La matière a-t-elle une âme ? Diachronie de matière, substance, objet et chose
Does Matter Have a Soul? Diachronic Analysis of Matter, Substance, Object and Thing

Summary/Abstract: Language is our “form of life”, as Wittgenstein says. We are educated in and by language and it is the very stuff of our thoughts. Language does not give shape to concepts, it is the other way round: meaning is given by the public use of words and it is stored in corpora of various types: memorised conversations, books, archives, papers, the internet, etc. When we are given the name of an object, be it a natural one such as a tree, an artefact such as a piece of machinery, or an immaterial object such as love or envy, we learn four things:1. That an object so named has existence for the speakers of that particular language;2. That this object enjoys a separate existence;3. That corpora of discursive knowledge about the object are readily available;4. That the name comes with a “grammar”, i.e. a phraseology which gives us indications about how to use the word in our utterances. Our anthropological environment is therefore essentially linguistic. Yet we are no more conscious of language than of the air we breathe. In particular, just as we are unaware that air was produced by primordial cosmological events and ensuing chemical reactions, the fact that words have a history escapes us entirely when we use them in discourse. I shall argue here that the history of words does have significant consequences on our thinking and that many a philosophical theory has unwittingly been formed by the very words philosophers have used: we are indeed “bewitched” by language, according to Wittgenstein.To make this point, I will examine the history of four words taken from the realm of matter, i.e. matière (matter), substance (substance), objet (object) and chose (thing). It appears that matter and substance have an immaterial sometimes spiritual aspect to them, and this is why (God forbid!) I wonder in the title of this text whether matter has a soul.To show that the meaning of matter could have evolved differently, I compare it to the words used in Japanese, a non Indo-European language where Greek and Latin have had no founding influence on the lexicon.In the last section, I examine Popper and Eccles’ quanta-based “dualistic-interactionist” theory of the mind and show that the philosophical dualism they advocate rests on deeply ingrained dualistic notions dating back to Aristotle and carried up to the present time by the very words we use to speak of matter.

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