On Ghosts

Everybody knows that ghosts take two basic forms: “residual” and what I can only call “interactive.”

Residual apparitions, while perceptible by one or more of the senses, seem stuck as it were in a loop. Clanking and creaking on the same staircase, at the same “small hour,” for the same duration. A shriek at the same pitch, with the same muffled reverberation, at the same stroke of midnight every All Hallows’ Eve.

They say that on certain crisp, autumnal evenings, when the fog captures and diffuses streetlamp light the way clouds sometimes catch moonlight in their translucent bellies, you can still today make out the faint whisperings of Edgar Allen Poe to Sarah Helen Whitman behind the pyramidal stairs of the Athenaeum in Providence, Rhode Island. It’s as if these forbidden lovers are doomed to repeat in lawlike fashion their liaisons that came to naught. Thus drones on the same sounds, figures, phantoms, events, dramas, tragedies, pivotal moments and peculiar habits of bygone eras—a masquerade of subjects utterly objectified, reels of the externalized past projected onto the screen of the present, stilted friezes on motile panels endlessly circling round the wheel of time.

Interactive apparitions, in near exact contrast, are perceptible by the senses but are often intended precisely for the one sensing. A symbol orchestrated to console a grieving loved one, something only the dead beloved could have known to use. Trickster ghosts that shuffle furniture and dishware, or cut an almost viscid-yet-transparent figure lurking in a photo’s backdrop, or flip off lights and turn on radios, or—to report an anecdote from an extended family member—make subtle replies to a podcast monologue of his, replies he detected only when he went to produce the episode.

In Schelling’s Clara, a three-way dialogue “On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World” between a priest, a doctor, and Clara herself, the doctor alludes to the then famous haunting of the French actress, Hypollite Clairon (Goethe had repackaged it in his “Story of the Singer Antonelli”). A certain “Mr. S” made his way into her social circles, quite obviously wishing to court her. Ms. Clairon did not requite, politely avoided him, and he fell ill. She refused to visit him even as she funded his care unto death, which occurred two and a half years later. On many an occasion thereafter Ms. Clairon along with her usual group of dinner guests would hear a scream at the same hour, 11:00pm. Soon the scream was replaced by a gunshot, and this in turn became “the sound of hands applauding and then fading into melodic sounds”—always at that same hour. Exactly two and a half years after the day of Mr. S’s death, all sounds ceased. Sometime later, Ms. Clairon inquired with a servant who relayed that when Mr. S heard that Ms. Clairon would not visit him on his deathbed, he cried out, “[S]he won’t gain anything by that, I will pursue her after my death for as long as I have pursued her in life!” He died around 10:30pm.¹ The irrepressibly personal anguish, the precision of details, the artful design of it all—these intersubjective strands weave an intensely second-person relation binding the disembodied to the embodied just long enough to express spectrally what had been suppressed terrestrially.

All of which leads me to suspect that ghosts are not “spirits” at all. They are the broken parts of spirit(s) scattered across spacetime. What I mean is that the reason apparitions come in residual and interactive forms, i.e. as pure object “out there” beyond my person and as intersubjective intentionality aimed “in here” at my person, is because any and every person that was, is, and ever shall be—every spirit—is both objective and subjective. Indeed, spirit is their very identity as this or that person in active relation to all else. Spirit, in my usage here, names the paradoxical identity that is at once utterly singular and utterly open to mutually constitutive relations with all.

We’ve always suspected something of the sort, haven’t we? Plato, for instance, conceived the soul as that incorporeal life-principle endowed with reason and desire, which, although oriented in the very structures of its knowing towards the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, could yet turn its desire through “constant intercourse and association with the body” towards the merely corporeal—the “bodily element” that’s “heavy, ponderous, earthy, and visible.” A soul can do this even after death. Plato was a great champion of the ancient metaphysical axiom, “like knows like.” A correlative axiom is that the knower’s soul becomes like what it knows: “such a soul has become heavy and is dragged back to the visible region in fear of the unseen and of Hades.” After its departure from its own body, this soul “wanders, we are told, around graves and monuments, where shadowy phantoms, images that such souls produce, have been seen, souls that have not been freed and purified but share in the visible, and are therefore seen.”²

Note three features of Plato’s account of ghosts here. First and most obviously, he regards the soul as capable of becoming less soul-like and more body-like. Perhaps one could say that as the soul becomes the very objects of its own desire, and since those objects are themselves mere (external, visible, heavy) objects, the soul, as subject, objectifies itself. (Yes, this is to read Plato in a more idealist fashion than this dialogue likely merits. But humor me a while longer.) The second feature’s this: the soul’s self-objectification as “bodily” never entirely succeeds. Its failure produces new yet unintended objectivity. These are the “shadowy phantoms” and “images” the spooked onlooker glimpses.

