14. Against the Despisers of the Body - Nietzsche's dismantling of "The Soul"

You have been taught to despise your body—to believe that your true worth lies in some hidden soul, while your flesh is merely a burden or a prison. 

But what if that is one of the greatest misunderstandings of the human condition ever? What if you are not a spirit trapped in meat, but the body itself—living, powerful, beautiful, and brimming with deep intelligence? 

In this episode, we tear away the numbing illusions that have kept you weak, confused, and divided against yourself. You’ll discover why your body is not something secondary or shameful—but the very foundation of your identity, your vitality, and your potential. You’ll learn how Nietzsche’s radical vision can help you reclaim the body as your greatest strength, and begin the journey toward a more unified, powerful, and fearless self. 

Welcome back—to yourself. 

Episode music choice: Singularity by John Hopkins

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Transcript

You’ve been gaslit all your life. You’ve been told that your body does not matter—that it’s what’s inside that counts, that the real you is an invisible essence called ‘personality’, ‘character’, or ‘soul’. You’ve been told that concern for your appearance is shallow and vain, that your true worth lies entirely within. Nietzsche claims we have all been hoodwinked into believing that we are immaterial souls imprisoned in flesh. But the truth is that you are a body, through and through. The health, strength, power and beauty of the body are not trivialities; they are fundamental to your identity—to your destiny. The mind itself, that chattering thing you call ‘I’, is not some sovereign ruler over the body, it is a function of it, an expression of it. Your mind is not the body’s master, it is its slave.

What follows is an exhortation to return to yourself: to the recognition that to love, strengthen, revere and transform your body is not superficial—it is the crucial first step in becoming who you truly are.

‘I shall not go your way, O despisers of the body! You are not bridges to the Übermensch!’⁠1

Thus far, we have done quite a bit of work analysing human desire and, if you credit Nietzsche’s psychology, we’ve established that desire is inescapable, and that all desires, not just in humans but in all living things, reduce down, in the end, to will to power expressed in the three imperatives:

• Maintain the power you have
• Accumulate more power
• Express your power

One of the most profound ways humans experience the thrill of will to power is in overcoming resistances, so not just pleasure in getting the things you want and need, but the pleasure in getting itself. In other words, it’s not so much the prize, but the very act of winning that gratifies us.

Now, turning our attention to something more tangible, consider  what is the first, most important and most incontrovertible fact of your existence: is it your mind? Your personality? Your soul? For Nietzsche, it is your body.

The centrality of the body, both to your sense of your own identity and to your self-esteem, is downplayed by society. It tends to honour the mind as the essential self. It says that personality is more important than appearance, that it is what is inside that counts and that one cannot judge a book by its cover. In particular, the body as aesthetic object is de-emphasised, at least in our public ethical discourse. ‘Beauty is only skin deep’, we say, and so happy acceptance of our own physical flaws and shortcomings is encouraged, as if that were a simple matter. But an undeniable tension exists. Even as we all dutifully repeat these mantras of self-acceptance ‘just the way we are’, legions of us spend our money on fad diets, personal trainers, steroids, skin treatments, slimming pills, dental braces, spray tans, hair transplants, tit jobs, face peels, mole removal and botox. We want to be beautiful and not just on the inside.

Our insatiable fascination with the beauty of others also throws doubt on any protestations of bodily indifference. If its media is a reflection of a society’s tastes and values, the preponderance of attractive celebrities in our media, in all media, shows that people are very far from indifferent about beauty. Beautiful people captivate us. That is their power, and recognising this, we yearn for that kind of power ourselves. 

Meanwhile, the industry that materialises to capitalise on our desire for beauty is railed against for setting-up unattainable ideals. The beauty industry parades a panoply of perfect models, personifications of a lifestyle we are told we can secure for ourselves if we have the financial means. Impossibly slender, doe-eyed girls and smooth, musclebound boys stare insouciantly at us from billboards and magazine covers. It is the beauty industry, we complain, that has made us feel bad about ourselves, made us feel fat, made us feel ugly, made us feel old. But the beauty industry is not the root-cause of this anxiety: this is to mistake the symptom for the disease. Even without exposure to its idealisations, most people are dissatisfied with their bodies and long to be more physically perfect. The industry merely offers its products and services as a purported means of approaching that perfection. It seeks to meet an pre-existing need, though it does, unquestionably, inflame that need. We are beguiled by its fake, photo-manipulated exemplars even as they compound our own inadequacy. The beauty industry may set an impossible benchmark against which we measure ourselves only to find ourselves wanting, but it is also a mirror. In its reflection we see our insecurities about our own physical attractiveness—our own worth. In the beauty industry’s promised land, every tooth is straightened, every unsightly blemish is effaced and every limb is sculpted and firmed. It tries to sell us what it thinks we want—what it knows we want. Almost invariably, when we buy-in to the fantasy, the products and services fail to deliver the magical transformations we were hoping for. Never fear, we are told, there are yet more products and services that can definitely help.

