Howard Richards, Professor of Peace and Global Studies - Chapter 13--Soul-talk after Wittgenstein

        I have been justifying non-authoritarian authority by its ability to perform social functions, which in the end are physical functions, as Plato justified the authority of pilots by their ability to steer ships safely to port, and of medical doctors by their ability to steer patients safely to health. Sometimes the entities that perform the functions and wield the authority are not persons like pilots and doctors, but words.   Like “soul.” Soul-talk or its absence can make a practical difference regarding whether one lives life enchanted or disenchanted.    Comforted or comfortless. Respected or disrespected. Confident or afraid.   In this chapter I will examine a little bit of the natural history of soul language-games.   It is somewhat arbitrary to choose “soul.”   I might have chosen any of many other words to build a case for an easygoing pragmatism that feels free to enjoy the spiritual treasures of the past, which is not deterred by claims that some language games are in principle nonsense, which instead of applying a priori criteria demarcating sense from nonsense observes whether the people playing the games appear to derive benefit from them or to suffer harm, which calls on old words to play constructive roles in the transformation of social reality, but which nevertheless cheerfully discards old words whenever they play destructive roles –whenever they lead backward to fascism instead of forward to social democracy.    Let this chapter on soul-talk serve as a stand-in for a set of similar chapters on other old words that could be written but which I will probably never write.
         Ludwig Wittgenstein wanted his main late work, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations), to be published with the English or other translation accompanied on facing pages by the German original. If after his death his wishes had been fully respected, then more English-speaking readers might have noticed how often the German word “die Seele” (“soul” or “mind”) appears in the original.   Soul might be called the central theme of the book.    “Soul” in the form of “die Seele” appears either as itself or as part of a compound such as the adjective “seelische” on pages 4, 12, 18, 19, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 67, 79, 81, 107, 113, 114, 119, 126, 132, 143, 151, 152, 153, 154, 159, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 176, 178, 179, 180, 187, 188, 189, 191, 217, 225, and 228. (Wittgenstein 1958)
             In his main earlier work, the Tractatus, “Seele” appears less often. (Wittgenstein 1922 sections 5.5421, 5.641, 6.4312).   One way to characterize the earlier work is to say that it attempted to prescribe the logical form of everything. Its topic was everything, insofar as anything could logically be said about anything.* At its beginning Wittgenstein writes that the world is everything that is the case (der Fall) (Wittgenstein 1922, section 1)    Putting the matter a little bit differently, he says that the facts in logical space are the world. (Id. 1.13)   He proceeds to prescribe the logical form that ideally makes it possible to state everything that is the case, all the facts.   At its end he writes, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Id. 6.54)   The soul is not part of the world (Id. 5.641); hence not a fact, not something that is the case. It is an Unding (not-thing) (Id. 5.5421).   One might conclude that the early Wittgenstein regarded “soul” as a dispensable word. Everything that is the case can be described without using the term.
            (On the other hand one might emphasize the mystical aspects of the Tractatus, regarding it as designed to endorse ethical, esthetic, and religious language, including soul-talk, by showing that they pertain to a higher reality outside and above everything that can be said about the world. (See Wittgenstein 1922 sections 6.41 to 6.54))
          In the later book, the Philosophical Investigations, the word “soul” is nonetheless frequently used.    It is not used because Wittgenstein changed his mind and decided that a soul is a fact after all.   For the most part “Seele” is employed because Wittgenstein finds the term helpful for characterizing mistaken ways of thinking from which he wishes to free his readers.   Wittgenstein often implies that “die Seele”, and also its near equivalent “Geist” (“spirit”) is not. Its presence is an illusion. Its absence is not the absence of anything. Wittgenstein writes: “Where our language suggests a body and there is none, there, we should like to say, is a spirit. (Geist).”    (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 18)   “In our failure to understand the use of a word we take it as the expression of a queer process. (As we think of time as a queer medium, of the mind (die Seele) as a queer kind of being.)” (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 79)   “The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it. This pointing is not a hocus pocus that can be performed only by the soul.” (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 132)    About the statement “I am frightened”: “The question is ‘In what sort of context does it occur?’ I can find no answer if I try to settle the question, ‘What am I referring to?’ ‘What am I thinking when I say it?’ by repeating the expression of fear and at the same time attending to myself, as it were observing my soul out of the corner of my eye.” (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 188)
             Thus Wittgenstein utilizes the words “die Seele” to identify metaphysical illusions that it is his business to dispel, to dissolve. The characteristic late Wittgensteinian procedures -- looking carefully at the practical workings of language to detect the exact points where sense degenerates into nonsense, the exact points where philosophers lead themselves and others astray into extraordinary and impractical dysfunctions of pseudo-language-- are supposed to lead to clarity.      In the light of such clarity illusions called “die Seele” are supposed to disappear as the shadows of the night disappear on a cloudless morning.
