Richard Seaford on the Origins of the Soul

[Music] Hello, I'm Earl Fontanel and you're listening to "Sweep the Secret History of West Minnesota Services" podcast. And this week we're talking to Professor Richard Seaford of the University of Exeter about the birth of the soul, the intellectual history of the early axial age. Richard, thank you for being on the podcast. First off, to set the stage. It might be worth asking what is the axial age exactly and what makes it so axial. Well, the axial age is a term invented by Carl Jasper's philosopher and polymath, not long after the Second World War. What is it? Well, unfortunately, it's so often there isn't a general agreement about what exactly it is. The roughly speaking, it's the period from about 800 BCE to 300 BCE, in which radical intellectual transformations occurred in a number of different civilizations, producing roughly speaking the cultural map that we still have and the civilizations of Greece, Israel, India, China, sometimes Iran. And it's a subject which has been attracting quite a lot of attention recently because the questions to be asked about it is, is there such a thing as the axial age as is to say are the intellectual transformations in these cultures, visually similar to deserve the same term, what caused this transformation to what extent is it still with us and so on? Okay, so you've covered the timeframe and the axialness of it presumably comes to this commonality or this perceived commonality of intellectual development. New stuff is happening and that's somehow axial in the grand scheme of things. So a particular interest to us in the axial age is one of the key developments seems to be the rise of new concepts of soul or of let's say what it is to be a human being, what a human being consists in beyond a body. But before we talk about these, it might be useful to look at the evidence for what we know about what constitutes a human being before the axial age. So I wonder if you could talk about some of this evidence. So in other words, if there wasn't a soul per se before the axial age, we'll get into maybe what we mean by soul a bit further on. What was a human being before that? Well the two axial civilizations that I know best, which are also I think the two which are best placed on the basis of which to answer your question, are Greece and India. And interestingly you have both in Greece and in India, early texts which are roughly speaking pre-philosophical and I'm talking about Homer in particular in Greece and the Rigveda in India, followed by in both civilizations something like the birth of philosophy, the penning of course on how you define philosophy. So that in Greece you move from the world of Homer which is roughly speaking the 8th century BC to a new conception, a radically new conception of the universe and of man's place he needs in the 6th century and the 5th century BC known as pre-socratic philosophy. And out of pre-socratic philosophy you have Plato and Aristotle and the home of ancient philosophy. In India you have the Rigveda which is a bit like Homer but even more so, dated to very different periods, dating from the earliest about the middle of the second Lenin BC but clearly the Rigveda, particularly the 10th book contains material which is much later. And of course Homer probably wasn't written down until the 6th century BC but these early Indian texts were not written down until very much later so the Rigveda was subject to centuries of oral transmission and therefore very difficult to date. However, what's interesting in answer to your question is that in India from about 8th, 7th, 6th century BC again dating is impossible with these early Indian texts, you have a new conception of the universe and the place of man in it. Just as in Greece you have a new conception about the same time in the 6th century BC. And the transition from Homer to pre-socratic philosophy has some striking similarities to the transition from the Rigveda to these later texts. In particular the Brahmanas which are mainly about ritual but nevertheless contains some pre-sophical speculation and the Upanishads. The Upanishads are emerging out of the need to interpret the sacrifice which is what the Brahmanas are mainly concerned with and as a result of the need to interpret the sacrifice producing something that is legitimate to call philosophy in which ritual has to a large extent been left behind and that then corresponds to pre-socratic philosophy. Now what is it that's similar in the between the Indian transition and the Greek transition? Well let's take the idea of the inner self or soul. There are a lot of terms which are used for something like the inner self, the soul, the mind, the subject and it can be quite confusing because they mean different things, they overlap. One perhaps is best advised to think of them in terms of their opposite so the soul is as it were the opposite to the body. The mind also, the opposite to the body but the soul is very often thought over as immortal. The subject is opposite to the object and the self is opposite to others. I like the term inner self because it implies an individual but just the inner dimension of the individual and is quite close therefore to soul and mind. Now it's striking and this has been recognised for some time that in Homer there's no word for the inner self as a bounded comprehensive entity of consciousness. That is to say what we think of as the mind or the soul which constitutes the personality, the real person of each individual and I use the terms comprehensive and bounded. It's comprehensive in the sense that it contains emotions, perceptions, desires, it originates action, it contains the full range of consciousness. It's bounded in the sense that it has boundaries, it can't be confused with