Modern philosophy has been inhospitable to the soul. In the English-speaking world, the dominant tendency, since Hobbes and Locke, has been to subordinate the mental to the physical. Even where mental phenomena are granted real existence, they are construed as effects of underlying physical processes. To explain them is to identify their physical causes. Physicalist approaches to the mind cannot but see the soul as, in Gilbert Ryle's derisive phrase, a “ghost in the machine.” It is an unwanted leftover from a religious age with a bygone philosophical psychology. To the extent that mental entities do any explanatory work, modern philosophy favors “mind” over “soul.”
Part of the problem is Descartes, or more precisely, the reaction to Descartes. Descartes's marking out of a special ontological domain for the res cogitans not only spawned an insoluble mind/body problem evident in his own day, but sponsored a dualism that looked to be a scientific dead end. The increasingly confident sciences of life and of the brain could have no truck with metaphysical entities resistant to empirical analysis. Descartes, in a distorted version, became a convenient whipping boy. Anglophone philosophy, disciplined by and attentive to science, saw Cartesian dualism as a pernicious error. Ryle called it a “category mistake,” an infinitely mischievous logical lapse.
Had the soul been conceptualized along Aristotelian rather than Cartesian lines, would modern philosophy have been more receptive to it? Aristotle gives us a soul/body holism as against the dualism of his teacher, Plato. Lenn E.Goodman and D. Gregory Caramenico’s
book is in many ways an attempt to rehabilitate precisely such an Aristotelian conception. It is Aristotle for the age of neuroscience, a bold proposal to restore talk of souls as a way of securing the irreducible reality of personhood as it emerges holistically from human biology. The ambition of the book is to make soul language scientifically and philosophically cogent—to do for the soul what Alasdair MacIntyre did for virtue (5). Goodman and Caramenico aim to persuade readers not only of the acceptability of soul-talk but of its necessity. No other term approximates the richness and capaciousness of “soul”—neither “mind,” nor “self,” nor “person,” nor “subject.” Although they sometimes use these words, particularly “self,” synonymously with “soul,” they argue that the word “soul” does indispensible conceptual work. A great deal of science and philosophy is assayed to make their case. But let the reader beware: if what is expected is a defense of the soul as a spiritual entity, separable from the body, immortal, and uniquely tied to the divine—the soul of Platonic provenance alive in popular and religious imagination—then the reader will be disappointed. That is not the quarry of this book, nor by the authors’ lights would it even be reasonable to pursue such an idea. Their stance is naturalistic albeit non-reductionist. “Supernatural” beings, such as Platonic or Augustinian souls, are notional, not real.
Goodman and Caramenico want to claim that talk of souls is more than semantic; it gets at something ontological. Souls are real, albeit in a broadly Aristotelian, not a Platonic or mutatis mutandis, Cartesian way. How, then, are souls real? Souls are not, as Democritus and his followers would have it, a kind of substance made of very fine stuff: “Souls are not . . . stuff at all, not airy, quasi-physical wisps of smoke. It's incoherent to call souls spiritual beings, and thus not physical, but then imagine spirituality as implying that souls can pass through walls or float in midair” (3). Souls have their reality at another level from that of “stuff.” In keeping with Aristotle, the reality of souls is to be sought in the concept, suitably adapted to modern science, of form. Thus, souls, they argue, “are emergent beings. They arise developmentally but outstrip and in some measure take charge of the bodies in which they arise” (2). Souls are emergent forms of biological organization that name “all that makes persons as such distinctive—our cognitive and affective, active and creative, appetitive and moral capabilities” (4). Soul is a name for the integrating, organizing capabilities of sentient, sapient, and agential personhood.
