Philosophy of language in the Five Nikayas

by K.T.S. Sarao | 2013 | 141,449 words

This page relates ‘Body and Mind (Introduction)’ of the study of the Philosophy of language in the Five Nikayas, from the perspective of linguistics. The Five Nikayas, in Theravada Buddhism, refers to the five books of the Sutta Pitaka (“Basket of Sutra”), which itself is the second division of the Pali Tipitaka of the Buddhist Canon (literature).

2. Body and Mind (Introduction)

This section seeks to briefly deal with and discuss the relationship between the body and the mind by tracing some argumentation over centuries of the philosophers, linguists, scientists such as Descartes, Locke, Newton, Aristtle, Galileo, Hooke, Chomsky, and so on. The serious philosophical problems present themselves when we examine the relationship between the body and the mind. The problems are not trivial, since they have occupied many brilliant minds for centuries, without producing a satisfactory solution so far.

Generally, if someone asks “Where are you?” you might reasonably give any of the following replies.

(1) a. I’m in the bedroom.
b. I’m in New Delhi. (Over the phone.)
c. I’m at Apple IMac office now. (Place of work.)

But the following reply in (2) would seem odd.

(2) I’m just behind my eyes.

Three answers in (1) are about your physical whereabouts, in some sense, but the answer in (2) would have to be an attempt to explain the location of the inner you, the thinking you, your mind, your soul, and so on.

When someone who has been close to us dies, we usually put their physical remains somewhere that we can regard as a shrine or a grave to visit. But, in fact, most of us have always felt that it doesn’t interest us to visit such a spot/grave, because we feel that the ‘real’ person is no longer there. So the body can’t be equated with the person. Yet without the body, the person could not have existed. Somehow, both the body and the mind, soul or self are aspects of a person.

Apparently, most of us live quite happily in two different kinds of worlds. First, there’s the physical world of rocks, trees and mountains; of water, beer and milk; of the bodies of cats, birds and fish, and of our own bodies. Second, there’s another kind of medium in which we all live, too: the realm that consists of thoughts, memories and emotions, of perceptions, attitudes and judgments, of dreams, daydreams, memories and ambitions.

The striking differences between these two ‘worlds’ are that physical objects have dimensions of length, breadth and height, but emotions, thoughts and so on do not. Furthermore, emotions and thoughts dwell in a secret, subjective world to which no one from outside has direct access.

It’s a matter of common knowledge that Descartes (the great French philosopher, Rene Descartes (1596-1650)) sought to prove his own existence. He began by rejecting all the beliefs that he had formerly acquired without sufficient justification. When he had purged himself of all such beliefs, he found there was only one left of which he was certain, namely, that he was a thinking being, and he concluded from this that he must therefore exist.

Descartes felt satisfied that he had proven that his status as a thinking being could be accepted. But what about the physical side; that is, his body?

Descartes (1985) says:

Although... I possess a body with which I am very intimately conjoined, yet because, on the one side. I have a clear and distinct idea of myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other, I possess a distinct idea of body, inasmuch as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that this I [that is to say, my soul by which I am what I am], is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist without it.

By claiming that body and soul were separate, and not explaining clearly the relationship between the two, Descartes was accepting a dualism which has carried his name ever since (‘Cartesian dualism’) and has caused unending debate.

About the soul, Descartes (1985) attempts to make some more specific claims by saying that the soul is joined to the whole body, not to anyone part of it, because the body is one and indivisible, and if we remove one of the body’s organs, that renders the whole body defective.

Thus, for him, the soul:

Is of a nature which has no relation to extension, nor dimensions, nor other properties of the matter of which the body is composed, but only to the whole conglomerate of its organs, as appears from the fact that we could not in any way conceive of the half or the third of a soul...

But although the soul is joined to the body as a whole, according to Cattell (2006) there is yet in that a certain part in which it exercises its functions more particularly than in all the others. That part is a small gland in the middle of the brain, the pineal gland. It is the gateway connecting the body and the soul, which allows bodily sensations to pass to the soul.

Note that Descartes is talking about the soul, a religious concept, and not just the mind. The mind can’t exist without the body, since it dies when the body dies, but to Descartes, as pointed out by Cattell (2006) it was an important notion that the soul does not die with the body. Presumably, however, the soul included the mind in the modem sense, since it was the thinking part of him.

But how is the mind related to the physical body? Presumably the mind exists somewhere in the brain, though it is not at present known exactly where. There is a more interesting question, too. If the body and the mind are separate, do they both conform to the same scientific laws? It seems difficult to apply to the mind the same laws as are relevant to physics. The mind is dependent on the physical brain in some way that we don’t yet understand, and nobody sure that the laws of physics, which apply to the brain, also apply to the mind. But if they don’t, are there two kinds of universe, two realities? In The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Jaegwon Kim (1995: 579) points out that “There has been a virtual consensus, one that has held for years, that the world is essentially physical, at least in the following sense: if all matter were to be removed from the world, nothing would remain -no minds, no ‘entelechies’ and no ‘vital forces’.”

We can concentrate on the claim that if all matter were to be removed from the world, there could be no minds. That seems to be a very convincing claim. It is not only thinking that we have to link to the body; there are also our emotions. Most researchers believe that the emotions are more basically associated with the mind, and consequently the brain. Our minds surely are involved in basic ways with our emotions, though that is not to deny that emotions also cause physiological changes in other parts of the body, like the heart, the sweat glands, the bladder, and so on.

There are good reasons to think that, as Cattell (2006: 4) points out, “the mind is not to be equated with the brain. Presumably our thinking and our emotions take place in the brain, and presumably these events could one day be matched, more accurately than they can be at the moment, with physical events in the brain: firings of neurons and so on.” The question now is to show how both thoughts and emotions are linked to the physical body, particularly the brain.

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