Even though the word “soul” is now rarely heard in people’s everyday conversations or in the media, reference to its secular equivalent, the “self” is everywhere, and few are those in the West who are prepared to accept the assertion by both Buddhism and Daoism that there is no such “thing” as an “inherently existing” self. Secular teachers of so-called “mindfulness” courses do not ask their students to “forget their self” for fear they drop out of the course, so ingrained the belief in the existence, and necessity, of the “self” has become in the West. The fact that China never developed a concept of the soul or self is something most Westerners will find beyond belief.
The concept of “soul,” which the West now associates with Christianity, has roots in Classical Greek philosophy
While the Greek word psyche (soul) is often associated with Plato’s Phaedo, it is not in this dialogue that the word first appeared. The Phaedo is only the dialogue where its existence beyond death is affirmed. Jullien points out that when Socrates asserts that “the soul and body separate at death, he introduces this not as a conclusion arrived at in the course of discussion but as an already self-evident proposition: at the moment of death, the soul stands apart from the body. ‘It isolates itself’, and the body, for its part, does the same. Simmias, his interlocutor, does not think to question this.” There was, Jullien says, “a background understanding” out of which the discussion of the immortality of the soul arose. And he goes into some detail into this background as found in the writings of earlier Greek thinkers. This mode of thinking is already evident in Homer, well before Plato deploys it. It is already implicit in the distinction cum parallel between psuche and thumos that is developed in the Iliad: the thumos of the soldiers in the siege of Troy, the ‘heart’ that dwells in their bosom, the source of their energy and courage, is ‘destroyed’ and ‘broken’ by death, while the psuche or ‘soul’,”associated with the head, subsists as the visible but impalpable image of eidolon of the once-living being. ‘Like a phantom in a dream’, ‘vaporous’, it ‘flies away’. It reaches its destination ‘in Hades’. Only later, most notably in Pindar and the gnomic poets, do we find such a principle of life implicated in perception, thought, and feeling, as life and consciousness are joined in a single entity. At this point, the soul is born as a crucial anthropological representation that philosophy henceforth takes to be ‘self-evident’. Simmias, debating with Socrates, does not think of questioning its existence.” So it appears that Pindar (518-438 BCE), rather than Socrates, born c. 470 or Plato born c. 428/423, should be credited with the birth of the soul in philosophical terms, whereas Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedo, is to be credited with the creation of the religious “soul” that flourished in Christianity. “In essence, at any rate,” Jullien concludes, “the game had already been won with the opening words of the Phaedo, since ‘soul’ was now in place.”
The Chinese tradition, by contrast, focused on feeding “life” rather than on developing a concept of the soul
The same “background of understanding” about the self-evident existence of the soul never developed in the Chinese tradition, because, Jullien says, “it did not establish a sharp a separation between a principle of life and organic being.It did not assign the ‘head’ a different fate from the rest of the body and instead situation the spirit in the heart (xin, which is usually translated as ‘heart-spirit’). Indeed, Laozi urges us to shift our attention to the ‘belly’, the seat of nutrition, where vitality is concentrated.” On the other hand, Jullien adds, “in Plato’s Timaeus, the head, the ‘most divine’ part of the body, is what matters most. The purpose of the rest of the body is merely to ‘support’ the head … Even if Aristotle … seems to have had no interest in [the soul] … he nevertheless used it as a mental tool for conceptualizing the ‘cause’ and ‘principle’ of the body … Consequently, the body was henceforth conceptualized only as ‘matter’ (hule) in-formed by soul.” Jullien then points out that “Even though, since the Kantian revolution, soul has disappeared from the philosophical stage, having been exiled to discourses on faith, the notion has nevertheless found its way into technical language by way of its Greek doublet: the ‘psychic’, whose pertinence we can hardly abandon … In other words, though I may doubt I have a soul, I will not doubt the entity I call my ‘psyche’. A dubious operation …”
Jullien does not investigate the socio-political and cultural circumstances that could account for the bifurcation between the two cultures, where the Chinese stuck to the notion of life as “animation,” whereas the Greek moved on to a reification of life into a soul/self. He simply concludes: “The fact that Chinese thought did not conceive of this thing we call a soul as a distinct entity with a destiny of its own and with essence as its vocation has enormous implications.”
For ancient Chinese, “subtle souls” are believed to return to heaven, while “corporeal souls” mingled the earth, but there is no “unique soul” that “withdraws into itself” at death
Now, this is not to say that ancient Chinese had no concept of the soul – in fact, “souls” as a principle of animation. In fact, Jullien writes, they “shared the idea of a separation of two distinct principles at death with Socrates but did not believe that a unique soul ‘withdrew into itself’. Instead, they held that subtle souls (plural) returned to heaven (hun), while other, more corporeal souls mingled with the earth. The older, more monistic idea was that a human individual’s subtle soul could leave the body, even when the person was still alive, and that the shaman had the power to call such vagabond souls back home. This idea was clearly quite marginal to the thought of Zhuangzi, however, even though he was not far removed from this shamanic culture. Commenting on the ‘course of heaven’ to which man returns when he connects with the natural process, he merely notes that ‘the spirit of the Sage is then pure’ and that his ‘soul’ (hun) is ‘not “tired’. Note, however, that although the “soul” is mentioned here, it is within the context of a discussion of vital potential and the conversation of energy. Otherwise, Zhuangzi limits himself to various scattered designations, none of which can be regarded as definitive.”Jullien lists a number of Chinese terms that could have developed into an understanding of the soul similar to that of Plato: “‘Treasury’, ’Spiritual Receptacle’, Terrace of Spirits (a medical term), more simply, to a ‘house’, or innermost self, from which possible dangers must be barred; and, in still more elementary terms, to the ‘interior’ of the physical being, about which one should not worry.”
