I think that’s an unfortunate dismissal of the body (a dismissal that has maybe been popularized by metaphysics and the tendency of modern philosophy toward the a priori).
It’s hard for me to totally separate my self from my body, not because I lack the mental capacity to do so (or maybe I do), but because I think I’d be, like, a different entity if I were just a non-spatial kind of consciousness. Even in thought experiments in which I refuse or reject my body, I can (and do) always return to my whole and undivided self.
And then obviously it seems even less feasible that we can separate our selves from our minds, as if we were floating bevies of nerve-endings or something, without a mind to reflect or understand or even use the things we were always sensing (never mind the fact that, really, a mind is also necessary to sense things).
I could never be/inhabit/contain/exist as my self without my mind, and the same I’m sure goes for my body. People cease to be themselves when they lose limbs in a war, when they lose fragments of their brains to necessary surgeries. I hardly think I could sustain the loss of wholly one or the other and still pretend to call myself my self.
Um, so I guess what I’m trying to say is that I view mind and body and energy/consciousness/whatever as a singular and fluid thing. I think we often have a tendency to dissociate or compartmentalize things for our convenience – time, the rooms of buildings, numbers, objects in space, etc. – and this includes the mind and the body (see, I just separated them). But I’d rather think they – or it – are/is one contiguous thing.
As for lacking both of them, like your last question: it’s pretty tough for me to imagine myself minus both mind and body. What would be left, the soul? Redistributable energy? I imagine it would feel – although it’s a fault to use that word – like being spread out over some huge distance, or standing in a river and dissolving into it or something, or like Govinda’s vision of Siddhartha’s mask:
he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha…. each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face—and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha’s smiling face….
That transparent and impossibly thin thing that covers all of us always, like an invisible mask, is what I think you’re getting at.
(Not a mask which conceals, by the way, but only covers.)
Of course as you suggested, all words are faulty in trying to explain this kind of existence, if it can even be called as much.
Composing members:
0
