ON THE CONCEPT OF SOUL AMONG THE GREEKS
(Rodrigo Peñaloza, 2013)

The idea we have about the soul came from the reflexions of the ancient Greeks about psyché (ψυχή). There was, however, an evolution from the Homeric poems to Neoplatonism.

In the Homeric poems (VIII century BC), the use of the word psyché (ψυχή) can be reduced to only two: shadow (σκιά) and vital force, which is extinguished with death. Robinson (2010, “As origens da alma: os gregos e o conceito de alma de Homero a Aristóteles”) illustrates it in a very interesting way. If we asked Achilles who’s the true Achilles, he’d point to his own body and would say “this living body!”, and if we further asked “who’s that shadow (σκιά) that is flying away as a bat to the Hades?”, he’d then say the shadow was the residue, like the corpse, of a man, himself, and that the true Achilles was himself answering such questions. The soul would then be taken for a shadow surviving for a while in the Hades, though it is the true Achilles the one who dies.

With the tragedy-writers a change happens. Aeschylus (c. 525–455 BC.) and Euripedes (480–406 BC.) conceive of the psyché (ψυχή) as a vital force that animates the body. In Agamemnon 1455–1457, by Aeschylus, the chorus says: “Oh, oh, mad Helen, unique! Many, very many souls you destroyed under Troy!” (ἰὼ ἰὼ παράνους Ἑλένα μία τὰς πολλάς, τάς πάνυ πολλὰς ψυχὰς ὀλέσασ᾽ ὑπὸ Τροίᾳ). In Antigone 175–177, by Sophocles (c.497-c.405 BC.), the soul is an agent that thinks and feels pleasure and pain: “it is impossible to know, of every man, the soul, the will and the judgemental reason before, by principles and laws, he manifests himself tested” (ἀμήχανον δὲ παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἐκμαθεῖν / ψυχήν τε καὶ φρόνημα καὶ γνώμην, πρὶν ἂν / ἀρχαῖς τε καὶ νόμοισιν ἐντριβὴς φανῇ).

Until the V century BC, psyché (ψυχή) was an expression of poetry. With Anaximenes, the soul becomes a principle and is identified with air (vide fr. DK B2). To Homer, what was blown out of the body in the moment of death was just a shadow destined to vanish in the Hades. To Anaximenes, it was the soul, made of breath and air. To Heraclitus (fr. 117, 118 and 85), the soul is not only a vital principle, it was also a principle of rationality and moral integrity. In fragment B85, for instance, “it is hard to fight against passion, because whatever one wishes, one gets it at the price of soul” (θυμῶι μάχεσθαι χαλεπόν· ὅ τι γὰρ ἂν θέληι, ψυχῆς ὠνεῖτει). The atomists Democritus and Leucippus describe the soul as composed of atoms colliding in a random fashion. Every cause is mechanical, not a final cause. The pre-Socratic period ends then with two opposing views.

Socrates approaches the immortality of the soul in the Phaedon, in which he presents the human soul and the real immortal person. Soul and body are distinct in nature. In passage 65d1–2, he says that the soul of the philosopher should avoid the body and wish to become alone with itself. The soul is the inner person. The soul is not physical, but influenced by the physical realm. The nature of this influence is orphic, that is, it has the character of purification through knowledge. In addition to the cognitive principle and the inner person, Socrates mentions three other meanings of the soul: (a) as a vital force (as in Homer), (b) as an ontological intermediary between the perceptible objects and the Forms, and (c) as endowed with a vital fluid that permeates the body and connects it to the spirit. In this sense, Socrates would be defining the soul as the incarnated spirit, just like Allan Kardec in the Book of the Spirits, question 134, according to which the soul is the incarnated spirit, connected with the body through the perispirit. Indeed, “Question 134: What is the soul? Answer: An incarnated spirit. Question 134(a): What was the soul before uniting with the body? Answer: Spirit”.

Plotino (204–270 AD) conceived of the universe as a fourfold structure. In an ascending order of emanation: (a) the One (ἥν πρῶτη); (b) the Divine Mind (νοῦς) or Intelligible Realm (κόσμος νοητός); (c) the Soul (ψυχή), with two portions, a superior one facing the Divine Mind and an inferior one that penetrates into Nature and Matter, and finally, (d) Mattter (ὕλη), which corresponds to the aesthetic realm (κόσμος αἰσθητός). This partition has to do with the passage from the One to the Many. Proclus, when writing on the immortality of the soul, says that the soul has three vehicles: (a) carnal, (b) pneumatic, and (c) divine or universal. The carnal vehicle refers to the material body, the pneumatic one is taken from the planetary elements, which, in my opinion, again refer to the perispirit. The divine is obviously the spiritual principle. For both Proclus and Porfiry, only the divine vehicle is immortal, in the following sense: the carnal vehicle is evidently perishable and the pneumatic one is gradually purified until its complete disappearance, after which perfection is reached.