Series:
Essay #5:
Synopsis:
Self
Grandma Embodied
A living being is an embodied soul, matter + self, as one unity
Remember that a living being has self (a.k.a. soul). A living being has self because he moves himself; he directs his own attention and he moves for his own purposes. If I didn’t have self to direct my movement, I’d be a rotting corpse. And if I didn’t have body, there’d be nothing to move. I am embodied soul because I move me.
Aquinas said that souls are embodied, and he’s right. A living being is embodied soul-- body and soul together as one indivisible whole like one coin, heads and tails. The one coin has two aspects, body and soul, where body is the thing and soul is the thing moving itself, and they’re inseparable because a thing moving itself is inseparable from the thing. Hence I’m not body and soul, rather, I'm embodied soul, and my embodied soul carries out all my living activities like homeostasis, sense perception, desire, imagination, memory.
I think of my mother-in-law, who suffers deterioration of the brain. Her brain is breaking down and so is its movement. Mother-in-law was a chemist in China and she (and my father-in-law, now deceased) raised three children including my wife. At one time in the 1970’s, mother-in-law had her name in banners on the wall, which wasn’t a good thing during the Cultural Revolution. Our family has been blessed with almost 30 years of mother-in-law living in our home.
Mother-in-law was sharp into her early eighties. In the morning, she’d wake up our son by putting her hands in cold water and grabbing his feet. But now in her nineties, the brain suffers. Mind lives on a meat platform, and deterioration in the meat platform is deterioration in mind.
I remember when I first noticed it. I drove away one morning and couldn’t remember if I’d closed the garage door. I pulled over and called home. Mother-in-law answered. I told her I can’t remember if I closed the garage door.
Mother-in-Law: You just left, why can’t you remember?
Me: Ma, I forgot. Tell me if the garage door is closed.
MnL: Why didn’t you close the garage door?
Me: Ma, that’s the problem, I don’t know.
MnL: Oh...
Me: Ma, are you there?
MnL: Yes, what do you want?
On the phone, I had to walk my mother-in-law to the garage, then have her report in real time the status of the garage door (closed). The mind is an aspect of the brain, and mind deteriorates along with the brain, but here’s the difference: the mind knows what’s happening while the brain doesn’t. My mother-in-law isn’t just body, rather, she’s embodied soul. She sees the deterioration and she doesn’t like it.
Over the years I’ve watched mother-in-law fight the fade. She memorized Buddhist texts and studied English to keep her mind strong. She was like the little Dutch boy putting his fingers in the dike, but there’s one leak after another until she runs out of fingers. Now, years later, I witness family members trying to converse with mother-in-law. She doesn’t recognize the family member and it’s painful for her to deal with a stranger who expects so much (as loved ones seem to do), so she withdraws into silence and tries to get away, if only in her mind. When forced into social interaction, she survives by pretending to know the person she’s with and what they’re talking about. When faced with our questions and demands (Ma, did you take your meds?), she just agrees with us. Go along to get along.
Body is inseparable from soul, and strength of brain affects strength of mind. When I’m exhausted my brain slows down and I know it. I know I should sleep before using my brain again. Sometimes I psyche myself up and talk about mind-over-matter, but it all slips away when the brain starts to drag. All athletes know this to be true, like Conor McGregor, who said after gassing in a fight, “I was profligate with my energy.” The mind slows and the will is weak. Many times I’ve sparred to exhaustion and watched my reactions slow to a crawl and now I’m getting punched in the face and I want to quit.
Thinking requires a meat platform. Both Aristotle and Aquinas said that thinking is the manipulation of material images in imagination. To think, the brain moves around images and language (as they exist materially in the brain), for example, when thinking of a circle, my brain calls up an image of a basketball or the letter, O. The image has a material basis in my neurons, and it’s a placeholder for the underlying idea of circle (which underlying idea is immaterial but that’s not relevant here). As my mother-in-law’s brain deteriorates, she loses her ability to manipulate the material placeholders, so she can’t think. And she knows it.
Embodied soul moves as one but it’s not reducible to one. I’m more than just body because I change my body. If I was just brain without mind, I wouldn’t be able to change my mind, or my brain, yet I change them all the time. I listen to your opinion and I change my mind, that is, I rewire my brain to think better. I envision a better-me and then, with purpose and plan, I rewire my brain by improving my habits. When training martial arts, I burn technique into my brain. If I was just body, I couldn’t do any of this.
A corpse can’t change itself because it’s all body no soul, but embodied soul changes itself in every moment.
I move me, therefore I’m embodied soul. A thing and its movement are inseparable, and just so, body and soul.