7 - (Ef)facing the Soul

Summary

Consider the following remark, from one of Wittgenstein's late (1950) manuscripts. The one-sentence remark reads: “It is as if he became transparent to us through a human facial expression” (LW II 67b). This sentence appears within a short series of remarks wherein Wittgenstein is ruminating on the idea of a human being “who had no soul.” As is the case elsewhere in his later writings, part of the upshot of this series of remarks is the difficulty of connecting anything definite or determinate with such an idea, thus calling into question the very idea of an idea here. The immediate context of this sentence is an attempt to describe such a “soulless” human being, and Wittgenstein finds himself resorting to rather familiar imagery of mechanical, uniform movements characteristic of an automaton. Even the thrashing and writhing of such a being, Wittgenstein declares, if carried out in a sufficiently mechanical fashion, might still not bespeak the presence of a soul; the being we are imagining would, in this way, fail to be “transparent,” not so much by remaining opaque, but by having nothing further to discern beneath the surface (except maybe more machinery). If, however, the play of the face were sufficiently nuanced, the idea of a soul would begin to find a place in our imagining of this being, and likewise the “possibility” of such a being nonetheless lacking a soul would begin to evanesce.