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  • The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity
  • Susan Paterson Glover (bio)
Raymond Martin and John Barresi. The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity. Columbia University Press. 2006. 384. US$32.00, 22.95

In an interview discussing his most recent book, I Am a Strange Loop, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter (author of Gödel, Escher, Bach) was asked why he had used the term soul in his discussion of human consciousness. He replied that, of all the possible terms one could use, it most evocatively suggests the deep mystery of first-person existence that any philosophically inclined person must wonder about. Those wishing to explore the history of how that first-person existence has been wondered about could hardly do better than to read Raymond Martin and John Barresi’s study of personal identity in the Western world.

The book addresses three aspects of this history: its development since the first references to an afterlife by the ancient Greeks up to the middle of the twentieth century, the decline and dismantling in the postwar period of any conceptualizing of a unified or coherent self (the soul had departed considerably earlier), and finally, what it all means for the future of scientific and philosophical inquiry specifically, and humanity generally. The first task – tracing the conceptualizing of and thinking about the soul, and by the nineteenth century, the mind – occupies most of the book. [End Page 133] Twelve chapters take the discussion from the earliest ideas of Pythagoras and Empedocles, who refer to a soul or psyche that could outlast the body, and later Plato’s more sophisticated theories of the self in the Phaedo, to the pessimism of the Frankfurt school and the erasure of a rational, autonomous self in the twentieth century. All of the major figures taking us from the ancients to the Enlightenment are here, along with myriad lesser figures that broaden and contextualize our understanding. While the authors note the foundational contribution of the three monotheistic religions of the West – Judaism, Islam, and Christianity – to the evolution of ideas about personhood, subjectivity, and identity over time, they devote considerable attention to Christian theology prior to the Renaissance and problems associated with the resurrected body. Was the resurrected body exactly the same as the one that had existed on earth? It was obvious that the body decayed, but what about those that had been eaten by animals, or worse, by other humans, absorbed into other bodies? These occupations with the flesh echo curiously in bio-ethical concerns arising in the twenty-first century.

With the arrival of Descartes and the seventeenth century, the word mind began to replace soul. And with Descartes’s dualism came the mechanization of nature and the problematic relation of mind to body. The authors trace the development in the nineteenth century of the disciplines of psychology and sociology, recognizably different from philosophy, but very much involved in the question of the mind and the self. And with the twentieth century comes what the authors call, in the penultimate chapter, Paradise Lost; the unified subject or self had been exposed as a fiction, posing new challenges to philosophers, and leaving the continuing investigations of the fragments to medical and social scientists.

The extraordinary breadth of material is evident in a scan of the names; the randomly chosen ‘H’ section reveals, inter alia, Habermas, Harrington, Hartley, Hazlitt, Hegel, Heidegger, Heloise, Heraclitus, Herder, Hermes Trismegistus, Hippocrates, Hobbes, Homer, Horkheimer, Hume, Husserl, and Huxley. What isn’t here is much consideration of any questions of gender: gender-neutral language is used for the most part through the consideration of two thousand years of thinking about subjectivity and self, as though these were the same for men and women throughout the history of Western thought. In their discussion of the early eighteenth century, the authors note that Locke’s critics failed to see the wave of naturalization about to engulf them, but that later in the century their vision improved. I shall wish the same for the authors here. In the meantime, this study offers a superb survey of what the authors...

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