I have been reading a bit Milan Kundera lately and one of his themes is the mind-body distinction, the difference between the body and soul (he’s a novelist, not a philospher, so relax about the terminology), their relationship, which is more important, in which resides the ‘I’, and so on. I then read a piece by her awesomeness Sarah Coakely in which she pointed out that currently many theologians are very critical of Descartes and cartesian ‘individualism’, including the negelct of the body. Now no-one would want to deny that the body has been negelected in western philosophy and theology and that it’s retrieval is very important, not least for issues of gender and sexual justice, but it is worth stepping back from all the talk about bodies for a moment because it is perhaps now something of a fashion. I re-iterate, I say this not to deny the importance of the body or to suggest we should cease thinking about it, but just to clarify a little.
It is common for people to talk about us as ‘mind-body’ wholes, ‘ensouled bodies’ or ‘enfleshed souls’ or something of that ilk, to be holistic. A theology doctorate even said to me not too long ago that they couldn’t imagine what it would mean to be a person without a body. Fair enough, that’s a good question for Thomas Nagel (‘what is it like to be a bat?’) or a novelist or poet (imagining herself inside the ‘thoughts’ of a woodworm or whatever). But imagine two scenarios. The first is a car crash in which A is paralysed from the neck down, the second is a car crash in which A ends up in a vegetative state. Clearly, the first scenario is one in which A is more himself: he can (with some help) talk, think, read, pray, have meaningfully reciprocal relations with others. In the second he can’t do any of that. This suggests that the ancient emphasis on reason as the most essential characteristic of the human is fairly close to the mark, however much it may now need supplementing. From a Christian persepctive this is confirmed by the idea of Paul’s that there is a period after death but before the resurrection of the body in which we are ‘at home with the Lord’. And the practice of prayer to the saints, and corresponding religious experiences, suggest he was correct. One could also look to the ascetic tradition that views the body as important and certainly very much part of the person, but not as important as the mind, will, soul, heart, or whatever terminology we devise. Reading Kundera one feels forced to agree with him that the physical characteristics of his characters (which he rarely describes) are not essential to relating to them as characters because our imagination completes the author’s creation (yet, would we relate to them differently if he described them physically? I think so).
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