As the brimming coffers of the beauty industry attest, physical appearance is vitally important to humans. Even when we actively reject the impossible standards of the industry’s ideals, we still want to be (or at least to look) fit, strong, healthy, symmetrical. We want to be able to feel pride in our nakedness—especially so when in a state of undress in the presence of another person. To be appreciated aesthetically, to be yearned for, adored, to spark infatuations in others—this is the height of intoxication! We have all experienced its power, if only as the fawning admirer rather the exalted admired.

In fact, the sight of the beautiful naked human body is so arresting, so provocative, that it is controlled and legislated. It is treated as if it were a public danger! You might point out that it is not just the sight of attractive naked bodies that is proscribed by society, but the sight of naked bodies generally, so perhaps it is the nudity that is the problem rather that the attractiveness. This is valid to an extent, but consider that relatively few people are interested in seeing unattractive naked bodies and even fewer in broadcasting images of them. This speaks volumes about the character of the nudity that society feels it must insulate its members from. Beauty is power. It communicates an unmistakable message in a language that is pre-conscious—how much more so when it is beauty laid absolutely bare in all its animal magnificence.

Today, one does not have to look hard to find evidence that physical appearance is amongst the most pressing personal concerns that people have. In particular, bodyweight and body shape are abiding obsessions and, with obesity at epidemic proportions in the most affluent countries, we can assume that the majority of adults are unhappy with their bodies. Society’s most ardent advocates of physical self-acceptance, who claim that to be beautiful on the inside is enough, are extremely vocal in their resistance to tackling this obesity problem. Not without some grounds, they argue that unattainable ideals for our bodies only serve to make us feel miserable about ourselves and that the pressure to attain such perfection is actually unhealthy—emotionally and psychologically. Social organisations have been formed to campaign against ideals of bodily perfection and promote greater acceptance of our physical imperfections, with a particular emphasis on excess weight—the so-called ‘body positive’ movement. This tenacious compulsion to reassure everybody that they can be, and should be, content with their bodies as they are seems to be well meant, but it is misguided at best and plain damaging at worst. From one obvious standpoint, it is itself the precise opposite of healthy. This is because being out of shape makes you way more susceptible to diabetes, cardiovascular problems, cancers and many other preventable diseases. Clearly, it is also unhealthy from the perspective of psychological wellbeing—little more than an incitement to self-deception. This is because, whether we like it or not, the notion that what you look like is not important to your happiness is a disingenuous platitude, if not an outright lie. 

Accepting that most people do actually care what they look like and (if the statistics are to be believed) tend to be out of shape to one degree or another, all that the advocates of self-acceptance achieve is a muddying of the waters. They weaken the commitment of those who are discontented with their physical state and are contemplating taking action, and they encourage and validate the inaction of the weak, the lazy and the complacent. Those who are unhappy with their bodies are led to believe that their bad feelings are not manifestations of struggling pride and healthy self-care but the consequences of societal injustice. ‘It’s not your dangerously inflated body mass index that is the problem’, the advocates of self-acceptance declare, ‘it’s everyone else making you feel bad about yourself. You’re just fine as you are. Don’t you know that everyone is beautiful and that means you are beautiful too’. Beautiful on the inside is the unwelcome proviso that goes unspoken. One wonders to what extent anyone really believes these platitudes, though its seductive allure is obvious enough: you are told it’s not your fault, that you are the victim here, and that you shouldn’t bother to exert yourself over this matter. There’s something a little insidious, I shall go on to suggest, about this culture of undermining attempts at healthy self-transformation. 

