Phil
Body and Soul
_Ilham Dilman
1. Cartesian Dualism: A Metaphysical Dichotomy
Descartes held that we are made up of two different substances, a mind and a body. What distinguishes them radically is that what makes a mind a mind is consciousness, an individual mind's contents being acts and states of consciousness, whereas bodies are material objects and as such extended in their very essence. All their properties, shared by other material objects, are rooted in their extension. It follows that the body and the mind are logically separate; in other words they can be thought in separation from each other and are identifiable independently. Together they constitute a unity in which they are in causal interaction with one another. This causal link is intimate in this sense: a captain knows that his ship has hit a rock by the sound it made on hitting the rock and the damage revealed to inspection, whereas a man feels the pain caused by the hammer which hits his hand in his hand.
Each individual takes his identity primarily from the mind he is: he is a mind and has a body. As such ± `a purely thinking thing or being' ± the individual manipulates his body by acts of will, and he can feel pain in parts of his body. In the one case the person, as a purely conscious being, is active, in the other case he is passive, he becomes aware of the pain caused by the hammer which hits his hand or the anger caused by an insult. The body, on this view, though uniquely connected to the person, as an individual mind, is still an object to him, an object among others. Thus it is conceivable for a person to be a disembodied mind, and even conceivable for a person to have more than one body.
In short Cartesian dualism is the separation of the mind and the body into a disembodied consciousness and the body as an object it can use as an instrument by mere acts of will. Voluntary movements are thus body movements brought about by acts of will. As for what
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Philosophical Investigations 25:1 January 2002 ISSN 0190-0536
we perceive, these are `mental phenomena' which stand to things as `representations', `sense data' brought about by physico-chemical processes in the body, themselves initiated causally by physical stimuli. We thus perceive the objects in our environment indirectly, through their reflections on the screen of our minds, somewhat in the way that the captain of a submerged submarine sees the ships on the surface of the sea in the mirror of his periscope.
The human body is a complicated machine, subject to the laws of physics, and more specifically of physiology, mostly running by itself, except where subject to the mind's activity in the form of acts of will. The mind itself, however, in its activity, is not subject to causal laws. In their identity with their thinking, judging and willing mind, therefore, human beings are free and have a unique status in a natural world subject to causal laws.
Out of this Cartesian dualism thus is born the dichotomy of an external world of matter and the inner world of consciousness, causally receptive of and directed to the external world, but otherwise self-contained. And out of this dichotomy is born an epistemology in which a person is confined to his inner world, transparent to him but opaque to others. He lives in his own inner world and acts on the outer world by using his body as an instrument in the way that a fork lift operator lifts heavy loads. He can only know what goes on in it indirectly, if at all.
Wittgenstein dismantles this conceptual framework and radically shifts the starting point from which to consider the relation between the mind and the body. He takes his start from a consideration of human beings, not as made up of a body and a mind, but as flesh- and-blood beings in the life they live and share with others, in interaction with them in the physical and social surroundings of this life. The life in question is the life of language and culture, in a world of significances which permeate the whole environment of this life and in which human beings have the distinctive capacities which mark them as human beings.
The mind, broadly understood, is the sum total of these capacities: the capacity for thought, reasoning and judgement, for feeling and apprehension, for awareness of oneself and one's environment, for pleasure and pain, for decision, volition and intention. These capacities are intertwined and do not exist in isolation from each other; and what has these capacities is a flesh-and-blood human being. I do not say embodied: we do not have a body, we are not inside a
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body, we are ± as I put it ± flesh-and-blood human beings. The body which Descartes joined to the mind and which many philosophers, past and present, tried to relate to the mind, or to `absorb' the mind into, through the brain, is the body of physiology ± `the whole structure of limbs that is observable in a corpse', as Descartes put it in the Meditations. But, as Sartre pointed out, that is not the body that we are, the body with which we are at one, and in which oneness or identity we are flesh-and-blood beings. We are, of course, also thinking beings; but we are that as flesh-and-blood beings immersed in a life we share with others. It is only as such that we have the capacity for thought. If we were not flesh-and-blood beings we could neither think, feel, nor act.
In Tennessee Williams' play Summer and Smoke the doctor John Buchanan, a materialist, shows Alma, a minister's daughter, on the anatomy chart, the location of our sex organs, stomach, and brain where, according to him, our three hungers are located ± `three hungry birds' as he calls them. He then asks her, in turn, to show him where her beautiful soul is located on the chart. She is confounded: `There is something not shown on the anatomy chart! [she says.] But it's there just the same . . . Somewhere not seen, but there.' Wittgenstein's response to the same question is: `How can a body [as such] have a soul?' (P.I. ½283). And again: `A corpse [vide Descartes' `the whole structure of limbs that is observable in a corpse'] seems to us quite inaccessible to pain' (½284). In contrast, he asks us to `look at a wriggling fly', and he adds that at once our `difficulties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here'.
