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Ailments of the Soul
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 March 2024
Abstract
The paper aims to trace the distinctive character of the talk of the soul and to disentangle it from the talk of the mind. The key context will be the way in which we talk about souls that are ailing. As a point of departure, I use the later Wittgenstein’s notion of the soul as anti‐dualist and anti‐substantive, which brings it close to Dennett’s or Davidson’s philosophy of mind, but which Wittgensteinian ethicists have elaborated upon as concerned with matters of good and evil, and beauty. In relation to these concerns, the sense of the ailing soul is different from issues relating to mental health. I then discuss cases of ailments of the soul that would be misleading to analyse as matters of mental health (issues): addiction, racism, and environmental grief. I conclude with a plea for maintaining the talk of the soul as helpful for making sense of existential or beauty‐ or morality‐related ailments, yet as something that does not necessarily subscribe to any doctrine of the soul as a substance. In support, I also use arguments from the spheres of eco‐theology and public theology.
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.
References
1 Robert Heilman, ‘The Possessed Artist and the Ailing Soul’, Canadian Literature 8 (1961), pp. 7‐16, https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.v0i8, see p. 11.
2 Heilman, ‘The Possessed Artist’, 14.
3 Nicholas Gier. ‘Wittgenstein, Intentionality and Behaviorism’, Metaphilosophy 13, no 1 (1982), pp. 46‐64, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9973.1982.tb00290.x; George Graham, ‘Behaviorism’, accessed 8 April 2022, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/.
4 Peter Winch, ‘“Eine Einstellung zur Seele”’, in Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 140‐153.
5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Revised 4th edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Chichester: Wiley, 2009), II, § 22.
6 Peter Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962), pp. 187‐211.
7 David Cockburn, Other Human Beings (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 6.
8 Winch, ‘Eine Einstellung’.
9 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II, § 25.
10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy or Psychology: The Inner and the Outer (1949‐1951), trans. M. Aue and C. Grant Luckhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 38.
11 Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 4.
12 Donald Davidson, ‘Problems in the Explanation of Action’, in Problems of Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 101‐116.
13 Bjørn Ramberg, ‘Post‐ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson’, in Robert Brandom, ed., Rorty and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 351‐370.
14 When and whether Wittgenstein’s Seele is to be translated as ‘the mind’ instead of ‘the soul’ is in itself a difficult exegetical question. Anscombe’s original translation of the Investigations favours ‘the soul’ in many places where the editors of the 4th revised edition (Hacker and Schulte) considered it reasonable to change to ‘the mind’ (cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, xivf).
15 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology I, trans. M. Aue and C. Grant Luckhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), § 267f.
16 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology II, trans. M. Aue and C. Grant Luckhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), § 695; also Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, trans. M. Aue and C. Grant Luckhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), § 954.
17 Wittgenstein, Remarks I, § 133.
18 Wittgenstein, Remarks I, § 586. In this passage, ‘the mind’ is Aue and Luckhardt’s translation of Verstand.
19 Wittgenstein, Remarks I, § 438ff. Here, admittedly, I (unlike Aue and Luckhardt) take Wittgenstein’s Seele to mean ‘the soul’, not ‘the mind’.
20 Wittgenstein, Remarks II, § 307.
21 Wittgenstein, Last Writings (1949‐1951), 65.
22 İlham Dilman, The Self, the Soul and the Psychology of Good and Evil (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 20f. Of course, Wittgensteinian ethicists are not the only thinkers tracing the essential link between the soul and morality; cf. the recent work by John Cottingham, In Search of the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 33.
23 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II, § 23.
24 D. Z. Phillips, Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1970), 49.
25 Rush Rhees, In Dialogue with the Greeks Volume II (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 93.
26 Rhees, In Dialogue, 80.
27 Rhees, In Dialogue, 94.
28 Rush Rhees, ‘That man is made for Heaven’, in On Religion and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 256‐276, see p. 259f.
