2026/10/25 You Are Your Body
Is all of Western philosophy footnotes to Plato as Whitehead wrote? It's a question about which I often wonder. That one man could have such an out-sized influence on the direction of the history not just of ideas, but on the very way we each think, defies credulity. Such a centralising figure seems the province of a poorly written fantasy world, where, say, all thought descends from the thought of the ancient 'Fluffleblart' and 'Flufflebartism' defines not only the intellectual currents of this world but its technology and deepest held priors. Instead, we have 'Plato' and 'Platonism'. And the more you look back to Plato, and the more you read the thought of the West - though there have been deviations along the way - the more you begin to realise that upon Plato's broad back today's deepest held beliefs ultimately rest.
To pass moral judgement on the fact is a fool's errand, for to judge Plato and his beliefs is at once to judge all of Western thought. It's simply too large. Even those thinkers who vehemently reject Plato's notions are not free of his influence. Plato has written the questions of philosophy, which, whether or not you agree with his conclusions, all philosophical discourse is bound within. This is what, after all, Plato was a master at: you read a dialogue, like the Republic, and you see how Socrates is truly a masterful Sophist, as much as Plato would vociferously deny the fact. The character of Socrates unceasingly paints false dichotomies, with his friends in the dialogue simply nodding along with a 'Well said, dear Socrates' to punctuate. Socrates asks the questions to his interlocutors, which in a sense is more powerful than giving an answer. What the question does is demarcate the stadium within which the match can take place. Granted, for there to be a match there must be a stadium: without boundaries, the match itself is meaningless. But the Platonic tradition which so colours our vision is but one stadium; and when the whole of the good green Earth is available as a pitch, the questions brought about by the Platonic tradition end up restricting what thoughts may be had.
I said I wouldn't pass judgement on the great man; and I shan't. To dismiss and reject Plato is to reject and dismiss more than we are able to realise, dismiss our very firmware. But there is one of Plato's assumptions, smuggled into his questions and thus the stadium of play, upon which I wish to tug today. That is, the assumption that truth is best explicated through propositional reason, and that this is truth's highest explication. Now, I know Plato argues this at length throughout his work. He critiques the body and the senses as unreliable for seeking truth, and critiques the arts as worse still, arguing they're only creating approximations of the partial truths the senses see. But to my mind this argument eats its own tail; and I wish to explain by way of dialectic.
GLAUCON: Socrates, do you mean to say that propositional reason is not the highest form of truth?
SOCRATES: Indeed, dear Glaucon, and allow me to explain by way of analogy. Does the physicist not see his profession as paramount, and say that all the world is fundamental particles and forces?
GLAUCON: Yes, Socrates, I have heard them saying thus in the marketplace.
SOCRATES: And does not the mathematician say that all the world is built upon numbers?
GLAUCON: Yes, indeed.
SOCRATES: And does not the psychologist say everything is but mind, the biologist that we are all genes, and the dramatist that the world's a stage?
GLAUCON: Yes, dear Socrates, but what has this to do with reason and truth?
SOCRATES: Why, if the physicist sees physics, and the psychologist sees psyche, how does the world seem to the propositional philosopher?
GLAUCON: Why, Socrates...
SOCRATES: Indeed, to the propositional philosopher, the world is propositional philosophy. To those who argue with words and reason, the truth is to be found in words and reason. Within the proposition, or within the very methodology, the answer is presupposed.
GLAUCON: Brilliant, dear Socrates.
Sorry Socrates for putting words you'd find disagreeable to your lips. As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message: and this goes beyond media like the television and radio, to all forms of inquiry and discourse. Just as how the nail can't nail itself in without the hammer, neither can philosophy propose truth without the written word and reason, the very tool of the craft. The hammer shapes the nail, the television shapes the mind, and reason promulgated in propositions shapes the truths that philosophy will find.
If propositional philosophy as a mode of inquiry, as an epistemological technique, always arrives at truth as proposition, as it's designed to do, the methodology is merely seeing a skewed, limited, or perhaps false understanding of truth. The question then becomes where are we to place our epistemic trust?
The questions of much of philosophical history from Plato onwards has been to look out at the world and contemplate by reason its structure. But I pose you this: who is it that knows the sheep better, the animal scientist who has studied sheep night and day from his laboratory having never seen one, or the farmer who every year delivers lambs, weans them, shepherds them, and watch them grow old. The former, the scientist, engages with all the reason, facts, and words the corpus has to offer, but to what extent does he understand sheep having never held one? To my mind, the farmer, whilst not being the philosopher, has a far greater understanding. Here's another thought experiment, one which is clearer as to its outcome. Can you read a book to learn to swim? The answer here is obvious, you can't. Knowledge is found through action; not through the mind, but rather through the body.