Now, it may be that you feel a little perturbed with this talk of bodyweight here at the very start of this journey. Doesn’t it seem grossly superficial? Where is Nietzsche in this? He was a philosopher, not a dietician or a personal trainer. Surely, there are less trivial issues to be tackled? Aren’t intelligent people above such vain concerns anyway, at least for the most part? In answer, I grant that it is true, Nietzsche did not tend to concern himself too much with cosmetic matters. My focus on this issue reflects our contemporary obsession rather than Nietzsche’s. However, as you will discover, Nietzsche is the philosopher of the body and for him the strong, healthy and beautiful body is an unalloyed good; is even the fundamental good. The state of your body is not something towards which you should be indifferent. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he writes that ‘the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else’.⁠2 For Nietzsche, ‘the body is a great wisdom’, ‘a great intelligence’ and ‘it speaks of the meaning of the earth’.⁠3 What can these cryptic and grandiose claims mean? Fear not, all shall become as clear as the resounding peal of a temple bell at dawn. If you sit quietly, perhaps you can already hear it in the distance?

Meanwhile, for people in the developed world, the most common barrier to a stronger, healthier, more beautiful body is, you will concede, excess weight. It is also the thing most amenable to being perceptibly changed. Therefore we confront this elephant in the room frankly and fearlessly. Furthermore, I will be arguing that this urge to brush aside concerns for the appearance of the physical body, labelling them vain, trivial and superficial is, in fact, a sign and a symptom of a poisonous culture of bodily denigration that is deeply embedded within the values that constitute our moral inheritance. 

So, when it comes to bodily appearance, we are confused by society’s mixed messages and our own individual ambivalence. There is dissonance for sure, but let us be honest with ourselves: we feel that appearance is important even though we say that it is not important or, more accurately, that it should not be important. But where does this ‘should’ come from: the idea that it should be only what is ‘inside’ that counts, that the body should be secondary to the personality and that concerns for the appearance of the body are signs of vanity, triviality and superficiality?

You experience yourself as two very distinct things. You have your body on the one hand and your mind on the other. Unlike your body, which is out there in the world, visible and tangible, a big lump of stuff, your mind is incorporeal—it cannot be seen or touched. The mind is your ego: your sense of ‘I’ (‘ego’ is literally the Latin word for ‘I’). Your mind is your personality, your character, your memories, your knowledge, your reasoning faculties, your hopes and fears, your desires and your fantasies. Your mind is secret and private. Only you are privy to its activity. Usually you alone really know what you are thinking or feeling unless and until you choose to share. And you can actively hide your true thoughts and feelings: for example, by smiling and being friendly towards someone you can’t abide. Certainly, the body can betray you: a little perspiration on the brow perhaps, an inability to maintain eye contact, some closed or furtive body language—but in principle, we can all paste on a poker face with some degree of success. For Nietzsche, this talent for concealing the activity of our minds has a long and very dark history—but let us not digress, not yet.

We are each of us, apparently, one thing that comes in two entirely dissimilar parts and so our everyday experience reinforces a dualism: body on the one hand, mind on the other. The body is a brute physical fact: you can look at it, you can slap it, you can pinch it, you can even smell it. The conscious mind, on the other hand, is like a ghost or a piece of music: you experience it, you know that it is there, but you will never be able to catch it by the tail. It is qualitatively different both to the body and to all the objects in the material world. Unlike the body, it has no physical attributes, no mass, no weight, no shape, no texture, no temperature and no colour. It is entirely silent too, because it is, of course, the body that broadcasts the word-sounds that the mind generates, via the tongue, the lips, the lungs etc. 

The mind is ever-present to you. It is always-on, even when asleep and dreaming. Its constant presence at all times suggests that, despite its elusive immaterial character, it is perhaps the most real thing of all. This was the observation that underpinned René Descartes’ skeptical enquiry that resulted in his famous dictum ‘cogito, ergo sum’, which translates as ‘I think, therefore I am’. Widely considered to be the father of modern Western philosophy, Descartes was a French thinker who lived from 1596 to 1650. The ‘cogito’ appeared in his book, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and it serves as a foundation for his philosophical views. Descartes wanted to definitively establish what, if anything, we could know with absolute certainty and so he contrived a thought experiment, the premise of which was that everything should be doubted. By this means he arrived at the conclusion that the act of thinking is the one thing that cannot be doubted, because one needs to be able to think in order to be able to doubt at all, therefore thinking is beyond doubt and so it is a reliable indicator of one's own existence as a mind. This we can know for certain, or so he claimed.

