The relationship between "mind" and "being" is a fundamental question of philosophy, and in ancient times this problem appeared in the form of "soul" and "body". The ancients, lacking knowledge of the anatomy of the human body, developed the idea that their mind was not an activity of the body, but something temporarily embedded in the body. After the body dies, this kind of thing can break free and continue to wander the world, and people are accustomed to calling it "soul".
Whether in the East or the West, the concept of "soul" prevailed in the first people's society. In China, the Zhou Yi has the term "wandering soul for change", the Book of Shang has the term "Zu Kao Laig"; in India, there is a theory of six reincarnations. The ancient Egyptians believed that the soul would not die, so they actively mummified it, and the ancient Greek Homeric Epic also tells the story of Odysseus's wanderings in the mansion and talking to various ghosts.
The concept of the soul arose in the age of the first people
With the development of history, the concept of the soul has been passed down along with the sacred and inviolable customs of antiquity, and has been adopted as a doctrine by the major religions, which cannot be questioned. The clergy claimed that the soul was independent of matter, that it was neither born nor perished, and that it was the cause of the existence of life, thought, and sensation. Yet John Locke scoffed at these baseless assertions. He was skeptical, adopted the methods of physics, and after an analysis of human reason, he said meaningfully: "I cannot imagine that the inevitability of the eternal thought of the soul will be greater than the eternal movement of the body." He shakes the theory of the immortality of the soul by doubting whether man can think forever.
This view of Locke inspired Voltaire. In 1730 Voltaire wrote an essay echoing Locke, only to be persecuted by the court and church, which left a lifelong shadow on him and recognized the importance of freedom of thought. In his Philosophical Dictionary, written in his later years, Voltaire boldly said:
"Freedom of thought is unlimited, the mother of knowledge and the first motive force of human reason; the vicious, jealous, and shallow-sighted people try to suppress this freedom of thought under the pretext of the danger of heresy."
However, he did not intend to give in, and in the entry of Soul, Voltaire once again attacked the church, exposing the absurd logic of religious superstition and continuing to defend Locke's Enlightenment ideas.
In his later years, Voltaire continued to challenge the concept of the soul
<h1>What exactly does "soul" mean? </h1>
The word soul is written in Greek as πνευμα (boo), which in general means "to make it alive". In the Book of Genesis, it is said that God gave the soul by blowing a breath into a person's face, and in Chinese mythology, it is also the god who exhales a breath of immortal breath to make things lively. In order to express this meaning, the Greek philosophers had to make up many concepts, such as Anaxa's "Nuss", Aristotle's "Hidden Lech", etc., which were regarded as the causes that enabled the physical activity, which were actually another way of saying the soul.
In the Greek conception, the soul was divided into three types, the first being the soul of the breath or mind, which can be extended to life; the second being the soul of feeling; and the third being the soul of wisdom. Because
When you ask a Greek " why do we have life, can feel, can think" and he will answer you, "Because we have a soul."
And when you continue to ask, "What is the soul," he will say, "The soul is what makes you alive, able to feel, to think." ”
In this way, the answer is swirling in the logic of chickens and eggs and chickens. You convert to a religion, you follow a priest, you meditate all day and you can't figure out the nature of the soul. In the end, Master says to you that this question is unthinkable, so let's leave everything to faith—the soul is the grace that God has given us, and God is divine and unknowable.
This rhetoric about the soul can only fool the irrational believer, but it cannot persuade the wise philosophers, who are mostly logical. Precisely because soul theorists cannot explain the exact meaning of the soul, Voltaire recognized the word "soul" as representing emptiness and ignorance, saying:
"The soul is an ambiguous noun that denotes the unknown origin of the known effects we feel ourselves."
In the early people's era, people's level of understanding was still very low, and they could not give reasonable explanations for many phenomena, so they created the word "soul" and used it as an "unknown origin" to set aside the problem.
Soul theorists cannot explain the nature of the soul
<h1>Use the spirit of science to acknowledge your ignorance of the soul</h1>
People attribute the unknown to the soul and then argue endlessly around the soul, and everyone thinks that they are omniscient and omnipotent and can explain everything that is unknown. They claim that the soul is immaterial, capable of immortality, and is the cause of life, sensations, and thoughts. They do not know, however, that the soul is not something like metal—to know metal, we have to observe its shape, smell its smell, touch its surface, listen to the sound of hitting it; if it is not satisfied, throw it into the crucible and burn it to see how it changes. However, we have nowhere to start with the understanding of the soul, and we rely entirely on our own imagination to talk nonsense, which can neither be confirmed nor falsified, and it is useless to fight around in the end.