Aristotle asserts that if the eye were an animal, “sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance or essence of the eye” (De an. 412b). Soul, then, is a matter of actualizing the potential of a living body, of actualizing it in a manner that fulfills its essence. Soul is the “first grade of actuality of a naturally organized body” (De an. 412b). It is the leading edge of the teleology that drives nature upward. Plants, animals, and humans all have souls, but the higher powers of the human attest to a higher type of soul. Even in the human case of rational soul, however, there is nothing that rises beyond body in the sense that it can have a separate existence, at least as a definite individual.Footnote 1 (For contrast, recall Socrates's jest at the end of the Phaed. Crito asks him how they should bury him. Socrates replies: “Any way you like . . . if you can catch me and I don't slip through your fingers,” Phaed. 115c.) The soul has no existence separate from the bodies it organizes, yet it exists as more than a façon de parler; it is not merely a way of talking about organization and functioning. For Aristotle ascribes causal power to the soul: it effects changes in the world. “The soul is the cause or source of the living body. . . . It is (a) the source or origin of movement, it is (b) the end, it is (c) the essence of the whole living body” (De an. 415b). That which can act as a cause has reality, though not the reality of a discrete, separable entity. For Aristotle, the relevant constituent of reality—that which has causal efficacy in the world—is the soul/body whole that is an individual human being. “Yet to say that it is the soul which is angry is as inexact as it would be to say that it is the soul that weaves webs or builds houses. It is doubtless better to avoid saying that the soul pities or learns or thinks, and rather to say that it is the man who does this with his soul” (De an. 408b).
Aristotle, in the view of the philosopher Peter Hacking, articulates a principle here. “Aristotle's principle,” as Hacking calls it, allows one to discern the “mereological fallacy.” That fallacy entails “ascribing to parts attributes that can intelligibly be ascribed only to the wholes of which they are parts.”Footnote 2 Hacking and other philosophers, including Goodman and Caramenico, make use of this principle—and identify the corresponding fallacy—when they focus on ascribing attributes to the brain that should properly be ascribed to the whole person. That is a major strategy of Goodman and Caramenico's book. But before we explore this further, it will be useful to dwell a moment longer on Aristotle. Aristotle speaks for a holism as against dualism and on behalf of a concept of the soul as the principle of actualization of a living body. The soul just is the proper, teleologically oriented functioning of the natural system that is the individual plant, animal, or human being. Yet, perhaps due to the logical pressure of the grammar of nouns, the psuchē also acquires an entitative status. It is not just the organized, functioning whole; it is its leading part. Is it then a whole or a part? It seems to be both. I do not think that Aristotle escapes this ambiguity. He may, despite his best intentions, commit a “mereological fallacy” in the very act of cautioning against it. It remains to be seen whether this problem affects Goodman and Caramenico's book as well.
Having announced their aims, the authors present five extended arguments, each constituting a chapter, for the reality of the soul. The five arguments rhetorically evoke Aquinas's five approaches to the reality of God. The soul will be shown to work as an actualizing, integrative force with regard to perception, consciousness, memory, agency, and creativity. In each chapter, contemporary science is used to show that some earlier philosophical and scientific views, which undermine a desirable holism, are seriously mistaken. However, contemporary scientific and philosophical views that take current theory to require the dismantling of the person or subject and its reduction to biology or brain are equally unwarranted. In the chapter on perception, for example, the authors show that the Lockean view of perception as a passive, receptive process in which a blank slate is filled with sensory impressions is dead wrong. Perception is an active, integrative process that goes on in a subject. Although much of it is preconscious, seeing is typically “seeing-as.” The life experience of a sentient subject shapes what is seen, building up from the innate “color map” in the brain (41). Locke's view of perception as a sequence of one-off sensory stimuli falls before the Gestalt view; the mind has a Bauplan. “Perception is relational, not atomistic” (35). It entails active pattern making, interpreting, filtering, and integrating—it does not just happen, as sense-data theorists thought. It is the work of mind or, rather, eliding the two concepts, of soul. “Color semiotics underscore the active engagement of the mind and thus speak for the reality of the soul” (48). The bottom-up flow of information from retina to cortex, in the case of sight, and the top-down cortical work of the brain directing the eyes toward fields of greatest interest show the directedness of a whole being, a subject with interests. Surveying a wide swath of the sciences of perception, the authors conclude that “the mind is actively at work integrating experience from the earliest stages of perception. Souls emerge where our integrated apprehension of the world joins and helps form a sense of self” (83).
