Dear Daniel, 

Acording to some readings, la mente-corpo che spiega come le credenze e il modo in cui pensiamo sono collegati a stati fisici. Dualismo difende la distinzione tra mente e materia, che tiene que proprietà mentali che coinvolgono l'esperienza cosciente sono proprietà fondamentali, accanto alle proprietà fondamentali da identificato la fisica completato. Alcune persone detenute coscienza que stato generato dalle contingenze roba del proprio ambiente. Un rifiuto esplicito della dicotomia si trova nello strutturalismo francese, ed è una que posizione generalmente caratterizzata dopoguerra filosofia francese.

L'assenza di un punto di incontro empiricamente identificabili tra la mente non-fisico e la sua estensione fisica ha dimostrato problematico dualismo e molti filosofi moderni di mente mantenere que la mente non è qualcosa di separato dal corpo. Questi approcci sono stati particolarmente influenti nelle scienze, in particolare nei settori della sociobiologia, informatica, psicologia evolutiva e neuroscienze.

un abbraccio

Helena

I will answer later, dear Humberto, your answer is very nice and I agree totally with you

Dear Helena , dear Takeshi, dear Humberto,

I think that we can find the first origin of the dichotomy soul/body in the Council of Costantinople in 869 after Christ, where Roman Chatolic Church did abolish the trinity body, soul and spirit, as the components of' human being and leaving the'human being composed only of body and soul. The dichotomy did therefore begin on the theological plan. Surely the modern dichotomy did begin with Descartes and then with Kant till today. Both Descartes that Kant regarded the body, the res extensa as a res mechanica subject only to the laws of physics. A body subject only to the laws of physics  is not a living body but is a cadaver. And here comes the spirit, in fact the nodal problem of all the modern and contemporary philosophy is the issue of time that Kant considered the basis of his transcendental schemata, i.e. the relationship between logos and individual. In the  nature the time is clearly visible in the growth and metamorphosis of the plant.  The plant that is the elementary representation of life is a temporal being. The time is a fundamental feature of life, and therefore of living organisms.  In a book I did write in 2014, I called that Res vivens.  The res vivens connects the body with the soul. In fact the psyche is a temporal being like the life. There is no space in the  mind. The mind is a sense-temporal being, as the body is a space-temporal being. Not only spatial as the res extensa of Descartes.

I did correct my answer, I hope now it were readable

one more thing: in German there are two words for "body": Körper and Leib. We can say that Körper is the res extensa and Leib has in itself the res vivens... In Binswanger psychiatric view the relations between the two kind of body has an other meaning that is very interesting anyway (l. Binswanger, Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschliches Daseins, Zürich, Niehans, 1942.)

Dear Daniele,

The  mind/body dichotomy is a dichotomy between the experiential and the scientifically knowable about the body and its relation with the world. Experience and Knowledge (and scientific knowledge in particular) are not of the same nature.  An agent experience and it is always through a body.  And the nature of this experience is intimatly related to the nature of the body and its interation.  But although the two are intimatly linked and the two require each other, there is the agent and its experiential perspective and there is the knowledge of this agent on the physiological process within its process and the process of different social nature or ecological nature its boddy is undertaking.  On the one side there is experience and on the other side there is an incomplete knowledge and their nature are totally different at the same time as being totally related. We will continue to learn more knowledge on the scientific sides and its relation with the experiential side but it is absolutly clear that the two side are not reducible to each other, that experience is not knowledge.  The experience side is explored by all kind of human artistic activities, all kind of philosophical envestigation and historical envestigation.  There are many experiential sides as there are many sciences exporing the body side and its interactions.  New tools appears on the scientific sides and even new scientific disciplines.  On the experiential sides there are a vast range of type of mind exploration approaches: meditation, litterature (vast number of style), history, multiple religious path, all forms of arts with vast number of styles within each, philosophy, etc  

We should encourage a dialogue between all these forms of investigation , each should benefit from this dialogue but they will not eliminate each other.  The more we advance and the more the dialogue will intensify.   In spite of all that has been learned in terms of scientific knowledges , what is ''experiencing'' has never entered the scientific world and will never enter it.  The reality of human experience is one we participate in though our body yes but not in virtue of knowing about it.  Knowing about it is the realm of scientific knowledge but this knowledge even if it pertain on the material conditions necessary for it is not in itself in the realm of engagement with the world.  We are engaged in the world.   

''The dichotomy mind/body is an unresolved problem.''  What is this unresolved problem?  I do not see one.  I see a lot of unresolved problems in all different part of human inquiries and I see these can only help each other.  But I do not see an unresolved mind/body problem. Nor do I see parallel unrelated worlds.  I do not see that such problem even exist.  What about the hard problem of consciousness that Chalmer popularized?  If by that one mean the fact that the experiential is so far not explained by the physiological then one is completly confused given that the physiology can only explain the physiology and the experential do not seach to be explained that way.  Who said we should explain one from the other?  This is a straw man problem.  Yes there is an old materialistic myth that human are machines which experience and since we are machine that experience then there are some mechanistic explanation of what is experience.  This is based on a wrong conception of the scientific method.  In science there is no concept of experience, end of the story.  Science is necessary objective.  So if a human is a mecanism that experience then as a scientist we can only investigate mechanism and at the end of the day if we establish correlation between alleged experience and some mecanism, this in no way is experience but mecanism. In science we will only find what is objective and the notion of experience or subjectivity will always if refer be ascribed to an objective entity.   Experience is lived and mecanism is known.  Even if one would suscribed that a human is a mecanism wich has the impression of experiencing, that alleged impression cannot be lived in terms of knowledge of it.  The position of the agent as actor engaging is not a knowledge but an engagement.  No amount of knowledge on the engagement can transform knowledge into engagement. In science the very notion of engagement cannot make any sense and only a desillusion robot such as humans can make sense of it.  This is the scientific viewpoint which can only be objective. There is no hard problem of consciousness but simply a dichotomy between knowledge and engagement.  

Caro Daniele,

Molto interessante le informazioni given da voi.

