BODY-MIND DUALISM

Limitations of Body-Mind Dualism for Understanding the Relationship between Body and Self: An Explanation

Limitations of Body-Mind Dualism for Understanding the Relationship between Body and Self: An Explanation

Introduction

This term dualism is used to describe any system in which there are two realities. The term is sometimes used to express the existence of two gods or the existence of God and the cosmos, but its most common usage is in the philosophy of human nature. A dualist holds that a human person is constituted by a body and what may be called a mind or soul or consciousness. Some dualists hold that persons are nonphysical concrete subjects who are embodied contingently (Caplan & Jane, 2000, pp 25-125). That is, a person may survive the destruction of his or her body, or one's body may continue to exist (as a corpse) after one has ceased to be. The greatest competing philosophy of human nature is materialism. While representatives of dualism in contemporary philosophy are in the minority, dualism is not easily uprooted philosophically, religiously, or culturally.

Discussion

Sociologists have shown how disturbances are typically grasped in the metaphors by which we understand mental and physical health. Body metaphors have been important in moral debate about these social disruptions. The division between good and evil has drawn heavily on bodily metaphors; what is sinister is related to left-handedness, the illegitimate side, the awkward side (Caplan & Jane, 2000, pp 25-125). Our sense of social order is spoken of in terms of the balance or imbalance of the body. In the eighteenth century, when physicians turned to mathematics to produce a Newtonian picture of the body, the metaphor of hydraulic pumps was used to express human digestion and blood circulation.

The therapeutic bleeding of patients by knife or leech was to assist this hydraulic mechanism and to relieve morbid pressures on the mind. Severe disturbances in society were often imagined as poor social digestion. These assumptions about social unrest producing disorder in the gut are reflected in the basic idea of the need for a government of the body. Dietary management of the body was translated into fiscal constraint, reduction in government expenditure, and downsizing of public institutions. In the language of modern management science, a lean and mean corporation requires a vibrant management team. In neoliberal ideology, central government is an excess—a form of political flatulence (Turner, 2000, Pp. xiii-xx).

In an important study of theories of the self, Jerrold Seigel (2005, pp 85-290) developed a useful model of how societies have conducted a philosophical conversation about the self. There are three basic components of the self. The most important is reflection. To be a self, we must be able to reflect on our identities, our actions and our relationship with others. We must have consciousness, language, and memory. Selfhood, whatever else it involves, must involve a capacity for continuous self-assessment and oversight of behavior. Second, the self is not an independent, free-floating form of consciousness because the self is also defined by its relationship to human ...