This essay is to increase our interest in intercultural studies of the concept of
immortality of the soul because the discourses
will give no new knowledge on an old subject as written by the
author. The paper is an attempt to explain
immortality of the soul from the western paradigm using Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas as the major interpretative community’s figures. These scholars’ views are explained vis –a- vis the meaning of the concept of immortality of the soul in Igbo worldview.
Nwigwe began with the expositions of Plato in the dialogues of Socrates, his master in
Phaedo – where Crito tried to dissuade Socrates from accepting to drink the hemlock. There, Socrates was quoted as saying: when I have drunk the poison, I shall remain with you no longer but depart to a state of heavenly happiness, and in other place, he said … I am assuming the existence of absolute Beauty, Goodness and Magnitude and all the rest of them. If you grant my assumptions and admit that they exist, I hope with their help to explain causation to you and to find a proof that the soul is immortal. All these are to show that the soul survives the body at death.
The author delved into Aristotle, where he admitted that the soul and body are not two separate entities but a unity. Here, Aristotle saw the soul as the form of the body. He ascribed to the soul some spiritual quality as in that the rational soul is in some sense a spiritual substance. Beginning from Augustine, he adopted to some extent Plato’s doctrine that man is a unity in the sense that the soul possesses the body, uses it and rules it. But that Augustine differed from him that the soul lives in the body as in a prison. He (Augustine) argued for the immortality of the soul when he says that the human mind is inseparably connected with the truth – that there is inseparable connection of soul (mind) and truth. Aquinas on his own part thought along the line of Aristotle that the soul is the substantial form of the body. But because of the importance attached to the church’s doctrine, he changed to somewhat inversion of Plato and Augustine that the human soul is able to perform functions in which the body plays no substantial part. This means that the soul does not exist only as an element in the composite, rather the composite exists by virtue of the rational soul.
The author of this piece was able to see the problem of interractionism propounded by Descartes in the work of Gilbert Ryle. The so-called modern reactions as expressed by Freud, Feuerbach and Marx were in response to the Cartesian body-soul dualism. The argument of Russell, for instance, that the brain is not immortal and that the organized energy of a living body becomes demobilized at death and therefore, not available for collective action poses a problem to the Cartesian ideology. It is rational in the view of the author to support the view that mental life ceases when bodily life ends. Continuing this discussion, Nwigwe submits with Ryle that traditional treatment of the soul-body relation involves a category mistake; in the sense that attempt is made to locate the soul when one ought to have known that the soul is exhausted in its activities and manifestations.
The author before explaining the position of Igbo culture, he made it open that the Igbo culture is supported by Descartes’ point that it is only those who cannot lift their minds up beyond sensory data that think that the soul is material. Man belongs to two distinct worlds – the ephemeral and the hereafter – in the Igbo belief system. Following the relation of the soul and the body, he made us believe that there is no such sharp dualism. They (Igbo) see death as a process of change from one form of existence to the other. “Ahu”- body is applied tostand for a living human being and not merely for the physical body but the totality of a man’s personality. The belief in the immortality of the soul is depicted in artifacts, proverbs and the likes. Given an analogy that people often exclaim in situation of extreme fear: “obi agbafuolem” – heart has flown off. To him, this is a form of temporal wandering of the spirit away from the body during sleep.
In all these explanations, man is seen as an entity performing two functions: physical and spiritual. They believe in the ancestral worship of their dead ones because they see them as not far from the community. He was able to puncture the belief system with the problem of reincarnation and ancestral worship, which the people have not been able to offer answers to.
Nwigwe concludes the paper with his own form of reflection where he writes that the issue of immortality of the soul involves an important fact. He says that if it is not logically possible that there is life beyond the grave, it is also logically impossible to assert that human existence is destroyed at death. To him, death is not an event in life because we do not live to experience it in agreement with Wittgenstein. Believing that human existence goes in phases and in each phase, something dies to give way to something else.