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Eliot Deutsch's The Concept Of The Body

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The body, while seemingly clearly definable and universally understood, is a concept that humans have struggled to define and understand for much of history. Social conceptions of the mind or spirit shaped philosophers’ understandings of the relationship between the mind and body, as well as attitudes toward the body. In his essay “The Concept of the Body,” Eliot Deutsch presents readers with four popular modes of conceiving of the body. These models, popularized at different points throughout history, are the prison, the temple, the machine, and the instrument. Through reading Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, one gains perspective on Socrates’ conception of the body as primarily a prison. The prison-body metaphor, as explained by Deutsch, is premised on the fundamental belief in a duality of mind and body, meaning that the mind and body are separate entities with different wants, needs, and characteristics. The …show more content…

When one goes to prison, one is stripped of one’s freedom, possessions, and overall sense of identity. Similarly, Socrates views the body as taking something away from the soul. However, in this case it is not freedom nor identity, but wisdom. The belief that the body takes something from an individual is present in Socrates’ epistemological beliefs. To Socrates, learning is recollection. To prove this, Socrates introduces the Theory of Opposites, which states that all things in the world come out of their opposites: largeness out of smallness, loudness out of quietness, life out of death. He reasons that this proves that the soul is immortal and after death enters a new body. This idea alone lends itself to the body as a prison metaphor as a soul does not belong to any body, but rather put inside of a body with a degree of randomness. However, the prison-body metaphor is more strongly reinforced by Socrates’ belief that the soul is exposed to the Forms in the period between death and

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