What Is a Human Being? Body, Mind, Soul and Why Your Life Has Purpose

Direct Answer: A human being is a physical body joined to a self that thinks, chooses and takes responsibility. Materialism explains the body well but struggles to explain consciousness and free will. The Quranic view adds a divine spirit that gives humans awareness and moral choice, which is why human life has a purpose beyond eating, sleeping and survival.

Man started thinking about the universe so that he could find out one thing: what is he himself? What can his life become? What is this universe, and how is he connected to it?

The answer he got was a bitter one. He was told he is a “puppet of clay” with no real worth.

Scientists who study the body (physiologists) took him to their laboratory, analysed him, and gave him the result. In you there is:

• about 10 gallons of water
• fat enough for seven bars of soap
• carbon enough for nine thousand pencils
• phosphorus enough for two thousand matchsticks
• iron enough for one small nail
• lime enough to whitewash a chicken coop
• a little sulphur and magnesium

That’s all. Finished.

(These figures are an old, rough estimate. The point is the picture they paint.)

Is that really what a human being is? Hardly anyone feels it is. This article follows the question from Greek philosophy to modern physics, and then to the Quran’s answer. If you want the personal side first, read What Are We Really Here For? A Question That Changed My Life.

The materialist view: is man only matter?

Democritus and the theory of atoms

It is hard to define materialism in a few words, because thinkers from the Greek philosopher Democritus (about 460 BC) onward have offered so many versions. But the father of the materialists is Democritus. His school is called atomism, because he believed the whole universe is built from parts that cannot be divided any further.

According to this theory:

• All these indivisible parts (atoms) are material.
• Everything is made of them.
• When they join to form something, empty space remains between them.
• They cannot be destroyed.
• They have always been in motion and always will be.
• The human mind is made of the same atoms, and thought appears from their physical arrangement.

Heraclitus: only what the senses can touch

Another Greek, Heraclitus, went further. He said time creates everything and time destroys everything. Only what the senses can feel has any value. This world is the same for everyone, was made by neither man nor gods, and always was and always will be.

In other words, the world is only the world of what we can sense. Anything beyond the senses has no value. This is the idea we call atheism, and up to here we are still in physics. Then a whole philosophy was built on top of it.

The machine view of life

Imagine I turn the handle of a machine and its parts start moving. The cause of that movement is the force turning the handle behind it, and the movement of the parts is its effect. The parts don’t know why they turn. The machine doesn’t know its own purpose. Their job is only to keep turning.

That is the mechanistic view. According to it, the whole universe runs by cause and effect. It came into being somehow, and now it just runs mechanically. No conscious being stands behind it and no goal lies ahead of it. It denies purpose altogether.

Just as I can predict what happens when I strike a matchstick on the box, mechanists said we can look at the causes in the universe and predict its effects. Every act is the result of a previous cause.

Is the human mind separate from the body?

The question materialism struggles with

Everything in materialism narrows down to one question. Does the human mind have its own independent existence, or is it just the result of what the physical body does?

If it’s a result of the body, then when the body stops, the mind should stop too. Switch off a generator and the electricity ends. By that logic, the matter should be easy to settle. But it isn’t, and the supporters of this view had to think harder.

What an ordinary person says

Ask an ordinary man, and he’ll answer simply and confidently that inside the body there is another thing called the soul. Everything a person does is the work of the soul. After death the body rots, but the soul leaves it and goes elsewhere. What is the soul? Where does it come from? Where does it go? He won’t go into those depths. He answers according to what his religion taught him.

A materialist laughs at this. But some questions are hard for him to answer too.

The world of the heart

Take this. I’m sitting here thinking. My heart is a vast ocean of thoughts. Sometimes hope stirs in it. Sometimes it becomes a house of mourning for lost hopes. Sometimes it holds a determination so high it seems to look down on angels. Sometimes it sinks into such weakness that even I’m not in control of myself. Sometimes revenge and hatred storm inside it. Sometimes it turns into a gentle stream of forgiveness and love.