For Descartes, the body was less certain than this doubting but undoubtable mind because, in theory, the evidence of our senses which discloses the body to us could be bogus. Is the world real or is it a dream? How could we tell the difference? What about if some evil demon fabricated sensory evidence of an external world, including our own bodies, to trick us? How would we know if this was actually the case or not? This disconcerting idea was given a vivid interpretation in the 1999 movie, The Matrix, in which an enslaved humanity lives in a simulated reality created by sophisticated sentient machines who are using their bodies as, sort-of, meat-batteries. 

With his conclusion that the mind is absolutely certain and absolutely real, but the body—meh, not so much, Descartes effectively secularised the body-soul dualism that was already unquestioningly accepted throughout Christendom. Descartes concluded that his pre-eminent mind was identical with that which the religionists called ‘the soul’. He even granted that, though the body may be mortal, subject to decay and passing away like all physical things, the mind or soul was immortal and could not be destroyed. 

Incidentally, speaking of religion, despite Descartes committing himself to doubting everything, the one thing that he apparently didn’t trouble himself to doubt, or at least dare not confess to doubting, was the existence of god—which in Catholic France in the 1600s is probably fair enough. But if this was merely a forgivable concession to self preservation, it didn’t stop him going on to proclaim god as the guarantor of the world’s real existence. His decidedly religious conclusion was that a benign deity would not fool people into believing there was an external world if there wasn’t and, as god’s existence was unquestioned (or unquestionable), and god was very benign indeed, Descartes was prepared to surmise the world was real and not an illusion. That meant that bodies were real too, even if they were not absolutely undoubtable in the way that the mind was. 

In Descartes’ dualism, mind and body are two distinct substances with different properties: the mind is the soul, an immaterial and imperishable substance that is responsible for thought, reason, and consciousness; and the body is an impermanent material substance, operating in the physical world and subject to its physical laws. He hypothesised that the mind and body interact with each other through the pineal gland in the brain, or some nonsense or other—a stab in the dark which only serves to illustrate that Descartes raised more questions than he answered with this notion of the seemingly incompatible mind and body and his lack of a clear explanation as to how the two work together.  

It is easy for us to presume, as Descartes himself did, that the conscious mind’s immanence to us as individuals is proof that it is a real entity in its own right; is even the most fundamental entity; is even perhaps the mythical soul! Can you doubt your mind without using your mind? The idea is absurd. Consequently your mind is central to your sense of self, right? And even though Descartes couldn’t explain how the mind and the body work in concert, your lived experience is that they do: your mind doesn’t just think about things passively, stroking its metaphorical chin, it seems to make decisions that determine your body’s actions in the physical world. 

And so to Nietzsche: Descartes may have run aground on a irresolvable conundrum with his lack of an explanation for this mind-body interaction, but Nietzsche brooked no such difficulties. He completely rejects this mysterious ‘Cartesian’ duality of mind and body, giving short shrift to the idea of a supernatural, immaterial entity at the core of every human being, and he even dismisses the idea that the mind is the essential self. For him, this notion of a conscious mind piloting itself through the world in its body, like an astronaut in a spacesuit or a genie in a bottle, is an illusion. Instead he maintained that the mind is not something distinct from the body. Contrary to Descartes, it is not even a thing—still less the most real thing. He writes, ‘”Something is thought, therefore there is something that thinks": this is what Descartes' argument amounts to’.⁠4

Nietzsche’s alternative view is that mind must be understood as a function of the body, not as a separate, commanding component of the self. Think of mind then as an activity—a verb like ‘swimming’ or ‘writing’ rather than as a noun like ‘swimmer’ or ‘writer’. It is thinking, not a thinker. 

These verbs: ‘swimming’, ‘writing’, ‘thinking’, they designate processes, events, stuff happening; the nouns: ‘swimmer’, ‘writer’, ‘thinker’, designate instead discrete, independent entities. To use a noun, ‘mind’, for the activity of ‘thinking’, a verb, is to sneak-in an entity where there is only a process, an event, some stuff happening. There is no mind in itself; it is not some kind of object; there are only mental activities: thinking, feeling, perceiving and so on. So what is it that does the thinking, feeling and perceiving? Of course, it is not the mind but the body that thinks and we call its unceasing flow of mental and emotional activity ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ or ‘ego’ or ‘soul’. Nietzsche writes that ‘soul is only a word for something in the body’.⁠5 In other words, what we call ‘mind’ is merely the body expressing a function. Consequently, there is no substantial separation of mind and body, even though it feels like there is. There is no real duality here. When we say a swimmer is swimming, there is just one thing, not two. It is the same with your body doing its thinking. In the same way that we cannot substantially separate the swimming from the swimmer, because we can only have swimming if there is a swimmer, we cannot separate the thinking from the body. By erroneously doing so, we create this superfluous, spectral entity: the mind. But there is no ‘ghost in the machine’. What we call ‘mind’ is an emergent property—an epiphenomenon. To be more precise, it is thinking that creates the idea of the mind itself—this is something we will drill into deeply over time and, properly grasped, it will completely overturn your understanding of who you are. 