Have un bel momento

Helena

dear Louis there is a very important book written by Evangelos Christou: The Logos of the Soul. Greek by birth, EVANGELOS CHRISTOU was raised in Alexandria, Egypt. He was educated at Cambridge (by Wittgenstein, among others) and trained at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Christou died tragically in a car accident in the Western Desert in Egypt in 1956. THE LOGOS OF THE SOUL, published posthumously in 1963, is his only book. I think It would help you to understand my point of view. I am too humble to tell you to read my book Categorie e fisionomie. Introduzione a un'ontologia del vivente. I am translating it in English and hope to finish this work in september. The life, the res vivens connects soul and body. And time is the basis of this connection. But It is necessary to develop an living thought, a kind of exact imagination to understand this kind of concepts. Goethe did posses this kind of imagination in his scientifical studies on the "visage" of natur, see, for example" his magic work  Metamorphosis of Plants, published in 1790. Otherwise everybody try to talk about method, experimental science, unpossibility to connect the subjective plan of mind with the objective plan of body. Fathoming the thought of an other person needs humility and above all "a long wait".

Dear Daniele,

I will have a look at The Logos of the Soul and also to your book when it will be translated.  I am very sympathic with Goethe's delicate empiricism and especially with the Metamorphosis of Plants which I find directly connected with my own conception on how vision/imagination/language are based on such image morphogenesis. I think that there is a lot to do with the training and education of human imagination through all kind of practices and that can be used in science as Goethe did.  I did use them even before learning about Goethe, and in many ways it is the observation of plants and trees that have guided all my research in vision.  Althought the final forms are all in terms of scientific models, the process of discovery itself was totally experential and I learned directly with what I was investigating.  The natural world can speak to us through our senses and imagination because we are part of it. What is to be human is primarily this capacity to be nature's mediator, naure speaking through us to itself.  All ancient culture without any formal science have learned to many effective ways to cure all kind of illness through all kind of practices and herbal.  In many cases, a shaman is instrumental in this curing process.  I do not take their practices to be magical, but natural as all that exist but what exist can be engage like our body in many ways that we cannot begin to understand presently. 

Imagination is a key to the mind https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290036759_Imaginings_and_imaginations_of_the_soul?ev=prf_pub

Article Imaginings and imaginations of the soul

Dear Louis, I totally agree with you and maybe I did answered instead of  asking you more information. Anyway I really appreciate your answer

un caro saluto

Daniele

 Dear Contzen, I have just downloaded your very intersting article. I will read it.

I think that the imagination is the future of thought, its evolution. But the imagination must be exerted in order that it may become an exact imagination and not a fantasy. We cannot return to time of ontology of myth we must go beyond the ontology of science for a better world

Descartes, VI meditation: "And to render this quite clear, I remark in the first place the difference that exists between the imagination and pure intellection  [or

conception]. For example, when I imagine a triangle, I do not

conceive it only as a figure comprehended by three lines, but I also

apprehend these three lines as present by the power and inward vision

of my mind, and this is what I call imagining. But if I desire to think

of a chiliagon, I certainly conceive truly that it is a figure composed of a

thousand sides, just as easily as I conceive of a triangle that it is a figure

of three sides only; but I cannot in any way imagine the thousand sides

of a chiliagon [as I do the three sides of a triangle], nor do I, so to

speak, regard them as present [with the eyes of my mind]. And

although in accordance with the habit I have formed of always

employing the aid of my imagination when I think of corporeal things,

it may happen that in imagining a chiliagon I confusedly represent to

myself some figure, yet it is very evident that this figure is not a

chiliagon, since it in no way differs from that which I represent to

myself when I think of a myriagon or any other many-sided figure; nor

does it serve my purpose in discovering the properties which go to form

the distinction between a chiliagon and other polygons. But if the

question turns upon a pentagon, it is quite true that I can conceive its

figure as well as that of a chiliagon without the help of my imagination;

but I can also imagine it by applying the attention of my mind to each of

its five sides, and at the same time to the space which they enclose. And thus I clearly recognize that I have need of a particular effort of

mind in order to effect the act of imagination, such as I do not require in

order to understand, and this particular effort of mind clearly manifests

the difference which exists between imagination and pure intellection." (Meditations in first philosophy, 1641). The interest of these considerations, which in reality Descartes operates to demonstrate the existence of the body and of the corporeal things  consists in the fact that it is clear the bridge between res cogitans and res extensa built by the imagination. The having underlined the relationship between imagination and feeling, then with the perception, gives us a glimpse of the possibility of considering the imagination as an integral part of the process of perception, therefore meant as a creative process in an artistic sense.

Daniele,

In antiquity, the prime philosopher of imagination was Aristotle. For Aristotle there is no thinking without images. And for Aristotle there is a continuity between the bodily senses, their structuration and union through imagination and the formation of more abstract ideas which for Aristotled are the images/forms rising to a higher level of actualization in intellectual forms.  Plato did not see that continuity and like many of its the pythagorian mathematical enthusiams was positing the separation of the intellectual forms, a kind of mathematical realm,  The fact that we perceive the worlds not as being a perfect mathematical realm is caused by the imperfections introduced by the bodily senses and thus are corrupting and distorting and only pure intellectual considerations can reach this purety.  Plato and the mathematical enthusiasms tended to antagonized senses and intellectual considerations and so tend to disconnect us from our sensual realities and from the forms of arts closest to the body.  Descartes was clearly close to Plato than Aristotle.  He restriced the Cogito to pure intellectual considerations which are epitomized in mathematical reasoning as put the senses , the imagination and the bodily mechanisms in the res extensa.  The res extensa is what can be modeled mathematically, but the cogito is the supreme intellectual capacity to think which Descartes assumed of not being reducible to the res extensa.   He proposed many arguments why cogito cannot be reduced.  One of them is that the res extensa is knowledge that cannot be certain while the cogito is not knowledge but existensial and cannot be denied and is epistemologically absolutly true. Husserl will recognized Descartes as the first modern phenomenologist although it was a very very primitive phenomenology.