So he speaks of the body as `the best picture of the human soul' (p. 178). But this is not the body as it figures in Descartes' thinking or the one depicted by the anatomy chart. It is the body of a man engaged in some activity in a particular situation of our life ± for instance, a soldier saluting his superior officer or a man responding to a friend with a smile. The body as represented by the anatomy chart does not provide the logical space for any expression of the soul ± say a smile of recognition or an expression of contrition. Indeed, we do not normally see the body of anatomy in our intercourse with people ± `in the traffic of human life'. No wonder Descartes thought of the body as a screen which hides other people's souls from us. Under the aspect in which Descartes thought of it the body is inevitably external to the mind and opaque to a person's pain, distress and other feelings. As for the person himself, it becomes an instrument he manipulates,
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one which, instead of bringing him in contact with his surroundings, separates him from them ± a kind of shell in which he is imprisoned.
The body is not an object to the person himself, something he has, acts upon, uses to act in the world. As Sartre puts it: `I am my body.' The foot with which I brake when I am driving, the hand with which I hold a pen when I write, are lived by me. They are not objects that I watch or observe. What I look at is something other than myself, something that is or has become external to me ± the swinging pendulum, my twitching muscle. In contrast I am my hand, the hand with which I handle things. I do not `bring about' its movement by doing something else ± an `act of will'. I said, I `live' my body. We could also put this the other way around: my body is that which I live ± in contrast with what I watch or manipulate. Sartre puts this forcefully as follows: `My body comes into being through the tools I handle and use; it is at the end of the stick on which I lean, at the end of the telescope which shows me the stars, on the chair on which I sit, in the home through which I move' (1943, p. 389).
In short, then, the body is not a screen hiding the mind from others. On the contrary, it is there that others come face to face with what we feel ± that is in our behaviour and facial expressions ± when we are not trying to hide what we feel. But hiding what we feel is a positive doing, something we have learned to do. In the first place our feelings flow into our reactions automatically ± as pain does in the case of animals. It is later, as we learn to speak and can tell others that we are in pain, that we learn to restrain ourselves, suppress our reactions, and so to hide our feelings. Only then do our feelings become something we can keep to ourselves and, in that sense, something in us. Hiding them is not simply omitting to communicate them. Thus while we can separate our feelings from our reactions, suppress our reactions in particular situations, conceptually, in our understanding, the two are tied together and are inseparable. For instance, when we think of someone who has been insulted as angry, although he exhibits no reactions of anger, we think of him as wanting to shout, to hit the man who insulted him. We think of him as checking his inclination to do so, keeping calm by controlling himself. Take away the inclination checked and the thoughts that go with it, and you have taken away his anger altogether. It is in this sense that conceptually neither anger nor pain can be divorced from the behaviour and facial expressions that belong with these in our understanding, and so logically require the body in their very being.
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This, however, goes both ways. For it is equally true that a smile or a scowl, the wave of the hand or a clenching of fists, in their significance in particular circumstances of our life, cannot be divorced from the feelings and intentions with which they are at one. Certainly a smile is not, as B F Skinner, the behaviourist, once put it: `a physical pattern . . . susceptible of geometric analysis' (1965, p. 301).
Skinner, like Descartes, must have been thinking of the body purely under the aspect of a material substance and of human behaviour as its movements. But once we can prize ourselves away from such a perspective, we shall come free of thinking of it as a shell standing between a person, as a thinking, conscious being, and his surroundings, like the shell of a tortoise when it withdraws into it, and of his thinking, feeling and sentience as made up of self- contained inner states, acts and processes which he cannot display, his inner life a prison. We shall see that, on the contrary, the person makes contact with his surroundings by means of his body: he handles objects, pushes and pulls them, examines them with his eyes. His body is not an instrument which keeps him at arm's length from what he handles; and his feelings are what he lives in the course of his engagements with his surroundings ± surroundings mostly not purely physical, but in their very identity invested with forms of significance which belong to the life of language he shares with others.