All of this happens in one small heart. No other person’s eye can see it, no ear can hear it, no tongue can taste its sweetness, no hand can touch it. This world is beyond the reach of the senses. And since “matter” means exactly what the senses can grasp, the world of the heart can’t be called material.

Yet this inner world isn’t cut off from the physical one, and the physical world isn’t unaffected by it. When hope colours your heart, its rainbow shows on your face, and everyone who sees you can tell your state. When your stomach is upset, or your blood is low (anaemia), your power to decide weakens. So the body affects the heart, and the heart affects the body.

If body and mind are the same thing, why are their worlds so different? And despite the difference, how do they keep affecting each other? That is the question that troubles materialists. They can analyse the body into flesh, bones, blood and brain cells, then into elements and compounds, then into atoms and electrons. But how matter and inner feeling influence one another, that is hard.

Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”

The first to give this problem a philosophical shape was Descartes (1596–1650). He began by doubting everything, and decided that nothing could be known for sure. Except one thing: his own self. The proof that “I” exist is that “I am conscious.” So he stated: “I think, therefore I am.”

From there he concluded that God made matter and mind separately. Their worlds are separate and their paths are separate, but the two run side by side. When I decide to drink, that’s the act of my mind. At the same moment my body moves, which is the act of the physical body. This became known as psycho-physical parallelism.

But how does one affect the other? Descartes said it comes from the power of God, which he accepted without proof. Most people weren’t satisfied. They said philosophy and physics can’t accept an argument beyond logic and cause and effect, so his theory was set aside.

Two roads: materialism and idealism

If body and mind are not two different things, then either the mind is a product of the body, or the body is a product of the mind. Materialists took the first road. The second school became known as idealism.

Epiphenomenalism: a half-way theory

A third group said the human mind is produced by the brain, yet has a separate, non-material existence. No thought can arise in it unless the brain started it. But once a thought arises, it can create other thoughts without the brain. So the body affects the mind, but the mind cannot affect the body. This is called epiphenomenalism.

It doesn’t solve the problem either. If the mind can’t affect the body, what is its separate existence worth? That is pure materialism again.

The shoelace test

Here is a simple example. I’m walking barefoot and my foot touches a spark. It jerks up at once. That’s a reflex action, like your eye shutting when someone’s finger comes toward it. Now take another case. As I walk, my shoelace comes undone. I see it, stop, lift my foot, tie it and walk on. The two movements are very different. One was without intention, the other with intention.

Materialists say both were the same chain of physical events. But then consider this. Sometimes I see the loose lace and decide to tie it now. Other times I see it again and again, weigh some considerations, and decide there’s no need yet, and keep walking. The eye is still reporting. The brain is still signalling. But my mind decides not to act on the report. That decision isn’t the result of any movement of the brain. Where did this power come from?

Behaviourism, genes and race: three attempts to explain a human away

Watson and behaviourism

The most extreme materialist school in psychology is behaviourism, led by Dr. Watson. After studying the habits of children (human and animal) for years, he concluded that what we call the mind’s “choice” is not a free decision. It’s the total result of all the stimuli that act on a child’s mind.

A hungry baby is shown a milk bottle. Repeat that, and the baby links hunger with the bottle. Soon, just seeing the bottle starts the bodily process of hunger and feeding. Later you say the word “bottle” as you bring it, and the word creates the same link. Words create concepts. Put all of these together and you get a person’s habits and character. These pass down through generations, and become beliefs without anyone noticing.

So what we call a “decision” isn’t a decision, only the physical result of those stimuli. A related school, psychoanalysis (Freud, Adler and Jung), says all decisions come from the unconscious mind, a mixture of heredity, environment, early schooling and suppressed wishes. Consciousness has no part in them.

For Watson, even asking whether the mind exists separately is meaningless. If it can’t freely affect human affairs, its existence or absence is the same.