         Wittgenstein’s translator, G.E.M. Anscombe usually translated “die Seele” as “the mind.”   “Mind” is also often a valid translation of “Geist.”    On pages 4, 18, 58, 76, 79, 152, 153, 154, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 176, 179, 187, 188, 189, 191, 217, 225, and 228 “Seele” is “mind.” (sometimes “Seelenzustand” translated as “state of mind”). On pages 12, 19, 59, 60, 61, 63, 67, 81, 107, 114, 159, 180, “seelische” is “mental.”   On pages 113, 119, 126, 132, 143, 151, and 178 “die Seele” is “soul.”   The more frequent occurrence of Seele in the German makes the legitimacy of soul-talk a more prominent issue in the original than in the translation.          Wittgenstein was, I will try to show, a philosopher who both denied and affirmed soul-talk.   (The same could be said of spirit-talk, looking at “Geist,” which Anscombe similarly translates usually as “mind” and occasionally as “spirit.”)
         I have already quoted some of Wittgenstein’s ways of denying that it is useful to engage in discursive practices (“language-games”) in which the word “soul” plays a role.   He has in mind philosophical illusions that the superficial grammar of ordinary language (for example nouns that make it easy to think there is an object the noun names) makes humanity all-too-prone to fall prey to.    Wittgenstein’s denial of soul-talk is similar to Jacques Derrida´s denial (“deconstruction”) of logocentrism, of the metaphysics of presence, and of onto-theology.   (e.g. Derrida 1967) It is a first cousin of the widely held view that the logos of classical Greek philosophy is part and parcel of the repressive apparatus of capitalist patriarchy. (e.g. French 1988)    In engaging in his patient labors to dispel the illusions surrounding die Seele as well as other illusions, Wittgenstein might have seen himself as making a contribution to society by demonstrating the meaninglessness of bogus concepts, somewhat as Derrida later deconstructed concepts that lent themselves to justifying oppression generally and somewhat as feminists have deconstructed concepts justifying patriarchy.      Bogus concepts ran rampant in the political and social life of the Vienna of Wittgenstein’s youth. (see Janik and Toulmin 1973)
            Except for mentioning above the option of a mystical interpretation of the Tractatus, I have yet to give my reasons for reading Wittgenstein as a philosopher who affirmed soul-talk.   As is perhaps already clear, I want to affirm soul-talk myself    I regard doing soul-talk as a practice that in many contexts increases our chances of achieving a future in which human institutions will be socially and ecologically functional. If carefully done, it, like the Hindu practice of namaste, strengthens respect for persons, and therefore strengthens non-authoritarian authority.   I would also add that my case for considering “soul” to be a useful word in the English language is not just an interpretation of Wittgenstein or of Foucault.    It rests on general grounds which Wittgenstein’s and Foucault’s philosophies help to make visible, but which would nevertheless still have been valid even if Wittgenstein and Foucault had never lived and therefore had not written any books.
           It is true (this is the denial side) that “die Seele” figures in Wittgenstein’s therapeutic diagnosis and treatment of “philosophy,” where philosophy is construed in a pejorative sense as taking words out of their everyday and scientific contexts and employments, fabricating irresponsible generalizations.   Philosophy so conceived is a fifth wheel. It spins but it does not do any work. “For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 19)   Wittgenstein invents a methodology (this is part of the affirmation side) which consists of carefully examining how words function in everyday life and in science, where they actually do something, where words participate in getting a house built, or in getting somebody to go to the grocery store to buy apples, or helping people to relax and have fun, or to explain chemistry to students with the help of the periodic table of the elements. Talking is part of the natural history of human beings. (Wittgenstein 1958 p. 12, p. 125)
            Hence although die Seele figures in Wittgenstein’s exposés of philosophical humbug, as “writing” and “presence” figure in Derrida´s exposés of philosophical humbug, it would be a Wittgensteinian procedure, following his method, to examine carefully how the word “soul” (or “writing” or “presence”) actually functions in everyday life and in science, where “soul” actually does something, where it participates in getting a task accomplished or in defining a relationship or in evoking an emotion, treating soul-talk as part of the natural history of human beings.   Along these lines Wittgenstein wrote: “Religion teaches that the soul can exist when the body has disintegrated. Now do I understand this teaching? --Of course I understand it. -- I can imagine plenty of things in connexion with it. And haven’t pictures of these things been painted? And why should such a picture be only an imperfect rendering of the spoken doctrine? Why should it not do the same service as the words?   And it is the service (Dienst) which is the point.” (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 178)
          Wittgenstein himself, however, did not study the natural history of “soul” in any detail. Michel Foucault did.     Foucault does not shy away from the word “soul” (“âme” in French).   Biopolitics is about souls. In modern industrial societies disciplinary power, including the disciplinary power of psychiatry and the other “savoirs” of modernity, shapes souls. (Foucault 1975)
             Although Wittgenstein probably thought of himself as serving the cause of enlightenment against reactionary obscurantisms such as those that plagued Vienna in his youth, he was no historian.   His ordinary language is imagined as providing efficient communication for a society that was problem-free until philosophers came along to exploit language’s inherent capacity for muddle with their idle speculations.   Foucault is an historian.   He is very aware that there are embedded in contemporary discourses and institutions words that have come down to us from antiquity traversing trails through time awash with blood, sweat, and tears.
