BODY AND SOUL RELATIONSHIP FROM GREAT THINKERS
Body and Soul relationship
The relationship between body and soul has been the main concern for many thinkers since the beginning of the history of philosophy. In this paper, we will be exploring this relationship from the perspective of three great thinkers: Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Agustin. They were all interested in this relationship, and as they do have common views, they also differ in many areas. The main concern that these three thinkers have is that the humans are made of both body and soul. They can see and touch the body, but they cannot touch the soul. They explore first of all, what is the soul, in what does it consist, and once they define it, they explore the relationship between them, to understand the role of each in the life and action of men.
It is important to notice that each of these thinkers before questioning the relationship between body and soul, they question the meaning of life, and particularly the topic of love and happiness. Each in its way, while Agustin searches for the meaning of life and Truth, Plato and Aristotle search for the best way of living, the virtuous man, and ultimately what makes people happy. They all discover that to answer these questions; human actions play an important role. Moreover, to understand human actions, they must understand what moves people to act in one way or another. They act through their bodies, but they also have something that they do not see nor touch, which is the soul, and it has a very key role in human actions.
For this reason, we will explore the relationship between body and soul, and in doing so, we will discover that the topic at the background of it will be the meaning of life and happiness.
In the Symposium of Plato, Socrates, and his students, present an exposition about love. Socrates’s exposition is key to understand Plato’s position of the relationship between body and soul. Even though he does not talk directly about this relationship, Socrates explains how all men desire immortality. If men go to women, it is to express their love, and they hope to leave an immortal memory of them by leaving children. However, it is of higher excellence to give birth to the things of the mind. Poets and inventors are examples of it. Love begins with a beautiful body, but the next step is beautiful words and ideas. Finally, the person must realize that the higher level of love is the beauty of form and not of the bodies.
For Plato, thus, the soul is to a higher degree than the body, because it is the soul that can contemplate beauty. Bodies are a dim reflection of the idea, the perfection of them, which are beautiful and are the form. Even if bodies are needed to begin the process of discovering and achieving the contemplation of beauty, people must overcome the bodies to reach the beauty of the ideas. It is well explained in the following passage:
The next step is to honour spiritual beauty above physical beauty, so that if he finds a man good in soul without a blossoming body, he will be satisfied, love and care for him, and, by giving birth to the kind of discussions that improve a young man be forced to observe the beauty of laws and customs, to see once again that all beauty is kindred and so conclude that physical beauty is only a paltry thing. After customs he must be led to knowledge and see its beauty also, so that, having by now looked upon much beauty, he will no longer admire a particular manifestation of it, but rather absorbed in the contemplation of a vast sea of beauty, give birth to sublime words and sentiments in the unstinting practice of philosophy. This is the proper way to go or be led to love: to begin from beautiful things and ever climb, as on a ladder, from one beautiful customs, from customs to beautiful knowledge, and from knowledge finally to reach that knowledge which is none other than the revelation of the beautiful itself, and so recognize at last what beauty really is. That is when time is worth living, spent in contemplating the beautiful itself.
So far, the end of the mind is the contemplation of beauty, and the soul does this. For Plato, men are living only in the world of shadows and them, need to find the truth, the ideas, and beauty. In the following text of the allegory of the cave, he explains how to discover beauty, the world of ideas and get out of the cave; it is necessary to live a virtuous life and to leave behind all evil. Indeed, when Socrates, in the mouth of Plato enquiries about an easy and quick way of achieving this, he says, that the way to do it is through virtues, in this sense, the body becomes an enemy that needs to be summoned to the soul because it makes virtue harder to live. The soul again is seen as superior to the body although necessary:
but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being on his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, he will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already, and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being
Aristotle: body and soul
Aristotle has a different interpretation of the relationship between body and soul. In the Physics, Book II, Aristotle explains how there are two different elements called form and matter. The substance for Aristotle is a compound of both form and matter, and he says that in the human person the body is the matter, and the soul is the form. It is a composite body.
Aristotle, in his writings about the soul, explores in more depth the human soul and both matter and form. What Aristotle has in common with Plato is that also for him, knowledge is noble and honourable, and this capacity of knowing is of the soul. Thus the soul has a higher esteem than the body for Aristotle as it does to Plato. Indeed, Aristotle says that it is the soul in all animals, the principle of the body, what animates the body.
Interestingly, while for Plato the body was needed as an instrument to reach the contemplation of beauty, for Aristotle knowing and thinking is also an attribute of the soul, it is honourable, and still, the act of imagination is part of thinking and cannot be done without the body. Furthermore, he says:
Thinking, most of all, seems to be proper to the soul, but if this, too, is a species of imagination or incapable of existing without imagination, then it, too, could not exist without a body. Accordingly, if there is any function or affection of the soul proper to the soul, the soul can be separated from the body, but if no function or affection is proper to the soul, the soul could not be separated from the body but would be just like straight now it seems that all the attributes of the soul e.g. temper, good temper, fear, pity, courage, also gladness and love and hate, exist with the body; for the body is being affected simultaneously with these. This is indicated by the fact that sometimes when strong or striking affections occur, we are not at the same time irritated or afraid, but at times when the affections are weak or obscure, we are moved, and the body is agitated in a manner similar to that when we are angry. If such be the case, it is clear that the attributes of the soul are things whose formulae include matter.
