“MY BODY”
by Eduardo Jose E. Calasanz Any philosophy of man is a systematic and holistic attempt to answer the question of “who am I?” In our day -to-day life, we may be so engrossed in our activities that we do not bother anymore to question what seems clear and obvious to us. The question of “Who am I?” is such a case. It is surprising to ask this ourselves. At first glance, isn’t this question so simple? What could be clearer and obvious to us than the reality of our “I”? But this is only at first glan ce, from a superficial and uncritical natural attitude. Certain events in our life (like sickness, failures, death) can awaken us and brings us to the limits of our ordinary experience. And then, the once-so-simple question deepens, begins to complicate, and beckons on us: Who am I? An important aspect in answering this question is the experience of my body. If I were asked about myself, my answers inescapably have reference to my body. What are you? Man, because I have form, activities, and a body of a man. Who are you? I am Juan Santos, tall, mestizo-looking long-haired, with small ears and a big belly due to beer-drinking (isa-pa-nga!). Where am I? Here, where my body is; look at me, look at my body. In these ways, I seem to say I am my body. But there are times too that I know I am not just my body. I am a man also because I have an understanding and a mind of a man. When I say to my parents “I love you,” this one loving them is not just this tall-mestizo-looking-long-haired-with-small-ears-fat-belly-etx.”” Body of mine but my whole spirit and will. And it can tall-mestizo-looking-long-haired-with-small-ears-fat-belly-etx. happen that while my body is in room B-109, listening to a boring lecture on the theories of Lobachevski or the poems of Chairil Anwar, I am taking a walk at the beach, along with my sweetheart, watching the sunset. On one hand, I recognize an intimate relation of myself with my body, and thus truly say: I am my body . Yet, on the other hand, I also know that I cannot reduce my whole humanity to my body. I am also spirit and will: my body is only something I have: I have my body . What is the meaning of this paradox? Some Answers from the History of Philosophy Classical Views. Views. Already in early times, the ancient philosophers of Greece tackled the question of the human body. What is the body of man? Is it truly a part of his becoming a man? Or is it just a contingent “addition” to his self? Is it a bestial imprisonment of the human spirit or its perfection? According to Plato (ca. 430-350 B.C.), man is his soul. This is the essence of his humanity and the source of all his activities. In the Phaedrus Phaedrus,, Plato uses the following metaphor. The soul is a charioteer of two winged-horses. One is sensible and flies high to the heavens to reach the light of truth and goodness. The other comes from a bad breed and because of neglect and sinfulness, had lost his wings and fallen to earth to assume human form. No wonder heavenly and earthly tendencies are in conflict in the spirit of man. The taking of a human body is an unfortunate accident and a cruel imprisonment of the free and pure soul. Consequently, Plato states in the Phaedo Phaedo,, that the true philosopher strives to evade his body because Surely the soul can best reflect when it is free of all distractions such as hearing or sight or pain or pleasure of any kind – – that that is, when it ignores the body and becomes as far as possible independent, avoiding all physical contacts and associations as much as it can, in its search for reality. In death the true man is freed fr eed from his imprisonment to see perfectly the pure light of absolute truth.
