musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

If one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers but the seed remains.


Do you ever wonder about the soul? I mean, were we all issued one at birth, or as the French philosopher Sartre believed, does existence proceed essence? Do we have to somehow establish our existence before we can acquire qualities? In grammar, a noun must be present or adjectives have no meaning; no purpose. Are souls adjectives that benefit us, describe us better?

What does it mean when a child discovers the Theory of Mind (that others have beliefs or perspectives that are different from theirs)? Does it mean that the child is now alone, or that despite the difference, they share something with a being outside themselves? That, although the other person is different, they are still friends and can still share thoughts and ideas?

So, could this awareness of your own distinctness mean that although you seem like everybody else, you are yourself and perhaps only a little different? Could this be the beginnings of an awareness of soul? Or, more abstrusely, is your social connection -the culture in which you find yourself embedded- an integral part of your soul? The cause of it?

I happened upon an intriguing essay about the soul by Nicholas Humphrey, a theoretical psychologist and bye-fellow at Cambridge.[i] He believes that ‘Souls are part of the manifest image we have of what it means to be a human being…’ Personal beliefs aside, the soul was likely not bestowed by God, or somehow dictated by genes; rather, ‘our souls have been added by human culture.’ In fact, ‘Your soul isn’t exactly yours at all… it’s what the human community has made of you. It’s their view of just who and what you are – where you belong in the scheme of things.’ But ‘Your soul is your private possession too. No other human shares your consciousness, and therefore no one else has the same soul you do.’

I’m fascinated by that idea. ‘The soul is the self that blinks into life every morning, when you re-emerge from sleep to rediscover what it’s like to be you… Your sensations are your doing and have biometric markers that distinguish them from all other people’s. No one does the redness of a poppy, the saltiness of an anchovy, the paininess of a bee-sting the way you do… It’s not so much that sensations influence the soul; it’s that they anchor the soul to the rock of your existence.’ I like that.

But, what about our prehuman ancestors? Did they have souls? If not, when and how did we moderns acquire souls?

‘Our pre-human ancestors were phenomenally conscious – for each of them, it was ‘like something’ to be me – but that alone did not amount to their having their own soul. What human culture added was interpretation, prestige and normativity: it turned sentience into personhood, and personhood into something sacred. The crucial catalyst was the evolution of language, which, about 200,000 years ago, gave human beings new ways to describe inner life, attribute it to others, and elevate it into a shared ideal.’

But much of this description of an inner life is really a type of imagination because it has so few reference points. Illusionism, as it has come to be called, ‘is the realisation that conscious experience is no more – and no less – than a set of ideas. It is the way each of us represents in our minds what’s happening around us, to us and because of us.’

Whoaa! What he’s saying is that ‘Sensations are what you as a subject make of sensory stimuli impacting your body. Like the pain in a pricked finger, or the redness of red … your mind watches itself reaching out toward the red, and it’s this self-monitoring that constitutes the conscious sensation. Sensation is, in a sense, always a self-portrait. It’s not a readout of the world; it’s a readout of you… mental representations, even if they are made by matter, are not made of matter.’ So, is this self-portrait, this consciousness, also part of the soul…? Is this where poetry is born…?

I think, perhaps, that this is what The Seagulls, by the Canadian poet E.J. Pratt demonstrates:

For one carved instant as they flew,
The language had no simile—
Silver, crystal, ivory
Were tarnished. Etched upon the horizon blue,
The frieze must go unchallenged, for the lift
And carriage of the wings would stain the drift
Of stars against a tropic indigo
Or dull the parable of snow.

Now settling one by one
Within green hollows or where curled
Crests caught the spectrum from the sun,
A thousand wings are furled.
No clay-born lilies of the world
Could blow as free
As those wild orchids of the sea.

I am reminded of Thomas Nagel’s famous 1974 essay titled ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ I may be able to describe all of the objective physiological processes which describe a bat -how they work, what purposes they serve and so on- but I am still not a bat; I still do not know what it would feel like to occupy a bat’s consciousness, feel it’s success as it captures its food, understand its relationship with other bats: experience the world as a bat… I still would not be able to experience the bat’s experience… or, if it had one, its soul.

But of course, if Humphry is correct, I can’t experience anybody’s soul -human, dog, or bat either: I am not them. And yet, at least for other humans, I can feel something about them that seems familiar: a recognizable numen, a spirit that surrounds them with each encounter, whether pleasurable, or odious -yet indisputably human. Something emanates from them that, like it or not, I recognize as not-me, and yet me at the same time…

It’s not appearance, or shared opinions; it’s not language, or similar culture; it’s not even fear, or mistrust. It’s just a feeling, I suppose: that we are linked –all of us- like it or not. As Richard Wagamese, an Ojibway poet and author from Northern Canada writes: ‘From our very first breath, we are in relationship. With that indrawn draft of air, we become joined to everything that ever was, is and ever will be.’ And who or what is that ‘we’? Could it be our souls…?

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/you-know-what-consciousness-is-you-live-in-soul-land

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