The geologists and the winding clock

Geology added its voice. Earth was once so hot that no life could exist on it. Life came later, when the heat dropped. And earth, along with the sun, keeps cooling. One day the cold will make life impossible again.

So, they said, the whole universe is like a giant clock wound up once. Its spring is slowly unwinding, and one day it will stop. Since no outside power rewinds it, there’s no hope of restarting it.

Darwin and evolution

Then came Darwin’s theory of evolution. Life began at a very low level in different species, and these evolved by purely mechanical laws:

• natural selection
• adaptation to the environment
• survival of the fittest

Species that couldn’t survive disappeared. Those that could overcame obstacles and moved on. No outside power was involved, and life wasn’t pushed by any inner urge toward a goal. Finally, life took human form. Now man lives under mechanical laws and will end under them, because he is the last link in the chain.

But there is a gap. Geologists couldn’t say how life appeared when the earth cooled. Darwin’s school couldn’t say how life first split into species. They call it “chance,” and in fact the mechanical theory begins with chance.

Three camps

Those who accept evolution fall into three groups:

• Materialists: life and consciousness all came from matter, and cause and effect can explain them.
• Vitalists: life didn’t come from matter. It has its own principles. Bergson called this force the élan vital. Driesch called it entelechy. Smuts called it holism. Osborn used the word aristogenesis and Berg used nomogenesis.
• Finalists: the universe appeared under a plan set by God, for a purpose, and evolution is one way toward that goal.

Genes and race

Biologists said a child’s traits come not from psychology but from genes, as the child gets his colour and features through reproduction. Temper, being quick to anger or gentle, even honesty or dishonesty, they said, depend on the genes inherited from parents. Professor Mottram wrote that our personality depends entirely on our physical body, and the body’s traits on genes.

Anthropologists said a child’s mental impressions and beliefs aren’t individual but racial, passed down from the tribe. (Dunn and Dobzhansky strongly opposed the racial theory, calling the era of racial superiority over.)

The mechanical picture in ten points

Put together, the mechanical view says:

1. Everything is made of indivisible atoms. (Modern atoms are different, but this was the original idea.)
2. Besides atoms there is energy, and the two together run the universe.
3. They appeared by chance, and now nothing can be added or removed. Why the laws exist, nobody knows.
4. Earth was hot, so life was impossible. Once it cooled, life came by chance.
5. Species evolved. Simple consciousness appeared, then self-consciousness. The last link is man.
6. Man’s habits and character come from early impressions (psychology), from genes (biology), or from race and custom (anthropology). So he has no control over his actions.
7. When the body’s machinery stops, man ends and the story is over.
8. The universe runs like a clock wound once. When it unwinds, everything stops.
9. There is no purpose to creation or to life.
10. So the purpose of human life is only to keep the body running: eat, drink, sleep and continue the line. And man is helpless. Nothing in him can freely decide anything.

What happens to ethics and politics under this theory

Of all the subjects humans have created, ethics is the one tied directly to human action. It asks: how should a person be? What should he do? Why? The whole of life improves or breaks by the answers.

But under the mechanical theory, man is a helpless machine with no free will. So the question of ethics doesn’t arise at all.

The theory that can’t be lived

Yet even those who believe it hold man responsible for his actions in practice. They have to. If a thief’s excuse were accepted (“I stole, but I’m not responsible, because my act came from physical, biological and psychological causes I can’t control”), nothing in society would be safe. If a murderer weren’t punished for the same reason, the whole system would collapse. Wages go to those who work and punishment to those who commit crimes because each person is responsible for his acts.

So the mechanical view can’t be lived in the real world. Its supporters have to accept free will in practice, even though that breaks their own theory down. They hold both at once.

Reason on the throne

Since they accept nothing beyond matter and the senses, they claim human reason alone can solve ethical problems. Haeckel wrote that reason is man’s greatest gift, and that revelation is false. In 1899, the Rationalist Association in England defined its movement as placing human reason at the highest level without limits, and building a philosophy and ethics that accept no outside authority.

