Mind, Soul and Body | Yeshivat Har Etzion

Mind, Soul and Body
1.Preface
I would like to open with an apology to those faithful readers who were perhaps feeling that this course had ended very abruptly. For personal reasons, I have not been able to write for the last six weeks; I am back at work now, and hopefully will be able to bring this course to a more appropriate conclusion.
2.Introduction
In the previous shiur, I did in fact complete my discussion of the Rambam's 13 principles. Even though that discussion was of course not comprehensive, I propose to move on to a few topics that are not explicitly addressed in the 13 principles. As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, my interest in the thirteen principles is not part of some project to describe the essentials of Judaism in order to draw the lines of what constitutes heresy (in general I think that hunting for heretics is ill-advised, to say the least – the Jewish people are not in such great shape that we should be looking for ways to exclude people). My interest in the thirteen principles was as a means of facilitating an investigation into the basic beliefs of Judaism. Though I have discussed all thirteen principles, there are a few more ideas that I think are worthy of discussion in this kind of overview and I will proceed to do so in the next few shiurim. The topic of this shiur and the one following it is the concept of the soul in Jewish thought.
In the shiur about techiyat ha-meitim and Olam ha-ba, I contrasted the Rambam and the Ramban's perspectives on the body and the soul. Strikingly, the Rambam, with (or perhaps despite?) his naturalistic tendencies, insists upon a radically non-natural notion of a disembodied Olam ha-ba. It is only as a disembodied spiritual being that someone can achieve the highest level of knowledge of God, which is, according to the Rambam, the purpose of human existence. In contrast, the Ramban envisions a future physical existence for those who are worthy, with the ultimate reward for the righteous being the resurrection of the dead in bodies that do not decay or die. As one would expect, these different conceptions of Olam ha-ba reflect very different conceptions of the soul. As we will see, what these conceptions are is perhaps not what we would expect. In the following, I will discuss different ways we have of conceiving of the soul and of spirituality.
3.The Prevailing Folk Model of the Soul: Substance Dualism
Religious people are used to thinking of human beings as composed of two distinct substances: the body is the physical part of who we are and the best way to describe it is by using scientific, especially biological, concepts. Today (as opposed to a stream of thought extending at least from ancient Greece until the 19th century), intellectual activity is often seen as seated in the brain and as fundamentally a feature of that organ's physical make- up. (I will return to this point later.)
The soul, as opposed to the body, is made up of spiritual “substance” and is thus not describable by means of scientific categories which are limited to the physical. The soul is the seat of identity and personality – who we really are and what we really care about depends essentially on our spiritual identities and is in principle separable from the details of our physical bodies. Additionally, the most fundamental expressions of our spiritual identities tend to be closer to the emotional rather than the intellectual. What makes us laugh or cry, feel uplifted or horrified, depends more than anything else on the state of our souls. That is not to say that the body has no influence on our responses or decisions: the body and its needs is the source of many of our desires and motivations. Nonetheless, how we act is ultimately controlled by the soul as it is manifest in the will.
This sketch is obviously oversimplified but I think it captures how many people conceive of the relationship between soul and body. Something like this conception is part of a common conception of the afterlife: if reward and punishment of an individual is to be meaningful in Olam ha-ba then the soul that survives death must in some significant way be the continuation of the individual in life. It is often assumed that a person's entire personality continues to exist in the afterlife, and as such we often comfort mourners by making reference to how their loved one is "looking down" on them from heaven. The notion of reincarnation, which is a major theme of many kabbalistic systems, depends upon a spiritual entity that maintains its identity when it is reborn into new bodies.
Additionally, we commonly speak of our "true selves" or "authentic selves" in spiritual terms, conceiving ourselves as spiritual entities that are often obscured or interfered with by bodily desires and drives.
There are major difficulties with this conception of the soul as an individuated entity that exists entirely separately from the body, yet is somehow linked to a particular body during a person's lifetime.[1] The notorious mind/body problem looms: how can a disembodied spiritual substance impact and influence the physical substance of the body? Beyond the technical philosophical problem of how the soul interacts with the body, there is a much more significant problem with the notion that personality resides in the soul which is a spiritual substance. Understanding the human personality (or at least its good parts) as distinctly spiritual rather than physical does not give enough credit to the ways that physical realities shape our personalities in positive ways. I will return to this point at the end of the shiur.