what is outside it. My inner self is quite distinct from your inner self and my inner self is quite distinct from that table or my leg. It is a bounded entity. Now in Homer there's no word for that. What you have is a number of different words for the various organs of consciousness like thumas meaning spirit or menos meaning something like might and so on. Prepiders and you have a whole list of these Greek words, none of which refers to what later was referred to by the word psuke meaning a soul which particularly from Plato onwards meant precisely this bounded comprehensive organ of consciousness. We have psuke in Homer but it means something yes we do have psuke in Homer but it only has one role which is to leave the body on loss of consciousness whether on death or on fainting. Now the psuke then having left the body on death goes down to the underworld and the underworld then has psuke in it and the psuke of patricle appears in a dream to a kill ease later in the illiad. Now the interesting thing about this psuke of patricle is it's the dead patricle. You can see him, you can hear him, he speaks, he is patricle except that there's a sense in which he doesn't exist. He's insubstantial not quite clear what is involved here but he's not substantial where you to lean out and touch him he would dissolve like a shadow. However the fact that he is patricle for all eternity and in most respects like patricle meant that the psuke was the word used later on by Plato but also even before Plato to refer to the most important part of you which is the immortal part of you the part of you which will survive after your death and so you have a development in which in Homer there is no word for the comprehensive bounded organ of consciousness. In Plato there is but the word Plato uses psuke has evolved from being simply the thing which leaves you when you die and plays no role in your life to the thing which is the most important thing about your life which is your inner self which will indeed leave you when you die and is immortal. So this is an [BLANK_AUDIO] enormous transition in which the Psuke becomes at the centre of attention, for Plato is enormously important for understanding the world and above all for understanding how we should live. Now if you turn to the Indian material with this question in mind and ask the same question of the Rigveda, is there a bounded, comprehensive organ of consciousness? The answer, as far as I can see after some research, is no. There are various words, Manas, Jeeva, Prana, Atman and so on, none of which refers to a bounded, comprehensive organ of consciousness. So it's like Homer. And indeed, as in Homer, the words that do exist for organs of consciousness are not particularly important. They're not at the centre of attention, they're not made into the subjects of sentences in the way that Psuke clearly in Plato is. So we'd rather like Homer. Then you go on to the early, you panichads, 6th, 5th century BC, and what you find is that one of the words that was used in the Rigveda as an organ of consciousness, sometimes seems to mean rather something like breath, Atman, has become at the centre of everything, the famous expression Atman is Brahmann, which you find repeated several times in the early panichads, means effectively your Atman, your inner self, is Brahmann, meaning the whole of the universe. Your Atman is everything. And in the discourse of the early panichads, Atman is enormously important, just as Psuke in Plato is enormously important, for understanding the world and how you should live. Now there are of course important differences between the Greek and the Indian material, but in this is a respect and there are others, but this is a respect in which they're strikingly similar. You have a movement from a world in which there is no bounded, comprehensive organ of consciousness to one in which not only is there a term for it, but it has become enormously important. And it's had enormous staying power in both cultures. Even if people don't necessarily believe in a soul or think about soul, per se, the idea of soul is a persisted background to Western thought. Even if it influences, say, classical liberal theory on the rights of human individuals and stuff like this, in law terms, which would ourselves as though we have souls, even if no one is actually necessarily believes in a soul, do you see what I mean? Yes, I mean, the fact is that the word soul has religious associations. And if you say I believe in the soul, people may well take you to believe that you consider it to be immortal. However, of course the psuké doesn't have to be immortal. It doesn't even have to be incorporeal. The first person to make a systematic distinction between the corporeal and the incorporeal is Plato. Before that, there's a quite a developed notion of the psuké in Heraclitus, for example, in which it's composed of fire, so it is corporeal. To be sure, it's a tenuous kind of body fire, but nevertheless, it is matter rather than the asomatos, the incorporeal, which you find for the first time in Plato. And interestingly, similarly, in the Indian material, you find the word asareera, which doesn't occur in the early texts, and it occurs for the first time, probably, in the early panchay, it's meaning incorporeal. So this distinction between the incorporeal and the corporeal, which is fundamental to so much later philosophy, occurs about the same time in these two different cultures. And it is distinct from the distinction between body and soul, because the body could be corporeal. Many so-called primitive cultures, the notion of the soul, but it's not considered to belong to a ontologically distinct realm of the incorporeal. It might be something rather tenuous that floats away, or takes the form of a bird, or whatever, doesn't