The invention of the soul

Imagine receiving a passport, but instead of just giving you permission to travel, you are handed a new identity: your soul. Anatole France, a French writer, recounted the story of a monk who baptized penguins, believing them to be human, thereby throwing God and the saints into a quandary: “Must we now give them a soul too?” The solution? Yes, a soul, but a small one. It may seem absurd, but this scene reveals something that often eludes us: the soul is not given to us by God or by our genes; we build it ourselves, collectively, through culture and, above all, through language. Everything we think about the soul—whether it’s the divine spark, the core of our consciousness, or the thing that makes us unique—is not etched into our biology; rather, it arises from how our community sees us and from the stories we tell about ourselves. A common misconception is to believe that the soul is an object, a magical substance inserted inside us like a battery. This is how Descartes envisioned it: matter and mind, united in some mysterious way. But the truth is even more startling. The soul is a kind of social passport: a cultural guarantee of our identity, which exists because everyone around us recognizes and reinforces it. Like a British passport, whose first page guarantees you rights wherever you go, the soul is also a collective promise: you are worthy, you are someone, you have the right to live life as a protagonist. Take the author’s personal story, for example. As a child, he spent hours staring at his first passport: he felt like he was worth more just because of that piece of paper. This is also how our consciousness works: the sense of being someone arises from the recognition of others and from the narrative we create about ourselves. But there is an even more surprising detail: no one perceives the redness of a poppy, the saltiness of an anchovy, or the pain of a bee sting exactly the way you do. We are all immersed in a private “bubble” of sensations that no one else can experience in the same way. We are not merely passive recipients of reality; we are active creators of our experiences. When you see a color, your brain doesn't just register a frequency: it stages a little internal spectacle, a “redness” that is yours and no one else's. And this representation becomes consciousness; it becomes soul. The real revolution, however, comes with language. About 200,000 years ago, human beings found a way to express their inner selves, to attribute a similar mind to others, and to elevate personal feeling to something sacred. At that moment, mere sentience—the ability to feel—became a person, and the person became a soul: a collective construct, a story we tell ourselves that, surprisingly, works even though it is in part a shared fiction. So why do we believe in it so strongly? Perhaps because, as the author argues, believing that we have a soul has helped us to live better, to respect one another more, and to see in others not only bodies but also inner worlds to be honored. We have become a species that lives in the “land of souls”: a mental environment where the value of the person, their uniqueness, and their freedom have become central. Animals have consciousness, but not a soul in this sense: not because they lack something inherent, but because they lack the cultural framework that transforms sentience into a person and the person into the sacred. Today, science attempts to explain consciousness as a product of the brain, but some hold a startling view: consciousness, and therefore the soul, are skillfully crafted illusions. They exist because the brain tells itself stories about itself. There is no need to find a magical substance: it is enough to understand that the conscious experience is a representation, a kind of mental art. The fear is that, if it is an illusion, then it “doesn't really exist.” But the author flips the perspective: the fact that it is a product of the imagination does not make it any less real—on the contrary, experiencing it as a collective work of art is perhaps humanity’s ultimate achievement. Jung’s statement, which saved his imaginary god by making him accept that he was a dream, sums it all up: sometimes, declaring that we are the product of imagination is precisely what saves us. To be human means to inhabit a world where ideas become more powerful than things, and where the soul—even if invented—makes us unique and unrepeatable. The true miracle is not having a soul, but having invented it together. If the idea that your soul was born out of culture and not from heaven has made you see everything in a different light, on Lara Notes you can press I'm In — choose whether this perspective intrigues you, whether you have experienced it, or whether you truly believe in it. And if tomorrow you tell someone that, at its core, the soul is a social passport, on Lara Notes you can mark that conversation with Shared Offline—because certain paradigm shifts deserve to be remembered together. That was from Aeon: you've saved yourself over twenty minutes of reading and taken home a question that won't leave you.