2. Body and Soul: An Ethico-Religious Dichotomy
The mind, I argued, is primarily man's capacity to think and all that goes with that capacity. It is the capacity of a flesh-and-blood being. As for the soul it is bound up with man's capacity for self- renunciation, for commitment to goodness, and so for compassion, remorse and repentance. In the Crito Socrates speaks of the soul as that part of a man which is scarred and ultimately ruined by wrong-doing (1955, 47c). A person whose life is steeped in evil could not think of himself as harmed by such a life. For he is alienated from the moral perspective from which he can appreciate this. Such a person is sometimes described as having `lost his soul' by those who are at one with the values which would give him such a perspective. They see him as harming himself and pity him for the way he lives and for what he does. Thus in the Gorgias Socrates speaks of Archelaus, the
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Macedonian tyrant, as described to him by Polus, as miserable and unhappy (1973, 471). Similarly Sonia to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment: `What have you done to yourself! Oh, there is no man more unhappy than you' (1956, p. 425). `Yourself': she means your soul. That is where, she says, he has hurt himself.
It is in remorse that such a person wakes up to what he has done. He recognizes the evil in what he has done. It is this recognition that hurts. The pain that Raskolnikov feels when he comes to feel remorse for what he has done corresponds to the pain that Sonia feels in her compassion for him. Such compassion and such remorse belong to the life of the soul ± spiritual life. What we have here is an aspect of the life we live as flesh-and-blood beings here on earth. A person finds his soul in such a life and loses it when he turns away from it.
I said that the mind is a person's capacity to think. Thus when a person loses this capacity and can no longer reason, judge, and understand what is going on around him we say that he has lost his mind. When we say of someone that he has a good mind we mean that he can think well, is intelligent and has sound judgement. When we say that he knows his own mind we mean that he knows what he wants or that his mind is made up. Similarly, when a person becomes totally indifferent to moral considerations we say that he has lost his soul; and when in the remorse he feels he wakes up to the enormity of what he has done we say that he has found his soul, meaning that spiritual life has become accessible to him. To repeat, the soul is that part of us, as flesh-and-blood beings, in which we respond to good and evil, and also to beauty. Socrates in the Phaedo, in a way that anticipates Christianity, says that it thrives in dissociation with the body and is weighed down in company with it: its life ebbs in association with the body. Here too the body is not what Descartes took it to be when he tried to work out the relationship in which the mind stands to it. It is the body lived by a person in a dimension of life which contrasts with and is, indeed, antithetical to the life of the soul: the flesh, in other words the carrier of sensuality, greed, gluttony and the like.
It is thus that the division between body and soul cuts across Cartesian dualism; it does not coincide with it. The concepts in question are ethico-religious concepts and have their home in a living language where their sense is to be found. Thus when Socrates says that the soul thrives in dissociation from the body, the dissociation in question is a person's detachment from that part of himself in which
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greed, gluttony, avarice, lust, envy and jealousy thrive. The person finds his soul only through such detachment. That is what Socrates is saying. In company with the body, in this sense, the soul is weighed down ± `down' morally, that is towards what is morally low or base. The opposition between the body, in the sense of the carnal in us, and the spiritual is thus a moral contrast, not a metaphysical one. It presupposes a certain moral perspective within which good and evil have their identities.
Earlier I quoted Wittgenstein's words: `The human body is the best picture of the human soul' (P.I. Pt. II, ½iv, p. 178). Just before these words he says:
Religion teaches that the soul can exist when the body has disintegrated. Now do I understand this teaching? ± Of course I understand it ± I can imagine plenty of things in connection with it. And haven't pictures of these been painted? And why should such a picture be only an imperfect rendering of the spoken doctrine? Why should it not do the same service as the words? And it is the service which is the point.
`The human body': I said the flesh-and-blood human being alive and in motion ± e.g. a soldier saluting his officer, a person in tears after having been slapped in the face, someone angry, with clenched fists and looking daggers at the person who insulted him. If we can know what state of mind a person is in such cases, Wittgenstein is saying, why can we not see it in a picture? Why shouldn't a picture depict it in the same way? We can depict it in words by describing the situation, the way the person looks, etc. What we do is to describe in words what we may depict in paint, what the painting suggests and leaves to our imagination. What we so depict or describe is a person in distress, or angry, or whatever else it may be.
In poetry a poet uses metaphors, similes, pictures in words, to say things which often cannot be said, or said as well and effectively, any other way. Similarly religions often speak in the same way: in pictures, myths, stories, allegories. What this is leading up to is that stories about the fate of the soul after death picture or depict it in terms of what happens to flesh-and-blood beings in earthly surroundings, often of a fantastic nature, shaped imaginatively. There is no other way this can be done, no other way in which we can think it. Thus, for instance, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
All right, so these are pictures of the soul in the face of its share of trials in the life it has lived, its voyage through earthly surroundings,
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having to face difficulties and brave perils which are meant to test him. But in an after-life? After death? What does this mean?