In the view of Aristotle (304-322 B.C.), man is the whole of his body and soul. There is no sense in asking if body and soul are one. They are one like the oneness of the ugly and his figure. The relation if the body to the soul is the relation of matter to form. There is no matter that is not informed by form, and no form that is not the form of the matter. Likewise, the body and soul of man are only two aspects of the whole man. In De Anima, we read the following observation: A further problem presented by the affections of the soul is this: are they all affections of the complex body and soul, or is there any one among them peculiar to the soul by itself? To determine this is indispensable but difficult. If we consider the majority of them, there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted upon without involving the body; e.g. Anger, courage, appetite, and sensation generally. Thinking seems the most probable exception; but if this proves to be a form of imagination or to be impossible without imagining, then it too requires a body as a condition of its existence. The Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages also dealt on the question of the body. In the City of God , St. Augustine (354-430) mentions that man can be divided into body and soul, and no doubt the soul is more real and important. But is it only the soul that is man, and its relation to the body similar to the relation of the charioteer to his horse? This is not possible, because the charioteer is not a charioteer without the horse; similarly the soul is not a soul if it is not the soul of a body. Is it possible that only the body is man, and its relation to the soul similar to the relation of the jar with the water? Neither is this possible, because the end of the jar is to be filled with water and the end likewise if the body is to filled with the soul. Man is the unity of body and soul, and he can only ex ist as this unity. The great St. Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274) in the Summa Theologiae also said that the soul is not man: “For just as it belongs to the nature of this particular man to be composed of this soul, of this flesh, and of these bones, so it belongs to the future of man to be composed of this soul, flesh and bones.” And in another place , he further states that although the body is not part of the essence of the body, nevertheless the very essence of the soul inherently needs to be one with the body. It is Rene Descartes (1596-1650) who sets a kind of questioning regarding the human body in the present history of philosophy. A prominent French philosopher and mathematician, he is considered as the father of modern philosophy and analytic geometry. In his Meditations on First Philosophy , Descartes explains the profound and real difference between the body and soul of man. In the first meditation, he states the methodic doubt: we should doubt all that we know because, first, they come from our senses which can be mistaken or can deceive us, and second, these can be just the result of a dream. Even the certain and universal truths of religion and mathematics I can think of as only imaginary, the work of a bad spirit. In the second meditation, Descartes shows that even if I use the methodic doubt , there is one truth that I can not deny or doubt: I think, therefore, I am (Cogito ergo sum). Even if I fully deny or doubt this, I only prove by my denial and doubting that I am thinking and existing. Descartes continues to ask, But what is this I which I have proven to exist? And his answer: “A thinking being (res cogitans). What is a thinking being? It is a being which doubts, which understands, which affirms, which denies, which wills, which rejects, w hich imagines also and which perceives. In the last meditation, Descartes adds that even if we can prove the reality of the world and material things, the real essence of man is still different his body. He stresses, And although perhaps, or rather certainly, as I will soon show, I have a body with which I am very closely united, nevertheless, since on the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself in so far as I am only a thinking and not an extended being, and since on the other hand I have a distinct idea of body in so far as it is only an extended being which does not think, it is certain that this “I” (-that is to say, my soul, by virtue of which I am what I am-) is entirely (and truly) distinct from my body and that it can (be or) exist without it.
At first glance, for Descartes, man’s body is just a material thing, extended, and as such does not seem to differ from a complex machine like a computerized robot. Yet Descartes himself also admits that the answer is not as simple as that. He mentions again in the Meditations, that we cannot say, for instance, that the relationship of the body and soul is like that of the captain and the ship, another metaphor of Plato. If the ship meets a collision, it is only the ship that is damaged or “hurt” but not the captain who simply observes the damage. But when my body is hurt, I do not just observe the incident; I am involved. When I a slapped, for instance, by a storekeeper in the market with whom I have quarreled, I do not say only my cheeks hurt, but I am hurt. If we read Descartes himself, we can see that his inquiry is rather complicated, and he does not really say that man is a “ghost inside a machine.” In several writings, he admits that the body and soul of a man is a real unity. However, this unity itself of the body and soul cannot be known and discussed by philosophy due to its inherent ambiguity. In Descartes’ view, the aim of philosophy is to reach clear and distinct ideas re garding reality. Mathematical truth is for him the model of philosophical truth. But the truth regarding the unity of man’s body and soul cannot fit into this frame of thinking. Thus, even if Descartes recognizes the unity of man’s body and soul as truth based on experience, he emphasizes that this is not a philosophical truth. Gabriel Marcel. In present times, a number