Soul Source

The roots of the word meaning soul in Greek and Latin are both from “breath,” thus pneuma in Greek and spiritus in Latin. The English soul is rooted in Proto-Germanic saiwalo and takes all sorts of variant forms in Germanic languages from Seele in German to ziel in Dutch. If you produce a list of the meanings of these three words, they all agree. At the most exhaustive level, the words mean “life,” more narrowly “an animating principle,” more narrowly yet a being that “feels, thinks, and wills.” Both the Online Etymology Dictionary (OED) and the much earlier (1852) and exhaustive German Dictionary produced by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm state that the Germanic word is of “uncertain origin.” Both, however, continue on to suggest that the root may be the Proto-Germanic saiwaz, meaning “sea.” The Grimm brothers speculate that the sea might once have suggested “waves” that mark the interior swings in the soul’s inner life. OED suggests what sounds much more plausible to me. Herewith OED’s addendum:

Sometimes [soul is] said to mean originally “coming from or belonging to the sea,” because that was supposed to be the stopping place of the soul before birth or after death [Barnhart]…. Klein explains this as “from the lake,” as a dwelling-place of souls in ancient northern Europe.

This struck me as strangely wonderful for a reason. Back about three years ago I put up a post on Borderzone (link) in which, commenting on Tony Hillerman’s The Dance Hall of the Dead, I had discovered a very curious aspect of Zuni religious beliefs. It is that souls come from and return to a sacred lake in Arizona called Ko-thuwallawa, literally God-Town. What do they do there? They dance.

It is not very likely that the Zuni peoples originated in ancient northern Europe—however similar the beliefs might be. What we glimpse here is something else. While in these bodies we’d better be breathing at right regular intervals. The Greek and Latin words are centered on this vital but also mundane activity. But as for that much less fragile structure, the soul, it may also be seen as a “substantial entity” (OED) that keeps on dancing on….

Stoutly Naive

Not a year passes but I read, usually in some philosophical context, the common man berated for his naiveté. But why do writers use that word? To signal nest odor? The word comes from just born, thus immature. It has connotations of native (“primitive”) or rustic (“stupid”). Thus to use the word is to claim superiority, sophistication, a certain elevation above the great unwashed.

The roots of this usage appear to rest on the notion that ordinary people, when they see an apple, think that they actually see an apple—and are too stupid to know that what is in the head is actually a representation of an apple, not the apple itself. But when people see an apple, they think of it out there, on the table, in the bowl, not in their heads at all. To be sure, what reaches the eyes is light reflected from the apple. It is then transformed into signal. The signal is translated by intellect, aided by memory, into a state of the brain that the mind then, if it needs to, can actually name using a concept. But the light must come from something. The machinery that translates it into a signal is naturally formed by a normal body. Description of the process—which I’d venture would take at least two or three months of very intensive study even mildly to grasp—in no way takes anything away from the concrete facts that something is out there. There is nothing immature, primitive, or stupid about the ordinary person’s naive realism. As ordinarily seen, people see an apple. When this act is painfully analyzed, we get a process—knowing which is not in the least necessary to get along in the ordinary world. So why else call people naive unless it is to shine in the eyes of those initiated into the “higher mysteries.”

Is Bertrand Russell right when he says:

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false. [Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth]

When Bertrand Russell sees an apple, does he actually see uncountably many atomic cores surrounded by probability waves of electrons and enormous voids between these structures? Or does he just see an apple? Which is the true picture of reality? Must it be the voids and only mathematically accessible waves—or is it the shiny red thing there? Or both? Or the cellular structure, with its mitochondria? What scoffers call naive may just be an indication of scale.

This is a minor matter, to be sure. People tend to be silly and try to make themselves look bigger than they are. No big deal. But such charges of naiveté are also used to suggest that people naively believe themselves to have minds (whereas all they have is neurons) and that they have souls (whereas all they are is dissipative structures). That last is a little obscure. The phrase is Ilya Prigogine’s who suggests that life is just a certain kind of self-organizing natural system. When it comes to such extensions of the concept of human naiveté, one wonders who is lost and thus needs a stiff dose of amazing grace.

The Soul Aloft

As Harriet followed Miss Lydgate across the lawn, she was visited by an enormous nostalgia. If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted; if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted by agents, contracts, publishers, blurb-writers, interviewers, fan-mail, autograph-hunters, notoriety-hunters, and competitors; abolishing personal contacts, personal spites, personal jealousies; getting one’s teeth into something dull and durable; maturing into solidity like the Shrewsbury beeches—then, one might be able to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, or see it, at any rate, in a truer proportion. Because, in a sense, it was not important. The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand-to-had struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one’s own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things. [Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night]

Harriet Vane, the heroine of this novel, is herself a writer of detective novels. This brief quotation records her thought as she returns to her old college and the ambiance of the place comes to surround her in a conversation with an old teacher. I marked this passage a long time ago. Oddly enough it came to mind when I read recently this passage in Plato’s Phaedo. The voice is that Socrates:

     And were we not saying long ago that the soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses)—were we not saying that the soul too is dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard, when she touches change?
     Very true.
     But when returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the other world, the region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.