A key methodological feature of the authors’ treatment of perception (and of the other four topics) is the concept of emergence. Emergence is a philosophical term of art enlisted to counter (and, if not to oppose, then to complement) the still regnant reductionism of many of the sciences. The philosopher of science John Dupré refers to “the thesis . . . of the centrality of the endogenous.” “This is the thesis,” he continues, “that we should always favour explanations in terms of the intrinsic, structural properties of things over explanations that appeal to the influence of context or environment.” Couple that focus on internal structures with the belief that the very smallest constituents, those explicable in terms of the laws of physics, most fully reveal causality and order and you have full-blown reductionism.Footnote 3 (Thus, a reductionist view of human behavior would look to genes and their molecular structures to provide the best explanation. Genes create brains. Consciousness and acts of mind are explicable in principle wholly in terms of their underlying neural correlates, which are explicable in terms of chemistry, which is explicable in terms of physics. All the “causal arrows” point upwards from the stipulated ontological bottom.)
An emergent view, by contrast, sees the context in which parts are organized as having its own reality and explanatory power. All the arrows of causation are not found at the bottom pointing up. Some of them are also top-down. “When attributes or activities,” Goodman and Caramenico write, “are not adequately explained by the elemental, one needs to speak of emergence and resist presuming that if we knew the makeup of things and the simplest properties of their simplest parts all natural mysteries would dissolve. That dream ignores the many ways in which complexity outstrips analysis” (19). Emergent systems require explanation in terms of the whole rather than the parts. It will not do to speak of a landscape painting as strokes and blotches of paint on a canvas; one must explain the image that has emerged from the (colorless, at the molecular level) paint. One must explain not only the physics of light and the neurophysiology of our perception of color as well as of the image, but also our endowing the image with meaning, our meaningful experience of the painting. There are levels and levels of Gestalten that properly resist reduction to explanation in terms of smallest parts—the mereological fallacy. Aesthetics cannot be resolved into physics. All of these levels have their own proper discourse.
To take an emergentist view is to attend both to the “properties or substances that, on the one hand, ‘arise’ out of more fundamental properties or substances and thus depend on those latter properties or substances and that are, on the other hand, ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ and thus in a certain sense independent from, the more fundamental properties or substances.”Footnote 4 The higher-level organizational properties supervene on—that is, track and depend on—the lower-level ones, but they also order and control the basal properties. A strong theory of emergence (as opposed to a weak, epistemic one) requires “downward causation”—the emergent systems have causal power over the lower-level systems from which they have emerged. This remains somewhat controversial, rejected by physicalists such as the philosopher Jaegwon Kim. But Goodman and Caramenico are strongly invested in it. An example of downward causation would be: natural selection drives evolution at a genetic level, but given the emergence of creatures adapted to their environmental niches, their success in reproduction determines which genetic populations survive. In the case of humans, our consciousness, emergent in yet unexplained ways from our biological substrata, comes to direct our life processes through even more emergent phenomena, such as culture, downwardly organizing the biological bases out of which we have arisen. Consciousness and culture impact genomes; causation is not just bottom-up, it is also top-down. Goodman's fellow Gifford lecturer, Michael Gazzaniga, explains:
On the neurophysiological level, we are born with a sense of fairness and some other moral intuitions. These intuitions contribute to our moral judgments on the behavioral level, and, higher up the chain, our moral judgments contribute to the moral and legal laws we construct for our societies. These moral laws and legal laws on the societal scale provide feedback that constrains behavior. The social pressures on the individual at the behavior level affect his survival and reproduction and thus what underlying brain processes are selected for.Footnote 5
Goodman and Caramenico read the relevant science of perception, consciousness, memory, agency, and creativity as requiring and warranting an emergentist story rather than a reductionist one. The cogency and, as they see it, the necessity of soul-talk enters with the logic of emergence. They are not alone in building a strong case for the reductionism-resistant reality of emergent subjects and personhood. (Yet, they probably are alone in denominating these subjects as souls.) The sociologist Christian Smith, in his recent work, What Is a Person?, similarly leverages emergence theory. But Smith does so without attention to the counterarguments against emergence.Footnote 6 Goodman and Caramenico, being fine philosophers, go in with their eyes open. Although they hold to a strong (ontological) rather than a weak (epistemological) version of emergence, they do so chastely, arguing on technical grounds with formidable opponents, such as Jaegwon Kim.Footnote 7 The argument comes down to ontology—to systematic claims about what is real. For Kim, the downward causation that emergentists ascribe to higher-level organization tries to jump over Occam's razor but does not succeed. Given the principle of “causal closure” (“no physical event has a cause outside the physical domain”), downward causation becomes redundant (21). Since alleged emergent properties, such as consciousness vis-à-vis its underlying brain states, supervene on basal ones, that is, cannot be instantiated without them, all the causal work has already been done at the lower level. Downward causation is an illusion. We just have not got a sufficiently powerful account of causation at the micro-level yet.
