BODY AND MIND? BRAIN AND SOUL?
It’s not EITHER/OR. It’s both AND/AND. And MORE than that: it’s NEITHER/NOR
Click here for the article “The Body of your Mind – A phenomenology of the body”
The Dutch professor Dick Swaab is probably known worldwide as one of the leading figures in the field of neurobiology and neuropsychology. I remember that as anatomy teacher in the 1980s, I was appalled by an article he wrote claiming that the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the brains of homosexuals is twice as large as in heterosexuals. Although years later this finding proved to be incorrect and was nuanced by others, the article was one of the first manifestations of the neurogenetic deterministic thinking that began to develop in those years. This was followed in 2010 by the book We Are Our Brains (500,000 copies of the book have been sold worldwide!). It has now become a widely accepted concept that our behavior is ‘produced’ by the brain and that your character is largely determined at birth – by your genetic background and the nine impactful months in the womb.
It was the time of the great AIDS epidemic. Initial reactions to the article (1989) in the Netherlands were mainly negative. Many felt that it reduced homosexuality to a brain abnormality, and Swaab was accused of claiming that homosexuality was not related to behavior or psychology but was a physical abnormality: “I refuse to accept that my homosexual orientation is caused by my brain.” The reaction among the American homosexual community was completely different. They now felt more justified in their orientation by this research: “Finally, we have the body that suits us. You can no longer dismiss homosexuality as a whim or a choice or, even worse, as pathological behavior that can be cured.” Who is right?
For more than 40 years, I have been trying to explain in my courses on phenomenological embryology that we are beings of soul and body and that we do not come FROM our body but THROUGH that body. Not from the brain or a product of the brain, but through the brain. The brain as cause and explanation? Or the brain as a condition, a necessary but not sufficient condition. Is it We are our Brain or is it We have a Brain? Surprisingly, that question already plays a role at conception. Do we start as a cell or do we start as a single-celled human body? Are we the product of the body and brain, or did we create the body, cell by cell (Rumi)? Or is it both? And do we not have to choose, but is there a hierarchy in which the brain we have is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the brain we are? In the link added here under the comments (see below), you can read my latest version of that message, entitled: The Body of the Mind: A Phenomenological Approach. Our soul is not the product of the body; the hierarchy is the other way around. Or as Paolo Cuelho says: “I am not a body with a soul, I am a soul with a visible part of it, namely the body.”
Click here for the article “The Body of your Mind – A phenomenology of the body”