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Issue VII The Body
If the project of Book XI is a valorization of the role of poetry and fiction in philosophical inquiry, an issue about the body is a very fitting subject for our journal. Plato maps the ‘old quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry onto the mind/body distinction, in that poetry takes as its subject the bodily domain of passions, desires, and emotions. We might say then that this issue considers the disorder of the body and spurns for a moment the governing reason of the mind. But it’s not that simple, even in Plato’s original formulation. Though it seems clear that for Plato the mind is privileged over the body—health and beauty in the body is meant to facilitate proper governance of the soul—the two are inextricably bound, and flourishing or destruction tends to develop in both.
As Laura Stephenson reflects in her poem published in this issue, Plato divides the soul into three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. The well-governed soul is one in which reason rules over the lower parts, not by repressing or ignoring them, but by directing our passions and desires. For instance, the appetite only desires—it does not desire any specific object. When we are hungry or thirsty, we desire only to eat and drink, but not to eat or drink anything specific. It is up to our reason to direct the appetite towards the good and distinguish between necessary and unnecessary desires. We need to eat to survive, so a desire for simple foods like bread and meat is necessary. A desire for sweets and banquets, on the other hand, is unnecessary. Plato’s Socrates recommends we avoid extremes and indulgence, any “indiscriminate excess” in food or love, but also recognizes that we need both. This temperance orients the soul towards the ideals of beauty, wisdom, and truth. Health of the body brings about peace, a condition for excellence in the soul.
Everything in moderation is an excellent credo. But certainly there are some things we ought never to touch (that inflammatory mix of wine with barley and cheese, if we can help it) and other things we can pursue unrestrainedly: Can we ever get too much philosophy? Is there any such thing as an excess of reason? If we include practicing moderation in moderation then distinguishing good and bad desires—as close and confused as eating and indulgence—becomes all the more important.
In rereading The Republic in preparation for this issue, I was particularly struck by a description in Book III in which Socrates reflects upon disease and medicine:
“Herodicus was a trainer of athletes. Then he became sickly, and so he sought to combine medicine and gymnastics. The result was that he discovered how to torment himself and, after him, many others… by inventing lingering death. Since his malady was incurable, there was no hope of recovery. But he was obsessed with tending to it—and tormented if he deviated in any way from the regimen he had prescribed for himself. Thus his struggle against death left him no time for the business of life.”
This description flies in the face of Plato’s otherwise straightforward rejection of multiplicity and complexity. Self-discipline was supposed to lead us to the good life, but the problem with Herodicus’s life is that it is too regimented, so much so that he can never stray from his routine without tormenting himself. Herodicus immoderately follows a restrictive diet. A healthy habit, like a certain diet, can shade into an unhealthy one. Tending to your body can turn into obsessing over it. Self-improvement can become tyrannical. The treatment might be worse than the disease. You might need medicine to cope with the side effects of your other medicine. Spoilage may occur with improper storage. You might go from gourmand to vegetable. Cook a body without organs. You might stitch a Leviathan. There’s excrement in the capital. Frankenstein is a vegetarian, Ghislaine is a vegan. Kim got lipo in her kitchen. I’ve got a zero-waste body. I thought I had some good thoughts but I expired.
Our bodies are very delicate. Sugar is evil, soy is evil, grain is evil, salt is evil, fat is evil, red meat is evil, flesh is evil. Our bodies are very resilient. No growth hormones, GMOs, artificial flavors, colors, preservatives, raw, uncooked, unfiltered, unwashed. We tend towards stability. Balance it out. We tend towards chaos. It’s hanging in the balance. It’s probably all about new encased in old, finding variety in stability, room in narrowness, freedom in restriction. Which means we’ll schedule time for binges, crashes, benders, destructive fits, fugue states, depressive spirals, dissociative spells, mental breaks, psychotic drives, poor judgement, ravings, ramblings, downing potions, falling down rabbit holes, hysteria, and bad vibes. Followed by satiety, storage, release, burn, purge, healing, repair, alignment, recovery. Boom and bust, feast and famine, on and off, week in, week out, week off. Really we’re always getting better or getting worse. And if we live long enough, we’ll die of some disease.
Herodicus’s story is so bleak because it’s too late for him. Constantly suffering with chronic illness, there is no hope of his recovering. Socrates says the art of medicine is wasted on people like Herodicus. Treatment ought to be a quick fix, a simple stitch or surgery, when the patient has healthy habits to return to. Herodicus should hurry up and die already, and people who are already burdened with bad habits are shut out from the good life.
Contra Plato—who contends that “a man who always supposes that he is being made ill and is constantly anxious about his bodily functions will never find his way to virtue”—I think bodily disease can sometimes be the best thing for the soul. The death of our physical life could be the birth of our spiritual one. Far from distancing us from virtue, being sick or in pain might furnish us with compassion, humility, and resolve.
Nor do I believe that badly educated people can’t improve themselves or that people who have known the depths of pain or evil can’t know peace and goodness. In fact, at the very end of The Republic in the Myth of Er, Socrates tells us that knowledge of evil makes us more strongly desire the good. The souls that have known good in their past lives are more likely to choose evil when they are reincarnated and vice versa:
“One might say of those who came down from heaven that not a few got caught up in similar circumstances because they had lost touch with the experience of suffering. But those who came up from the earth below were well acquainted with suffering in themselves and in others. Hence they were less inclined to make hasty choices. For these reasons, together with the factor of change in the lot, most souls found themselves exchanging good for evil as well as the reverse.”
It may be that we have to roll in excess to learn moderation, that people can be poorly educated but come into knowledge, that in making mistakes we uncover truth. We are continually bringing pain upon ourselves and recovering, falling behind, erring, improving, healing, stitching up, ripping through the stitches, watching the skin open and close. Plato writes that “studies like these can refresh and purify… even if the soul’s habitual behavior has left it blind and corrupt.” There are long periods of dormancy before bloom.
Just as peace accommodates disruption, excellence in soul must make way for bodily disorder. We have people in this issue that are old, sick, fat, and ailing. These stories and poems extend immoderately in their fancies and directions, souls move inside and out, bodies travel upward and down, space falls or collapses between the individual and the world. There’s a dancer whose body is like a building, a metalworker whose hands are like his hammers, two fat women whose bodies are like one another’s. A philosopher is stoned to death, a loser is eaten alive by vermin. There’s an old man whose bearing is like a king’s and an old woman whose fall is like a comet’s. It’s gutsy to put the body in philosophy and philosophy in poetry all in the same issue of our little journal. We don’t play at bridging any divides. Maybe we’ll say we can have some poetry in moderation, or better yet, some moderation when it comes to moderation in these pages.
Book XI: A Journal of Literary Philosophy