Thus, Voltaire believed that "we call the soul what gives vitality." Since we have limited knowledge, we know only this about the soul. "And it's enough to admit it." We don't need to explain what we can't see, touch, or smell, and we can't force what it should look like—"Man, keep a snack!" With your weak reason you have no more evidence that the soul of the other mind exists. Therefore, we can still despise the priests who claim that the soul is invisible, that the soul is immortal, that the soul is omnipresent, that they have no more sense than we do, and why should we say that the soul is what they depict it? These shameless people who don't know how to pretend to understand!
For the soul, we only know that it means "to give vitality", nothing more. Acknowledging this is the attitude of science to accept what you do not yet know in silence, rather than to cover up ignorance by making things up. When we know that electromagnetic propagation does not require special media, and that fire does not require special particles, "aether" and "flaming" disappear into physics. Similarly, when science proves the "unknown origin" of life, sensation, and thought, the "soul" disappears into philosophy.
Locke and Voltaire had no intention of explaining what the "soul" really looked like, nor did they want to argue with the clergy that the soul should be black and not white, but to doubt the theory of the soul—why did the clergy reduce the causes of life, feeling, and thought to the soul? On what basis do they say that the soul is immortal and immortal? Why is it said that the soul can exist independently of the body? Could it be that these priests possess more than five senses and are creatures of a higher level than humans?
The clergy's assertion of the soul is entirely speculative and has no reliable scientific basis
<h1>It is necessary to change the mind and abandon the ancient concept of the soul</h1>
The scientific level of the ancients was still very shallow, they knew very little about the structure of the human body, and they were unable to explain the origin of life, feelings and thoughts, so they invented the category of the soul. It's like when a child asks a parent, "How did I get here?", they often don't know how to answer. Either out of shyness, or ignorance of biology, or lack of expression ability, or feel that there is no need to seriously explain to children, parents often use words such as "you picked it up" to avoid questions, so that children do not continue to ask questions. When you ask a priest: How did human life, feelings, and thoughts originate? He will also use the soul as a metaphor, throwing a vague concept at you to avoid over-interpreting.
The level of thinking of the ancients has not yet reached the level of science, and they cannot explain clearly within the scope of the problem, so they often have to run outside to ask for help. They don't understand natural phenomena, so they turn to supernatural forces.
As for the difference between scientific thinking and theological thinking, Voltaire gives a vivid example in the Philosophical Dictionary. There was a priest who had never seen a clock in his life, and one day he got an English watch that could tell the hour, and saw that the time indicated by the hour hand was exactly the same. The priest was full of curiosity, and he pressed his finger, and the clock immediately rang. The priest, on the basis of his own thinking, believed that there was a soul in charge of the scale in this table, which could give it vitality. So he talked about it and preached to the believers about the "soul theory of clocks and watches." But the master who repaired the watch could not understand the words of the priest, he took apart the clock, showed the internal parts to everyone, and said that the reason for the movement of the clock was in its own structure; the priest did not believe it, he shouted, saying that there must be an unknown soul outside the clock that dominates it, and this instrument master does not understand philosophy, so he is ignorant and ignorant, and cannot understand the original problem.
Voltaire believed that the mechanic represented a kind of scientific thinking
In fact, people are like clocks, their lives, feelings and thoughts must find the cause from their own body structure. It is necessary to study the bones, organs and blood that make up the human body, to understand the nerves and brains of the body, rather than to go outside the body and invent a soul to deceive others. When we understand the structure of the body, the digestive system, and the blood circulation, we know why we can live—if I don't eat, drink, or sleep, how can the soul outside my body dominate my life and death? Similarly, when we understand how the nervous system works, we know why people have the ability to feel and think—and there is no need to look for souls outside of people as a cause.
The soul is just an immature concept, it is a hybrid of the categories of life, nerves, brain, consciousness, desire, spirit, etc., and when we separate these categories, the soul is also "diluted".
The soul is only a part of the body, a property of matter, a stage that we go through in the process of knowing "thinking." At this stage, mind and existence manifest themselves as an extreme opposition—the soul strives to distance itself from the body, to break free from the body and to exist independently. Scientific discoveries have proved that this practice is futile, "thinking" is human thinking, "existence" is human existence, if people do not exist, how to think? Therefore, "thinking" and "existence" are contradictory relations of opposites and unity, which have the distinction between materiality and immateriality, and at the same time are unified in "people", and each person is objectively real, which is not subject to the subjective will of others.