          For Foucault the history of “soul” is a history of social control. The direct ancestor of modern normalization is the medieval confession. Foucault finds that the main elements of the confession, of the examination of conscience, were invented before the conversion of Constantine, in the techniques for self-improvement of imperial Rome. Before Rome, the trail of “soul” leads back to ancient Greece, although Foucault must have known, as everyone else knows, that it could be traced farther back in time and elsewhere in space. (e.g. Foucault 1976, 1984)
         I will follow Foucault and others in treating Plato’s dialogues as a classical source of soul-talk in western languages. If one were to name one single corpus of documents where soul-talk began, one would name Plato’s dialogues. I will only discuss Plato, and will not comment on later thinkers that Foucault found to be at least as important, more instructive for the culture of the twentieth century, more in tune with his own strong tendency toward anti-authoritarian individualism, and/or to be essential links in the chain from Plato to us.   I will follow Wittgenstein by trying to discern in Plato’s dialogues what “soul” (“psuche”) was doing as a word in language-games Greeks were playing.   I do not expect to say anything that has not already been said in the vast literature on “psuche.”   My aim is to gather evidence in support of my claim that the word “soul” and its cognates like “die Seele” and “l´âme” are vital cultural resources for the construction of socially and ecologically functional institutions.   Their pragmatic values are undiminished by the refutation, dissolution, and/or deconstruction of what Wittgenstein called die Seele, and Derrida called logocentrism, the metaphysics of presence, and ontotheology.
              Plato’s dialogue Gorgias is repetitive because it repeats arguments also found in several other dialogues. For this reason it is a good sample of Plato’s thinking; and consequently also a good text not just for engaging Plato the ancient Greek but also and more importantly for engaging, albeit indirectly, the series of interpretations of Plato that have shaped the uses of words in the West from in each age from Plato’s time until our own.   Socrates interviews Gorgias.   Gorgias is a teacher of rhetoric.   Gorgias sings the praises of rhetoric while Socrates seeks to demonstrate the superiority of philosophy.
          Rhetoric, Gorgias says, enables his students to achieve archein, power and authority in the city-state.   (S 452d) And how do they achieve archein?   By persuading the psuche polein, the souls of the people. (S 453a)   Here the soul appears as that which is persuaded. The soul is a source of political power.   Gorgias anticipates Hannah Arendt’s definition of power as the capacity to act in concert (Arendt 1969), and claims that the art of rhetoric produces it.    Archein’s efficient cause is rhetoric.   Its material cause is soul, or souls, the object and target of rhetoric’s action.
          For Socrates, however, rhetoric is not an art at all.   It is not a techne, with its corresponding agathon (good) and episteme (knowledge).   Rhetoric is a species of flattery, which is not an art but only an empeiria, an empirical knack. Being a successful rhetorician requires having a certain kind of psuche (soul): an imaginative, gregarious soul with the gift of gab. (S 463a). Here a soul is a certain kind of personality, a certain set of dispositions and capacities.
        Later Socrates makes a distinction between body and soul in the course of making his critique of rhetoric. (S 463d ff.)   The legitimate arts of the body are gymnastics and medicine.   The corresponding pseudo-arts of the body, the flatteries of the body, give superficial pleasure but not health.   They are cosmetics and cookery. The soul is about politics. (S464b) The legitimate arts of psuche are legislation and justice. Legislation corresponds to gymnastics (prevention), while justice corresponds to medicine (cure).   The bogus pseudo-arts, the flatteries, of the soul are sophistry (corresponding to legislation) and rhetoric (corresponding to justice).   (S 465c)   In the classificatory scheme Plato uses here the things of the soul are to the things of the body as social relationships are to the individual physical person.
