Episode 4: Richard Seaford on the Origins of the Soul
This episode was recorded when I was just getting the hang of my newfangled recording technology, so please excuse the poor sound quality, which is more than made up for by the fascinating subject-matter.
In some of the earliest documents we possess from Indo-European cultures – the Rg Veda and the Homeric poems – the human beings depicted do not have ‘souls’. That is to say, they have organs of what we might call different types of consciousness, but there is no indication that there is a unifying principle which knits all the different organs together. Then, at the beginning of the sixth century BCE, something rather startling happens: in both Indian texts (the Brahmanas, Upanishads, and others) and in Greece (in the movement known as Pre-Socratic philosophy) the notion arises that there is indeed a unifying, bounded, and possibly immortal soul.
Richard Seaford has a provocative theory, based in a sociological / anthropological approach, as to why this new and revolutionary idea comes into being at just this time in just these places. Whether you agree with him or not, you will not want to miss Professor Seaford’s masterful survey of the Greek and Sanskritic evidence for the first appearance of that most essential entity, the soul.
Other fascinating themes touched on:
- What is the ‘Axial Age’, and what makes it so ‘axial’?
- The problems of dating the Homeric poems and the Rg Veda
- The origins of the concept of the incorporeal in Greece and India
- What money and private property have to do with the rise of the soul
Works Discussed in this Episode
- Macpherson, C.B., 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. The Clarendon Press, Oxford.
- Parfit, D., 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- Sorabji, R., 2006. Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Recommended Reading
On the development of Greek ideas about soul, see
- Bremmer, J. N., 1983. The Early Greek Concept of the Soul. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
- Claus, D. B., 1981. Toward the Soul: An Inquiry Into the Meaning of ψυχή Before Plato. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT / London.
- Robinson, T., 1970. Plato’s Psychology. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
- Seaford, R. (2017). ‘The Psuchê from Homer to Plato: A Historical Sketch’. In: Seaford, R., Wilkins, J. & Wright, M. (Eds.), Self and the Soul: Essays on Ancient Thought and Literature in Honour of Christopher Gill, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Not a lot of comparative work has been done looking at the parallels between early western and Sanskritic world-views, but check out the essays in the volume
- Seaford, R. (Ed.), 2016. Universe and Inner Self in Early Indian and Early Greek Thought. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Professor Seaford has a monograph on the soul in early Indian and Greek thought currently in production. When it is published (we hope some time in 2019) we’ll let you know!
Themes
Heraclitus, Homeric Poems, Interview, Parmenides, Plato, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, Soul, Vedas
Bernie Lewin
September 3, 2019
A compelling historical argument in so many respects. But it left me confused over my preconceptions. I had always thought of psyche as life, as the life of an animal that is normally regarded to be extinguished when it takes its last breath. Immorality argues that it is not extinguished, that the fire burns on. You seem to be describing the social self, the ego self, the “me”, not a consiousness but a self consciousness, like the fallen Adam realising he is naked and so ashamed. Perhaps Plato’s About the Psyche psyche is like that, but then that sometime appears as a coat that can be shed when it is alone (p. 79), and so more akin to the observer-I ?