Modernism & Post-Modernism both are seeking transcendence

Bordo locates the foundation of Modernism in the Cartesian split: the division of the soul from the 

body in life rather than at death. Descartes’s radical leap out of his body and into the ‘I’ signified an

 effort to transcend the limitations of perspective (‘because we are embodied our thought is perspectival’) 

and to see, as it were, like God. If one had the right method, he believed, one could achieve what 

Thomas Nagel has called ‘the view from nowhere’ – a place of objectivity or unqualified truth. 

Bordo brilliantly suggests an affinity between this illusion of Modernism, the ‘view from nowhere’, 

and the fantasy of Post-Modernism, which she calls ‘the dream of everywhere’. Like the angels who 

seem to arrive in greater numbers each Christmas as the new millennium approaches, the Post-Modern 

subject is at once nowhere and everywhere, no place and in all places at once.

Post-Modernism thus signals the return of the (briefly) repressed wish for transcendence

whose truth, whose history, whose psychology, whose tradition? ‘No one’s or everyone’s’ is Post-Modernism’s giddy reply.But behind the playfulness of Post-Modern discourse, there lies something ominous: the assumption or resumption of omniscience and control. This is achieved by dispensing with both mind and body, by the privileging of culture over nature and the disappearance of the author from the text. The body, once again, has become mere body – a tabula rasa on which the culture inscribes its messages. In the absence of any empirical or experiential grounds for knowledge, the epistemological focus turns to method,

What remains the constant element throughout historical variation is the construction of body, as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom ...) and as undermining the best efforts of that self. That which is not body is the highest, the best, the noblest, the closest to God.’ In contrast, bodies are vulnerable, mortal, transient, insignificant.
What remains the constant element throughout historical variation is the construction of body, as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom ...) and as undermining the best efforts of that self. That which is not body is the highest, the best, the noblest, the closest to God.’ In contrast, bodies are vulnerable, mortal, transient, insignificant.

The mind/body dualism is no mere philosophical position, to be defended or dispensed with by clever argument. Rather, it is a practical metaphysics that has been deployed and socially embodied in medicine, law, literary and artistic representations, the psychological construction of self, interpersonal relationships, popular culture and advertisements – a metaphysics which will be deconstructed only through concrete transformation of the institutions and practices that sustain it.