The Wonder of the Human Person - Some Books to Ponder VI

I wish to discuss very briefly two books which I purchased recently: (i) James Harpur's A Complete Guide To The Soul: Who am I? What is my life's purpose?  Where am I going when I die? London: Rider, 2010 and (ii) The Human Voyage of Self-Discovery: Essays in honour of Brendan Purcell, Dublin: Veritas, 2013.

(i) A Complete Guide To The Soul

My copies of the two books reviewed here

Anything from the pen of Patrick Harpur is well worth reading for its breadth of scholarship. I realise the title sounds very New Age-like, but Harpur is too astute and learned to let his heart run away with his reason; rather he balances both wonderfully.  When I buy any book on spirituality, philosophy or psychology I read about the author first to see his/her academic or professional background and (ii) check his/her endnotes and references. A perusal of Harpur's bibliography includes on the one hand, literary and philosophy figures from ancient and modern times, e.g., Homer, Plato, Plotinus, Aristotle, Blake, Coleridge, Graves, Hopkins, Eliot and Yeats, and on the other a scientist like Richard Dawkins, psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud, the founder of Psychoanalysis, the therapists Carl Gustave Jung and James Hillman, the modern philosopher Mary Midgley, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, and the existentialist theologian, Paul Tillich.  I list these purposely to show the scholarly provenance of the work, because the title is so New Age-like that one is more than aware that this book could belong to the crazier fringe of that rather amorphous grouping.  Much insight into Harpur's esoteric but in-depth studies and writings can be found at The Skylight Press website here.  As well as his interest in religion, folklore, Forteana, mythology, depth psychology, our man is a poet and novelist.  One might succinctly call Patrick Harpur a writer.  However, in his case, this attribution literally covers a multitude.

It is interesting, to this writer at least, that anyone who has lost interest in their job, or who is frustrated with some task they have to do rather too often, describe it as "soul-destroying."  It would seem that to destroy what we commonly deem to be the "soul" is literally to stifle the very centre point of enthusiasm, interest and vitality, the focalpoint of enchantment and allurement.  John Keats, one of my favourite poets, spoke about this world with all its sufferings as "the vale of soul-making." How often do we talk of music as being the very song of that same soul; of the Arts in general as being its sustenance.  It is, then,  with delight that we soul-workers and soul-makers read  Harpur's opening words in the book under discussion here:

It is notoriously difficult to talk about the soul.  If we believe that we have a soul, we tend to picture it vaguely - as some essence of ourselves, some core of our being, which constitutes our "real" selves or our "higher selves."  Even if we are not specifically religious we can still resonate with the notion that there is some part of us that should not be sold, betrayed or lost at any cost. (Op.cit., p. ix).

In the above short quotation one can immediately see Harpur's interest in psychology in general, and depth psychology more specifically, shining through.  The "soul" is the English equivalent of the Greek word "psyche," which can also be rendered as "mind" or in more holistic terms by the word "self," which many writers in the psychotherapeutic field capitalise thus, "Self."  Jung capitalises this word practically everywhere in his writings. Anyone into self-development is by virtue of simple word association engaged in the equivalent exercise of "soul-making."  Those who go to therapy to find a centre point or focal point of self, or more simply "to find themselves" or to "find their 'self'" are also, in fact engaged  essentially in soul-work.  In a certain dismissive sense, one could see A Complete Guide to Soul as an esoteric woolly sort of enterprise, but on a more openly human level one could also see it as a good exploration of the topic of self development and of the principles which underlie the same undertaking.

One point I loved is where Harpur points out that death is not the opposite to life - it is, in fact, the opposite to birth.  This point is worth pondering as there is a lot of profundity there. Interesting, too, is the fact that the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus saw the word soul as meaning "depth," giving us a fitting link with the Psychodynamic or Depth School of Psychotherapy.  Harpur returns again and again to what he terms the "real self," which anyone who has read any breadth in psychotherapy will know is a term straight from the writings of the founder of PCT, viz., Carl Ransom Rogers.  

