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Part a) Distinctions between Body and Soul
The problem It is part of the core belief
in many religious traditions that the individual survives the body after
death and is involved in some sort of personal afterlife. In some faiths it is believed that the soul
moves from one body to another, as in reincarnation and this is called the
‘Transmigration of the soul’. This is
a belief that began with Plato and was incorporated into the Christian church
by Dualism Plato argued in his analogy of the cave that the every day ‘real’ world was in fact an illusion and the actual real world was a world of ideal forms. This was accessible when one became spiritually and intellectually enlightened and found the memory of the forms within oneself as innate knowledge. We all therefore participate in the world of illusion, but also the world of forms and perfection. The soul belongs to the world of forms and is immaterial, thinking and of the real spiritual world. The body is material and is linked to the world of illusion. The soul survives the body on death. The following extract is from the AS Plato revision guide and gives Plato’s
arguments in greater detail. Plato thinks there are certain opposites operating in our view of the world. The world of forms opposing physical objects, appearance-opposing reality, senses opposing reason. In the same way Plato sees us made of two parts, body and soul. This is known as ‘dualism’. o The body is physical, in a state of change, the source of physical sensation, mortal and unreliable. The body is our appearance to others and is able to pass data, via the 5 senses, to the mind in order for it to form opinion. o The soul is unchanging, eternal, immortal and the source of intellect and reason. Our minds and souls are able to comprehend truth and the world of forms beyond the physical world. o The mind/soul and body often oppose each other. The mind wishes to focus on thought and the spiritual to gain real knowledge via the forms. The body is interested in physical sensation such as eating, sleeping etc. The mind is often overcome with desires and states such as greed and hunger, pain and sadness etc and the mind is unable to focus on anything else until these needs are met and this prevents spiritual and mental development. o The body is seen as a nuisance and a bind, it is not the real person. Our everyday language supports this. I say ‘I have a pain in my leg’- this implies that something other than me is having the pain, that is, the leg in which there is pain is separate to me. Otherwise I would say,’ I am pain in my leg’, which would take ownership of the leg and the pain as me. o The soul directs the body. It is the charioteer, which brings the twin horses of mind and body to work together. If the body gains charge it will waste its time on destructive physical pursuits, if the mind gains total control it will do so to the neglect of the health of the body. Plato recognised that his philosophers must have souls and minds well developed and in charge, but care of the body, whilst it must be minimal to avoid distraction, should be given in the form of good diet and exercise to keep the mind and body working efficiently. o The soul is immortal. It exists before being in the body and exists after the death of the body. It is unchanging, thus must always exist. This is tied to his idea of innate knowledge, which claims we have knowledge of the forms born into us from previous existence. The purpose of education is to remember the forms, which are obscured by our rebirth into a physical form. o Knowledge gained by the soul and opinion gained by perception is explained with the analogy of sight. Sight needs an object to be seen an eye to see and also light to illuminate the object. The light is the form of good; the eye is our sense data. In order for knowledge rather than opinion to be gained we need sense data, but also knowledge of the good, or else we do not see the truth clearly. o Transmigration of the soul is when the soul leaves the body at death. It is then that true worth is established. Physical possessions and the benefits or afflictions of the body are left behind. Plato had two arguments for the existence of the soul; the argument from opposites argues that everything has its opposite, big has small, noble has humble, violent has peaceful etc. In this way we can see the body exists and it must have an opposite, in every respect this is the soul. The argument from knowledge is the second argument and states that we are aware of inferior and inaccurate opinion. We would not know it to be inferior and untrue unless we had something accurate and true to compare it to. Therefore there must be a source of this perfect knowledge – that is the soul that contains the innate idea of forms. Thus the soul must exist. Descartes Rene Descartes was a French philosopher who was interested in finding true knowledge. This search was called his ‘project’. He began with global sceptical doubt. This meant that he meant not just to doubt if the next bus would be on time or if the chair was stable, but to doubt if everything he held to be true was in fact true. He came up with three arguments to introduce this doubt; 1. Argument from illusion- we know that our senses can be deceived in many ways, so how can we trust them to be giving us in any sense a ‘real’ world? 2. Dream argument- we are aware of dreaming in such a vivid way that we think our dreams are real. If we can be deceived in this way how do we know what we call ‘real’ is not a deception? 