06 November 2009

Duality

Is there an irreconcilable duality of body and soul? Man was once unable to understand himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the body - it was a cage. Today however, the body is not so unfamiliar and the soul has been seen to be nothing more than grey matter in the brain. The old duality of body and soul has become surrounded by scientific terminology and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice. Scientifically I'm a rationalist, and philosophically I'm a materialist. But overall those outlooks are unbearably bleak. Try to make someone who has fallen in love to comprehend their stomach rumbling or heart thumping, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science instantly fades away.