The soul is what ultimately counts: soul as in soulmate, life and soul, a nation’s soul, selling or mortgaging our soul – that indestructible, indivisible inner core or spirit of ours.
Soul is the marrow of our existence as sentient, sensitive beings. It’s soul that’s revealed in great works of art, and soul that’s lifted up in awe when we stand in silence under a night sky burning with billions of stars. Soul is present in moments of intimacy, in flights of fancy, and in rituals that hallow the evanescent events of our lives with enduring significance.
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.” Here was “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” holding up a mirror to us creatures inhabiting an animal body complicated by a soul — that organ of want and worry which we ourselves invented to explain why we make art, why we fall in love, why we yearn to converse with reality in prayers and postulates.
It is daring enough to ask what a soul actually is. It is doubly daring to question the age-old dogma that the soul is the province of the human animal alone. Even as we have incrementally and reluctantly admitted other creatures into the temple of consciousness, we have denied them souls — denied them because our tools of communication and computation have failed to probe it: the inner life capable of imagination and play, of love and grief, of dreams and wonder. And yet our very language defies our denial: the word animal comes from the Latin for soul.
This is an introduction by Maria Popova to, ‘The soul of animals’. We may be reluctant to exalt the life of ‘lower beings’ as possessing a soul. But her reference to it as the inner life is straightforward enough to be useful. And then we have her expansion of it as being capable ‘of imagination and play, of love and grief, of dreams and wonder’. It is indeed the very wonder at our inner life that makes us reify it, and then place it apart from the body. It’s but a small step from there to attributing to soul the ability to survive the death of its current host brain.
The image of ourselves as ‘creatures inhabiting an animal body complicated by a soul ’ feels nice. It becomes easier to consider that other species too have corresponding inner experiences rather than a grand core able to infiltrate some heavenly domain. Rather few would deny that animals have inner experiences. A quality they likely don’t possess is the human foible of pretentiousness, which allows attribution to ourselves the status of the chosen species. Fortunate are those unassuming species not slated for ascension.