In short, then, this is a wonderfully comprehensive book on the quest for soul or self and covers topics such as world-soul, the unconscious, myth, daimon, spirit, ego, initiation, afterlife and the Otherworld.  

(ii) The Human Voyage of Self-Discovery: Essays in honour of Brendan Purcell

I only bought this book three or four days ago.  Like all compendiums or collections of essays it can be judiciously dipped into from time to time or when the humour or a whim takes one. These essays are in honour of the Rev Dr. Brendan Purcell who was lecturer in philosophy in UCD for nearly forty years.  He is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Notre Dame, Australia.  Indeed, Brendan lectured me for two years when I was an undergraduate in the late nineteen seventies.  I have to admit that I found him an atrociously poor lecturer insofar as he spoke so quickly that there were too many unfinished sentences elided by the subsequent sentences  This was because the man was so enthusiastic and also because his mind worked far more quickly than his tongue could enunciate those thoughts that one sentence tripped the other up as it were!.  However, his copious notes were works of wonderful scholarship.  I have often come across in my time at college this phenomenon, that is, lecturers who are brutal in the classroom, but wonderful researchers and scholars.  I know universities are trying to remedy this major flaw these days at Third Level by actually training lecturers in their task of teaching.

My copies of the two books reviewed here

Anyway, be that as it may, Rev Dr Brendan Purcell is a wonderful scholar in philosophy, and especially in his own area of philosophical anthropology on which he has written a wonderful magnum opus entitled: From Big Bang to Big Mystery: Human Origins in the Light of Creation and Evolution, Dublin: Veritas, 2011).  In this collection of essays here under discussion, the scholarly contributors offer their own valuable insights into the human voyage of self-discovery and discuss among others, Plato, Aristotle, John Henry Newman, Eric Voegelin, Patrick Kavanagh and Emmanuel Lévinas.  The thorny problem of the relationship between religion and science is discussed by Dr. Eoin G. Cassidy.  However, it is to the essay by Professor Fran O'Rourke entitled "Person and Spirit" to which I wish to address my remarks especially here.  I do so because Dr. O'Rourke addresses what the soul may be, and argues in an Aristotelian and Thomist tradition that it is immortal.   Hence this balances wonderfully my brief discussion of Harpur's book above. 

O'Rourke takes as his starting point a quotation from the philosopher Richard Rorty to the effect that what happened around the fateful year 1910 was the fact that then people began to be confident that human beings had only bodies and no souls.  The essay continues by refuting this universal and general claim by an in-depth analysis of Aristotle's De Anima and further by an analysis of what the Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas had to say on that very topic.  The essay is consequently also a good argument versus materialism as well as a right good one on the nature of the soul.  O'Rourke defines soul, in the words used by Ian Ramsey as "an immaterial, indivisible reality of a non-spatio-temporal kind." (Quoted op. cit., p. 125)  He argues that it is gratuitous "to conclude a priori that material bodies are all that exist." (Ibid., p. 126)  O'Rourke slates this as an error of method, that is, we rule out all possible channels of knowledge save the empirical.  He then begins to outline what we mean by a "living thing," and goes on to argue that the soul is what essentially makes it "living."  I learnt a lot about Aristotelian philosophy of soul from this article, to wit:

For Aristotle it is neither the soul nor the body that thinks but the individual, just as it is the individual who perceives, loves and hates.  The individual is a unity of body and soul.  The dependence of intellect upon the body, however, is not the same as that of sensation.  Aristotle makes an important distinction: memory and love terminate with the death of the individual, but thought and reflection are beyond destruction. (Ibid., p.127)

O'Rourke proceeds with erudition and scholarly insight to tease out his arguments for the immateriality of the intellect (or substitute soul here, if you will) by using Thomas Aquinas' and Proclus' arguments for such immateriality as opposed to saying that the mind could in any sense be material as it could not return (reflect) upon itself if it were material as quite simply parts would get in the way.  

This is a deep article which requires two or three readings.  However, I will finish with an apt paragraph O'Rourke quotes from Blaise Pascal:

Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind.  This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being. (Quoted ibid., p. 132)