Reconstructing Reality

Erasmo Calzadilla

Read this post for the salvation of your body

Do human beings have souls or are we made only of matter?

This question has been posed for centuries, yet without finding a conclusive and definitive answer.  I came up with the solution a while ago, so if you want to find out what it is, you have nothing more to do than follow the lines below.  The prize goes to those who make it to the end.

Many cultures of antiquity believed that the soul was as physical and divine as the body and all other “material” objects.  Many of our ancestors didn’t make a distinction between the spiritual and the earthly, or they believed that these qualities could coexist within the same entity.

Among the Greeks, for example, the soul was identified with the vivifying breathe; and the world’s breathe was the wind, meaning that it was both material and divine at the same time. The subtlety, purity and dynamism of the air made it worth a great deal when these qualities ended up being important among people.

Later a crack began growing between the soul and its partners: the Earth, water and fire.  The former won in autonomy in the eyes of humans, while the other ones seemed increasingly inert and passive, as well as corruptible.

Everything fit together almost perfectly, but these resulted in a question that could not be solved: How could the soul (so fine and delicate) move its partners (so heavy and different from the former)?  Paradoxes like this they were chipping away at the credibility and hegemony of the soul-centered paradigm.

The momentary solution to the issue appeared, or at least it was propagated, with the words of a young Jewish man who history knows as Jesus Christ.  According to Christian mythology, the body of Jesus also passed into the kingdom of the heaven, but how could such a thing occur without the soul being divine?  Wasn’t the body created by God and from God?

Here, in short, is the answer, not that of Jesus Christ but my very own: The soul and the body are constructs, that’s to say they were built and reconstructed as entities by women, men, cultures and communities, which are also constructs by the way.

And us —who too are constructed just like them, and who are also active constructors— we can and should intervene in the process where the entities of “reality” are gestated.  Otherwise, we will be as passive, dependent and corruptible as they once believed the body was.