But they had already said reason itself is a product of mechanical cause and effect. And something produced by a machine can’t freely judge anything. The mechanical view and human freedom contradict each other.

Marx: bread is everything

If life is only physical, its problem is only economic. Karl Marx (1818–1883) said the whole history of mankind is a story of economic struggle. In the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 with Engels, religion and ethics are by-products of economics. Revolutions aren’t done by human will but by historical necessity, which no one can speed up or stop. Man is tied in economic chains. Lenin added that we can know reality through the senses, and that human reason can give absolute truth.

The politics of force and fraud

If no standard of right and wrong stands outside human reason, then whatever solves the economic problem is acceptable. Henry Ford is quoted as saying what is economically right is morally right. Politically, every nation will seek its own prosperity by any means. This is the politics shaped by Machiavelli (1469–1527). Force and fraud are the two pillars of it, and a method is judged by one thing only: did it get the result? Lord Acton observed that successful politicians don’t listen to conscience.

For this long arc of history, read Human Civilization: From Tribes to Modern Politics.

What modern physics did to the old picture of matter

Matter stopped being solid

Watch a carpenter saw a plank. Sawdust falls. What’s sawdust? Tiny bits of wood. Make them as small as possible and they’re still wood. Iron dust is iron, gold dust is gold. That was the atomists’ idea of matter.

But discoveries in the late 1800s and early 1900s overturned it. Take a drop of water to a laboratory. Analyse it and it becomes two gases, oxygen and hydrogen. Break the oxygen atom further and you reach electrons, which are positive and negative charges of electricity. Sir Oliver Lodge thought further analysis would turn them into “ether energy.” (Today the ether idea has been dropped. Professor H. H. Turner even said it doesn’t exist.)

Keep analysing matter and you end up with pure energy or pure motion. But who can picture motion without something that moves? So modern physics found that the basis of matter is non-material, and talks about the physical world mostly through symbols.

Einstein, Russell and “connected events”

Einstein’s work went further. Matter isn’t a solid, still thing but a set of connected events (some called them condensed thoughts), whose source is motion or energy. Bertrand Russell wrote that relativity has damaged the traditional idea of matter more than any philosopher’s argument. Matter is no longer solid. It’s a collection of inter-related events. He even called “matter” a convenient formula. Ouspensky said it’s a condition, like blindness, which isn’t a thing but a state.

Sir James Jeans said the universe looks more like a great thought than a great machine, and Sir Arthur Eddington spoke in a similar way.

I’m not claiming physics proves religion. It doesn’t. The point is smaller. The picture of dead, solid matter that fed old materialism is gone, so the question “how did life and mind come out of matter?” isn’t as simple as it sounded.

Is life just chemistry? What science still can’t explain

The biologist E. B. Wilson found that studying cells widened the gap between living and non-living matter instead of closing it. J. S. Haldane said a living body can’t be explained by the old mechanical laws. Viscount Samuel said our knowledge of life and mind stands where our knowledge of matter stood centuries before.

Bergson gave an image. A curve can be cut into tiny straight lines, and in a sense it’s made of them. But you’ll never understand a curve by thinking only of straight lines. Aristotle had a similar idea: a thing is matter plus form. Water is two gases, but its qualities are nothing like either. The “form” appears when the parts combine, and no one can explain how by counting the parts.

New things keep appearing

The thinkers behind emergent evolution (Lloyd Morgan and others) pointed out that real novelty appears at every level, which the old machine picture said is impossible. George Gaylord Simpson noted that evolution keeps opening new possibilities. Lloyd Morgan went as far as saying it reflects a Supreme Mind. That’s his personal belief, and I mention it as history.

