Being or having a body

In the Phaedo, the body is the tomb of the soul: it hinders it, deceives it through the senses and turns it away from the contemplation of truth. The philosopher practises dying, that is, separating soul from body. The true self is the soul.

Phaedo, 64a-67b

The true self being the soul, the body is only its instrument and provisional envelope, the low place where the soul lingers and risks forgetting itself. Porphyry reports that Plotinus "seemed ashamed to be in a body" and refused to have his portrait made. The body is not the subject we are but that from which we must free ourselves in order to ascend, which places Plotinus at the extreme of the body-as-instrument.

Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 1 · Enneads, IV, 8; I, 1

The argument from kinship draws its conclusion from the metaphysics of the Forms: what knows the intelligible must resemble it, and the soul grasps realities that are simple, invisible and unchanging; it is therefore itself of that nature, and what is simple cannot be decomposed or perish. The body, by contrast, through its needs and passions, blurs contemplation and chains the soul to the sensible: hence the image of the body as the tomb of the soul (sōma/sēma). The true self is thus the soul, not the compound. This rules out in advance the thesis, ascribed to a Pythagorean in the Phaedo, that would make the soul a mere attunement of the body, perishing with it.

Plato, Phaedo

The true self is the thinking thing; the body is a machine, distinct from the soul, to which the soul is joined. Descartes nonetheless acknowledges a substantial union of soul and body and rejects the image of the pilot in his ship, which tempers the pure instrumentalism somewhat.

Meditations on First Philosophy, VI; Letters to Elisabeth

Marcus demeans the body with a famous bluntness: he decomposes it into its elements, a little flesh, blood and bone, reduces food and the union of bodies to their organic processes, and sets against this perishable matter the ruling faculty alone. The body is but an instrument lent to the soul, which places Marcus squarely on the body-as-instrument side, without yet despising it into a mortifying asceticism.

Meditations, II, 2 · Meditations, VI, 13 · Meditations, VIII, 24

The mind is the idea of the body: there is neither a soul housed in a machine nor a mere body, but a single reality expressed under two attributes. Spinoza embodies psychophysical unity, equidistant from the body-as-instrument and the lived body.

Ethics, II, prop. 13

If the soul were a separate substance housed in the body, as for Plato, the evident unity of the living thing would be unintelligible, and so would the question of why this soul animates this body. Hylomorphism dissolves the difficulty: every substance is a compound of matter and form, and the soul is precisely the form, the actuality, of the organized body, as sight is the actuality of the eye. To ask whether soul and body are one, Aristotle concludes, is as idle as to ask it of the wax and its imprint: the human being is neither an imprisoned spirit nor a mere machine, but a single animated reality.

Aristotle, On the Soul, II

There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. For Nietzsche, the conscious self is but an instrument of the bodily self, which thinks, evaluates and wills through us. To despise the body is the resentment of the despisers of the body.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On the Despisers of the Body"

The description of perception reveals what Cartesian dualism conceals: I never experience my body as an extended object set before a consciousness, but as the lived body from which a world is ordered, with an up and a down, a near and a far. My body is not in space, it is my anchorage in space: perspective, sidedness and touch prove that every point of view on the world is first a bodily position. Hence the refutation of Descartes's disembodied subject: there is no thought that would own a body as an instrument, but an embodied subject for whom perceiving and inhabiting the world are one and the same.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Husserl, Ideas II

The body holds a unique metaphysical position in the system: it is the only thing given to us twice, as one representation among others and as will felt from within. This double knowledge is the keystone of the whole edifice: it is through the body, not through reasoning, that we know what the world is at bottom.

The World as Will and Representation, §18

Against the dualism of Descartes, who makes the body an extended thing distinct from the mind, existence is said to be embodied: I do not have a body as one owns an instrument, I am my body, the anchored point of view from which the world opens to me. Merleau-Ponty makes it the lived body, neither pure object nor pure consciousness, and Sartre adds that it is also that by which I expose myself to the gaze of others, who grasp me from outside as a thing. It is through the body that I am situated, and so committed.

Sartre, Being and Nothingness; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

I do not have a body like an object: I exist my body. In Being and Nothingness, the body is the point of view I am upon the world, and the body-for-others makes me feel my objectness under the gaze. The body is lived, not an instrument.

Being and Nothingness, Part III, "The Body"