have to be incorporeal. But to go back to your question about the influence of all this, and it's still being with us, of course you're absolutely right, psuk-e-e-s-ness, of course still with us. We might call it the mind or the soul, but it's, there's notion of this bounded in the self, there's still very much more. Well, I see four Christians will simply say, no, this is the soul, the force of the soul. Yes, yes. It's called definition. Yes. But interestingly, there has been, in the last 15 years or so, an interesting debate in British analytic philosophies to the question of whether the inner self exists. Now this goes back to David Hume, the philosopher of the Enlightenment, who said no, actually inner self doesn't exist, because if you examine your experience, your emotions, your perceptions, what's going on in your mind, what you're aware of is of constant flux of impressions, thoughts, motives, desires and so on, and where is this extra thing which is the inner self? It just isn't there. We made it up. You don't need to talk about it in order to describe your subjectivity. Now this position was argued in great sophistication and detail by Michael Derrick Parfitt on the book called Reasons and Persons. And the counterposition was taken by Richard Sirabji in a subsequent book on the self in which he claims, no, no, there is an inner self. The inner self is what owns our perceptions and emotions and so on. And it's quite an interesting debate. One of the interesting features of it for me is the terminology used by Sirabji owns which must be a metaphor. I mean, ownership is legally sanctioned possession. You don't have legally sanctioned possession of your emotions, but he's constantly using this word own. So the question is, what is it a metaphor for? I don't believe it's a metaphor ultimately. I think that ownership historically is crucial in constructing the idea of the inner self in which I stand apart from my inner data, my desires and perceptions and all the rest of it in the way that an owner of goods stands apart from his goods and yet he has exclusive rights to them in the way that he does to his own body, for example. And so that's one of the interesting things about this debate, but another interesting thing of course is the fact that it's happening at all because we just take it as a fact of nature that each of us has an inner self. We reify it. But neither of them, neither Parfait nor Sirabji, consider the question anthropologically. They talk about this issue as if they're talking about whether Paris is the capital of France or not. It's just a fact about the world, isn't it? You have it all that you don't have it. But actually if you look outside the tradition which they are operating, outside the Western tradition, particularly at Melanesia, you'll find a wealth of anthropological writing which shows that these people don't have a conception of the bounded comprehensive in itself. They just don't have it. So the question then arises, well, have they not noticed they've got it? This is the question you might put to Sirabji. And not these people in error have they gone through their lives just not realising they've got this thing. They just never got round to noticing it or describing it. And the answer is, if you consider it in this light, is of course that the inner self is a construction. And of course the Buddhists who were sighted by Parfait take the view that we don't have such a thing. Well, I was going to bring up the Buddhists because very soon after the Punishites start to appear, we get early Buddhism appearing. And this would seem to be the Humie and Critique about, you know, two, one and a half thousand years before Him or two thousand years how long it was saying, this Atman business, this reified substance that you guys are positin, doesn't exist. It just doesn't exist. Yes, you have feelings, yes, you have effects, yes, you experience desire and so on and so forth. And the sound of being behind it is extra thing, is not there. Yes, I take the view and it can only be speculation that what's really going on here is that the Buddhists are reverting to roughly speaking a pre-Upanish addict view of the world in which they're at the end of their days old school way of thinking. Yes, just as they do in certain other respects. For example, the Sangha, the Buddhist Sangha is a community of monks. But that word Sangha originally meant a political assembly. So it's the persistence of the assembly now no longer possible in the monarchy but in a new form. And I would say something quite similar about the doctrine of Anata, the doctrine of nonself. However, as I must emphasize, that's impossible to prove. That's the way I think history works. Interestingly, both Parfit and Sirabji talk about Buddhism. But also, Rabji does is to argue that their arguments in favor of nonself are fallacious. And what Parfit does is to say, look, not only do I have these arguments, but the Buddhists also have these supporting arguments which are not fallacious. So they're dealing with it entirely analytically, both of them because they are not in philosophers. They have no sense of history or of sociology. So yeah, up, right, already reasoning. could maybe take us to believe in a soul or not, depending on our, because it's obviously in history, our priori reasoning has led in both directions, hasn't it, to a strong idea of the soul, and to none, a strong idea of the soul? But you would argue that this so-called independent our priori reasoning is always conditioned by the kind of society, but a given reasoner finds himself in. There've been a reason in a certain way, depending on the kind of society that live in. Yes, that's right. The reason why the issue between Suraji and Parfid is undecidable is that the soul, the inner