While thinking about our discussion today, i was still perplexed with the
idea of the objective me and the subjective I and the human soul and what
exactly it;s relationship was to the self and all that. so i looked back
on some of my highlights from chapter 5 in Charon, and i came upon this:
"Symbols are critical for the human precisely because...(3) they MAKE THE
HUMAN BEING POSSIBLE" (p. 55) that really struck me as odd. i mean i
know symbols are important and may make culture or even society possible,
but human beings themselves relying on symbols for existance was just a
strange thought.
So my question is this: is it possible that we are innately symbolic
interactionists and that the above quote is true BECAUSE
the human body ITSELF is a type of symbol of our inner self? There seems to
be no other way to manifest the soul outside of our bodies, and so our human
beingness, if you will, is all just symbolic of whatever our inner self
is. At first i thought this was ridiculous because symbols are supposed
to be arbitrary and i thought it was only natural to attach our "self" to
our flesh, and that wouldn't be arbitrary. But then i remembered
something about how babies don't become "self aware" and realize that
they do have hands and feet and other extremeties and working parts until
they are so many months old. So who's to say we as humans couldn't have
attached what we know to be our thinking, feeling innerselves to trees,
or some other random object....we just happened to attach it to our
bodies from a very young age. I wonder, what is the reason for this?
or maybe also other cultures only attach soul and body together to a certain
extent. Maybe they attach the self to other things as well, and that is why
some cultures (right now i'm thinking specifically about Native
Americans) hold very strongly that they can be "at one with nature"
etc. Whoa, i've got to stop thinking about this for a while! ;) I hope
it made some kind of sense. Please tell me what you think, i'm not saying
i believe that our bodies are just symbols, i'm just wondering if it's a
possibility and perhaps the reason we interact symbolically to begin with.
happy reading! Carolyn Escobar