4.Mind and Soul: the Rambam's conception of the Soul
In the familiar notion of the soul sketched above, the soul is the source of the individual's identity and personality and is primarily manifest in one's memory and emotional makeup, since those seem to be at the core of personal identity. This might seem obvious until one considers that no less an authority than the Rambam disagrees. The soul, in the Rambam's Aristotelian conception, can be analyzed in terms of five different faculties. These faculties should not be understood as distinct entities but rather as aspects of the unified human soul:
1. What we can call the biological organization of the human organism: it is due to this aspect of the soul that the human organism grows, has an immune system, a digestive system, etc.
2. The sensory capacity: the five senses are aspects of the soul in Aristotelian thought. That is not to deny that the senses work by means of bodily organs: eyes, ears, etc., but the sensory input must be processed, and that is done by the soul.
3. The capacity for imagination – the ability to imagine and conceive of things that are not directly perceived by combining previous sensory input. Thus people can imagine things (like winged horses) that do not exist.
4. The human emotional capacity: the soul is the explanation for the fact that people feel joy and sadness, desire and revulsion, despair and hope.
5. Human intellectual capacity which includes the ability to reason and understand both practically and theoretically. [2]
It is very clear that the Rambam's notion of the soul is very different from the one sketched above. The soul, according to the Rambam, is not a separate entity that somehow inhabits the body, so much as the organizing principle of what makes human beings what they are; in Aristotelian terms, the soul is the form of humanity. The role of the soul is not merely religious: it is part of the explanation of human biology and psychology. Some of what is included in the Rambam's notion of the soul is part of we understand to be simply the functions of various parts of the human body. Other parts are what we understand to be brain function - the processing of perceptual input and the like. The rest can be understood as the functions of what we call the mind.
5.The Soul as the Mind: The Rambam's Intellectualism
For the Rambam, the most important part of the soul is the intellect. Like most medieval philosophers (or perhaps most philosophers even today?), the Rambam considered intellectual activity to be the highest form of spirituality. Human beings exercise their Tzelem Elokim, their being created in the image of God, insofar as they attain knowledge of abstract truths, particularly metaphysical truths. The intellectual or cognitive aspect of the human soul is that which distinguishes it from the souls of animals.
The Rambam is often criticized for being overly intellectual and as regarding intellectual achievement as essentially the only sort which has ultimate worth. Spiritual life that is more emotional, that has people connect with God through how they feel more than what they know and understand, appears to be undervalued in his way of thinking. I do not think that this criticism is entirely misplaced but one must be careful to appreciate that the Rambam's intellectualism is not merely an elitist prejudice but an essential part of how he understood the world. Moreover, I believe that we have a lot to gain with regard to our own understanding of spirituality by carefully considering the Rambam's position.
A way to think about the Rambam's understanding of the soul is to compare it to parallel discussions in modern philosophy. How human beings are special and distinct from other animals, and if they are, is a question that is discussed to this day. Some philosophers and psychologists have argued that there is no fundamental difference and that human beings simply have larger brains, giving them the capacity to interact with their environment in more complex ways. Though that thought has gained adherents in recent years, it is hard to take it seriously (even ignoring its religious implications) given the fact that the reflective capacity to even frame such a thought is unique to human beings. A more nuanced approach is close to that of the Rambam: self-consciousness and abstract conceptual thought are what set human beings apart. These cannot be understood in merely biological terms and hence can be regarded as a spiritual component in human beings (though at least English speaking philosophers have largely given up on using the language of 'spirit' and 'spiritual' and have replaced them with 'mind' and 'mental').
Neither these philosophers nor the Rambam conceive of humanity's intellectual ability as a distinct or separable element of the human personality. Rather, human conceptual ability informs and shapes every aspect of human life: not merely what we know and understand "intellectually" but what we feel, how we react, and how we perceive are shaped by the fact that we are beings who use concepts. That ability is what separates human beings from beasts and that separation is not limited to what we do in the library or the Beit Midrash but to all of our interactions with each other and the world. Understood in this light, the Rambam's vision of the soul has both broad and focused elements. Since the soul-mind-spirit is integrated into everything we do, then the scope of what, at least potentially, can be understood as spiritual is very great indeed; nearly every part of human life contains the potential for holiness and connection with God. At the same time, intellectual-cognitive activity is spiritual activity par excellence. This serves to justify the centrality in our tradition of Talmud Torah as a religious activity and functions as a powerful response to those who conceive of the cerebral as antithetical to religious experience.
