John COTTINGHAM.  In Search of the Soul: A Philosophical Essay.  Princeton University Press, 2020. pp. 174. $22.95.  ISBN 978-0-691-17442-6.  Reviewed by Michael H. BARNES, University of Dayton, Dayton, OH 45469.

This well-crafted and humane book is actually in search of that restless self open to transcendence to which Augustine attested long ago, a self which today Charles Taylor finds unfortunately “buffered” by an excessive naturalism.  Cottingham wants to show us how even in these modern times a theistic orientation makes sense of those elements of our humanness that have traditionally been attached to the soul.

He argues that we do not need to reject the conviction of many moderns that it is the material brain that does our thinking and valuing.  He makes this case by a review of the evolution of the notion of the soul.  Plato’s Socrates detached the soul from material existence; Aristotle reattached it to the body as its form, later thereby giving Aquinas and others the format to insist that the human soul is made for bodily existence.  Along the way, in a nice exegesis of Descartes’ fuller thought, Cottingham absolves old René of a simple dualism which divides us into a thinking substance in an extended body.  A “trialism” is Cottingham’s word for Descartes late position that includes an emphasis on the sensate and emotional life that arises from the human combination of body and soul.

In his third chapter Cottingham explores further what it means to be a subject, a conscious being in need of meaning and open to transcendence.  This capacity develops gradually from infancy to adulthood.  It is made possible by the extraordinary complexity of the brain, yet is experienced in us as more than mechanical computation – it constitutes a “me,” with personal identity and values and yearnings.  In the face of philosophers who treat this “me” as a kind of illusion produced by the workings of the brain, Cottingham surveys alternative approaches.  He does not find panpsychism persuasive, though it is a way of treating consciousness as an inner aspect of all realty.  He finds more congenial a traditional theism, which attributes our existence to a mind-like ultimate source.  To see us as “in the image of God” is a way to make sense of our subjectivity.  This also makes sense of what Cottingham believes to be our sense that some values are objectively valid, based on more than changeable cultural habits.  How else be able to say that cruelty is truly wrong; that we should take care of one another?  Affirming a “transcendent personal consciousness at the heart of reality” ties things all together.

The soul, this inner self, is always partly hidden, Cottingham says, roaming through philosophical and psychoanalytic theory.  Much is buried within us, opaque to our rational analysis or introspection.  Yet we have a sense that what lies beneath the surface may be a joyful response to the world of the real and the possible – and the transcendent.  A theistic orientation, Cottingham continues, need not at all take one away from the natural world into some oddly separate supernatural; Hopkins was on the right path, the world is indeed “charged with the grandeur of God.”  This book is what a modern spirituality could look like.