What is consciousness? The radio and the “I”

The old view says the brain makes consciousness, like a generator makes electricity. Others offered a picture. Think of a radio. When it works, you hear a voice. When it breaks, you hear nothing. But the voice didn’t come from the radio. Perhaps the brain relates to consciousness the same way, as an instrument and not a source.

Be clear what this is. It’s a philosophical position held by Bergson, Ouspensky and others. Most neuroscientists today think the brain produces consciousness. Nobody has settled it.

The “I” that stays the same

Remember yourself at ten. Your body has changed beyond recognition, and many of its cells have been replaced. (The popular “every seven years” figure is too neat, because tissues renew at different speeds.) Show a sixty-year-old a photo of himself at four and he may not recognise it. But when he says “I killed a snake when I was ten,” he feels a flicker of pride as if it just happened. The same “I” is speaking.

The machine view says it’s only memory, and memory lives in the brain. Bergson disagreed. In his book on matter and memory he argued that the brain helps memory work in the present, like a filing room, but is not where memory comes from. Burn the filing room and you lose the files, but the clerk who wrote them is untouched. That inner “I” is the ego, the self, or in Iqbal’s word, khudi.

Levels of consciousness

Richard Bucke described three levels: simple consciousness (animals), self-consciousness (ordinary humans), and cosmic consciousness (rare people). Ouspensky imagined a ladder of dimensions, from creatures that sense only a line, to animals that sense surfaces, to humans who grasp volume and abstract ideas. Take these as thought experiments, not settled science.

What makes a human different from an animal?

Yes, we are animals. But George Gaylord Simpson wrote that calling man only an animal denies everything no other animal has. Bergson argued that plant sensation, animal instinct and human intelligence differ in kind, not only degree.

What marks us out?

• Concepts. A dog reacts to this ball. We think of “roundness,” “justice,” “forever.” Every concept needs a word, so thought and language grow together.
• Tools. An animal’s tools are its body. We build tools to make other tools.
• Awareness of death. Animals live in the present. We know we’ll die and plan beyond our lifetime.
• Choice against instinct. We can say no to what the body wants.

The unseen world

Modern science quietly admitted something striking. Beyond the world our senses reach is an unseen side of reality. Eddington said the roots of the tree of the universe are there, and we only see trunk, branches and leaves.

The Quran has two words for the pair: khalq (the created, visible world) and amr (the command, the unseen side). Pringle-Pattison complained that English has only one word, “creation,” so the difference is lost. Iqbal argued that science studies reality one slice at a time, so religion has no reason to fear it. Science honestly picks one angle. A claim that the angle is all there is goes beyond science.

What the Quran says about the creation of man

Adam, the angels and Iblis: the fight inside you

The story begins with the announcement of a khalifa, a steward on earth (2:30). The angels object. No argument follows. Adam is taught the “names,” which can be read as the power to form concepts (2:31). The angels bow, and Iblis refuses (2:34). Retellings appear in 7:12–17, 15:32–40 and 38:76–83.

On the reading I’m following, Adam is humankind, the angels are natural forces that obey perfectly and can be harnessed by knowledge, and Iblis is the rebellious part of you: appetite and ego putting self-interest before truth.

The three parts inside you

1. Emotions and instincts supply wants and energy.
2. Intellect finds ways to get what you want.
3. The self decides.

Intellect is neither good nor evil. It’s a servant. When it serves raw desire, it becomes clever, rebellious and full of excuses.

From garden to struggle

On the same reading, the “garden” was an early stage of life when food was plentiful and nobody owned land. Then people split into groups, land became property, and a living took effort.

Self-preservation is natural. But in a crowded world, each person’s intellect says, “gather more for yourself, then for your children.” The story calls it the whisper of a tree of eternal life (20:120). An animal stops when full. A human never does, and that endless wanting breaks society into winners and losers. The Quran says turning away from remembrance leads to a cramped life (20:124).

See Human Emotion, Desires and Usage of Intellect and Laws Set by God and Materialistic Concept of Life and Human Being Evolution.

