THREAD 1: The Trouble With Souls POST 3: How a Soul is Like a Hammer We are not at all dissuaded from pursuing our original question “What is a soul?” (see post 2 of this thread); but Ryle has given us fair warning: to ask questions about what something IS turns out to be a tricky business; for as Ryle shows, the main word in our question, 'is', is ambiguous. Ryle noted one such ambiguity of ‘is’: to say a word 'is' or 'exists' is not the same thing as saying that a physical object is/exists. Our confusion between the existence of 'souls' and the existence of souls (argued Ryle) is what led us to look for 'soul' as though it were an object. But the ambiguities of ‘is’ do not stop with that noted by Ryle. Consider the assertions ‘Bob is blonde’, “Bob is a builder” and “Bob is” (i.e. “Bob exists”). It is not at all obvious that we mean the same thing by ‘is’ in any of these cases. Is being blonde (a physical feature) anything like being a builder (having an occupation)? Are either of these anything like being Bob? So if we ask, “What is a soul?” or “What is it to be a soul?” we had better be more careful with our copula. When we ask, as we are now doing, a question of the form “What is a ___?” we need to say more about what sort of IS we have in mind... ************** ************************ ******************************* ************* The idea of different sorts of ‘is’—and so different ways which souls might exist—might be—may seem strange. Yet it is not strange—or at least, we suppose these different ‘is’s’ and use them every day. The easiest way to show that this is so is to forget about souls for a moment, and instead consider the humble hammer. Let us ask, “What is a hammer? What it is to be a hammer? What is it for a hammer to exist/be?” We immediately notice that what it is to be a hammer has two very interesting features—features which are intimately connected. First: as we saw earlier with souls, a hammer has a strangely tenuous relation with the physical world. That is, there is no obvious answer to “What is it to be a hammer?” in terms of what a hammer must be physically made of. For a hammer is able to be made of many different materials and take very different physical forms, but still remain what it is. We could (and do) make hammers out of all sorts of materials in all sorts of ways (a ball peen hammer, a giant jack-hammer, a plastic toy hammer, a steel hammer, a ceramic hammer, etc.). What it is to be a hammer is remarkably tough, even impossible, to physically specify. This does not, of course, make us suspect hammers of enjoying an essence which is immaterial or ‘ghostly’. But it does make their ‘being’ hard for the physicalist to nail down. Second: the usual scientific stories we tell about the origin of a ‘natural’ object in the world (say, a cat, rock, or tree) do not apply very well to things like hammers. After all, a hammer is not something we find in nature, awaiting us to use it to hammer (‘Aha! There’s one! I can use it because it really is a hammer!’). That would be a very bad history of hammers, or of any artifact. Such a history, taken to explain what sort of thing hammers really are and/or what it is to really be one overlooks the fact that we did not discover or observe a hammer being a hammer by itself, “in the wild”. Rather, it was purpose which brought hammers into being. There was and is no ‘natural’ hammer. A hammer is, originally and essentially, any physical thing we use for hammering. So the history of hammers runs purpose-first. The first ‘hammer’ was a handy rock, perhaps; then a rock selected for its propitious shape; then a stick tied to a rock and swung overhead, etc. We eventually engineer them, of course—tailor them for specific tasks, and now buy them off the shelf. But to treat a hammer as something which we discovered is really for hammering, as we might discover a cat which, do what we like, really is a cat is, at best, an eccentric doctrine. For with things like hammers, intent is original. What it is for gets there before the first hammer, because for hammers, for-ness comes first. This is why one cannot give an account of what it is to be a hammer by listing what parts it has. For in the case of things like hammers, its purpose precedes its parts. Unlike natural objects, which seem to have what parts they do regardless of anyone’s purposes, things like hammers have the parts they do solely because of their purpose. Indeed, this is what it is to engineer them. What counts as a part of the hammer—the reason a hammer has the features it has—is not a purposeless story. No, what parts a hammer includes is explained by whatever we have included in it in order to further its purpose. To be a hammer, then, is to be for something—some purpose— not to merely to be, or to be made of, something, in a physical or ‘scientific’ sense. The ‘being’ of hammers thus seems a different sort of being than that enjoyed by natural objects. Now note: this purpose definitive of the being of hammers—what it IS FOR— cannot be found by looking at the hammer alone. The for-ness of a hammer cannot be found within it, cannot be grasped by analyzing it, staring at it. Rather, this purpose comes from outside the hammer itself, and pre-dates the existence of hammers. As to not being found within it: the purpose comes from outside hammers—in this case, from us/our intentions (‘Now—I need something solid, shaped like so...’). Thus all the physical variances we experience with wildly different forms of hammers are unified NOT by any physical properties in hammers at all; instead they are united only by the aims for which all hammers are formed, the common end to which they were all assigned. As to pre-dating the existence/being of hammers: this purpose necessarily pre-dates the ‘being’ or existence of hammers because the hammer’s very being rests on its commission/assignment. Without the aim of hammering, no physical item can be commissioned to hammer; thus this assignment/commission was already in place before a single hammer could be. A hammer’s being is in this way premised on a purpose it did not assign itself, was always prior to itself, but without which it could not be what it is. Of course, the hammer is not unique in being best understood not by having its parts observed, but by having its purpose identified. Other examples of this kind of ‘being’ come easy, arising in everyday life: drinks, love-tokens, weapons, gifts—none of these things have strong ties to some specific physically discoverable composition which defines them; for what defines them is not their composition at all. What makes them what they are is simply what they are for— drinking, courting, fighting, and giving, respectively. To go on to talk about what such ‘things’ really are (‘Is that sunflower really a gift?’) is a mistake which, if pursued, would lead straight-away to some embarrassing ‘observations’ (‘It is really a gift? In that case, look at that field of gifts growing there!’). ************************************************************************************ All the heavy lifting now done, we need only transpose from hammers to souls. We said at the top that if we wish to ask “What is a soul?” or “What is a person?” we must get the different IS questions straight. By way of accomplishing this we identified the ‘IS’ question appropriate to things like hammers. We can now see why to ask a ‘regular’ IS question about hammers is to have already made an error—is to ask what a hammer IS, when, if we want to get down to the essentials of hammers, we meant to ask what a hammer IS FOR. This BEING/BEING-FOR distinction firmly in hand, we can now more intelligently ask this: When we ask what a soul IS, what kind of ‘IS’ question are we really asking? Are we asking the sort of IS question which seems appropriate to finding the essence of things like cats, rocks, and waterfalls: namely, “What are its parts/processes?” Or are we asking the sort of IS question most appropriate to things like hammers—i.e. “What is its purpose?” “What is it for?” Later posts will justify our moving in this more ‘purpose-full’ direction as regards souls/selves…but for now, and in sum, our idea is this: We have sufficient reason and resources to entertain and explore the possibility that to ask “What is a soul/self/person?” may be taken in the sense of ‘What is a hammer?’ or ‘What is a gift?’—i.e. in the sense of things which are not properly characterized by their parts, but by their purpose. To look past the purpose and to focus on the parts is not, as the science-minded may imagine, to look ‘further’, ‘deeper’, or to understand more. Rather, it is to abbreviate—even amputate— the correct question to ask about our souls/selves (“What is a person for?”) with a shorter, misleading, and much easier one (“What is a person?”). In looking to understand what it is to be a person—to be a self or soul—we must therefore endeavor to avoid the prejudice built in to this abbreviated IS question, and instead ask it in its alternative, longer, and more soul-appropriate form...