Body, Soul, Spirit: The Ancient Tripartite Person

                John R. White argues that a shortage of English terms has distorted American translations of Carl Jung and other German thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud. At the heart of the problem is the German noun Seele, which is usually translated psyche or mind. Translators avoid the English cognate soul because of its theological freight, but all the translations are problematic. Translating a native one-syllable German word with the exotic Greek term like psyche is bad enough, but mind is worse. It replaces the German soul's care with mental health and creates the confusing oxymoron, unconscious mind, as if there were a self-aware parallel mind playing hide-and-seek, not just a pre-conscious soul-part of the integrated person.

An ancient lineage recommends two distinct terms for human mentation, represented in English by soul and spirit. German Seele and English soul (Old English sawol) translate Latin anima, which translates Greek psyche and Hebrew nephesh. All of these words refer to a life force, identity, or animating principle. Without soul, a dog or a human being--even a tree--would be dead matter (not to speak of a blues song). The other term, spirit in English but formerly ghost (from Old English gast 'breath'), is Geist in German. The Latin is spiritus, which translates Greek pneuma and Hebrew ruach. All of this second group meant 'breath' or 'wind,' invisible movement or power that gives us our term spiritual. All of the above produce death by their absence (to entirely lose either soul or spirit is to die) but there are important distinctions. 

Unlike spirit-words, soul-words apply to animals. Soul suggests an irrational substrata, spirit a higher function, James Hillman associates soul with valleys and images, spirit with mountains and abstract ideas. Soul is often understood as animal energy that dissipates without the matrix of a living body or sinks to a shadowy Hades or Sheol, while spirit is the rational part--especially in the sense of knowing good from evil or knowing God--that may be immortal. The distinction between nephish as the instinctual and ruach as the moral is explicit in Jewish Kabbala, like the distinction between cognates nafs and ruh is in Islam. Chinese makes a parallel distinction between hun-soul and po-soul (yang and yin) in the living human being.

The ancient tripartite human identity of body, soul, and spirit is lost to most of Christianity, perhaps from a reluctance to disappoint believers' hope to wake up intact in heaven, earthbound instincts and all. Christian theology, particularly after Augustine, inherited the Neoplatonic concept of a separate, complete immortal soul inhabiting the body rather than the concept in Judaism and early Christianity (particularly the theology of Irenaeus) of an inseparable composite including the body. Hillman suggests that the confusion of soul with spirit, the blurring of both words into spirit, was complete when the 869 Council of Constantinople ruled that icons were only venerable as representations, as pictographic symbols, not as spirit-filled images. White (2001) associates it with a misreading of Thomas Aquinas.

Whatever the cause, the Christianity I grew up with was dualistic. People had two parts, body and soul. At death the soul left the body. Soul lived, body died. Or spirit lived, body died. Same thing. But this isn't how the words were used in the New Testament. In Jude 19, sowers of division in the Christian church are condemned as soulful (psychikoi) rather than spiritual (pneumatikos). In 1 Corinthians 15:44, Paul describes saved as being buried in soulful (psychikon) bodies and raised in spiritual ones. Of course, the terms aren't translated soulful in English Bibles--but as physical or natural--because a verse devaluing soul would be misread today. This only demonstrates White's point: our reluctance to use soul in its ancient sense of a natural life force obscures a tripartite division of consciousness that may be best explained--in modern philosophical terms anyway--in the writings of the Catholic philosopher Max Scheler (1874-1928).

Max Scheler

In Scheler's analysis, the three parts are (1) Leib 'living body', (2) Seele 'soul' (usually translated psyche or mind), and (3) Geist 'spirit'. Scheler's categorical distinctions revitalize wisdom tradition with philosophical rigor. Body consciousness is private, autonomous, and impersonal, but not what he calls intentional. This means that it doesn't reference any outside object or image. If my head aches, it doesn't ache for something. It just aches. Body consciousness isn't desire, but rather it is fact on which the soul may base desire. It is also private. Nobody else can feel my pain or hunger. They may sympathize, but it remains my consciousness, not theirs. Still, body consciousness isn't personal like my name, beliefs, or family; I don't lose any of my self-identity when I take an aspirin and my head stops aching. A pain or need is mine, but it isn't me. Also, body consciousness is autonomous, existing in the same relation to my will as the weather. I can't acquire an ache or lose one just by deciding to. I can, of course, decide to ignore one, maybe with success, but it's still there. It's mine but not me, and it drives and delimits my soul and spirit. A Stoic precept comes to mind: I may be free to do anything I want, but I'm not free to want anything I want. If my my bladder is full, I'm not free to enjoy a good book.

