The Division of the Mind, Soul & Body
We do not live in a world of our own creation. We live in a world that is made up. In the words of James Baldwin an African American Historian, “People invent categories in order to feel safe.” (Dialogue 88-9) In other words people create associations to loosely say ‘I am not that’ or ‘I am this’, to feel a part of something and have a classification for social order. This notion applies to the body as well. People cannot simply understand the complexity of the body in total, so therefore it is classified.
There is always a powerful deviance position of the way we see life. This power determines the reality for most people. The only certainty about this matter is the fact …show more content…
Socrates outlook of the body is as a
“helpless prisoner chained in the body, compelled to view reality not directly but only through prison bars.” (Synnott 9) To elaborate, the body is a restriction to the soul, restraining the soul too does freely. In the body, the soul has to conform to what the body needs and wants. Socrates goes on to explain that it is “only in death that the soul is liberated from desire and evils of the 1 A Greek philosopher of 540 BC-480 BC
Duval 2 body”. This is just one idea of what the body is, some people noted the body as a temple, and even a machine. Derived from the Oxford Dictionary, the body is settled as ‘the physical or material frame of structure of a man or of any other animal; the whole material organism viewed as organic entity’. This is also just one aspect, of the grand interpretation of the body. Others may illustrate the body as more than just a frame or structure but includes hair, blood and even a shadow. In one case study regarding criminal anthropology in Lombroso’s Anthropology, female criminals and prostitutes were evaluated compared to the ‘normal’ woman. Based on the …show more content…
In the same way, this correlates with the unthought known concept, which is a feeling or experience of something without being taught. Similar, to the way babies blink or cry when they are hurt. The unthought known is an informal interchangeable term with the mind and soul. The term mind symbolizes to most, as a communicating mechanism and the subject of our ‘mindful’ or conscious state amongst the soul and body. (Maher, Bolland 1)
The soul on the other hand, represents the proposition of spirituality which instructs and guides behaviors and actions in the physical form. The theory of an existence of something besides the visible body and all its forms is a common settlement by many philosophers. In the eighth century, before Christ the soul was described as “the unseen seer, the unheard hearer, the 3 Indifference to pleasure or pain
Duval 4 unthought thinker and the unknown knower.” (Maher, Bolland 20).The acts of imagination, memory and consciousness while asleep all denote to this impression.
Two central angles of the soul, seen by modern society, are Idealism and Materialism.
These philosophies meld into Monism. Drawn from the American Heritage