of philosophers, notably the phenomenologists, have criticized the philosophy of Descartes. One of them is Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973). Like Descartes, Marcel is a Frenchman, but unlike Descartes, he is a playwright and musician. His propensity is not clear and skeletal order of mathematics but life itself and the clear-vague world of drama and music. In Marcel’s philosophy, man’s embodiment is not simply a datum alongside other data but the primary datum that is the starting point and basis of any philosophical reflection. Descartes’ failure, according to Marcel, lies in the imprisonment of the methodic doubt which aspires mathematics-like truths. This way of thinking is on the level of primary reflection. In this kind of reflection, I place myself outside of the thing that I am inquiring on. An ob- jectum (“thrown in front”). It has nothing to do with myself nor do I have anything to do with it. I take each parts (analysis0 study their ordering (systematize) and arrive at some clear and fixed ideas regarding the thing itself (conceptualize). But in this manner, the body studied in primary reflection is no longer my body but a body. “A body” is an objective idea apart from me; I have nothing to do with it nor does it have anything to do with my life. This is the body talked about in anatomy, physiology and other sciences. Because this is an objective and universal idea, this can be the body of anybody else, and consequently of nobody. There is a particular value in primary reflection on the body (Medicine, for example would not progress without the sciences that study the human body), but this is not the whole truth. In order to come closer to an understanding of the totality of all that exists (and isn’t this the primary aim of philosophy?), we have to go back and root our reflection on the concrete experience of my body. We have to enter into the level of secondary reflection. In this kind of reflection, I recognize that I am part of the thing I am investigating, and therefore, my discussion is sub- jective (“thrown beneath”). I have something to do with it and it has something to do with me. Because I participate in the thing, I cannot tear it apart into clear and fixed ideas; I have to describe and bring it unique wholeness in my concrete experience. In using secondary reflection, we discover that what exists is not “a body” but “my body” – a body full of life, eating sleeping, happy, afflicted, etc., my body that is uniquely mine alone. Marcel’s philosophy of the body is an inquiry on the meaning of the experience of my body. If we use secondary reflection and recognize the experience of my body as the starting point and foundation of our inquiry, we can see that it does not make sense to separate the body and to ask, “What is the relation of the I to the body?” The reason is because the body refe rred to here is no longer “my body” but the abstract “a body”.
But what is meant by my in “my body”? Is it the possession (avoir) that I r efer to when I talk of my “ballpen” or “my dog”? Is the logic “I have a body” the same as “I have a dog”? Marcel shows that in order for me to possess a dog, we must have an inter-relationship with each other. I must have a claim, for instance, on the dog: I decide when it will stay and I take care of it or have it taken care of. Likewise, the dog recognize my claim over it: it follows me, it loves or fears me, etc. in short, I must have responsibility and control over what I possess. At first glance, it seems that this is also the relationship I have with my body. First, like having my dog, my body is mine and mine alone. Even in societies where slavery exists and the masters own the body of their slaves, the slaves experience that this is unjust and violates their rights as human beings. If they do not realize this, then we can say that their humanity is destroyed. Secondly, I have a responsibility over my body and I take care of it; I nourish it and let it sleep, bathe it, give it pleasure, etc. The limit of these examples is the ascetic who evades whatever pleasures of the body; it is difficult to say if he is still included in the experience of “my body”. Thirdly, I have control over my body. It can do whatever I want it to do if it can – sit, walk, go out of the room, drink cola, talk, etc. – if I so desire. There is validity in liking “ I have my body” to “I have my dog,” but there is also lim itation. Even if I am intimate with my dog, I cannot deny that our lives are still separate. It can be in the house while I am in the moviehouse; it was born while I was in my teens, it may die earlier than I. This is not the case with my body: our location and history are inseparable. Wherever I am, there also is my body, and wherever my body is, there I am too. Upon reconsideration of second reflection, it does not make sense too to consider the relation with my body as only an instrument. If I say I own my body, I treat it like an instrument that I possess and use in order to possess and use other things in the world. Only by means of my body, for instance, can I possess and use this ballpen, this table, this car, this building and others. Is my body then an instrument? For Marcel, the body that I can say I have is a body-object, “a body” that I or anybody can use. This is the body studied by primary reflection of the sciences. But if I treat my body as only a possession, its being mine loses its meaning. The experience of my body is the experience of I-body (body-subject). Here secondary reflection recuperates and states that there is no gap between me and my body. In short, I am my body. If I say I am my body, this does not mean that I am the body that is the object for others, the body seen, touched, felt by others. Like the dualism of Descartes, this materialistic view is imprisoned in the Procrustean bed of primary reflection and reduces the experience of my body to the idea of “a body.” “I am my body” has only a negative meaning. It simply states that I cannot separate my self from my body. My being-in-the-world is not the bodily life alone nor the spiritual life alone but the life of an embodied spirit (‘e tre incarnee’). The Life of Embodied Spirit We begin our reflection of the experience of my body by recognizing its paradoxical character. On one hand, I cannot detach my body from myself; they are not two things that happen by chance to be together. Rather, myself is absolutely embodied. Likewise, on the other hand, I cannot reduce my self to my body: I also experience my self as an I-spirit and will that can never be imprisoned in my flesh and bones. That is why we can say there are two faces shown in the experience of my body: “I have my body” and “ I am my body”. It is very tempting for any erudite person, philosopher or scientist, to forget this paradox and fix his attention to only one side of the experience. This precisely is the danger of any primary reflection: our inquiry becomes clear and distinct
