personality disorder

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goldenboy

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I've got a geekish philosophical buffyverse question. I assume it's been discussed ad infinitum. I'm not sure how the buffy/angel writers would define a soul, or a vampire. Is the soul a person's mind, his essence? Or merely one's conscience?

Angel has access to the memories of the crimes of Angelus. He feels the emotion of guilt, though he knows intellectually he's not responsible. There are two distinct beings in that body, yes? Or do they warp eachother into something new and different; no more Liam and no more purely evil demon.

I was thinking of this because of Spike. This vampire/demon must be more noble, less evil than the demon Angelus. This vampire/demon willingly reensouled its body out of a desire for Buffy. From that point on, Spike the demon would be merely a vicarious witness to the actions of William, right? Or are they both somehow in charge simultaneously?

It was always easy to figure out who was driving with Angel/Angelus. But I can't detect a new personality with this new Spike/William being. "Spike" on Angel season 5 seems to be the same cocky, sarcastic SOB he always was. Where is that sad sack loser William the Bloody? Isn't he in charge now? Did he decide he liked Spike the demon better than himself and adopt that persona? Is Spike the noble demon now deep inside William, unable to act, as Angelus is inside Angel?
 
goldenboy said:
It's easy to distinguish who's behind the wheel when it comes to Angel vs Angelus. Spike the former soulless demon seems to be the same sarcastic cocky SOB before and after. I can't detect two distinct personalities there. Where's William, the sad sack loser? Did he decide he liked the personality of Spike the demon better than himself and decided to adopt that persona? And is the demon called Spike now buried within William, like Angelus is buried within Angel?
Click to expand...

It's never outright written down, so all that can be offered really are opinions, and mine would be yeah. The soft poetic nature of William has been subliminated beneath 100 years or so of developing the Spike persona. It's still there, and closer to the surface as we saw in the poetry reading scene of Not Fade away, but it's not the surface personality of what Souled Spike wants to present to the world. You'll notice he kept the bleached hair.

As to has souled Spike changed from chipped I'd say he has. Remember the scene in Just Rewards where Spike wakes Angel and tells him something like he can't live like this. Basically what he was saying was he wanted to do good. Chipped Spike might have helped Buffy, but that was more to impress her, and fit into her world to be with her.

When Drusilla says vampires can love, I think she's talking of a more instinctual, hormonal kind of love, than the kind of spiritual love that might for instance turn Angel into Angelus. With that kind of love Angel will sacrifice and leave Buffy rather than hurt her. With the soulless kind of love Spike will sacrifice and seek a soul in order to fit into her world.

The Buffy/Angelverse tells us the soul has something to do with conscience. When Spike is propositioned by Lindsey as Doyle to do good he agrees, just because he thinks it's the right thing to do. Chipped Spike would have only done it if he thought it would get him closer to Buffy.
 
I love this question. I think it is central to the Buffy mythology, and a ridiculously under-developed idea. Here's what I think, just based of textual and visual evidence from Buffy (Since I haven't watched Angel over and over often enough to start forming philosophical opinions about it yet...😉 ) Slipping into my Giles mode:

I tend to think that a "soul" doesn't define, essentially, who a vampire is. After all, how often do humans think about why they do what they do, or why they do them. Past experiences, combined with our personal moral background, influence the actions that we take, and our responses to new situations. That sense of morality, community, concern for society and other people, is what we might term the "soul". (In other words, not one's intelligence, memory, personality or morality alone, but these things combined in different capacities)

Obviously, this should be the way vampires evaluate new situations as well. The memories of the person who inhabited that body remain, obviously, since we have seen flashbacks of both Angel and Spike as Liam and William, and these memories would be the only source of knowledge available to the demon that now inhabits the body. Therefore, for example, Angelus would draw on Liam's memories to discover how he should react to a situation. The difference between human and vampire comes when that "soul" comes into play. I believe that a demon would "fall back on" the human's memories and personality, but that demons have their own morality...or lack thereof.

That said, I don't think that a "soul" is in any way...personal. There is no one soul that belongs to a particular person. After all, there is no evidence that the gypsies who cursed Angel made an effort to retrieve the "soul" that was present in that body during the time that Angel was Liam.

Instead, maybe a soul is like a conscience..kind of once size fits all? Hmm, I was on a roll there, and now I've lost it. What do y'all think?
 
I don't know. The "one size fits all" might be the case in the real world. Who knows? It's definitely not the case in the Angelverse though.

In Angel season 4 Angel's soul is contained in the muo-ping. It has to be that particular soul used to re-ensoul Angel. Otherwise Willow would just dip into the one-size-fits-all soul pool and grab one.
 
