The Risk of Loss
In the legend dramatized by Marlowe and later retold by Goethe, Faust makes a disastrous bargain: he gains a great deal of power and pleasure but loses everything that truly matters. Anyone who thinks that the badness of the bargain hinges entirely on whether there really is an afterlife has failed to grasp much of the deeper significance of the story. Itâs perhaps unlikely that a dramatist today would write a play about selling oneâs soul, but even though the word âsoulâ may be less commonly found than it used to be, the underlying idea is very far from obsolete. Philip Pullmanâs acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials describes a world where people have âdaemons,â which take the form of animals who closely accompany them everywhere. In childhood, peopleâs daemons have the ability to change their shapes frequently, becoming, for example, cats or birds or monkeys, but in adolescence the daemons âsettleâ into a single shape. The daemon is closely linked to the life and distinctive personality of each character, and even a temporary separation of people from their daemons causes intense distress. In the course of the story, some of the characters fall into the hands of evil experimenters who use a hideous process called âintercisionâ: a silver guillotine is employed to sever permanently the lifelong connection between a person and his or her daemon. The result is a listless, demoralized individual, bereft of energy and will, already well on the way to dying.
It does not take any great leap to understand Pullmanâs concept of the daemon as a kind of imaginative representation of the soul, or at least as having something in common with what people mean by that difficult term. Losing your daemon is about the worst thing that can happen to you, depriving your life of its distinctive rhythm and its moral centre. No price, one feels, would be sufficient recompense for losing oneâs daemon, and (as the âintercisionâ episode implicitly conveys) no scientific or technological project, no matter what benefits it promised, could justify depriving someone of his or her daemon. Pullmanâs attitude towards religion is ambivalent (he certainly targets its powerful institutional manifestations), but it is not hard to detect religious overtones in his portrayal of the preciousness and vital importance of oneâs daemon, calling to mind the question posed in the gospels: âWhat shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?â
But what does it really mean to lose oneâs soul? Outside the realm of fantasy fiction, can we today still take seriously the idea of the soul as something we are in danger of losing, or perhaps have already lost? Many of the most influential thinkers of modernity seem to have thought so. T. S. Eliot, that great prophet of the modern age, watched the seething crowds flowing over London Bridge and declared: âI had not thought death had undone so many.â The line deliberately echoes Danteâs vision of the lost souls in Hell, severed from their earthly bodies, just as Eliotâs unfortunate city dwellers seem to be severed from their souls. Herded together, condemned to a repetitive existence that is messy and pointless, âdistracted from distraction by distraction,â they seem to lack any moral purpose, as listless and demoralized as Pullmanâs tragic victims whose daemons have been forcibly sliced off. And yet all this, Eliot implies, is accepted by most people as quite normal: no one seems to have noticed that anything is amiss. A century before Eliot, the philosopher SĂžren Kierkegaard wrote:
A person can go on living fairly well, seem to be a human being, be occupied with temporal matters, marry, have children, be honoured and esteemed, yet it may not be detected that in a deeper sense this person lacks a self.⊠The greatest hazard of all, losing oneâs self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other lossâan arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.âis sure to be noticed.
Instead of âsoul,â Kierkegaard talks of the âself,â or sometimes of the âspirit,â but he seems to be speaking of much the same momentous threat as the danger of losing oneâs soul. Those who âmortgage themselves to the world,â he says, may achieve all kinds of temporal success, but âspiritually speaking they do not existâthey have no self.â Even though it can happen imperceptibly, without anyone noticing, the loss of the self is, for Kierkegaard, a catastrophic moral collapse and amounts to nothing less than âsickness unto death.â Putting this in theistic terms, Kierkegaard says that in losing my self I am losing that which makes me conscious of âexisting before God.â The remark comes in Kierkegaardâs Sickness unto Death, the title of which recalls the gospel story of Lazarus, whose sickness was indeed fatal and who had to be summoned back from the tomb by Christ. Kierkegaardâs implicit suggestion seems to be that the plight of one who has lost his or her very self is even graver than this, unless redeemed by renewed consciousness of God.
Though these reflections of Kierkegaard have a strongly theistic, and indeed Christian, stamp, the idea of the self or soul as the precious and fragile moral core of oneâs being, something that can be irretrievably lost, does not have to be expressed in explicitly religious, let alone Christian, terms. Several centuries before Christ, Socrates reproached his Athenian accusers for being overly concerned with things like money and reputation, but not having the faintest concern for the virtuous conduct of their lives, or the improvement of the most precious part of themselvesâtheir souls. And in some of the later Hellenistic philosophers, the terms âcare of the soulâ and âcare of the selfâ are closely linked. By the time of the Christian gospels, this linkage is well established, so that the saying quoted earlier from Markâs gospel (âWhat doth it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul?â) appears in Luke as âWhat shall it profit a man if he gains the world and loses himself ?â
Lives, we know, can go well or badly. People can be more or less successful, more or less lucky, and advantaged or disadvantaged in many different ways, by birth or geography, or economic circumstances, or physical health. And sometimes such external circumstances can crush someone so completely that no worthwhile human capacities can unfold. But for those able to enjoy at least a basic modicum of health and physical security, there will always be, beyond questions about fortune or misfortune, wealth or poverty, a further more fundamental question about the moral core of their beingâthe âsoulâ or self that defines each individual. Have they found themselves, are they at peace with themselves, or have they wasted their lives, pursuing illusory goods at the cost of losing their very souls?
These brief opening remarks have ranged from the fourth century BC through to the time of Christ, and on down to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and beyond, and it may seem to be moving much too swiftly to assume that ideas from such disparate historical periods can be grouped together. But the essentials of the human condition have not significantly altered in what is, on an evolutionary timescale, the tiniest blink of an eye. Indeed, however often we are told that this or that technical or scientific development has âaltered human life beyond recognition,â the existential predicament that confronts human beings is fundamentally the same as it has always been:
The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
To be sure, these âtroublesâ may manifest themselves under various guisesâas threats to our psychological equilibrium and identity (Pullman), as spiritual and existential anguish (Kierkegaard), as the risk of neglecting the most precious part of ourselves (Socrates). But there is a common thread, insofar as the task of finding or recovering that vital part of ourselves that has been called the âsoulâ is a task that transcends any given historical circumstance and is inseparable from the human condition. Beyond the imperatives of securing the wherewithal to keep ourselves alive and physically secure, to be human is to be subject to a deeper demand, the requirement to seek, and to find, our true identity. This will not be a merely factual task, like determining our genetic profile; it will involve measuring what we have so far made of our lives against what they are capable of becoming. The demand is inescapable, no matter how much we may try to stop our ears to it. And in the way we finally respond to it we will either find ourselves or lose ourselves.