Members-only podcast episode
Robert Bolton on the (Immaterial, Immortal) Soul
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One of the most fascinating things about the field of the study of western esotericism is the number of different methodological viewpoint it embraces. Our discussion with Richard Seaford on the birth of the soul took a strongly materialist, historicist line: you can account for the idea of a soul arising at a particular point in the evolution of human cultures because of the kind of material circumstances arising in those cultures at that time.
But Dr Robert Bolton has an entirely different story to tell: there is, and always has been, a reality which we call soul, one which is immaterial and immortal. Dr Bolton’s discussion combines a priori reasoning with reflections on his own conception of the philosophia perennis. This episode provides a tonic opposition to the previous discussion, and it is hoped that the juxtaposition is fruitful for many listeners. It also gives a first-hand, or emic, insight into the thought of a practitioner of a certain kind of esoteric Platonist Christian way of life, one which may be understood as part of western esotericism. In the final part of the interview, we explore Dr Bolton’s particular vision of a Catholic Platonism and the place of the soul within it.
Works Discussed in this Episode:
Bolton, Robert, 2017. Person, Soul, and Identity: Philosophy and the Real Self. Angelico Press, San Rafael, CA. Listeners interested in the ideas about cyclical time mentioned in the episode will want to check out Idem. 2001. The Order of the Ages: World History in the Light of a Universal Cosmogony. Sophia Perennis, San Rafael, CA.
John Scotus Eriugena: De divisione naturæ Book 1, section 486 B – D (part of a larger discussion 486 to 494A) the essentia–virtus–operatio triad, translating the Greek Platonist οὐσία/δύναμις/ἐνεργεία.
Lorenz, Konrad (2002). Marjorie Kerr Wilson, trans. King Solomon’s Ring : New Light on Animal Ways. Routledge, London. See Chapter 5 for ducks thinking the author is their mother because the first thing they see upon hatching is him quacking away.
Plotinus: Ennead III.6 On the Impassibility of Things without Bodies.
Recommended Reading:
The classical arguments lying at the beginning of this traditional way of thinking about the soul are to be found in Plato. The dialogue Phædo is especially important in this regard. Also check out the Meno.
Saeeduddin Ahmed
February 24, 2022
Finally listened to this. Very nice episode
It was good to listen to it after I heard Dr. Seaford’s points about the soul, inner self and Axial Age.
Dr. Bolton comes very close (it seems) to Donald Hofmann’s position on consciousness, which is interesting because Hofmann starts from a very different paradigm (cognitive sciences).
https://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/
Further, I felt that Dr Bolton was more “participatory” in his outlook than historic, compared to other guests I have listened to.
Would you agree?
Earl Fontainelle
February 24, 2022
I would agree. He’s a philosopher more than a historian of philosophy.
Kenneth Dee Shaw
March 4, 2022
Robert Bolton bowled me over! I could listen to his sonorous tones all day. Sooo different from the brittle postmodern intellectualism of some of the others.
Omar Abou Saada
April 25, 2022
I enjoyed a lot of the nuance in this discussion, I like the contrast with Dr. Seaford’s view that “having” a soul derives from a developing materialization, commodification of goods in the ancient world. Said commodification then priming the humans of the time to start thinking of their own selves as
I also think the two conceptions are not mutually exclusive. It seems that Dr. Bolton proposes that a soul, or a consciousness, simply is, and individual entities can embody it (literally, I suppose), much like how a stone can embody the shape of a sphere, or be ground down to the shape of a triangle.
So, obviously there’s an opposition in the sense that for Dr. Seaford, I think the argument would be that a soul is a purely social construct which did not always exist and presumably could, in the right environment, disappear. Still, I don’t think Dr. Seaford would suggest that the concept of a soul, a unifying system of consciousness that represents the internal self, is any less or more “real” than that of a perfect circle. So it feels like they can agree with each other on a lot of points, even if they seem to disagree on the origin of the idea of a soul, or its source.
As an aside, the placebo effect was brought up to support the idea that the human soul has some power over matter. The placebo effect is one of those concepts that has been burned into the public consciousness by pulpy pop science nonsense. I’d like to get on my soapbox and bring up a few points about the placebo effect. Some of this is still emerging research but I think there is enough evidence supporting the following claims:
A person’s response to the placebo effect is influenced by their genetic makeup. The genes involved are
genes that code for proteins in the dopamine pathway, serotonin pathway, opioid pathway and endocannabinoid pathway (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4573548/)
This is linked to the view that the placebo effect is a learned response. Much like how Pavlov’s dogs learn to start salivating with the mental context of hearing a particular bell ring at a certain time, humans learn to start expecting pain relief within complex medical contexts and upon ingesting pills which have previously provided pain relief. The placebo effect is the activation of neural pathways which have previously been activated. In fact, you have a stronger effect if you start by giving a person a real pain reliever on the first day, and placebos every subsequent day, because they have learned the response better. It also means that if you’ve never seen a doctor or a pill before, the placebo effect will not work for you.
