3 Body Michael Hauskeller & Lewis Coyne Michael Hauskeller: For all we know, there are no free-floating spirits: we are all embodied beings. And yet we routinely talk as if our bodies are not really essential to what we are – as if the connection between us and our bodies is merely accidental. We do know, of course, that we are pretty much stuck with the body we have, but we still fantasise about swapping bodies with others,1 acquiring new bodies, and even getting rid of our bodies altogether, be it by continuing our existence in a bodiless form after our death2 or by uploading our minds to computers before our death in order to gain some kind of ‘digital’ existence.3 While the fact that we can imagine this kind of thing may not in any way prove that we can actually live without a body (which is what the French philosopher René Descartes claimed),4 it is certainly suggestive of the possibility. We cannot deny that we all, as a matter of fact, have bodies; but we also feel that bodies are not really what we are – that what we really are is not our body, but something that inhabits that body, something inside, something that is in principle detachable from the body. This seemingly immaterial something is traditionally called ‘the soul’ or, perhaps more commonly today, ‘the mind’. Now if this is what we really are, then the body may indeed be best understood as a mere ‘vessel’: nothing more than a ‘mortal shell’ or, even more drastically, the soul’s tomb, as the Pythagoreans, echoed by Plato, declared the body to be (soma sema)5 – which strongly suggests that we are somehow impaired and curtailed in our freedom by our body and that we would be better off, or at any rate freer, without one. This idea of the body as something that, for some unknown reason, we are intimately connected with but that is still distinct from what we really are of course has roots in our own personal experience. For one 46 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 46 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 thing, we often feel insufficiently represented and indeed let down by our bodies. There is so much we want to do and so much we cannot do because our bodies are so weak and frail. Often it seems as if the only thing standing in the way of our fully becoming what we feel we truly are is our own body. Then there is also the fact that we can actually see and touch our body, just as we can see and touch other objects in the world out there. Being visible and touchable (as well as audible and smellable), the body is clearly also an object – one among others, a thing really – and we know ourselves to be not merely an object, not a thing, but (at least primarily) a subject: unlike mere objects, we are thinking beings; we are world- and self-aware. In addition, we very much use our body as a tool, or rather a wellstocked tool box. ‘Tool’ is actually what the Greek word ‘organ’ (organon) means, and rightly so because our organs function as tools: we use our eyes to see, our ears to hear, our hands to handle things, our feet and legs to walk, just as we use other things – a knife to cut things, a vehicle to move around, and so on. All these tools, both those that form part of our body and those that do not, help us do and get what we want, but they are not us. Rather, we are the ones who use those tools. This is why we can even replace parts of our body without compromising our identity. If for instance one of my hands is cut off, I have one tool fewer at my disposal, but I am not suddenly split in two parts – the hand part and the rest-of-my-body part. By having my hand separated from my body I am not being separated from myself. While I am certainly losing part of my body, I am not losing a part of me in the sense that I am now less me than I used to be. And yet, despite all the evidence that speaks in favour of there being a difference between us and our bodies, doubts remain; and those doubts, too, are rooted in our experience. If you break my knife or crash my car, I don’t feel it directly as something that is being done to me. I can shrug it off as being of little concern to me. In contrast, if you break my nose or shatter my kneecap, it is difficult if not impossible for me to remain indifferent to what is happening, because by inflicting damage on my body you are also, directly, inflicting damage on me. What goes on in my body goes on in me. If you hurt my body you are hurting me, because if my body hurts I hurt. And it is not just our body’s pain that we feel directly as our pain. Unsurprisingly, our body’s pleasure is very much our pleasure, but also, although perhaps less obviously, my emotions are very much my body’s emotions.6 When I am tired my body is tired; when I am angry my body is angry; when I am in love my body is in love. We think, BODY 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 47 47 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 feel and indeed live in and through our bodies. In that sense, we do not have a body: we are that body. So what is it? Do we have a body or are we that body? Or is it perhaps both: are we the body that we have? But isn’t that a contradiction? How can we both have something and be what we have? Isn’t that like saying that we are both identical with our body and not identical with it – that we both are our body and are not our body? * Lewis Coyne: The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once said that the ‘body phenomenon is the most difficult problem’.7 I’m not sure that it is the most difficult problem, but Heidegger was rightly perplexed by exactly the dilemma that you identify: the body both appears to be something that we have, somewhat like a tool, and also appears to be what we are.8 How can we make sense of this apparent contradiction? We might be tempted to follow Descartes, who famously argued that while he could doubt the existence of his body, he could not doubt that he existed as a mind, for the mere act of doubting was enough to prove it.9 As he put it: cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).10 Although he did ultimately accept the reality of his body, Descartes’ method led him to believe that we are thinking things that merely have bodies: a theory that has exerted great influence over Western intellectual history ever since.11 What Descartes overlooked, however – or at the very least undervalued – is the fact that much of our lives, even for philosophers, is spent not in thought, but rather in engagement with people and things in the world.12 Reflection on how we encounter such beings and the world opens a window onto the peculiarity of the body, and