Soul Discretion

Actions might be soulless, music played with soul, earnest reflection soul-searching, the pith or model of something its very soul, a lover one’s soul mate. Upon my soul!, one wants to say, What a useful word! Notice, however, that when “soul” is applied in these ways, it can also be paraphrased sensibly. Actions are robotic, uninspired or insensitive, music rhythmically infectious and emotionally intense, reflection honest and thorough, the very soul of something a surpassingly fit example of it, a lover or mate extremely close and well matched. A pretty word, and a useful one, but hardly mysterious.

What are people saying when they talk about immaterial alter egos or souls? These souls don’t think or speak, cannot live or act at all except vicariously through their owners’ lives. For that reason they cannot be said to have the least effect on or in the world. A soul is created entire at the moment the person is, and disappears entirely at the person’s dissolution. It cannot be sensed, improved, expanded, damaged or manipulated. No ascription of responsibility can be made to souls. No communication can be transacted with them. Outside the religious fantasy, any application of the word “soul” and its varieties that we might make to people will not refer to souls, but to people, as do the instances cited above.

So why do people cling to their immaterial, metaphysical souls? Habit, dogma, pride? Perhaps as a direct and intimate link to an immaterial, metaphysical God? People believe in all sorts of funny things for all sorts of funny reasons, I suppose.

The Act of Being

Is it so strange to suggest that personality is shaped, meaningful selfhood undertaken, individuation achieved, through the manipulation of varied, complex and ramifying relations to a larger neighbourhood or family or world? Not just words, but people too, make sense only in a context or setting. And this setting does not have to be static. As much as any person, one's personal setting, place or function can and will be altered, refined, expanded, fitted, shaped, balanced, harmonized, electrified, and authenticated through action.

Actions are guided by values. Yet received, conventional, neighbourhood values are actively culled, sorted, weighted and shaped by individuals. This routine is circular, of course, but the circle is integral and alive: integral because it cannot be avoided, and alive because its content changes constantly.

I don't claim that this is how things should be; this is how they are.

In all this complicated process of acting, the play writes itself, constrained and undetermined.

Never say to someone, “Be what you are.” That isn't possible.

Honestly

People sometimes lie. Some lies are effective. The most effective lies are those that tell us what we want to hear. Our first defense against advertising, then, is self-knowledge.

This, That and the Other

Tanks are vessels, often large, usually intended to contain liquid or gas. A tank might also be the quantity of material thus contained. A tanker will transport it. Damp and secure, jail cells are called tanks. Things that fail are said to tank, perhaps after the septic container. To tank up is to fill with fuel or alcohol, by which latter means inebriates get tanked, sometimes while wearing tank tops. The word “tank” might have come to English from Latin via Portuguese, in which case it is related to “staunch”, itself implying both firmness and the stoppage of fluid. Large, strong athletes are often nicknamed Tank after the weapon of war.

While designing tanks for military purposes during The Great War, the British called them landships. To keep their development secret from the Germans, landships were publicly described as tanks for holding benzene or water (take your pick). Military jargon in English now dubs the tank an Armoured Fighting Vehicle, partly to ape the German Panzerkampfwagon, and partly to empty the vessel of its civilian and undisciplined content. Even soldiers, however, generally contract this to its acronym AFV, or retain that gem of common parlance, the vulgar “tank”.

Many a philosopher has dreamed the dream of a perfectly unequivocal language in which each utterance says one and only one thing. Innovation in such a language would be difficult. Not only would it require the invention from scratch of new words and whole idioms every time something new was to be said, but such neologisms would lack the buzzing fertility of pre-existing, equivocal, expressions: their history, their grammatical plasticity, their whole or leadingly partial synonymity, their connotative auras and figurations, their innate humour and suitability for play, their manifold and ramifying relations to a local neighbourhood or family of sense. Equivocation is as important to invention in words as indeterminacy is to growth in character.

Something New under the Sun

“Then a thane of Hrothgar who was skilled in word and song, who knew the lays of olden days, sang new words truly bound, began to sound in story all the glory-feat of Beowulf. He stirred his phrases wisely, mixing rhythm with the words, and told a wonder-tale...” Beowulf, 867b-874a.

Twin Peaks, or The Ghosts that Haunt Me

Given that our language is rule-governed and community based, its complex norms the stuff of learning to speak, how is it anyone ever says anything that is both meaningful and new? How do we say new things?

Given that the elements of every individual’s character are shared by large numbers of other individuals, that people are not in fact snowflakes, how is meaningful individuation possible? How do we be new things?

If meaning can be generated within a language, and personal identity can be generated in, through and by living a human life, might not these processes, or sets of processes, be related or similar? How so?

In the Balance

Good ideas are a dime a dozen. If you want to know what work is, try negotiating their implementation. Any creation introduced to custom’s house will require something similar, since to excite one expectation is always to disappoint others. And when the arrangement is quite new, when it confounds its idiom, the negotiation can be heartbreaking.

Of course, good ideas from Planet 9 are not so common. What generally makes innovation work is its fit into, onto or around some received pattern of values or rules or functions or expectations. The smooth and productive fitting together of new and old can be called a balance. Caught in the balance, however, there will still be casualties.