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» We Got Non-Quantifiable Energy Associated With Living Things, Yes We Do! We Got Non-Quantifiable Energy Associated With Living Things, How About you?! |
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We Got Non-Quantifiable Energy Associated With Living Things, Yes We Do! We Got Non-Quantifiable Energy Associated With Living Things, How About you?!
by Mark Havenner
If one were to ask a random person if there was a difference between spirit and soul
they would say, "no". I tested this by randomly asking my wife and she
said, "no". I could ask four more people to be a bit scientific, but I
think that just by shooting from the ol' hip, that this is probably
true. Are the words really the same though? I mean, remove any notions
of religions, metaphysics or (no pun intended) spirituality and how are
the words used just in our regular day to day worlds?
We got spirit, yes we do!
That
chant generally refers to the amount of energy, gusto or, to borrow a
term, chutzpah to win the game and perhaps more of this substance than
the opposing team.
New Orleans has soul
When
this common perception is articulated one is not referring to the
energy, gusto and chutzpah of New Orleans, but rather the long-lasting,
permeating "personality" of the place.
She has a feisty spirit.
The
person who talked about this woman behind her back is not necessarily
saying she is "feisty" but that her energy is. Otherwise, she would
have just been called feisty without qualifying what her spirit is like.
My dead grandfather's soul is in Heaven.
Even
taking a common religious point of view, one does not usually say a
spirit is in Heaven (well they may, but not usually). That person's
identity is in Heaven, not the energy around that person.
Okay
. . . let's get more scientific. What does Webster have to say on the
subject? There are tons of definitions for both words, so I'll just
look at the first.
Spirit: an animating or vital principle held to give life to physical organisms (found at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spirit).
Soul: the
immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an
individual life (found at
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/soul)
Webster thinks that the fundamental difference between these two words is that spirit refers to the function that gives organisms life, whereas soul
is the essence of life. Truthfully, not much of a difference.
Especially since the definition of soul goes onto state that it is a
cause of life as well. So far they look like the same exact thing. So
let's turn to etymology to explain this.
Spirit comes from the Latin word spiritus,
which means "breath". This word can also be used to mean soul. It
wasn't until the Judeo-Christian influence that the word became
distinct from Soul (Hebrew's psykhe and pneuma correlating to Latin's anima and spiritus). Soul, on the other hand, did not have Latin roots, but rather Germanic ones (saiwala - although the roots of it are not clear). The Greeks eventually absorbed the word as psykhe and so the distinction between the two concepts began.
Why
the difference? In the olden days both words essentially meant "life
force/energy/wind". Why, then, were two words necessary throughout
history to survive into the modern day?
We can blame the Greeks.
To most Greek philosophers it was one thing to exist and it was an entirely different thing to behave.
Plato as a proxy for Socrates, believed that the soul was a person's
essence and exists even after death in different bodies. Aristotle
agreed that the soul referred to a person's essence, but argued that it
was not an ethereal and permanent identity of that person or thing, but
rather the sum total of its parts. In other words a person's soul was
that person, complete and behaving. If that person is no longer
complete and behaving than there is no soul. He did say, however, that
the intellect, a part of the soul, could exist
permanently without a body. This was the first attempt to make a
distinction between a person's essence and a person's function.
The
Muslim philosophers took Aristotle's point and ran with it. Avicenna
and Ibn al-Nafis actually made the distinction between spirit and soul
by saying the soul can exist without a function or purpose. Tons of
philosophers and religions have taken it from there.
In
today's world there is perhaps an under-the-radar difference we
generally accept. Most traditions will, when forced to define a
difference, state that soul is a person's identity/essence/ego whereas
spirit is a person's energy/function/emotion. They are inter-related,
but not exactly the same thing. It isn't a person's spirit that is judged by God and it isn't a person's soul
that expresses their personality. But ultimately why is it important to
make a distinction between these two concepts? Perhaps it isn't. But
perhaps it allows us to understand the difference between the
sum-total-of-our-parts and our behavior.
But
the next time you hear the cheerleaders assert that their team has more
spirit than the other, remember that even if that is case they both
have the same amount of soul.
This work by Mark Havenner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Photo courtesy of slcpsc at flickr.com
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