          But psuche has yet another role to play in this language-game. The soul is supposed to command the body. The soul is supposed to distinguish cookery from medicine, and to direct the body away from the former towards the latter, i.e. towards health. (S 465 c-d)
          Here the role of psuche is similar to that of the builder A in Wittgenstein’s second example of a language-game. “A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words “block”, “pillar”, “slab”, and “beam”. A calls them out; --B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. –Conceive this as a complete primitive language.” (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 3) In this language-game A as builder has sapiential (i.e. knowledge-based) authority, as in examples frequently given by Plato a pilot has sapiential authority in steering a ship at sea, a doctor has sapiential authority in prescribing cures for illness. Although sapiential authority in principle derives from knowledge, in practice it has conventional elements; it pertains to people who are conventionally presumed to have knowledge. One can imagine a case in which B knows how to build a house as well as A.   They could exchange roles on alternate days, one calling out the stone needed, the other bringing the stone at the command.
          The use of psuche at S 465 c-d where it is the role of the soul to command the body connects with the use of the same word at S 453a where persuasion of the souls of the people leads to archein. If in the case of the individual the soul has authority to command, then the concert of the souls of the citizens of the polis combines the wills of numerous authorities to command and thereby produces legitimate political power.
          The ability of the soul to direct the body away from cookery and towards medicine rests on the cognitive capacity of the soul to distinguish superficial pleasure, a flattery of the body, from the objective requirements of health. It rests on knowledge. Psuche here is good and wise authority; good because it seeks the health of the body, the body’s good; wise because it is able to distinguish true from false.   Psuche is (as Foucault notes in Foucault 1976, Foucault 1984, and in some of his lectures at the Collėge de France) a form of social control of impulse parallel to other ancient forms of legitimate authority: the shepherd, the father, the mother; the king or queen conceived as shepherd, parent, deity, or agent of deity.    But it is individuals who have psuches, or who are psuches.   Consequently psuche is a form of autonomy.   Plato anticipates Kant and echoes moralists and psychologists of all times and places who have found that the best social discipline is self-discipline.
          Socrates goes on to say that with respect to three things (they might be called three aspects of life), namely wealth (chrematon), the body (somatos) and the soul (psuche), there correspond three defects: poverty, illness, and injustice. (S 477c). The worst of these is injustice, the defect of the soul.   Socrates’ argument that having an unjust soul is worst, including the counter-intuitive claim that it is worse to act unjustly than to suffer injustice at the hands of others, is fairly complex. It depends on the premise that injustice is ugly (aischite or kakite).   Justice is identified with beauty and injustice with ugliness. But Socrates’ case does not rest on grounds we moderns would call esthetic. The key point is that justice is beautiful because it is useful, while injustice is ugly because it is harmful. (S 474, S 475)
          Here Plato makes a move he also makes elsewhere. When using a word like “useful” or “harmful” the meaning of the word refers to the general, social, common good.    A medical doctor who is only practicing medicine to make money is not really a medical doctor and is not really practicing medicine; that is not the meaning of the term “medical doctor.” In Gorgias “harmful” does not mean “harmful to me.”   It means “harmful.”   Consequently injustice is ugly.   Consequently it is bad, and indeed Plato identifies the beautiful with the good, the ugly with the bad.   Similarly, in The Republic Socrates invites his interlocutors to pursue the meaning of “justice” by looking first for “justice writ large” on the scale of an ideal city.   Immediately his interlocutors are drawn into drawing up plans for realizing the general, social, common good.   Similarly too John Rawls invites his readers to think about what a just society would be under the constraint of a veil of ignorance that conceals from them their private interests.
          Plato’s discussion of the beauty of the soul, from which he deduces conclusions about what is best and what is worst for a soul, relies on a view of the relationship of individuals to language articulated in a different way twenty four centuries later by Jacques Lacan in his account of a fateful transaction he calls le non du pêre. To be is to be social, but to be social is to be constrained.    Early in life the infant gets a social identity, a linguistic identity, deriving this benefit that in an important sense calls her or him into existence by the same token that obliges her or him to pay the costs of being admitted into language, starting with the poignant word “No!”   Language has its own standards and requirements, which are not those of infant impulse, and according to which the infant, or any individual person, is not the center and raison d’être of the universe.
