Wrestling with Religion

           It was about 2000, that I first noticed the triad body-mind-spirit in a feature story in the Bowling Green Daily News. A man had kicked bad habits. Now he was "taking care" of his "body, mind, and spirit." This caught my attention because it seemed to be presented as common-sense language, but I didn't get it. Isn't spirit a function of mind ? Doesn't mind include all cognitive activity? Of course, some idioms do imply a narrower sense, like reading to improve the mind .  If body-mind-spirit meant something obvious to the reporter and his subject, my best guess was that "taking care of" them is something like (1) exercising and eating right, (2) reading and learning, and (3) worshipping and praying. I envisioned body, mind, and spirit as places where people are variously nurtured, centered on (but not limited to) gym, library, and church. This may indeed be many people's understanding, but, searching the Internet, I found ...

  The Sufi mystic Rumi distributes sweetmeats.               I've  discussed the ancient division of human experience into body, soul and spirit as systematized by Max Scheler. This isn't about metaphysical or unconscious entities, but, in keeping with Scheler's phenomenological bias, describes lived experience. Concepts with a history millennia old are expressed in Scheler's Leib 'lived body,' Seele 'soul' or 'life-force,' and Geist 'spirit.' Equivalents with pedigrees dating back to Plato are belly, heart, and head.         The lived body is experienced as autonomous, private, impersonal fact. Though it is ours, its pains, pleasures, and hungers are, like the weather, impervious to our will. We can't will not to be hungry if we are. Lived body is private but not personal, not part of personal identity. Hunger felt or satisfied does not make us any more or less ourselves. And finally, lived body is about goalless bac...

                 John R. White argues that a shortage of English terms has distorted American translations of Carl Jung and other German thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud. At the heart of the problem is the German noun Seele, which is usually translated psyche or mind. Translators avoid the English cognate soul because of its theological freight, but all the translations are problematic. Translating a native one-syllable German word with the exotic Greek term like  psyche is bad enough, but mind is worse. It replaces the German  soul's care with mental health and creates the confusing oxymoron, unconscious mind , as if there were a self-aware parallel mind playing hide-and-seek, not just a pre-conscious soul-part of the integrated person. An ancient lineage recommends two distinct terms for human mentation, represented in English by soul and spirit . German Seele and English soul (Old English sawol ) tr...

  As Hannah Arendt explains in Eichmann in Jerusalem,  when  a population adopts an unjust ideology, even well-meaning people experience temptation, not as an urge to sin, but as an urge to resist sin. The sins of a large, self-validating group are invisible. Even if the sufferings of a sinned-against group are obvious, they are accepted as "just the way things are." One example, comfortably resolved for most of us, is American slavery . It began with land surpluses and an extreme labor shortages in agricultural colonies. White indentured servants, the solution in most British colonies, had to be freed after seven years. Black servants--initially on par with whites--were so alien that planters were able hold them for life. It was "necessary" for economic success. Slave state s became so dependent on black labor that Southern editorials in the 1850s condemned abolitionists as seditionist. An institution that legalized kidnapping, family separation, torture, rape, a...