Answers From LaRouche

Q: What is the soul in the human being?
                                 - from November 23, 2023 Ibero-American Cadre School

Question: Yesterday, we were discussing, what is the soul in the human being? But, we also were discussing how Leibniz defined the fact that some animals also have souls. So, I didn't quite understand that part, so I would like you to talk about that. Also something else, which I was asking myself: If Gauss understood in the same terms in which Schiller writes the “Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man”? Did he understand with that same vision as Schiller personally? How would you comment in this regard?

LaRouche: Well, Schiller was a genius, a true genius, in the sense of being an individual who developed ideas which were unique in his time and place, who also uplifted the conception of drama, from the foundations given to him by ancient Greece and also Shakespeare, in particular, to get to this conception of the Sublime....

Maria Stuart is an example of this. The case of Jeanne d'Arc, is the most famous, and simple, and clearest example of this. That the individual, faced with a crisis, is capable of finding that their fundamental self-interest is located in what they do for humanity. That mortal life is short, but there's an aspect to human life which is immortal, and that is what we represent with respect to preceding and coming generations. What do we do while we are visiting this mortal planet, that gives satisfaction to the aspirations of those who went before us? Which solves the problems left unsolved by generations before us? And which provides a foundation upon which a better future can be built by humanity? This idea of the Sublime: That you locate your identity not in what you experience within your biological existence as such, but what you develop under the circumstances of your biological existence, which is of external value. And therefore, you find the true meaning, true self-interest.

Schiller made this clear; he made this clear with his drama; he made it clear with his politics. The important thing about Schiller, which is an idea which Shakespeare would have accepted, but which is unique to him, is that Schiller developed this concept of the Sublime, as a true self-interest of mankind, and developed this as a method of popular education, using Classical drama. That is, Schiller never composed a drama in the way that Shakespeare is often explained in universities, in my lifetime as a student, and earlier, and later. The influence on the English language, of course, you would have people who I was opposed to, like Bradley and Coleridge, and people like that: Romantics.... Romantic interpretation of aesthetic or morality examples. Schiller did not do that. Schiller approached everything from the standpoint of the Sublime, or as a negation of the Sublime--the true tragic principle.

For example, I just gave you an example of this in my outline on the history of culture since the 18th Century, of European culture as it exists in the Americas today. Therefore, to understand the tragedy of European civilization, since the 18th Century, you have to see the tragedy as posed, as if on the stage, by the disgusting immorality of the French and British 18th-Century Enlightenment. And then, you have to see the struggle to free European civilization from this tragic force of the Enlightenment, this corruption, this degradation. You see the struggle upward, in the case of the support from around the world of the American Revolution, as typified by the support from France, the support from Charles III of Spain. An upward struggle. Then you see this terrible thing happens: The French Revolution, organized by Shelburne and company from London. We see to the present time this degeneracy, a worsened form of Enlightenment culture, this degeneracy--pulsations of it have taken over. And now it has brought us to the virtual end of the existence of civilization.

Therefore, to put this on the stage, in such a way that the audience is sitting before the stage, looking from their imagination, lifting themselves up from being little people on the street, into being people in society, looking at society over the long term, over generations, and seeing the mistakes, and seeing the challenges which man has faced. And seeing the role of the Sublime, the role of leadership of this quality, of pulling man through these crises, to levels of safety. That is the way in which to see this.

Now, going back to the question of the individual soul. As I said, the individual soul can be defined in only one meaningful way. There are many ways in which this is described, and most of it is nonsense. It's taught as nonsense, probably by priests who don't understand what the soul is anyway, so they try to give an explanation despite their ignorance of the subject. The soul is simply the fact that the faculty of mankind, which in the first instance, is capable of discovering universal physical principles as Kepler did, for example; and doing this not only for man's individual relationship to the physical universe, mentally, but also in terms of soul processes. That's one aspect. No other creature has this capability.

In the animals in general, the animal dies with its death as a mortal creature. Man does nothing with his or her death. Man may live on, through the work he does in influencing the domain of ideas, the domain beyond the mortality of biological life. That's the difference.

Now, in terms of the animal soul. Well, the animal can get a soul as Nicholas of Cusa emphasized, by the concept of participation. Cusa used the conception of man's participation in God, as the animal's participation in man. That is, when you adopt a puppy or kitten, especially a puppy--puppies are much better at this; kittens are much more asocial, essentially. Dogs tend to be a little more social in their behavior, as some of you know. But, when you take a dog who, met in the wild, is a very nasty fellow, more or less like a wolf, hmm? But you raise a dog from a puppy, you humanize the creature. The creature depends upon you. With its own little doggie way, it finds a way of participating in you. It becomes an emotional reaction to you, an emotional reaction with you, and therefore, we see a reflection in the animal of that. You see this also in the relationship of the farmer to his horse or even to his cow, who he may slaughter later on, or the donkey. (I like the donkeys very much on this thing.) They participate in you, they look at you, they depend on you. They act to please you, so to speak, they act to help you.

For example, we have a donkey here. The donkey's called Ambrose....

Now, the horse was feeling sick, and the horse fell down. The horse is old, it's arthritic, it's stiff, and so forth. Ambrose went over to the horse, and Ambrose nudged the horse, and he bit the horse in the rump: “Get up!” As if he sensed that the horse's life was menaced if he didn't get up. You know, it's bad for horses, when they're sick, to lie down like that, at least for long periods. So, he's concerned about the horse.

Ambrose would be concerned about us, too. He would be concerned about our dogs. So, they participate in us, in the sense that their participation in us, through our cultivation of them, projects qualities which are human-like, into them. But they never achieve the power of reason. They have a certain kind of animal insight, but it's not human reason.

So, the attempt to define the human soul as a product of the animal soul, is a mistake. More adequate would be, that we give to the animal a sense of soul, when we take an animal, such as the horse that works for us, the ox, or a mule--we give them a sense of soulness, through participation in us, and therefore they participate in our soul. And thus, as man participates in the Creator, so these creatures, as Cusa put it, participate in us.

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