"Ultimately, to acknowledge the life of the body, and to affirm our solidarity with its physical form, is to acknowledge our existence as one of earth's animals, and so to remember and rejuvenate the organic basis of our thoughts and our intelligence...
Human beings alone are possessed of an incorporeal intellect, a 'rational soul' or mind which, by virtue of its affinity with an eternal or divine dimension outside the bodily world, sets us radically apart from, or above, all other forms of life. In Aristotle's writings, for instance, while plants are endowed with a VEGETAL SOUL (which enables nourishment, growth, and reproduction) and while animals possess, in addition to the vegetal soul, an ANIMAL SOUL (which provides sensation and locomotion) these souls remain inseparable form the earthly world of generation and decay humans, however, possess along with these other souls a RATIONAL SOUL, or intellect...
In Descartes's hands, two thousand years later, this hierarchical continuum of living forms, commonly called 'The Great Chain of Being' was polarized into a thorough dichotomy between mechanical, unthinking matter (including all minerals, plants and animals, as well as the human body) and pure, thinking mind (the exclusive province of humans and God)...
Meanwhile, all other organisms, consisting solely of extended matter, are in truth nothing more than automatons, incapable of actual experience, unable to feel pleasure or suffer pain...According to Aristotle, for example, women are deficient in the rational soul, and hence 'the relation of male to female is naturally that of the superior to inferior-- of the ruling to the ruled'. Such justifications for social exploitation draw their force from the prior hierarchalization of the natural landscape, from the hierarchical ordering that locates 'humans', by virtue of our incorporeal intellect, above and apart from all other, 'merely corporeal' entities. ---David Abram, "The Spell of the Sensuous"
When the animal world got carved up into higher and lower forms, it was only a matter of time before humans themselves began carving each other up into higher and lower forms.
Human beings alone are possessed of an incorporeal intellect, a 'rational soul' or mind which, by virtue of its affinity with an eternal or divine dimension outside the bodily world, sets us radically apart from, or above, all other forms of life. In Aristotle's writings, for instance, while plants are endowed with a VEGETAL SOUL (which enables nourishment, growth, and reproduction) and while animals possess, in addition to the vegetal soul, an ANIMAL SOUL (which provides sensation and locomotion) these souls remain inseparable form the earthly world of generation and decay humans, however, possess along with these other souls a RATIONAL SOUL, or intellect...
In Descartes's hands, two thousand years later, this hierarchical continuum of living forms, commonly called 'The Great Chain of Being' was polarized into a thorough dichotomy between mechanical, unthinking matter (including all minerals, plants and animals, as well as the human body) and pure, thinking mind (the exclusive province of humans and God)...
Meanwhile, all other organisms, consisting solely of extended matter, are in truth nothing more than automatons, incapable of actual experience, unable to feel pleasure or suffer pain...According to Aristotle, for example, women are deficient in the rational soul, and hence 'the relation of male to female is naturally that of the superior to inferior-- of the ruling to the ruled'. Such justifications for social exploitation draw their force from the prior hierarchalization of the natural landscape, from the hierarchical ordering that locates 'humans', by virtue of our incorporeal intellect, above and apart from all other, 'merely corporeal' entities. ---David Abram, "The Spell of the Sensuous"
When the animal world got carved up into higher and lower forms, it was only a matter of time before humans themselves began carving each other up into higher and lower forms.
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Canada
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Re: The Beginning of Racism
Fri, September 14, 2007 - 7:42 AM"When the animal world got carved up into higher and lower forms, it was only a matter of time before humans themselves began carving each other up into higher and lower forms."
Absolutely!
