An Interview with Raymond Martin and John Barresi

In The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity, Raymond Martin and John Barresi trace the development of theories of the self and personal identity from the ancient Greeks to the present day. In this interview the authors discuss the book and the changing concepts of soul and self.nnQuestion: Is the notion of soul still a viable notion?nnRaymond Martin and John Barresi: For science? No. The basic problem is that there is no empirical test to determine the presence or absence of a soul. Classical and medieval science  tolerated such notions, but modern science, which arrived in the seventeenth century, could not. The Empiricism of John Locke and David Hume helped to rid science of notions. However, due mainly to the Church Fathers’ use of Plato’s views when developing a theology for Christianity, the immaterial soul found a permanent niche in Christianity. The immortality of the immaterial soul came to displace the resurrection of the material human person. Displaced from science, the notion of the soul continues to play a role in religious thought. And, of course, the word soul continues to resonate in popular culture, where it has come to mean something like one’s vital center, as in Soul Music or Chicken Soup for the Soul.nn nnQ: What’s the relationship between soul and self? They seem to be used pretty interchangeably.nnRM & JB: Historically, soul (psyche) and self appeared on the scene at about the same time, where the soul was conceived as the immortal and life-giving part of the person or self. But since the main theoretical project in classical Greece had to do with explaining what it was about living things that made them alive, the notion of soul was much more important theoretically, that is, as an explanatory tool. In Western culture, the theoretical notion of the soul continued to be important until at least the seventeenth century when the rise of modern science motivated theorists to marginalize the notion of an immaterial soul and move their attention to the mind/brain as the locus of a mental self. At this time, theorists, such as Rene Descartes, also began to get very interested in human anatomy and physiology. University teachers would steal bodies from freshly dug graves so that they could dissect them, often in the presence of their students. In the eighteenth century, thinkers were not just interested in what one had, physically or psychologically, but also in how one had come into being. In particular, they became interested in the psychological acquisition of self-concepts. Gradually, the notion of soul dropped out of theoretical discourse and attention focused not only on the notion of self, but on the variety of self-notions: self-esteem, self-understanding, self-reference, etc. The philosopher-psychologist William James was a prime mover in motivating this transition. However, with the inevitable fragmentation of notions of self, the idea of a unified mental self, which had replaced the immaterial soul in the eighteenth century, was largely abandoned. Your average person on the street doesn’t normally appreciate the significance of this development. He continues to think about himself in terms of notions that are now discredited in science and, as a consequence, overestimates his own personal unity and substantiality. Today, while most ordinary people believe that their self is their essence, most philosophers and psychologists believe that the self is a fictional entitynnQ: There seems to be a split between what the philosophers are arguing and how the everyday world is functioning. What is the difference between theoretical and practical uses of self-notions?nnRM & JB:  For practical purposes, people need to be able to refer to themselves and keep track of who’s who in order to make personal plans, practical arrangements, and assign ownership and responsibility. If I think that you owe me money, I don’t want to hear about your view that people last only until they change. Amazingly, in the fifth century B.C.E., this issue was the focus of a scene in a play written by Epicharmus. In this scene a lender asks a debtor to pay up. The debtor replies by asking the lender whether he agrees that anything that undergoes change, such as a pile of pebbles to which one pebble has been added or removed, thereby becomes a different thing. The lender says that he agrees with that. “Well, then,” says the debtor, “aren’t people constantly undergoing changes?” “Yes,” replies the lender. “So,” says the debtor, “it follows that I’m not the same person as the one who was indebted to you and, so, I owe you nothing.” The lender then hits the debtor, knocking him to the ground. The debtor protests at being abused, but the lender replies that the debtor’s complaint is misdirected since he—the lender—is not the same person as the one who struck him a moment before. As interesting as it seems to us, the amazing thing about this scene is that it suggests that even in fifth century B.C.E. Greece the puzzle of what it is about a thing that accounts for its persisting over time and through changes could be appreciated even by theater audiences. Obviously, this very strict sense of same person is not an everyday notion, but a philosophical term. It isn’t exactly very useful unless you owe someone money.nnQ: Did postmodernists put an end to serious talk of the self?nnRM & JB:  No, of course not, not any more than they put an end to serious talk about such things as objectivity, truth, or progress. So far as the notion of self is concerned, the main contribution of postmodernists was to sensitize theorists to the ways in which the notion of self is connected to language and the ways in which language is dynamic. According to Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), for instance, language is unstable and lacks an external reference. A student of Foucault, Derrida named his view, Deconstruction; but, he said, even though words and concepts, including the self, are open to question, we have no choice but to use them. Once we are aware that they are open to question, we should put them “under erasure,” that is, never lose sight of the fact that their meaning is ephemeral.nnQ: Can we expect the soul to make a comeback?nnRM & JB:  No. For theoretical purposes, the notion of soul is dead. In the seventeenth century, it was replaced in science by the notion of the self. Then in the second half of the nineteenth century, the self suddenly appeared as a multitude of hyphenated objects of study: self-image, self-conception, self-esteem, self-knowledge, self-reference, self-modeling, self-identification, and so on. In time, these hyphenated “selves” came to be investigated by different groups of specialists, who devised their own technical vocabularies, their own distinctive approaches, and, to some extent, their own criteria for determining what constitutes theoretical advances. As a consequence, the notion of self has been pretty thoroughly replaced in the study of psychology by these more scientifically useful notions. However, for practical purposes, the language of soul is as useful as it has ever been, so we will continue to hear about selves and souls. People need a way of talking about what they regard as their innermost being, even if there is nothing—that is, no thing—that corresponds to that notion.nnQ:  What is to be learned from looking synoptically at the history of theorizing in the West about soul and self?nnRM & JB:  For starters, it reveals the strong and persistent need that humans have had to think of themselves not just as another animal but as something special: an immortal being, the locus of consciousness, free will, and so on. Equally important, by looking at the entire history, one can see how easy it has been for humans to exaggerate the extent to which they are unified psychologically. So far as theory is concerned, what this history tells us is that progress has been made, at the cost of fragmentation, which may or may not be a surface phenomenon and, hence, the end of the story. So far as practice is concerned, things are pretty much as they have always been. For many purposes of everyday life, theory and practice remain autonomous. We do not need to understand ourselves theoretically to get on in the world. The reason for this is that theory and practice are fundamentally different dimensions of human activity. At the very beginning of Western theorizing about the self and of personal identity, Epimarchus seems to have seen this. Yet, even though practice can be autonomous of theory, it is rarely ever wholly autonomous. If nothing else, theory may profoundly affect how we feel about practice. So, even though in most respects we may continue to behave as if we are unified selves, we may not feel completely unified, and those feelings may then affect how we behave.