29 For various versions of this point, cf. Peter Winch, ‘Moral Integrity’, in Ethics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 171‐192, see p. 172, Rush Rhees, ‘Understanding What Men Do and Understanding the Lives Men Live’, in Moral Questions (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 231‐237, see p. 233f, or Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (London: Routledge, 2006), chap. 11.
30 For instance, Joshua Farris, in The Soul of Theological Anthropology (New York: Routledge, 2017), advocates for the notion of the soul as a conscious substance that owns and unifies a person’s mental events (and is akin to the greater spiritual substance: God). I am afraid that my observations in this paper have no direct bearing on whether Farris’s account is right or not.
31 An intriguing example of this intuitive yet philosophically often neglected distinction between the mental/intellectual and the soul‐related occurs in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series: when the procedure of producing ‘horcruxes’ is explained as based on ‘ripping one’s soul apart’, through murder. Dumbledore says that while Voldemort’s soul is thereby ‘maimed and diminished’, his magic powers, related to his brain (and, presumably, mind), remain intact. That a bad person may not be mentally impaired is of course a trivial observation; what is notable is that Rowling’s characters naturally specify it in terms of the soul vs. body‐and‐mind distinction.
32 Charles Perakis, ‘Soul Sickness: A Frequently Missed Diagnosis’, Journal of Osteopathic Medicine 110, no. 6 (2010), pp. 347‐349, https://doi.org/10.7556/jaoa.2010.110.6.347.
33 Bryan Massingale, ‘Theology in the Public Sphere in the Twenty‐First Century’, Horizons 43, no. 2 (2016), pp. 351‐356, https://doi.org/10.1017/hor.2016.110, see p. 355. Etty Hillesum, in An Interrupted Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 11, also calls ‘indiscriminate hatred’ (towards all members of a nation simply by virtue of their nationality) ‘a sickness of the soul’.
34 Bryan Massingale, ‘To Redeem the Soul of America’, accessed 2 May 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhFyaNYkKTg.
35 Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity (London: Routledge, 2002), 57ff.
36 Gaita, A Common Humanity, 238f.
37 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 656.
38 Ondřej Beran, ‘Addiction as Degradation of Life’, Ethics and Medicine 35, no. 3 (2019), pp. 171–190.
39 J. Keene and P. Raynor, ‘Addiction as a “Soul Sickness”: The Influence of Client and Therapist Beliefs’, Addiction Research 1, no. 1 (1993), pp. 77–87, https://doi.org/10.3109/16066359309035325; Sonia Waters, Addiction and Pastoral Care (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2019).
40 Waters, Addiction and Pastoral Care, 18.
41 Leon Holtzhausen, ‘Addiction – a brain disorder or a spiritual disorder’, Mental Health and Addiction Research 2, no. 1 (2017), pp. 1‐7, https://doi.org/10.15761/MHAR.1000129; cf. Herbert Fingarette, Heavy Drinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), chap. 5.
42 Francis Seeburger, Addiction and Responsibility (New York: Crossroad, 1995).
43 More about this in my ‘Addiction as Degradation of Life’, section 4.
44 Seeburger, Addiction and Responsibility, 41.
45 Keene and Raynor, ‘Addiction as a “Soul Sickness”’, 86.
46 Alternative sources of ‘positive reinforcement’ (cf. Carl Hart, Charles Ksir, and Oakley Ray, Drugs, Society and Human Behavior [New York: McGraw‐Hill, 2008], 35ff) include ‘the ability to earn income, learn a skill, or receive some respect based on your performance in some sort of way, those things compete with potentially destructive behavior (…) [s]kills that are employable or marketable, education, having a stake or meaningful role in society, not being marginalized’; see Carl Hart, ‘Everything Americans Think They Know About Drugs Is Wrong’, accessed 2 May 2022, https://www.alternet.org/2013/06/drugs‐addiction/.