These kinds of knowledge cannot be written. You can describe to someone who's never swum how to paddle with your arms and kick with your feet until you're blue in the face, and the moment they enter the pool, they'll sink. It is a kind of tacit knowledge, resistant to propositional reason's phoney monopoly on truth. What I mean to say is that most knowledge of import is like this. Interviewing for a job, they'll ask for your experience over and above what you may or may not know; they'll ask you technical questions, sure, but they know you can swot up on those before the exam. They want to know what you can do because you are what you do.
I will, in a perhaps heterodox tone, take this a step further to matters of faith. Take this or leave this, but more and more I'm coming to the view that the Christian life is done through deeds, not thoughts. Leaving aside the more contentious issue of salvation and its means, faith is not a passive thing such as simply believing. Faith is like faithfulness to one's wife, it is trust: it is to place one's trust in Christ. Doctrinal orthodoxy, do you agree with this, do you believe that, so often becomes a kind of magic spell cast to separate those who are 'true' believers from those who aren't; and I feel this obsession with right-thought and rigidity of mind takes one down an incorrect path. What I feel is most important in the Gospels is that Christ lives out his life. Over-and-above the parables, Christ performs miracles to heal the people, argues with people from all walks of life, and, most importantly, breaks bread with His disciples, is crucified, and rises from the dead. Christ lived a perfect life, and didn't simply preach the perfect life. And though so much of Christian belief comes from a text, from the Bible, I stand firm on C. S. Lewis' truism that the Word of God is not the Bible, but Christ. Through the Gospels' truthful recording, we learn about the life of Christ, and come into contact with Him. And we come into contact with Him most intimately through the Eucharist.
I believe then that we are how we act. It is our bodies, not our minds, which define us. A thing is what a thing does; and a person is how a person acts. We are our bodies, we are our actions. What, then, are the repercussions of this view? First it is to notice the subservience of the mind to the body. The internal chatter, the endless justification, the endless rhetoric we tell ourselves are but prompts to action. Thoughts drive actions, and emotions drive motion, with our bodies. These thoughts aren't us in any real sense, but prompts for us to act, for we are our bodies. Neglecting these prompts may make them all the louder. This is why the neurotic amongst us have such loud and intrusive thoughts repeating and recurring, sometimes in language sometimes in symbol, because we aren't listening to its instruction. That voice isn't you. The real you, your body, is sovereign; because if you perform an act, it is performed, and if you don't, it is not. That voice is but an adviser to the sovereign, a noisy mandarin yapping in the emperor's ear.
The second repercussion is to re-evaluate your activities. The body, the lived life, is first: therefore, you should go and live. Touch grass: win, fail, laugh, and cry. That is living. Every philosophy describes oneself and one's era; and I can't, unfortunately, claim to be any different. I spend too much time indoors, not-living; and I suspect many others do too. Our eyes and ears remain hyper-stimulated looking at screens, but our bodies remain inactive. We don't seek out novel experiences, seek out others, or seek out new skills to better ourselves. We become slaves to content, slaves to the machine.
To my mind, the most evil of our day's philosophies has been and will always be transhumanism. Full transhumanism is a kind of total rejection of the body, a removal of the body, of reality experienced, in favour of the simulacrum, the endless stream of content, now soon to be made near-infinite with AI. To reduce man to a mental stimulation content machine can only be done by removing our bodies. To live in the phantasmagoria of images, to live in Human Instrumentality, can only be achieved by leaving our human form. It is our human form which hungers, cries out, gets nervous, makes us unequal, and yet it is the human form which gives us form. It is folly what the transhumanists propose, because I don't believe that stripping man of his 'meat mech' will leave very much of him at all left. Should they follow through with their dastardly beliefs, I believe they will discover that they are their bodies, and they are gone. They want to, in a twisted gnostic sense, strip themselves of sin by punishing their sarx, the flesh, in a literalistic misinterpretation of St. Paul. To what extent Plato knew what he was to unleash, it is hard to say. Gnosticism's rejection of the world and of the body, running as a current up to uploading your consciousness in the present, is one long trajectory set off by Plato's disdain for the material world and the body.
All that said, this whole article I've been delivering polemics in propositional reason. I understand that this could be perceived as a kind of hypocrisy, but though I've advocated so strongly for truth as how one lives, that is in part to restore it's rightful place as king with reason as his dauphin. Propositional reason has it's place. We learn, become more knowledgeable, communicate; but value lies in digesting that knowledge, and converting it to action. Indeed, stop reading my blog,1 go outside, and earn your spurs.