MODULE 3:

The Human Person as an Embodied Spirit

Objectives: At the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

 Recognize how the human body imposes limits and possibilities for
transcendence.
 Evaluate own limitations and the possibilities for their transcendence

In this lesson, we will understand that

our uncertainty about many things stems from
our limitations as human beings. Specifically,
we will learn that many of our limitations is
due to our being embodied beings. This does
not mean, however, that our bodies are merely
hindrances to our desires and aspirations. Just
as much as our bodies limit us, our bodies also
enable us to create meaning in the world.
Hence, the body is both a source of limitation
and possibility.

THE BODY SA LIMITATION AND TRANSCENDENCE

Thumb-less life

Pretend that your thumbs are gone for five minutes. While in
this state, proceed with your normal activities while your
thumbs are not functioning (immobile). How did you feel about
your self after failing to do certain activities that you would
normally do easily? Did you appreciate the importance of a
very small part of your body, your thumb, more after this
activity?

Did you know that humans are the only animals on earth with fully
opposable thumbs? Opposable refers to the ability of the thumb to
“lie across the palm, perpendicular to the four fingers.”

Scientists and anthropologists have pointed out that the

human opposable thumb is one of the key factors that helped the

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human species developed into what we are today. It is what makes us distinct from our
closest relatives in human evolution, the great apes.

The thumb of apes are not long and

opposable enough. Hence, their motor activities
are not as refined as ours. Note that with our
opposable thumb, we have learned to make
tools, create art like the ancient Greek vases,
write beautifully like Chinese calligraphy, and
play beautiful music like Yo-yo Ma playing the
cello, or Carlos Santana playing the guitar. Apes
cannot lift bodies and dance as beautifully as ballerinas do. All these thing – innovation,
art, sports- these are activities that define our lives as human beings. But we know now
that these fine motor activities may not have emerged in our development as a species if
not for the small digit in our hands – the opposable thumb.

The anthropological fact about our thumbs emphasize a very important insight
about our being human –the development of our species does not owe itself only to our
unique capacity to think, but to the things made possibly by the design of the human
body.

THE BODY AS A SOURCE OF LIMITATION AND POSSIBILITY

Human Limitations

We love to watch movies about

superheroes because they showcase amazing
feats that ordinary human beings simply
cannot do. Superman can fly; Ironman can
survive an explosion of tons of heat. Are these
human achievements? Obviously they are not.
What is interesting about our love for fictional
heroes is how they come to be imagined.

The story of Superman that debuted in comic books during the late 1930s emerged at a
time when mafia-led crime was one of the most known threats in American society.
People loved the character of Superman as much
as they longed for a safer neighbourhood. Literacy
critics point out Superman was a projection of
people’s own frustration about their own
limitations. These limitations were the direct
opposite of Superman’s powers. He could carry
and throw three burly men with one hand, stop a
train wreck or airplane crash by pushing them to
safety, move from one end of the earth to another
in a flash of a second, and even turn back time by
reversing the world’s turning on its axis.

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 What interest us in this example is how these projections people have on Superman
indirectly reveal the limitations we come
to terms with everyday. We have only a
certain amount of strength to carry things
or accomplish tasks. We cannot prevent
accidents entirely no matter how careful
we are. We cannot move as fast as we
could from one place to another. Despite
all advances in technology, we can never
reverse the course of time. These are our
limitations because we are embodied
beings.

Human existence is embodied existence. Many things that are related to our
existence as persons are related yo our bodies – age, sex, race, relationships, etc. we
started counting our birthdays to determine our age from the time they fantasized about
having children when they were young. Our age count began as soon as our embodied
existence, not imagined existence, began. The bodies that we are born with also
determine our sex, (Gender is not completely synonymous with sex. Gender is defined
culturally rather than biologically). Race or our line of
descent among the groups of the first human beings in
our evolution, is determined by our bodies. Finally, our
biological relationships – mother, father and siblings –
are connected to our embodied existence. In other words,
a large part of who we are and how we define ourselves is
determined and delineated by our bodies. The details we
write in our bio-data are not things we can simply choose
or change – our birthday, age, sex and familial
relationships. If we do, we can be accused of falsifying
information about ourselves. In this sense, we are
“confined” to these details about ourselves.

Confine comes from the Latin cinfinis made of two words;

con – ‘together’ + finis – ‘end, limit or territory’. It is as if our bodies are made up of fixed
boundaries that we cannot transgress.

As limitations, the body-related aspects about our

selves are not products of our free choice. They have, in a
sense, been given to us on a permanent basis. It then
comes as no surprise that the body is a source of
frustration to many. Some people are not happy with their
age, sex, or familial relationships. Some people wish that
they were born at a different time, of a different sex, or of
a different family. Frustrations of this kind put the body in
a negative light as if it is some form of imprisonment.

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The Body as Transcendence

While we mostly complain about how there are so

many things that we can’t change about our lives because
of our bodies (the most common example for this is our
height as Filipinos), we hardly see that the body also opens
possibilities. We recall the groundbreaking observation
of anthropologists regarding our opposable thumbs. In the
activity you performed, you discovered that a very simple
detail about our bodies has multiple implications with
regard to our lives. In other words, if not for our opposable
thumbs, we would not have learned as a species many
things – writing, creating tools, playing with objects. Many
parts of the story of our evolution and development as a species would have been very
different.

There is an important paradox about the body that we

need to understand. While the body limits us, the very same
limitations create opportunities for us. Athletes would
understand best what this paradox of the body as limitation
and possibility means. The best athletes we know today –
Manny Pacquiao, Hidilyn Diaz, Michael Jordan, Michael
Phelps – are boung together by a common story. All of them
have been subjected to rigorous training at a very young age.

Pacquiao’s first coach, Sardo Mejia, shares how Manny has been so disciplined with his
training at the age of 15. He would always wake up at 4 am to jog. Everyday was a difficult
day of subjecting the body to exhausting and
painful excersises. He knew he was small,
compared to all the other boxers who grew up
in the West. In the world of boxing, this can be
a source of limitation, but Manny used his
limitation as an opportunity to define boxing
in a new way. Because of him, boxing became
more the phenomenal experience of watching
the beautiful unity of hand, foot and head
work.

The paradox of possibility in Limitation

We often complain that we cannot be everything we want to be. In this lesson, the
paradox of the body is both limitation and possibility teaches us to be thankful that we
cannot be everything, because trying to be so would end us up being nothing at all. This
is a paradox.

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 A paradox is a statement that brings together two
opposing ideas as true at the same time. In the
outset, a paradox seems senselessor absurd. Upon
closer look, however, the contradiction is sending a
very powerful message. For example, “It is
through our limitations that possibilities
become real.”

To illustrate, we use the analogy of a potter.

He scoops mud from the floor and mixes it with
water to make clay, throws it into a potter’s wheel
and with his firm gentle hands, shapes it as he
wishes. What the potter does is put a form to the
shapeless clay. Without those limits, the mud may
just as well be nothing, a shapeless entity spread
out on the ground for stepping on.

The same is true of the limitations of the body. Even if we complain about our age,
height, race, or sex, we must not fail to understand that these are the limits enable us to
create our own unique identity. We may not be everything, but we have to start of with
something in order to make our existence count in the world.

Application:

 Explain how statement below illustrate the paradox discussed above.

Give similar examples. (15 points)
The body limits us. Unlike the birds that can fly we have no wings to make
us fly. But with our creative minds, we invented jets and planes to makes us
fly even farther than any bird.

Sources:

Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person, Brenda B. Corpuz, et al.

West Central College of Arts and Science Inc. | Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person