          To write a complete account of psuche in Plato, I would have to review the long discussion of soul in Phaedo.   Socrates is dying. Poison hemlock is gradually taking possession of his body, turning moving flesh into solid corpse. He tells his friends that the real Socrates is not the body that is dying, but the soul that is speaking.   The real Socrates is choosing which words to say. He is listening to his friends’ ideas; he is lining up reasons to convince them that the soul is immortal, and that the best thing they can do for Socrates and for the city of Athens is to care for their own souls. I would also have to discuss the striking image of psuche in Phaedrus.   There the soul is a charioteer.   Reason is the reins.   The sentiments are two strong horses, a white horse surging upward to health and purity, and a black horse lunging downward into self-destructive and anti-social behavior.   I would have to say more about The Republic, where the harmonious soul is the model for a harmonious city.   The logistiche psuche is too weak to control the passions.   It can only harmonize the passions -- by balancing them against one another, and by showing them and guiding them towards the satisfactions of beauty. Nevertheless, for my purposes what I have already written is enough. More would be redundant.   “Soul” survives deconstruction. It survives the tests limiting what can be said imposed by the schemata of the Tractatus, by David Hume, by the Vienna Circle, by the logical positivists; it survives the therapeutic positivism of the late Wittgenstein and of Gilbert Ryle; because “soul” refers neither to a fact nor to a process.   Wittgenstein was not mistaken to argue that Seele conceived as an immaterial thing is an illusion.   I have followed him in refraining from asking what immaterial thing the Greeks named with the word psuche; and then answering my question by saying the word originally meant “breath,” as did spiritus in Latin, ruach in Hebrew, atman in Sanskrit; and then saying that the original material meaning was gradually refined until psuche named an immaterial thing. (In refraining from taking this tack I am declining to follow, among others, Max Műller. (Műller 1892, pp. 208-234)).    Instead I have tried to ask what was going on, what language-game was being played when Plato in Gorgias has Socrates use the word psuche. It would be more appropriate, if one were to assign a meaning for “soul” at all, to say a soul is a person.   That would be better than saying it is a fact or a process.   It would be better to agree with Kant that a person is not any natural thing.   For Kant “person” names a rational being categorically different from the phenomenal world. “Everything in nature works according to laws. Only a rational being has the capacity of acting according to the conception (Vorstellung) of laws, i.e. according to principles. This capacity is will.” (Kant 1785, p. 29) This rational being who is not one of the things in nature, who has a capacity to will, is a person.   (e.g. Id. p. 47) It is better not to talk about the meaning of “soul” at all, since the main function of “meaning” (Sinn) as Wittgenstein developed it in the Tractatus, and as “meaning” functions in much ordinary and philosophical usage, is to connect a word with a fact.   It is better to talk about the uses or roles of “soul” in language games.   They are similar to those of “self” and “subject” and of the personal pronouns “I”, “you”, “he”, and “she”.
          The late Wittgenstein came to what seems to me to be a conclusion the same as mine in the preceding paragraph. (This is another part of the affirmation side: Wittgenstein not only proposed a method others might employ to show the uses of soul-talk; he also affirmed a positive use of “soul” himself.) He wrote: “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul (zur Seele).   I am not of the opinion that he has a soul (eine Seele).” (Wittgenstein 1958 p. 178).   If behind the physical appearance of a man or woman, there were or could be something else called a soul, which would, if it existed, be a fact, then one could have an opinion regarding its presence or absence. But Wittgenstein has no such opinion, and it would be irrelevant if he did.   He simply treats his friend as a soul.
          If soul were a process, a strange sort of mental process taking place at a strange location called the mind, then it would be possible to observe the process. (The process would be a sort of fact.) In his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein invites his readers to observe carefully what actually happens.   The findings from careful observation are that no such process is detected.    Nevertheless, Wittgenstein assumes a Kantian and Habermasian attitude, a respectful attitude, toward his friend, and he employs the word “Seele” in expressing what he is doing.
          Soul-talk is in tune with the rule-talk I have been employing in offering causal explanations of historical and social phenomena. (I do not know what the difference might be between “historical” and “social” but in case there is one I use both adjectives.)    In the accounts of rules given by H.L.A. Hart and Rom Harré, which I have been following (See Chapter One), people deliberately look to rules for guidance. Here I could also say, “Souls deliberately look to rules for guidance.” (Hart calls this “the internal aspect of rules.”)   (See Chapters One and Two above and the accompanying references.) Another feature of the concept of rule I have been using is that violation of social norms (or rules) licenses criticism. A great deal of the conversation I overhear on the bus on the way to work is of this nature; it is people complaining about other people doing something wrong. That cultures are centrally made of norms, that the norms are followed or not followed; licensing social approval of the former and social disapproval of the latter (with all the nuances and exceptions anthropologists have noted) is consistent with the traditional notion that humans are souls.   Souls are sources of norms because they have authority to govern the passions, and because they have authority to create legitimate social authority by agreement of the psuche polein.   They are also subject to rules; for Plato’s they ought to be just, beautiful and not ugly.
