narrowly than it tends to be used in our culture today. It’s used to describe a general kind of “life force” that animates everything from humans to grasses, but it’s also construed specifically quite intellectually. In the
Phaedo
, the earlier of Plato’s two major works on the soul, Socrates ascribes beliefs, pleasures, desires, and fears to the
body
, while the soul is in charge of regulating these and of “grasping truth.”
In Plato’s later work,
The Republic
, he describes the soul as having three distinct parts—“appetite,” “spirit,” and “reason”—with those first two “lower” parts taking those duties (hunger, fear, and the like) from the body.
Like Plato, Aristotle didn’t believe that people had a soul—he believed we had three. His three were somewhat different from Plato’s, but they match up fairly well. For Aristotle, all plants and animals have a “nutritive” soul, which arises from biological nourishment and growth, and all animals additionally have an “appetitive” soul, which arises from movement and action. But humans alone had a third, “rational” soul.
I say “arises from” as opposed to “governs” or something along those lines; Aristotle was quite interesting in this regard. For him the soul was the
effect
of behavior, not the
cause
. Questions like this continue to haunt the Turing test, which ascribes intelligence purely on the basis of behavior.
After Plato and Aristotle came a school of Greek philosophy called Stoicism. Stoics placed the mind at the heart, and appear to have taken a dramatic step of severing the notion of the “soul” from the notion of life in general: for them, unlike for Plato and Aristotle, plants did
not
have souls. Thus, as Stoicism ascended to popularity in Greece, the soul became no longer responsible for life function in general, but specifically for its mental and psychological aspects. 7
No Dogs Go to Heaven
Stoicism appears to have been among the tributary philosophies that fed into Christianity, and which also led to the seminal philosophical theories of mind of René Descartes. For the monotheistic Descartes, presumably the (Platonic) notion of multiple souls crowding around was a bit unsavory (although who could deny the Christian appeal of the three-in-one-ness?), and so he looked to draw that us-and-them line using just a single soul,
the
soul. He went remarkably further than Aristotle, saying, in effect, that all animals besides humans don’t have
any
kind of soul at
all
.
Now, any kid who grows up going to Sunday school knows that this is a touchy point of Christian theology. All kids ask uncomfortable questions once their pets start to die, and tend to get relatively awkward or ad hoc answers. It comes up all over the place in mainstream culture too, from the deliberately provocative title of
All Dogs Go to Heaven
to the wonderful moment in
Chocolat
when the new priest, tongue-tied and flummoxed by a parishioner’s asking whether it was sinful for his (soulless) dog to enter a sweet shop during Lent, summarilyprescribes some Hail Marys and Our Fathers and slams the confessional window. End of discussion.
Where some of the Greeks had imagined animals and even plants as “ensouled”—Empedocles thinking he’d lived as a bush in a past life—Descartes, in contrast, was firm and unapologetic. Even Aristotle’s idea of multiple souls, or Plato’s of partial souls, didn’t satisfy him. Our proprietary, uniquely human soul was the only one. No dogs go to heaven.
The End to End All Ends: Eudaimonia
Where is all this soul talk going, though? To describe our animating force is to describe our nature, and our place in the world, which is to describe how we ought to live.
Aristotle, in the fourth century B.C. , tackled the issue in
The Nicomachean Ethics
. The main argument of
The Nicomachean Ethics
, one of his most famous works, goes a little something like this. In life there are means and ends: we do
x
so
Phaedo
, the earlier of Plato’s two major works on the soul, Socrates ascribes beliefs, pleasures, desires, and fears to the
body
, while the soul is in charge of regulating these and of “grasping truth.”
In Plato’s later work,
The Republic
, he describes the soul as having three distinct parts—“appetite,” “spirit,” and “reason”—with those first two “lower” parts taking those duties (hunger, fear, and the like) from the body.
Like Plato, Aristotle didn’t believe that people had a soul—he believed we had three. His three were somewhat different from Plato’s, but they match up fairly well. For Aristotle, all plants and animals have a “nutritive” soul, which arises from biological nourishment and growth, and all animals additionally have an “appetitive” soul, which arises from movement and action. But humans alone had a third, “rational” soul.
I say “arises from” as opposed to “governs” or something along those lines; Aristotle was quite interesting in this regard. For him the soul was the
effect
of behavior, not the
cause
. Questions like this continue to haunt the Turing test, which ascribes intelligence purely on the basis of behavior.
After Plato and Aristotle came a school of Greek philosophy called Stoicism. Stoics placed the mind at the heart, and appear to have taken a dramatic step of severing the notion of the “soul” from the notion of life in general: for them, unlike for Plato and Aristotle, plants did
not
have souls. Thus, as Stoicism ascended to popularity in Greece, the soul became no longer responsible for life function in general, but specifically for its mental and psychological aspects. 7
No Dogs Go to Heaven
Stoicism appears to have been among the tributary philosophies that fed into Christianity, and which also led to the seminal philosophical theories of mind of René Descartes. For the monotheistic Descartes, presumably the (Platonic) notion of multiple souls crowding around was a bit unsavory (although who could deny the Christian appeal of the three-in-one-ness?), and so he looked to draw that us-and-them line using just a single soul,
the
soul. He went remarkably further than Aristotle, saying, in effect, that all animals besides humans don’t have
any
kind of soul at
all
.
Now, any kid who grows up going to Sunday school knows that this is a touchy point of Christian theology. All kids ask uncomfortable questions once their pets start to die, and tend to get relatively awkward or ad hoc answers. It comes up all over the place in mainstream culture too, from the deliberately provocative title of
All Dogs Go to Heaven
to the wonderful moment in
Chocolat
when the new priest, tongue-tied and flummoxed by a parishioner’s asking whether it was sinful for his (soulless) dog to enter a sweet shop during Lent, summarilyprescribes some Hail Marys and Our Fathers and slams the confessional window. End of discussion.
Where some of the Greeks had imagined animals and even plants as “ensouled”—Empedocles thinking he’d lived as a bush in a past life—Descartes, in contrast, was firm and unapologetic. Even Aristotle’s idea of multiple souls, or Plato’s of partial souls, didn’t satisfy him. Our proprietary, uniquely human soul was the only one. No dogs go to heaven.
The End to End All Ends: Eudaimonia
Where is all this soul talk going, though? To describe our animating force is to describe our nature, and our place in the world, which is to describe how we ought to live.
Aristotle, in the fourth century B.C. , tackled the issue in
The Nicomachean Ethics
. The main argument of
The Nicomachean Ethics
, one of his most famous works, goes a little something like this. In life there are means and ends: we do
x
so
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