Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-5nwft Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-03T09:52:22.265Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Demythologizing the Soul

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Extract

When Wittgenstein chose St Augustine’s account of how an infant learns to speak, he was surely signalling his intention to interrogate the whole western way of thinking (and feeling) about the relation of body and soul. He was engaging in the Philosophy of Psychology, as they say. The hard thing, as he noted (Culture and Value, p 48), is to get hold of the difficulty deep down: “Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way”. Merely to say that we no longer believe in the story of the soul’s exile in the body doesn’t mean that we have worked ourselves free of all the ramifications of that powerful ancient myth. On the contrary, quickly reached ‘results’ in philosophy, or easily ‘taught’ methods and theses, only leave the student more oblivious than ever to his or her own confusion. “The philosopher treats a question — like an illness” (Investigations, no 254). The sickness must run its natural course: “slow cure is all important” (Zettel, no 382). Wittgenstein held that the ‘solution’ to a problem in philosophy is no good unless it comes to you when you need it. The first step in philosophical work is thus to make us see that we really did need such an answer. In fact Wittgenstein “hoped to show that you had confusions you never thought you could have had”.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Cf “Stories of the Soul”, New Blackfriars, March 1983.

2 See the Gasking‐Jackson obituary in The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1951.

3 Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality, 1963, p 148.

4 This is brought out by Derek Bolton, in his lecture “Life‐form and Idealism”, in Idealism – Past and Present, edited by Godfrey Vesey, 1982; but also in his book, An Approach to Wittgenstein's Philosophy, 1979, a Cambridge thesis supervised by G.E.M. Anscombe and C. Lewy, and by far the finest introduction available to Wittgenstein's work.

5 It is the trail which, for a Wittgensteinian, heads straight into the morass of general theory of meaning etc.

6 Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning, Volume 1, by Baker, G. P. and Hacker, P. M. S., 1980, p 7.Google Scholar

7 The essay appeared in 1962 but is reprinted in Must We Mean What We Say? The quotation comes on page 52. My understanding of Wittgenstein's writing on the soul has been deeply influenced by Cavell's splendid book, The Claim of Reason, 1979.

8 There are some beautiful exceptions.