          My approach to Plato is consistent with my (and my co-author’s) explanations of the tragedies of the twentieth century, which I will now sketch again, partly in the hope that by repeating myself I will make myself clearer. I offer the following paragraph partly as a brief summary of ideas I have expressed at length elsewhere (Richards 1995, Richards 2000, Richards and Swanger 2006, Richards 2007), and mainly as background for further explaining my approach to Plato.   My approach to Plato is deliberately different from those of people who in their explanations of Communism, of right wing dictatorships, of dogmatic neoliberal capitalism, and looming ecological catastrophe emphasize the baneful influence of illiberal ideas. (E.g. Popper 1945,    Camus 1951,   Berry 1988). I have in mind people who tend to think that Communism happened because people believed Lenin; that Franco, Pinochet, Videla, Suharto and others seized power because of fundamentalist religion and dogmatic anti-Communist ideologies; that savage capitalism prevails because people believe Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman; and that humans are destroying the biosphere because they have human-centered values instead of earth-centered values. On the contrary, I agree with those who tend to see the causes of the tragedies of the twentieth century in the light of the systemic imperatives established by the constitutive rules of modernity.   Hitler rose to power mainly because the social democratic Weimar Republic could not solve Germany’s principal problems: unemployment, inflation, poverty, insecurity.    The Bolsheviks were able to take power because the social democratic Kerensky government was ineffective, or not effective enough.   A decisive factor in the instability of democratic governments in the third world has been the structural problem, by no means an easy problem to solve, of combining efficient production with equitable distribution.    Today’s global neoliberal hegemony arose beginning in the 1970s as it became apparent that the Swedish Model and European social democracy generally were neither sustainable at home nor a viable model for the masses of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to emulate.   (Richards and Swanger 2006)   The fate of the earth will not be decided mainly by campaigns to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, nor mainly by campaigns to raise ecological awareness, but rather mainly by the emergence or failure to emerge of greater human ability to act in concert to solve collective problems. The causes of failure were not mainly that the Weimar social democrats, Kerensky, and the post World War II European social democrats were incompetent. The main causes are found in structural obstacles make the achievement of social democracy extremely difficult. The Earth Charter only scratches the surface of the ecological problem, saying what should be done without addressing the real difficulty: how to augment the human capacity to act in concert to do what should be done. To make social democracy work it is necessary to build cultures of solidarity, and thereby to transform the basic cultural structures of the modern world.   It is in speaking from a point of view that sees a need for a culture shift that modifies modernity’s constitutive rules that I recommend judicious and selective encouragement of soul-talk. I recommend a critical and constructive pedagogy that facilitates the construction of cultures of peace and solidarity starting with the honoring of persons.
             Some approach Plato looking for the ancient roots of today’s dominations.   They follow Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari and others in deconstructing western metaphysics because they see in it the deep cultural causes of the domination of women by men, of men by men, of nature by humans, of labor by capital, of queers by straights, and other dominations. They tend to see the causes of the dominations in the ideas that are used to rationalize and to justify the dominations. What they look for in Plato they find. I find it too. (Richards 1995) However, I am of the school of thought that holds that the main key to overcoming today’s dominations and dysfunctions is to be found in constructing alternatives that work.   The deep causes that make the problems intractable in spite of countless empirical studies designed to find solutions to them are structural causes.   Effective solutions to the problems require transforming the basic cultural structures of the modern world.
             What I look for in Plato; and in any text ancient or modern, western or non-western; are cultural resources.   A cultural resource, defined by analogy to a natural resource, is whatever enables people to cooperate and to share.   In other works I have attempted to overcome the incredulity of those who find it counter-intuitive to believe that anything as humble as cooperating and sharing could contribute key elements to anything as momentous as transforming basic global structures. (See Richards 1995, Richards and Swanger 2006, Richards 2007) In the 2006 work my co-author and I define social democracy as implementing ancient ideals of cooperation and sharing under modern industrial conditions.
