EMBODIMENT

from My Body,
Eduardo Jose E. Calasanz

I. Classical Views (C 87-88)

Plato

St. AugusIne of Hippo: the
individual is a body-soul
composite, but the soul is
more real and important

Aristotle

St. Thomas Aquinas: It is
one and the same man who is
conscious both that he
understands and that he
senses. But one cannot sense
without a body, and
therefore the body must be
some part of man. (Aquinas,
Summa Theologiae)

Rene Descartes (31 March 1596 - 11 February 1650), French

mathemaIcian and philosopher

Portrait by Frans Hals, h_p://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Frans_Hals_-

_Portret_van_Ren%C3%A9_Descartes.jpg

II. Modern View: Rene Descartes

- there is a profound and real dierence between the body and soul of
man, argued for by his Medita0ons in First Philosophy (C 89)

I have a body with which I am very closely united,
nevertheless, since on the one hand I have a clear and disInct 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 disInct 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 []) is enIrely (and truly) disInct from my
body and that it can (be or) exist without it. (Descartes, Medita0ons I)

- It is in the nature of the body (res extensa) and the mind (res cogitans)
to be completely (essenIally) disInct, and it is the cogito, the I think,
that denes ones being

- However, man is not really a ghost inside a machine, in that
(contrary to Platos ship and captain metaphor) we are involved in the
experience of pain, as argued for in the same work: I am not merely
present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but [] I am very
closely joined, and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the
body form a unit. (Descartes, Medita0ons VI)
[T]hose who never philosophize, and who make use only of
their senses, do not doubt that the soul moves the body and that the
body acts on the soul []. It is in dealing only with life and everyday
aairs, and in refraining from studying and meditaIng on things which
exercises the imaginaIon, that we learn to apprehend the union of the
soul and the body. (Descartes, personal correspondence)