WHAT IS SOUL by Wolfgang Giegerich - Lighthouse Downunder

REVIEW: WHAT IS SOUL by Wolfgang Giegerich (2012)
by
John C. Woodcock Ph. D.
In this review I would like to share some thoughts regarding preparation for engagement with
this ground-breaking book. Yes, I think some preparation is necessary! This is not an easy-toread
book for beginners. It is not a self-help book. It is not designed to give the reader some
convenient ideas to make life more understandable or manageable today. With adequate
preparation however I believe this book can make a very big difference to how you will
comprehend the modern world and your place in it today. The author’s intention is not to
persuade or offer consolation or an ideology. His intent is simply to explore the nature of the
soul but as he does so, I think you will find, as I did, your eyes getting opened to the real
situation of modern life, in which we are each inescapably embedded, for better or worse.
The first point I want to make in preparation to read this book is the common knowledge that
today, “soul” does not have any currency in the “official narrative” of the major disciplines
that are shaping our modern world culture—physics, biology, economics, evolution, neuroscience,
philosophy, technology, politics and so on. Religion, yes, theology yes and at the
same time churches are emptying as people seem to be saying that they can get on fine today
without considering the fate of their eternal soul. So although soul obviously still is spoken of
in some quarters the engines driving our culture are doing fine without the need to invoke
soul at all. In fact ‘soul’ or “god” is known derisively as ‘God of the Gaps’ meaning that
‘soul’ is thought to be conveniently invoked whenever we have a current and undoubtedly
temporary gap in our knowledge.
So, ok, most people get on without any well-thought out notion of the soul at all but for those
that do still believe in such a thing, the most common idea of soul today is that of an ‘eternal’
substance that may ‘show up’ at various times of our lives (e.g. extreme situations) and which
endures beyond our mortal death. This idea satisfies on two counts: we can draw comfort
from the soul’s presence at times when we feel utterly alone and we can go towards our death
with some sense that it is not all over, which for many is a frightening prospect.
Giegerich’s book arrives then in a time of “soullessness” and a time where the idea of a soul
as a eternal ‘help-mate’ or ‘angel’ still works for some, even if as a simple belief. These two
facts of modern existence must be addressed by any author who discusses soul. They are the
two facts, perhaps the only facts about soul that inform our existence today.
Wolfgang Giegerich does address these facts and addresses them in a way that could astound
you, if you are not prepared. With regards to the soullessness that characterizes our modern
existence, he does not bemoan this reality or seek to console us, or compensate for it. In a far
more radical move, Giegerich demonstrates that this modern condition of soullessness is still

soul! This means that even though we feel ourselves to be in a world without soul, in reality
we are still within soul, that this modern reality is the work of soul.
This brings me to the second point of the ‘eternal soul’. Giegerich demonstrates that this
concept of soul was indeed true, i.e. at another time (the time of metaphysical philosophy) but
is no longer true for us. Two issues emerge from these astounding responses to the “facts of
life” today: how can a concept of soul be true in one age and not another and what is the true
concept of soul today? Both issues are raised and answered in this remarkable book. All I can
do here is to give a brief summary of Giegerich’s brilliant and to my mind conclusive
arguments.
Giegerich throughout his book includes a scholarly review of the concept of soul from former
ages, leading to the present. This may seem quite ordinary, quite in keeping with other forms
of historical research where ideas about things (e.g. planets and their motion) and the way
these ideas change are reviewed. But what Giegerich is implicitly proposing throughout his
review is much more radical and I believe that readers must grasp what he is saying here in
order even to make sense of his arguments and conclusions. So let’s unpack it a bit here.
Historical research is most commonly rooted in an assumption that history is a study of ideas
about the world. Our ideas get refined but the world stays the same as it always was. We just
get better at matching our concepts to the reality of the given world.
In order to come to terms with this book, you must throw out this assumption!
The soul is not an object of historical research the same way as other things in the world.
Giegerich’s starting point (his a priori) is that the soul is not a thing at all, it is what
determines both our ideas and the world. From this startling a priori comes the corollary that
when the soul changes or transforms, both our ideas (our philosophies) and the world i.e. the
form of the world and our mode-of-existence in it transform. Not how does the soul change
down through history but how does the soul change as reflected in historical movement—a
totally different and radical view of history—soul as history, soul as historical movement
itself, soul as determinative of our existence in the world, soul not as abstract concept
conforming with some object in the world, but soul as living concept, just as Life is a living
concept, not conforming to any one thing in the world but playing through and determining
the life of each living thing.
So we can see here that Giegerich also answers the question of the ‘eternal’ soul. Yes that
idea was historically true, i.e. the truth belonging to a period of history. He demonstrates that
the soul has once again transformed taking us and the world with it. The reason that we all
feel the stunning absence of soul in the world today is that the living concept soul has
transformed once again (roughly from the 19 th century on), only this time it no longer reflects
its life in any aspect of the substantial world as it once did (e.g. Medieval Philosophy
regarded nature as text which could be read in order to discover truths of the soul etc.).
Instead the soul has now entered and become the very form of consciousness that we are
today—a radically new situation.

We have become in our depths, what we vainly seek in the world. The present “soulless”
world is still ensouled because our present world and the form of consciousness that
correlates with it are both products of the soul’s latest transformation out of metaphysics and
into positive-factuality.
To get anywhere near Giegerich’s arguments I therefore believe the reader must throw
overboard the universally accepted conception of history as a study over time of our human
ideas about an unchanging world and also the reader must relativise the notion of an ‘eternal
soul’ to its appropriate historical context. If you can achieve these two acts of ‘kenosis’, then
I think you will find that What is Soul will indeed open up for you and become a living text
that will inform you of the soul’s truths, those of the past and those of today’s modern
existence.