Why reason and conscience alone can’t decide right and wrong

You walk into a friend’s room and fall in love with a rare painting. The wish is emotion. Then intellect gets busy with ways to get it, and also with arguments: he doesn’t value it, I’d care for it better. Psychologists call this rationalisation. Freud found criminals often build beliefs that excuse their crimes. Ouspensky wrote that reason can’t defeat a feeling. Only another feeling can.

Conscience isn’t enough either. It differs from person to person and can be trained or numbed. If each conscience is its own authority, even a dedicated criminal is “a man of principle.”

Test it. A friend leaves you money for safekeeping, then dies. No witness, no record. Your needs are real and your mind lists clever reasons. What stops you? Only a value that doesn’t depend on being caught.

That’s why ethics needs permanent values, hard to ground without a source above human opinion and accountability beyond this life. Dostoevsky is often paraphrased as saying that without God everything is permitted. The Quran places guidance above shifting opinion while still praising thinking, and criticising those who refuse to think (8:22). Earlier nations had sharp senses and strong minds, and it didn’t save them once they rejected guidance (46:26). Wars, exploitation and cruelty rarely come from too little intelligence. They come from intelligence serving appetite.

The balanced way: living for both body and soul

Look after the body. Work, health and strength matter. The Quran doesn’t ask you to run from the world.

Don’t make the body your whole life. Those who live like cattle, only eating and enjoying, have missed the point (47:12).

Strengthen the self. A strong self can take revenge and forgive anyway, take wealth and share it anyway.

Keep growing. The Quran describes the universe as active “every day” (55:29), and life and death as a test (67:2). On this reading, human life is a stage, not the last step.

Struggle is the design. Species that never faced hardship stagnated. Your inner struggle between what is and what ought to be is what sharpens you.

Seven habits to try this week

1. Spend ten quiet minutes a day on your inner life.
2. Before a decision, ask if your intellect is serving a craving.
3. Distrust excuses that sound too convenient.
4. Decide in advance what you will never do.
5. Use your skills to help people.
6. Treat difficulty as training.
7. Ask what you’re building that will outlast you.

More ideas in Daily Habits for Success in Life and How to Live a Happy Life. For learning and character, see The Revolutionary Power of Education: Leading Humanity to Peace and Dignity, and for the same question from another side, The Dual Nature of Existence: Is Human Life Merely Physical or Something More?.

Frequently asked questions

What is a human being according to philosophy and religion?

Philosophy has called a human a physical machine (materialism), a thinking mind (Descartes), or a body joined to a deeper self. Islam and other religions describe a physical body with a spiritual dimension that carries awareness, choice and responsibility.

Is a human only a physical body?

Chemically the body is made of common elements. But the steady sense of “I,” abstract thought and moral choice are hard to explain by physical description alone. Whether they come from the brain or beyond it is still debated.

What makes humans different from animals?

We share biology with animals. What sets us apart is abstract thinking, language, awareness of death, open-ended tool-making and the power to choose against instinct.

What does the Quran say about human creation?

It mentions water and clay (21:30; 15:26; 55:14), creation in stages (71:13–14; 22:5), and the divine spirit that gave humans hearing, sight and understanding (32:9). Scholars read these in different ways.

What is the purpose of human life?

In the Quranic view, it is to develop the self through free, ethical choices, use knowledge responsibly, serve others and prepare for the next stage. Other traditions answer differently.

So, what is a human being?

Back to the laboratory table. The scientist has counted the water, the carbon and the iron. The real questions are still sitting there: who loves, doubts, forgives, and wonders what it’s all for?

Materialism gave us a machine and couldn’t explain responsibility. Modern physics turned solid matter into energy and events. And the Quranic view gives us a being with body, mind and self, free to choose, accountable for the choice, and growing through struggle.

You don’t have to accept all of it. I’d only ask for an honest hour with the question.

Pick one habit for your body and one for your inner life, and keep both for seven days.