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Conclusion hans Jonas refers to the road through dualism as irreversible. in his view, dualism represents “the most momentous phase in the history of thought, whose achievement, however overtaken, can never be undone.”1 having sundered the world of matter and the world of spirit, we cannot think them back together again. if he is right about this, then what i have been proposing in this book is a pipe dream. the road not followed cannot be travelled now. he goes on to suggest, however, that while we cannot undo the polarity, we can attempt to absorb it “into a higher unity of existence from which the opposites issue as faces of its being or phases of its becoming.”2 i do not know if he had Spinoza in mind as he wrote this, but his statement calls to mind Spinoza’s metaphysics of mind and matter as expressions (or faces) of the one substance, rather than as substances in their own right that need to be fitted back together. and if i am right, then perhaps we can still find our way on the road not followed. the problem, of course, is finding our way to the “higher unity of existence” or the one substance (which, for Spinoza, is god or nature), and here our mechanistic science of nature (and of body) is the stumbling block along the road. We cannot perceive the higher unity or the one substance. We cannot touch it, objectify it or quantify it. therefore, from the point of view of mechanistic science, it does not exist. Whatever names the ancients gave to it or its forms (e.g., pneuma, world-soul), or whatever names eastern science or religion attaches to it or its forms (e.g., qi or Siva), these are simply fanciful terms for the animism that was banished with the scientific revolution. no matter how many infinitesimally small subatomic particles the 290 reCovering the Body physicists discover (and they now number in the hundreds), the idea of some fundamental, all-pervading reality is still anathema to Western science. the result of this is that science cannot explain life, or the living human body. it can tell us how living things work, and it can even work to create life and living things in the laboratory. But it cannot tell us what they are in philosophical terms. in other words, we have no ontology of life or of the living body. We have only mechanistic explanations that stand in for ontological ones. dualism and mechanism have given us the body-machine; but they are incapable of giving us back the living body. i have attempted in this book to demonstrate how we arrived at our Western conception of the body-machine, and to point to alternative approaches that could lead us away from it. as shown in Chapter 7, materialistic mechanism has brought us to the brink of losing the body. We have learned to see our bodies as objects of scientific investigation, then of medical diagnosis and treatment, then as objects to mould to our wishes (to match our conception of a ‘self’ that is somehow not properly reflected by the body that ‘contains’ it). now we are asked to believe that the body, which is an obstacle to achieving the true potential of our minds, should be disposed of and replaced by more efficient, nonbiological machines. We have been drawn into a medical paradigm in which the body is a collection of interchangeable parts, and many of us are not shocked at the idea of buying and selling those parts (organs, gametes, genetic material). in our dualistic and mechanistic world, our bodies are not us. What we do consider ‘us’ is the self, which we see as in some vaguely defined way different from our body—but just how and why neither biologists nor psychologists can tell us. i have tried to show in Chapter 5 how this modern, separated self is linked to a dualistic view of mind and body, and how it differs from more holistic views. the effort we invest in, and the importance we attribute to, this constructed self is part of the great divide between the holistic and dualistic visions that i have been exploring in this book. in a holistic view of mind-body-soul-cosmos, the self is not divorced from the world in which it is situated. if we think of Spinoza’s conatus or the Stoic’s oikeiosis, we have an idea...

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