From Wikipedia:
Spirit
The English word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, meaning “breath”, but also “spirit, soul, courage, vigor”… It is distinguished from Latin anima, “soul”
Soul
… related to the notion of being “bound” in death, and the practice of ritually binding or restraining the corpse of the deceased in the grave to prevent his or her return as a ghost… It could refer to a ghost or spirit of the dead … and to a more philosophical notion of an immortal and immaterial essence left over at death … in English variously translated as “soul, self, life, creature, person, appetite, mind, living being, desire, emotion, passion”…
Self
The self is the subject of one’s own experience of phenomena: perception, emotions, thoughts. In phenomenology, it is conceived as what experiences, and there isn’t any experiencing without an experiencer, the self. The self is therefore an “immediate given”, an intrinsic dimension of the fact of experiencing phenomena.
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So we have three different concepts here:
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Aliveness and vitality in the body that is distinguished from the material body.
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An immortal and immaterial essence left over at death that retains desire, emotion, and passions of the person.
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The experiencer in a live body, which continues as soul after the death of the body.
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We find that, initially, the physical and spiritual aspects are seen as coexisting in a person. As religion considered the mysteries of birth and death, much thought was given to what happens at death. It was obvious that the physical body disintegrates after death, but do the spiritual aspects of the person disintegrate too?
Another problem was the wild beast nature latent in every person. Plato started out by considering the Ethical problem. That led to the Political problem; which, in turn, led to the Psychological problem. Plato then came up with a solution to this Psychological problem in terms of setting up internal controls. These controls involved the indoctrination of people into believing in a personal God who can judge, reward or punish them. Plato’s solution provided the groundwork for later religions, such as, Christianity, which provides a system of faith designed to set up internal controls to make people behave properly.
The idea of soul was introduced as part of this system of faith. It was assumed that the spiritual aspect of the person survived death. This was the soul of the person that retained the desires, emotions, and passions. The soul was then rewarded or punished based on the actions committed during the person’s life.
The spiritual aspect, which coexisted with the physical aspect, now came to be viewed as separable from each other. This idea was then projected back to the existence before death, and the soul was seen as living in the body but separate from it. This came to be viewed as the self of the person that is independent of the body.
Here we see an abstract idea of spirit evolving and gradually becoming personified as self.
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