The souls are the principle of the matter and actuality of the body. For Aristotle, the whole substance of a human is a compound of both body and soul. Indeed, even the noblest actions of the soul such as thinking, and other affections that the soul experiences, cannot be separated from the functions of the body.
While Aristotle does not see the body in such a negative way as Plato does, nor as Augustine as we will investigate in the next part of this essay. He develops the necessity of living a virtuous life in other of his texts, and the role of the body in it. However, he always refers to the relationship between body and soul as elements that are necessary to each other’s because together they form a compound, that is in the case of humans, the human person.
St. Augustine: body and soul
St. Augustine lived a sinful life. He lived a life carried away by his passions, his desires and not ruled by the mind. While Aristotle talked about the elements and the compound of the person, Plato talked about the end of men, searching for beauty, and Augustine is a combination of both. He acknowledges that he has a soul and a body and that each want something different due to original sin, that left his nature wounded, and thus his body desires something, moved by lust, and his soul something else. For the body to obey the soul, or his will, virtues, or habits are necessary, but also a strong and wholehearted will that give an order and the body must obey.
In Augustine, we find the person as a combination of both body and soul. Even if he does not talk about matter and form as Aristotle does, he does acknowledge that in all his actions both body and souls are present, even though it is more perfect to be ruled by reason, that is the soul. In this respect, he gets close to Plato’s view of body and soul. Furthermore, Augustine talks about living in sin as being a slave of his passions and in chains. The body has also seen in a negative way, as an enemy of the soul, that needs to be conquered and summoned under the will. If a person lives ruled by his passions, such as lust, is a slave and his heart, which is in the soul, is blind as sin has darkened it. In his autobiography, he tells his life, his search for the truth, for God and he tells all the fights he had to be free from his passions and live a sinless life, he says:
"bodily desire, like morass, and adolescent sex welling up within me exuded mists which clouded over and obscured my heart, so that I could not distinguish the clear light of true love from the murk of lustin my tender youth they swept me away over the precipice of my body's appetites and plunged me in the whirlpool of sin"
Moreover, he also says:
"for I had been deafened by the clank of my chains, the fetters of the death which were my due to punishing the pride in my soul.
Moreover, in the book eight he also says how he was divided when his body acted one way, not ruled by his will because his will was weak and he did not order it with a full will:
"I tore my hair and hammered my forehead with my fists; I locked my fingers and hugged my knees; and I did all this because I made an act of will to do it. However, I might have had the will to do it and yet not have done it if my limbs had been unable to move in compliance with my will. I performed all these actions, in which the will and the power to act are not the same But when the mind commands the mind to make an act of will, these two are one and the same and yet the order is not obeyed, the reason, then why the command is not obeyed is that it is not given with the full will wholly rise to the heights where it is lifted by the truth, because it is weighed down by habit”.
Moreover, even when Plato and Augustine seemed to be very close to each other in their view of the relationship between body and soul, Augustine says in his writings about caring for the dead, that the body must be respected after death. He says that just as we take care of a garment or a ring of a person we cared for very much, the body has been part of us all our life and so after death, we must also respect it because of that. Because the body has been to us more than a garment or a ring.
Conclusion
Chronologically, Plato comes first, then Aristotle, who was a disciple of Plato and finally Augustine. Of the three, Augustine is the only who was a Christian and thus sin plays a big part in human actions, and of course the role of the soul and the body. They all have similarities to one another, and yet, they are all different. While Plato and Augustine share similarities in the dualism of body and soul, the main difference can be it is that Augustine converted to Christianity and thus even if the body must obey the mind, the soul, because it is not material and so more noble, and God is spiritual. Augustine also talks about sin, something Plato does not. Augustine blames original sin for his lust, and his body is not obeying his mind. Aristotle is more concern with the relation of them as constituent elements of the whole person. He explores the role of each element, and how they interact and the necessity of each other to perform actions, both the noblest actions such as thinking and others such as affections of anger and fear.
Both St. Augustine and Plato are called dualists, because even though the body and the soul interact and they need each other to perform actions, they are “enemies.” The soul is nobler for both and is the one that can ultimately achieve the goal of man. For Plato the contemplation of beauty and the world of ideas, and for Augustine the contemplation of God. However, for both of these thinkers, the body becomes the main enemy and an obstacle to achieving their goal. The body goes one way, and the soul pushes to another. Ultimately until the body is not in the service of the soul, true love cannot be found.
Aristotle is not a dualist. He does not see these two elements as enemies. In fact, he sees them as both necessary elements to be a whole person, and even though one is nobler than the other, that is the soul performing more noble actions, still requires the help of the body to do them. Plato and Augustine approach this relationship from a perspective of actions and the ultimate end of men, while Aristotle approaches it from a metaphysical perspective of the main constituents of beings.
It is important to know that the relationship between body and soul is key to understanding all human actions and how this relationship is understood, has many consequences in all the branches of philosophy.
Bibliography
Hardie and R.K. Gaye "Complete Works of Aristotle, Physics, Book II" Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984
Hippocrates G. Apostle, "Aristotle's on the Soul," The Peripatetic Press.
Plato, "The Republic," (514a-520a).
Raymond Larson, "The Symposium and The Phaedo Plato", Crofts Classic.
Saint Augustine, "Confessions," Penguin Classics.
Saint Augustine, "On Care to be Had for the Dead."