undermines Descartes’ position. Say, for example, that I am walking across a pebble beach in search of a stone to skim on the water. As everyone knows, I will consciously be looking for a circular, flat stone, as these are best able to hit the water without sinking. But my goal here will also be defined, in ways that may not even be explicit, by the possibilities made available by my body, and in particular by my hands. Without really thinking about it I will be looking for a stone of the right size and heft, which essentially means the right size and heft for me to hold and throw. This act of sorting takes place prior to conscious deliberation: I do not perceive each pebble and then examine it for its size, comparing it to that of my hand; I see certain pebbles as graspable for me, overlooking those that are not. Going on alongside this I walk across the beach, my feet finding the right places to fall. 48 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 48 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 Again, the ‘right places’ are not identified through a deliberative examination of various possibilities; they are simply perceived as right for my feet and stride. As such, in my encounter with the pebble beach my body not only determines what is possible for me, but in fact structures the world as I perceive it in accordance with those possibilities. Here we can best speak of the subject not as – or at least not primarily as – a thinking thing, but rather as an acting thing; not an ‘I think’, but an ‘I can’, and the body not as an impediment to freedom, but rather as the condition of freedom, opening up the world to us as a horizon of possibilities.13 It is because we live as the body in this way that we feel we are a body. As you rightly point out, however, the possibilities of the body sometimes fail to live up to our hopes and expectations, and here it reveals a wholly different aspect. Most notably there are times when we fantasise about precisely what is impossible for us. Who has not dreamt of being able to fly, or climb great heights and run great distances with ease, and then felt their own body as limited in comparison? Undoubtedly these fantasies are influenced by our cultural milieu, such as science fiction films and comic-book tales of superheroes. Yet the latter may themselves spring from a universal human preoccupation with the limitations of the body and the possibilities offered by other corporeal forms. Folklore and myths from across the world feature animals revered for their remarkable abilities, as well as humanoids with heightened powers, and even gods that take animal form to carry out tasks impossible for humans.14 The oldest known representative artworks also show a fascination with non-human bodies, depicting, almost without exception, the forms of various animals and occasionally even human–animal chimeras.15 All of the above reflects the other way in which our bodies appear to us: as a restricted set of possibilities, a hindrance on the mind which can float away from it through thought and imagination. It is because of this power of freely roaming thought that we can also be said to live in the body, underpinning the sense that we have it. Such are the two ways in which we are embodied: living as the body, and living in the body. Indeed, human existence itself can almost be described as a kind of oscillation between these two modes of being.16 If this is correct then the answer to your question – whether we have a body or are a body – does then seem to be ‘both’. But are we simply resigned to this contradiction? By no means: we can attempt to explain how it is possible, and one means of doing so, I suggest, is through a comparison with other kinds of living beings.17 Ever since Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was accepted as the best scientific account of humanity’s origins, we have BODY 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 49 49 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 grown accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a kind of animal – or at least, as an offshoot from the animal kingdom. This knowledge brings to the fore the aspects of our lives that are shared by animal, and in particular mammalian, life. We find safety in warmth, howl when in pain, nurse and rear our young, live alongside others with varying degrees of ease and animosity.18 And yet there are clearly ways in which human beings are quite distinct: no other animal has the mastery of fire, reflects the world in objects of aesthetic appreciation, or has language (as opposed to signals) as an integral part of its existence. Could these differences be explained by the peculiar way in which we humans are embodied? I ask this question not only with regard to our anatomical form – including opposable thumbs, an upright stance, and so on – which no doubt does play a pivotal role in accounting for our capacities and achievements.19 I instead wonder whether it is the fact that we both live as the body and live in the body that sets us apart from animals, and ultimately accounts for the cultural and psychological achievements mentioned. * Michael Hauskeller: I suppose you are right that even those non-human animals closest to us are unlikely to ever experience that curious detachedness from their bodies that plays such a prominent role in our own existence. Non-human animals, as a rule, live as their bodies and not in them.20 So this does indeed distinguish us as a species. There are, however, many different characteristics that distinguish humans from other animals – you already mentioned some of them – and I am not sure this is the one that somehow constitutes, as it were, the essence of being human. (In fact, I rather doubt that there is such a thing as the human essence.)21 In any case, it is worth spelling out what it means to experience oneself as having a body rather than being a body, and what exactly it is that prompts or allows us to conceive of ourselves and our bodies in that peculiar way. When we think of ourselves as having a body, what happens is that we distance ourselves from what we are, that is, as bodies. We take a step back from the reality of our existence, from everything that binds us to the world as it actually is in its concrete materiality, from all our dependencies and vulnerabilities, our existential embeddedness. And we are able to do this only because we have a highly developed ‘sense of possibility’, as Robert Musil called it,22 which allows us to abstract from what is actually there and consider (and then, if we wish, also aim for) what is not there but conceivably