Thread 1: The Trouble with Souls Post 2: How ‘having a soul’ is like ‘having breakfast’ Though there are troubles going the physicalist route, there are likewise troubles if we take a more traditionalist road with regard to the soul. For, as noted in the previous post, the soul has a tendency to merely hover over and/or haunt the solid and well-behaved bodies we are sure we have. Traditional thought says this is because the ‘stuff’ of souls is special, made of spiritual material which ambles about, unencumbered by physics, while nonetheless successfully interacting with the physical. That is: I—or my soul— act, USING my body as its instrument. My body is a tool of my soul. For example, I use my brain to think, as though my brain were a machine I might operate, gripping its physical levers with ghostly hands. But this proves to involve considerable problems—in particular, how does the soul’s ‘ghostly hands’ get a grip on physical things/levers? How might a non-physical thing cause a physical event/act? A problem, no doubt! Yet, some say, there is an easier explanation: the reason the soul can ‘go anywhere’ and enjoys such an indigent and ethereal lifestyle with respect to the physical world and its laws, is that it travels at the pleasure of the imagination. Souls are as elusive and anarchic as they are because they are imaginary. It is our imagination which stuffs the human body with soul. Of course, more has to be said here. Part of correcting a mammoth and nearly universal ‘mistake of imagination’ is to explain why it has been so persistently made. What could have possibly led almost all of humankind to imagine there is something over and above the body— some crucial additional essence, private place, special spirit amidst the merely physical--a ‘ghost in the machine’? What are we to make of the fact that the bulk of the world believes the same ghost story—has seen, still sees, and deeply cares about, the same ghost? Gilbert Ryle offers the following on behalf of the claim that the soul is a ghost of grammar.... Suppose I sit down before a hearty platter of bacon, pancakes, and eggs. I happily dig in to all three—yet say, between mouthfuls: “I sure enjoy this bacon, these eggs, and these pancakes—but what I’d really like is this ‘breakfast’ everyone raves about.” Should I say such a thing, you would no doubt point out to me that I have made a basic linguistic error. For to ‘have’ breakfast is not to have something over and above this morning’s eggs, bacon, and pancakes. ‘Breakfast’ (the single quotes matter greatly here!) is a NAME for what I am already having, not itself another physical thing to have, which could make its own appearance on my plate, be swabbed with syrup, and/or be stabbed with a fork. That is, where morning meals are concerned, and multiple realizability issues (i.e. that I could have had oatmeal instead) are bracketed, it is correct to say this:

Eggs+Bacon+Pancakes= ‘My Breakfast’

Look at these terms and their relation: ‘breakfast’ is not a FOURTH THING; rather, it is a NAME for the other three together. Vis-à-vis what is on my plate in the a.m., ‘having’ eggs, bacon, and pancakes JUST IS to ‘have’ breakfast, full stop. Now, Ryle suggests, let us move from considering the having of breakfasts to the having of souls—or rather, move from considering the grammatical function of terms like ‘breakfast’ to the grammatical function of terms like ‘soul’. Suppose you say to me: “I see very well that I have a physical body and experiences in and of the physical world —but where is this mysterious, otherworldly, intimately personal ‘I’ I seem to have in addition to my body and my experiences? Where is my SELF? In our looser language: where is my soul? By Ryle’s lights, this is as bad as the breakfast question—and it is based on the same poor grammatical math. For, roughly speaking,

Body+Experiences=‘Self/Soul’

without remainder, just as bacon, eggs, and pancakes involved no ‘breakfast’ left to eat. If I have had my bacon, eggs, and pancakes, I can be said to ‘have breakfast’; but I will find no ‘breakfast’, if/insofar as I suppose ‘breakfast’ to be an additional ingestible. Likewise, I can (trivially) be said to ‘have a soul’—but only insofar as I do not expect to find the soul to be something additional to my physical being/body. This, Ryle argues, is the sense in which your ‘having a soul’ is a grammatical mistake, where the soul is treated as some distinct thing one might have over and above one’s physical properties—the sense in which (the traditional, unique, and private) 'you' and/or 'me' is a function of a grammatical error, to which all peoples with a language are prone. His argument, to which we have here been faithful in structure, claims to explain not only where the notion of soul-having comes from; but also why (being merely a term, mistakenly sought as a thing) the soul has proved so elusive, immaterial, ghostly. For wouldn't our 'breakfast' appear likewise, should we seek it out while eating our pancakes, eggs, and bacon?*************** There are problems with Ryle’s view we will not consider here--problems over and above the absurd difference in significance with respect to the reduction of souls to 'souls' and the same grammatical reduction run on 'breakfast'. Suffice to say here that Ryle’s overall view led him to some rather public and painful intellectual struggles with very simple notions we take for granted every day--for example, the notion of ‘talking to ones self’. After all, the post-reduction idea of talking to one's 'self' (note the quotes) fares poorly; it turns out to be hard to characterize talking to my 'self'--perhaps because it is hard to plausibly characterize a dialogue between a grammar user and his own grammatical mistake. But, problems aside, what Ryle does succeed in showing is how careful one must be when using copulas and soul-talk together. What he does successfully show us is that there is something remarkably peculiar about the 'being' involved in ‘being a soul’ or 'being a person'—a peculiarity we will look at in a string of future posts...