Effectionary Morality

Innovating on the common RPG trope of monster drops, Dark Souls introduces the idea of the “soul” as an item released upon death of an enemy. The basic idea of the drop is innovated to its always present conclusion in this, where the item once dropped as the expression of what that monster was in life now literally referred to as it functions, the soul of that monster. The brief description of the attained item gives a thesis statement on the monster encountered as well allowing the player to recreate the essence of that monster for themselves, crafting the soul into a weapon that mimics their attacks.

That the soul produces the ability to imitate the attacks of the monster shows that the soul produces what beget it in the first place. The boss appears to the player and only exists in the context of what the boss does unto the player, ie their attacks. That the soul would replicate the attacks, makes the soul return full around to what originally stated the personhood of the boss to the player, their attacks, their actions in relation to the player.

This is a more radical turn than is understood at first interpretation. The soul post-dates the encounter with the person, the being comes as a result of the becoming. The linkages of this to other thinkers are obvious - identity emerges from performance (one is not born, but becomes, as de Beauvoir said) and thus the personhood is created as an accumulation of all that person is.

The opposite of this is pervasive, the platonic referencing to an ideal or higher realm granting personhood. The idea of a platonic soul appears even in cases where the spiritual is on the surface, dead and removed. Often in debates over moral guilt of those who commit violent and criminal acts, the debate goes between two sides endlessly adjudicating the criminal’s immortal soul. One proposes inborn explanations, biological race, gender, etc, the other proposes environmental explanations, systemic obstacles, mental illness, etc. Both of these are ultimately making the same fault and thus are utterly indistinguishable. Both assume that the victim is tabula rasa an immortal soul which was then degenerated into the being they are now, coming up of theories of why a being would do this thing that most beings do not.

The way out of this debate is to recognize that being only occurs as an accumulation of becomings. The being of an individual to everyone except themselves is a creature made by the effects that consciousness had on the world, a composite images of all the marks they’ve left on everything around them. It does not matter whether the criminal had any motivating factors, because what matters is that they’ve made themselves ontologically immoral by becoming-immoral, by committing an immoral act.

The individual made of becomings shows another radical truth of this - the individual ultimately doe not exist outside of themselves. Their personhood is only real in one way to others, with the consciousness being fundamentally not their personhood, but the conductor attempting to steer the construction of their personhood by dictating its becomings. Contra Thatcher, it is the individual which does not exist, only being a consciousness navigating the great mesh of all interlocked effections and becomings.