31
A Belonging or a Possession?
The popular understanding of gender insists that the body belongs to the human person as
derivative of “felt” experience. For this reason, the significance of the human body depends upon how
the physical body fits into any given human person’s body schema. Philosophically, however, if the
significance of the physical body derives from its place within the body schema, then is not the body
schema merely a mental image of oneself? Would not the body more properly be understood as a
possession of the mind? It seems to me that the popular understanding of gender misconstrues the
concept of a belonging with the concept of a possession. How the human body relates to the human
person differs greatly between these two concepts. A belonging consists and harmonizes with a thing’s
nature as a participation in a thing’s nature, while a possession refers to something extra the thing has
taken for itself. The popular understanding of gender claims that the human body belongs to the human
person, yet treats the human body as a possession, to be altered or discarded at will.
It is essential to remember that human bodily development reveals human nature, defined as
“the internal principle of a thing’s growth and operations.” 109 Based on this thesis’s arguments from the
second section, a substantial link was uncovered between human nature and embodiment – the brute
fact that “I am my body” is an acceptable, correct, and true statement, without unnecessarily reducing
the person to his or her body. I am my body, because to be embodied rightly accords with my human
nature. However, as philosopher John Crosby recognizes in The Selfhood of the Human Person, modern
culture (at least in the Western world) perpetuates a false dualism between personhood and human
nature. He writes that the human person often relates their body to a mere thing to be used. 110 He
further describes this dualism as a peculiarly modern dissociation of the human person from their body,
a “dualism, which expresses a far reaching estrangement of the person from his body.” 111
In Becoming Nicole, Amy Ellis Nutt evidences Crosby’s claim that the popular way of thinking
accepts the notion of the physical body as an instrument of the mind. Our bodies, she writes, “are the
instruments by which we experience the world” and that our bodies give us the context by which we
109
Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy: Basic Concepts (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2009), 211.
110
John Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press,
1996), 144.
111
Ibid.