Re: PS (re: soul?)

Clay Spinuzzi (spinuzzi who-is-at iastate.edu)
Thu, 10 Sep 1998 12:04:54 -0500

Regarding the soul, At 07:59 PM 9/8/98 -0700, Francoise wrote:
>In AT or similar terms as the religious term is what is problematic to me.
>
>Francoise
>Francoise Herrmann
>fherrmann who-is-at igc.apc.org
>http://www.wenet.net/~herrmann

Francoise, I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for. But a few years
ago I read a good chunk of Watchman Nee's _The Spiritual Man_, a treatise
on the Christian treatment of body-soul-spirit. (Nee was a Chinese
Christian at the turn of this century and was strongly persecuted for his
beliefs.)

Nee's contention was that the traditional formulation of soul=spirit, and
the dualistic coupling of body-soul, was based on an incorrect reading of
the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Rather, he argued, "man" (sic) is a
tripartite being in which the physical body has been joined with the breath
of God (spirit), and the *result* is the soul -- a unit that is only
analytically divisible from the body and spirit. (To use a familiar
illustration: joining hydrogen and oxygen atoms results in water, a
material that has quite different properties from its components. But while
the soul is created from the confluence of body and spirit, the body and
spirit still remain separate entities as well.)

When the body is killed, Nee says, the soul is also destroyed, although the
spirit is not. (He gets this, in part, from a detailed analysis of the
Genesis text describing Adam's creation.)

Nee claimed that the soul has the properties of mind, will, and emotions.
These properties are quite different from those of body and spirit.

Now, what is interesting to me is the *materiality* of this notion of soul.
This notion is quite different from that of mainstream Christianity, which
(perhaps taking its lead from Greco-Roman philosophy) sees the soul as
immortal and immaterial. But I see similarities to Bakhtin's idea of the
(material) soul as expressed in _Art and Answerability_, as well as some
vague similarities to the Vygotsky school's notion of (material) mind.

=============
Clay Spinuzzi
spinuzzi who-is-at iastate.edu
Iowa State University
206 Ross Hall
Ames, IA 50014
(515) 294-9325