In The Rise and Fall of Soul and
Self Raymond Martina and John Barresi set out to write a history of
personal identity. The book is divided up into an introduction and 14
subsequent chapters: From Myth to Science, Individualism and Subjectivity,
People of the Book, Resurrected Self, The Stream Divides, Aristotelian
Synthesis, Care of the Soul, Mechanization of Nature, Naturalizing the Soul,
Philosophy of Spirit, Science of Human Nature, Before the Fall, Paradise Lost,
and Everything That Happened and What it Means.

The title of the last chapter,
Everything That Happened and What it Means, is the authors’ methodological
point of departure of which they give an account in their introduction. They
grab their readers’ attention by referring to Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window,’ in
which Jimmy Stewart’s character tries to persuade his girlfriend, Grace Kelly,
that he has witnessed a murder. At the brink of being convinced, Grace Kelly,
who previously has dismissed his accounts, frantically asks him to tell her
everything that happened and what it means. ‘For those parts of the presents
that interests us,’ the authors write in their introduction, ‘everything that
happened and what it means is what many of us who are curious about the past
really want to know’ (p.1). However, they proceed to attempt to narrow this
impossibly broad scope somewhat. They want to know ‘everything that is relevant
and helpful to understand why theory [in the evolution of theories of the self
and personal identity] followed the course it did’ (p. 1-2).

Their first chapter, From Myth to
Science, starts with Homer (p.9), and goes on to mention Pindar, Sophocles,
Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Heraclitus (p. 10-13) before dividing into three
short subsections: Platonism (p. 13-21), Aristotelianism (p 21-24.), and
Materialistic Atomism (p. 24-28). The second chapter discuss Cicero, Epictetus,
and Marcus Aurelius under the heading ‘Roman Stoicism’ (p 29-33), Lucretius
under the heading ‘Roman Epicureanism’ (33-35), and Plotinus under the heading ‘Neoplatonism’
(35-38). The third chapter deals with Judaism (39-44), Christianity (44-52),
and Islam (52-54). In the next chapter we find brief discussions of relatively
unknown figures: the pagan philosopher Celsus (p. 57), Justin Martyr (p. 57),
Athenagoras (p. 57-58), Irenaeus (58-59), Minucius Felix (p. 59), Methodius
(64-65). In the fifth chapter the authors tell us about Arab Philosophy
(al-Kindi, Avicenna, and Averroës), Jewish Philosophy (Gabriol, Maimonides) and
The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (among others Otloth of St. Emmeram, Guibert of
Nogent, Abelard, Crétien de Troyes, Honorius Augustodunensis).

It would take too long to summarize
all the chapters, and all the branches of philosophy, and all the philosophers,
which this book deals with. It should be obvious from what has been summarized
of it, which is less than the first 100 pages, that this book really
does comment on ‘everything that happened,’ and that its scope is enormously,
almost infinitely, wide and broad. This is furthermore illustrated by the
concluding chapter in which the authors tell us that the concern with the self
actually started before the Greeks and then proceed to tell us how the
Neanderthals had arrangements of stones on their graves, which might indicated
that they believed in a life after bodily dead (p. 290). Even the unnamed
Neanderthals get a place in the history we are being told.

The authors’ conclude that both the
soul and the self have fallen – at least from a scientific perspective (as
opposed, for example, from a religious one). The soul and the self do no longer
play any explanatory role in science. If, at the end of the day, we are unified
by anything it is our bodies (p.304). The conclusion, which is hardest to
swallow, and which the authors also take to be the most problematic, is the
fall of the self. For although we might agree that we do not have a self which
persists over time it is hard, perhaps even impossible, for each of us not to
think of him- or herself as an autonomous persons with a free will who is able to
make his or hers mind up. That it, it is hard, if not impossible, not to
imagine that we ourselves act, and that there is a rational self
over and above the body, which controls and directs the body, and which cannot
be reduced to body. In the Phaedo, Socrates tells his visitors about his
disappointment that Anaxagoras did not use his principle of nous, mind
or intellect, to explain human behavior:

‘This wonderful hope was dashed as
I went on reading and saw that the man [Anaxagoras] made no use of the intellect,
nor gave it any responsibility for the management of things, but mentioned as
causes air and ether and water and many other strange things. That seemed to me
much like saying that Socrates’ actions are all due to his intellect, and then
in trying to tell the cause of everything I do, to say that the reason I am
sitting here is because my body consists of bones and sinews, because the bones
are hard and are separated by joints, that sinews are such as to contract and
relax, that they surround the bones along with the flesh and skin which hold
them together, then as the bones are hanging in their sockets, the relaxation
and the contraction of the sinews enable me to bend my limbs, and that is the
cause of my sitting here with my limbs bent… To call those things causes is too
absurd. If someone said that without bones and sinews and all such things, I
should not be able to do what I decide, he would be right, but surely to say
that they are the cause of what I do, and not hat I have chosen the best course,
even though I acted with my intellect, is to speak very lazily and carelessly.
Imagine not being able to distinguish the real cause from that without which
the cause would not be able to act as a cause. (Phaedo 98b-99b; trans.
G.M.A. Grube)

            Socrates’ point seem to be that if the self does
not play a role in (natural) scientific explanations then so much the worse for
the (natural) sciences. Aristotle, later, modified this point with a
dual-aspect theory. The natural science cannot be expected to give us a
comprehensive worldview, which is why we also need a ‘Geist Wissenschaft’ (or,
in Hegelian terminology, a Wissenschaft des Menschlichen).  A similar
dual-aspect theory can be attributed to Kant. We can regard a human being as
phenomena, and as such as an object for the natural sciences, or as noumena,
and as such as a subject who is the author of his or hers own thoughts and
choices.

The authors’ conclusion that the self does no longer play a
role in the (natural) sciences, and that the sense in this sense has fallen,
might thus have been anticipated by discussed by, amongst others, Plato,
Aristotle, and Kant. This, of course, is not to say that Plato, Aristotle or
Kant have successfully refuted the conclusion of the authors hundreds of years
before they wrote their book. But perhaps it does show that the history they
tell us is not as linear and as ‘straight’ as they will have it appear.

            The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self is, as
already stated, extremely wide and broad in its scope. The range of the authors’
knowledge command respect, and their style of writing is clear and concise.
However, the scope of the book means that no single philosopher or
philosophical position is analyzed in depth. This, of course, is true of any
history of philosophy book, but, unfortunately, comprehensiveness has won over
depth to such an extent that The Rise and Fall at times felt decidedly
shallow and unsatisfactory. It will, I fear, only be of real interest to
someone who needs a very basic first-time historical introduction to the
subject of personal identity.

Categories: Philosophical