Dualism in David Abram (Class Readings)

March 2, 2022 

In his book "Spell of the Sensuous," David Abram brings up the fact that both the Hebrews and the Greeks seemed to start the culture of mistreating the earth. The Jews and Christians interpreted the command to rule the living things and dominate the earth as a call to something higher and a negative view of the earth. The Greeks, beginning with the Pre-Socratics, but culminating in Platonic philosophy looked forward to something better than this bodily existence on earth. Plato looked upward to the forms and also distinguished between the material and the immaterial. The material world was negative and not everlasting while the soul and immaterial world was forever and the home of true beauty. Abram, then, explains that the western world was forever impacted by Jerusalem and Athens and the negative view they both had of the material world, or earth. 

 

I'm inclined to agree with David Abram, specifically with his account of the Jewish and Christian traditions looking down upon the material world. I think this is more present in Christianity based on a skewed reading of the Old Testament. Many of the early Christians, and still most Christians today, interpret Genesis through the lens of Greek philosophy, specifically Platonism. When they read that God blew his "Ruach" into dust, he created a person, they expect that this means there is a distinction between the body and the soul. There is the dust and the spirit. Instead, a closer reading of the original text seems to show that God blows his spirit into the dust, creating a living body. The body and the soul are in some ways in separable. this fits, too, with the teaching in the New Testament of New Creation and the eventual resurrection of our human bodies into New Creations. Again, here there is no distinction between the soul and the body, but instead the two work together to create a person. In sum, I think Abram makes a great point about the misunderstanding that the Jewish and Christian traditions have had, but that this misunderstanding is actually rooted Greek philosophy, specifically Platonism. 

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