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chapter three From Transcendence to Obsolescence A Route Map Although the age-old problem of the conflict between body and mind that has tortured philosophers from Plato to Kant and obsessed the Church from Augustine to Pope Paul has been resolved in modern philosophical thinking by the elimination of “mind” as an autonomous entity, the conflict would appear to have returned again to haunt us in a new guise. The idealized emphasis on “rational” in the concept of man as the rational animal that characterized Platonic-Christian thought for two millennia had generally been the product of man’s sense of his own physical weakness, his knowledge that Nature could not be tamed or bent to his own will. In lieu of the ability to mold Nature to serve his own ends, man had chosen to extol and mythify that side of his being that seemed to transcend Nature by inhabiting universes of thought that Nature could not naysay. The triumphs of intellect and imagination by thinkers and artists, and the heroic transcending of the body by saints and martyrs who said “no” to their earthborn limitations, provided for centuries the consolations of a victory that could be obtained not by winning the battle but by changing the battlegrounds. In the course of human history until the twentieth century, there was never any serious likelihood that the body-mind battle could be won on the field of the body. If one found that it was necessary to produce ten children in order to insure the survival of five, if one could be swept away by plagues that killed hundreds of thousands, if one lost one’s teeth by thirty, could not be certain of a food supply for more than a few days, carted one’s own excrements out to the fields or emptied chamberpots out the window, one could hardly come to believe (despite humanity’s fantastic ability to believe almost anything) that one’s ideal self would ever stand forth on the field of the body, in the natural world. Nature was indeed the 38 enemy, whom one propitiated in the forms of gods and goddesses or saints and martyrs, but who would finally do one in en route to one’s true home, Abraham’s bosom. Good sense taught that it was pointless to waste what little life one did have in a quarrel with the cruelty of Nature when the rational solution could only have been to accept a final repose in the kindness of God. If humans were indeed made in the image of God, then it was reasonable to assume that only God could fully appreciate “man’s unconquerable mind,”1 while a just assessment of reality required that the field of the body be given up—as how could one do otherwise?— to Nature. The exaltation of religious figures during all of Hebrew-Christian history prior to modern times was an acknowledgement that saints, prophets, priests, and nuns more fully embodied spiritual ideals than did most people and that an approximation to spiritual perfection, however difficult, was a more realistic goal than that of bodily self-sufficiency or domination over Nature. The fascination with the fall of heroes in history and fiction involved a painful recognition that nothing physical could endure, not merely in the obvious sense that everything created must inevitably die but in that everything created can barely stay alive. The philosophy of carpe diem—make your sun run fast if you can’t make it stand still, to echo Andrew Marvell—was never a prevailing one. For most people, the fear of human fragility and a lack of substantial power against the material world made profound self-confidence a luxury only for kings, who themselves derived their power from God. For others, realism required an acceptance of the Divine will: existence was a gift, and the creature had no rights. All was grace. But by the eighteenth century, the rise of industrialism in the West was accompanied by a decline of religion that cannot be seen as an accidental concurrence. And from then on the trend accelerates. As the average person becomes more enabled to live in comfortable houses that resist the elements, to escape most of the childhood diseases that had made fecundity a virtue, to preserve his teeth into middle or old age, to store food for weeks, months, or years ahead, to communicate rapidly through time and space, to move long distances...

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