In a previous post titled The fog of religious language I said that sophisticated religious apologists tend to speak so vaguely and elliptically that it is hard to know exactly what they actually believe, and singled out Marilynne Robinson as one culprit. In an interview in the September/October issue of The New Humanist, she does it again.
Q: You use the word “soul” in your book. What do you mean by this?
A: There is a very primary self, a companion self one answers to, intimate and aloof, keeper of loyalties, bearer of loneliness and sorrow, faithful despite neglect and offence, more passionate lover of everything one loves, the unaccountable presence of joy in quiet and solitude. Soul is one name for this self within the self, which I believe is a universal human possession.
Well, I’m glad we cleared that up.
Good point. Also, interesting how she name drops Yale in the first sentence of her interview.
There are terms that just cannot be defined with words and this is a very good example of it. But it’s not only a question of religious language. What about philosophy and the passion for creating new abstracts terms that have only a meaning in connection with a certain point of view? The German language is peferct for this that’s why it is often called the language of philosophy.
Robert,
The problem is not that of the difficulty of capturing abstract quantities in words.
The problem is that people like Robinson never come right out and say that the soul is an entity that exists apart from the body but talk about it as if that is implied.
Does what people call the ‘soul’ exist independently of the body or not? That seems to me to be a fundamental question that believers in it should be able to answer yes or no.
Mano,
Indeed this is a fundamental question and I understand your point. The soul lives on even when the body dies -- this is what very often is heard and said and this is what people mostly believe in. But because it is a belief, it cannot be explained rationally or maybe I am wrong?
Robert,
From a philosophical standpoint it is very important to explain these abstract things rationally. That is, I think that is the main point of philosophy (I am not a philosopher myself so I might be wrong).
These types of questions are quite hard so to be rigorous you need to start defining what the terms mean. So a good way to do this is to invite multiple definitions for the word “soul” and discuss how well they work. Metrics for this can include
1) How well does the definition coincide with regular usage of the word?
2) Is the definition self consistent?
and so on.
Once (or while) these are worked out we can start thinking about what the properties of the defined category (say soulA or soulB) are.
I think that I ascribe to the philosophy that categories are not real (in the sense that there is no ideal CHAIR that defines the chairness of something) but they are vital for language. Categories can change and shift and overlap. The reason this is my philosophy is because I think that this is how language works and also how consciousness works. But this is why when we are being rigorous we have to be very careful with being clear about what we mean when we invoke a category and what its properties are. We must be aware that categories can be vague and try to avoid this.
The reason Mano (and me too) are so harsh with people like Robinson is because she sneakily shifts back and forth between categories so you can never really know what she is talking about. Kind of like a bait and switch. So in the interview she is only giving secondary properties of her hidden category but never gives its primary properties. She gives the results but not the starting point.
As a sort of PS I want to say that I am not against ambiguity and duality as a whole. In art and literature it is extremely important and often helps continue our understanding of the same fundamental questions. You can have a strong understanding of art and literature without an appreciation of ambiguity and hidden messages. Perhaps this is what you meant? But this is not the contention here. When making a rigorous argument in any context you must have something concrete to base it off of.
Jared,
Thank you for your comprehensive response. I believe I can follow your explanation. I agree that especially in philosophy and religion (or just in general) you need to be very careful about what and how you express your mind.