The Problem of Man in Philosophy

The Essence of Man

Animatedness

Even in primitive societies, there arose the notion that within humanity one must distinguish between the body and the soul. The human body is a unique entity within the realm of things. Its existence necessitates a range of material conditions—a specific chemical composition of the environment, a certain temperature range, and so forth. Like other living organisms, humans have bodily needs, the fulfillment of which is essential for life. To secure the necessary material conditions and means for existence is the natural right of humanity as a natural being. However, unlike all other beings, humanity is not merely a living organism. The life of the body in humans is intimately linked to the life of the soul.

Traditionally, the concept of the soul has been viewed as a special force residing within the human body. In mythological consciousness, human traits were projected onto objects, which were likewise attributed with animation. This gave rise to the earliest polytheistic religions, which posited the existence of many gods resembling humans, yet immortal and more powerful.

The further evolution of religious consciousness led to a transformation in the understanding of the relationship between humanity and the divine: having created gods in their own likeness, humans then began to think that these gods created humanity in their image.

The human soul and God are concepts that are genetically linked. At the foundation of religious worldview lies the idea of similarity between humanity and the world: just as humanity possesses a dual nature, so too does the world—its visible, material body (the Cosmos, the Universe) conceals an invisible, immaterial "soul" ("the world soul," "the world spirit," "the higher spiritual substance," "God"). And just as the human body is flesh of the world’s flesh, so too is the human soul a part of the divine spirit within humanity, bestowed upon them at birth as a "gift of God."

Attempts to comprehend human existence from these perspectives give rise to religious anthropology, in which humanity is considered a creation of God. The question of understanding humanity is thus framed as a question of grasping the divine plan concerning humanity.

The soul is the central category of religious anthropology. It is characterized by the following qualities: immateriality, immortality, the capacity to exist independently of the body. The human body lives only as long as the soul resides within it. The separation of the immortal soul from its body signifies the end of earthly existence. Questions regarding the subsequent fate of the soul are answered in various ways: the soul may wander the world in a bodiless state; it may reincarnate into other bodies; it may merge with the world soul; or it may transition to another realm—heaven, hell, or purgatory.

The purpose and meaning of an individual’s life, according to Christian belief, are tied to the observance of God’s commandments, with eternal bliss in heaven serving as the reward. To save the soul from sin, to preserve its purity, and to aspire towards its perfection—this is the primary concern of humanity in earthly life. However, the soul is imperiled by sinful desires.

Frequently, the source of sin is regarded as the human body, human flesh. Thus arises the characteristic ascetic preaching found in many forms of religion—an exhortation to subdue bodily passions, to abstain from carnal pleasures.

An alternative perspective holds that God endows the soul with free will: the soul must itself choose between virtue and vice. Therefore, if the soul chooses evil, it does so due to its own "corruption," thus the source of sin lies within itself.

Both viewpoints depict human life as an arena of constant struggle between the soul and the body. The relationship between soul and body remains a question that has not found a satisfactory answer in religious anthropology.

To advance in the understanding of humanity, its body and soul, it is essential to transcend religious-scholastic reflections and turn to scientific methods for studying reality. Both body and soul should become subjects of empirical investigation and theoretical generalization of established empirical facts.

Regarding the human body, it is a material object that can be observed, and thus it has long been the subject of many sciences: anatomy and physiology, anthropology and anthropometry, medicine and its various branches, and so forth. Science knows much, if not all, about the human body. It is understood to consist of the same atoms and elementary particles as other bodies in nature. Its cells, tissues, and organs share similarities with those of other living animals. The life of the human body adheres to all the natural laws established by physics, chemistry, biology, and other sciences.

The soul, however, is a far more complex matter. In scientific terms, it cannot be studied by invoking God or otherworldly supernatural forces; rather, it must be understood solely through the processes occurring in our "this-worldly" realm according to its own natural laws.

The roots of such an approach can be traced to ancient notions of the soul as a special body residing within the human body that "takes flight" at the moment of death. Yet, in those times, it was challenging for people to conceive of the spirit as incorporeal.

In ancient Eastern philosophy, the human soul was understood as the "vital spirit," circulating like a fluid through the channels within the body’s organs. The heart was regarded as its center. Ancient materialist philosophers, advancing atomic theory (such as Democritus), believed the soul to be a special organ of the human body composed of "fire atoms"—spherical, very small, and mobile. The physician Alcmaeon, who discovered the nerves connecting the eye to the brain, proposed the idea of the brain as the seat of the soul. The renowned ancient Greek physician Hippocrates believed the soul was formed from a fine ethereal substance present in the air ("pneuma") that enters the brain through respiration.

The Greek word "psyche," meaning "soul," has entered European philosophy and science from ancient tradition. It gave rise to the term "psychology," which began to denote phenomena and processes related to the soul.

However, it was not until the 18th century that the problem of the soul was articulated as an issue of empirical natural research on the psyche. Different mental processes, states, and personal attributes were identified and subsequently described and analyzed in detail. The science of the psyche became known as psychology (a term that emerged in the 18th century in place of "pneumatics," which had previously designated the science of the soul). Nevertheless, in the 18th and 19th centuries, psychology was considered a philosophical science, a branch of philosophy. It was only at the end of the 19th century that psychology separated from philosophy and gained status as an independent science, a transition associated with the name of W. Wundt.

