Print Soul
Written by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, 2011
Our ‘soul’ is our species’ instinctive memory of a time when our distant ancestors lived in a cooperative, selfless, loving, innocent state, BUT that is a truth we couldn’t afford to admit until we found the clarifying, biological explanation for why we humans became competitive, selfish and aggressive; in fact, so ruthlessly competitive, brutal and even murderous that human life has become all but unbearable and we have nearly destroyed our own planet!
In short, before we could acknowledge the truth about our soul we had to explain the HUMAN CONDITION—explain why the human race became corrupted, ‘fell from grace’, left the fabled ‘Garden of Eden’ of our original innocent state, or however else we like to describe the emergence of our present less-than-ideally-behaved, soul-devastated condition.
MOST WONDERFULLY, biology is now finally able to provide this dreamed-of, exonerating, ‘good-and-evil’-reconciling, ‘burden-of-guilt’-lifting and thus rehabilitating EXPLANATION OF THE HUMAN CONDITION—thereby making it possible to safely admit the truth about our species’ innocent, soulful past!
In his awesome 1807 poem Intimations of Immortality, the poet William Wordsworth gave this rare honest description of our species’ tragic journey from its original soulful, innocent, instinctive, moral state to its present soul-devastated, often-immoral, apparently—but, as we will see, not actually—non-ideal or ‘unGodly’ state: ‘The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star…cometh from afar…trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.’ In the poem Wordsworth also described how quickly this ‘life’s Star’ of our ideal, moral, ‘God[ly]’ ‘Soul’ that is ‘with us’ when we are born becomes corrupted as we grow up in the human-condition-afflicted world today: ‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and streams / The earth, and every common sight / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light / The glory and the freshness of a dream / It is not now as it hath been of yore / Turn wheresoe’er I may / By night or day / The things which I have seen I now can see no more // … I know, where’er I go / That there hath past away a glory from the earth.’
Long ago, around 360 BC, the philosopher Plato also bravely acknowledged the existence within us all of an all-loving, innocent, pure, aligned-with-the-ideals, original instinctive self or soul when he wrote that humans have ‘knowledge, both before and at the moment of birth…of all absolute standards…[of] beauty, goodness, uprightness, holiness…our souls exist before our birth’. He continued, ‘the soul is in every possible way more like the invariable’, which he described as ‘the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless…realm of the absolute…[our] soul resembles the divine’ (Phaedo, tr. H. Tredennick). Again, while these greatest of poets and philosophers were able to acknowledge the existence of our human soul, Wordsworth’s and Plato’s inability to explain why our soul became corrupted meant their beautifully honest words ultimately left us humans feeling unbearably condemned for our present seemingly-highly-imperfect condition. In fact, trying to face the truth about our species’ present corrupted condition without the exonerating explanation for it left humans facing the prospect of excruciating, even suicidal, depression! Such has been the extent of the real agony of the human condition! Wordsworth’s and Plato’s words were brave indeed.
Because the human race could not psychologically afford to face the truth that our soul is our instinctive memory of a cooperative, selfless and loving ‘Garden of Eden’ ‘golden age’ in our species’ past until we explained our present corrupted, innocence-destroyed, soul-devastated competitive, selfish and aggressive condition, science has, until now, had to avoid the whole issue of what our soul is—as the psychologist Ronald Conway noted, ‘Soul is customarily suspected in empirical psychology and analytical philosophy as a disreputable entity’ (The Australian, 10 May 2000). When the need for denial is critical any excuse will do, but calling soul a ‘disreputable entity’ is a very poor excuse indeed because it is one of our most used terms and therefore has a very real and authentic meaning. Beyond being poor, this excuse verges on the ridiculous when we take into account the fact that our soul is actually the fundamental issue in ‘psychology’, with the word ‘psychology’ literally meaning the ‘study of the soul’, derived as it is, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, from psyche, which comes from the Greek word psykhe, meaning ‘breath, life, soul’, and the Greek word logia, meaning ‘study of’. Yes, ‘psyche’ is another word for soul, as the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology confirms: ‘psyche: The oldest and most general use of this term is by the early Greeks, who envisioned the psyche as the soul or the very essence of life’ (1985). Also revealing is the word ‘psychiatry’, which literally means ‘soul-healing’, derived as it is from psyche (which again means soul) and the Greek word iatreia, which, according to The Encyclopedic World Dictionary, means ‘healing’. Similarly revealing of what the study of psychology is really all about is the word ‘psychosis’, which literally means ‘soul-illness’, coming as it does from psyche (which again means soul) and osis which, according to Dictionary.com, is also of Greek origin and means ‘abnormal state or condition’.
Dictionary definitions of ‘soul’ itself have also understandably been somewhat evasive—for instance, the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘soul’ as ‘the immaterial…moral and emotional part of man’, and as the ‘animating or essential part’ of us, while The Macquarie Dictionary describes ‘soul’ as the ‘principle of life, feeling, thought, and action in humans’, and as being ‘the spiritual part of humans regarded in its moral aspect…the seat of the feelings or sentiments’.
So, what is the reconciling, redeeming and thus rehabilitating and soul-resuscitating biological explanation of our present less-than-ideal, seeming-highly-imperfect, soul-devastated human condition? What is the explanation that finally makes it psychologically safe to both acknowledge that our moral soul is our instinctive memory of a cooperative, all-loving past, and explain how we acquired it in the first place?