Alright, I'm becoming a little more satisfied with your descriptions here. I know the Jossverse is not exactly what you would call a Judeo-Christian 'verse"”at least in terms of soul. It's maybe more Eastern, less personal. The "soul" is like a little drop from the ocean of the collective human consciousness or something. A person gets one of these drops at birth and can shape it, improve it, destroy it based on his or her actions. If you treat it well (by treating others well), it's your ticket to a better place, perhaps?. It's mere presence can even improve a lowly demon, one who's just near it like Darla was when pregnant with Connor.

So the person, the individual known as Willam has gone to his reward or whatever, never to return. And what's left isn't "him", it's his body and memories. And the newly ensouled being is a combination of all these experiences combined with a body and a brand new "drop" from the ocean.

But maybe the Jossverse isn't completely Eastern. With Buddhism, the personal "person" is ultimately eliminated, right? The drop drops back into the ocean. That always gave my Western brain the creeps I guess. Buffy seemed to retain her personhood even in death. So when the person known as Buffy came back, she had a brand spankin' new drop(soul)?
 
It may be one drop from the soul pool at birth, or whenever, but one thing's for sure in the Angelverse at least, that particular drop is forever identified with the particular essence it's connected to. Again, Muo-Ping.

You know when it get's really mind boggling, is when you factor in This Year's Girl and try to figure out what the Buffyverse is telling us about the lines between Body, Mind and Soul.

Check out this old thread:
Brainbuster from This Year's Girl
 
Come to think of it, Angel and Co. seemed to believe that Fred could never be revived because her soul had been destroyed. Who knows if that was really the truth or a lie, but it suggests the idea of a unique personal soul that can't be replaced.
 
nerd4hire said:
I don't know. The "one size fits all" might be the case in the real world. Who knows? It's definitely not the case in the Angelverse though.

In Angel season 4 Angel's soul is contained in the muo-ping. It has to be that particular soul used to re-ensoul Angel. Otherwise Willow would just dip into the one-size-fits-all soul pool and grab one.
Click to expand...

Ugh! You are exactly right! And having just watched that episode YESTERDAY I should have remembered that. : blush : Hmm...ponder ponder. Ok, the rest of this is mostly thinking out loud...or..typing...out loud...or something. 😉

Could the obvious (duh, Kate!) singularity of Angel's soul have something to do with his status as this Champion with a big old important destiny? Is there something about a vampire that bonds it's new soul to that individual? Is this individuality characteristic of all souls? Hmm...all good questions, and I don't know the answers to any of them.

If each of us is given one of these drops of the human conciousness at birth, and it is gone again at death, did the gypsies that gave Angel his soul and the demon that gave Spike his simply reach into the one-size-fits-all pool again? And if so, is it "wearing" or having that soul for so long, using it to maintain control over his demonic instincts (most of the time), what made that particular soul so important to Angel remaining Angel? Or did it simply...interweave itself within him after 100 odd years of wear? Did these souls somehow become part of Spike and Angel the same way any soul bonds irrevecobly with it's owner?

If Spike somehow lost his soul after having the chip removed, would Soulless, Chipless Spike revert to being William the Bloody the way that Angel reverts to Angelus when his soul is removed? Or might he revert to the Spike of late Season 6 who was willing to do anything to make Buffy love him (which might not be any better)? Is Spike's soul more permenant because he sought it out, rather than having it forced upon him?

Ok, here's what I think. Maybe there is nothing personal about a soul, nothing male or female or distinguishing, until it is given a body with which to interact and form memories and live in the world. But once it does, that soul is forever identified with that body and that person and to remove it from that body (through death) is to...get rid of it or possibly destroy it, or send it to a heavenly (or hell) demension like Buffy experienced when she died.

Oh, that raises whole other questions! What about when Buffy died and came back? Did Willow's spell retrieve her soul from that heavenly demension? I think that's got to be what it is. How else would Buffy remember it?

ok, I could go on like this for a very long time, but what do y'all think?
 
I think the drop of soul theory is an interesting theoretical concept for the real world, but there doesn't seem to be any support for it in the Whedonverse.

All evidence seems to suggest Joss wants us to believe, at this point anyway, that the Buffyverse soul is distinctive to a particular individual. There's the Fred/Illyria thing Goldenboy mentioned, the muo-ping thing I mentioned, the Buffy remembering her soul beyond the grave thing you mentioned, and I'm almost positive there's more.

If there's any support for the generic drop of soul theory, I haven't heard it yet.