The Cogito of Descartes is not a logic inference , but a perceptual act, therefore the cogito was the starting point of Husserl, well clarified in his  Cartesian Meditations of 1931. In english empiricism , already starting from Hobbes, has prevailed in the relationship between thought and perception, the sense semantic-linguistic of the intellective act. The perception, as also affirms Helmoltz, has place for an unconscious inference, an act of logic type and certainly not imaginative.

Daniele,

The cogito of Descartes was a thinking act.  I think therefore I exist.  What do you expect from a mathematician?  In the first meditation when he rejects all what can be doubt, he rejected perception on the basis that it can be a pure hallucination but the only thing that he could not rejected along this thinking process of elimination what the thinking act itself. Yes the empirists had made the senses as central to formation of ideas but they reduce them to be order within the senses that are learned during the life of the individual. As we know most of this order is not learned by the individual but is learned by biological evolution in the construction of the biological body and the individual only learn only on this basis and most of what is learned is not really through the sense but through culture which is built over human history and is encapsulated into linguistic forms but all of those are ultimatly interpreted in bodily narrative experiences.  The first philosopher which realized this was Vico.  He established the centrality of language and its historicity for human understanding and is the first to make a sharp separation between a res extensa understanding, i.e. a scientific understanding and a human understanding in terms of  deeply rooted narratives.  Herder and Dilthey will expand on this idea.  The mind-body problem is a cartesian problem of an individual mind.  Individual mind are always socially historically speaking and enculturated minds .  Individual mind are always integrated into a we, a collective mind that has historical roots.  Understanding such a mind is not simply a bodily understanding although it necessarily goes through an embodiement.

Louis and Daniele, all of this was written and imganied by these philosophers in a embodied state within the limits of space and time. In my opinion, when in a state of disembodiement the exploration of the mind is not restricted and therefore the imagination goes beyond the limits of space and time. 

Contzen,

What is embodied into a human being is never confined to this human body since the processes that participated in these embodiement are not confined either to the a human body nor are limited to the span of time that this human body will be alife.  My parents actions are still being echoes into my actions and my actions will be echoes in other actions.

Husserl's interpretation is that "cogito ergo sum" is a phenomenological starting point. The difference between immanent and transcendent perception reflects the difference between being as experience and being as thing.Things as they exist in themselves cannot be perceived immanently, and they can only be perceived transcendently. The difference between immanent and transcendent perception also reflects the difference in the way in which things are given and presented to consciousness. Givenness may be adequate or inadequate in terms of its clearness and distinctness, and in terms of its intuitability. Every actual cogito has an intentional object (and is a mode of thinking about something). The cogito itself may become a cogitatum if the principle that "I think" becomes an object of consciousness. Thus, in the cogito, the act of thinking may become an intentional object. Cogito is an Erlebnis, i.e a phenomenon that I live immanently. From http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/husserl.html

Dear Daniele,

Husserl distinguished immanent being vs being as thing.  There are other distinctions :

The being as thing is within the immanent being and The being as animal being (including human being) is within the immanent being.  These two are self-enact within the immanent being. The whole evolution of the mammalian imagination has lead to the evolution of these two mode of self-enaction in human being.  The transition from primate to human consisted in the conscious control of the primate imagination.  It was a very small alteration but it opened up a new realm of life, the construction of culture. To take the analogy of weber: we live suspended in cultural web that we are spunning. The arts and the natural human language are mediated through the animate being self-enaction and the mathematical language and their scientific expression are mediateted through the being of thing; the later correspond to the core of our intellectual and mathematical cognition and the former correspond to most of our social being.  Our social being is cultivate in our life through our social interaction  taking place mostly through the animate being self-enaction and the whole history of our civilisation is being embodied through it. All religions, arts and spiritual practices are developing this part of us.  Empathy and historicity have been emphasized by Dilthey and Heidegger but neglected by Husserl.  The dominant modes of transmission of cultures are highly determininant for the type of society and individuals living in this societies. The most ancient cultures had an exclusie oral and bodily expression (singing,dancing,painting,etc) transmission.  The transition to writing (early one on clay tablet and visual symbols, the second one phonetic writing on paper at the time of Socrates, the third one with the printing press, and the fourth electronic one now) reinforced the the being of thing in us and push us to control each other as if we are things and bring different forms of slavery, the latest being the financial form.  Vico had seen this and recommended teaching the rational disciplines and mathematics after a good development of the arts and languages in order to avoid our degenerescence into a barbarous rational reason dominance by the res extensa,

Dear Louis, Dear Takeshi

I think i have been misunderstood. I do not want to demonstrate that Husserl has reason when he writes what I reported from reading Cartesian Meditations, his book of 1931, that is born from two conferences held at the Sorbonne in 1929 with the title Einleitung in die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Personally I have studied very deep this book, but by this moment I am more interested in the Third Logic Research. and, more generally I am working with the imaginative processes, in the sense of Goethe and Steiner. I don't know if you did read and study directly the Cartesian Meditations. What I reported is what Husserl says, but personally I am abstaining from a judgment on his statements and especially on its written after his transcendental turn began with the very beautiful book Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie.

Daniele,

I did not study carefully Husserl.  I read the crisis and but I did not read his other books.  I have read summaries and commentaries on all his books and I know the change of perspective he did n the cartesian meditations. But as I said in the previous post , he neglected the most important part of imagination.

 I have read a few of Goethe scientific words (the work on colour, the growth of plants, his philosophical ideas) and I am sympathic in general.  He was a much more serious phenomenologist than Husserld.  Not in its theorezing but in its practices.  I am closer to him than Husserld.

I know a bit about Steiner and know that he walked in the footsteps of Goethe but I am allergic to its Atlantis and esoteric stuff. On the one hand I see that I agree with a lot of what he said and even experiences and the art based educational approaches he advocated but I do see that he totally lost his touch with science and let himself float in the space of fussiness.  I am not against fussiness but you have to do some effort towards science without having to become a materialist, or total positivist. If you are  a shaman,a scientist and a philsopher ,fine but you have to separate this stuff.  Because of this allergic instinct to its esoterism, I did not studied him.  WHen I was 14 years old (1972) I was both enthusiam for science and the spiritual and  for all this esoteristic stuff but I got so disapoint with this esoteristic stuff and I have since stayed away from  that but I kept the meditation practice and the study of serious philosophical and religious stuff. Barfielf is a philosopher I respect a lot and he had quite a high opinion on Steiner.  So I have to give him some benefit of the doubt. And that he was hated and attack by Hitler and the National Socialist is quite a good sign in his favor.

