Watts, Alan (1915-1973)

The Tao of Philosophy: The Edited Transcripts

North Clarendon, VT

Tuttle Publishing

1995, 2002

"However, as I said last night, we just ask for this because most of us consider ourselves as chauffeurs inside our bodies, which we own in the same way as we own a car. When it goes wrong we take it to the mechanic to fix it and we do not really identify with our body, just as we do not really identify with our car."

[...] After all, in an article on human physiology the author will usually include drawings which show the human body as a sort of factory. They show how peristaltic action carries the food in and how it is processed by this organ and that organ, just as if a certain product is fed into a factory as a cow at one end and comes out canned corned beef at the other. The human being is illustrated in just such a way, and in some kinds of rather degraded medicine, that is now practiced when you go the the hospital for a medical examination, you are treated as a machine and they process you. Even if you are perfectly healthy and can walk, nevertheless they have to have you in a wheelchair immediately. They put you through a process whereby the heart specialist looks only at your heart, because he does not understand anything else. Then perhaps a psychiatrist takes a look at you and goodness knows what happens there; and so on, and so on. Everybody looks at you from their specialized point of view as if they were a bunch of mechanics examining your automobile. However, as I said last night, we just ask for this because most of us consider ourselves as chauffeurs inside our bodies, which we own in the same way as we own a car. When it goes wrong we take it to the mechanic to fix it and we do not really identify with our body, just as we do not really identify with our car. So this is the theory which has grown up in the West of nature as an artifact, or something that is made.
(p. 21)

Population::Chauffer Vehicles::Car

Reading Oliver Burkeman, Consciousness: The Long Read (January 21, 2015). <Link to Guardian.com>

Alan Watts, The Tao of Philosophy: The Edited Transcripts, ed. Mark Watts (North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2002).

02/10/2015