I continue looking into the implied theory of ghosts in Reginald Hill’s short story “There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union”. After preliminaries (the pseudoscientific psychobabble, underlying metaphysics of persons), we’re knee-deep into Chislenko’s reasoning and the identification of ghosts with persons (and not for the first time).
6. There is an extra complication with the story’s theory of ghosts that I haven’t yet commented on. In the ghost sighting episode, there are two people who are not really there but seen by the witnesses: the “ghost”, i.e. the man who dies, and another man who murders him. What’s the status of that latter figure? Is he a ghost? But he hasn’t died in strange circumstances that trigger a recurrence. In fact, as the story later shows, he hasn’t died at all during narrative time. The witnesses later identify him as one of the people involved in the investigation. So by the Chislenko reasoning, that’s not a ghost. But obviously, nor is he a “currently” living person. Thus in the metaphysical universe of this story, not only are there sightings of people who don’t live any more, disembodied egos — there are also sightings of earlier versions of people who still live!
Now this doesn’t contradict either of premises (1) or (2), of course: we could still assume that the ghost is a person who has died in the past under circumstances that trigger a recurrence. But now the picture begins to appear seriously incomplete: premises (1) and (2) seem collectively no longer necessary to qualify an episode as ghost sighting. (They weren’t collectively sufficient in the first place, either: not every past death would cause actual ghost sightings, only a subset plausibly would.) True, that only applies if we consider the second person a ghost as well. But if we don’t, then what’s the alternative? Then, in addition to persons and person-ghosts, we’d now have to deal with another, third, category: that of non-ghost non-persons.
Alternatively, we might refine premise (2), by making it weaker: a ghost now would not just be a person who died, but might be a person “somehow related” to another person’s death. But now we’re drifting into adding epicycles — this starts to look like a desperate move, making things extremely complicated without aiding understanding.
The problem with this situation, once more, arises because of the idea that a ghost is either a person, or at least in some sense a continuation of a person. (That is the first Chislenko premise, premise (1)). If one thinks of persons as not necessarily (only contingently) embodied, i.e. if one thinks that a person is something like the “bodiless essence” or “soul” of the people we usually see around us, one assumes that the person, qua ghost, is simply the same thing, just now having left their body. If one thinks of persons as necessarily embodied, a ghost can no longer be the person after the person has died, but could be something derivative and secondary (i.e., a person now disembodied, as in the speculative notion we have discussed earlier in Strawson — a notion that’s at least conceivable, although not likely empirically realistic).
But the second person the witnesses see in the ghost sighting episode in Hill’s story fits neither idea: it cannot simply be identified with the person, since that person is still around (now having aged significantly, but still inhabiting the same body). Even if one were willing (quite absurdly) to go as far as claiming that the “bodiless essence” of a person can be in two places at the same time (once, still inside that body, and secondly, appearing in the ghost sighting episode), this would not work here: the person has obviously no consciousness of appearing in that ghost sighting. But the relaxed version (“in some sense a continuation of a person”) wouldn’t apply either, since that presupposes that the person has died and that whatever secondary entity remains (the “continuation”) is now existing independently of the earlier body it inhabited. But that’s not the case: the embodied person is still there (and alive). So there is really no sense of “ghost” in which that second person that is sighted in the ghost sighting can be plausibly called a ghost.
