The Body in Question

With a respectful nod to Jonathan Miller, who produced a TV series and then wrote a book using that title, both being products that gave us much delight, I want to borrow the title for use in another context. My context is more, shall we say, philosophical. Much the same thought often arises as I age and, waking in the mornings, become aware of my body—as a body. It is that with accumulating years the elegant traditional classification, known as the Great Chain of Being, seems less and less persuasive. To save me lots of words I’ve produced a little visual poem to summarize a vast philosophical structure, that very chain. It had its origins in Aristotle and then came to be formalized, in western thought, before the Renaissance came.

Post-Renaissance this structure started to unravel. The very word, chain, signifies necessary relationship—and that chain began rust from the top down so that, by the nineteenth century (Nietzsche and the death of God) the chain had lost its meaning. It was gradually inverted. the Mineral came to rest on top—and all else derived from it, by chance and happenstance, not by a logically elegant relationship.

At the root of this conceptualization are Aristotle’s ideas of potential and actuality, both having real existence. At the top actuality is total, at the bottom we find pure potential. Humans, in the middle, are the mysterious transition from the realm of becoming to the realm of being. As we ascend from the bottom, more and more potential is actualized until it is total Being in God. But what with the inorganic at the top, the whole concept of being loses all interest for the obvious reason that the original duality of potential and actuality is lost.

Now you might think that I would strongly embrace the Great Chain of Being. I appear always to be on the side of tradition. But that’s not the case here. The more aware I become of the body in question, the less inclined I am to see either life as a whole (plant, animal, etc.) or human life as natural to the grand scheme of Creation. The body becomes more and more visible (indeed feel-able) as a kind of temporary tooling for a limited purpose—the longer you live the keener the knowledge of that. I wake up and remember telephone calls bringing me news of my own generation’s physical problems: the parts are making troubles; this fails, that needs a fix, chemical help, surgical assists, etc. That perfect balance in the center of the chain of being might make sense to someone just to either side of forty, not to someone past three-score-and ten.

The machine-like nature of the body is a problem in elegant schemes of this sort. At the same time I think that a duality does underlie reality. But when it comes to human centrality—a kind of centaur-like existence, neither horse nor human, properly speaking—there I feel genuine intellectual discomfort. When I contemplate that state, especially when its old, gnostic ideas present themselves either in pagan forms, like genuine Gnosticism, or in the Christian variety which speaks of a fallen world. It is only in a fallen world that spirits can possibly be required to be prisoners of machines.