could be there. In other words, we are 50 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 50 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 able to imagine all sorts of things that do not exist, at least not yet. In a way, absences are as real for us as presences. This gives us an enormous power: the power to change the world. It is pretty obvious, though, that some of the things that our sense of possibility conjures up are not really possible at all. Unlike non-human animals, we sometimes imagine (as possible) what is actually impossible, such as travelling back in time or communicating with the dead. The idea that we can somehow separate ourselves from our bodies and go on living without them, or replace them with a different one, may well fall into the same category: we can imagine it, but it is factually impossible. This would also solve the problem we identified earlier: how we can appear to both be and have a body. For a solution is indeed required because it strikes me as logically impossible to both be and have a body. This is because having a body entails not being that body, and we cannot both be and not be a body. If being a body and having a body are both modes of being, they seem to be mutually exclusive. Yet what is entirely possible is that we sometimes feel distinct from our body and sometimes not. This is quite compatible with our never really ‘having’ our body at all. We would simply be frequently deceived by our imagination (our strong ‘sense of possibility’) into thinking that we do. The notion that we can become separate from our body would then just be an illusion or a fantasy. We would, just like all the other animals, live as bodies rather than in bodies. Naturally, we may find this hard to accept because being a body comes with a price that many of us are rather reluctant to pay, which is death. Bodies, or at any rate the kind of bodies that we happen to have or be, are mortal. If we only had our bodies, there would still be hope. Having a body holds the promise of a possible escape route from our existential dependencies. If we are not, or at least not entirely, identical with our bodies – if the real me is somehow beyond the reach of the physical universe and its destructive forces – we may still survive the demise of our body. But if we really are our body, then there is no way out. The death of our body will be our death, just as the life of our body is our life. So clearly the question whether we are our body or have our body is not just of academic interest. The stakes are high for all of us. This may explain why the illusion, if indeed it is one, of there being an essentially bodiless (and for this reason potentially immortal) self that merely uses a particular body to interact with the material world is so persistent. There is of course another possibility that we should at least consider: that we are not at all mistaken about having a body; we are mistaken about being one. Even if we are certain that two states of affairs (in this case: being a particular body and not being that body) are BODY 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 51 51 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 mutually exclusive, this does not tell us anything about which of the two states actually obtains and which does not. Perhaps it is not our sense of possibility that misleads us, but our sense of reality. Perhaps it is our constant active engagement with the material world in which we find ourselves that deceives us into thinking that we are no more than the bodies we use for that purpose. Perhaps Descartes was right all along and we are (nothing but) thinking things. Is there anything we can say to prove Descartes wrong, or at least to show that we have little reason to believe he was right? * Lewis Coyne: It is true, to be sure, that one cannot both have a body and be a body at the same time. As you say, to have something presupposes that it is separate from oneself, and so to claim that one also is this thing would be self-contradictory. Note, however, that I suggested that our having a body and being a body are just feelings, or impressions, that we have about ourselves, and it is of course psychologically possible to feel contradictory things. These feelings are based on our two modes of being: living as the body and living in the body. It is the latter that underpins the former. The question then is whether it is logically possible to both live as and live in the body equally. Again, however, the answer would appear to be no, and for exactly the same reason as before: to live in implies a separation between the self and the body that to live as denies. Hence what we are searching for is a reason to believe that one mode of being is in fact foundational, and ultimately underpins the other, merely subsidiary mode. One answer, as you note, is essentially Cartesian: we are thinking things that live in the body, and only mistakenly believe that we are that body on the basis of the derivative mode of being that is living as the body. This brings us to the question you raise of whether there is anything we can say to prove Descartes wrong. I think we can argue with some confidence – which is usually as much confidence as philosophy permits – that he was probably wrong, and the justification for believing this is partly philosophical and partly scientific. The philosophical reasons to reject Descartes’ mind–body dualism centre on the purported relation between those two entities. Despite his claim that the body and the mind are fundamentally different things – one material, the other immaterial – they are evidently interrelated, and uniquely so: if my body is struck, my mind feels the pain; if I will my limb to move, move it does. With no other object in the world do I have 52 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 52 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 this twofold relation – a fact that Descartes himself recognised when conceding that we are not in our bodies in the way that ‘a pilot [is] in his ship’.23 To explain exactly how the mind and body could interact with one another, despite being different kinds of thing, Descartes supposed that the pineal gland in the brain acted as a point of contact.24 The problem with this explanation, however, is that the pineal gland would then have to be both material and immaterial, which it obviously is not – indeed, it is impossible that anything could be. The second major reason to reject the Cartesian answer is simply that our worldview has drastically changed since the early modern era. Descartes’ understanding of the mind