The Embodied Soul and the Ensouled Body: Theological Anthropology, Habit, and Medicine
Matthew Vest, MA, PhD Candidate, The Ohio State University
Center for Bioethics
The constitution and boundaries of what defines a person is an essential issue to the practice of medicine, and at the heart of defining a person is the mind-body question. Most approaches to the mind-body question fall within dualist or monist frameworks, and Cartesian dualism seems to carry a particularly influential role within modern Western medicine. While few contest that the mind and body are interrelated in some way, the mind and body are seen as fundamentally disparate substances.
While this famous problem continues primarily in the wake of Descartes, Felix Ravaisson offers an intriguing alternate view of the human person through the lens of habit. Habit, for Ravaisson, reflects the ways we encounter change: “an acquired habit is the consequence of change.” Habituation is not the numbing of will or intelligence amidst repetitious movements but rather reveals how ideas are disseminated throughout the body. Through habituated movement, Ravaisson maintains, we can observe how the idea becomes being, and this opens a new line of inquiry into the body—and all organic material—as bodily habits reveal principles at work. In place of substance dualism, habit serves as a phenomenological paradigm to reveal a robust ontology of material things and the body.
Ravaisson’s analysis of habit implies an embodied anthropology with strong implications for the practice of medicine. On one level, Ravaisson’s embodiment naturally addresses fields such as sociobiology, psychology, and the neurosciences by challenging these fields to examine seriously an epistemology of body. On perhaps a deeper level, however, Ravaisson’s embodiment challenges all medical fields to see the habituated body not as mere matter but as ensouled matter. For Ravaisson, it is the very nature of things—matter and bodies—to function as conscious things, and this consciousness seen through habit extends like a “moving and living chain” from inorganic matter to human freedom and intelligence. Regarding this scale: “Habit descends from one to the other; it brings these contraries together, and in doing so reveals their intimate essence and their necessary connection.”
While tracing some implications of Ravaisson’s habit for contemporary healthcare, this paper will also probe the theological grounds of Ravaisson’s thought. What does Ravaisson mean to claim: “‘Nature is prevenient grace.’ It is God within us…hidden solely by being so far within us in this intimate source of ourselves.” From the Cappadocian Fathers through especially the 14th century, the distinction between God’s essence (ousia) and energies helped explain the relationship between God’s transcendence yet and his immanence in nature. Can Ravaisson’s insights through habit serve as an exposition of traditional Incarnational theology?
The constitution and boundaries of what defines a person is an essential issue to the practice of medicine, and at the heart of defining a person is the mind-body question. Most approaches to the mind-body question fall within dualist or monist frameworks, and Cartesian dualism seems to carry a particularly influential role within modern Western medicine. While few contest that the mind and body are interrelated in some way, the mind and body are seen as fundamentally disparate substances.
While this famous problem continues primarily in the wake of Descartes, Felix Ravaisson offers an intriguing alternate view of the human person through the lens of habit. Habit, for Ravaisson, reflects the ways we encounter change: “an acquired habit is the consequence of change.” Habituation is not the numbing of will or intelligence amidst repetitious movements but rather reveals how ideas are disseminated throughout the body. Through habituated movement, Ravaisson maintains, we can observe how the idea becomes being, and this opens a new line of inquiry into the body—and all organic material—as bodily habits reveal principles at work. In place of substance dualism, habit serves as a phenomenological paradigm to reveal a robust ontology of material things and the body.
Ravaisson’s analysis of habit implies an embodied anthropology with strong implications for the practice of medicine. On one level, Ravaisson’s embodiment naturally addresses fields such as sociobiology, psychology, and the neurosciences by challenging these fields to examine seriously an epistemology of body. On perhaps a deeper level, however, Ravaisson’s embodiment challenges all medical fields to see the habituated body not as mere matter but as ensouled matter. For Ravaisson, it is the very nature of things—matter and bodies—to function as conscious things, and this consciousness seen through habit extends like a “moving and living chain” from inorganic matter to human freedom and intelligence. Regarding this scale: “Habit descends from one to the other; it brings these contraries together, and in doing so reveals their intimate essence and their necessary connection.”
While tracing some implications of Ravaisson’s habit for contemporary healthcare, this paper will also probe the theological grounds of Ravaisson’s thought. What does Ravaisson mean to claim: “‘Nature is prevenient grace.’ It is God within us…hidden solely by being so far within us in this intimate source of ourselves.” From the Cappadocian Fathers through especially the 14th century, the distinction between God’s essence (ousia) and energies helped explain the relationship between God’s transcendence yet and his immanence in nature. Can Ravaisson’s insights through habit serve as an exposition of traditional Incarnational theology?