Inseparable from Your Own Life

In this guest column, the author argues against Wittgenstein’s aphorism that the human body is the best picture of the human soul. Such a picture, she shows, would have to include all that a person is, in some sense, inseparable from. Drawing from Plato’s analogy between city and soul, and from Socrates’s description of a luxurious city, this piece argues that what we are inseparable from are mostly things and persons that our body can go on without. To the extent that such things and persons, and the relationship in which we stand to them, are distinct from our bodies, what we are inseparable from is also a sign that we are not self-sufficient creatures. Thus, the piece concludes, inseparability is evidence of the species’ gregariousness, and the body is only one among many tokens of a person’s soul.