By Seraphine

The dualism of Descartes still heavily influences contemporary understandings of the mind-body problem. It also heavily influences the LDS Church's own form of dualism: spirit-body.

According to Cartesian dualism, each individual is made up of a mind and a body. The two are linked, but the mind has precedence over the body (who can forget Descartes' famous "I think, therefore, I am"?). The source of initiative, rationality, and all other good things, is the mind, while the body is dangerous, transgressive, emotional, etc. (An interesting side-note: many feminist scholars have published on how the mind-body division was imposed onto the man-woman division, where men become associated with the elevated, rational mind and women with the transgressive, emotional body.) In today's society, we still have not escaped this dualism. People still trust rationality (a quality of the mind) over emotionality (a quality of the body). Bodies and bodily desires, especially those of women, are still generally considered dangerous and transgressive.

In the church, we have a similar dichotomy, though here the elevated category is that of "spirit" rather than "mind." In church classes, we are encouraged to submit our natural desires to the dictates of the spirit. In his October 1985 conference address on "Self-Mastery," Elder Russell M. Nelson argues, "Before you can master yourself, my precious one, you need to know who you are. You consist of two parts-your physical body, and your spirit which lives within your body. You may have heard the expression ‘mind over matter.' That's what I would like to talk about -- but phrase it a little differently:  ‘spirit over body.' That is self-mastery." He continues, "Your spirit acquired a body at birth and became a soul to live in mortality through periods of trial and testing. Part of each test is to determine if your body can become mastered by the spirit that dwells within it."

Nelson's talk is a clear, representative example of the church's discourse on the body and spirit division. While we do believe that "[t]he spirit and the body are the soul of man" (D&C 88:15), our discourse often indicates that the spirit is of a higher element than the body, and we need to subsume our bodies to our spirits.

Yet underneath this elevation of spirit over body, the church has a truly amazing (and I would argue, unique) emphasis on the body. Many religions consider us strange for thinking that God is embodied and looks like us. The notion that God has a body of flesh and bone is a significant doctrine, as is our belief that one of the central (if not the central) purposes of mortality is for us to get a body. We learn that Satan and his followers are passionately jealous of our bodies, and that in that time after death but before resurrection, we'll be limited in the progress we can make because we will not be in possession of our bodies at that time.