All I'm hearing is maybe, and what if. It's an interesting 'what if', but really isn't that all it is? It's like "What if there's a third slayer?", or "what if the First was actively playing a part behind the scenes in Angel". They're interesting, but there's no reason at this time to believe that's what the writers want us to believe is happening in their verse.

Personally given a choice between what the writers do seem to be suggesting, and what they've never mentioned, I'll choose the former.
 
You've got a point, as far as the "drop of soul" thing goes. The only thing I would say is that there's no evidence that the any of the "ensoulment" rituals that we witnessed, with the exception of the one with the Muo-Ping, involved any particular soul. Now, there's no evidence that they didn't either. That's why I say this idea is ridiculously underdeveloped, and awesome fanfic fodder 😉

but I still wonder about the other things. Like is Spike's soul permenant? And if it's not, under what conditions could he lose it? Can souls really be destroyed, like Fred's? Who decides where souls go and what happens to them after they die? Fun specualtions, yes?
 
On the Fred's soul being destroyed thing. I agree there's no hard evidence saying it actually was. In fact it's hinted at that maybe it wasn't. However Wesley believed Illyria when she said Fred's particular soul had been destroyed. This suggests a trained watcher believes in distinctive souls.

That doesn't mean anything in itself, but if you put it together with all the other suggestions of concern for "his" soul, or "her" soul in Buffy or Angel, it tends to suggest the writer's want us to believe a particular person's particular soul matters.

Oh, and yeah all that stuff is fun. 🙂
 
This discussion is really interesting and I'm quite sure I have nothing to contribute, but my problem is I can't stop my self from typing so here are my (not at all thought through) thoughts about this:
I the real world, I'd say the soul is your personality, your mind, your memories.. well, pretty much "you" (if I even believe in such a thing as a soul). But in buffyverse I believe a soul isn't personal in the same way. I believe the soul is what makes someone "human", or carries the humanity, while the mind is the personality and the memories and so on.
But there's still the problem with Angel and Angelus having two different personalities, or being unable to change what the other "person" does (like Angelus is trapped inside while Angel is there, and vice versa).
So Angel was just given a soul by the gypsies. He didn't get Liam's soul. But when Willow returned his soul, that was his own soul (uh, the soul he has always had when he was Angel).
Spike did change before he got his soul. He had the same personality, he was the same person (unlike Angel/Angelus), but I still think removing his soul would change it. Not completely like removing Angel's soul would, but it'd still change him.
I don't believe Spike's soul is permanent though, no souls probably are, although, more than Angel's, for sure.

I haven't seen the Fred/Illyria thing so I didn't know Fred's souls was (or was not) destroyed.. hm, now I do..

(Btw, that TYG-thread was interesting as well..)
 
The main reason I have such a difficulty in accepting Whedon's view that vampires have no soul is how he portrays them on the show. If the human characters in the two series show that even souled beings are capable of great evil and lack of compassion, why would vampires - who are also shown as possessing emotions and other individual traits - basically be soulless? It doesn't make sense. To me, a soulless being is nothing more than a zombie. An animated pile of flesh and bones with no personality or feelings, whatsoever. Vampires - including the ones portrayed in Jossverse - do not strike me as being that.

Are vampires capable of love? Of course. Beings of all kinds are capable - whether they are "good", "evil" or any other kind of label. Beings are even capable of committing evil in the name of love (see Wesley in AtS Season 5). In "Crush", Drusilla had said to Buffy that not only are vampires capable of love, but they do not handle it wisely. If the truth be told, humans are the same way. It is a rare human being who can handle love in a wise manner.
 
But there are differences between "evil" humans and vampires in BtVS and AtS. I think you almost always can spot that humanity, the compassion, even if it's not that obvious it is there somewhere. While vampires are just happy to do what they do and be as "evil" as they are. It's obvious how it's not a choice to them. Well, I have always had that kinda romantic view on vampires, them being young and beautiful and interestingly evil. So when I started watching BtVS they were more monsters than I was used to.
But, this is why I believe the soul can only have to do with that good/evil thing. To humans being good comes natural, while it comes natural to be evil to vampires. Although both vampires and humans are capable of doing both "evil" and "good" things. Vampires still have personality, they are like humans, except that thing switches, from "good" to "evil". Eh, that's kinda what I believe anyway.
 
Alright, so I agree this is becoming little more than a mental excercise at this point, idle speculation. Never took any philosophy or comparative religion so my brain is starting to hurt.

