Being As My Body-Farewell To "Soul" Without Body

Human creates their culture, meanwhile culture contrarily molds human. With respect to western culture, the dichotomy of body and soul (body and mind) was dominant in its philosophical thinking and also its political ideas, and actually was partial to soul and rigorously restrained body, so that in the past thousands of years man was merely a soul without body and could barely be a whole man, though it meant to make human exist above and independent of material experience, namely, to be transcendent. And such a tradition had never been authentically oppugned or shaken until the nineteenth century, when body was finally found and gradually rewrote its miserable history of being outcast.Terry Eagleton reveals theoretically in his work The Ideology of the Aesthetic that the issue of body constitutes the core topic of our age. He defines culture from the aspect of body and holds that culture is no other than a stigma on our body by nature. This point of view was further developed in his following work The illusions of postmodernism, videlicet, body is the gemel between culture and nature. Entering on the era of civilization is both a glory and a disaster to human being, as human being has been incurring ceaseless warfare and conflicts since, and freedom is suppressed all through. This comprehension hits the point of the facts of history. In Die Philosophie im Fragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, Nietzsche points that due to some kind of fate permeated malice, those philosophies of Plato and so on were inherited and turned into the tradition lasting thousands of years, and this is just because their books were kept and came down; while the philosophies of Heraclitus and Democritus were lost, which should have been more desirable and much better to human being.Based on observing conditions of our survival, I develop my paper in a series of arguments, which cover theory and reality, history and images, illuminating that human (body) and its culture are interrelated and interact on each other, revealing that the miserable history resulted from the dichotomy of body and soul. Consequently, we may further reflect on our established culture, comprehending that body is not anything else but the very root of human being and thereby of greatest value. And accordingly, we are supposed to think much of our body, cherish our body, and maintain our body while cultivate our morality. Since only in this way, we may eventually lead a happy and blest life, which is what we are yearning towards all the time. On the chance of this, I take this paper as such an attempt.Firstly, I summarize theoretical difficulties of the dichotomy of body and soul. It might be just out of the nature of being transcendent, availing himself of his talent of reasoning, Socrates thought up the concept of soul, and set up an ultimate fraud in the history of human thought: the dichotomy of body and soul. However, such a supposition collapses of itself once it encounters reality. Nietzsche exposed that so called logic is nothing but a mendacious synonym of survival interest. To make the matter worse, Plato even actually failed to present a tenable reasoning. Rationalism predominated over all in the seventeenth century, body was spurned, and man virtually became an epistemological gimp. Hegel had no regard for body either in his phenomenology of spirit, where body was still excluded of his dialectic thinking. Man as being transcendent is nothing but pure reasoning. Since reasoning conquered all and became everything. Obviously, it seriously lacked of reasoning. Herein, reasoning collapsed of itself. However, this mistake, just like a curse, befell philosophy as well as human itself ever since Plato, which resulted in a long history ending in tragedy.With that, I appeal to material world, concretely analyzing and revealing wicked aftermath of the dichotomy: body is cast off, while soul is sapless, we are actually robbed of any possibility of being transcendent, but formalized and rigidified. In modern society, as Foucault unfolded, we are constructed as epistemological subject, moral subject, and power subject, meanwhile we are the very object of taming and disciplining, deprived of humanity and freedom. Herein, we need to question closely how have all of these happened, and we are supposed to find evidences of corporality.Carrying the idea farther, I make an attempt to observe closely the conditions of body above ground, so as to reveal that a body falling sick cannot think, a body suffering distress seeks help nowhere, solitude places oneself in a fatal position where leads to freedom. Thus it can be seen that body is the very root of human being, where thinking and psychical things make home in. Body is restricted while it transcends the material experience. Herein, our substance gets revealed that human is the very combination of body and soul.Culture is derived from cultivation, essentially relating to labor (body) and mother earth. And in ancient Chinese hieroglyph,"wen"(culture) shares a same character with"ren"(man), both of which are presented as one's figure. Hence, I shift theory to reality, since theory is supposed to avail life. We retrospect history and find that thinkers at all times and in all over the world virtually echo each other at a distance, all of who present abundant valuable thoughts of body, which share nearly same substance, namely, originating from mother nature, human finds its root in the body, which is of greatest value, and constitutes the base of all kinds of ethnics. Our body therefore deserves denoting all our attention, needs to be resuscitated in accordance with its nature, only in this way we may create more free life patterns in order to nurture and renew our spirits, so that eventually we may exist as a creation as well as a creator.In one word, just as what Wittgenstein suggests,"Body is the best picture of human soul". We have to hold it a point of being to think much of and cherish our body, and maintain our body while cultivate our morality, so that we may expect to lead a healthy, happy and satisfactory life eventually.