An Argument for the Soul and God from "Existential Desire" - Some Personal Thoughts

By Stephen Alexander Beach

(810 Words) 

An Argument From Existential Desire
One of the traditional arguments for the existence of a spiritual soul is the argument from "existential desire". The argument goes something like this: 

First, if we think about what it means to have a "desire", we will see that a desire represents some type of incompleteness or unfulfilled capacity within us, an emptiness of sorts which generates the feeling of want or need. It is this emptiness that creates the desire we experience as it longs to be rectified or satiated. For example, when we experience hunger and a desire for food, we can logically see that the desire originates in our capacity for food which is currently incomplete, i.e. the organ of our stomach which is now empty. Secondly, the reality of a stomach which processes food and generates our desire for food is proof that food actually exists. How could the stomach desire something which it had no experience of or relation to? The existence of the stomach necessitates the existence of food, at least at some point in time. 

From this bodily example, I belief we can take the structure of the argument and extend it to the notion of an "existential desire". An existential desire refers to the desires we experience as humans for the most ultimate realities which transcend simple physical things or representations. Plato talked about desires for perfect justice, perfect truth, perfect goodness, perfect beauty, and perfect love. In other words, we have a desire for the perfection of all being. This is shown by the fact that human beings always experience incomplete happiness when they attain any of the goods of this world. If you take any example of people who "have everything" you will still see that their desires are always left unfulfilled. There is something about human nature which seems to always desire more than this world can offer. Many of the 20th century philosophers aptly expressed this. Sartre talked about this phenomenon as "nausea". Camus talked about it as "absurdity". Heidegger called it "angst". 

And so the question becomes, why do I have a desire for things which transcend what the physical world around me can possibly offer? If I have a desire for perfect justice, for example ... what bodily organ is that desire generated from? Perfect justice is a completely abstract notion which has no physical instantiation in the world, and yet I desire it. If desires are born from capacities, then it follows that I have a capacity for these non-physical abstract notions. This is what Plato would call the soul.

At the same time, if the capacity and desire for perfection exists, then like the stomach and food, the reality of these things must exist also. For how could I desire something, or have a capacity for something, which in no way exists or has every existed? Again, if these desires are qualitatively different form physical desires, then how could I desire them if I was simply a body? And so it follows that not only do we have a non-physical soul, but that perfect truth, perfect goodness, perfect beauty, perfect justice, and perfect love all exist as well.

A Materialist Response

The Materialist would probably try to explain this argument away by taking a reductionist stance. Naturalism or Materialism begins with the axiomatic assumption that all that can possibly exist is matter and energy. If one takes this assumption as given, then the only logical way to explain the experience of existential desire is to claim that it is actually reducible to bodily desires, though maybe desires which are more attached to ideas in the brain. They also must deny the abstract nature of ideas as qualitatively different from physical things, and thus at the end of their reasoning is that all desire, thought, and ideas are simply non conscious chemical interactions. Some realize the absurdity of this and have coined the phrase "emergent properties", as though this explains away the inconsistency and the qualitatively different properties that exist. The idea of emergent properties, though, if one believes in sufficient reason only shows that an adequate explanation is needed, one that is qualitatively consistent with its effect. So in my opinion, emergent properties only goes to show that a soul is needed, not to explain it away. 

I do not believe they would offer any evidence to disprove the argument above, but only show how they would explain existential desire from their ideological narrative. 

The Argument Stated More Simply
If the argument had to be laid out in simpler form, I would lay it out like this:

1) Human beings only experience desires because they have an inherent capacity for them which is in a state of incompleteness ... thus generating that desire.

2) If humans experience desires which transcend the physical world, then they have a capacity which is qualitatively similar and therefore transcends the physical world.

3) The existence of both this transcendent capacity and desire would not exist unless there was a corresponding fulfillment to it, as the stomach would not exist if food did not exist.

Thus...
4) There exists an ultimate transcendent reality which the transcendent capacity in us longs for, causing the experience of incompleteness in human beings i.e. "existential desire."