Chinese thinkers perceived the principle of animation in the human person in terms of “quintessence”
In common with pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, Jullien writes, “Chinese thinkers did, however, perceive in the human person a principle of animation distinct from the physical being. When it was not thinking of this principle in terms of its function in knowledge and moral perception (as xin, or spirit, which is located in the heart), however, it usually used the term ‘quintessence’ (jing, the ‘refined’ or ‘subtle’) … As we have seen, it is essential that ‘the physical form operate at full capacity’ and that “quintessence replenish itself.” But, although it is indeed paired with the physical form, it nevertheless refers to any purified, distilled, or refined matter (the ‘spirit of wine’, for example) and cannot therefore sustain any sort of metaphysical rupture,” which the word “soul” would entail. Jullien explains that “associated with the notion of the ‘spiritual’, it also enters into a more stable compound,’as pure as snow’ and return to the Without-Beginnning’ rather than deplete itself in worldly affairs.” What could have been an attempt as setting up a spiritual principle comparable to a “soul” is disrupted by the association of jing shen “to denote different degrees of purification, a verbal indication of their processive character, which shuts off the possibility of any form of hypostasis (reification).”
Jullien therefore concludes: “There is [in China] … no such thing as ‘soul’ (as substance, posing the question of its existence) but only a process of animation, which, by way of progressive purification and disengagement, leads to full vitality. In other words, the more I refine myself (or ‘decant’, ‘unbind’, or ‘disencumber’ myself), the more animated I become. Thus to ‘feed’ the ‘quintessence’ in myself (yang shen) usually means to relax and rest my spirit.”
More than a semantic disparity, the concept of soul in the West gave rise to the centrality of “love”
Coming back to the Western concept of soul, Jullien is keen to highlight the extent to which it “inaugurated a whole different destiny for thought,” in the West, which Daoist practitioners were deprived of. He writes: “Without a soul constituted in partnership with the invisible, we would not have been able to conceive of an intimate relationship between man and God (prayer, for example, quickly atrophied in Chinese civilization). And without a soul taking all feeling into itself so that it can reach out through the felt toward the infinite, we would not have been able to erect love as an absolute of the human adventure (Chinese thinkers conceived of love solely as emotion, or as playing a sexual role in cosmic regulation). Furthermore, without a soul splitting man between himself and his principle, we would not have been able to bestow such importance on the monologue of consciousness with itself: Oh psyche! Oh, my soul. Nor would we have been able to celebrate the inner voice (there is no evidence of this interior monologue in pre-Buddhist China).”
“Zhuangzi tries hard to discover within human reality an order different from that of the physical and tangible”
In other words, Zhuangzi tries hard to uncover the sort of transcendence found in Western theistic religions, which he defines as“an order in which we ‘keep the Original’ in ourselves so as to cease to feel fear, or in which we ‘dominate the whole universe’ and ‘gather up all beings within ourselves’, using the ‘physical skeleton’ as a mere ‘dwelling place’ and taking the ‘audible’ and ‘visible’ as pure ‘phenomena’ and regarding ‘the spirit as never dying’. He does find ‘an appeal to detach ourselves from the sensible and a way of looking, though here only for an instant, at what might be a kind of immortality distinct from physical existence. There is transcendence here, but because it does not give access to any substantial mode of being or soul, the aspiration to surpass has no well-defined status. No doubt this is part of the reason why we find Zhuangzi attractive today. He points toward another horizon, but without raising it to a level on which the metaphysical mind might build another world. He opens up a dimension beyond the tangible and the concrete, and he does so without turning it into objective greatness or an object of faith.”
Daoism already had a word for what animates us as persons: “De” (capacity) which already accounted for the process of animation in the whole universe.
later he calls it “capacity” (de)”
Have you ever wondered why Zhuangzi talks so much about amputees, hunchbacks, cripples, and individuals with hooked noses, goiters, and other marked physical characteristics? Jullien tells us that he uses these as “conceptual personages” meant to “direct the mind to a place ‘beyond’ perceptible form.” He quotes the example of a man who “is said to be so ugly that he “frightens the whole world” and is in no position to come to the aid of others … And yet the men in his entourage show him great loyalty.” A prince invites him to be his prime minister … What is it that gives such men an aura, in spite of their repulsive appearance? Another example is that of “piglets feeding from their dead mother’s body. A moment later, as if gripped by fear, they abandon her and flee.” He comments: “What they loved in their mother ‘was not her physical being’ that which puts the physical being to good use, Aristotle would no doubt have named ‘the soul’. But Confucius leaves it without a name, although later he calls is ‘capacity’ (de). In the absence of a substantial notion of the soul, this is the notion that ultimately prevails.”
“De” is, of course, the middle word in Daodejing, usually translated as “Power”or “Virtue (in the sense of “inner potency” as in the “virtue” of a medicinal plant) to which Jullien prefers “capacity.” With “De” taken to be the very dynamism of reality, there was no need to locate an animating principle in the person. It was already in the world itself. In Jullien’s words: “With the return to this fundamental category of Chinese thought comes a perspective that turns out to be not subjectivity but invisible communicative effectivity, as it flows incessantly from the dao, or ‘way’, that animates the world … And this is also what we encountered earlier in the guise of ‘heavenly’ capacity – the full power of the natural process that resides within us and that we must learn to connect with in order to ‘feed our lives’.”
Source:
François Jullien – Vital Nourishment – Departing from Happiness (2007)