The Essential Body
A linguistics instructor once challenged his students to bring him a signified. He claimed that no student has ever been able to bring him a signified, and that there were only signifiers.
I would have brought myself and made this following argument:
Humans are dependent on things to create them and sustain them, but this doesn’t rob them of their properties of being independent bodies. This property of being a body is outside of the word “body,” and has properties which are independent of the description of those properties. A body with a brain has life and singularity. It is essential and signified by body, life, consciousness, psyche, but the signifier is secondary to the essential body.
A human body arises from two parents, a father and a mother. Dependent on both for the creation, eventually a human can become seperate from the mother, father, society. A human must eat and drink, or the human must die. Also the human will die. The human is dependent on other things to survive, and also to be born.
I am genetically dependent on a father and mother, neither of whom could have produced me independently, but they did produce something, which is a third body. The third body has their essential code, but the body itself is not internal to their body. The third body of the child is an independent body.
Going back, you find a chain of independent bodies which had arisen from other bodies contributing their genetic code, all the way back to the primordial soup and the beginning of biological life. A bacteria splitting from one body into two bodies does really split into independent bodies even if their worlds are totally determined from the interaction and amount of other bacteria, and so it is with humans as well.
Humans develop a variety of cultures and ideas and languages, bacteria do not. Each independent bacteria if pointed to exactly is not universal or formic, but a specific particular body which can be traced back to the formation of life. This formation of life can be traced back to pre-life atoms combining and interacting. As for inorganic things having bodies, this is more complicated as no internal arrangement of atoms is necessary to hold say, a rock together. A slice of a rock can be taken, but a slice of a human can not be taken to produce another body. A slice of a plant in some cases can be taken to create another plant, which would be another body. A human however, requires the origin of two things which are similar enough to produce a third body, but not too similar to produce malfunctions which are emphasized.
Strangely, the things I care about the most, the people I love, the activities that bring me happiness, they have nothing to do with the fact that I am a body. No amount of ideas or life can change my singularity, the creation of me from two progenitors and my eventual dissolution into nothingness.
So what does me being a body tell me about the things I do care about them, since it is my nature, like the Stoics say, maybe it is relevant to all things, since I can then be in line with my nature as an independent body. I can say my desire to not be an independent body is absolutely irrational, since as a body I am doomed to my nature. I can exchange things with other bodies, and if I were a female, I would even be able to grow a body inside my body, but this body would leave me. In a family of three, with a man, a woman, and a child, there would be three bodies that would have to be considered seperately, rather than thought of as a single unit, if I wanted to recognize the three single bodies. Or because thinking is internal to my body, I could think of them as a single unit for practical purposes sometimes. I could even think of my community as a single body.
However, a community as a body, despite using the word body, is not the same thing and does not hold the same properties of the human body, despite being composed of a multitude of human bodies. Each of those bodies is contingent on two other bodies to come into existence, and each of those bodies will leave existence and no longer be bodies which function.
When you die your body is there, but the body which needed to be created does not have the property of life, which is independent of the word or signified word life, and being alive when you are a human is to be a complicated arrangement. Your humanness escapes all thoughts you have, insofar as your body does not necessitate the actions of the body, although the code may push your body in predictable directions.Not only does your code push your body, but things outside of your body push your body. Arrangements of other bodies and objects arrange your body in conjunction with alrger forms, but you never cease to be a body.
I am the signified body. You are the signified body. The body-ness can be partially described, and is essential beyond the description of the body, and does not need to speak. The body arranges itself throughout its life, but it will not stop being a body until it dies. The body is a complicated arrangement, even a fruit fly’s body is a complicated arrangement, it’s brain as an adult only recently fully mapped.
Humans have bodies, flies have bodies, but more specifically, each human has their singular body, as does each fly. My hair comes from my body, but I only feel it when it is pulled at the root. My body can gain or lose things. I can lose part of my body. Once I die, I cease to be an essential body at all. I am an object with different properties, no longer the essential body arising from the root.
To find the signified, we trace to the root. A single object can be taken apart, questions of a pen being an esssential pen, or essential writing instrument is more complicated. Is a ink cartridge a pen? Is a pen without ink a pen or a pen without ink? A pen is not a body, but an object. An object is more open to change. A body with a brain has life and singularity. It is essential and signified by body, life, consciousness, psyche.