HUMAN PERSON AS AN EMBODIED SUBJECT

Outline:

INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2
The Mind-Body Problem ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 2
Definition Of Human Person.................................................................................................................................................................................... 2
Definition Of “Embodied Subject” ....................................................................................................................................................................... 2
The Significance Of The Idea Of “Human Person As An Embodied Subject” ............................................................... 2
PLATO’S CONCEPT OF BODY AND SOUL ...................................................................................................................................................... 2
Soma Sema ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2
Tripartite Theory Of The Soul................................................................................................................................................................................. 3
ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE .............................................................................................................................................. 3
Body-Soul Hylomorphism ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 3
Hierarchy Of Souls ........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 4
ST. AUGUSTINE’S NOTION OF HUMAN BEING ......................................................................................................................................... 4
The Immateriality of The Soul ............................................................................................................................................................................... 4
View on Soma Sema and the Soul’s Origin ................................................................................................................................................ 4
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS’ NOTION OF HUMAN BEING ........................................................................................................................... 5
Subsistence rather than Substance .................................................................................................................................................................. 5
Hierarchy of Souls............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 5

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INTRODUCTION
THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM
The statements “I am my body” and “I have my body” reflects the Mind-Body Problem. It is a
philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human
mind and the brain as part of the physical body.

DEFINITION OF HUMAN PERSON

“Human” is a biological term. One is considered as a human once they have a human DNA. Whereas the
term “person” is moral term. One is considered as a person if they are part of moral community.
Determining if a being is a person is a lot more complicated than determining if a being is a human.

DEFINITION OF “EMBODIED SUBJECT”

“Man is an embodied subject” implies that our bodies are not accessories. Our bodies are essential to
our being integrated persons. Human person is the point of convergence between the material (body)
and spiritual entities (soul).

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE IDEA OF “HUMAN PERSON AS AN EMBODIED

SUBJECT”
It enables us to determine the potentialities and limitations and also simultaneously exposes us to a
thorough and deeper understanding of ourselves as a unique creature united by body and soul.

A human person can be distinguished by:

1. Metaphysical - essential components of a human person. The what of a person.

2. Existential - essential features of the human way of life. The who of a person.
3 non-bodily human components a human person has:

1. Soul - life giving function

2. Mind - consciousness
3. Spirit - nonphysical nature

Essential components of a human person:

1. Unspirited body view - A human person is essentially just his/her body and nothing more.
2. Disembodied spirit view - A human person is essentially just his/her spirit and nothing more.
3. Embodied spirit view - A human person is essentially the unity of his/her body and spirit.

3 main spiritual philosophies:

1. Buddhism
2. Christianity
3. Hinduism

PLATO’S CONCEPT OF BODY AND SOUL

The nature of the human person is seen in the metaphysical dichotomy between the body and the soul.
This implies that there is an inherent contradiction between body and soul.

SOMA SEMA
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“Soma-sema” is a short play of words which literally mean “body-prison.”

Plato’s concept of body and soul is a reflection of his Theory of Forms. He argued that the body is part
of the material world whereas the soul is from the World of Forms and thus is immortal. According to
Plato, the body’s existence is dependent on the soul while the soul’s existence is independent of the
body. The body existed prior the body. He believed that man’s body serves as a prison as it hinders the
soul to be what it is, to do what it can and should.

Man’s body belongs to the world of the sense, world of things, subject to decay, changes; perishable;
temporal; dependent on the soul which leads, commands, and opposes it.

Soul must free itself from the imprisonment of the body.

TRIPARTITE THEORY OF THE SOUL

Each person’s soul is divided into three different parts and these parts are in different balance from one
person to the next. Plato described the three division of the soul as logistikon, thymoeides, and
epithymetikon. Logistikon or reason is located in the head. This part of the soul enables the human person
to think, reflect, analyse, comprehend, draw conclusion, and learn rationally. Thymoeides or spirit,
located in the chest, is the part which causes people to feel emotions. Epithymetikon, or the appetitive
part of the soul, is located in the abdomen and drives the human person to experience thirst, hunger,
etc. In Plato’s perspective, epithmetikon existed in opposition of the other two parts; he considered desire
as illogical. He thought that the major role of the soul’s other two parts is to tirelessly resist the appetitive
part.

He illustrated this problem in the Allegory of the Chariot. Plato paints the picture of a charioteer driving
a chariot pulled by two winged horses.

First the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of
the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in
breed and character. Therefore, in our case, the driving is necessarily
difficult and troublesome.

Plato, Phaedrus, 246b

The charioteer represents thymoeides, reason, or the part of the soul that must guide the soul to truth.
One horse represents rational or moral impulse or the positive part of the passionate nature; while the
other, represents the soul’s irrational passions, appetites, or concupiscent nature. The Charioteer directs
the entire chariot/soul, trying to stop the horses from going different ways, and to proceed towards
enlightenment.

ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE

Plato was a dualist who believed that we are composed of two substances, material body, and
immaterial mind. Aristotle, however, rejects this. Aristotle uses the same basic concept of “form” and
“matter,” “actuality” and “potentiality” on his theory of human nature.

BODY-SOUL HYLOMORPHISM
Aristotle defines a soul as that which makes a living thing alive. Aristotle believes that man is one
substance whose matter is his body and whose form is his soul. A body is a human body because it is
determined by the rational/human soul; a human soul is not simply a body, it is a body determined by
a form (rational form). A rational soul does not exist apart from the body, independent of the body but

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as always and necessarily determining a body. Just as a wax object consists of wax with a certain shape,
so a living organism consists of a body with the property of life, which is its soul.

