Are We Our Bodies?

On a camping trip, I met a preacher in the mountains of West Virginia. During my conversation with this rather eccentric man, he said “why don’t you touch me.” I touched his hand. “That was only my hand. I told you to touch me.” He said, so I touched his shoulder. “that’s only my shoulder. Try again.” “and that’s my chest,” he complained patiently. I had begun to feel like the rabbit with the tar baby. It didn’t matter where I touched him, his face, his foot, even a full embrace, I was only touching parts of his body, not him. I was fourteen, and baffled. Of course, this man, being a preacher of sorts, was trying to get me to see that we are not our bodies, that there is something more, that we have idea selves, which of course he would want me to know are souls that go to heaven etc.

Okay, so we have idea selves. The exercise with the body parts proved that much to me. I do not think that we are merely our bodies, because we have minds. The idea of self exists within that mind, just as the mind exists within that body. Is the mind, its ideas, the spirit inseparable from the body? I don’t know. I suspect however, that Plato was wrong about the idea selves predating their bodies. Perhaps it is precisely because I have seen that hands, and shoulders, and chest, face, feet, and body of the preacher, that I can have an idea of him in the first place. I have seen other bodies, other forms, and perhaps it is after seeing them that I form the ideas of them in my mind. Perhaps, since my mind is in my body, my mind dies with it, although the forms of course do not. Those forms lie waiting for another body, with another mind, to come into contact with them. Since bodies are designed similarly enough, it stands to reason that minds are too, which means they might have similar (idea) reactions to the same set of stimuli. In this way the idea bodies exist separately from the bodies themselves.