        I think I have shown in this chapter that engaging in soul-talk is not an inherently meaningless activity.   It is a language-game some people play and some people do not play. Whether in a given context it does more good than harm (as a cultural resource) or more harm than good (as an instrument of mystification and repression) is a separable question. It is a question about the interface between cultural reality and physical reality. It is an instance of a kind of question harder to answer than questions about the meanings of words, because the answer does not depend on human conventions.    As an ecologist, a pragmatist, and a critical realist, I think it is possible to make reasonable judgments concerning how well the language-games we are playing enable us to cope happily with the existential conditions of life, although I do not think it is easy to do so.
          I recommend soul-talk and other kinds of talk that honor the self and promote its social integration, as just what is needed in the conditions imposed on us by today’s global economy.   We live in a world where common sense (or common senses in plural) is (are) disintegrating. (See Chapter Three above.) The elementary forms of authority that organize meaning and cooperation dissolve one by one. We live in a world largely governed by contractual relationships in which those who have nothing to sell that someone else wants to buy have no contracts and therefore few and weak relationships.   The poor, the delinquent, the mentally ill, the alcoholic, and the drug dependent tend to be the same people, the excluded.   Even many who are not poor in strictly monetary terms are culturally poor, and are drawn into low life for reasons similar to those that draw the homeless into it. In this world, our world, an emphasis on relationships of soul to soul recovers ancient sources of legitimate authority; it refers to what is highest in the person and commands most respect. In this world soul-talk can help to alleviate the social disintegration caused by the rejection of those who fail to achieve satisfying economic relationships, and partly or wholly as a consequence of economic failure fall into one or another form of evasion of reality.
            The political and economic problem of achieving social democracy cannot helpfully be separated from grassroots community-building. In our world where so many people are so emotionally damaged, where so many suffer from addiction, aggressiveness, and anxiety (Frankl 1964), community-building cannot helpfully be separated from the therapeutic and evangelical problem of integrating the alienated. The culture of recovery should not be separate –although unfortunately it often is separate—from the social project of building better cultures to recover into.   I suggest that both the desired better culture and the processes leading to it would be enhanced by greater respect for souls.
              Jerome Frank has shown in Persuasion and Healing how different forms of psychotherapy in different cultures, some of which use soul-talk and some of which do not, pursue similar goals. (Frank 1961). Above and beyond the various schools of thought and practice usually called psychotherapy, Frank also considers faith healing, shamans, and various ways in which traditional and modern societies have institutionalized the “healing” of people whose behavior is deviant in ways categorized using the term “sick” or some other term which functions as “sick” functions in our culture.   In Frank’s terminology different societies and social groups support the work of “persuaders” who help “sufferers.”     A persuader necessarily works within the “assumptive world” of the sufferer.    Healing by persuasion employs meanings available in the culture both persuader and sufferer are part of.   The result of healing is to a large extent the re-integration of the deviant individual into the group.   The sufferer ceases to suffer, and begins to function normally, when the sufferer is able to become connected again to the social system as a person who has a respected role to play in it. Soul-talk plays a subordinate role in Frank’s study, as a kind of discourse employed in some healing processes but not in others.    I think his findings both justify its legitimacy in cases where soul-talk is already part of the assumptive world of the sufferer, and also support my recommendation to encourage people to regard themselves and others as souls more than they do now. It seems to me that one might account equally well for the facts Frank gathered in his comparative study of several cultures by choosing to use either “therapy,” or “soul-talk,” or “social integration” as the umbrella term covering the other two.
         Several objections that might be brought against my recommendation to do more soul talk concern the relationship between our times and the earlier times when soul-talk began.   “Soul” is an old word. It can be thought to pose a dilemma.   One horn of the dilemma takes soul talk to be inseparable from institutions and beliefs that in ancient and medieval western culture formed the contexts in which that word functioned and had its meanings. But to the extent that old times were worse than our new times –more patriarchal, more hierarchical in general, more violent, poorer, more superstitious—then whatever tendency soul talk has to restore old times is a tendency to make the world worse instead of better.   The other horn of the dilemma is this: Suppose I drop the traditions that have formed the language games in which the word “soul” has been uttered from Plato’s day until modern times began. Then the difficulty appears to be that “soul” does not have enough connections with modern psychology to be assigned a new meaning to substitute for the loss of its old meanings. (Anscombe 1958)
         It might be said that if I am going to recommend doing today with “soul” the sorts of things Plato and his contemporaries did with “psuche” then I should be able to explain how the soul knows what is good or bad, and from whence it derives its authority.   But I cannot.   If I rely on old-fashioned arguments concerning authority, concerning what is good and what is bad; then I rely on the institutions and beliefs of a past many regard as best forgotten. But if I try to build social principles on language games played today, in which one says, for example, “I love you body and soul,” or “my partner and I are soul-mates,” or “we rebuild lives one soul at a time,” or “she has the soul of a poet,” or “although much of his conduct has been anti-social, deep in his soul there lives the memory of a caring mother,” then I am building on sand. When “soul” slips into contemporary speech today, it might be said, it can only be a rhetorical flourish with no solid meaning and no important consequences.   If I am promising to build on “soul” a justification of authority and a criterion for distinguishing right from wrong, I am making a promise that cannot be kept.   Or so it would seem.