In contemporary scientific psychology, the concept of the soul has yielded to the concept of the psyche. Thus, some scholars express the opinion that, since the concept of the soul is unscientific, there is no soul at all. However, such a judgment is not entirely correct and bears more stylistic weight than substantive significance. How then are the problems concerning the soul approached and resolved in contemporary science?

Three aspects can be distinguished within which the soul is described: — Firstly, the structure or composition of the soul, meaning the various types of mental phenomena—desires, feelings, experiences, sensations, thought processes, knowledge, etc. (the structural aspect); — Secondly, the content of human spiritual life, that is, the specific individual complex of desires, emotions, experiences, thoughts, etc., that fills the soul of the individual and grants them a unique and distinctive spiritual face (the content aspect); — Thirdly, the "nature of the soul"—its origin, its substrate or substance from which it is formed (the genetic or substrate aspect).

The primary focus of scientific-psychological research has been the structural aspect of the soul. This is what has come to be known as the psyche. The psyche thus represents the soul in its structural aspect. Consequently, the concept of the psyche encompasses only a portion of the concept of the soul, and thus it is not identical to the latter.

The content aspect of the soul refers to what is objectively implied by the term "the spiritual world of the individual." Within the context of this aspect, the spiritual world of the individual is contingent not only upon the psyche: its content is determined by the social life in which the individual is immersed, the cultural state of society, and the real possibilities for that individual to engage with cultural values. The spiritual world of the individual constitutes a domain that is the subject of analysis in philosophy and various humanities: ethics, aesthetics, cultural studies, and more. It also forms the primary subject of the arts.

In the genetic aspect, the soul is characterized in its "essential" definition. Here, the focus is on the soul's relation to being, within which it emerges and resides. As previously noted, two approaches exist in understanding the essence of the soul: 1) the soul emerges as a product of a higher, supernatural spiritual substance; 2) the soul is created as a result of the combination of certain forms of matter and constitutes a unique material formation. W. Wundt refers to the first approach as spiritualistic and the second as materialistic. However, in this formulation, the second approach is characteristic not of materialism in general, but rather of naïve, vulgar, naturalistic materialism.

Developed forms of materialist philosophy do not assert that the soul consists of matter. The soul is immaterial; however, it (as psyche or the spiritual world of the individual) exists within humanity due to material processes occurring within its nervous system. In other words, ultimately, the soul is dependent on, and derivative of, matter. The materialist understanding of the psyche corresponds with contemporary scientific approaches to its study.

In this regard, the question of the relationship between mental and physiological phenomena becomes significantly important (the psychophysical, or—more narrowly—the psychophysiological problem). The existence of connections between processes occurring in a person's psyche and physiological processes observed in their nervous system is indisputable. However, the essence of the problem lies in explaining the "mechanism" of such a connection. After all, mental phenomena—images, thoughts, desires—are immaterial; they lack physical properties. They possess neither substance nor energy necessary to exert force on physical bodies. At the same time, they induce material—physical, chemical, physiological—changes in our bodies. How then does thought influence the body?

This problem was first posed by Descartes in the 17th century, who proposed the initial version of the concept of psychophysical interaction. According to the philosopher, mental phenomena (consciousness, thought, will) and bodily phenomena (muscular movement, changes in nerve cells, etc.) belong to two fundamentally different realms: bodily phenomena relate to material substance, while mental phenomena pertain to the spiritual. The material substance possesses spatial extension, while the spiritual is non-spatial. Therefore, material and spiritual processes cannot influence one another. However, as Descartes believed, there exists a specific site (the pineal gland) where they come into contact, enabling their interaction.

An alternative variant—the concept of psychophysical parallelism—was proposed by Leibniz and other philosophers, who argued that interaction between spirit and matter is fundamentally impossible. This concept asserts that, although there is no causal connection between mental and physiological phenomena, correspondence and coherence are nonetheless possible between them. Mental and physical processes unfold "in parallel," "synchronously." According to Leibniz, the correspondence between them is established through "pre-established harmony," the creator of which is, of course, God.

In both concepts, the mental and physical are interpreted in a dualistic spirit—as two independent substances that exist separately from one another. This hinders understanding of the true connection between psyche and body. Many contemporary philosophers and scholars propose other pathways for resolving the psychophysical problem. Some attempt to "materialize" thoughts, completely equating them with brain processes and attributing physical-energy characteristics of these processes to them (G. Feigl). Others speak of a special "spiritual energy" that creates an "influence field" of thought, which can "activate" neurophysiological processes in the brain (G. Eckles). However, endowing thoughts with physical energy means considering them not as ideal but as material formations. If thoughts possess a unique spiritual energy, it is unclear how such energy, lacking physical properties, can induce changes in nerve cells.

To this day, no solution to the psychophysical (psychophysiological) problem has gained universal recognition. Among the various directions of inquiry, one of the most promising is the informational approach: mental processes are viewed as processes of acquiring, storing, transmitting, and transforming information, while physiological (neurodynamic) processes serve as material carriers of this information—"signals" in which it is "encoded." From the perspective of the informational approach, the ability of thought to influence bodily processes is explained by the fact that thought always has a material carrier—a corresponding neurodynamic system. The influence of thought on the body constitutes informational control. Thought does not govern the body "on its own," but rather through neurophysiological processes that are its material carriers.

Thus, materialism does not deny the existence of the soul; it does not assert that the soul is material but speaks only of its dependence on the body. Unlike religion, it rejects the belief in the existence of the soul outside of the body and in its immortality. The only immortals may be memories of the deceased and their deeds, but not their individual souls.