The Human Body as an Embodied Spirit

In the course Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person, one of the prominent
concept is the idea that the human person is an embodied spirit. The human person is the point where
material and spiritual entities merge. It is important to understand the specificity of the human person
as an embodied spirit because it enables us to know our feasibility and limitations, it also exposes us to a
profound and vast understanding of ourselves as a distinct creature united by body and soul.

Plato argues that in the condition of the nature of the human person, the body’s existence is
dependent on the soul while the soul is independent on the body. And Plato believes that the soul is
confined inside the body thus when the body dies, the soul survives because it is immaterial, immutable,
and indestructible. There are three parts of the soul according to Plato, to wit, the rational, spiritual and
appetitive souls. The rational souls guide the spiritual and appetitive souls and is located in the head
while the other two contribute to the motility of the whole person.

Rational souls grow, reproduce and most importantly it is capable of thinking. According to
Aristotle, the highest level of soul, the rational soul, is present only in humans. Humans withhold all the
characteristics of all animals and is able to think rationally. Man is a rational animal as Aristotle would
say.

MAN=BODY+SOUL: Aquinas's Arithmetic of Human Nature

A human being is not something that has a form; it is a flesh, a special kind of living body. A
human being's dead body is no longer a human body or any other kind of body, but an outgrowth of
several bodies as it decomposes. Aquinas dispute that a man’s humanity is what he calls the form of the
whole, as opposed to the form of the part, which he identifies as the soul, and that the form of the
whole varies from the form of the part because it contains matter and form. The quality or state of
having a living body is not the substantial form of a living body nor the materialistic form of the body. A
sense cannot refer to the whole being rather only a part of it can signify the substantial form. There are
two modes of existence, the material and spatio-temporal existence, once these are distinguished, there
will be use of different names to signify a distinct act of being a worthwhile self. If materiality is
distinguish as the substantial form then it will coincide to all living bodies with their soul, for whatever
its form, body or not. The body and soul have the same distinct act of substantial existence in which the
body and the soul are one being in which it is an entity and not two entities. To have existence, there is
a need to add some qualification to the sense in which existence is specified to the substance which has
unqualified impression.