The form of something does not exist independently; it is not an entity in itself. Rather it is the specific
pattern or structure or form of a thing which defines how it exists and functions. Thus for Aristotle, it
makes no sense to talk of a soul or mind without a body, for the essence of a person is intertwined with
their matter.

It is not necessary to ask whether soul and body are one, just as it is not
necessary to ask whether the wax and its shape are one, not generally
whether the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter are one.
For even if one and being are spoken of in several ways, what is properly
so spoken of is the actuality.

Aristotle, De Anima ii, 412b6-9

HIERARCHY OF SOULS
The souls of living things are ordered by Aristotle in a hierarchy. Plants have vegetative or nutritive soul
which comprises of growth, nutrition, and reproduction. Animals have sensitive soul which, in addition,
have the powers of perception and locomotion. Humans, in addition, have the power of reason and
thought, thus containing the rational soul. By this definition, he famously said “man is a rational animal.”

ST. AUGUSTINE’S NOTION OF HUMAN BEING

In his early days, Augustine thought that the soul was a fine material substance dispersed throughout
the body. He could not accept the existence of a substance that lacked spatial dimensions:

Whatever was not stretched out in space, or diffused, or compacted, or

inflated, or possessed of such qualities, or at least capable of possessing
them, I judged to be nothing at all.

Augustine, The Confessions, 162

Augustine, therefore, starts off as a materialist. But he changes his mind upon reading Plotinus (a Greek
Philosopher who is of Platonic tradition. Plotinus teaches that God is an immaterial substance. Augustine
reasons that because we are made in the image and likeness of God, human soul is also an immaterial
substance.

THE IMMATERIALITY OF THE SOUL

Augustine used the Platonic tradition as his philosophical framework to harmonize and shape the
Christian philosophical anthropology that is compatible with the teachings of the Christian Scriptures.
Augustine does not rely on the Christian doctrine of the Imago Dei (or the Image of God) to prove his
point. Instead, he develops a number of philosophical arguments to demonstrate the soul’s
immateriality. One of these arguments is that because the soul’s cognitive subjects are not limited
spatially, the soul itself cannot be limited spatially; and because the soul cannot be limited spatially, it,
therefore, cannot be a material body. Another argument is that because the soul thinks and wills, but a
material body cannot think or will, the soul therefore, cannot be a material body. A third argument is that
we attribute moral qualities to the soul, but moral qualities cannot be spatially extended properties of a
material substance (e.g. justice cannot be tangible); so the soul cannot be a material substance.

VIEW ON SOMA SEMA AND THE SOUL’S ORIGIN

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For St. Augustine, the individual human being is a body-soul composite, but in keeping with his
Neoplatonism, there is an asymmetry between body and soul. As a spiritual entity, the soul is superior
to the body, and it is the province of the soul to rule the body. This presents a fairly positive conception
of the soul-body relation, one that clearly runs counter to the picture of soul’s entrapment. Matters are
somewhat less clear, however, when we turn to the question of how the soul comes to be embodied.

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS’ NOTION OF HUMAN BEING

Influenced by Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas believes that man is a substance constituted by matter
which is his body and by form which is his soul. Aquinas maintains that the soul is capable of existing
apart from the living body after the death of the body, because soul is incorruptible. This might suggest
that he is a kind of Substance Dualist, the soul being one substance and the body another, with the soul
“interacting” as it were the other substance, the body. However this picture fails to recognize the
Aristotelian terms of the account that Aquinas provides of soul and body. Thomas knows and accepts
Aristotle's assertion in De anima II.1 that it is as pointless to ask whether soul and body are one as it is to
ask whether the seal and the wax are one – they are.

SUBSISTENCE RATHER THAN SUBSTANCE

The soul is indeed capable of existence apart from the body at death. This incorruptibility results from
the actualities of understanding and willing that are not the actualities of any bodily organ, but of the
human animal as such distinguished by the rational form. However, Thomas merely concludes from this
fact that the soul is a “particular thing” and thus a subsistent after the death of the body. He argues that
what belongs to the notion of “this particular thing” is only that it be a subsistent, and not that it be a
substance complete in a nature. A subsistent is something with an operation of its own, existing either
on its own or in another as an integral part, but not in the way either accidental or material forms exist in
another. Existing on its own is not distinctive of substances alone.

A substance, on the other hand, is something that is both subsistent and complete in a nature—a nature
being an intrinsic principle of movement and change in the subject. A human soul is a constitutive
element of the nature of a human substance. It is the formal principle of a human substance. It is what
is specified when we say what the substance is. But it is incomplete.

HIERARCHY OF SOULS
Aquinas discusses different aspects of the soul in different ways. The “sensitive” and “nutritive” parts of
the soul belong to the human being as “composite” of soul and body. The more intellectual parts of the
soul that sets us apart from animals “belong to the soul alone” and “such powers must remain in the soul
after the destruction of the body.” He believes that the sensitive soul depends on the body because in
order to demonstrate sensitivity you need to be living and that the intellectual soul carries your
knowledge from your life span into your afterlife.

3 reasons why embodied spirit is preferred:

1. Maintains human freedom

2. Gives importance to the soul
3. Accommodates opposing views