A Book That Calls Forth Your Soul
John Cottingham’s latest makes a compelling case for the self beyond the material.
Review by Christopher Hauser
From time to time, we discover books that bring forth thoughts not about those books but about ourselves, our place in the universe, and what life is all about. When we begin reading, our attention is focused outward, on the book’s narrative or line of argument. But then, as we read further, we find ourselves pausing, stopping for a moment to contemplate not the author’s words, but what those words have called forth in us: ponderous thoughts about “what a piece of work is a man” (Hamlet, II.ii) and our often ignored but never forgotten restlessness, our yearning for our lives, and the lives of those we love, to have the significance and meaning that we, in the most beautiful, elusive moments of our lives, intuit that they do indeed have. John Cottingham’s In Search of the Soul is one such book.
In fact, as the discussion of In Search of the Soul makes clear, Cottingham would say that what has been called forth by reading is the “soul”—or rather the aspects of human existence that are at the root of all philosophical and literary talk of there being something in us (“a soul”) that transcends the material constituents that make up our bodies. Each of us has a capacity to think ponderous thoughts about what it means to be human, about the origin of the universe, and about the purpose of human life; a capacity to recognize goodness and beauty and, what’s more, recognize the call to respond in certain ways to the goodness and beauty we recognize; a capacity to yearn for and seek a transcendent meaning and purpose in our lives; and a capacity to know oneself as a self. This is the “soul,” as Cottingham would put it, that is so familiar to us and yet so out of place in the universe described by the reductionist or naturalistic philosophers of our day.
For many years now, in works such as On the Meaning of Life (2003), The Spiritual Dimension (2005), Why Believe? (2009), and How to Believe (2015), Cottingham has sought to take what he calls “a more humane” approach to philosophizing. This “humane” approach is at the heart of In Search of the Soul (2020). As he puts it in the Foreword, this is an approach to the big questions of life and human existence that “draw[s] on the full range of resources available to the human mind, including those that depend on literary, artistic, poetic, imaginative, aesthetic, and emotional modes of awareness.” Readers of In Search of the Soul will find that Cottingham lives up to this aspiration to take this “more humane” approach to his subject matter. To answer his central question, which concerns what it means to be human and why we might reasonably adopt a theistic worldview in light of our understanding of what it means to be human, Cottingham discusses not only the ideas expressed in the writings of great philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, but also the elusive experiences expressed in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Wordsworth, and W. B. Yeats.
Cottingham is not claiming that the theistic worldview is the only way to make sense of conscious creatures like us who can recognize and respond to irreducible moral truths.
What exactly are the book’s central claims? In Chapter 1, Cottingham explores and defends the idea that all human beings cannot but be “engaged in the task of trying to understand the ‘soul’ in this sense: the experiencing subject, the core self that makes us what we are.” Following this, Cottingham turns to a brief history of philosophical thinking about the extent to which there is something in us (“the soul”) that transcends the physical or material constituents out of which our bodies are made. Here Cottingham focuses in particular on the conceptions of the soul found in Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes. Though pointing out flaws in each of these thinkers’ arguments, Cottingham also draws readers’ attention to what he takes to be the lasting insights from these three philosophers.
Building from this historical discussion, Cottingham turns next to consider the extent to which contemporary people can and should believe that there is more to our universe than the mechanistic processes that are the focus of much contemporary science.
In Chapter 3, Cottingham follows a growing number of philosophers in arguing that there are “two striking features of the reality we encounter in ordinary human lives” that do not fit into the universe described by naturalistic or reductionist philosophers: these two features are “the irreducible nature of conscious experience—the ‘life-world’ accessible to each individual subject—and the irreducible normative requirements to which, like it or not, we are subject as moral beings and which continually demand a response from us.” Cottingham goes to argue that our recognition of these irreducible features of our universe can lend support to a theistic worldview. In particular, he suggests that
Once we have made the necessary philosophical move of acknowledging the reality of the lifeworld presented to us conscious subjects, then in integrity we have to try to fit this into an overall world picture that allows for such a reality. And since we cannot suppose that this world is created by us, and if, furthermore, we cannot see how it could be derived from the principles of physics…then we can hardly refuse to consider the theistic alternative.
Cottingham is not claiming that the theistic worldview is the only way to make sense of conscious creatures like us who can recognize and respond to irreducible moral truths; rather, his claim is simply that the theistic framework is one that rightfully appeals to us insofar as it “makes sense of those irreducible aspects of reality that we cannot in integrity deny but which underpin the very meaning of our lives: the compelling values we encounter every day as we are confronted with beauty and goodness whose objective authority we are constrained to acknowledge whether we want to or not; and the vivid way in which the world is wondrously made present to us through the right and precious gift of conscious experience.”
His purpose is merely to demonstrate how the theistic worldview fits with our deepest yearnings and offers a framework in which our lives.
Later, Cottingham builds on this discussion by exploring how “we humans have a strong and vivid intimation of the power of goodness, a power that transcends the muddle and decay of so much of our human existence, and points us towards out true destiny—accomplishing the task of ‘finding the soul,’ of realizing the better selves we are meant to be.” We can respond to this call without adopting a theistic worldview. And yet, Cottingham suggests, it is precisely here that many of us will recognize a strong reason to adopt a theistic worldview, for to “hold on to the idea of the soul in this context is to hold on to the idea of an objective teleological framework for human life,” a framework in which “the significance of our lives, and perhaps most crucially the lives of those we love who have died, is somehow ‘gathered in,’ and hence that these lives amount to something more than a series of events and actions irreversible and finally terminated in death.”
In making this point, Cottingham is careful to note that he does not intend to be offering a demonstrative or probabilistic argument for accepting a theistic worldview. His purpose is merely to demonstrate how the theistic worldview fits with our deepest yearnings and offers a framework in which our lives, including the moral agency we exercise in those lives, can clearly and truly have the objective significance that we, in the most beautiful moments of our lives, experience them as having. This fact, Cottingham suggests, provides a powerful reason to adopt a theistic framework, to hope and even believe in its truth, even in the absence of a demonstrative or probabilistic argument in favor of its truth.
Christopher Hauser is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Scranton, a small Jesuit university located in northeastern Pennsylvania. He teaches courses on philosophy of religion, ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, and metaphysics and has published scholarly journal articles in Faith and Philosophy and Metaphysics.
In Search of the Soul: A Philosophical Essay was published by Princeton University Press on February 11, 2020. You can purchase a copy from the publisher’s website here.
