![]() ![]() History suggests rather the enormous capacity of Idealism in its various forms to rise above the threats. Perhaps today's newly heightened sense of the ultimate fragility of the body, seemingly threatened with extinction from one quarter by neutron bombs, from another by AIDS, will at last engender a fundamental cultural reversal. ![]() The nineteenth-century tuberculosis victim, his or her body wasting away, was somehow "spiritualized" by the process, just as in an analogous way, twentieth-century Freudianism represents a final if backhanded vindication of the ultimate sovereignty of consciousness. Even the direct physical anguish of the flesh, as in the experience of disease, fails to challenge our preferences. It is a mark of the perduring Idealism of our culture that the "body" side of the mind/body relationship has been neglected, or, to put the same point another way, that the major studies of the mind/body problem have been philosophical rather than material-social. ![]() A Social Perspective on Mind and Body Roy Porter ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |