Martha Nussbaum: On not hating the body
Consider the elaborate flight stratagem of Western metaphysics, where body-hatred reigned supreme (though not uncontested) for about two millennia. One might have thought that the obvious theoretical position was in the vicinity of Aristotle’s: we are animate bodies, and the soul is the living organization of our matter. And yet what amazing contortions others, and even Aristotle himself, have gone through to deny the idea that we are essentially enmattered.
To hate the body, it
helps to imagine its opposite. It turns out that the incorporeal was a concept
that took a very long time to be invented. Homer says that Achilles’ anger
“cast many strong souls into Hades, and left the men themselves to be prey for dogs
and a feast to birds.” So the body is the person; and even the psuchê is
clearly something physical, albeit insubstantial and needing to drink blood in
Hades in order to regain its wits. So when did Western philosophy come up with
the idea that there is something about us that is totally incorporeal, and that
we essentially are that immaterial super-something?
**************
I pause to celebrate a paradigm of classical scholarship, Robert Renahan’s essay, from 1980, On the Greek Origins of the Concepts Incorporeality and Immateriality. Renahan begins by observing that more or less all previous scholars take the concept of incorporeality as obvious and therefore assume that the Greeks found it obvious, too. They therefore retroject it into texts where it does not exist. With painstaking and often withering scrutiny Renahan rebuts them, finding no solid evidence of the concept of the incorporeal — until we get to Plato. (Asomatos, the word often used later on for the incorporeal, could mean, even as late as Aristotle, simply “less dense.”)
“For almost two
thousand years,” he concludes, “the concepts of incorporeality and
immateriality were central in much Western philosophical and theological
speculation on such problems as the nature of God, Soul, Intellect. When all is
said and done, it must be recognized that one man was responsible for the
creation of an ontology which culminates in incorporeal Being as the truest and
highest reality. That man was Plato.”...
https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/on-not-hating-the-body/
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