Chosing Me

THE EMBODIED SELF

Quassim Cassam

1. Introduction

2.

3. Chapter Three presents evidence indicating that deprivation and

social polarisation are also

Descartes thought that he was distinct from his body and could exist without it. The self that is distinct from its body is, according to Descartes, an immaterial substance. This immaterial self possesses a body and is so intimately conjoined with its body that it forms a union with it. The relation between self and body is, Descartes insists, unlike the relation between a pilot and his vessel. If one were in one’s body like a pilot in a vessel one would not feel pain when one’s body is hurt. Nevertheless, the fact remains that each of us is, strictly speaking, distinct from his or her body. The self is a thinking and unextended thing. The body is an extended and unthinking thing.[i]

The question to which Cartesian dualism is a response is, first and foremost, a metaphysical question, namely:

(M) What is the relation between a person and his or her body?

To talk about the ‘person’ is, in the context of (M), to talk about the thinking, experiencing self. It is this self or soul that, according to the dualist, is distinct from its body. At the other end of the scale from dualism is a form of materialism according to which, far from being distinct from its body, self and body are in fact identical. On this account, the only sense in which each of us has a body is that each of us is a body.[ii] A third view is constitutionalism. This says that a (human) person is constituted by a human body without being identical to the constituting body. For the constitutionalist, the relation between person and body is like the relation between Michelangelo’s David and the piece of marble that constitutes it.[iii]

Both dualists and constitutionalists think that the identity conditions for persons are different from those for bodies and that it is metaphysically possible for a person to have...