Editor's Note
For Whitehead and for John Cobb, the soul is real but not supernatural. It is as natural as, say, gravity or sunlight.
What is it? It is what many call the psyche or the mind. Viewed from a third-person perspective, your soul is a series of momentary souls: that is, series of momentary subjects of experience extending from birth (but perhaps earlier) to death (and perhaps afterwards.) Experience is an activity of feeling influences from the past actual world consciously and unconsciously in the moment at hand and responding to them with creativity of your own. Understood as a series of subjects that occur one after another, the soul is fluid and moving, never quite the same at any two instants. It is more like a river than a rock.
Understood from a first-person perspective, the soul is always here-and-now even as different at every moment. It is You-now. You are never in the past anticipating the future, and never in the future remembering the past. You are always in the here-and-now remembering the past and anticipating the future. As you read these words, the "you" who is reading is your soul. As you turn your attention to something else, the "you" who turns away is your soul. You can never not be your soul. Whatever you are doing or undertaking, there you are.
Where are you? From third-person perspective, it is tempting to think that the soul is but a bundle of neurons in the brain, objectively beheld by a detached observer. But for Whitehead and Cobb, this does not tell the whole story because it misses first-person experience. At any given moment you are “in” your brain as that which receives influences from the brain and initiates responses, but you are also more than the brain as its dominant seat of awareness: the one who is receiving and initiating. Imagine that you are undergoing brain surgery as while enjoying chocolate ice-cream. The surgeon sees your brain objectively as an amazing complex of neurons, but the surgeon does not taste the chocolate. "You" are the one who is tasting the ice cream.
What happens to the soul after the brain dies? It is possible that your soul dies, too. There is nothing inherently immortal about the soul. But it also possible that, after the death of the brain, the soul – that is, the series of experiencing subjects – undergoes a continuing journey. The journey may last forever or for a limited duration of time. Whitehead speculated on this possibility very briefly in Religion in the Making, and John Cobb develops it further in A Christian Natural Theology, published in 1960.
This page is an excerpt from Cobb's book as he presents the metaphysical possibility of life after death. Note that the metaphysical possibility is a possibility. For Whitehead and for Cobb, the question of whether the soul actually continues after death is an empirical question, not a metaphysical question. The question is: Given the metaphysical possibility of life after death, what does the evidence suggest?
In James and Whitehead on Life after Death, David Ray Griffin argues that the evidence is strongly in favor of the bodily survival of the soul after death. Click here for excerpts. You might also be interested in my own essay called Life after Death as a Context for Soul-Gentling. But here the subject is the metaphysical possibility of life after death. John Cobb’s arguments below, in combination with Griffin’s work, make the case for the actuality of life after death. To be sure, when it comes to what happens after death, we see through a glass darkly. But there may be, after all, more light than we imagine.
- Jay McDaniel, 4/9/2022
What is it? It is what many call the psyche or the mind. Viewed from a third-person perspective, your soul is a series of momentary souls: that is, series of momentary subjects of experience extending from birth (but perhaps earlier) to death (and perhaps afterwards.) Experience is an activity of feeling influences from the past actual world consciously and unconsciously in the moment at hand and responding to them with creativity of your own. Understood as a series of subjects that occur one after another, the soul is fluid and moving, never quite the same at any two instants. It is more like a river than a rock.
Understood from a first-person perspective, the soul is always here-and-now even as different at every moment. It is You-now. You are never in the past anticipating the future, and never in the future remembering the past. You are always in the here-and-now remembering the past and anticipating the future. As you read these words, the "you" who is reading is your soul. As you turn your attention to something else, the "you" who turns away is your soul. You can never not be your soul. Whatever you are doing or undertaking, there you are.
Where are you? From third-person perspective, it is tempting to think that the soul is but a bundle of neurons in the brain, objectively beheld by a detached observer. But for Whitehead and Cobb, this does not tell the whole story because it misses first-person experience. At any given moment you are “in” your brain as that which receives influences from the brain and initiates responses, but you are also more than the brain as its dominant seat of awareness: the one who is receiving and initiating. Imagine that you are undergoing brain surgery as while enjoying chocolate ice-cream. The surgeon sees your brain objectively as an amazing complex of neurons, but the surgeon does not taste the chocolate. "You" are the one who is tasting the ice cream.
What happens to the soul after the brain dies? It is possible that your soul dies, too. There is nothing inherently immortal about the soul. But it also possible that, after the death of the brain, the soul – that is, the series of experiencing subjects – undergoes a continuing journey. The journey may last forever or for a limited duration of time. Whitehead speculated on this possibility very briefly in Religion in the Making, and John Cobb develops it further in A Christian Natural Theology, published in 1960.
This page is an excerpt from Cobb's book as he presents the metaphysical possibility of life after death. Note that the metaphysical possibility is a possibility. For Whitehead and for Cobb, the question of whether the soul actually continues after death is an empirical question, not a metaphysical question. The question is: Given the metaphysical possibility of life after death, what does the evidence suggest?
In James and Whitehead on Life after Death, David Ray Griffin argues that the evidence is strongly in favor of the bodily survival of the soul after death. Click here for excerpts. You might also be interested in my own essay called Life after Death as a Context for Soul-Gentling. But here the subject is the metaphysical possibility of life after death. John Cobb’s arguments below, in combination with Griffin’s work, make the case for the actuality of life after death. To be sure, when it comes to what happens after death, we see through a glass darkly. But there may be, after all, more light than we imagine.
- Jay McDaniel, 4/9/2022