Three or One or None? A Short History of the "Soul" |
What Is the Unconscious
Take our Can You Spot Defense Mechanisms?
Find a therapist near me
For centuries, theologians debated whether human beings had one or three souls.
Prior to Descartes, animals also had souls.
In returning their soul to the animals, Leibniz stumbled upon the unconscious.
For Aristotle (384-322 BCE), all living things had a vegetative or nutritive soul; animals also had a sensitive soul; and humans, on top of that, had a rational soul. As a result, medieval theologians and philosophers debated whether humans had a plurality of souls.
To pluralists such as Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215-1279), the vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls were distinct entities stacked within the human body. For Kilwardby, this explained how Christ’s body remained holy in the tomb after his human soul had departed.
The pluralists were fiercely opposed by unitists such as Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who argued that a person with multiple souls would be no more than a bundle of parts, rather than a single, unified substance. Following centuries of debate, the unitist view, of course, came to prevail.
The philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) completely changed the conversation. To uphold his dualism of mind and body and defend the immortality of the human soul, Descartes argued that only humans (and higher beings such as angels) possessed both a physical body and an immaterial soul. Being the source of thought and reason, this immaterial soul qualified human beings for things like heaven........