The genetic element mentioned before supports this view. If some genes in charge of part of your dopamine or serotonin pathways have a given mutation, you may end up less sensitive to being activated by your learned expectation of pain relief. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6175283/)
This is just to say, the placebo effect is limited to pain relief and other symptoms which are mainly treated by influencing neural pathways such as, if I’m not mistaken, tremors for Alzheimer’s patients. I think when you brought up the placebo effect as a known example of “mind over matter” or the soul influencing matter, it was following the widespread misconception that any disease is susceptible to being treated by sheer will or belief in treatment. For that we would need evidence of root causes being treated by the placebo effect, rather than only symptoms being mitigated.
PS: I’m new to the shwep, this is my first comment. I absolutely love it so far.
Earl Fontainelle
April 25, 2022
Thanks for the insightful comments, Omar.
Gregory Esteven
September 17, 2023
I found the contrast of the two discussions to be thought-provoking. I don’t know that they’re mutually exclusive — then again, I have lumper sympathies.
Seaford’s observation that the explosion of the money economy and numerical speculation (even metaphysics proper, if he would say that) occurred simultaneously, and are related, seems sound enough. Truly, I had never thought about this.
Having a social system where numbers become all-important may well be a condition of possibility for sustained mathematico-metaphysical speculation. That seems straightforward enough, and we wouldn’t question that if we were just talking about the use of mathematics in architecture in the ancient world. People used mathematics in the construction of buildings — or in sea-faring — that must have conditioned philosophical speculation about number. Empirically, doing things with numbers seems to give us insight into the nature of things.
Why wouldn’t that also be the case with money and trade, if these things became a fact of daily life?
That doesn’t negate that the mathematical operations done with money correspond, seemingly, to something transhistorical (it’s the same as any other math, adding, subtracting). We think that mathematical operations used in the planning of a building do so, even though styles, technology, and so on relating to architecture change over time.
The historical rise of the importance of numbers doesn’t imply that something about them is discovered in reality, or underlying reality.
If the idea of the soul develops at a certain time, perhaps it is also discovered, or corresponds with something having an ontological status.
In materialist science we say that the atom was discovered, but that it was already there.
Earl Fontainelle
September 18, 2023
Right! This is Dr Bolton’s view; the soul was always there, but science (we might say ‘philosophy’) needed to get to a certain level of development before it could give a satisfactory account of the soul. So the lumper-thesis would make the rise of arithmetic, quantifiable currency, and so forth instruments which advancing science was able to make use of to come up with a new and better language to describe reality.
Gregory Esteven
September 20, 2023
Fascinating!
I was struck by another issue today. Perhaps this is addressed elsewhere in the podcast; I am making my way back through it, and listening to member-only episodes for the first time. I am also making my way into Plotinus, and may find some treatment there.
Here’s the thought. Not as a scholar, but as a contemporary occult practitioner, I am concerned with daimones and lares, let’s say — lato sensu.
I wonder how relationships with such beings squares with the unitive self, as in Plotinus and other late Platonists. Plotinus had a daimon who was a God, evidently, so he didn’t “depopulate Heaven.” There’s a spiritual ecosystem.
But if there is a unitive self, one that is bounded in some sense and not a congeries, is its relationships with these beings accidental or essential? I mean, is the soul sort of bound to a daimon in the Nous? If so, what does that mean regarding identity.
Part of what I’m wondering is whether older (e.g. Homeric) notions of composite selves, or relational assumptions about identity continue alongside the Platonic, Christian, etc., soul tradition.
I’m also not assuming that something like a daimon is just another part of the psyche, in a modern psychological sense.
Earl Fontainelle
September 20, 2023
Gregory,
All good questions, which will indeed be covered in the Plotinus episodes. The question of the ‘undescended self’ in Plotinus is not easy, though! What does it mean to have a unitive self when the true self exists within the Nous, and the Nous is a ‘multiple unity’, all of whose parts are the Nous itself? But yes, the human self here has a higher self there, often called a daimōn. This relation is absolutely essential: no daimōn, no human being, because how could you have an imitation of something if you don’t have the something to imitate?
As for the older bronze-age notions of the self continuing, I think that definitely happened. As with cosmologies (where e.g. we still talk about ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’), linguistic habits and assumptions about the self tend to change VERY slowly, it seems to me. Indeed, the vocabulary of the ‘new self’ — psychē, nous, pneuma, etc. etc. – was all adapted form the older ways of thinking rather than being fresh coinings. Plotinus, at his most elevated, will sometimes use the term ‘anoun‘ in its everyday sense of ‘a thickhead’, even though his nous has highly specialised metaphysical functions which have nothing to do with ‘being intelligent’ in the normal sense.
I hope some of that is helpful.