Of My Body
A theme that keeps arising in Whitman’s work is that of the body. He makes it very clear that, to him, one’s body is also one’s identity. In the poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Whitman claims “I too had receiv’d identity by my body,/that I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I/knew I should be of my body” (310). This line is the one that struck me as the most directly addressing this point that I’ve read so far, but throughout his poetry he makes comments such as “I believe in the flesh and the appetites,/Seeing hearing and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.” in “Song of Myself” (51).
This reference to the body-as-self seems unremarkable at first but considering the time frame it is a rather remarkable thought. Until Husserl published his work in the 1900’s, although much of his work was influenced by Kant who wrote much earlier, the standard understanding of the self was that of a mind or soul which simply used the material body until it could free itself and become pure. For example, Descartes with is famous cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, is the most well-known representative of the mind-body dualism argument. Descartes argued that the senses, since they could relay false information, must be false and therefore the mind (thought/idea/soul) was the only thing which could be considered real. He went on to show that the rest of the world was also real due to God not being a deceiver (a very boring and flawed argument that I won’t spell out here), but in the end what he accomplished was setting the mind as the highest and purest part of human experience.
Granted, he wrote all this in the 1600’s but it became the pervading thought throughout the world until many years later. This is why Whitman’s body-as-self imagery is interesting, it’s somewhat out of place, particularly with the religious feelings of the time. The body was generally considered as a prison of flesh for the soul/mind. I think that the reason for Whitman’s difference of opinion with this pervading theory was his love of the individual.
Whitman spends much of his time detailing a variety of actions by a variety of people, we talked some in class about how this was due to a wish to give everyone a possibility to relate, which I think was a result of it, but I think it was more about showing the expansive range of people, each one an individual and separate identity. In the mind-as-self view, each person’s individual traits are really only accidents, or added characteristics, of the basic form. At every one’s essence there is only mind, and all mind is the same. Whitman on the other hand puts the body as equally important to the mind.When that is done, individual characteristics cease to be mere accidents and become important and defining features of the person.
Sartre, a later philosopher who based much of his study on Husserl, extolled the importance of the body in one’s experience of the world. He spoke of how a paraplegic experiences the world in a very different way than an athlete, or even an average non-disabled person. I think it is this kind of idea that led Whitman to speak so highly of the body and to describe it so thoroughly (although that was probably not done simply as an innocent philosophical study). Whitman has an undertone throughout his work that pleads with the reader to see him or herself as truly individual and important because of that. Whitman claims “I am the poet of the body,/And I am the poet of the soul” (46), but I think that Whitman is truly the poet of the person.
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Brendon, this is a fascinating examination of Whitman through the lens of philosophical thought and history. It is very easy to notice how much emphasis Whitman places on the body as an extension or representation of the self, but it is interesting that this goes in direct contrast, as you say, to the common idea that the soul is the extension of the self. I also think it is interesting how he describes the body and soul as being in a direct and symbiotic relationship with one another. In the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, he says, “The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body (21). When I first read this, it reminded me of the “one body, many parts” passage in 1 Corinthians 12 of the Bible, which says, “12The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. 13For we were all baptized by[c] one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink” (New International Version). It then goes on to say how no part of the body is more useful than the other because the body needs all of its parts to function properly. I think this is interesting, as I discussed in my first post, because Whitman again manipulates scripture in order to better convey his message. Here he is talking about a unification of the body and soul, though his focus is clearly on the body as it is a more common understanding that the body receives from the soul. His insistence that the soul receives also from the body reminds his readers that the body is an active and important part of the existence of the human being.