3. The Soul after Death
In the Phaedo Socrates says that the body is the tomb or cage of the soul and that death is its release. In the Gorgias he quotes Euripedes: `Who knows if life be death or death be life' (1973b, 492). The life and death in question is that of the soul. The life most people live, engaged in a struggle for survival or existence in a jungle of egos in competition with each other. Or a life of moral mediocrity and outwardness, at the level of gossip, chit-chat, following the latest trends and fashions. Euripides is saying, who knows whether such a life is not a form of death? As for death as a release from all this: is that not better than such a life! If we could get such a release while we are alive, why that would be life! The soul can breathe in it. The body as the tomb or cage of the soul. This is the same idea: in attachment to the flesh the soul has no life, it is like a bird in a cage. Why not? Because it promotes our self-centred emotions and pursuits: lust but not sexual love, gluttony but not enjoyment of food, greed in which we crave more and more for ourselves and are therefore ungiving, envy in which we want to take from others what they enjoy and to spoil their pleasure, the pursuit of pleasure as opposed to finding pleasure in our engagements. Dying as the release of the soul from its cage; that is detaching ourselves from these things and growing indifferent to them.
All this while we are alive and, therefore, not too difficult to understand. But what about after death? What sense are we to make of that? Well, the soul's fate after death, in an after-life, is still represented, inevitably, as the fate of a flesh-and-blood being: deformed by the crooked life the person has lived while alive, the scars of his body representing the injuries done to his soul by acts of perjury, cruelty, selfishness and other wrong-doings, being punished for these by being burnt in naked flames. But what does all this mean when the person is dead?
What is important to recognize is that what it all means ± the meaning ± is to be found among the living who pray for the dead, remember the dear departed, celebrate their life now over, think about their own future death and reflect on their life in its light, think
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of those they have loved and lost, think also of those who have hurt them in their life-time, forgive them, etc. It is we, the living, who think of someone dead now whom we have loved, one whose life is over, we who remember him with gratitude for the good in his life, with longing because we shall never see him or her again, or in the opposite case, think of his sins that he can no longer redeem since his life is over. We pray for him. We, ourselves, live our life in the light of such thoughts. Our relationship with the dead is not over now because they are dead. It continues, transformed, transformed in their permanent absence and silence; and in that transformation they are transformed as objects of our transformed relationships. It is here that we shall find our conception of the dead ± what they are to us, what they mean to us, and so the sense of what we say about the dead, what our religions say about them, and what we can learn from those sayings.
To go back to the pictures Wittgenstein mentions and those sayings, like the teaching that the soul can exist when the body had disintegrated, which he says he understands. What is thus represented are the dead and their souls in an after-life; but it is related, directed, said to us the living, in the course of our life. It is here, in the life of the living, that the service of the words in which we speak of the dead is to be found and, as Wittgenstein says, their sense lies in that service. The souls that exist when the body has disintegrated are the objects of the relationships I have mentioned ± our relationships in our life-time. We know they are dead, we know their bodies have disintegrated, we know we shall never see them again, that they will never be able to talk to us, think of us, respond to us. But our relationship with them continues. It is only as such that the soul can exist when the body has disintegrated. What is in question is our thought for the dead, such thought from within the life of the living. Praying for them, for their souls, for instance, is a way of remembering them and of going on with our relationship with them in their absence, an absence that is final and from which they can never return to us.
Someone may object: are you saying anything more than that the dead survive only in the thoughts of the living? And if so, does that not mean that they have ceased to exist in reality? You are at best giving what is an attenuated account of what we say about the souls of the dead.
I say No. One's relationship with those we have loved and lost, for instance, does not come to an end, but continues transformed. They
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cannot answer one; they cannot change towards one. They are, however, real in this transformed relationship, but their reality is a transformed reality ± not less real, not an illusion, but a different form of reality: the reality of the dead. The dead continue to live within one, in one's heart. They are then present to one `in their absence', as Simone Weil puts it. They exist `in the form of absence'. That is not to say that they exist as `mere ideas' or as `mere memories'. One does not merely remember them; they continue to live in one's heart in one's engagement with them. And is not what one engages with real, provided one is not deluded? One would be deluded if, for instance, one believed that the beloved, now dead, will one day come and hold one's hand. But the person I am imagining does not believe this. On the contrary he says: `I miss her. My heart aches with her absence; all the more so because I know that I shall never see her dear face again.' Obviously he is not deluded, and the object of his sorrow, longing and grief is real. The person whose loss he mourns is real to him in her absence.