In contrast to body consciousness, soul is referential and public, but still autonomous and relatively impersonal. Its urges toward (or away from) objects are not voluntary. If I'm calorie deprived, delicious food--real or imagined--will make me want to eat it. It's not a choice. A sexy person--real or imagined--will stimulate desire, more or less strong depending on lived body's libido (weaker since I've gotten older). The soul reacts to object-images on the basis of body-consciousness, and soul is basically bimodal: either attracted or repelled. Soul is nuanced, but in broad terms it seeks pleasure over pain, life over death. Soul is the life-sustaining "instinctive" wisdom of living bodies. My dog Rumi is soulful. His eyes (and ears and tail) are mirrors of his soul, a shadow-play of desires and fears. He sees, hears, and smells images of things in the moment like a leaf in the wind, and his soul visibly affirms or denies them. This brings up an unexpected trait of soul: it is social. It is expressed without permission. Embarrassment blushes, lust erects, hunger salivates, and love is obvious. Soul may not be inevitably social, but that's the tendency. I can easily hide thoughts and opinions, but people around me read my soul. They sense how I feel by looking at me. If I succeed in hiding my feelings, it is only through effort as an actor (hypokrites in Greek). Acting is the spiritual craft of faking soul.

Spirit is like soul in that it referential--about our relationships with objects--but different in that it is voluntary, private, and personal. Secretly (unless it chooses to reveal itself) spirit defines who we are as persons. Soul adapts reflexively to experience and forms habits but does not choose. Spirit chooses. It is is the agent of personal will. The personal and the voluntary are deeply intertwined. By spirit, we exist as personalities responsible for our actions. Soul is morally blind. It functions (presumably on a evolutionary basis) to promote life, whether individual or collective, by processes close to the sensory ground. It doesn't always succeed (for example, when adaptation to pleasure turns into addiction) but its basis is the impersonal, direct expansion of life. Spirit, in contrast, is capable of self-sacrifice. Maybe the principled, reasoned behaviors associated with spirit require language: the interplay of abstract principles, sustained art, self-sacrifice, and personal responsibility that is human society. Images express soul, words define spirit. We can't be blamed for an impulse of the soul any more than for a dream, only for how spirit acts on that impulse. Plato describes Intelligence as a charioteer guiding horses representing two lower functions. 

I have followed an arc that may seem to leave us with spirit as a wise ruler called to whip our baser natures into shape, but this is a dangerous and impoverishing view, perhaps best corrected by advice in chapter 60 of the Tao Te Ching:

         Ruling a great nation is like frying small fish

         When they are over stirred, they will break into pieces.

The "higher" function of spirit, despite being named after the wind, is not the source. Its energy is borrowed from the body and soul. Its rational rulings--or, more often, its ideological ones--become destructive if they ignore the soul's root wisdom and the body's limits, disrupting the harmony of a tripartite symbiosis. The irrational functions of the instinctive soul, like the invisible workings of a self-programming computer, express the memory of the species and must be respected like a beloved companion at spirit's peril. A life divided cannot stand, and the living human spirit thrives by maintaining the health of the body and soul at its basis. 

Scheler's basic system is not, like much of psychoanalysis, a metaphysical construct of the unconscious, but a scheme for experiencing conscious, lived experience. Here's one example. I wake up each morning, retired and old, groggy from sleep and aching a little, needing stimulation but also comfort (lived body) and gravitate to my iPad, coffee, recliner, and lapdog. I punch into social media, news, and weather, a habit so ingrained that it borders on a conditioned reflex, an acquired soul-urge operating like an addiction. With Rumi dozing in my lap, tying me down in the language of soul, I stare at the screen beyond the point that I benefit from it or especially enjoy it. 

     "Enough," I think, "Do something." "I" verbalize to "myself" that it's time to get up and move, but soul-myself isn't listening. She's like my dog when he smells a rabbit. She has a mind of her own. Though perfectly convinced as rational spirit that what I'm doing is pointless, I fail to move. Will-power fails to stir the autonomous other parts. Soul as habit and bodily inertia overrule it. Finally, I break free to do serious reading or mow the lawn or write something like this, works of the spirit. But this requires the spirit-I to coax its soul-I and body-I to join in.

Sources

Hillman, James. "Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as a Basis for Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline" in Senex and Puer," edited by Glen Slater,  Spring Publications, 2015.

White, John R. "Max Scheler's Tripartite Anthropology," in Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 75:255-266, 2001. White explains concepts in Scheler's Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics (1913-1916), translated by M. Frings and R. Funk, 1973.

White, John R. "Toward a Phenomenology of Participation Mystique and a Reformulation of Jungian Philosophical Anthropology" in Shared Realities: Participation Mystique and Beyond, edited by Mark Winborn, Fisher King Press, 2014.