For Nietzsche you are your body. It is a doer doing. Your body is the doer and your mind is just a word for one of its doings. 

If this is confusing, consider that Nietzsche identifies grammar itself as a cause of error when talking of the mind: ‘that there must be something "that thinks" when we think, is merely a formulation of a grammatical custom which sets an agent to every action’.⁠6 That is to say: the subject and predicate construction of language creates false divisions. Nietzsche uses the example of people saying that ‘the lightning flashes’. In this case ‘lightning’ is the agent (the subject) and ‘flashes’ is its action (its predicate)—two things. But the flash is not something the lightning does; the lightning just is the flash. He writes, ‘there is no “being” behind the doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is simply fabricated into the doing—the doing is everything. Common people basically double the doing when they have the lightning flash; this is a doing-doing: the same happening is posited first as cause and then once again as its effect.’⁠7 Similarly, the mind is fabricated into the thinking. But the mind does not do the thinking; it just is the thinking. Nietzsche suggests that the grammatical construction of language generates bogus metaphysical assumptions. In other words, we presume that reality conforms to the structure of language. But humans created language as a means of representing reality, so to then have the temerity to think that reality should conform itself to these representations, is to get things completely the wrong way around.

Before we proceed, a brief note on this word: ‘metaphysics’. If physics is the science of understanding the physical world of matter and energy through observation, experimentation and mathematical modelling, metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with exploring the nature of reality beyond the physical world. It concerns itself with the abstract and unobservable aspects of existence and it has been an abiding obsession for philosophers since ancient times—the great Aristotle himself coined the term in the 4th century BC. The problem with metaphysical theories is that they generally tend to be unprovable in practical terms and so metaphysical disputes tend to be irresolvable. 

Metaphysics encompasses explicitly religious questions such as the existence of god or gods, sin, karma, life after death, spirits and the soul—ideas that might also be described as ‘supernatural’ in that they are based in some kind of ‘reality’ beyond the natural one of our everyday experience. Nietzsche dismisses metaphysical supernaturalism as fantastic speculation and wishful thinking. He sees his task as deflating such theories by finding naturalistic explanations for the questions it concerns itself with. His stated task it to ‘To translate man back into nature’.⁠8

To return to our examination of the metaphysics of grammar, take another example of the grammar trap: you say ‘my body’ and thereby you postulate two entities: ‘my’, the one who possesses the body, and ‘body’, the body itself. But who is this one who says ‘my’? Who is it that possesses the body? Probably you usually feel your mind is the one saying ‘my’ because (for one thing) that’s the part of you that uses language. But if you accept for a moment that mind is not a separate entity from your body, not the real you—that you just are your body—then in this claim it just is ‘your’ body itself that possesses your body. Considered in these terms, the claim ‘my body’ doesn’t make a lot of sense. It is like saying ‘body’s body’. The grammatical structure of the claim postulates two things (you and your body) where there is only one thing (your body). The same could be said of pronouns like ‘myself’; it is equivalent to saying self’s self. But we don’t possess our bodies, we just are our bodies; and we don’t possess our selves, we just are our selves. 

You can see that dualism and the separation of mind and body are built right into our language. As indeed is the elevated status of the mind over the body: when you, viewed as a conscious language-using mind, say ‘my body’, the statement suggests that the body is subordinate to, and a possession of, your mind when in fact, for Nietzsche, the opposite is the more appropriate expression of the relationship. He writes that the conscious mind’s relationship to the body is one of merely being a ‘small accessory’⁠9 and ‘a little instrument and plaything’⁠10. This is the conscious mind as a mere tool in the service of the body—quite a jarring reversal of our commonly accepted intuitions.

How about the expression: ‘my mind’? Again, there’s two things here: the mind and the one who possesses the mind—and who is this mysterious one who says ‘my’, the one to whom the mind belongs? 

If your mind is the real you, who is speaking when you say “my mind?”

