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Imagining Soul
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20254 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
3,342 Words |
| Author
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Charles Taliaferro
Charles Taliaferro, professor of philosophy at St. Olaf
College, is the author of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion
(Blackwell) and Consciousness and the Mind of God (Cambridge). |
Psychotherapy can be taken on as a thoroughly secular venture, a short-term project for those of us in need of urgent behavioral repair who lack the enthusiasm, time, or funds for analysis; even more important, psychotherapy can be carried out without challenging our most fundamental priorities. Thomas Moore is one of many advocates of alternative therapy, and in Care of the Soul he outlines a rich understanding of a life lived with depth, imagination, and spirituality. His aim is the formidable one of providing a guide for living soulfully. This engaging, sometimes enigmatic book is motivated by powerful philosophical and theological ideas, and these will be the focus of this essay.
Throughout the book, beginning with the title, readers are confronted with a vocabulary that is remote from well-entrenched clinical categories of self and health. I shall begin by looking at Moore's notions of "soul" and "care" and then will assess his central claims.
The term soul has had a checkered career of late. Many contemporary philosophers are heavily invested in carrying out a sustained campaign against subjectivity in the name of science, and philosophy's recent love affair with computer models of intelligence hardly seems the stuff of which souls are made. In Death of the Soul, William Barrett documents the crucial moves in the debate and shows himself to be an energetic partisan on the soul side (Oxford University Press, 1987). Thomas Moore construes "soul" in a fashion that would be allied with Barrett, though Moore and he would part ways on some points and Moore goes considerably beyond Barrett in his speculative conjectures about the dimensions of soul.
In using the term soul to maneuver around some of the most puzzling and obstinate terrain in philosophical psychology, Moore is in solid company. He resists both a materialist reductionism of the person and an excessive mentalism. His concern is to write a book having to do with caring for the soul, and it is no accident that the book he has written is not slanted toward care for the body or mind. At this juncture, Moore stands with philosophers who use the term soul in the course of developing a holistic, integrated conception of living beings.
Soul has been used in much Greek and medieval philosophy to name that which is neither the mind nor the body, but it can also do duty in referring to living organisms as embodied centers of life and activity. Western philosophy has not always promoted such a unified, soulful portrait of persons and their living things. Rather, philosophy
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