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In Chaim Potok's insightful and moving novel, The Chosen, Rabbi Reb Saunders laments his older brother's brilliance, describing his mind as "cold" and "almost cruel, untouched by his soul." When Saunders observes the same type of brilliance in his own son, at age four, he grieves that "there was no soul in my four-year-old Daniel, there was only his mind. He was a mind in a body without a soul....A mind like this I need for a son?" Saunders mourns. "A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son ...not a mind without a soul."
"A mind without a soul." One could profitably meditate for weeks on such a phrase. And, though figurative, it identifies a reality that is both literal and universal. For what is most needed today, both in our homes and in our offices, is not more intellect but more...well, soul. Whenever stupidity seems to run rampant, intellect itself is usually in full flower. Imagine a manager, for example, who consistently fails to inform her people of important developments in the company so that they are constantly in the dark. How carefully such a manager must orchestrate her every move, her every word, to marginalize her people so completely! It is not that such a manager is not thinking carefully, it is that she is thinking carefully about the wrong things. The difficulty is not with her mind, but with her "soul."
TWO WAYS OF BEING
Philosopher C. Terry Warner identifies two ways of being in the world, or two states of "soul." One is the state in which I see other people primarily as things, as objects that either help me or hinder me in obtaining what I want. I see myself as real--with hopes, dreams, fears, and wants--but I see others as mere objects for my use. The other way of being is the state in which I fully recognize others to be just as real as I am I acknowledge their personhood--I embrace the reality that they have their own hopes, dreams, fears, wants, and needs. Others are as real to me as I am to myself.
Others have noted the difference between these two ways of being...