Dear all, is there a dichotomy? Why is it a problem? It seems to me that the dichotomy is false and, therefore, not a problem. Why do you assume there is a dichotomy? It was expressed by René Descartes —it became the "mind-body split"— and somehow it stuck as a mainstay of philosophy. This is a Western thing, not a universal thing. It is not a "spiritual thing" either, and does not refer to the medieval war between body and soul. 

Best regards, Lilliana

I repeat what I have already written:

Dear Helena , dear Takeshi, dear Humberto,, and now, dear Liliana

I think that we can find the first origin of the dichotomy soul/body in the Council of Costantinople in 869 after Christ, where Roman Chatolic Church did abolish the trinity body, soul and spirit, as the components of' human being and leaving the'human being composed only of body and soul. The dichotomy did therefore begin on the theological plan. Surely the modern dichotomy did begin with Descartes and then with Kant till today. Both Descartes that Kant regarded the body, the res extensa as a res mechanica subject only to the laws of physics. A body subject only to the laws of physics  is not a living body but is a cadaver. And here comes the spirit, in fact the nodal problem of all the modern and contemporary philosophy is the issue of time that Kant considered the basis of his transcendental schemata, i.e. the relationship between logos and individual. In the  nature the time is clearly visible in the growth and metamorphosis of the plant.  The plant that is the elementary representation of life is a temporal being. The time is a fundamental feature of life, and therefore of living organisms.  In a book I did write in 2014, I called that Res vivens.  The res vivens connects the body with the soul. In fact the psyche is a temporal being like the life. There is no space in the  mind. The mind is a sense-temporal being, as the body is a space-temporal being. Not only spatial as the res extensa of Descartes.

Dear Daniele, yes!

The fact is that the very idea of dichotomy comes from an idea of body and an idea of mind that are cultural, not "out there" as facts. One of the most interesting things we have learned from phenomenology in the 20th century is precisely the contrary: how much the body has to do with our "mind", how little "distance" we experience between them so as to almost eliminate this conveniently-posed dichotomy. Explaining the origin of the dichotomy does not answer the question of its validity, much less of its actual existence. In fact, we are recovering our capacity to "be" our bodies because culture —the culture of "suspecting" our bodies, our frustration at not being able to overcome illness or aging, our rage at not being beautiful enough, etc.— is there to block our understanding of the unity of mind-body. Culture has kidnapped our bodies to make them the culprit of sin, the harbinger of pain, the material house that fails us because of its weaknesses. So we reject our bodies and believe that our minds are superior.

I remember the little monologue by Hamlet in Shakespeare's famous play: 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!" Here, the Bard has a tenuous idea of the "togetherness" of mind and body, but finally falls prey to Aristotle when insulting Ophelia: women are body, men are mind, women are "materies", men are idea and "sophia". In short, the mind/body split probably had a gender-based differentiation that spilled over to a matter of class (there are humans that are actually animals, like for Thucydides's troglodytes from Ethiopia, etc.) The mind-body split has created many injustices: the devaluation of women, the devaluation of non-white races, the devaluation of children, etc. 

It bears noting that, during the Enlightenment, a few treatises on the matter of the body came to light, which eliminated the mind-body split: Julien Offray de La Mettrie's Histoire Naturelle de l'ame (1745) and his famous L'Homme Machine (1748), in which books he questions the separation of body and mind and creates mental experiments to prove so, especially in his second book. There is also Samuel Auguste André David Tissot's fascinating book on masturbation and the body titled L'onanisme : dissertation sur les maladies produites par la masturbation (1760), where he accuses the body of capturing the intelligence of humans due to desire and, thus, technically eliminating the mind-body split. There is also Jean-Jacques Rousseau's brilliant Confessions (1782), a careful and minute exploration of the relationship between his desires and his ideas, that finally ends by listening to the call of the body. I have the three books but they are hard to find. You can download them from https://archive.org.

It bears noting that pornography became an important manifestation of a politics of the body expressed by these three authors —for example, according to Lynn Hunt, Marie Antoinette was found "guilty of immorality" and beheaded because of her alleged devotion to her body— even though the moralists accused people of listening to their bodies, whereas the "pornographers" —starting with Boyer d'Argen's Thérèse Philosophe, passing through Fanny Hill by John Cleland, Diderot's La Réligieuse, all the way to the Marquis de Sade's impressive Juliette and Philosophie dans le boudoir... assumed a critical stance vis à vis the constrictions of a puritanical society. In all these extremely popular —though clandestine— books the authors-philosophers (18th-century pornography was, actually, posited as philosophy), what was at stake was the elimination of the mind-body split. Sade was especially explicit about the primacy of the body in the endless "theatrical lectures" in his 100 days of Sodom. This rebellious philosophical stance exploded during Romanticism and left a negative mark in the naturalist novel at the end of the 19th century. To the pornographer's cry of "Let the body thrive!", the Victorian moralists (Freud among many others, according to the extensive research done by Peter Gay's five-volume masterpiece titled The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, 5 vols., 1984-1998), responded by yelling "Every person who gives priority to the body must be found immoral and mad!" This brief detour through pornography as an example of the philosophical reaction against the suppression of the body in Modernity says lots about the why of this suppression is actually political: morality is one of the most useful weapons society (the "polis") uses for controlling its citizens, and thus controls the bodies by treating them as prima facie "immoral". It bears noting that 18th-century pornography has little resemblance with the banality and repetitive stupidity of present-day pornography. What it has lost is its political depth and its will to suppress the mind-body split. 

Thus, this dichotomy has had to do with political control and the devaluation of peoples based on false differences and their "management" of their own bodies! Philosophy has given wings to this barbarity. It is time to suppress this false dichotomy.

