By William Keating, Regis ’12
It can sometimes seem that the science of the brain overshadows the soul in
the model of human consciousness. Yet Dr. Al Burke, Regis ’49 and Prof. of
Religion and English at Hofstra University, contends that studying the brain
alone is a limited pursuit, because neuroscientists are restricted to a
“narrow epistemology,” i.e. inductive reasoning. In
contrast, he argues, the scholars of the Humanities have a variety of
epistemological tools at their disposal, including deductive reasoning. Dr.
Burke says that it is this freedom and flexibility that allows a thorough and
gratifying inquiry into our understanding of the human condition, including the
nature of religious belief and the soul.
This introduced the topic of his lecture, the Platonic
dialogue “The Phaedo.” But why that text?
In “The Phaedo,” Plato records the first attempt in the Western
Tradition to postulate the theory of the “spiritual” soul, distinct in
substance from the body. This concept separates the physical and spiritual into
the body and soul, distinguishing between the mortal and immortal attributes of
the human being.
Dr. Burke revealed that those ancient philosophers who
believed in a spiritual soul, primarily Socrates and Plato, were among a
minority, with the rest believing (as later Aristotle did) in a material soul or in no soul at all. These observations prefaced
Dr. Burke’s presentation of Socrates as a radical thinker, a man who caused a
paradigm shift in philosophy, away from cosmology (the
study of the universe and the four elements: Earth Wind, Fire, and Water) and toward the study of ethics.
The central theme of Dr. Burke’s lecture was the
philosophical disdain for the body raised in “The Phaedo,” that the body was in
fact “the prison house of the soul.” Believing that the purpose of life is to
seek truth, Socrates in “The Phaedo” describes the body as distracting from
that purpose, constantly pursuing sustenance and reacting to emotions such as
fear, desire, and affection. On the other hand, Socrates attributes to the soul
the intellect and all that is like the divine, attempting to justify his belief
that there is an immortal aspect of humanity. This tenet of Greek philosophy
has impacted discussions of the soul for millennia, even to the present. This
phenomenon can be attributed in part to Christianity, Dr. Burke explained,
which was heavily influenced by Greek thought as it spread through the
Mediterranean, and shared much in common with the Greek philosophy of the
immortal soul.
“The Phaedo,” Dr. Burke divulged, is also important to the
literature of the soul because it contains Socrates’ account of life after
death, his “Orphic myth,” which suggests a parallel with the Judeo-Christian model
of the spiritual world. Although the two developed independently, Dr. Burke
explained that the afterlife described in “The Phaedo” is analogous to the
Christian purgatory, heaven, and hell, in so far as Socrates adapts the
traditional Greek view on Hades to include punishment for vices and the
purification of the spirit.
Yet one must be careful not to approach the text with
retroactive bias; as Dr. Burke pointed out, the Judeo-Christian model of the
soul differs greatly from that of Plato, even as it articulates an identical
justification of “eternal life.” Nevertheless, rather than insist on a division
of body and spirit, scripture portrays their immortal union, as in a passage
read by Dr. Burke: “The dead shall live again, their bodies shall rise” (Isaiah
26:19). In fact, the Bible treats the body with reverence, calling it the
“temple of the Holy Spirit,” a far cry from the disdain for the corporeal
form exhibited in “The Phaedo.” This
insight builds a more cooperative model of body and soul, based on the
interpretation of Judeo-Christian message of spiritual and bodily unification.
Dr. Burke began his presentation of “The Phaedo” with a quote
from Bishop John Robinson: “Man doesn’t have a body, he is a body. He is flesh
animated by soul; the whole is a psycho-physical unity.” If we take anything
from studying the history of the soul, let it be an understanding of how we
arrived at the conception of spirituality we now have, let us learn the lessons
afforded us by our perspective. It may be that the competition of
epistemologies between
the Sciences and the Humanities, neurology and philosophy, is as misguided as
the conflict proposed by Plato between a divine soul and contemptible
body. Perhaps these rivaling epistemologies differ less than we think; it may
be true that they, like body and soul, are capable of increasing understanding
more as a whole than as individual "ways of knowing" (i.e., epistemologies).
What advantage does this concept of unity offer in regard to
our future study in the Seminar? While it can be difficult for us to distribute
our concentration evenly among three models of consciousness, each offers us
valuable insight into the human condition. It seems to me that the aim of this
Seminar is attained in Dr. Burke’s response to “The Phaedo”—that the
investigation of consciousness is best served by cooperation among the constructs
of brain, mind, and soul, that more can be achieved in collaboration than in
contradiction.
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