The Body as Language

Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks in his Philosophical Investigations that if you want to see the soul, you should take a look at the human body. He means, one assumes, the body as a form of practice, not as a material object. Practice constitutes the life of the body rather in the sense that meaning is the life of the sign. As for bodies as material objects, the ultimate objectification of the body is known as death, though it is notable that Thomas Aquinas refuses to use the word ‘body’ of a corpse. He speaks instead of the remains of a body, as we sometimes do ourselves today. It is just part of the damage inflicted by a Cartesian tradition that when we hear the phrase ‘the body in the library’, the last thing that springs to mind is an assiduous reader.

Bodies as material objects are not greatly in fashion in these dogmatically culturalist days. Even so, it is worth pointing out that whatever else human beings are, they are in the first place natural lumps of matter, and that anything more sexy or glamorous they can get up to can go on only within this constraining context. If men and women are more than just parcels of matter, it is not because they harbour within themselves a mysterious entity known as the mind or soul, but because they are parcels of matter of a highly specific kind–a specificity is, in fact, precisely what mind-language or soul-language is trying to account for.

Like Aristotle, Wittgenstein regards the soul as the ‘form’ of the body–as its animating principle or uniquely particular mode of self-organisation. And this is not an especially mysterious affair. It is perfectly open to view. You can see someone else’s soul, just as you can see their grief or rage. It is not particularly helpful to speak of our emotions as being ‘inside’ us. Howling or snarling or emptying bottles of Scotch over other people’s heads is not an internal affair. If nobody in the world had ever witnessed grief behaviour, we would not be able to use the word ‘grief’. How would we know in our own case that this was the name of what we were experiencing? In these situations, our consciousness is inscribed on our bodies as the meaning is present in a word. It is true that we can conceal our emotions, but this is a complex social practice that we have to learn, just like lying.

We can see that Hoovers and hat stands do not have souls simply by looking at what they do, or rather at what they don’t do. We do not need to peer into their innards to establish this fact. Indeed, to claim that they do not have souls is to claim that they don’t have such innards–that they lack of the kind of complex interior depths observable in the behaviour of Colin Firth or Judi Dench, though less evident in the case of Mel Gibson and Sarah Palin. It is important to recognise, however, that if Colin Firth has internal depths, it is by virtue of his participation in a set of social and material forms of life. Consciousness just is such a form of participation. It is not something one can achieve all alone. How do I know that what I am feeling is fear rather than envy? It would be enough to say that I belong to a public language which provides me with the concepts by which I can discriminate between the two states. The idea that I can spontaneously or intuitively know that I am furious is absurd. An infant cries because it is wet and hungry, but it does not know that it is. Nor does an adult know that he or she is wet, hungry or in pain, since our relationship to our bodily experience is not a question of knowledge. An adult, however, can reflect that what she is feeling is pain or dampness or jealousy, as an infant cannot. And this is because she is a body that has become articulate...