There are many good references on how the body has been demeaned throughout history for explicitly political reasons. I recommend the 3-volume anthology of texts by Michel Feher, Ed., Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi. Fragments for a history of the human body. NY: Zone Books, 1989. Vol. 1, 480 pp.; Vol. 2, 552 pp.; Vol. 3, 575 pp. It took me four years to read these splendid anthologies because I could not avoid to search and read many fascinating references made by the authors of the articles.

Sorry for the typos!

Best regards, Lilliana

an artistic answer to Liliana who didn't consider what I did write, but did show her fascinating style

Dear Daniele, what I said is not "style", but knowledge, references, bibliography, facts. But thanks for reading. I read you thoroughly. I just though you merely described what these philosophers —whom I know well— said, and you added nothing new. That fact is that their saying what they said does not validate the dichotomy. Just being Descartes or Kant does not validate anything. Proper names do not go that far, according to Saul Kripke. Descartes and Kant just described the dichotomy because they thought it was not necessary to defend it: they took it as something real, they probably did not even question it. If you want to criticize philosophy, sometimes it is useful to do what I do: I look outside philosophy to see what other disciplines are saying about the same subject. The rise of medicine as an important science in the 18th century was the best place from which to see the body not as a cultural corpus but as a place still rather unknown whose materiality was trying to say something. The lack of knowledge of the body was probably caused by its being underestimated by morality voiced through philosophy. More on these in Susan Bordo's excellent books on Descartes: The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. Albany: State U of New York P, 1987; The Male Body: A Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999;  Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. 

Yes, Daniele, we women think and write, research and innovate, read, invent, know, discuss, we even disagree with any and all! We also have a great style. Thank you for the compliment. :-)

By the way, is that Rubens's The consequences of war? Fascinating! If Rubens had know about the importance of bodies, he would not have put men and women to portray "war". We would be happier as a humanity... The war of the sexes was invented by men, never forget that, Daniele. 

Best regards, Lilliana

My dear Liliana, the question of res vivens ist an idea of my mind, between the mechanical body, and I speak as a medical doctor and biologist, and the psychical sphere there is the complex of biological processes which are only temporal processes, non spatial. The psychical processes are surely not spatial, they are sense-temporal. Do you know a philosopher who adfirmet this statement? Please I want to know the name of this philosopher.

one more thing, I don't like to cite myself, I think that humility should be the principle of knowledge. Unlike the knowledge only generates controversy...

this atmosphere is that I Iove to feel

Dear Daniele, I will try to remember, but I am sure time has gained intelligence since the start of the 20th century. Besides, it is not bad or uncomely to cite oneself. It is great to know the ideas and proposals of our colleagues here in RG. I really mean it. It is a pleasure conversing with you. :-)

I have the impression that the time question comes from our late modern experience of time, its seemly greater experiential speed. I think the latest questioning of our time schemes is that of Norbert Elias, in his splendid An Essay on Time. I read it in Spanish, but your question invited me to look it up. I found a reference and the first three pages of it in English at the website of the Norbert Elias Foundation: http://www.norberteliasfoundation.nl/docs/pdf/09EssayonTime.pdf

The Spanish edition was printed by Mexico's Fondo de Cultura Económica some years back. It studies how we came to measure time, and how that exercise in measurement distorted our experience of time. The essay begins more or less like this: "In order to perceive time there must exist centering units (humans) capable of elaborating a mental scheme wherein successive events A, B, C, go together, even though they evidently do not occur simultaneously. This requires a being specifically capable of synthesizing, that becomes alive and structured by way of experience. The capacity to make a synthesis of these characteristics is a human trait that characterizes how humans orient themselves. Contrary to any other living being that we know about, humans orient themselves less by instinctive reactions that by perceptions marked by a process of learning, by previous experiences not only of the individual, but of a long chain of human generations. This capacity to learn and transmit experiences from generation to generation, in the form of knowledge, is the foundation of the progressive enlargement and improvement of human modes of orientation through millennia..." My translation from Spanish. He goes on to inquire on these modes of orientation, privileging them over space.

I am not sure whether this is what you meant, but here it is. We could confront Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Jean-Paul Sartre as to time and space: it seems to me that Merleau-Ponty bases his phenomenology on the experience of location in space in his Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) as hi proposes the human body as the locus of experience, as the place of experience; and Sartre on the experience of time in his L'être et le néant, as he posits the constant failure of purpose of life in the process of accepting "nothingness". The failed intent to lead a "complete" life speaks to us about the process of time. I do not quite sympathize with existentialism, I am an irrepressible optimist. 

I suggest a beautiful anthology prepared by Umberto Eco titled Story of Time, where he gathers different authors in a transtemporal discussion of what time has meant for successive generations throughout millennia. I bought it some time ago at the MET in New York, but I just checked in Amazon and you can get in from $2.00 on. When I bought it, it was't that cheap, but it is a great book on this subject matter.

Best regards, Lilliana

Dear Liliana 

You have well described our anger, culturally built-up anger at our bodies.  It is a very old cultural built-up but it is still well alive in our contempory culture.  Seeing the body as a prison that when the soul emodied itself at our conception it got corropted and all our afflictions are attributed to the weakness of the body.  Transmigration of the soul is a very old idea probably constructed in India but that was alive in the ancient greek in ancient orphic cult.  The ancient egyptian culture was totally centered on reaching an eternal life beyond death.  Look at the pyramids and the mommies.  All these were the proper and necessarily disposition of the eternal life.  These were design as eternal house and there are still there.  Not only the pharaons were obsessed with proper burial for the bodies and their preparation for preventing their decomposition but the whole noble class , so much so that there are thousand of mommies all over the world in museums.  There is a link between this fascination for the eternal life of the soul in the egyptian and their mathematics.  The egyptian invented a lot of mathematics and it is obvious just from the geometrical shapes all over their architecture.  Mathematic are abstractions , abstract from imperfect material bodies that when expressed are seen as perfect and eternal and existing into a realm of their own.  The ancient greek Pythagorians were positing that the whole universe was just made of numbers, and numbers made all mathematics.  And also this fascination with the mathematical notion of infinity that makes mathematicians feel they close to God because infinity and eternity are two attributes traditionally attribute to God.  What I find sick in this sacralisation of mathematic is that mathematic is like eternal death, it is totally disembodied and static and linking it to God that should be link to LIFE is totally sick.  Another aspect of the sickness of this culture of mathematics is that mathematic was invented by the Egyptian priests, the slave masters.  This desembodied aspect of matematics correspond to this division between thinking/mathematics that the slave master does prior to construction and work done by the bodies of the slave, that will  perish and rot and that nobody care.  The glorification of the mind of the slave master and of mathematic is a glorification of the the eternal realm of death and the celebration of slavery.  And this division correspond to the psychological division between the intellectual/mathematic and empathic human relation part.  Notice that money, which is a number corresponding to labor by the slave, is modern slavery under the financial masters.  These old cultural constructs are constantly mutating and only increase in their enslavering power. They are a living cult of death and of dead bodies.