3. The evil demon argument- imagine an evil demon that can deceive us about anything and chooses to deceive us about every aspect of our experience, thought and emotion. If we cannot prove that this is not happening to us then we must accept it could be happening, thus nothing we currently believe to know can be counted as knowledge. Descartes’ does not want to remain at this level of scepticism and so asks himself if there is anything he can be sure of. He hits on the fact that he is aware that there is something existing to ask the question ‘is something existing?’. This questioning thing he calls the ‘cogito’, or the ‘I’. Hence the phrase ‘cogito ergo sum’, or ‘I think therefore I am’. This cogito must be distinct from the body, which I know can be deceived. Therefore he comes up with certain distinctions which make his dualism clear. · The mind/soul is separate to the body and brain. · The soul leaves the body on death and is therefore not part of the body. · The body is corporeal matter, the soul is non-corporeal. · Corporeal matter has dimension (length, breadth and depth) and its essence is to take up space, the non-corporeal soul lacks dimension and its essence is thought. · The soul is the seat of all thought feeling, sensation and knowledge. · The body is the source of physical sensations and activity. · The body and mind affect each other, but the mind is, ideally, in charge. This type of theory is called interactionism. Parallelism This is a type of dualism which claims that there is no direct interaction between the body and soul merely that the two are in synchronisation with each other. This theory attempts to head of the problem as to how two distinct and different things like body and soul can interact. (the second bullet pointed problem with dualism below). However, it creates the further problem of explaining what it means to say there are a body and a soul if the two never interact? Epiphenomenalism This claims that the body can affect the mind i.e. produce the mental state of a cat, but the mind cannot affect the body. Again this tries to sidestep the problem of how bodies and minds interact, but still to maintain that there is some connection between the two. However, even just body to mind interaction seems to leave the mind with no part to play and the interaction of the body and mind unexplained. Assessment of Dualism Plato arguments from opposites and of knowledge are the reasons given for the soul and they do not bear close scrutiny;
Descartes arguments have been much criticised, but the main criticisms relevant to us are; 1. That it does not follow that because I am surer of my mind than my body that there is not a body as the source of the mind. 2. That the sceptical arguments do not reduce me to a soul but in fact reduce me further o the level of the single question,’ Do I exist?’, if this is all I am then I have a reason to doubt the soul. Dualism in general has come under criticism from many sources; · Bernard Williams maintained that who we were was linked to what we were physically. I cannot separate myself from my physical body; therefore the soul is an illusion. · If the soul is non-material and the body is material and the body affects the soul and vice-versa, how does this interaction take place? It is hard to imagine a thing without dimension or physical form having any effect on a physical, dimensional body. · Scientists have found strong correlation between the mind and the brain which seems to suggest the soul is just a function of the brain and not a separate thing. Materialism Materialism is the claim that there is nothing immaterial and thus everything can be explained in a materialistic way. Thus there is no room for an immaterial soul. There are several ideas linked to this idea of materialism; 1. Hard and soft determinism – determinism is the philosophical theory which states that every event has a cause. This is one of the ideas that underlies modern science. It is claimed that if we could track every chain of cause and effect back to the beginning (if indeed there is a beginning), then we would have a perfect understanding of the universe. It is a materialist idea because it holds that only matter exists a part of this chain of cause and effect. It is at odds with metaphysical theories which claim that there is free will, or causes, such as God, outside the material world. Hard determinism is the view that all events without exception have a cause and are the result of a chain of cause and effect. There is no room for free will and the idea of freedom is an illusion. This idea is common in science and a branch of psychology called ‘behaviourism’ founded by J B Watson uses this idea to try and explain human behaviour purely in terms of cause and effect. He believed in the idea of ‘conditioning’, which is the idea that creatures can be trained, or conditioned, to give a certain response to a certain stimuli. Thus our behaviour is a result of response to a stimuli and not a choice we make. Soft determinism is the idea that in the natural world events are a result of cause and effect, but human beings can use their will and decide freely between different options. This does not mean that humans are not influenced by events, but that the ultimate choice is his, 2.
Realism – this
is the epistemological theory which supported the scientific age and its
claims. It is the basic idea that the
world is pretty much as it appears. There
is no other world which contains the real truth; it is up to science to
investigate the real world of objects.