The third feature proves a bit more elusive and ghostly to grasp. It is that the soul’s newly produced objectivity, though wrought by its desire for determinate (bodily!) objects, remains abstract all the same. The soul longs for “the bodily” in many bodily objects. It’s as if such a soul doesn’t even know quite what it desires as it desires a fragmented multitude of extended objects, and that this ignorance turns its intention now to this object, now to that, such that it runs through a series of one damned object after another. The very failure of ever acquiring what it wants—and so of ever being embodied—blots out the contours of its actual “object.” Its object appears always vanishing, always elusive, exactly as the ghost’s own gossamer-like “images” (or sounds, or reverberations, etc.) that render it (sort of) sensible.

Schelling’s doctor-character plays on Plato. Suppose the ghost itself isn’t merely an incorporeal soul in thrall to desiring the bodily but is instead borne along a continuum of becoming truly spiritual. “For there may be so many intermediate stages,” the doctor remarks, “from a person’s present corporeality right up to spirituality that at death he could, indeed, break free from the former without thereby passing over into the spiritual and completely leaving the external, corporeal world.” Like Plato, Schelling thinks the “evil will” of a disembodied soul, just because it lacks the body it loves to sate, develops “a strong yearning for the body.” Beyond Plato, Schelling sees that this yearning orients the ghost’s intention towards potentially any and all bodies whatsoever, especially those it might conveniently use for some end. Nor does it matter much that the ghost is disembodied when it comes to its making use of the bodily. We already know of at least one case where the (relatively) non-bodily immediately affects the bodily: ours. “Thus,” he goes on, “it doesn’t seem impossible to think that when released from its own body that essence [i.e. the disembodied soul] could have greater freedom to affect other things and that, like a corrosive, it could free that similar essence within them, too.”³

Notice: what began as an account of seemingly interactive, intention-having ghosts—Plato’s account presumes the subjective desire of the disembodied soul for the bodily—rather easily transitions into an account of increasingly objective, “residual” apparitions. The subject becomes what it desires, and it desires bodily objects; its enacted desire makes it quasi-bodily in proportion to the failure of any bodily object to satisfy its desire; this failure then diffuses its desire in an abstract direction towards “the bodily,” all of which appears to terminate in sheer objectivity—sheer external “manifestation” of a disembodied yet self-objectified subject. An abstract desire for just whatever body at all is simply another way to describe the absolute externalization of the ostensibly interior subject. Interactive apparition becomes residual apparition.

But what if the interactive specter—the poltergeist—desires not external objects but other subjects or persons? Love is good, after all, indeed the summit of all goods. And love is always directed towards another person, a beloved.⁴ Here, though, we must ask: Does the departed soul desire another person truly or falsely? Is it a desire from love for the true beloved or from spite of some false image projected onto the putatively beloved? Or, as with living souls, is it something situated more precariously in between? When the ghost’s desire is good and pure and true, we get those tender tales of the departed somehow consoling the aggrieved in a paranormal way. We also get Jacob Marley and the three “spirits” that haunt Scrooge unto salvation. An interactive apparition’s intentionality is still intersubjective, still destined for another subject, and so still attentive to the particular condition and apposite need of the other. They need not always be touching communications bringing immediate reassurance. But when the ghost’s desire is evil or false, it appears menacing or mindless. Such are the hauntings, the horrors, perhaps even the demonic confrontations. Demonic, I say, because the disembodied soul’s evil desire depends on a false objectification of the subject it intends—a disfigured portrait or deluded storyline to which the intended subject is reduced. And it is just this false object that demon and wicked soul alike desire to control, to possess.

Here again, with this second form of an interactive apparition corrupted by false desire, we meet a lurid transition from subjective desire into false objectivity. The impassioned poltergeist concentrates its entire intention upon the haunted, living other. This gives the impression of an intensely intersubjective encounter (“I felt the distinct burning of unseen eyes gazing upon my back”). But what’s really happening is that this hyper-subject—something like a mere subject—craves not the enriching relation and experience of love for the other, but rather the to disturb, terrify, dominate, or possess “the other” that this ghostly subject has conjured by the inner-workings of its own fancy. Like any evil will, it objectifies the other subject in order to have or even to become that objectified subject. Supremely interactive apparition becomes supremely residual apparition, here the dully diffuse “subjectivity” that wants to be any and all subjects as objects. Hollywood devours these scripts.

