Body and Soul: the Self in Between

    In Existence and the Absolute, Jean-Yves Lacoste writes about the inseparability of soul and body. “The problem of the body is that it is an I: not some ‘thing’ that we may or may not possess, but something we are: and, more rigorously, something that defines us as man: as someone.” (p.7) Lacoste is not interested in the importance of the body per se. Rather, his point is that the experience of the self cannot be divorced from an existence of place in the world. Lacoste is speaking against the possibility of an interiority apart from an exterior orientation toward place. However, Lacoste’s comments suggest that body and soul exist as a unified whole, both being essential to our identity in the world. Many recent books and film question this premise, suggesting a growing obsession with the life  of the flesh and the fate of the soul.

     To begin with, the movie Avatar portrays a world in which a manipulating consciousness, through technical support, can switch or even swap bodies altogether. When not in-use, these bodies lie inert, although subject to biological requirements. Not only are these switches between empty bodies undetrimental to self, but seem to offer an opportunity for a more beneficial expression of the self. By finding the right body, a person can inhabit their “true” selves. Predictably, the movie portrays the main character’s disability (he is paralyzed in the course of military service) not as a condition which might inform his person, but that which represses the self and should therefore be rightfully discarded. As opposed to an integrated necessity, the body is presented as an amenity which can be upgraded or exchanged given the right resources.

     Along different lines, recent “undead” moves, books, and video games depict bodies animated beyond consciousness. Beginning with the classic zombie flick, Night of the Living Dead, zombies are depicted, not as supernatural beings, but reanimated flesh devoid of the human characteristics of intellect, will, and emotion. More importantly, in the recent undead narratives, the undead are almost always a consequence of some bioengineering project gone wrong (e.g. the book, The Passage by Justin Cronin; the film, 28 Days Later; or the series of video games, Resident Evil). Certainly, these stories express current anxieties about genetic manipulation, but more pointedly speaks to fears about the elusiveness of the soul in spite of our growing mastery of biology. When our cells can be manipulated beyond consciousness, how do we define identity? These stories typically offer an answer no less bloody than the affliction: the infected are inhuman and therefore all forms of retaliation are not only warranted, but demanded. More often than not, these movies completely relieve the living characters of the ethical quandary of “killing” undead family members and friends due to the barbarity of their attack. There is much more that can be said about the amoral forces at work in these narratives (Rowan Williams, in fact, has said much on this point in his The Truce of God). However, the point I wish to make is that these stories seem to forcefully reject that the body is an integrated part of the person.

     In contrast to these fictional accounts, I offer the conclusions of Rebecca Skloot’s book,  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (the book was also featured on fantastic episode of Radio Lab). In it, Skloot writes about the cells of cancer patient Henrietta Lacks. After these cells were taken without her knowledge, they were then reproduced for research. Henrietta’s cells became central to many advancements in medicine, including the polo vaccine. The cells were replicated millions and billions of times. When Henrietta’s youngest daughter, Deborah, learned that her mother’s cells were still in existence, she was at first confused. She worried that her mother was still alive and was being harmed in some way by the medical experiments. After a lot of emotional and spiritual anguish, she arrived at a comforting conclusion. Her answer was not to disconnect her mother’s identity from the cells, but to believe that her mother’s cells were living out a philanthropic purpose; she was a kind of an angel aiding medical research. As the title of the book suggests, as far as her daughter is concerned, Henrietta continues through her cells in a kind of immortality.

    Although I am not anxiously anticipating a zombie apocalypse, the need to readdress the relationship of body and soul has never been more important in light of the very real possibility that our bodies may indeed exist, at least in part, apart from us. When our ability to identify a person extents to an individual cell, what happens to personal identity? When the soul is unquantifiable and the body is potentially reproducible, how do we continue to make a case for the unique human condition of being, at once body and soul?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[John McAteer]

I love this post! Your discussion made me think for the first time about the ethics of zombie killing. I blogged a response over at filmphilosopher.wordpress.com.