drew heavily on the Christian idea of an eternal soul, distinct from the world of nature. After Darwin, however, we must assume that humanity and its mental faculties are part of nature, or at least an outgrowth of it, and therefore seek selfunderstanding on that basis.25 From our post-Darwinian perspective the idea of a mind that merely has a body, interacting in ways that were already hard to account for, appears yet more implausible. The more attractive solution is the other one you described: that our living as the body is fundamental, and our living in the body merely derivative. Now, if, as we have supposed, animals exclusively live as their bodies, then we must ask what distinguishing feature or features we have that allow us to temporarily suspend our immediate engagement with the world. What allows, in other words, for what you called our sense of possibility? Although there are probably several factors simultaneously responsible, the best single candidate, to my mind, is language.26 As users of language we are capable of more than signalling (although we also, of course, do a great deal of this). Signalling is an outward expression of an inner feeling: the snarled warning of a dog, the contented purr of a cat, the genuine smile that reveals good intent. This is real communication, no doubt – but in language proper words signify ideas. Thus the word ‘book’ (and its equivalents in other languages) names the idea of the book as such. Although this idea is formed from encounters with actual books, which are brought together under the label ‘book’, the idea itself is available to us as an object of contemplation totally independently of the books from which it was derived. We can then take this idea and freely manipulate it in our imaginations, including in ways that would be physically impossible to enact. And the same is true, of course, of any other entity that we have an idea of, ourselves included. The fact that I can call myself ‘I’ means that I have an idea of myself, and can scrutinise myself and imagine myself in all sorts of ways as a result. I have, in other words, the power of self-consciousness. BODY 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 53 53 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 With self-consciousness comes, of course, an awareness of our eventual death. This knowledge once again reveals the ambiguity of the body, albeit in a new and more urgent light. You note that if we only had our bodies there would still be hope, as then our ‘real’ selves might be able to survive the deaths of the bodies that housed them. I quite agree. Equally, however, if we only were our bodies, there would be no scope for existential anguish, as we would lack the self-reflection necessary for knowledge of our own mortality. To put it another way: if our only mode of being were living as the body, existing in a permanently unfolding present, then we would not be preoccupied with ourselves and the fact that at some point in the future we must die. Animals, to be sure, are well-served by instinct to fear threats to themselves and their group. But can we really call this an awareness of their own mortality? If we cannot, then perhaps we would have been better off as a species to remain animals: death would still await us, of course, but we would not live with it as an ever-present possibility. * Michael Hauskeller: An interesting question for sure, but I feel we are drifting a bit off topic here. Also, I am not entirely satisfied yet by the proposed solution to the contradiction that we have identified, which is that we are our bodies, just like non-human animals are their bodies, but what distinguishes us is a particular cognitive capacity, namely self-consciousness (rooted in language and the ability to operate with abstract ideas), that allows us to assume a certain degree of detachedness from what we are, which in turn deceives us into thinking, falsely, that it might actually be possible for us to exist without our bodies, or within a different body. It is true that the dualist position (that has us existing in a body rather than as a body) is hard to reconcile with what we know about the world. As far as we are aware, when our body dies, we die. If there is a spirit or soul – some immaterial substance that forms the core of our being – that is set free when our body dies, it must continue to exist in some other dimension of reality to which we have no access. Those who are dead seem to be gone for good, at least from this world, which strongly suggests that the death of our body is indeed the death of us. And if the death of our body is our death, then the life of our body is our life. However, I don’t think that the two reasons you provide for why we should reject the dualist position are conclusive. Of course, it is difficult to understand how it should be possible for an immaterial, non-physical substance (if that is what we really are) to interact with the body, which 54 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 54 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 is part of the physical world. But just because we haven’t yet figured out how to explain this interaction does not mean that such an interaction is impossible. There are many things in this world that we know are real and that we do not understand and cannot explain. Modern science is full of unsolved riddles.27 Neither is the fact that we have evolved naturally a compelling reason for rejecting dualism. Perhaps it is not just us, but everything that exists that has this dual nature. Perhaps all things merely have a body, while the essence of their being is immaterial. Let us have another look at something I pointed out at the beginning of our conversation. Not only do we use our body in many situations, like an extremely adaptable multi-purpose tool, we can also lose and indeed replace parts of our body without, apparently, losing parts of ourselves. How is that possible if I and my body are one and the same? It seems that I can lose a leg and still be me, and not be less me than before. I can lose another leg and still be me. I can lose both of my arms too. I can lose my eyes and my ears. I can have an artificial lung implanted and even an artificial heart and still be, not only partially but wholly, me. None of the parts that I can lose or replace seem to be essential to what I am, with one possible exception, which is our brain, and even that can be at least partially replaced (an artificial hippocampus is already being tested).28 Should we then say that what we are is actually not our (entire) body, but our brain? But that seems odd, too, and