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It’s a weird thing innit. You get older and look back at your life and all the things that you thought you were right about and realise it was bo11ocks and you were wrong even though you thought you were tottLly right.
Then you get older and realise what an berk you were but now you’ve learned a lesson and now you’re totally right about everything. It’s a bloomin conundrum for sure.
You live, make mistakes, learn but at no point are you ever wrong. Until you’re dead.
So is death the truest state of mind? Or is that just bo11ocks.
Anyway, Skin Deep by the Stranglers is an alimightily good sing. And that ain’t wrong.
'So is death the truest state of mind? Or is that just bo11ocks.'
Let us turn to the history of philosophy and Spinoza's answer to that question:
'We formulated this problem [of the separation of mind and body] in the preceding essay. Spinoza found a very simple solution to it, brilliant in its simplicity for our day as well as his: the problem is insoluble only because it has been wrongly posed. There is no need to rack one's brains over how the Lord God 'unites' 'soul' (thought) and 'body' in one complex, represented initially (and by definition) as different and even contrary principles allegedly existing separately from each other before the 'act' of this 'uniting' (and thus, also being able to exist after their 'separation'; which is only another formulation of the thesis of the immortality of the soul, one of the cornerstones of Christian theology and ethics). In fact, there simply is no such situation; and therefore there is also no problem of 'uniting' or 'co-ordination'.
There are not two different and originally contrary objects of investigation body and thought, but only one single object, which is the thinking body of living, real man (or other analogous being, if such exists anywhere in the Universe), only considered from two different and even opposing aspects or points of view. Living, real thinking man, the sole thinking body with which we are acquainted, does not consist of two Cartesian halves 'thought lacking a body' and a 'body lacking thought'. In relation to real man both the one and the other are equally fallacious abstractions, and one cannot in the end model a real thinking man from two equally fallacious abstractions.
That is what constitutes the real 'keystone' of the whole system, a very simple truth that is easy, on the whole, to understand.
It is not a special 'soul', installed by God in the human body as in a temporary residence, that thinks, but the body of man itself. Thought is a property, a mode of existence, of the body, the same as its extension, i.e. as its spatial configuration and position among other bodies.
This simple and profoundly true idea was expressed this way by Spinoza in the language of his time: thought and extension are not two special substances as Descartes taught, but only two attributes of one and the same organ; not two special objects, capable of existing separately and quite independently of each other, but only two different and even opposite aspects under which one and the same thing appears, two different modes of existence, two forms of the manifestation of some third thing.
What is this third thing? Real infinite Nature, Spinoza answered.'
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