but we get farther away from real experience. The paradox is the experience itself, and this should be the one described by philosophy by means of secondary reflection. The body as intermediary. I experience myself as being-in-the-world through my body. My body acts as the intermediary between the self or subject and the world . When we use the term intermediary, we refer to one of two conflicting meaning. If I say, “Y is the intermediary of X and Z,” I may mean that because X, Y and Z encounter or become closer to each other or come to an agreement. Let us take this example from the story of Macario Pineda titled, “Kung Baga sa Pamumulaklak.” A young farmer named Desto wants to win the hand of the illustrious young lady named Tesang. However, he cannot just present himself directly to the lady of his affection to tell her of her feelings. He first approaches his uncle Mang Tibo who is the kumpare of tesang’s parents so he can act as intermediary between him and Tesang’s parents. Only then do Tesang’s parents allow Desto to court her. In this situation, the intermediary serves as the “bridge” for the union of the young man and the lady. On the other hand, I can also mean the opposite. I can say that because X, Y and Z are separated. Still with the example of courting, the parents of the girl may stand between our affection and prevent our being sweethearts. In the old films of Virgo Productions, often Lolita Rodriguez plays the role of the “other woman” who stands between the beautiful relationship of the couple Eddie Rodriguez and Marlene Dauden. Here, the intermediary is not a bridge but an o bstacle. Now, when I say my body is the intermediary between my self and the world, I refer to the two meanings of intermediary. On one hand, because of my body, an encounter or agreement occurs between my self and the world. In reality, the encounter of the experience of my self and the experience of the world can only take place in the experience of my body. Because of my body, I experience the world as my world and we are familiar to each other. Because of my body, the chair I am sitting on is hard, the sunset is as red as a rose, the effect of the lambanog on my empty stomach is strong, the smell of the Pacwood factory in San Pedro, Laguna is like hell. Because of my body, I have an experience of “near” and “far”, “ up” and “below” and many other relations in space. The world of man is different from the “world” of the fly because their bodies have different frameworks. My body is by nature intentional (directed to the world), and it creates and discovers meaning that I am conscious of in my existence. Thus because of my body, the whole universe has and reveals for-me-and-for-man. Through my body, my subjectivity is openness to the world and the world is opened to me; the world fills me, and I fill the world. On the other hand, also because of my body, I experience the world as separate from me. I am “not world”, and the world is “not-I”. In the giving-of-meaning-to-the-world of my body, I also experience the self as “outside” of the world, I am one who sees , and who gives-mane to this or that. My body shows that I am not simply a thing among other things in nature. The oneness and wholeness of my body is different from the oneness and wholeness of the world. If I did not have this kind of distance from the world, I would become only a thing without interiority; and clearly this view is not true to our experience of life. My body participates in the world but cannot be r educed to it. The body in intersubjectivity. My body is not only an intermediary between me and the world but also between me and others. I show myself to the other and the other shows himself to me through my body. Because of my body, we interrelate with each other in many different ways – in our vision, actions, attitude, in our rituals, signs and speech. We face each other in anger, tenderness, sadness, etc., because we have a body to present. If the other shows wrinkles on his forehead, he is indicating dissatisfaction, confusion or disapproval of what I am saying. The wry and red appearance of my face is anger, my fixed-to-the-ground look and my sigh are loneliness. The child does not have to disobey his parent, a look from the parent is enogh to prevent him. Every part of my body says something of myself and my world. As what a poet says of an alluring young woman:
There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of he r body. The language of my body has its own grammar and rhetoric in expressing my interiority. If I love Maria, I show this through my kisses, embrace, holding tenderly her hand, etc., and also through exchanges of rings, daily telephone conversations, weekly visits. I respect my parents in kissing their hands; I accept new acquaintances in shaking his hand. Embodiment is not just an additional or external appearance; it is the gesture and appearance of what I truly feel inside. I cannot say I love my brothers and sisters if I do not show this love to them. I cannot say I respect my parents if my speech to them is not respectful. My faith is meaningless if I do not realize it in my daily actions and life.
