Relation to oneself· Body and life
The body as instrument
Axis: Being or having a body — Am I my body, or do I have a body?
The true self is the mind, the soul or thought; the body is a vehicle, sometimes a prison, that I use and can regard as an object distinct from me. I "have" a body more than I am one.
Movements 1
Platonismexplicit
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 , that would make the soul a mere attunement of the body, perishing with it.
Plato, Phaedo
Philosophers 5
Platoexplicit
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
Plotinusexplicit
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
Descartesexplicit
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 Aureliusexplicit
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 alone. The body is but an 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
Show inferred positions (1)
George Berkeleyinferable
My own body does not escape the general rule: it is, like any body, a collection of sensible ideas that I perceive. What is me is never this perceived body but the active mind that perceives and moves it. The body thus stays on the side of the object, instrument and sensible appearance rather than subject of my experience, which places Berkeley near the body-as-instrument, even though he developed no philosophy of the lived body.
Principles of Human Knowledge, §§135-141