answer for millennia. All souls are parts or mirror images of a single indivisible, all-embracing (world) soul that has always been and always will be. This definition of a world soul is not directly identical to the idea of "Anima Mundi" or "Psyche Tou Panthos", even though both the Latin and the Greek term literally mean nothing other than the World Soul. With the idea of "Anima Mundi" the notion is related that the universe, i.e. the macrocosm, is a structured, living, and animated organism – analogous to man who is the microcosm. I will come back to this later.

Science and philosophy have always struggled with the concept of the soul. Let's start – almost obligatory – with the ancient Greeks. In fact, notions of an immortal and perhaps over-individual soul that "enters" the body at birth to leave it at the onset of death are almost as old as humanity.

Aristotle believed that it was impossible to obtain secure knowledge of the soul. For him, there seemed to be no separation between soul and body. He taught that the soul is that portion of the human being by means of which he feels, perceives the world, moves in it, understands it. And the body is undoubtedly involved in feeling and perceiving: feelings trigger physical reactions. Our five senses are "body-bound": no seeing without eyes, no hearing without ears, no sense of touch without skin, no smelling without nose, no tasting without tongue (that's of course without consideration of physiological details).

Understanding involves thinking, and if not Aristotle, at least modern science knows that our brain is our mind; anyway they say so. So one might think that soul and body are identical. But that's not what Aristotle says! Rather, he thought the soul was "that which moves the body" (today we might say "which controls it"), and that cannot be identical to the body. However, he also says that there is no evidence of the existence of a disembodied soul, that the soul is bound to the body. One could interpret Aristotle as holding the soul as the unmoved mover of the body, an indication that there is something non-material that moves objects.  But Aristotle must not be understood to mean that the soul is either something that is trapped within our body, that controls it from within, so to speak, or that it is something outside of our body being connected with it by which means soever.

The soul, as Aristotle "defines" her, is not measurable or weighable, and she is indivisible; she is everywhere in our body; she is contained in every little part of our body. She is not material and yet has substance; but she is just a special substance that cannot be moved – the unmoved mover. For Aristotle, the body (matter) is first of all potentia, we could say potential energy, although not quite in the sense in which today's physics uses this term. Potentia: this is a set of possible actions that are implemented by the soul in actual reactions - in motion which is kinetic energy. The soul makes possibilities become facts – an idea that is not as antiquated as it might sound at first sight, since modern physics has encountered a similar concept in its attempts to understand the subatomic world. There are some indications that the material world exists as a "res potentia", in the imaginal so to speak, until consciousness allows it to become fact, that is to become "factual". I will come back to this later.

To be continued.