47 For example Bruce Alexander, The Globalization of Addiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
48 Cf. my article ‘Who Should Have Children? (Us?) When Should We Have Children? (Now?)’, SATS 23, no. 1 (2022), pp. 55–74.
49 Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 231ff.
50 Roger Gottlieb, Political and Spiritual (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield 2015), 11.
51 Kriss Kevorkian, ‘Environmental Grief’, in Darcy Harris, ed., Non‐Death Loss and Grief. Context and Clinical Implications (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 216‐226.
52 Tamma Carleton, ‘Crop‐damaging temperatures increase suicide rates in India’, PNAS 114, no. 33 (2017), pp. 8746‐51, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1701354114.
53 Cf. Jakob Meløe, ‘The two landscapes of Northern Norway’, Acta Borealia 7, no. 1 (1990), pp. 68–80, https://doi.org/10.1080/08003839008580385, see p. 79.
54 Wittgensteinian ethicist Roy Holland speaks of these resources as a matter of ‘nourishment of the soul’. R. F. Holland, ‘Education and Values’, in Against Empiricism (Totowa: Barnes and Noble, 1980), pp. 52‐61, see p. 59.
55 Cf. Theodore Hiebert, ‘The Human Vocation. Origins and Transformations in Christian Traditions’, in . D. T. Hessel and R. Radford Ruether, eds., Christianity and Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 135‐154; or Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace, 234ff.
56 Cf. Roger Gottlieb, ‘Introduction: Religion and Ecology – What Is the Connection and Why Does It Matter?’, in Roger Gottlieb, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 3‐21, see p. 13 (quoting the Orthodox patriarch Bartholomew).
57 Cf. Ashlee Cunsolo Willox and Neville Ellis, ‘Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change‐related loss’, Nature Climate Change 8 (2018), pp. 275–81.
58 Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 67.
59 Dilman, The Self, 9f, 20f. Dilman presents this distinction as motivated by Wittgenstein’s discussion, though he himself implicitly struggles with the difficulties of mapping the English soul‐vs.‐mind distinction onto Wittgenstein’s terms Seele (inclusive) and Geist (rather marginal).
60 Ian Hacking notes that acknowledging that the notion of the soul is culturally specific (Western) and has a complicated history and a range of social functions is not a way to explain away the soul but rather to understand better what it is. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 215f.
61 Ian Hacking, ‘Humans, Aliens & Autism’, Daedalus 138, no. 3 (2009), pp. 44–59.
62 To borrow the phrase of Geoffrey Hollin (‘Autism, Sociality and Human Nature’, accessed 2 May 2022, http://somatosphere.net/2014/autism-sociality-and-human-nature.html/).
63 Hacking, ‘Humans, Aliens & Autism’, 57.
64 Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
65 Rowan Williams, ‘Lost Souls: What Do We Think We Are?’, Ministry Today 21 (2001), pp. 105‐115, see p. 108f.
66 I find this ‘not’ rather confusing, but it does not affect the point about the ‘place of regret’.
67 Wittgenstein, Remarks II, § 307.
68 Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 72.
69 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), 307.
70 Cf. David Hufford’s critical point about reductive explanations of after‐death communications:
‘the information that comes from such experiences must be perceived as valid; after‐death communications, for example, would not assuage grief if they were taken to be symbolic expressions of the bereaved person’s deepest wishes, as Freud suggested’ (David Hufford, ‘The Healing Power of Extraordinary Spiritual Experiences’, Journal of Near‐Death Studies 32 (2014), pp. 137–156, see p. 150)
I discuss the philosophical importance of the ontologists’ approach to survival in detail elsewhere: Ondřej Beran, ‘The Other Modern Séances’, in Gustav Strandberg and Hugo Strandberg, eds., Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life after Death (Cham: Springer, to appear in 2023).
71 Work on this article was supported by project no. 22‐15446S, ‘ECEGADMAT’, of the Czech Science Foundation.