It is intersting what Liliana said about Rubens, Baudelaire in Les fleurs du maI, in the poetry Les Phares, writes:"Rubens,fleuve d'oubli, Jardin de la paresse/Oreiller de chair fraiche où l'on ne peut aimer,/Mais ou la vie afflue et s'agite sans cesse,/Comme l'air dans le ciel et la mer dans la mer;... "

Dear Louis, I am absolutely fascinated by your comment, the very idea that mathematics are cold and distant, and they positively subtract from view any living things that are born, change die and corrupt. No wonder that the suppression of the body in Wester culture has something to do with the rise of the prestige of mathematics as something that existe regardless of life, as Descartes himself regards them in his Meditations on First Philosophy: even in dreams mathematics remain true. I am moved by you comment that centering leadership on the mind as an exercise on "inferior bodies" is central to our hate for the body, as I commented above. The idea is spelled out by Aristotle in his books on animals. Only (white, Western) men are capable of thought: the rest are mere animals that lack the essentials of thought, like when, for example, we talk about inferior races or genders. We have had to bear the Aristotelian burden on the body for too long. Many things have happened since the 18th century to help us look in another direction. If our bodies are not free, our minds will never gain freedom. Thank you, dear Louis! You are right: "These old cultural constructs are constantly mutating and only increase in their enslavering power." Yes.

Warm regards, Lilliana

Daniele, though I love Baudelaire, I see that he was a child of his time. If you read his "Le serpent qui dance" you will see what he thought about his "negrese", his "belle d'abandon" and his "femme fatale": Jeanne Duval... You see? We are finding things in common. That is good. :-)

Dear Liliana your article On women Philosophers: an Allegory, is really a masterpiece, for the subject matter and for the style. I did study in a very deep way the works of Edith Stein and Hedwig Conrad-Martius scholars of Husserl in the Göttinger Kreis, but I studied as well their biography. I agree totally with you and I advice all the followers of this small "Kreis" to read your article they can find in your profile. Yes we are findig things in common and that is really good

Thank you, Daniele! This little essay is part of what I do for a nice radio program titled Palabras Encontradas, or Words in Strife (there are two of us and we are supposed to disagree at least some of the time). Every week I read a very short piece like this one and my partner reads another one. We call these short essays "Capsules". That day we were talking about Hannah Arendt, and that is why she is so prominent in my essay, while it is also quite readable by non-experts like most of our radio audience. That day was quite fun. If you like, you can listen to us sometime as we go on air on Tuesdays at 3:00 pm Atlantic Time or La Paz. The program is in Spanish.

Best regards, Lilliana

Dear Helena, as I said above,  this questioning of the mind-body split has taken place in late modernity, "l'incontro con il corpo"...I totally agree with you:  "L'assenza di un punto di incontro empiricamente identificabili tra la mente non-fisico e la sua estensione fisica ha dimostrato problematico dualismo e molti filosofi moderni di mente mantenere que la mente non è qualcosa di separato dal corpo. Questi approcci sono stati particolarmente influenti nelle scienze, in particolare nei settori della sociobiologia, informatica, psicologia evolutiva e neuroscienze."

Best regards, Lilliana

Dear Liliana, I read and understand Spanish just a little bit as the most of Italians which love this Language. I will try to listen to you. I am very interested... I am 65 years old but I really feel all the things as a child...

Dear Daniele, to me age is no longer that important in so many ways. But I am 62 and I once read in Time magazine a scientific article about the Brain where the scientist author explained that the best age for the brain runs from 50 to 70. He said something like "during these years everything you have learned comes before your mind as if you could take it and used it, many things from different times come together and spark new relationships and new ideas. Knowledge is your capacity to make connections" That sounded a bit Hegelian to me ("ideas collide against one another in the mind and spark new thoughts", Phenomenology of Mind), but I have experienced it thoroughly. 

I know Time is not a serious science journal, but the scientist who wrote that was a guy from Princeton University who who had quite scientific reputation. His name escapes me. I will try to find it.

Best regards, Lilliana

Daniele,

''The psychical processes are surely not spatial, they are sense-temporal.''

Bergson has done a lot in that direction.  He is the heir of the French philosophical tradition that begin with Maine de Biran (which supported a position not far from Shopenhaer) , Ravaisson (an Aristotlean Shcellian, his small ph.d. thesis is worth reading: On Habits)  and he has influenced Von Uexkull. 

I did a lot of digging about this question but I do not have much writing on it that can be usefull to you.  I will simply gave you my main touch stone.  A lot of people have tried to escape the mecanical trap by focusing on changes instead of focusing of what do not change.  But most of them fell into another conceptual trap: searching knowledge is ALWAYS searching that what do not change.  Searching knowledge about changes will only succeed at finding non-changing aspect of changing things.  Scientific knowledge is by definition about knowledge about order and order is by definition about what do not change.  If someone claim to have said something about change in a book, notice that what he has said is there not changing and static in that book.  Can something that is static and not changing be about change?  I did not go deep in Whitehead's process philosophy but at the end of the day, that philosophy of process is static like any philosophy.  

