The word soul in Hebrew is nephesh. In Hebrew literature, nephesh means throat. Whatever else we make of words figuratively, and there is plenty to make of them that way as I’m about to show, we take literature literally for the same reason we take music musically. We start there so that it can take us somewhere.

The Hebrew language is earthy and imagistic, thick with metaphor, and nephesh is characteristic Hebrew. Think about your neck. It connects what thinks with what feels, to say nothing of everything else. Your neck or throat is where the wind goes up and down between your nostrils your mouth and your lungs. It’s a place where everything comes together. Everything has to go between the head and the body. Cut your neck and it’s all over. There’s nothing. No nephesh no soul, no ‘you’. Notice that the word itself doesn’t have anything to do with the invisible. It’s visible. It’s the neck, the throat.

On 22 May, 1986, my first child was born at 3:42 in the morning. After a long day prior of contractions and a longer night of labor, when our nurse and our obstetrician recognized that the baby was in severe distress, they rushed blessed Victoria and me too into the operating room where I watched my son Evan delivered by emergency caesarean section. When the coast was clear, I went out to a waiting room and closed the louvered doors of an old-fashioned phone booth to call my parents. The phone rang once, and again, then my father picked up and said hello. At the sound of his voice, all that I’d wanted to say I couldn’t say. I couldn’t speak. Something was stuck in my throat, and it was this recognition: All my life I thought I knew my parents loved me, and now I know I had no idea.

In the English language there are idioms that have nothing to do with Hebrew. Stuck in the throat isn’t one of them.

Isaac Babel’s fate illustrates a key tenet of Soviet ideology, perhaps the single most important one. I have in mind the doctrine that there is no such thing as human nature or individual selfhood. As thinkers from John Locke to Margaret Mead and today’s many “social constructionists” like to say, people are simply whatever they are conditioned to be. In his 1921 treatise, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology, Bukharin claimed that

if we examine each individual … we shall find that at bottom he is filled with the influences of his environment, as the skin of a sausage is filled with sausage meat… . The individual himself is a collection of concentrated social influences, united in a small unit.

And that is all he is.

It follows that selfhood cannot be violated. Individual rights do not exist because individuals do not exist. Human nature places no limit on social engineering because human nature does not exist in the first place. Brent concludes:

The endpoint of Bukharin’s logic is that everyone is a nonperson… . Inwardness and all that comes with it, selfhood, consciousness and conscience were nothing but the illusions of a long history of Western metaphysics. What remains after the illusions of the bourgeois sausage, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” universal justice, or truth are scraped away? Power alone and its terror, a fury that in Lenin’s words can express itself and “therefore must.” … The physical destruction of individuals had long been preceded by their philosophical negation.

Marxism-Leninism claims to be materialist, but, in fact, it is governed by ideas. It is the idea of social constructionism — certainly not empirical reality — that led Stalin and so many since to treat people as the wholly redesignable products of their environment, as so much sausage.

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Gary Saul Morson in The New Criterion, reviewing Inside the Stalin Archives by Jonathan Brent.

Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed… . Modern Westerners have a clear boundary between mind and world, even mind and body. Moral and other meanings are “in the mind.” They cannot reside outside, and thus the boundary is firm. But formerly it was not so. Let us take a well-known example of influence inhering in an inanimate substance, as this was understood in earlier times. Consider melancholy: black bile was not the cause of melancholy, it embodied, it was melancholy. The emotional life was porous here; it didn’t simply exist in an inner, mental space. Our vulnerability to the evil, the inwardly destructive, extended to more than just spirits that are malevolent. It went beyond them to things that have no wills, but are nevertheless redolent with the evil meanings.

See the contrast. A modern is feeling depressed, melancholy. He is told: it’s just your body chemistry, you’re hungry, or there is a hormone malfunction, or whatever. Straightway, he feels relieved. He can take a distance from this feeling, which is ipso facto declared not justified. Things don’t really have this meaning; it just feels this way, which is the result of a causal action utterly unrelated to the meanings of things. This step of disengagement depends on our modern mind/body distinction, and the relegation of the physical to being “just” a contingent cause of the psychic. But a pre-modern may not be helped by learning that his mood comes from black bile, because this doesn’t permit a distancing. Black bile is melancholy. Now he just knows that he’s in the grips of the real thing.

Here is the contrast between the modern, bounded, buffered self and the porous self of the earlier enchanted world. As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that the things beyond don’t need to “get to me,” to use the contemporary expression. That’s the sense to my use of the term “buffered” here and in A Secular Age. This self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it.

These two descriptions get at, respectively, the two important facets of this contrast. First, the porous self is vulnerable: to spirits, demons, cosmic forces. And along with this go certain fears that can grip it in certain circumstances. The buffered self has been taken out of the world of this kind of fear. For instance, the kind of thing vividly portrayed in some of the paintings of Bosch.

Charles Taylor