in some ways more implausible than to say that we are our entire body. We live in the world as bodies, we engage and interact as bodies, we love and hate each other as bodies. But we do not do all these things as brains. In many ways I live my life as a body, but I do not seem to live my life as a brain. So if most of our body is expendable or replaceable and therefore not an essential part of what we are, and if what remains (the brain) is not something we can easily identify with, then it would appear that we are not our body after all. Instead, we seem to have it. This would also explain why so many people feel alienated from their bodies. It is increasingly common for people to assert that the bodies they happen to have do not really reflect what they are. When we are getting old and our bodies begin to show it, we often find it difficult to reconcile the image we see when we look in a mirror with the more youthful image that we have of ourselves in our heads. We then feel betrayed by our bodies because instead of lending expression to what we are they seem to conceal it: we look old even though we still feel young(ish), and this experience is then reinterpreted first as ‘We are old on the outside, but young on the inside’, and finally as ‘Our bodies are old, while we are still young’. Yet while this still makes some kind of sense – we can perhaps BODY 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 55 55 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 meaningfully distinguish being physically young or old from being mentally so – there are other assertions indicative of an alienation from one’s body that prove more challenging to our understanding. If I am, in my bodily constitution, a man, but feel that what I really am is a woman, or if I am white, but feel that what I really am is black, then what appears to be claimed here is not simply a mismatch between my body and my (immaterial) self, but a mismatch between my actual body and my true body. Both sex and skin colour are, after all, physical attributes. So what is being claimed here is that what I only have is this particular body, while what I am is not something non-physical, but, instead, a different (not yet realised) body. And I am not sure this makes any sense at all.29 * Lewis Coyne: I admit that the above arguments against Descartes do not constitute absolute, knock-down criticisms. Were his theories not plausible, at least up to a point, they would have long since gone the way of old Scholastic puzzles such as whether angels are sexed beings or not (once a hotly debated question). And more than that, Cartesian substance dualism resonates with a deep – perhaps universal – desire to comprehend ourselves as merely having, rather than being, bodies. Why we have this psychological need one can only guess (your suggestion that it has something to do with awareness of our own mortality is surely on the right lines), yet the proliferation of dualistic religions throughout history and across the world attests to its force, and despite everything I have said against Descartes I of course feel it too. Nevertheless, I find the evolutionary argument against Cartesian substance dualism rationally persuasive, primarily for its parsimony. Perhaps I can put it more convincingly this way. We have already supposed that animals simply live as their bodies, and have already argued that human beings, who evolved from non-human animals, both live as and live in their bodies. Now, since logic dictates that one of those modes of being has to be fundamental, then one of two possibilities has to be true. Either we human beings really live in our bodies, and therefore represent a rupture with the remainder of the animal kingdom, or else we really live as our bodies, just like other animals. The problem with the first option is one of continuity: we evolved from non-human animals and yet exist in a way that is fundamentally at odds with our closest relatives. How are we to explain this radical departure? To be sure, nature presents us, as you say, with many unexplained phenomena. Yet the gap in our understanding of how humans alone could exist in their bodies is significant enough 56 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 56 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 to prima facie count against the suggestion. Far more parsimonious is the second option: that humans, just like animals, in truth live as their bodies. The problem with this explanation is comparably minor: we have to explain how human beings can also experience themselves as living in their bodies, which is precisely what we have sought to do by pointing to the human capacity for self-consciousness grounded in the possession of language and its concomitant grasp of ideas. The latter position may also be able to shed some light on the phenomena that you describe, in particular the facts that we can lose certain parts of our bodies and yet feel no less of a self, and that ageing can lead people to feel subjectively alienated from their objective body. Recall the distinction drawn above between the acting self, the ‘I can’, and the ego, the ‘I think’. The former is the self living as the body, finding its way through the world in accordance with bodily possibilities, whereas the latter is the self living in the body, roaming freely in thought and imagination. Now, if I lose a limb, for example, then the latter mode of being is indeed unaffected; I will carry on thinking just as before. But the former mode – living as the body – is affected. Whereas I could formerly move in and interact with the world in a great many ways, some of these possibilities are now objectively closed off to me, which can affect my living as the body in two possible ways. On the one hand the ‘I can’ may simply readjust to accommodate the new, restricted set of possibilities presented by the body: the staircase that previously appeared climbable now confronts me as an obstacle, for instance. On the other hand, the ‘I can’ may (at least for a time) remain just as it was courtesy of a phantom limb – a limb that is still felt to be there. But in that case the ‘I can’ is sure to be betrayed by the objective body, which can no longer engage with the world in the way that gave rise to the ‘I can’ as it originally was.30 In either case, then, our living as the body is negatively affected, yet our living in the body remains intact. Resting on the cognitive capacity for self-reflection, the latter mode of being is only impaired by damage to the body parts chiefly responsible for cognition – namely, certain regions of the brain. It is on these