It's just that these things seem like critical plot points to me. That really crushed me and pissed me off when they said Fred's soul was destroyed. I guess I was in the mode of equating a person's soul with a person. Fred ceased to exit therefore. Apparently, this is ambiguous, even to the writers and characters.

So in one theory, the person called Fred may still exist somewhere. They just can't retrieve that person because they don't know how to dip into the "soul pool" and marry a new soul to Fred. They've only managed to retrieve existing souls floating out there in the ether, or a mason jar.

Or the soul (being Fred) is forever gone because a soul is essentially a person. (but what's a soulless demon? It's not like an animal, it's sentient. In the Christian conception, a demon is a fallen angel, immaterial as far as I know. Wouldn't that be all "soul" and no body?) OK, so I guess in this scenario a person really is a soul, a little sliver of God's image granted free will and a body. An angel/demon is another order of spiritual being, but not a soul. But it also has free will (as evidenced by the rebellious angels cast out of Heaven).

Or a person as an entity, a being, doesn't actually exist. A person is really nothing more a collection of memories stored in a brain. In that case Fred, William, Liam are still around and kicking as much as they ever were. Hmm.
 
What makes it all make a kind of sense for me is if I view the characters as existing on three levels: Instinctual (the body and all it's instinctual demands), Mental (Their memories and lessons they've learned), and Spiritual (whatever that means in a Buffy/Angelverse sense I'm not exactly sure).

The where is Fred question is admittedly still a little foggy even here, but in that framework it would look something like this.

A.On a physical level Fred's body is under new management. It's also been added to. Has anything been lost? I don't know.

B. On a mental level, Illyria still appears to have access to all that. I'm not sure but didn't Illyria refer to Fred's memories as "echoes" at one point?

C. On a spiritual level it's very cryptic. Both the Buffy and the Angelverse claim the soul has something to do with conscience. Illyria does not have Fred's conscience, but something does seem to be niggling at her/him/it.

As far as the question goes, "what exactly is the demon essence?", there is a kind of Angelverse explanation.

It's that demon thing Angel becomes when they go to Pylea. Some people (me among them) choose to see that thing as a manifestation of the demon that lives in Angel. Now if he becomes human again does that demon essence leave? I don't know. Is that another facet of the Shanshu prophecy?
 
Thanks for that Nerd4hire. I've been watching angel season 4 with the subtitles on just to make sure I'm getting the terms and exposition just right (how geek is that?). Season 5's a hazy memory right now. I should probably get one of those buffy/angel guides. And explore these boards of course.
 
Does anyone know of good guidebooks that delve into the buffyverse mythos and are based on canon, don't veer off too much into speculation? Is there such a thing?
 
The one's I see spoken of the most fondly are the Nikki Stafford books.

If you want an introduction to her you can check this out:

Nikki Stafford Interview

Believe it or not there's a lot of reference stuff on site here. Although admittedly a lot of opinion also. You can check out an overview of what's available here:

Whedonvers Buffy-Boards Index
 
Ha! You thought this thread was dead, but no...just pondering vampire personalities again.

Apparently, the demon species that "infect" humans are fairly primitive, relatively speaking. Other demon species seem to have fully formed personalities in their pure form. That green horned thing in Pylea that was once Angel may not have even been sentient. Impossible to tell for sure. If it isn't, it couldn't technically be "evil", seems to me.

At any rate, once a "vampire demon" infects its human host's body, it has access to that person's memories. Memories of experiences, emotions, abstractions like "morality". It exploits them for its own instinctual needs, or its selfish desires, if it really is sentient.

Was thinking of this because of the "Why We Fight' episode of Angel season 5. The second in command of the sub, Lawson? Something like that...Angel felt forced to vampify him cause he was dying and he was the only one with all the knowledge needed to raise the sub. A strategic moral compromise on Angel's part.

From that point on, what was left of this poor bastard was a vampire. He merrily went on his killing and pillaging sprees for decades. All the while though, a deep hatred and resentment for Angel was building. And why would that be? You'd think all a vamp wants is blood.

Seems like the mind of the demon is actually merging with mind of the dead sailor. The sailor's desires, his original sense of duty, honor, injustice, are overpowering the demon's own nature. In a sense, the demon not only becomes sentient, but it can become something approaching "human", given the right circumstances.

Maybe the particular demon inside Angel is simply so powerful, so willfull, that Liam's humanity had no impact on it. Or Liam was truly just an amoral lout. Therefore, there is no morality, no redeeming qualities to "infect" the demon.

Maybe William was a better man than Liam. So, Spike's a slightly less despicable vamp than Angelus. Could the original morality of the man determine the ultimate morality of the vamp?
 
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