As an empiricist and a realist John Locke held that the mind was like
a ‘blank slate’ upon which experience writes knowledge. From this perspective there is little room
for the soul, which is distinctly non-empirical. It is this view which is incorporated into
materialism as the claim that there is no world other than the material and
no immaterial substance or object. Gilbert Ryle Ryle is a philosopher who, in his book,’ The concept of mind’ (1949), claimed that the soul was nothing more than the ‘ghost in the machine’. This was a derogatory remark expressing the view that the human body is a biological machine and the idea of the soul is as superstitious and ridiculous as a belief in ghosts. Ryle describes this belief as a ‘category mistake’. This simply means that we make a linguistic mistake when we refer to certain qualities as contained in the soul, when they are in fact contained in the physical self. The existence of a ‘soul’ is simply unnecessary to explain the qualities which we ascribe to ourselves. Dawkins There have been many materialist scholars. One of the most recent academics and popularists of the materialist view is the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In a series of books, such as ‘The blind watchmaker’ and ‘the selfish gene’ Dawkins has repeatedly attacked the religious concept that there is a God, a soul, or an afterlife. His basic idea is that evolutionary theory is sufficient to explain all the order within the organic world, including man. A similar explanation is assumed with the physical sciences of physics and chemistry explaining the non-organic world. As such this rejects the need for a metaphysical world, including the soul. Daniel Dennett, a contemporary writer, in his book Consciousness Explained, attempts to explain brain functions as a source of the thoughts, feelings and self-awareness experiences which dualists have put down to the soul. His theory focuses on the idea of different parts of the brain and the way they communicate with each other giving the impression that there is an ‘I’ which observes the world and is the recipient of the feelings and thoughts we receive. Assessment – Dawkins is a convincing popularist of science, but he adds little that is new to the debate. The teleological argument for example, posits that God is the designer behind the universe and the fruits of his creation include the system of evolution. Therefore the order and system which Dawkins counts against the existence of God in fact count in his favour. It must also be recognised that Dawkins, as do many scientists, uses a reductive method to analyse religion. This is of the variety,’ Religion is nothing more than…’ and in Dawkins case he sees religion as an outdated superstition believed by the gullible. The danger of this approach is that it ignores the broader picture of religion as a highly diverse and complex set of beliefs and practices which span huge geographic and temporal expanses and huge numbers of people. To reduce religion to a simple maxim or phenomena reduces it to something which cannot account for religions complexity. Dennett’s idea tries to explain self awareness, namely that ‘we’ are aware of thoughts feelings and perceptions. This tends to support the dualist view that there is an ‘I’ which is aware of the body it inhabits. Dennett’s view is that rather than a separate body which the ‘I’ is aware of, the ‘I’ is located in one portion of the brain, observing the operations of the other areas of the brain. The failing with this and other neurological theories is its failure to locate the actual place of perception within the brain. If we are seeing a tree where does the image of the tree exist in the state we perceive it? Hick John Hick is a famous philosopher of religion and has asked the question whether a materialist view necessarily excludes the possibility of a personal existence after death. It should be noted that this does not claim the continued existence of a soul as dualists imagine it, but of the person (who could be called the soul), carrying on in any form after the death of the original person. Hick proposes a theory of
re-creation. Person X lives in ‘Someone will ask,’ How can the dead be raised to life?’ You fool! When you sow a seed in the ground it does not sprout to life unless it dies… God provides that seed with the body he wishes’. Therefore, literal material existence after death is possible and is within Gods power. Assessment – Hicks claim here has the drawback that it does not indicate if God has or will do this merely that it is not logically impossible to assume that he could. Also, the existence of the soul, in the dualist sense is not proven and it is doubtful if a traditional believer would be willing to accept Hicks account as an account of a soul, rather than a description of how a physical facsimile was a possible way of continuing the physical ‘I’. Idealism Idealism is a philosophical view which provides an interesting alternative to dualism or materialism. Idealism starts with the problems of realism (which as we have seen is linked with materialism). Realism (representative) claims that our senses transmit a sensory picture of the world to our minds. For example, there is a cat, my eyes receive sensory information about the cat, and I get a picture of the cat in my head which pretty much resembles the cat. The classic problem with this is known as the ‘veil of perception’. This states that because we cannot perceive the cat directly, as it is, without using our senses, we cannot know what the cat is or indeed if it really exists at all. Therefore, the existence of ‘real’ things in general is never certain and I have reason to doubt the evidence of my senses. Bishop George Berkeley was such an Idealist who said that because our senses cannot be trusted to show us the real world, all we can know are the ideas in our mind. Therefore we are just this world of ideas with no material world. This view rejects dualism, because we cannot have a material body, only an idea of one. Equally, we cannot be just material as I have no evidence of matter at all, only of ideas. Assessment – Later Idealists, such as Immanuel Kant, claimed that the continuity of our ideas of the world can be explained by the order our mind imposes on sense data. The cat continues to exist because my mind orders the world via categories such as space, time and causality. Thus it is not surprising that all my ideas contain those features and exhibit continuity. Interestingly Kant says that the soul cannot be proven from the evidence available, because if it does exist it exists in the world beyond our senses. This world he refers to as the ‘noumenal’ world. If there is a soul it stands beyond our ability to prove, as does the afterlife, which the idea of the soul was introduced to preserve. For Kant the existence of all metaphysics was a matter of faith based on reason. |