To make this point clearer by means of a parallel example let us suppose that one does something very bad and later grieves for what one has done in the remorse one feels. A friend says: `Pull your socks up, what you have done is past and gone. Look into the future, boy. The past and with it your past action no longer exists. Your dwelling on it is a form of self-deception.' But is the past unreal? No, it has a different mode of reality from that of the present or the future. And the same is true of what is in the past. For the person who grieves his past action that action is real; he does not merely remember it. In contrast, for the person who turns his back on it in complete indifference, even though he remembers it, it has no reality: it has become a mere memory. That is the kind of reality which the object of one's grieving has.
The soul's existence after death and the disintegration of the body, then, does not presuppose the possibility of `disembodied existence' ± the kind implicit in Cartesian dualism. As such it would be an incoherent metaphysical idea. The soul is not something within us, unseen like an invisible gas, capable of leaving the body like a gas that escapes from a punctured balloon. How can we attribute distress, remorse, compassion, joy or intent to a gas? How can we keep up a personal relationship with an immaterial substance? We've got to think of it in terms of a visible, touchable, moving, living being, and in the case of the dead in terms that we can picture them in our
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imagination or represent them in a drawing. Where? In physical surroundings in some ways similar to those of our life. These, however, are to be found in a picture-space, in our thoughts. Again: but where in reality? If this means, where in physical space, perhaps beyond the stars, then the answer is: nowhere there. The service of the picture, of the words (vide Wittgenstein) has been misunderstood. (See my discussion of Zossima's words of comfort to the grieving mother in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov: `Do not be consoled. Grieve and be patient. Your little boy is in heaven with the angels' ± Dilman 2000, chapter 9, section 4).
In a recent discussion my ex-colleague and friend Professor Herbert Fingarette said to me something like this: We find it conceptually difficult and emotionally disturbing to think that we shall simply cease to exist when we die, that death is the end of everything as far as we are concerned individually. One day someone is there, large as life, the next day he is no longer there, gone, but not elsewhere, gone nowhere and for ever. He has simply stopped existing. And this is something that awaits each one of us, inescapably. It is difficult to comprehend this, difficult to stomach it. He suggested that belief in the indestructibility of the soul, however expressed, is a response to this.
I can understand this as a response to a very real difficulty, at once conceptual and personal. But I cannot personally believe that death is not the end of the existence of a living creature. Only the body remains and it disintegrates in time. I cannot make sense of the idea of continuing to exist in a disembodied form. The only answer, therefore, it seems to me, to the very real difficulty about death being the end of my existence and that of others, including those I have known and loved, is to try to come to terms with it: to learn to accept it, not to deny it or to water it down. I am not saying that the pictures of souls after death do so ± that has been my whole point but they can easily be so understood, and they often are.
Someone may say that what happens to us after death is a mystery and that what I said about death as our final and irrevocable end is brash. I am willing to accept that what happens to us after death is a mystery, but not an epistemological mystery. It is a mystery, to be understood as such within a religious context, meaning that it is not something to be probed. That is to say we have to accept death and not ask: what next? To do so is to place ourselves in the hands of God. I respect this, but as a philosopher I still have to ask: what is it to
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place oneself in the hands of God? However I cannot now go into this within the space of this short paper.
4. Summing Up
If one wishes to understand what might be meant by the soul, the vicissitudes of its life, its existence in an after-life, and what religions have to say about these things, one would do well to consider the role of these sayings in the life of the living. That is obviously where any language is to be understood.
`The soul lives in separation from the body; but the soul cannot be conceived of as existing in separation from the body.' I have tried to show that this involves no contradiction, for here `body' and `separation' are used in two different senses. `Death of the soul in the life of the living; the life of the soul after death.' I have tried to articulate what these mean without recourse to metaphysics. So my two-fold task has been to turn my back on the very catching metaphysics of Descartes and then to elucidate references to the life and death of the soul in a living language to which Plato himself has contributed as a religious thinker. I have personally been helped to understand that language by the novels and stories of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
References
Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim's Progress (Pocket Books Inc. 1957). Descartes, Renë, Meditations on the First Philosophy (New York: Liberal
Arts Press 1960). Dilman, _Ilham, Raskolnikov's Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding
of Good and Evil (Chicago: Open Court 2000). Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment, trans. By David
Magarshack (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1956). Plato, `Crito', `Phaedo' in The Last Days of Socrates (Harmondsworth:
Penguin 1955). Plato Gorgias (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1973). Sartre, Jean-Paul, `L'Etre et le Nëant (Gallimard 1943). Skinner, B. F., Science and Human Behaviour (Free Press Paperback:
The Macmillan Co. 1965).
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Williams, Tennessee, Summer and Smoke (Secker and Warburg 1957). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: 1963).
Department of Philosophy University of Wales, Swansea Singleton Park Swansea SA2 8PP
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