The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self

An Intellectual History of Personal Identity

Raymond Martin, John Barresi

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780231510677
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

This book traces the development of theories of the self and personal identity from the ancient Greeks to the present day. From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Foucault, Raymond Martin and John Barresi explore the works of a wide range of thinkers and reveal the larger intellectual trends, controversies, and ideas that have revolutionized the way we think about ourselves.

The authors open with ancient Greece, where the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the materialistic atomists laid the groundwork for future theories. They then discuss the ideas of the church fathers and medieval and Renaissance philosophers, including St. Paul, Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne. In their coverage of the emergence of a new mechanistic conception of nature in the seventeenth century, Martin and Barresi note a shift away from religious and purely philosophical notions of self and personal identity to more scientific and social conceptions, a trend that has continued to the present day. They explore modern philosophy and psychology, including the origins of different traditions within each discipline, and explain both the theoretical relevance of feminism and gender and ethnic studies and also the ways that Derrida and other recent thinkers have challenged the very idea that a unified self or personal identity even exists.

Martin and Barresi cover a number of issues broached by philosophers and psychologists, such as the existence of a fixed and unchanging self and whether the concept of the soul has a use outside of religious contexts. They address the question of whether notions of the soul and the self are still viable in today's world. Together, they reveal the fascinating ways in which great thinkers have grappled with these and other questions and the astounding impact their ideas have had on the development of self-understanding in the west.

NOTES

Introduction

1. Her actual words: “Start from the beginning and tell me everything you saw and what you think it means.”

2. Of course, there will be competing interpretations of this relevant and helpful information according to some of which there has been a murder and according to others not. What the Grace Kelly character really wants to know is whether there is an interpretation in either group that is better than any interpretation in the other group. In her view, an interpretation will be better only if it is more likely to correctly answer the question of whether there has been a murder.

3. This remarkable exchange was known to Plato (Theaetetus 152e) and subsequently widely discussed in late antiquity as “the Growing Argument.” See David Sedley, “The Stoic Criterion of Identity,” Phronesis 27 (1982): 255.

4. It may not have been until after the appearance of Christianity that this thought came to be used as a basis for suggesting that some (but only some) of the ways in which atoms come together and pull apart in an organism or thing are compatible with its remaining the same. An additional question suggested by Greek materialistic atomism is whether the change and stability of selves, or people, is to be understood on the same model as would be used to understand change and stability in general, or whether people are special, so that their change and stability is to be explained differently. So, for instance, at the end of the seventeenth century John Locke gave one account of the identity of inanimate objects, another of the identity of animate objects, and another of the identity of persons. Some other philosophers, by contrast, have given just one account for everything.

1. From Myth to Science

1. For a discussion of the origins of psychological terms in Greece, see, e.g., E. R. Dodd, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951); Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1976); R. P. Onians, The Origins of European Thought About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Paul S. MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind: Speculations About Soul, Mind, and Spirit from Homer to Hume (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003).

2. See, for instance, the essays on this topic in James C. M. Crabbe, ed. From Soul to Self (London: Routledge, 1999).

3. Thomas Metzinger has recently suggested that out-of-body experiences (OBEs) may have played an important role in the prehistory of the concept of soul as a substance separate (and separable) from body. See Metzinger, “The Pre-Scientific Concept of a ‘Soul’: A Neurophenomenological Hypothesis About Its Origin,” in Auf der Suche nach dem Konzept/Substrat der Seele. EinVersuch aus der Perspektive der Cognitive (Neuro-) Science, ed. M. Peschl (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2003), 185–211.

4. Or perhaps merely removing the illusion of separateness.

5. Kathleen Freeman, ed., Ancilla to The Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmenta der Vorsokratiker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), fragments 129, 81, 89, and 45.

6. Freeman, Ancilla, fragment 91; and Plato, Cratylus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 421–74. In Cratylus’s view, in order to speak truly, one needs a world that is stable. This aspect of his view is not so different from Plato’s own view, except that Cratylus thought that no stable world exists. Plato, of course, posited nonmaterial “Forms,” or “Ideas,” as the stable objects of knowledge.

7. Plato, Symposium, 207d–208b, ed. and trans. C. J. Rowe (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1998), 91, 93.

8. In most of the Phaedo, Plato seems to be thinking of survival as the persistence of a naturally immortal, indivisible, individualistic soul, whether extended or not. Yet, at the end of the dialogue, he presents a myth in which the ideas of reincarnation, “guardian angels,” and “purgatory” are introduced. If one takes this myth seriously or goes beyond the Phaedo and attends to everything Plato said on the topic of survival of bodily death, a confusing picture emerges. In the Republic, for instance, Plato proposed what today we would call an empirical psychology, in which he recognized an irrational factor within the mind itself. And, in contrast to the Phaedo, where the passions are depicted as a distraction from without, in the Republic they are an integral part of the mind and even a source of needed energy for sensuous or intellectual activity. Interestingly, in the Phaedo Plato uses the same passage from Homer to illustrate the soul’s struggle with the body that he uses in the Republic to illustrate an internal dialogue between two “parts” of the soul.

9. Plato, Timeaus, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (1871), 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 69b–70b.

10. But if Plato were a dualist in the modern sense, he would then be faced with the problem of explaining how what is material and extended can be affected by what is immaterial and unextended. Specifically, in the case of humans, he would be faced with the problem of explaining how a human’s immaterial, unextended part—the soul—and his or her material, extended part—the body—interact. This is the Achilles heel of dualism. No substance dualist, as holders of this view are called, has ever proposed a plausible solution to this problem. That is the main reason why there are so few substance dualists among professional philosophers today.

11. Two other aspects of Plato’s view of the soul deserve brief mention. First, in the Theaetetus, he endorses the view that different sense organs—eyes, ears, sense of touch, etc.—are responsible for conveying to the mind different data of sensation, such as sights, sounds, and feels. He claimed that these data then need to be combined in the mind in some appropriate way in order for the organism to perceive physical objects in an external world. To effect this combination, he supposed that the mind has a special faculty whose job it is to do this combining. Second, toward the end of the Cratylus, Plato comes close to introducing into the discussion of personal identity the hypothetical possibility of fission, which from the eighteenth century on has proved to be a potent source of theoretical development. In the Cratylus, fissionlike issues arise in the context of a conversation about names and other representations, such as images. The question is raised whether only a perfect image can represent or whether imperfect images also represent. Socrates says:

Let...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction
• I. From Myth to Science
• II. Individualism and Subjectivity
• III. People of the Book
• IV. Resurrected Self
• V. The Stream Divides
• VI. Aristotelian Synthesis
• VII. Care of the Soul
• VIII. Mechanization of Nature
• IX. Naturalizing the Soul
• X. Philosophy of Spirit
• XI. Science of Human Nature
• XII. Before the Fall
• XIII. Paradise Lost
• XIV. Everything That Happened and What it Means
• Notes
• References
• Index of Names
• Subject Index