Recovering the Body

Carol Collier

Published by University of Ottawa Press

Collier, C..
Recovering the Body: A Philosophical Story.
Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2013.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/27654

Access provided by Tufts University (19 Jul 2017 18:03 GMT)

 PART I

The Road to Mechanism:

Ancient Greece to the
Scientific Revolution

M y story of the body in philosophy begins with Plato; however, there are
concepts of the body pre-Plato that are of interest to my narrative. My
story focuses on philosophy in the Western world, but later chapters bring in
Eastern concepts of body for comparison and contrast. An interesting aspect of
the history of the body before Plato is the number of comparisons that can be
made between ancient Eastern (particularly Chinese) and Western conceptions
of body and cosmos. The most important of these in relation to my narrative
is the concept of breath in the two cultures.
In his book The Expressiveness of the Body: The Divergence of Greek
and Chinese Medicine, Shigehisa Kuriyama writes, “Once upon a time, all
reflection on what we call the body was inseparable from inquiry into places
and directions, seasons and winds. Once upon a time, human being was being
embedded in a world.”1 Part of the way in which the body was embedded in
the world was through breath, known in the Greek world as pneuma and in
the Chinese world as qi.2 But in the case of both the Greeks and the Chinese,
Kuriyama notes a “blurriness of the divide separating outer flux and inner
vitality, winds from breath,” such that there was a unity of outer and inner
breath, and disruptions of its flow were the cause of disease.3 In both cases, the
terms referred to wind and only later to breath, a similarity that is remarkable
since there was no known contact between the two cultures.4
In neither culture had a division between inner and outer been made,
and winds, linked to weather, could blow gently or rage violently, controlling
the fortunes of individuals and communities. But wind was also linked to the
14  Recovering the Body

immanent powers of the gods to an extent that blurred the distinction between
the individual and the cosmos. In Homeric times, for example, the body of the
hero was permeable to forces animating it from the outside, and the powers
of the hero were attributed not to the hero himself, but to these external, vital
powers: “When a man feels joy, irritation or pity, when he suffers, is bold or
feels any emotion, he is inhabited by drives that he senses within himself, in his
‘organic consciousness,’ but which, breathed into him by a god, run through
and across him like a visitor coming from the outside.”5 But the same wind or
breath could also be dangerous, being able to inspire madness, cause myriad
diseases and even kill. Kuriyama tells us that Chinese physicians “discerned
wind’s influence everywhere,” and that in both Europe and China “winds
haunted the imagination.”6
In both Greek and Chinese cultures, wind became internalized into
breath, but there the similarity ends and contrasts begin. The Eastern concept
of qi continued to function as a link between microcosm and macrocosm, and
the notion of vital energy, with its importance to health and healing, survived
in what is referred to as Traditional Chinese Medicine (which will be discussed
in Chapter 9). The Western internalization of pneuma began to be elaborated as
“inner content,” and eventually became linked to the inner core or essence of a
person. In so doing, it “redefined the nature of the body.”7 The emphasis shifted
from forces to forms, the latter being identified with the organs. The result
was that the theory of the body became synonymous with action and human
agency: “Organa were tools—the original meaning of the term—instruments
with specific uses. And they presupposed a user.”8 The long-term result of this
shift in the two notions of wind/breath was a medicine in the East based on
vital forces and one in the West built on musculature and anatomy. The result
was also two different conceptions of autonomy, one that in the East “portrayed
selves preserving their integrity by resisting the depleting outflow of life, the
loss of vital energies….” In the West, on the other hand, “the autonomy of
the muscleman lay in the capacity for genuine action, for change due neither
to nature nor chance, but dependent on the will.”9 As my story of the body
unfolds, we will see the rise of the individual self out of the Western conception
of soul (eventually reduced to mind), and its gradual retreat from the forces of
the cosmos. We will see a body impervious to external forces, be they wind or
breath, operating solely under the principles of matter and mechanism. With
multiple shifts in the notions of body, soul and cosmos, the impermeable and
objective body, along with the autonomous willing ‘self,’ will be born.
 The Road to Mechanism 15

Notes
1. Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body: The Divergence of Greek and
Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 262.
2. Pronounced chi (and sometimes written that way).
3. Kuriyama, 246.
4. The ancient Indian notion of prana was similar, as well being both wind and
breath: “This cosmic wind was mankind’s vital breath (prana), the unique
manifestation of a person’s immortal soul.” Kenneth G. Zysk, “Vital Breath
(Prana) in Ancient Indian Medicine and Religion,” in Yosio Kawakita, Shizu
Sakai, and Yasuo Otsuka (eds.), The Comparison Between Concepts of Life-Breath
in East and West (Tokyo and St. Louis: Ishiyaku EuroAmerica, Inc., 1995), 33.
5. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Dim Body, Dazzling Body,” in Michel Feher, Ramona
Naddaff, and Nadia Taxi (eds.), Zone 3: Fragments for a History of the Human
Body (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 29.
6. Shigehisa Kuriyama, “Pneuma, Qi, and the Problematic of Breath,” in Kawakita
et al., 9.
7. Kuriyama, Expressiveness, 262.
8. Kuriyama, Expressiveness, 264.
9. Kuriyama, Expressiveness, 268.