Human Identity

The apparent difficulties faced in dealing with such issues arise largely from the fact that our ordinary language derives from the vocabulary and concepts of ancient civilizations; so along with those words it drags the assumptions those people made about life as they experienced it. These assumptions all tended to be concerned with issues of religion and philosophy, rather than what we would consider scientific psychology. To consider the origins of this vocabulary, it is necessary to delve into these religious and theological matters.

The earliest writings of the Greeks--Homer, Hesiod, the pre-Socratic philosophers--assume that human beings consist of soma, psyche, and pneuma, the recognizable roots of such modern words as psychosomatic and pneumatic. As in the word "psychology," the Greek psyche meant something much more like "mind" or "personality." In order to have something like what we now mean by "soul," we must think of a compound of "mind" plus "spirit," of psyche-plus-pneuma. In the Greek view, when the body died, the psyche-plus-pneuma went to the underworld, to stand

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ls, including humans, have this ability; it was needed in order to hunt for food. A pattern is real, although immaterial; it is an organization of information. And here we can see a way to interpret the concept of the ôimmortal soulö in a way that would make sense to a modern person. Plato, in the "myths" that conclude many of his dialogues, proposes that the natural home of the psyche-plus-pneuma is the world of pure idea, beyond the realm of the gods as we are able to form some concept of them, and that the psyche-plus-pneuma is sent down into the body in this imperfect world of decay and corruption as a punishment. He mentions an "Orphic" catchphrase: soma sema, "the body is a tomb." Plato suggests that a person may be rewarded for virtue in this life by being born into a better position in society in the next life, but he suggests also that the true reward is to be freed from rebirth entirely, so as to be able to return to the world of pure idea, and that each person has only so many chances (perhaps nine rebirths) to achieve this freedom. This clearly is a major source of the Christian concept of the soul going to heaven. Jewish tradition was quite different from Greek tradition on this point. By Hellenistic times, many J
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1441
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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