There's no single authoritative view of what a soul could be or ought to be, Josh, and some like me think it's a meaningless concept.
Much of the traditional Western view of souls derive from the work of Plato and Aristotle, then elaborated by thinkers like
Avicenna,
Aquinas and
Augustine. In the selection below I've tried provide an historical perspective of Western thought, mainly using Wikipedia quotations, and shown how diverse thought can be
outside Western beliefs.
So here's
Plato's view:
Plato, drawing on the words of his teacher
Socrates, considered the soul as the
essence of a person, being, that which decides how we behave. He considered this essence as an incorporeal, eternal occupant of our being. As bodies die the soul is continually reborn in subsequent bodies. The Platonic soul comprises three parts:
- the logos (mind, nous, or reason)
- the thymos (emotion, or spiritedness, or masculine)
- the eros (appetitive, or desire, or feminine)
Each of these has a function in a balanced and peaceful soul.
But
Aristotle disagreed:
Aristotle, following Plato, defined the soul as the core or "essence" of a living being, but argued against its having a separate existence in its entirety. In Aristotle's view, a living thing's soul is its activity, that is, its "life"; for example, the soul of an eye, he wrote, if it were an independent lifeform itself, would be sight. Again, if a knife had a soul, the act of cutting would be that soul, because 'cutting' is the essence of what it is to be a knife. Unlike Plato and the religious traditions, Aristotle did not consider the soul in its entirety as a separate, ghostly occupant of the body (just as we cannot separate the activity of cutting from the knife). As the soul, in Aristotle's view, is an
actuality of a living body, it cannot be immortal (when a knife is destroyed, the cutting stops).
The problem of defining soul got more complicated when religious dogma was added, so we have a diversity of
Christian views:
The majority of
Christians understand the soul as an
ontological reality distinct from, yet integrally connected with, the body. Its characteristics are described in moral, spiritual, and philosophical terms. When people die their souls will be judged by God and determined to spend an eternity in heaven or in hell.
Some Christians regard the soul as the immortal essence of a human – the seat or locus of human will, understanding, and personality.
Other Christians reject the idea of the immortality of the soul, citing the
Apostles' Creed's reference to the "resurrection of the body" (the Greek word for body is
soma σωμα, which implies the whole person, not
sarx σαρξ, the term for
flesh or
corpse). They consider the soul to be the life force, which ends in death and is restored in the resurrection. Theologian
Frederick Buechner sums up this position in his 1973 book
Whistling in the Dark: "...we go to our graves as dead as a doornail and are given our lives back again by God (i.e., resurrected) just as we were given them by God in the first place."
Augustine, one of western Christianity's most influential early Christian thinkers, described the soul as "a special substance, endowed with reason, adapted to rule the body". Some Christians espouse a trichotomic view of humans, which characterizes humans as consisting of a body (
soma) , soul (
psyche), and spirit (
pneuma),however the majority of modern Bible scholars point out how spirit and soul are used interchangeably in many biblical passages, and so hold to dichotomy: the view that each of us is body and soul
These views are reasonably compatible with a
Judaic view too:
The soul, we say, is the aspect of the body which gives or causes the organism to grow and have vitality. Without the soul, the body deteriorates and becomes putrid; it is the soul that injects life into the body. More so, it is the soul that is the life of the body, the life force of the body, the charging agent that gives animation and growth to the body.
And not too dissimilar from
Muslim belief:
The human soul is a spiritual body that is the Ruh; it possesses the Qalb (Spiritual Heart consisting of emotions and conscious. The spiritual body resides in blood and heart.
But the further we stray from Western thought, the less 'soul' follows these Platonic/Aristotelian ideas.
In
Hinduism for example:
The term "soul" is misleading as it implies an object possessed, whereas Self signifies the subject which perceives all objects. This self is held to be distinct from the various mental faculties such as desires, thinking, understanding, reasoning and self-image (ego), all of which are considered to be part of
Prakriti (nature).
Or
Buddhism:
According to this doctrine of anatta (Pāli; Sanskrit: anātman) — "no-self" or "no soul" — the words "I" or "me" do not refer to any fixed thing. They are simply convenient terms that allow us to refer to an ever-changing entity
When we get to ancient
Egyptian belief it gets very different:
The Ancient Egyptians believed that a
human soul was made up of five parts: the
Ren, the
Ba, the
Ka, the
Sheut, and the
Ib. In addition to these components of the soul there was the human body (called the
ha, occasionally a plural
haw, meaning approximately sum of bodily parts). The other souls were
aakhu, khaibut, and
khat.
And a
Taoist view is arguably more different still:
According to Chinese traditions, every person has two types of soul called
hun and po (魂 and 魄), which are respectively
yang and yin.
Taoism believes in ten souls,
sanhunqipo (
三魂七魄) "three
hun and seven
po". The pò is linked to the dead body and the grave, whereas the hún is linked to the ancestral tablet. A living being that loses any of them is said to have mental illness or
unconsciousness, while a dead soul may
reincarnate to a
disability, lower
desire realms or may even be unable to reincarnate. Also,
Journeys to the Under-World said there can be hundreds of divisible souls.
As a secular humanist I don't believe any of the above. I think that life is just chemical reactions, that organic function arises from the way the chemicals are organised, that thought is a result of organic function and our perception of self is an artifact of thought. So when the chemicals get disorganised and stop reacting as they used, life and thought are extinguished, and those chemicals go on to do other things -- they might even become part of some other life. A Buddhist view is perhaps closest to my own, but we differ in certain particulars.
I hope that helps!