self, in my view, is a construction. That's really pretty much all you can say when it comes to trying to resolve the dispute between them. But then the really interesting question start, which is, why do you find this construction at all? Why do you find it in some societies and not in other societies? And if you look at the anthropological evidence, you can see how the arrival of Western economic models, in particular, individual property, promotes the belief in the bounded individual self. Let's back up a bit. I'm very interested in this. Can you very briefly talk about exactly what you're talking about when you say the arrival of Western economic models, and when this is happening, what exactly do we talk about? So money has something to do with it, I believe. Money has something to do with it. But there's-- for example, there's a passage I'm thinking of written by Melanie Jean Anthropologist who is describing the arrival of the trade store in a community. I mean, he has experience of this. This is probably from the '50s and '60s. I can't remember exactly when and where. But the arrival of the trade store makes a big difference because it brings with it different ways of constructing the world, in which you can't just go and take your cousin's things. If you do that, you might get prosecuted. It's illegal. And people don't understand this. But now, because the trade store, what he says is by looking at the way the trade store operates, he does involve money and does involve commercial relations rather than sharing and gift exchange. In commercial relations, there's absolute ownership and absolute separation of goods and money from possessor in the exchange, where it never occurs with gift exchange. You always, in some way, are identified with what you've given. And then that creates links between people. The arrival of the trade store, he says, introduces a new model of the person. A model of the person introduces a new model of the person in which ownership is used to construct the new kind of individual. And if you go to a text, which is no doubt somewhat out of date, but nevertheless, clearly contains some truth by MacPherson on the 17th century England. Do you find something very similar? The new conception of the individual is created, he says, by reading back into it ownership of property. Because this is a period in which a new class is establishing itself through the individual ownership of property, which is theirs absolutely. It's not vulnerable to being taken away in any form by anybody else. So their freedom and their life potential is defined by the property that they own. And therefore, the notion of the individual is constructed, to some extent, at least, out of the institution of individual property. So you go to Greece and India. There's quite evidence, quite independent from everything I've been talking about for the development of individual property, at the expense of ownership by the kinship group. So what is property like in the Homeric poems? And what is exchange like in the Homeric poems? Well, first of all, the Homeric poems, there's no money. Secondly, there's very little commerce, and it's only at the margins and performed by disreputable people like Phoenicians. And that's the main form of exchanges, gift exchange. And through gift exchange, you create relations. Now, what is exchange and gift exchange were in Homeric poems, because they only concerned with an elite group. It's prestige objects like tripods and horses and so on. Fine textiles. And that is is that creates links between aristocratic households in different places. And you have genre scenes, which is all beautifully described, so the center of what's going on socially. Now, of course, when it comes to the Iliad, you have a problem, because the Greeks storm a city-- and not necessarily try-- they stormed a number of other cities. And the issue arises of who has the right to distribute the plunder. Now, it can be done by the Greeks in general, by the king. The king does it in various versions. And he does it unfairly. So what he should be doing is taking this plunder and giving it to Achilles or Disuse or whatever it is. That's a gift. It's not an income. It's a gift. And by doing that, he creates the links. There's no other link that enables Agamemnon to hold the Greeks into a coherent body. It's through distributing the goods and their gifts. But things go wrong. And Achilles feels slighted. And he withdraws from the battle so that what does Agamemnon do? He offers more gifts. He offers gifts. Lots of them to bring Achilles back into the battle. But Achilles says, in effect, it's too late. I hate your gifts. Ekthriti Moi Tassadora. Your gifts are hateful to me. That is devastating, because it's not just about Agamemnon and Achilles. It's about a whole social system breaking down. Use rejecting the principle of gift. And there's something similar that goes on in the Odyssey. So the Iliad and the Odyssey are about what I call a crisis of reciprocity, in which the old economic system has broken down. And it's precisely in the context incidentally of rejecting the gifts that Achilles talks about. He's owned Tsukhi. And it's the Pasagin Homo, which comes closest to the Tsukhi being what it is later, which is something infinitely valuable, which he's not going to give up in return for gifts. So it's the isolation of Achilles, as I was out of the breakdown of this exchange system, which gives you the first glimpse of what would be so important later, which is the valorization of the individual Tsukhi. There's a lot there to chew over. I think we're going to have to leave it for this episode. Thank you very much for listening. We've learned a few things about where the soul came from in the West. And until next time, stay esoteric. [MUSIC PLAYING]