The body
This theme runs through several big questions. Here are the ones where it plays out.
The questions that illuminate it
What should we do with our desires: affirm them, sort them, or detach from them?
Desire is at once what sets us in motion and what torments us: to extinguish it is to extinguish life, to follow it unchecked is to forfeit peace. To take a position is to say where the drive that makes us live ends and where the servitude that wears us out begins.
Should we distrust the pleasures of the body, or celebrate them?
Is giving in to the body's pleasure a way of fulfilling oneself, or of being ruled by what one cannot master? To take a position is to say whether the body is an ally of the good life or a force to keep in check.
Should we use technology to enhance human nature beyond healing?
Healing repairs what falters, but should we go further, and make ourselves stronger, smarter, all but immortal? To refuse is perhaps to accept limits and sufferings we could lift; to accept is to risk dissolving what makes us human and opening a gulf between enhanced human beings and ordinary ones. To take a position is to say what, in us, must remain untouchable.
Am I my body, or do I have a body?
To treat the body as an instrument is to be able to stand back from it, repair it, leave it behind in thought; to identify with it is for nothing of me to remain when it suffers or wears out. Our relation to illness, to pleasure, to ageing and to our own animality is decided here.