So scientific knowledge is by definition static and about a mechanical aspect non-changing aspect of the world. But our language and arts are providing us understanding and insights of all kind about our relation with the world and between ourself and about what we are and what we want.  The key is try to investigate it directly by engaging in research and art and indirectly through science by chasing all the bodily and social processes related to these activities.  But we have to understand everything evolutionarily, it is the only way to understand anything.  So we have to understand the evolution of the mammals and the primate and how and why humans evolved.  That like any other subject of study have to be studied both form the insight engagement as human and indirectly through scientific formalisation.  

When we write about these questions, we use a natural language and this use is essential in itself for the success of the investigation. Whe we use these language, the more we learn to master them through the concepts we try to forge and the more the tradition that has christalized into it become alive into us and speak to us and mediate the process of discovery.   We use our sense, we use language, we use science, we live and engage in life and all that together speak to each other and come alife and help us carry the task.

The question of music is of high interest.  It is intimatly related to the sensory-motor system as the connection to dance is a testimony.  THere is a connection between music and language and I think the two were one for the first humans.  See the book: the singing Neandertal.  How did a small group of bonobo-like primate found the path to humanity? Communal singing-dancing practices for coupling the nervous system of an entire tribe.  That intimate coupling is the core of human sociality.  What is the point of that coupling?  To be intimatly together in each other bodies and to start a real conversation.  This has allowed the gradual biological transformation that has allowed the conscious collective control of the mammalian imagination which for our mammalian ancestor is totally under the control of the environmental circumstance and are reacting to them.  While here the tribe itself start to self-enact, like in dreams, the imagination, the reality engine that is at work in all animals but now become able the take be activate through another channel and all arts and language practices will stem form our original collective singing dancing practice where we learned to be together in a intimate way.  We are mammal and most of what we do , we do it exactly like any other mammals.  In the normal mammalian way to act, we live a dream through our imagination, it is a controled hallucination.  All mammals live that way.  HUman has simply learn to control in a slightly different way this live imagination.  We can come out of the normal mammalian lived hallucination and through arts, language, thinking, enter another one mediate by these languages, enter all kind of narratives.  It is not that different from ordinary mammalian living.  Shaman do it just a little bit further and loose control of their body and the sense of being there but it is essentially the same as what we do with art and language.  Just to illustrate that , take the phenomena of pareidolia.  We see strange face in clouds and sometime it is at dawn and for a brief moment with see a complete animal but come closer and see a branch.  We just say, I had a visual illusion without realizing that all our visual perceptions are produced exactly like these pareidolia.  Why call these special cases illusion.  Because either the contex like in clouds or more acuity by coming closer and the changing of the perception has made of aware of the illusionary nature of these perception.  But all our perceptions are produces in exactly the same manner that these illusions were produced, all perception are thus illusions but in 99.9% of the cases these illusions are totally fine and in tune with what we want to do and are stable and in proper context.  When I say illusion, I do not use the word in the sense of erroneous, but in the sense that it is self-created, it is constructred by the mammalian imagination on the basis of some information gathers by our senses.  Our sense gather informations and this informations is not what we see, what we see is what we imagine on this basis.  This is our mammalina imagination working in the background and generating the reality we live in, it is a controled hallucination, a well controled one contrary to the psychotic badly controled one.  The arts are the medium for the mediation of our mamalian imagination which through enculturation make us live into cultural worlds that human history has built and into which we live through the mediation they permit in the use of our imagination.

To end this unending post, I will simply finish on a very small question: but what is life in all this?  Is there something outside of all this talk about mechanism?  I began with the dichotomy: knowledge (non-changing, order) and change .  In the change there is the most important aspect of all which is what built the world, the universe, life, and you and me.  This is creation and life.   If I tell you what it is, what I will tell you will be as static and as mecanistic as everything else that can be said.  The only strategy of communication is using the natural language for the guiding you for finding it in yourself and finding it in oneself is the process of becoming more alife, this is art.  I will also use a metaphor, the one of the builder.  Life is the builder in all that is alive.  We are the builder of our own life and with science can described only what is build by the builders of all these growing bodies.  But through natural languages and art we can build together, we inhabit a common body and become one and renew the foundational act of creation of humanity that a remote tribe of bonobo-like primate have began contructing.  Here we come in concepts, interesting one but concepts are not alife and only the continuiation of the artistic process of building humanity keep it alife, any slow down , deaded it, momify it.  The force of momification are increasing  constantly and the story is far from over. And think about all these tumbs, the pyramids, the first emperor of china, jesus's grave, etc...  why on earth celebrating important rulers and humans through graves.  This is something very disturbing here. The question of where is supposed to be the soul in diverse tradition is very revealing: in paradize away for the whole universe, or here on earth as reborn, or in the tomb itself , or in the ground and waiting for the world to end and restart.  I find all these scenario sickening.  THe scenario I find the most healthy because the most alife is the scenarios described by the natives of this planet: the soul of the dead do not leave us but stay here in this beautiful planet and stay with us in this paradize.  A tradition that make its dead escape this place is not a tradition that like this place and this tradition is not going to take care of this place.

Dear Lilliana,

Although I am not as good to memorize new stuff that I had, it is still not bad but far from my former teenage capacity.  In circumstances where I was motivated like prior to an exam, I was able to memorize 100 English words in 1 hours study, I was able to memory a full sheet of mathematical formula in 10 minutes prior to the exam, I was able to recite 200 pages words by words of my biological book in grade 8.  Now I have a hard time remembering a new phone number.  But I have notice that I have  gained new memory capacities.  I had already in my 30's started to remember new stuff about my life and put it together but this capacity of putting a lot of narrative together has increase after fifty.  WHen I was a teenager , language and making French narrative was almost impossible.  I was a nerd in mathematics and natural science and history and at the end of the class in languages and in my capacity to invent a story.  I was not bad orally but zero in written form.  I developed my capacity of telling stories in my 30's by telling stories that I was inventing to my young children.  I invented brand new mythologies for them and they will probably tell these to their children.  But it is only since the last 10 years that I begin to be able to write and as you can see painfully and with a lot of errors. I developed this capacity here on RG after nearly 7000 posts.  Through all these tiny narratives , I am trying to create a Novel that would be my story, our story and the story of the universe.  A crazy idea I know.