         But there is another possibility.   A recommendation to do more soul talk need not be taken as a threat or a promise to restore real or imagined past certainties.   Nor need it be a promise to use “soul” to overcome today’s uncertainties.   There is a third possibility. It may be a better way to talk that leaves our certainties and uncertainties for the most part unchanged.        Calling human subjects souls enhances the authority of our existing ideal –the dignity of the human person— in an additional and supplementary way, as Wittgenstein did when he treated his friend as a soul (Wittgenstein 1958, p.178).     One should not postpone the benefits of doing more soul talk until one is ready to accompany them with a complete justification of ethics.
          Reviving “soul” might be –and I think it is—a step in a good direction, a step that on the whole affirms and improves women and men, a step that contributes to the reenchantment of the world (Berman 1981),      even though by itself it neither provides nor requires a complete solution to modernity’s crisis of authority; even though by itself it neither rejects nor guarantees the more general solutions to that crisis that I and others have proposed here and elsewhere. I think it is a step in a good direction that blurs a distinction that ought to be blurred.   By reviving an old word in the context of new times it blurs the difference between ancient and modern.      The dilemma posed above exaggerates that difference.   It imagines too sharp a break between our times and the earlier times when soul-talk began.   It underestimates the extent to which ancient cultural structures, and therefore ancient forms of intelligibility, dwell among us still today among our skyscrapers and multi-lane freeways, and in the hyperspace of our world wide web. To convince oneself of their continued presence it is enough to browse the Oxford English Dictionary or any dictionary that gives the histories of words, and to notice how many of the words we use every day carry meanings whose origins are pre-modern.   Nor is there a sharp break between ancient and modern psychology.    Freud’s three actor mind with its superego, its ego, and its id is not much different from Plato’s three part soul with its rational part, spirited part, and appetites, and neither is much different from up to date ego psychology (Gray 2005).           Other schools of contemporary psychology (besides ego psychology) also bear similarities to the belief-systems of other cultures and to earlier belief-systems of our own culture. (See the work of Jerome Frank discussed above.)    If some contemporary psychologists prefer to write “ego” where Plato wrote “psuche,” that tends to confirm my suggestion that “soul” often refers to a shifter, a word that changes meaning depending on who is speaking, like the personal pronouns “I,” “you,” “she,” and “he.”   (“Ego” is a Latin pronoun for “I”).    For many psychologists switching back to “soul” is an appealing option (Hillman 1975). If Michel Foucault still in the 20^th century often prefers to describe social control in prisons, schools, and other institutions in terms of a biopolitics of “soul,” instead of employing a more contemporary term like “subject,” or “individual,” then that tends to confirm that in the history of systems of thought there are continuities as well as discontinuities.
           After late Wittgenstein one should have fewer conceptual prejudices, and make fewer wholesale judgments.    Wittgenstein demonstrates that before making a judgment about a given word, one should examine what it does in practice. His outlook favors considering the possibility that a word may be helpful in some contexts and harmful in others. My recommendation to do more soul-talk should not be rejected immediately on the ground that from a scientific point of view the word “soul” is a non-starter.   Wittgenstein levels the playing field, so that different ways of talking can be judged according to what they do in their contexts.

                                       References
* While I here implicitly endorse several of Wittgenstein’s ideas and procedures, I do not agree with what Roy Bhaskar calls his idealism; I do not agree, for example, that the theory of evolution has nothing more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis of natural science (Wittgenstein 1922, section 4.1122) nor that belief in causal connections is superstition. (Id. 5.1361)
G.E.M. Anscombe, ¨Modern Moral Philosophy, ¨ in Collected Philosophical Papers, volume III.   Oxford. Blackwell, 1981. (1958)
Hannah Arendt, On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969.
Thomas Berry, The Dream of Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988.
Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Albert Camus, The Rebel. London: Penguin Classics, 1971. (first published in French in 1951)   (1951)