Body, Mind and Spirit

Richard Ostrofsky
(September, 2001)
Of what, precisely, does our common humanity consist? It is difficult to ask
this question today, let alone answer it convincingly, with all the
information at our disposal, and all the sensibilities and agendas to be
careful of. With so much documented experience of the ways that human
beings can differ, it has become very difficult to see the anthropological
“forest” for all the “trees” we find there. Certainly, it is not acceptable to
think of adult male hunters – or farmers, factory workers, philosophers or
capitalists – as representative of our species. No type that we might seize
upon could possibly do justice as being typical of our species as a whole.
We have lost the innocence of imagining a world of Adams, each with his
Eve and his own little patch of garden.
Notwithstanding, however, when you meet another person, you can
scarcely help but imagine that he or she must be like yourself in essential
respects. However different she may be in all the ways a person can be
different, you cannot make sense of her behaviour without positing some
underlying commonality of needs and capabilities to perceive, remember
and reason. With all due allowance for genetic make-up, social affiliation,
life history, and whatever, you must find some common ground as a basis
for imagining how you might desire and choose as she does, or she like
yourself. Granted that you cannot expect to get him or her exactly right:
Any analogy you draw between this other person and yourself will be
crude, and will eventually prove wrong in fundamental respects. Yet
without such assumptions, you can scarcely deal with her at all. Without
assuming that she has perceptions, memories, appetites, wishes, fears,
thoughts, feelings and intentions broadly comparable to your own, you
cannot make head or tail of her behaviour. And indeed, if you are at all
sophisticated in drawing this working analogy of Other to Self , you will be
right more often than wrong. As we watch children moving out into the
world, we see them becoming less self-centered, and much more subtle and
accurate in their judgments of similarity and difference between themselves
and others. In the end, a cosmopolitan person – a well-traveled, sensitive
anthropologist, let’s say – will come to imagine the basic likeness of the
people he encounters in fairly abstract terms. But will-nilly, one way or
another, he must conceive some likeness because it is not possible to make
sense of his subjects otherwise. Hopefully, he will certainly not commit the
vulgar error (as the first anthropologists did) of assuming that these are
basically just like Englishmen or Frenchmen, but laboring under their
peculiar delusions and deprivations. He will not commit the still more
vulgar error of conceiving them simply as “wogs” or “goyim” – persons so
unlike himself as to be incapable of full and equal participation in truly
human society. He will have gained some working understanding of how
people can be strange in their customs and ways of thinking, yet still be
sisters and brothers in sharing a common humanity.
In dealing with persons of a different age, gender, culture, etc. – in fact,
with any other person at all – our best strategy is to look for, and attempt
justice to both the sameness and the difference that we encounter. The
problem is to see this other person as kin – as a valid manifestation of the
common human estate but, at the same time, in all her or his individual and
cultural particularity. Only on these terms, with simultaneous recognition of
difference and sameness, can there be a science of “anthropology.” Or, for
that matter, a global society.
The mind-set needed for this double vision is by no means easy.
Accordingly, I have in mind over the next few months to write a serialized
essay on the concept of Man as such. I will assume that our categories of
body, mind, spirit and person are universally meaningful, and will attempt
to sketch the life and needs of each, mindful, but not cowed by the variance
of which each is capable. Over-simple and wrong in detail as my account
will be, it is the best I can do. It may be worthwhile as a basis for dialogue
if nothing else.