Category: Soul and Body

Four Attitudes Toward Embodiment

Am I ineluctably trapped in a dying animal? Is embodiment an axiologically negative state of affairs or is it an axiologically positive one?  Here are four possible attitudes toward having a material body. They may be loosely associated, respectively, with the names Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Benatar.

a) To exist is good, but it would be better to exist without a gross material body subject to decay and dissolution. The body is an impediment, a vehicle for sublunary roads that it would be better not to have to travel.  I am neither identical to my body, nor dependent on it for my existence; I am a soul temporarily incarcerated in a body from which I will be released upon death. I have fallen from a topos ouranios into a spatiotemporal matrix and meat grinder extrication from which is both possible and desirable.

b) To exist is good, but a gross material body is necessary to exist as a conscious and self-conscious being, whence it follows that embodiment is at least instrumentally  good. I am not (identically) a soul; I am a soul-body composite, both components of which are necessary to exist at all.  

c) To exist is good, but only with a 'resurrected' and perfected body supplied by a divine being that needs no body to exist.

d) To exist is not good because possible only with a gross body.  (See my Benatar category.)

De Anima

David K. writes,

I need some help.  I have been exploring the concept of the 'soul' over the last few months. I've meant it to be a fairly wide open review.  I have 'rounded up the usual suspects' philosophically and worked my way through a great deal of the biomedical writings.  Presently, I am in the middle of two works:  The Soul of the Embryo by David Albert Jones and Soul Machine by George Makari.  I am looking for a contemporary philosophical treatment of the topic.  I have searched the categories on both your blogs but wonder if there is a direction you can point me to as well.   

With pleasure, David.

For a high-level contemporary treatment by a distinguished philosopher of religion, I recommend Richard Swinburne, Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019.  The Soul Hypothesis, eds. Baker and Goetz, Continuum 2011, is a collection of essays by analytic philosophers. For a hard-core old-time  Thomist treatment, one that is probably not quite in line with your current interests as a medical doctor, but still highly relevant given your Catholic upbringing, take a gander at  Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Life Everlasting and the Immensity of the Soul (no bibliographical details in my copy!).  More relevant to your biomedical interests is Norman M. Ford, When Did I Begin? Cambridge UP, 1988. 

Directly relevant to your concerns is  the mercifully short Were You a Zygote? by G. E. M. Anscombe. Also of interest is Erich Klawonn, Mind and Death: A Metaphysical Investigation, University Press of Southern Denmark, 2009.

I'll add further titles if they occur to me. Comments are enabled  if anyone wants to make suggestions.

Finally, here is a review by Thomas Nagel, no slouch of a philosopher, of the Swinburne volume mentioned supra.