Plato's Soul and the Concept of Guf

This is the first of three reposts of academic papers from my first year of college that I'm particularly proud of now, a month from going into my second (after a false start last year).

Plato’s Soul and the Concept of Guf 
Nathan Turowsky

            Plato’s dialogue Phaedo is notorious in some circles for apparently putting Plato’s thoughts in Socrates’ mouth, unlike earlier dialogues that are generally thought to serve as more accurate representations of Socrates’ own thinking. Phaedo’s Socrates talks about the ideal forms, argues explicitly for the immortality of the soul and the existence of an afterlife rather than making the best of either eventuality like he does in the Apology, and generally uses the infamously circuitous logic of the student rather than the clear, linear thinking of the master.

            Unlike Socrates, Plato feels comfortable in positing highly complicated metaphysical realities if he feels that there is a good reason to do so. One of his major arguments is that all learning is done by recollection—remembering and forming patterns from things previously seen. He demonstrates this by having Socrates talk to a slave who has never studied mathematics and coax out of the slave a correct understanding of how squares and square roots work. Since the slave could not possibly have learned this in this life, and since Plato does not admit of the possibility of new synthetic truths being formulated, he concludes that before bodily birth the slave (and, thus, everybody capable of learning anything) must have existed in the world of ideal forms, Plato’s Heaven, where you can see moral, mathematical, and semantic truths face-to-face.

            There are several problems with Plato’s ideas for all that they are internally consistent, chiefly a refusal to recognise the human capacity for pattern recognition, which can synthesise statements of fact. But the idea of the soul existing from the world’s beginning until its end, or even beyond, is also supported by the idea that a ‘soul’ is defined as being alive and can thus never die. In Plato’s metaphysic a soul faced with death could simply cease to exist, but in that case it would be neither dead nor alive, thus short-circuiting Plato’s definition. Thus, Plato declares, it is semantically and logically impossible for a soul to either die or cease to exist.

            Of course, this assumes that existence is a predicate along the same lines as tallness, warmth, or (to give the classical Platonic example) equine-ness. While this is generally regarded as false, it may be argued that necessary existence is a predicate, as in Kant’s, Gödel’s, or Plantinga’s work in the field of ontology.

Necessary and eternal existence applied to the soul also appears in some forms of Jewish mysticism, in the form of a concept called the Chamber of Guf (also spelt Guph or Gaf or even Gup). Guf is the word for ‘body’ or more specifically ‘corpse’ in many dialects of mediaeval Hebrew.

            Guf is said to be an enormous hall located in the highest Heaven, where the souls of everything that will ever live were created at the beginning of the universe, and from which all souls emanate. Jewish mysticism often sees the soul as a birdlike entity and so the Guf is frequently envisioned as a dovecote or birdhouse; it is further held that sparrows can see souls descending from Guf to Earth, which explains their constant joyful chirping. In the Talmud it is said (Yevamot 62a) that when all the souls in existence have been cycled through the material world and returned to the Guf at least once, the Messiah will come. This teaches respect for all life, since according to this every living thing brings the Messiah closer simply by being born. The mystic significance is that everything has a unique role that only it can fulfil and that everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.

            The idea of the Guf dates back to Roman times, but it became especially prominent in Jewish thought in the High Middle Ages following the publication of the Zohar, a Qabala text supposedly dating to the second century, by Spanish Jew Moses de Leon in 1270. This school of mysticism was further propagated by Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia (c. 1240-c. 1295), one of the most important mystics in the history of Judaism.

Abulafia was a very well-travelled man and it is likely that he was at least somewhat familiar with Plato’s works as well as the mystic traditions of his own culture and faith. It is, I think, no coincidence that the corpus of Guf mysticism began to solidify in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries when Plato’s work was being rediscovered by Christian monks and Muslim scholars. As Umberto Eco points out in Serendipities, Abulafia had something of a language fetish and would probably have leapt at the opportunity to pore over the Greek and Arabic texts in which Plato’s ideas were discussed.

Of course, Guf is a far more mystical concept than recollection, relying upon meditation and symbolism rather than the whirligig logical patterns that Plato so loved. Even so, the similarities between the two ideas deserve serious consideration. A concept that originated in the Roman Empire, came to prominence during the Scholastic renaissance, and looks as though it was influenced by Plato, probably was influenced by Plato. De Leon and Abulafia are important figures in mediaeval thought and their influences deserve serious consideration. Plato is an important figure in philosophy in general and what he influenced deserves serious consideration as well.

            It is in any case remarkable that the pre-existence of the soul is so pervasive a concept in these sorts of mystic rationalism. The rationale for this can be parsed down to a quite simple question, though, originally posed by an anonymous rabbi and since co-opted by the late George Carlin: if a soul only comes into existence when its possessor is born, doesn’t that mean that there are more and more souls the longer history goes on? If so, wouldn’t that tend to lower their value?