You Are Your Body

For the longest time, I’ve been very interested in philosophy. Philosophy is the pursuit of truth in all areas, but in modern times, it has come to encompass primarily the big questions: what is real? And how do we know? For me, these questions are the most important because they are the foundation of what we believe, whether explicitly or implicitly.

I also find it just plain fun to learn all of the odd beliefs that have come out of philosophy. There was one ancient Greek philosopher who argued that the entire world was made of water. There was another guy who argued that the material world was a product of our minds. Why did these people believe this stuff? That’s something that I am fascinated about the most. I like learning the reasons why people believe what they believe. Especially when it’s something at odds with the prevailing norms.

Of all of the philosophers I’ve come across, the one I’ve identified the most with was Aristotle. Born in Greece in the fourth century BC, “the Philosopher” as medieval Christian knew him was the teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on a variety of topics, including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics and politics. His views strongly influenced Islamic and Christian thought in the middle ages. To this day, he is highly regarded as one of the greatest philosophers in world history.

Part of Aristotle’s philosophy that I find especially helpful is his rejection of substance dualism. Substance dualism is the belief that the mind or soul is a separate thing from the body it resides in. People nowadays have a highly dualistic view of themselves. That is, they tend to assume that their bodies are somehow separate from them. Their bodies are just a really fancy vehicle to carry around their brains.

Substance dualism was argued for by philosophers like Aristotle’s teacher Plato as well as the seventeenth century philosopher René Descartes. Descartes believed that the human mind was found in the res cogitans (unextended, thinking thing) and that the body or res extensa (extended, unthinking thing) was something the mind controlled that was external to it. Today, we clearly see this idea in some of modern religious thought, which views the body as some sort of vehicle (or even a prison) for our immortal souls. However, you see this view even in secular political discourse. For example, in the transgender debate, the pro-transgender side that their real self is something other than their physical body implicitly accepts this sort of dualism.

However, your body is not a vehicle for your mind. The ‘you’ sensing the light of the computer screen, reading these words, and understanding them are all the same ‘you’, and all of these processes involve your body. It follows then that your body is not separate from you, but is you. According to Aristotle, the self is a substantial unity of body and mind.

Aristotle’s view of the human person was an extension of his view of all material things. He believed that all material things had two parts: form, which makes a thing what it is, and matter, what a thing is made up of. Matter without form would have no properties, and form without matter would just be a mental abstraction. This position is known as hylemorphism (hyle = matter, morphe = form). Hylemorphism is an elaboration is just an elaboration of Aristotle’s view of forms. While Plato held that the form of the object – that is, what made the object what it was – was located in a realm of forms, Aristotle believed the form of the object existed within the object itself.

Applied to human beings, the matter is the human body, and the form is the soul that gives the human body life. The complete person, the complete human, is body and soul. The mind is an immaterial faculty inherent to the human soul that gives the human person the ability to know of the forms of objects directly without actually being those objects.

So, which is true: hylemorphism or substance dualism? Well, I believe that the falsity of dualism was made apparent to me just this past week. If you remember, I didn’t post a blog recording last Thursday. Why? Well, because I was on vacation. During vacation, I ate, slept, and sat around a lot, not doing much of anything. Because I had gotten out of the habit of exercising, my body became lazy and sluggish, and my mind soon followed suit.

Now, if substance dualism were true, we wouldn’t think that anything that happens to the body would really affect the mind. After all, how can a ghost be affected by something material? And yet, the problems of the body become the problems of the mind. My lack of exercise and lazy habits led to my thinking becoming lazy as well. Previously, exercising helped me to come up with better ideas. It filled me with energy and cheer. But when I stopped doing it, the opposite happened. The actions I took affected my thoughts.

What is the takeaway here? The actions I took affected the way I thought. Because I became physically lazy and didn’t exercise my body, I became mentally lazy and didn’t exercise my mind. The lack of discipline in one area spread to all the others because a person is a unified whole, not a collection of parts. This is the insight of Aristotle: that action creates character. If I am going to continue writing this blog, I’ll need to keep my body in tip-top shape! Time to go work out.