Perhaps in this example we catch a glimpse of a yet more subtle instantiation of the soul—something even more rarified and essential than the mind is being called forth into existence purely by grammar. In such cases language seems to imply the presence of an enigmatic other, an essential self, standing behind and beyond such claims. Can you see how language, the very architecture of thought itself, can have significant metaphysical implications, suggesting, in this case, a separation of you from your body, from your self and even from your mind? Little wonder then that we are so susceptible to the illusion of the soul.

I hope you are starting to see some of the deficiencies in this commonly-held faith in mind-body dualism. However, if we are to communicate clearly we will need to continue to work with the apparent ‘facts’ of everyday, lived experience and talk about it using the existing conventions of language. It can be difficult (at this stage) to think about yourself non-dualistically (that is, with your mind and body as a single, unified entity) and it is almost impossible to talk clearly about yourself non-dualistically (due to the subject and predicate structure of language). Therefore, to keep things easy, I will speak of ‘your mind’, ‘your body’ and ‘yourself’ even though this tends to reinforce mind-body dualism, implying that mind and body are discrete things separable from each other in some way. The important thing is that you understand that, for Nietzsche, there is something fundamentally artificial in this dualism we attribute to ourselves. Understanding this will help you overcome some very common and very negative prejudices about the body and it will also, ultimately, help you to gain more effective command over your ‘self’. 

I will leave you with the first in a series of exercises that will help you return to the body, understand yourself with greater insight, and ultimately help you master yourself. But first…

It is time to have some illuminating fun experimenting with the way that language affects your sense of self. Take a day for each exercise and try to confine your language-use and your thinking about yourself in the following ways:

Refer to yourself only in the third person, avoiding all first-person pronouns: ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘mine’. This is an effort at a concerted disassociation from yourself. You might ask why bother with this when disassociation (from the body) seems to be part of the problem that results from mind-body dualism. Firstly, you will learn something about yourself from this exercise in contrived detachment which is going to be helpful as you proceed. Secondly, it will provide an interesting contrast to the other variations of this experiment that follow below. 

Whilst conducting the experiment, refer to yourself only in the third person, by name. This will get quite embarrassing as you will appear insufferably pretentious to other people. Explaining yourself each time would be tiresome (though interesting), so an alternative option, instead of doing it for real, would be to keep a journal and just record your thoughts, feelings and activities in it in the third person. See how it feels. Write about how it feels. Of course, if you want to live a little more dangerously (which I encourage) just do it for real in your everyday life and offer no explanations to anyone. Write about the hilarious reactions you get. What fun!

Conclusion:

Public discourse encourages the belief that the body is secondary to the mind, that personality and inner virtues alone constitute true worth. Yet our relentless preoccupation with physical beauty, both in ourselves and in others, exposes this as a hollow ideal. While the beauty industry intensifies our dissatisfaction, it is not the origin of our anxieties—it simply exploits a far deeper, pre-existing yearning for aesthetic excellence. Nietzsche helps us to understand why: at a fundamental level, we are not beings of spirit trapped in bodies, but bodies through and through. He dismantles the Cartesian dualism that still infects our thinking, showing that the mind is not a separate, essential entity but a function and expression of the living body itself.

Through a careful critique of language, Nietzsche reveals how grammar tricks us into positing a false split between doer and deed, between body and mind, creating the illusion of a “soul” lurking behind our actions. The mind is simply a process of the body—it does not stand apart from it. Accepting this truth demands a profound reorientation of how we understand ourselves: not as ethereal minds burdened by physicality, but as organisms whose physical vitality, health, strength and beauty are integral to our being.

To proceed, we must be prepared to question not only the superficial devaluations of the body but the deep metaphysical assumptions embedded in our thinking and language. In doing so, we lay the groundwork for a more honest, more empowering philosophy of selfhood—one that does not deny the body, but exalts it as the true source of our power, creativity, and becoming.

In the next show we will further delve into the mind-body confusion and I will share with you and exercise, indeed a guided mediation, that I am convinced will prove to you that the notion that you possess a soul is not just fanciful but in actual fact completely and utterly absurd.  

1 Z.Despisers of the Body

2 Z.Despisers of the Body

3 Z.Afterworldsmen and Despisers

4 WP.484

5 Z.Despisers of the Body

6 WP.484

7 GM.1,13

8 BGE.230

9 JS.III,111

10 Z.I,4