This is the topic for our Cambridge philosophy café this Halloween week. Here are the notes that have been circulated, with small changes. They comprise only questions. Answers are left as an exercise for the reader.
The ghosts of Halloween are the ghosts of folklore. They may be scary, but they vanish in the sunrise of sobriety. The ghosts of philosophy are something else. Studying them may teach us something about being human.
We find them in Jean-Paul Sartre's screenplay Les jeux sont faits, filmed in 1947. The deceased are ghosts who can walk around the city, can see and be concerned about what goes on, but can only interact with other ghosts. The living cannot see or hear them, and they can do nothing in the world of the living unless they are briefly returned to life - as happens to the two main characters.
Detachment from the world, fully aware of what was going on but unable to help, could be annoying. But more than that, is it essential to our humanity that we can do things? Does your sense of who you are depend on your being in a world that changes in response to your actions? Are you only who you are because you are at a specific location, a point from which you not only see certain things you would not see from elsewhere but can do things you could not do if you were elsewhere? (Lucy O'Brien's book Self-Knowing Agents is particularly relevant here.)
Another element of the sense of self that ghosts would lack would be a sense of achievement. It is not just that we do things. We find that the world resists. Doing things takes effort, and sometimes things do not go to plan. We can say "I did that" with pride. How important is a sense of achievement to our sense of self? Sartre's ghosts would lack any such sense.
Sometimes we must say "I did that" with shame. We make choices that we later see as bad ones. We take responsibility for our actions - or at least, we do if we are good existentialists. Is that possibility vital to our humanity? Again, ghosts would be safe from any such sense because they would not act in the world.
One of our greatest challenges is time, or the lack of it. In the screenplay we are told that the living seem to be in a hurry, while the dead just stroll around. Would we be fully human if we did not feel the pressure of time?
Situations demanding action, our responses, our successes and our failures make us different people. But if we were ghosts, without the pressures and possibilities of life, would each of us still be unique? Perhaps after a while all the ghosts Sartre imagined would be the same, dressed in the costumes of the times when they died but otherwise indistinguishable.
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