RE-THINKING | re-imagining

BEYOND DUALISM

Photomontage by Maria Pesma

A little philosophy.... The human body has long had a raw deal in the way it has been thought about. In its supposed difference from the soul or the spirit or the mind, it has found itself downgraded in many ways. It has been seen as a mere vehicle or tool, an encumbrance or burden or limitation, a temporary residence, even a prison. In the scientific age there has been too much tendency to see the body as an assemblage of parts. As a result, scientific questioning of vague immaterial entities like soul and spirit, even mind, has done little to undermine the tenacious assumption that the self is distinct and different from the (relatively mechanical) body.

This is a Western view of the body and of the self’s relation to it. It’s not static or fixed, of course, but the problem is that throughout its evolution it has been dualistic. Body-soul dualism has given way to body-mind dualism, and lately even to body-brain dualism. But in each case the body is the ‘poor relation’.

It’s not that we need a ‘better dualism,’ one in which the body is no longer the inferior partner. We need to go beyond dualism. The problem with dualism is the way it siphons the subject – the ‘you’ – from the body. It’s dualism, in other words, that robs the body of much that is truly the body’s own.

But re-thinking isn’t enough to take us beyond dualism to a full appreciation of the body-as-subject (also called the ‘lived body’ or the ‘I-body’). For this we need RE-IMAGINING too. But this is a kind of re-imagining that can’t happen solely ‘in your head’. Re-imagining has to be active, to get you on your feet, and to get your body moving, breathing and being in more richly self-aware ways.

And a little poetry.... Andrew Marvell’s dense and difficult, but also remarkable 17th century poem, “A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body” (you can read it on this page) complicates and subverts dualism (in this case the traditional body-soul version) but cannot quite find a way beyond it. So the poem ends up as a kind of elaborate, thought-provoking joke.

The poem begins with a straightforward (medieval) version of the dualism in which the soul feels imprisoned by the body and the body suffers the tyranny of the soul (though this is set up to reveal the relativism of each point of view). But the third and fourth stanzas greatly complicate the picture. In the third, at least in its first six lines, the soul acknowledges a certain mutual interdependence or ‘blending’ with the body. Most strikingly, the soul can only conceive itself as the rational soul that does not feel pain. But inexplicably (to the soul) it does! It feels the body’s pain as its own. In the fourth stanza, Marvell sets up a correlation between physiological disturbances and psychological passions (cramp corresponds to hope; palsy to fear; heat to love; an ulcer to hatred, convulsion to both joy and sorrow). This implies that the soul is now seen as the source of the passions. These passions, to the body that is made to suffer them, are maladies which ‘physic’ (i.e. physiologically based medicine) cannot deal with. Ironically, then, the soul that longs to escape the sinful body is the very thing that, through its passions, leads the body at least into the likelihood of sin!

What Marvell does in this poem is make the reader question the very nature of body-soul dualism. It makes us ask: what, in our experience of being human, belongs to the soul and what belongs to the body? When we try to answer this question we start to see that, beyond a certain simplistic starting-point, the answers soon become arbitrary. The only conclusion to draw from this is that the dualism itself is misconceived. Marvell cannot possibly say that explicitly, but he hints strongly at it.

Today we need to do something similar, but more explicitly, with body-mind dualism - and with the emerging substitute of body-brain dualism that is not in any way an improvement on it.

A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body

SOUL

O who shall, from this dungeon, raise

A soul enslaved so many ways?

With bolts of bones, that fettered stands

In feet, and manacled in hands;

Here blinded with an eye, and there

Deaf with the drumming of an ear;

A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains

Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;

Tortured, besides each other part,

In a vain head, and double heart.

BODY

O who shall me deliver whole

From bonds of this tyrannic soul?

Which, stretched upright, impales me so

That mine own precipice I go;

And warms and moves this needless frame,

(A fever could but do the same)

And, wanting where its spite to try,

Has made me live to let me die.

A body that could never rest

Since this ill spirit it possessed.

SOUL

What magic could me thus confine

Within another’s grief to pine?

Where, whatsoever it complain,

I feel, that cannot feel, the pain;

And all my care itself employs,

That to preserve which me destroys;

Constrained not only to endure

Diseases, but, what’s worse, the cure;

And ready oft the port to gain,

Am shipwrecked into health again.

BODY

But physic yet could never reach

The maladies thou me dost teach;

Whom first the cramp of hope does tear,

And then the palsy shakes of fear;

The pestilence of love does heat,

Or hatred’s hidden ulcer eat;

Joy’s cheerful madness does perplex,

Or sorrow’s other madness vex;

Which knowledge forces me to know,

And memory will not forego.

What but a soul could have the wit

To build me up for sin so fit?

So architects do square and hew

Green trees that in the forest grew.

Andrew Marvell

"Or sorrow's other madness vex..."