The main paragraph of my response is this:

One partial exception to this general rule is Peter Jackson's "Dead Alive" (Jackson, 1992; AKA "Braindead"). "Dead Alive" is one of the only zombie movies with a funeral. Even after the main character's mother turns into a zombie, her son still has enough respect for her body to attempt a traditional burial. And after she is “resurrected” (as the priest’s humorous line suggests), far from dismembering her corpse as is standard in zombie movies, he takes her home and cares for her like an invalid, clothing and feeding her and continuing to refer to he as “mother”. Is this what a Christian response to zombies would look like? A kind of zombie leper colony on the model of the L'Arche Community?

[Bryne Lewis Allport]

John, Thank you so much for you comments.

I haven't seen "Dead Alive" (although I'll have to look up it now), but another exception would be "Shawn of the Dead," a satirical zombie movie. At the end of the movie, the protagonist keeps his best friend in a backyard shed where he plays video games all day... which is much the same way he spent his normal life. Other zombies are given "mindless" jobs or made to be game show contestants. This acknowledges their limited human capacity while still maintaining their essential humanity.

I don't know about a Christian zombie ethic, but I know so many people who are reluctant about organ donation or participating in medical research or even cremation because of their beliefs about the body/soul connection, especially in reference to bodily resurrection.

Somehow we have to find a way to describe the relationship between body and soul that preserves the possibility of having a unique, human (and therefore carnal) identity, while acknowledging that our bodies do not exclusively belong to us, being composed of material that is and will continued to be recycled.

[geoffrey holsclaw]

bryne,

great post. I really like the way you raised the issues here.

this is slightly off topic, but in our dying-rising in Christ, are we in a sense a zombie people?

[Nursing top]

interesting!These stories typically offer an answer no less bloody than the affliction: the infected are inhuman and therefore all forms of retaliation are not only warranted, but demanded.

[Bryne Lewis Allport]

Thanks, geoff.

That's an interesting thought, not because i think we resemble reanimated, mindless brain eating machines in Christ, but rather because the terms "dying" and "rising" come into different light in this contexts. Aside from ambivalence Christians might have about what those terms mean, what does dying to self and/or sin and rising in Christ communicate to a culture constantly chattering with stories of the undead? It may be time to revisit the belief behind the words and choose to communicate those concepts differently.

Or is death even our primary fear in facing eternity? Considering the narratives i mentioned above, perhaps mindlessness is a greater fear? What if we talked about distractedness or inattentiveness in contrast to alertness or intentionality? However, you’ll notice that i’ve already moved away from language that incorporates the body. So easy to do. Then what about lethargic versus exuberant?....

[Bruyere]

Of course, no Christian should fear death, but we absolutely shouldn't fear what comes after death. A view for a passive, "lethargic" as you say, existence after death is completely unheard of in Scripture and promulgated almost exclusively by a very (relative to Her 2000 year existence) young branch of the Church. "Exuberant" would not even begin to describe it, I think. As Christians, we're the only non-zombie people, having been raised into true life, and so how could the life after resurrection be anything but more alive?

[Bryne Lewis Allport]

Bruyere,

Thank you for your comment.

It was not my intention to suggest that the Christian after-life is lethargic or exuberant. I understood Geoff's use of the terms dying and rising in Christ to refer to discipleship (in the manner of Paul in Galatians 2:20). My comments were intended to redescribe Christian life.

Along these lines, I also make the assumption that Christians employed the terms dying and rising partly in response to a cultural anxiety about death and an unknowable afterlife. My intention is to question whether that is still the dominant fear and whether Christian doctrine is better served by adjusting the vocabulary to address current fears about mindlessness or unconsciousness while continuing to insist on the essential relationship between body and soul... therefore I suggested lethargic and exuberant, because both terms have mental and physical connotations.

[John W. Morehead]

I appreciate your reflections on this, and your desires to "do theology" in the vernacular of contemporary culture. In regards to your final paragraph, I recently explored this with a brief post at Religion Dispatches that connected theology to The Walking Dead TV series that might be of interest: http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/guest_bloggers/3871/toward_a_zombie_theology/. In addition, I wrote a post on my blog exploring the "zombie Jesus" phenomenon: http://www.theofantastique.com/2010/12/27/catholic-theologian-rejects-zombie-jesus/.