From every vantage, then, what we call “spirits” appear to be mere fragments of true spirit, variously refracted and objectified and subjectified (so to speak). It’s not so strange though, this notion that certain dimensions of spirit can be experienced in separation from each other. If you squint a little, you can catch it even in today’s standard physics. Nothing you perceive is right “now” as it was when the photons that hit your retina departed from whatever you now perceive. Of course, most of the time that doesn’t matter much. If you’re two feet from me, what your face looked like at the time it took light to travel two feet between us is almost exactly what it looks like “now” (from your perspective) as I’m seeing your face. But when the light emanates from vast distances, from stars and galaxies and the like, what we see now is not at all what is “there-now” (from the perspective of the objects we are seeing from our “here-now”). There is no third physical (four-dimensional) vantage-point from which to perceive any other perceiver (subject) and perceived (object) at the same space-time. There is no such thing, we now think, as “the same space-time” among any physical objects, at any scale. Which turns up this very odd conclusion: “The past is not ‘over’: it’s racing away from us at the speed of light like ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond, but not in circles—in spheres. Spheres of time.”⁵

If someone who’s positioned, say, two light-years from Earth could somehow perceive another person walking and talking with her best friend in Central Park, the perception wouldn’t be open to interaction with the two friends. The remote perceiver’s perception is of two subjects, but this “of” seems more like an objective genitive: it’s an objective perception, a perception of the subjects that, due to distance, can only ever appear to the distant perceiver as objects. Obviously, things would be otherwise if the distance were shortened from two light-years to two feet. But that just underscores the main point: even in that apparently least ghostly of the fields of perception—in physics—we see the objectivity of subjects splayed across spacetime itself. Nor is this due merely to extended spacetime: the very subjectivity of the subject at the other end of the distance is just as integral to the perception of that other subject entirely objectified. Almost as if the fabric of physics is fragmented spirit.

In his underappreciated book, The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis cautions against interpreting the medieval concept of “spirit” as indicating anything like what we mean when we call “angels or devils or ghosts as ‘spirits.’” Medieval spirit refers instead to a tertium quid, “this phantom liaison-officer between body and soul.” Neither merely immaterial nor merely material, spirits were, “putting it bluntly,” rather like “the aether of nineteenth-century physics, which, for all I could ever learn of it, was to be and not to be matter.”⁶ Lewis detects here the most tendentious doctrine of standard medieval metaphysics. And while I don’t wish to dispute Lewis on the historical point, I wonder if there’s not something more than a pun in linking “spirit” conceived as the tertium quid mediating body and soul to ghostly apparitions, something like a deeper intuition that spirit, whatever else it is, includes within itself body (objectivity) and soul (subjectivity), and that the ability to perceive the separation of objectivity and subjectivity in our act of perceiving other spirits, even ghosts, reflects a severing of spirit itself.

But that’s not quite right either. It’s not that we can rest content with this simple equation: soul = subjectivity, body = objectivity, and so body + soul = spirit. That formulation really would remain open to Lewis’s critique. It’s rather that spirit is the whole of those “parts,” but is therefore their synthesis in such a way that its own logic isn’t reducible to the logic of either part as thought on its own. True subjectivity or personhood, spirit, is no mere hybrid of the two parts; it is their living synthesis. On this view, the formula is more nearly this: soul = objectified subject, body = subjectified object, and so body + soul = the ongoing synthesis of objectified subjectivity with subjectified objectivity. Spirit is the paradoxical, whole unity of all these dimensions as they interpenetrate and find perhaps their most poignant expression in a face. Maybe the Lewis of Till We Have Faces would approve of this development after all.

Spirit as ongoing synthesis can move either to unite its own parts or to divide them. Often, especially in this embodied life, we vacillate, in both degree and scope, in this endeavor. The principle and triumph of such a synthesis is love. Love births and perfects spirit. Love does this because it occurs only by and to and among persons, and the more perfect the love, the more lover and beloved achieve the greatest paradox of all: in true love, the lover becomes simultaneously more singular and more united to the beloved, not merely as “one flesh” (Gen 2.24) but as “one spirit” as well (1 Cor 6.17; Eph 4.4–6). Death, by contrast, understood physically, is anti-synthesis, anti-spirit, the violent separation of spirit’s parts or dimensions in such a way that they still retain traces of their relation to one another (and to all else).

