Logic and the Immortality of the Human Soul - Admission/Application Essay Example

Prof’s Logic and the Immortality of the Human Soul The fate of a person after death is obviously of the utmost importance to each and every individual who has lived – because each would also die, eventually. This probably explains why, even though there are very few givens, or a priori truths that can be used to argue the existence of an immortal soul logically, many philosophers have been tempted to creating arguments, both for and against such an entity existing. The fact that such debates play well in public discourse might have also had something to do with it. The first philosophers to attempt to logically demonstrate the existence of the soul were the ancient Greeks, starting arguably with Plato. He extends the existence of an immortal soul a an extension of the argument of forms, entities that exist in a pure, non-physical realm that still function within this realm. Plato’s ideas of Forms is essentially an attempt to deal with the existence of abstract constructs that humans can observe, but seem themselves not to exist in the physical plane. The classic definition is of someone who possesses beauty – they can certainly be said to possess it, and people will acknowledge beauty’s existence. But where is beauty? You cannot find beauty in the physical realm, it is an abstract principle that still, nonetheless, can defitively be said to exist. Plato deals with this by creating a world of forms, which are non-physical yet can cast shadows on the physical world, and with each form representing a fundamental thing. This girl thus reflects the fundamental form of beauty, while she is beautiful, but would stop to when she becomes less so. The question then becomes how we observe these non-temporal forms. Plato’s idea is that we have a faculty to observe these forms, which (if one follows his logic) is self-evidently true because we do observe the forms. Finally, this object must exist in a similar realm of existence to that of the forms to be able to interact with them and observe them. This idea of forms relates to the existence of an immortal soul. Essentially, the argument goes that we know some things to be true, for instance, geometric proofs which are self evidently true (or a priori). We also know, however, that the sense cannot be trusted to understand truth – senses can be deceived, and if we have doubt over the truth of something, it is thus not true. Truths thus operate outside of the realm associated with our senses, that is, the world of forms. We know truths, and therefore have a faculty to perceive them. This faculty is the soul, so the soul exists. The arguments for the immortality of the soul are slightly less coherent, and mostly rest on the idea that the soul is a simple thing, and simple things cannot die, because they cannot be deconstructed. Plato also argues that we can demonstrate the existence of souls from knowledge of things that are not granted through empirical evidence, which shows that souls did exist before the body was alive, and something with no beginning can also not have an end. There are several important problems with this interpretation, including important ones by famous philosophers. But there are few problems with this that I have not encountered before that still seem serious to me. Firstly, there is a problem with definition – the soul has been perpetually defined as an organ that can interpret the world of forms or truths. Even if this were true, it does not imply the ability to contain existence necessarily – why would a soul work like a brain, having ability to comprehend and retain information, rather than like a microscope or a pair of binoculars, which, when its owner dies, can go on to be used by another, but not retaining any trace of the past owner? The definition of soul as “immortal faculty to observe truth” does not necessarily mean anything to human identity. Another problem with Plato’s argument is the necessity of the soul being immortal and immaterial, like the things it observes. This is logically incoherent. It rests on the assumption that a thing can only observe or interact with things that are of like substance – that a spatiotemporal thing cannot observe a non spatiotemporal thing. But the problem with this is, that there is obviously some kind of connection between the spatiotemporal body and the nonspatiotemporal soul – they are connected. Why should this connection be allowed, but not a direct connection between spatiotemporal bodies and non spatiotemporal forms or truths? It is arbitrary to say that spatiotemporal things and non-spatiotemporal things cannot interact, excepting soul/body interactions. The other arguments to refute this are the fact that there is no necessity for the soul to be simple at all, and even if it is, this does not mean that it mean it cannot cease to exist, even simple things can be annihilated (rather than decomposing)(Kant). In physics terms this could be described as particle-antipartical annihilation – presumably for even the simplest thing in the physical world it can be destroyed by its opposite. Simmias’ objection essentially states that the soul and the body exist in a state of harmony, but if the body (the instrument of the soul) ceases to exist, then the harmony ceases to exist, than the soul ceases to exist as it lacks an instrument to have harmony with. This is an incredibly subjective argument, because it rests on notions of inherent order and harmony in the universe, something that cannot be proven logically. Cebes’ objection likewise rests on an anology, this one of the soul as a tailor and the body as a garment (the body as clothing for the soul is a traditional understanding of it). The essential question is this: does the tailor outlive all of his clothes? So essentially, one of Plato’s arguments, that a soul must be eternal because it has no beginnings, falls to tatters, because this analogy proves that something can have an existence that pre-exists something else, but still die, even if it is after the thing it created has. There are several problems with this argument. One is that, were this the case, one would expect to meet a soulless person – if the soul was not eternal *and* not tied to the creation of bodies, then why would the soul never die before the body did? Second, there is a chicken/egg problem with this argument – the only logical way to understand things existing is either that a) they always existed (in which case an immortal soul is no problem) or b) they are created by things that have always existed (likewise, not a problem for an immortal soul). So, the tailor/garment argument goes, it is possible for something to exist before something and not forever – but then you still need to go back to something that has existed forever, and created souls. Why not simply have that thing be souls themselves? The moral argument for the soul is in some ways fairly simple, and in some ways incredibly complex. In its simplest form, it runs that good exists, but nothing in the physical world is inherently good. Good, therefore cannot come from the body, therefore it must come from something else. This means that the soul exists. Taken in the Christian context, goes that people do things that are good, even when they are to their own detriment in the material world. If only the material world existed, there would be no motivation to do good, so good would not exist. Therefore, we prove that heaven and hell exist because of the presence of people who do good things even when to their own physical detriment. There are many issues with this argument, one of which, from Hume, will be dealt with below. But one of the fundamental problems with this is that it denies a biological imperative for altruism – that humans could develop to be altruistic because it encourages the survival of the species. This is not a very convincing argument, especially in its second form. The problems with it in its second form are myriad, but there is one that rises above the rest: it indicates the belief of heaven and hell, not the actual existence of it (Hume). Obviously people’s behavior of doing good for reward in the afterlife rests on the fact that they believe there to be one – and there is a massive caste of people (the clergy) who make it their mission to convince people of this, in order to support their own livelihood. Were this line of reasoning to be valid, Barack Obama would be made a Muslim by the fact that many American believe it, and the world in the year 1200 was actually flat, because some people thought they could fall off of it. There is very little redeemable about the moral argument for the existence of an immortal soul. There are so few premises on which to rest any arguments about the soul, that is interesting that philosophers continued to pursue it for so many years. The fact is that we have few a priori truths to use, that any argument will likely be fallible, at least to some degree. Bibliography Hume, David. “On the Immortality of the Soul” Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, and What Is Enlightenment? New York: Liberal Arts, 1959. Print. Plato. Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic,. Ed. Benjamin Jowett. Trans. Louise Ropes Loomis. New York: Published for the Classics Club by W.J. Black, 1942. Print. Read More