That being said, focusing on the soul in terms of the human capacity for cognition and the possession of intellect does contain pitfalls. There is a risk of thinking in terms of an implicit hierarchy under which those activities that are more exclusively intellectual or abstract become those with the greatest value while practical action or, alternatively, "spiritual" activities like prayer, though they too contain a cognitive element, are devalued. (Some would accuse the Rambam of doing this.)
There is a further risk of equating intellectual brilliance with religious greatness, when the former only contains the potential for a kind of religious greatness. Finally, and I think most importantly, one could say that this vision of the soul does not give enough weight to the importance of the uniqueness of each individual. If the soul is identified with the human cognitive capacity, then that capacity is more or less the same between individuals and the differences between individuals are a function of how their conceptual capacities shape the particularities of their physiology and experience. The differences between living individuals are thus not part of what we call the soul at all. This appears to be what the Rambam thought and I will address it the next shiur. Before doing so, I need to explain how the soul relates to the body according to the Rambam.
6.The Rambam's Integration of Body and Soul
For the Rambam the soul is inseparable from the body – it is in fact the organizing principle of the human body and all of its functions:
You will never see matter without form, or form without matter.It is the heart of man which in its knowledge considers the bodies that are found and knows that they are a combination of matter and form… the soul found in all living flesh which allows it to eat, drink, reproduce, feel, and think.[3]
Accordingly, the soul and the body are not two distinct entities joined together in temporary union. For the Rambam, the distinction between the spiritual and the physical is part of the basic explanation of human (and animal) nature. Many philosophers, cognitive scientists and psychologists today, working on the nature of human consciousness, are attempting to provide a reductive explanation of human mindfulness. That is to say, they believe that human consciousness and mentality can be explained purely in terms of the properties of a biological organism. If they are successful, they claim, the notion of the soul as a spiritual or transcendent element in the human personality will become redundant. The Rambam, in treating the soul as inseparable from the body, agrees with the bent of modern cognitive psychology that we should not conceive of the soul as a separate entity that is mysteriously joined to the body. But in contrast to the reductivist trend in cognitive psychology, the Rambam affirms the validity of the spiritual as part of the explanation of human consciousness. In denying full-blown substance dualism, the Rambam does not embrace a reductionist monism (i.e., that there is nothing but physical substance) but rather includes the spiritual as part of the explanation of human nature.
The Rambam's Aristotelian conception[4] of the soul and the body as aspects of the unity of the human personality rather than as separate entities is, I believe, very important. First of all, this conception of the soul avoids (rather than solves) the notorious "mind/body" problem mentioned above. The Aristotelian understanding has the soul as an aspect of a person who is made up of physical stuff yet is more than just physical stuff, even if there is no way to separate the physical and the spiritual into separate entities. Under this understanding, the very real contributions of cognitive science and psychology to understanding the human mind and emotions can be appreciated and the aid and comfort that people receive with their help need not be explained away. Studying how people think, feel, behave and respond to stimuli is the study of the soul, according to the Rambam. Though it would be presumptuous for such scientists to think only they have insight into human nature, there is no less presumption when a religious perspective makes the same claim.
7.Conclusion
In this shiur I have focused on the Rambam's understanding of the soul as an integrated part of the human personality and contrasted it to what I have called the "folk" conception of the soul as a distinct entity. The Rambam's particular version of the soul includes a hierarchy in which intellectual and cognitive aspects of one's personality are given greater value than, say, the emotional or imaginative. This is obviously a difficult position to accept; most of us conceive of our identities as irrevocably connected to our emotional makeup and lives. As we saw, this point is largely lost on the Rambam, for whom the nature of the soul has little to do with personal identity. I will return to this point in the next shiur.
[1] Plato is perhaps the most articulate advocate of this idea, particularly in the Phaedo and the Phaedrus.
[2] This list is a paraphrase of the Rambam's list in the first chapter of the introduction to his commentary to Pirkei Avot, commonly known as Shemona Perakim.
[4] This conception is far from uniquely the Rambam's. Its explicit source is Aristotle, and some version of it was accepted by many of the medieval philosophers (with important differences that I cannot go into here). This Aristotelian view was historically in conflict with a more substance-based notion of the soul that perhaps can be traced back to Plato, particularly in the dialogue Phaedrus. Furthermore, I believe that the notion of the soul that is implicit in much of Tanakh and Chazal (with some exceptions that I will not elaborate on here) is close to the Aristotelian view in conceiving of the soul and body as an integrated whole rather than as separate substances. Since neither the Tanakh nor Chazal ever elaborate an explicit theory of the nature of the soul, it is hard to draw too firm a conclusion about how they thought about it or even if there is a consensus opinion about it.
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