In Search of the Soul

This wide-ranging and well-written book looks at a variety of meanings associated with the soul, a concept that has largely gone out of fashion in modern philosophy, psychology and neuroscience with the rise of materialistic theories of mind. However, there are many other philosophical associations with the word that are examined here in terms of soul making, meaning, value and growth. The title chapters are indicative: humanity in quest of the soul, the evolution of the soul, soul, science and subjectivity, the partly hidden soul, and the soul and the transcendent. This last theme brings up the search for a deeper identity, but for the author this is more in terms of a 'hospitable' theistic framework than an investigation of the nature and implications of mystical experience. For him, theism is a more plausible 'fundamental framework of interpretation' than materialism when it comes to explaining consciousness. He points out that these pictures are not empirical hypotheses to be tested against evidence but rather the backdrop for any possible hypotheses - and this includes the view espoused by scientism.

At one level, soul language is about moral integration and fulfilment, ripening and meaning, soul as opposed to 'the' soul in a traditional metaphysical and immaterial sense. Here the author, like all philosophers unfamiliar with the psychical and mystical, is at a loss in attempting to connect the mechanistically material with the immaterial when restricted to the notion of a purely physical rather than subtle or light bodies. He also assumes that modern neuroscience has disproved this metaphysical soul and is evidently unacquainted with the vast experiential literature indicating the contrary. Interestingly, his analysis of the 'ratiocentric' Descartes is trialistic rather than dualistic: not only as physical, biological beings and conscious, thinking, concept-using beings, but also with sensory experience as a distinctive phenomenon that cannot be attributed to either body or mind. Cottingham rejects the thesis that consciousness is an illusion, regarding the complex semantic life world as irreducible, even if underpinned by ultimately physical mechanisms. However, theism posits 'a source or ground of all being that is somehow mind-like: consciousness is taken to be at the heart of reality.' (p. 83) The author realises that this is not a provable assertion but advances it as a plausible one (p. 99).

The fourth chapter is devoted to a more psychoanalytical view drawing on Freud and Jung and looking at the cognitive unconscious and the archaeology of belief. The author identifies a deep longing for wholeness and relationship in the human condition, which for him is the soul's yearning for God and a sense of infinite good and beauty. This is where transcendence comes in, but attributively rather than in a supernatural sense and indicating a grasping after meaning and value. I agree that the term supernatural is unhelpful although I would not go so far as to deny the existence of an independent spiritual realm. I appreciated Malebranche's idea of God as infinite and universal being, and also Moltmann's notion of the Spirit indwelling creatures - so both transcendent and immanent, with the human as microcosm or a spark of the divine. Here it would have been helpful to bring in actual experiences of the light, rather than referring to it in an abstract sense. Certainly poetry such as Wordsworth can help, but there is something missing here in terms of connection. This arises from a neglect of the intermediary realm between the physical and the divine as described by visionaries such as Swedenborg and reflects a tension between the persuasiveness of physicalism and the subjective acceptance of a transcendent notion of God.