Goodman and Caramenico find the ontology of “causal closure” impoverished:
But the real alternatives to [Kim’s] materialism should not be hidden behind a straw man. Numbers too are not physical things. Nor is organization, or information. Yet they do matter, not apart from the bodies they inform, but in the way they order them. Numbers don't rattle chains or pass through walls. Nor do they make choices or play piano. But every general knows that organization and information are just as critical as ordnance. If you asked a commander which matters more, numbers or communications, you’d probably earn a pretty blank stare. What emergentists see is not a ghost in the bodily machine but a weakness in the machine metaphor: Brainwork is not sufficiently described electrochemically. The actions of the whole here far exceed the powers of its parts. That's why persons show life and sensibility, consciousness and agency when an atom cannot” (205–6). True enough. But is the explanation of those astonishing, mysterious phenomena by reference to emergent wholes absolutely and in principle necessary or only faute de mieux until a more powerful science of the micro-level comes along? Is emergentism scientifically fecund or is it primarily a philosophical way of drawing together and topping off a science that, as far as the higher human capacities go, is mostly a set of promissory notes (and in addition, a philosophical way of criticizing those philosophers, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland, who read those notes as demanding a rigorous reductionism)?
I am not sure that the debate between emergentists and reductionists can be settled. It is a debate within and, one might say, over the soul of naturalism. Is naturalism, all things considered, physicalism (think Quine's metaphor of desert landscapes), or should naturalism be as fecund and prolific as nature itself (think Henri Rousseau's jungle paintings)? Goodman and Caramenico, as evidenced by many of Goodman's prior works, envision a capacious, ampliative naturalism, informed by thinkers such as Aristotle and Spinoza. It is a naturalism where teleology returns—the Darwinian fitness of beings can only be reckoned by the interests and purposes of beings (18). In this naturalism, ontic value—the Platonic and biblical goodness of being—returns (239). Value is rooted in the conatus of all beings, in their claims to life and light. Goodman and Caramenico's naturalism subtends an emergent order, which carries the richness and potential of its base into novel, irreducible, and quite real heights. Nature no less than the souls that emerge from it are not spare givens but evolving projects. Soul is a success term.
It might have been prudent to opt for an extremely chaste strategy and go with a weak, rather than a strong, version of emergence and treat emergent phenomena, such as the soul, as doing conceptual work, while remaining agnostic about their ontological status. But Goodman and Caramenico, given the ambition of their naturalism, decline to take that route. Nonetheless, they are chaste enough to construe emergentism as working in tandem with the reductive analysis typically practiced in the sciences (albeit while eschewing reductionism). “Emergence,” they explain, “stands in tension with reduction. Yet the two are not alternatives but complementary perspectives, one looking upward or forward, at what is distinctive in a complex or outcome; the other, down or back at origins or parts. Reduction is vital to understanding . . . [but] becomes foolish when it pretends to replace what it explains” (17).