grounds alone that the self can be thought of as co-extensive with the brain, in the fashion you mentioned. It seems to me that something similar, albeit far less dramatic, may also be true of physical ageing. My first-hand experience of growing old is limited, but I have noticed that certain athletic feats which came easily 10 years ago are now more difficult for me: running for extended periods, or swimming widths of a pool underwater. In these cases the ‘I can’ finds itself let down by the objective body, which ‘can’ no longer, although once BODY 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 57 57 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 again the ‘I think’ of course remains perfectly intact. A different process is surely at work, however, in the way that our physical appearance lets us down with age, when we begin to notice wrinkles, a receding hairline and the like. For here the expectation that goes unmet seems to be based not on the ‘I can’, but rather on a mental image that we entertain of ourselves, one that once accurately reflected our objective body but now is at odds with it. As an idea, the latter is surely an operation of selfconsciousness, of the ‘I think’, even though the thinking subject itself goes unaffected, as before. The latter is close in structure, I suspect, to the Cartesian belief that one is not really this body, but rather a soul, spirit or mind simply encased within it. As a belief about ourselves this also depends on our self-consciousness. And as with our disappointment at noticing physical signs of ageing, the person who believes themselves to really be a soul or mind is perplexed, perhaps even outraged, by the persistent reminder that they are not free from the brute presence of the body. However, unlike the mental image of our objective body that ageing so rudely contradicts, the Cartesian understanding of the self does not reflect the way that I once was but am no longer. On the contrary, it may never have been true at all. * Michael Hauskeller: Right then. So let us assume that we are indeed bodies, just like any other animal, and that it is only because of our ability to think that it does not always seem that way to us. And paradoxically, as you point out, it is precisely when our bodies start diverging from the mental image we have of ourselves that we become painfully aware that we do not just inhabit those bodies, but are in fact identical with them. As long as we are young, healthy, reasonably presentable, and at the height of our physical powers, we do not feel constrained by our body: it remains unobtrusive, a well-functioning tool, completely at our service. It is then, when we are most at one with our body, that the body appears least essential. It is only when it fails us that it dawns on us that we cannot escape it – that the fate of our body is in fact our fate. It is easy to distance oneself from a healthy body; it is much harder to do this when the body is in pain or dysfunctional, thus transforming the largely pre-conscious ‘I can’ into a very conscious ‘I can’t’. Let us move on, though. We have established or at least (tentatively) agreed that we are bodies. I am my body, and you are your body. However, what we have not talked about so far is what exactly a body (or perhaps our body) is. The question that I posed at the start of our conversation, 58 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 58 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 which we have been discussing ever since, was whether we are a body or (only) have a body. This somewhat echoes Descartes’ question whether we are res extensa (an extended thing) or res cogitans (a thinking thing). But now we can see that Descartes may have got not only the answer wrong, but also the question. Even if we are indeed bodies, this does not mean that we cannot also be thinking things. These predicates are not mutually exclusive. And there is, in fact, no doubt that we are thinking things. Clearly, we are things that think – and not only in the narrow rationalistic, concept-using sense, but in the wider (Cartesian) sense of thinking, which is something like subjective awareness. We are thinking things in the sense that it is something that it is like to be the body that we are. We are thinking things in the sense that we are aware of the world and ourselves in it, that we feel pain and pleasure and all kinds of other things like fear, anger, love, desire, or simply our being alive. Yet if we are bodies and thinking things in this wide sense, then we can only conclude that the body, or at any rate the human body, is itself (not only an extended thing, but also) a thinking thing. But if the human body is a thinking thing, then should we not – based on the same considerations that led us earlier to conclude that if non-human animals are their bodies, then humans must also be – now conclude that perhaps all bodies are thinking things? Surely the argument from evolutionary continuity cuts both ways: if we must be bodies because non-human animals are bodies, then non-human animals must be thinking things because we are thinking things. And why not go further than that? Why stop with non-human animals? Plants have bodies or rather are bodies, so perhaps they are thinking things too,31 although if they are, they are most likely thinking things in a more diffuse way, perhaps akin to the way we are still thinking things even when we are only-half awake or indeed fast asleep. Whatever the body is, if we are it, then we know that it is not just an extended thing. And if that body is also a thinking thing, then it is a thinking thing by virtue of it being a body and not by virtue of it doing any actual thinking. What I am wondering, though, is whether all extended things are also bodies. Perhaps a body is a particular kind of extended thing. Our body, the body that we are, is an organised whole. If it were not, it could not be one particular entity, which we believe ourselves to be. For this body to be me it must have an organisational unity that sets it apart from other bodies and other extended things that are not part of that unity. The borders of our being may not be clearly defined, but it certainly seems that there are such borders, fluid and fuzzy as they may be. There are clearly extended things, including bodies, that are not me. But we know that sometimes what is part of me can stop being part of me, BODY 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 59 59 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 for instance when I lose an organ, a limb, or even something as small and seemingly insignificant as