Carl Friedrich Göschel: Of the proof for the immortality of the human soul (1835)

Last time we saw Göschel, he was busy explaining his own take of the intricacies of the whole Hegelian system. In the work we are now dealing with, Von den Beweisen für die Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele, he grapples with a special question of how to prove the immortality of human soul. His fundamental line of defence is again his reading of Hegelianism, which he mostly calls speculative philosophy, but he does point in this work to many other philosophers, using even thinkers like Spinoza and Kant to find arguments for his own understanding of what to expect after death.

Göschel is clearly very fond of analogies, and one of the two most important ones presented in this book is that between the three traditional proofs for God’s existence – a division going ultimately back to Kant, but viewed as being reimagined by Hegel – and what Göschel takes as three fundamental proofs for the immortality of human soul (fundamental in the sense that all other proofs should be mere variations or combinations of these three proofs). Göschel knows his Hegelese and adds at once that these three proofs are not enough, because they are part of pre-Kantian dogmatic philosophy that failed to ask the important question of how thinking could be applied to being.

To bridge this gap, Göschel introduces the second important analogy in the work. He lifts a threefold schema of the ideal development of individual human beings from Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit and rereads it as a development of spirit in a more traditional sense (of course, Hegelian habit of using words like soul and spirit with religious connotations made this repurposing easy). The difference is that while Hegelian philosophy of subjective spirit ends merely with the human being becoming part of a society of other human beings, Göschel’s new reading turns the development to more theological fields.

Göschel notes that even before humans wondered about proving the immortality of the soul, they were immediately convinced of the fact that the soul would go on continuing its life indefinitely. This immediate certainty, as it were, forms for him in a sense fourth proof of immortality, just like similarly the existence of God has been justified by humans at large agreeing about this being immediately certain. What awakens the need to prove that this inborn conviction is certain, Göschel states, is the fact of death that appears to contradict the immediate conviction.

The first real proof, corresponding to the cosmological proof of God’s existence, Göschel says, is what he calls theoretical or metaphysical proof. In effect, this is proof familiar at least from the Wolffian tradition: the soul is simple, thus, it cannot be destroyed through division like a composite, material thing. Göschel gives this proof a new twist by relating it to the immediate phase in Hegelian philosophy of spirit, named appropriately soul.

Hegel understood by soul a human being in a state where they had not yet grasped the idea of themselves as distinct from the world around them (or to which they had regressed through suggestion or mental illness). Göschel takes the word to describe more the result of the development of Hegelian soul, namely, a distinct individual. Furthermore, he gives it a new twist by understanding the soul as an individual necessarily related to what he calls an internal body. This internal body should be simple – kind of what Leibnizian monad was supposed to be – and separable from the external body, capable of surviving without it. Thus, Göschel states, just like the cosmological proof of God’s existence deduces from the current existence of world that requires something to sustain it the existence of an entity that will sustain it, similarly theoretical or metaphysical proof of the immortality of soul deduces from the current existence of the soul as a simple monad or atom its continuing into the future.

Survival of such a soul-atom is not enough, Göschel thinks, because just like even Wolffians noted, mere continued existence of such an atom does not guarantee that our memories and thoughts continue to exist in separation from the body. Even worse, there’s the possibility envisioned even by Leibniz that an omnipotent God could come and annihilate even the seemingly indestructible monad, just because they wanted to. Thus, Göschel states, staying in this standpoint of abstract individuality we would be locked to a most frightful dualism, where soul would be separated from everything else, including its external body, and would live in a constant fear of the absolute other or God and in pain for being separated from them.

This awareness of oneself as distinct from everything else and awareness of something else beyond oneself marks already, Göschel states, a transition to the next phase of the journey of soul, which he calls, following Hegel, consciousness. Here Göschel and Hegel have pretty much the same understanding of the term, except while for Hegel the other of which the consciousness is aware of means the external world in general and other humans in particular, for Göschel, the important other is always God.

For Göschel, the move to consciousness is also a move from the mere existence of the soul to its essence. He appropriates a Hegelian pun that the essence (Wesen) of something refers to what has happened to this something in the past (gewesen). In the case of consciousness, this involves the soul recollecting or internalising (another Hegelian pun on the word Erinnerung) this essence, which in Göschel's opinion means the consciousness becoming aware of the determination or destiny set to it by God at the time of creation.

Göschel connects this idea of the past determination of human consciousness with an analogy with the teleological proof of God’s existence, which hinges on the notion of finding the world to be geared toward some purposes. He links this proof to what he calls the practical proof of the immortality of the human soul: in essence, this is the proof Kant used in Critique of practical reason. In other words, consciousness is determined for some infinite goal that it cannot realise in a finite time, thus, because this goal is determined by God, they must guarantee the continued existence of consciousness.

The immortality in the practical proof appears to be based on the capacity of the human consciousness to approach its destiny, which due to the finity of humans seems hopeless to achieve. Here Göschel states that God has the power to change this human condition and will do it some day for everyone, leading us to the final stage of our development or spirit. While for Hegel this stage meant simply a time when a human being does not anymore feel alienation from the world around them, for Göschel the term takes more obvious religious connotations.

In Göschel's eyes, the phase of spirit means a return to the original conviction that a human soul will continue its existence indefinitely, but now this conviction can be put in a form of proof. While the ultimate experiential realisation of this conviction must wait for the time of our death, Göschel insists, we can already state this proof that he calls logical or ontological. In effect the proof is simply a variation of the Cartesian cogito: I think of my continued existence, but while I am thinking it, I must continue to exist. Göschel’s ontological proof of immortality appears to have a clear flaw: what about the time when we are not thinking? This flaw makes it as suspect as its analogue, the more famous ontological proof of God's existence, where the inevitability of thinking the most perfect being or God as existent should make us admit their existence.

What Göschel offers as a foundation of both ontological arguments is his rather metaphysical reading of Hegelian idea of thinking forming a unity with being, thinking being in a dominant role in this relation. He describes this unity as personality, not referring to a character of a conscious being, but to the concept of personhood in trinity: God is a unity in seeming multiplicity. In effect, Göschel insists that divine thinking has the capacity to penetrate anything that seemingly differs from it, both within itself (the different persons) and without itself (the creation). This penetrating thinking is going on all the time – or more likely, it is eternal in the sense of timeless. When a human spirit truly experiences the truth of both ontological proofs, it takes part in this divine thinking.

Göschel’s reading of Hegel seems to come close to pantheism, where the human spirit is like a droplet of water assimilated in the wide ocean of divinity. Yet, Göschel rejects this outcome with the Hegelian phrase that the earlier moments of development are retained in the later stages. While with Hegel it is quite natural to read such statements as saying merely that the history of human society is always played out through individuals, Göschel endorses a stronger interpretation that every individual human soul is retained by the divine thinking – not just in the Spinozan sense that these individuals are eternally thought by God, but as full individual soul-atoms with their own consciousness.

By being in community with God, Göschel continues, the individual human souls gain the divine ability to penetrate anything. This means that even the external world is not anymore a mystery to humans, but something they can freely manipulate by their will. This final stage of the development of the human soul Göschel calls resurrection, where the soul is not anymore an atom distinct from its external body, but reconstitutes this body as being now alive in a spiritual union with the soul.