The ghost, then, like death itself, is a parody of synthesis. Yet it retains its “genitive relations,” as it were—the fact that it remains the soul of someone separated from the body of that same one. It bears the traces of its relations to other spirits even as it continues to desire them, falsely or truly or somewhere in between. The ghost will take on various configurations and degrees of objectification, subjectification, love and possession—from the extreme of objectivity (residual apparition) to the extreme of subjectivity (interactive apparition). Hence, they will strike us, we who are spirits too, quite variously. They’ll do so because they are, in a very intimate sense, projections and fragments of the sort of thing we are and the sort of things we desire and do. Our reactions will reflect the same continuum. So ghosts may at times appear as pure menaces: Proserpina “must repress the attach of ghosts and keep the gates to earth closed fast.”⁷ At other times they might effect some momentary foretaste of resurrection: “for the departed, soul is where love is.”⁸ Hence, in literature and eyewitness testimony alike, the ghost reveals itself a most ambivalent signifier, a symbol of all possible despair and all possible promise.

And so I concur with Edith Wharton, who writes in the Preface to her collection of short stories, Ghosts, that whether to believe in ghosts is a “pointless question” posed mostly by “those who are incapable of feeling ghostly influences.” Wharton concedes that the ghost-seer is “a rare bird.” But the “ghost-feeler”? Hardly. The ghost skeptic demands proof ill-fitted for the phenomenon. The skeptic wonders whether “to believe,” but only within the predetermined confines of their own prejudice about what belief here should mean. Belief for the skeptic names “a conscious act of the intellect,” whereas “it is in the warm darkness of the pre-natal fluid far below our conscious reason that the faculty dwells with which we apprehend the ghosts we may not be endowed with gift of seeing.”⁹

My own way of putting it is that the reason so many believe in ghosts is the same reason many don’t: they appear neither as mere object nor mere subject but rather as the broken pieces of the very framework by which we distinguish and unite subjectivity and objectivity as aspects of ourselves. Ghosts are spirit’s own dimensions unnaturally scattered. Ghosts but seldom appear “out there,” sure. They might also seem merely “in here,” a figment of my mind. But then again, what mind, what spirit, what person, is so easily dissected into its parts? Even in its spectral form the spirit strives to express its dimensions anew, albeit never successfully. Yet here again: are we who haunt bodies really any more successful than ghosts?

The dispute over belief in ghosts is not another instance of those (mostly fabricated) contests of “science” versus “religion” or even naturalism versus any other metaphysics. In fact, the statistical and anecdotal trends often move exactly contrary to that thesis. While John Calvin could actively denigrate the ghostly for the sake of his theological doctrine, a recent historian of modern science and religion can write with good reason that “the death of God does not necessitate the death of magic, and if anything, secularization seems to amplify enchantment.”¹⁰ The real struggle, to my mind, is that it’s hard to recognize “spirits” when we can barely recognize ourselves as spirit. “To make themselves, manifest,” writes Wharton, ghosts “require two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind: silence and continuity.”¹¹ She’s admittedly more concerned here with the way modern technology (already in 1937!) scrambles attention with its unbroken background noise and thus drowns out the subtler sounds and sights by which apparitions betray themselves. Still, I think it at the very least poetically precise that these are also just the conditions we require truly to know ourselves.

1. F.W.J. Schelling, Clara, or, On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World. Translated and with an introduction by Fiona Steinkamp (State University of New York Press, 2002 [1812]), Pt. III; see the summary in Steinkamp’s notes at p. 94, n. 13.

2. Plato, Phaedo, 81cd.

3. Schelling, Clara, Pt. III, p. 56–7.

4. Before you charge me with denigrating the rest of impersonal creation, know, dear reader, that I don’t believe in such a thing.

5. Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack, The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World(Yale University Press, 2011), p. 75. Similarly: “The era when our sun and earth were forming, four and a half billion years ago, is still out there, spherically enfolding our solar system, our Galaxy, and all the nearby superclusters of galaxies” (ibid., second emphasis added).

6. C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1964), 166–7.

7. Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11.2 (LCL).

8. Heinrich Stilling, Theorie des Geister-Kunde (1808), quoted by the translator in Schelling, Clara, p. 94, n. 13.

9. Edith Wharton, Ghosts. Selected and with a Preface by the Author (New York Review Books Classic, 2021 [1937]), vii.

10. For Calvin’s aversion to ghosts, see, e.g., Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma (Bayor University Press, 2017), Ch. 1; for the surprising statistical data on modern unbelief in God and belief in the paranormal especially in Western countries, see Joseph Ā. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 22–40.

11. Wharton, Ghosts, ix.