No one has yet determined what the body can do
The title of this one is a quote from the early modern philosopher Spinoza. It’s come up a lot for me, lately, in learning how to relate to my own body. Another score for the “philosophy isn’t useless” club, I suppose.
He was writing in response to contemporary discussions about mind-body interaction. There were a lot of different ideas floating around. Some people thought that the body was controlled by the mind in some odd but specific way; others thought that they were entirely disconnected, but that God makes it look like they’re connected.
Spinoza had a different idea. He thought that whatever there was, at the bottom, it wasn’t mind or matter. Instead, it was some other, underlying stuff, and that mind and body are different kinds of expressions of that underlying stuff. This had a lot of big implications, which he gets to around the time he says “no one has yet determined what the body can do.” If Spinoza is right (and, for reasons I won’t get into in this post, I am inclined to think he is), then the mind is probably not actually capable of finding the limits of the body. The mind is an aspect related to but strictly different than the body; the mind is not over the body, and it does not contain the body. Trying to find any way to prove that the mind can find the limits of what a body can do has proved pretty unfruitful. Go talk to any medical professional or academic in human biology and you’ll learn how the body always keeps finding new ways to surprise the mind.
Here’s how I used to interpret it: I followed the “mind and body are aspects of one underlying thing” argument to believing that one step on the way to peace is collapsing mind-body dualism and fully identifying with your body. If you’ve read much about what else is going on with me, you might be able to piece together how that might have caused me trouble. I ended up with a really fancy justification for “if I don’t like how my body looks, then I’m just morally bad.” It became intellectual fuel for anorexia.
But I think I was misinterpreting Spinoza. What Spinoza follows this statement with is saying that the best way to understand bodies is in dynamic relation to other bodies. In other, more normal words, we are always changing, or at least always contain the potential for changing. And because the mind can’t contain the body, the mind will never be able to fully stay ahead of or control these changes. Continuing with my Spinoza-as-life-advice approach, the takeaway here is that you will never find full peace with reality unless you accept and embrace the way that your body changes. After all, Spinoza says a little later on: “The effort by which each thing tries to stay in existence is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.” Again rephrasing and reinterpreting: Your body is trying to live, and your mind is trying to live, and how they do that is, in some very real sense, good. Being alive is good and natural, and your body and your mind are continually trying to do that, and in doing so they will change! And that’s okay!
No one has yet determined what the body can do. I have not determined what my body can do. And I’m learning to be okay with that, and to even love that, to see the way it lives and breathes and strives as beautiful.