Relation to oneself· Body and lifenamed middle
Soul-body union
Axis: Being or having a body — Am I my body, or do I have a body?
I am neither a mind steering a body-machine nor a mere organism. Soul and body form a union so close that I am one with it: I am my body as much as I have it. It is through my body that I feel, act and inhabit the world.
Movements 1
Aristotelianismexplicit
If the soul were a separate substance housed in the body, as for , the evident unity of the living thing would be unintelligible, and so would the question of why this soul animates this body. 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
Philosophers 2
Spinozaexplicit
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
Show inferred positions (1)
Thomas Aquinasinferable
From the substantial union of soul and body follows a refusal of the body-as-instrument: the body is neither a prison nor a tool the soul would make use of, it enters into the very definition of the human being, who thinks only from the senses and the image (phantasm). Without going so far as phenomenology's lived body, Thomas occupies the median position of a close union in which the soul needs the body to exercise its own operations.
Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 76, a. 1; q. 84, a. 7