Dear Louis, this is precisely why I always tell stories here. They give structure to my memory of things. :-)

Best regards, Lilliana

I simply love your stories, dear Liliana. Thank you for sharing ! 

Dear Daniele, to answer your question...

1 . "Mens sana in corpore sano" would be my first choice of an ancient quote that illustrates so well the intricate mutual relation between mind and soul;

2. Thanks to Liliana who just offered me this morning an outstanding link to pdf catalogues on the NY MET, I chose this link to a marvelous collection of illustrations that masy reply the present question. "Wisdom embodied " - Enjoy ! 

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Wisdom_Embodied_Chinese_Buddhist_and_Daoist_Sculpture_in_The_Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art#

Kind regards, from sunny Portugal.

Dear Louis I fundamentally agree with you. Writing never can become something living. It is useful only to fix some work hypotesis. When you look at a plant in the sense of Goethe you can understand that all in the plant is methamorphosis. What is real in a plant is what is invisible. Not leafs, not root, not flower and fruits, not seeds, but the metamorphic movement between all them. I mean res vivens, life, this kind of movement. Only imagination, an imagination able to compare the parts to find the Whole. Every movement of this kind of living thought can arrive till reality, that is not material but ideal. We must think our life, the relationship between human beings, plants, minerals, animals like in a tale or in a legend. Logic thought kills, imagination as living thought make the world a living being. In this sense I intend life as the mediator between soul and body. This life is ideal, is spirit.

Dear Daniele,

It is through a direct realization while looking at a tree of this parts to whole relationship that I got started in my Ph.D. and later on, my specific mathematical approach which  is centered on the notion of axis of growth, creases in image surface, was also sudgested to me by looking at tree branching patterns sitting on a beach.  Then later my synthesis about how crease structure are hiearchically structure and recapitulate the morphogenesis was exactly structure as a tree grow.  I have the impression that trees have spoke to me.

A quick review of the book ''On habit'' 

On habit and the mind-body problem. The view of Felix Ravaisson

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4158773/

By the way Ravaisson was the curator of ''le louvre'' and a fan of  Leonardo.  He was involved in the way ''la deesse de Milo'' is presented.  He was also the minister of education for a while and has tried to introduced mandatory life drawing as fundamental in education.  

Mens sana in corpore sano: medice cura te ipsum

Yes, dear Daniele. I'll correct my previous Latin, that I quoted from heart... (so much for imperfect memories... One tends to be forgetful, after 50...)

I collected a few beautiful quotes, on the question of Mind and body, that I'm sure you'll enjoy:

1. "The mind covers more ground than the heart, but goes less far"

----- Chinese Proverb.

(This reminds me of an Asian ancient saying that I always think of, when travelling intercontinental : "One shouldn't travel more than 30 km per day, otherwise the soul doesn't follow your body" - When I change time zone, I know that it will take me one day for hourly difference, to get back together to my own self again... - )

2. " The flesh endures the storms of the present alone, the mind those of the past and future as well as the present. "

----- EPICURUS - Quoted in Diogenes Laertius. Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, 3rd c.AD

(As I teach Anatomy, I often remind this to my students, as a form of consolation: " Don't be afraid to touch a dead body, although you need respect. This is only the enveloppe of a beautiful Letter that has already gone on its own")

3. " I have said that the soul is no more than the body,   /   And I have said that the body is no more than the soul,  "

----- WALT WHITMAN Songs of Myself. 48. Leaves of Grass (1855-92)

Dear Maria, I am sorry, I didnt want correct your mistake, I do so many mistakes that you cannot imagine. I thank you very much for the beautiful and interesting words you did write. Your sentences did make me remembering what Plotinus said in Enneads: "Is not the soul that is in the body but is the body that is in the soul"

Hey, you guys... let the dichotomy go!

As Judith Butler famously said some 25 years ago: ours are "bodies that matter". :-)

Love you all, Lilliana

Lilliana,

We communicate through language among ourself here.  Built-in in this language there is a dichotomy .  A lot of the words refers to what is seen trough our senses, what is out there including these human bodies as we see them and touch them or hear them.  But there are others words refering to our intention, pain, feeling, efforts that do belong to us in a different ways than the former.  

''When Merleau-Ponty refers explicitly to the “double sensation”  ...

 When I touch one of my hands with the other, he writes,

the two hands are never touched and touching at the same time

with respect to each other. When I press my two hands together, it

is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two

objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous arrangement in

which the two hands can alternate in the role of “touching” and

“touched.” What was meant by talking about “double sensations”

is that, in passing from one role to the other, I can recognize the

hand touched as the same one that will in a moment be touching''

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/188_s05/pdf/Carman_Body.pdf

When your consciousness corresponds to your right hand touching then it is the subject and the left hand is its object.  And vice versa.  

Dear Louis, your answer is very interesting from an heuristic point of view, your words open the mind. Thank you Louis

Dear Liliana, I don't understand what you want trasmit with the words: ours are "bodies that matter".  Can you help me to understand?

thanks

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311715924_Near-Death_Cases_Desegregating_Non-LocalityDisembodiment_via_Quantum_Mediated_Consciousness_An_Extended_Version_of_the_Cell-Soul_Pathway

Article Near-Death Cases Desegregating Non-Locality/Disembodiment vi...

mind and body = inseparable, there is no dichotomy but a union. without one, there is no other. body without mind is will never become a body. mind will never exist without body. body and soul is a dichotomy. but not body and mind. without mind, nothing can be known as existence and without body, what would exist than a fleeting awareness that has no existence, which doesn't make sense. nothing exists that does not exist.

The René Descartes' popular thought, "cogito ergo sum." meaning I think therefore I am", if you dissect it, there is a mind and the thinker in there. not just mind, not just thinker. but both at the same time. inseparable union

 Very interesting works by Katerina Albano

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8749.2008.03006.x/full

Robert J.Richards

http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/richards/Cambridge+Darwin+on+Mind.pdf

Tina Lindhard

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271965239_Emotions_Including_Anger_Bodily_Sensations_and_The_Living_Matrix?focusedCommentId=58b1e8af934940f9f7ed9716

Article Emotions Including Anger, Bodily Sensations and The “Living Matrix”