Heroes Not Zombies

What is it to be human?

We have a tendency to break wholes into parts and then conceive of the parts as entities. This is just a conceptual skill however and often it doesn’t reflect reality terribly accurately. Mind and body, for example, is one such common division of a person. At one point I thought of myself as a “mind body doctor”, or as a doctor who “took a mind body approach”. I don’t do that any more. It’s too falsely dualistic for me. I think the mind and the body are no more separate than the wave and particle forms of light. (You know how light when considered in one way behaves as an energy wave, but in another way, as if it is made of individual particles?)

So from the conceptual perspective of looking at a human being in two ways, we can see that human beings are physical organisms. Becker, in his “The Denial of Death”, uses the term “creatureliness” for this aspect. I rather like that. Our creatureliness is what we share with all other creatures. Our bodies are physical and transient. They will degenerate and expire, like all other creatures. And like all other creatures, part of our behaviour and experience can be understood from an examination of instincts and “basic drives” – hunger, thirst, safety and so on.

However, we have another aspect, not shared with other creatures. It’s that invisible part of us. What shall we call it? Soul? Consciousness? Spirit? Becker calls it “the symbolic self”. I’m not sure I’m that keen on that particular term, but it does capture both our facility of imagination and our ability to give and gain meaning in all sensations and objects. We don’t just see the colour red. The colour red is laden with meaning. And this is true of the whole of our experience in life.

We live both a creaturely life, and a symbolic, invisible life.

Interesting, huh? And a consideration of a person which ignores either of these two perspectives, is a consideration of a person at a less than human level. Let’s always see a human being as fully human.

Heroes not zombies.