a hair or a fingernail. And if what is part of me can stop being part of me, then perhaps what is not part of me can become part of me, for instance a prosthetic arm or leg when it is integrated into the organisational whole that is my body. * Lewis Coyne: I agree that the argument from evolutionary continuity cuts both ways. Earlier I suggested that we have reason to think of living as the body as our primary mode of being because non-human animals, our closest relatives, appear to exist in precisely that way. As you rightly point out, though, this invites the question of whether that mode of being can also be traced down from animals, and, if so, where we then draw the line between those beings that exist in that way and those that do not. One answer, which deserves some consideration, is that we should not draw a line at all. This would amount to the claim that everything that physically exists is a body, and that living as the body accordingly goes all the way down, to the atomic and even sub-atomic levels of nature. The advantage of this position – which owes something to Descartes’ great antagonists, Baruch Spinoza32 and Gottfried Leibniz33 – is that we no longer have to explain how mind and matter interact with and relate to one another: they are simply construed as two facets of one and the same nature.34 The disadvantage, however, is simply that it is hard to accept that sentience or subjectivity, however rudimentary, can be attributed to every physical entity. For if all bodies are thinking things, and if everything that physically exists is a body, then everything that physically exists is also a thinking thing. This conclusion stretches the limits of credulity: can we really say that electrons live as their bodies, or that there is something-that-it-is-like-to-be a quark? Perhaps – but at face value I find it hard to accept. The problem with the above is evidently not the idea that ‘all bodies are thinking things’, but rather that ‘everything that physically exists is a body’. To be sure, everything that physically exists is a spatially extended entity. But the body that our conversation is concerned with – the body that we have and are – is evidently a good deal more than this. In trying to establish more precisely what a body is, beyond its being a physical object, it might be instructive to recall the two modes of being that we called ‘living as the body’ and ‘living in the body’. What these formulations share, apart from ‘the body’ being their subject, is the predicate ‘living’. If we take this latter commonality seriously as a clue to defining 60 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 60 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 the body, our attempt will be restricted to the domain of physical beings that are alive. Are there, then, any good reasons to think that living beings alone are bodies in the sense that you outline? The strongest evidence for believing this to be the case has already been pointed toward, namely, your observation that ‘[o]ur body, the body that we are, is an organised whole’. This is entirely correct – but it still does not quite get to what is unique about living beings. The reason for this is that a being counts as organised if it possesses parts that play a functional role in fulfilling an end or ends of the whole. Evidently, this definition excludes a great many non-living physical beings: rocks, clouds, the sun, wind and rain, to name just a few. All are what we may call non-teleological, in that they lack teloi, or ‘ends’, which is another way of saying that they are not characterised by any kind of purpose.35 Only organised beings, as indicated, can be so described. A chair, for instance, has parts (one or more legs, a seat and a back) that contribute to the fulfilment of its purpose, which is to be sat on. Saw it in half and the parts of the chair will cease to function, meaning that the chair itself no longer fulfils its purpose – a purpose which nevertheless remains the chair’s defining characteristic. Tools, furniture and machines are perhaps the clearest cases of organised beings, but the category also includes anything intentionally created by human hands, as, even if the purpose is not merely instrumental, some kind of purpose is by definition involved regardless. Even a painting, for example, consists of parts (paint and canvas) that serve to stimulate the eye and the mind, invite us to reflect on its themes and qualities, and thereby obliquely serve the purpose of enriching our inner lives. While the chair and the painting are organised, however, neither is alive, and it is the latter that we have taken as our clue to defining the body. What, then, distinguishes an organised living being from an organised non-living being? The answer is that the former alone is selforganised. The chair and painting are created by humans, meaning that their parts are arranged by us in order to serve overarching purposes which are themselves bestowed upon the object. Matters are quite different with a living being, however. An organism generates its own parts (cells, organs and so forth), the functionality of which serves the purpose of its continued existence – a purpose that is not imparted from without, but is rather immanent to the organism.36 Clearly, all organisms are brought into being through reproduction, but regardless of whether this occurs sexually or asexually, at no point in the development of a living being is a telos bestowed on it by a third party. It is, to reiterate, its own end, and the fact that complex organisms such as we only survive BODY 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 61 61 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 through symbiotic relationships with bacteria and the like does nothing to undermine this fact. Thus the living being is a categorically distinct kind of physical entity: one that is not only organised, but also – and unlike an artefact – self-organised.37 Evidently we are such entities, and, since we have also agreed that we are our bodies, it would appear that our being organisms and being bodies amount to one and the same thing. If we extended this line of thinking to all organisms, then everything alive – but only things that are alive – would count as bodies. To my mind, this position has a fairly significant advantage over the one previously examined, namely that in placing a restriction on the domain of bodies it also places a restriction on the domain of thinking things. For if all bodies are thinking things, and if everything that is alive is a body, then everything that is alive is a thinking thing. Some