As the book proceeds, the case for souls is made by attending to the integrative, downwardly causal work being done by conscious, temporally cognizant, agential, and creative beings. Consciousness requires a subject, an owner of conscious experience; it must be more than a process or flow of experiential events. Goodman and Caramenico take aim at Hume and his philosophical descendants, such as Derek Parfit, who constitute personhood and identity in the flow of conscious experience as such. The authors disagree. The flow of continuous conscious experience is a flow for someone. That someone is not identical with the flow. “Consciousness is no mere sequence of events. It belongs to someone” (117). Consciousness gets its unity from the self—“or, as we might say, the soul” (96). They take issue with the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, whose recent book Self Comes to Mind addresses some of the same questions, for fighting shy of giving the self (or soul) the full reality it deserves. Damasio writes: “My working definition of the material me, the self as object, is as follows: a dynamic collection of integrated neural processes, centered on the representation of the living body, that finds expression in a dynamic collection of integrated mental processes.”Footnote 8 The result, as they see it, is a failed effort to hybridize mechanism with subjecthood. Selfhood is still ex post facto a name for the activity of “integrated neural processes” rather than a causal factor, and therefore a reality, in its own right.
Although science is far from seeing the full picture, it reveals “consciousness not as a jerky silent film viewed through a single cyclopean lens but as an active and reflexive subjectivity drawing upon a host of neural events integrated by the very subjecthood that its own awareness helps to constitute” (136). The self/soul as owner of consciousness both emerges from neural processes and governs, directs, or employs them at the same time. It is thus both part and whole, an unsettling ambiguity. Neither perception, nor consciousness, nor memory, nor agency is the whole—the self or soul who owns them is. The reciprocity between basal conditions and the reality of personhood that emerges from them is presented by the authors as a virtuous circle. But is it? In closing, I would like to suggest two problems with their view.
The argument of Goodman and Caramenico obligates them to constitute the soul as something more than a complex, functional organization. Although it is not “stuff,” the soul has individuality and identity. (“Brains are not subjects, but they make subjecthood possible, not by housing some ethereal stuff but by fostering the emergence of a subject who can say ‘I’ and ‘it’ and ‘you’” [136].) The subject per force acquires an entity-like status. Yet in emergence theory, what emerges are complex, self-organizing systems. Organization as such propagates more complex instantiations of organization. For the physicist Robert Laughlin—who has brought emergence theory into particle physics—organizational context, rather than particles, is fundamental.Footnote 9 Does the emphasis on organization not dismantle the conceptual wall between entitative and processive views of the self? Is it not the case that the self is just what we call the organization of parts, processes and potentials that we notice in ourselves and others? Why tie this to a presumed entity, however emergent, other than as a way of speaking? Aristotle's ambiguity, I would suggest, complicates this picture as well.
Another problem is linguistic. Committed though they are to souls, the authors sometimes use “soul” interchangeably with “self.” But what, other than rhetorical punch, does soul add to self? Soul allows the authors to reclaim a term with a much more religious resonance than self, but does it do some essential conceptual work that self leaves undone? The answer comes rather late, in the afterword. The reality of souls, declared in the emergent powers of “perception, consciousness and creativity, memory and moral agency . . . amply point toward links with something higher” (243). It now becomes clear that Goodman and Caramenico favor soul (over self or mind or person, etc.) not only because of the role it plays in their ramified naturalism but because of the transcendent dimension to which it points. It helps to ground not just our moral agency but the normative direction of that agency; it helps to ground awe, appreciation, and gratitude.
Fully aware of the leap from nature's “finite beauty and brilliance” to its “infinite Source,” the authors see the “facets and achievements” of our “emergent . . . selves and souls” as gifts, not givens. God has given creatures “capabilities of self-creation—as witness the fact of evolution and the general reality of emergence, of which biological evolution is a special case” (243). Soul, unlike less resonant mental or phenomenological terms, opens up a way of talking about human beings that affirms their rootedness in nature and their simultaneous transcendence of it. The conceptual work that soul does exceeds a mere rhetoric. It allows a bridge to be cast from the sciences to the sacred. Self, person, or subject will not take us that far.
Although it emerges most visibly at the end, a religious impulse thus animates the whole work. The severest critic, but not I, would say it distorts it. I would say that it works sensitively and responsibly within the horizon of science and naturalism to point over the horizon in a gesture of gratitude. That gesture will be reciprocated by anyone who reads this book.