people will still find this hard to accept, of course. Indeed, my earlier incredulity can be turned back against me by asking whether we can really say that bacteria live as their bodies, or that there is something-that-it-is-like-to-be a fungus. But if we understand ‘being a thinking thing’ in the very broad sense you suggest – as merely ‘sentient’, or ‘having subjectivity’ – then it strikes me as entirely plausible. The tentative outcome of our conversation, then, is that bodies are identical with the physical form of living beings, and that such beings live as bodies – even though human beings, courtesy of our linguistically grounded capacity for self-consciousness, sometimes adopt the second, derivative mode of being that is living in our bodies. It is for the latter reason, we suggested, that human beings feel that we both have and are our bodies. If this is at least partly correct, then we can conclude that Heidegger was indeed wrong to say that ‘the body phenomenon is the most difficult problem’. But it would seem, at least on the basis of our conversation, that an analysis of the body leads almost by necessity to the question of the mind, and ultimately to the phenomenon of life: perhaps the greatest problem of them all. Notes 1. A common trope in many science fiction novels and movies, the idea was first brought up as a thought experiment by Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 340. The thought experiment was meant to show that the identity of the person is independent of their body. 2. Among many popular accounts of life after death see for instance Tomlinson, Exploring the Eternal Soul. 3. See for instance Wiley, A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind-Uploading, or Rothblatt, Virtually Human. 4. Descartes made this argument in his Meditations on First Philosophy, which I cite here in Sutcliffe’s translation (Descartes, Discourse on Method, 156): ‘[I]t is certain that I, that is to say my mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it.’ 62 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 62 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 5. Plato, Gorgias, 492e–3a. 6. For a comprehensive discussion of the extent to which and how emotions are enacted and embodied, see Colombetti, The Feeling Body. 7. Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, 146. Heidegger did, however, develop an account of the body in his Zollikon Seminars. 8. The body’s alternating appearance as something that we have and something that we are – a distinction sometimes captured by the labels ‘objective body’ and ‘lived body’ – has been explored in great depth by philosophers belonging to the phenomenological tradition. See, for example, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 9. Descartes, Discourse on Method. 10. This canonical Latin formulation of the idea appeared in Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, originally published in 1644, seven years after his Discourse on Method. 11. Of course, Descartes’ position is itself a variant of the body–soul dualism that can be traced back to Plato, Pythagoras and other Ancient Greeks, in addition to the Judeo-Christian tradition (and many non-Western intellectual traditions besides). 12. As Heidegger argued, a phenomenological analysis of our being-in-the-world reveals that beings are primarily revealed to us in and through practical engagement rather than disinterested reflection. See his Being and Time. It is only in the Zollikon Seminars, however, that Heidegger connects this idea to an account of the lived body. 13. My use here of the phrase ‘I can’ is indebted to Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, 266. 14. Greek and Norse mythology are prime examples of sources of such stories. 15. I am thinking here of the Paleolithic cave paintings of Altamira, Lascaux and Chauvet-Pontd’Arc in Spain and France, and Lubang Jeriji Saléh and Leang Tedongnge in Indonesia. 16. This is a point made with great sophistication and justified at length by Plessner in Levels of Organic Life and the Human. 17. This is, in part, the method employed by Plessner and other proponents of philosophical anthropology in their quest to solve the ‘riddle’ of human existence in a non-reductive naturalistic fashion. 18. On this point see ‘Philosophical aspects of Darwinism’, the second essay of Hans Jonas’s The Phenomenon of Life. 19. For competing accounts of the existentially significant anatomical and morphological features of human beings see Alsberg, In Quest of Man and Gehlen, Man. 20. See Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human, 237. Plessner distinguishes between the ‘excentric positionality’ of the human, which allows us to distance ourselves from our body, and the ‘centric positionality’ of the non-human animal, which does not. 21. See Hauskeller, ‘Making sense of what we are’. 22. Musil, The Man Without Qualities, 10. 23. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 48. 24. Descartes, Treatise on Man, 95. 25. See Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: ‘Philosophical aspects of Darwinism’. 26. This has been argued at some length by Cassirer in An Essay on Man. 27. See Brooks, 13 Things that Don’t Make Sense. 28. https:// futur ism.com/ a- new- dev ice- could- make- mem ory- impla nts- a- real ity (accessed 1 December 2021). 29. On this matter, see my conversation with Holly Lawford-Smith on gender in this volume. 30. For full discussions of missing and phantom limbs and their meanings for a philosophy of the body, see Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception and Goldstein, The Organism. 31. See Segundo-Ortin and Calvo, ‘Are plants cognitive?’. 32. Spinoza, Ethics. 33. Leibniz, The Monadology. 34. For a sophisticated modern expression of this position see Whitehead, Process and Reality. 35. For classic philosophical accounts of organismic teleology see Aristotle, ‘De Anima’, in Complete Works, 641–92, and Kant, Critique of Judgement. 36. This is a distinction that I have elsewhere called ‘immanent’ versus ‘transcendent’ teleology. For a full discussion see Coyne, Hans Jonas, 20. 37. For a complete account of this idea see Jonas, Organism and Freedom. BODY 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 63 63 09-Feb-22 11:08:36 Bibliography Alsberg, Paul. In Quest of Man: A biological approach to the problem of man’s place in nature. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1970. Aristotle. Complete Works, volume 1, edited by J. Barnes and translated by J. A. Smith. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. 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