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The dualism of mind and body—the belief that we possess an incorporeal essence, a soul that is truly “us,” and that the body is merely a vessel or flesh-puppet animated by this spirit—is one of the most enduring myths surviving today. According to this view, the body is temporary, disposable, even suspect. The “real” person is immaterial, invisible, eternal—floating somewhere behind the eyes, piloting the body until the inevitable breakdown of the machine.
This is no new notion. It lingers in the modern mind like a cultural fetter, surviving through into the secularisation of society. Even after the formal decline of religious authority—after Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead”—dualism continues to shape how people intuitively understand themselves. Few could name the category of this worldview, but many live by it. We speak of “having” a body, as if it were a possession, rather than something we are.
Funerals are particularly telling moments where this dualistic sentiment finds voice. We speak of the deceased as having “passed on,” as if the true person has vacated the premises, leaving behind a shell. The language of soul and spirit resurfaces even in secular memorials: “He’s in a better place now,” “Her spirit lives on,” “That wasn’t really her lying there.” Civil society, especially in spiritual or interfaith contexts, often sustains and recycles this metaphysical dualism—even when dressed in the language of inclusive humanism.
But here we turn to Ludwig Feuerbach, the 19th-century German materialist philosopher whose influence resonated through later thinkers, particularly Karl Marx. For Feuerbach, this split between soul and body is a fiction. There is no ghost in the machine. We do not dwell in our bodies as passengers—we are our bodies. Our thoughts, memories, dreams, and loves do not hover above flesh; they are born in it—in the firing of neurons, the circulation of blood, the warmth of skin. What we call the “self” is not above or beyond matter—it is matter, exquisitely organised and self-aware.
Human beings are not split between mind and body, soul and flesh, subject and object. Man is the embodied subject–object. He is nondual; he is a monistic unity. In the classical tradition of materialist philosophy, the human being is recognised as a single, unified, material entity. We are not minds trapped in bodies—we are bodies that think.
Feuerbach repeatedly emphasised that human beings are both the perceivers and the content of perception, rejecting the dualism central to idealist thought. He famously wrote:
“The true relation of thought to being is this: being is not a product of thought, but thought is itself only a property of being.”
— Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843)
This statement crystallises the materialist position: thinking is not the cause of being—as dyed-in-the-wool idealists might claim—but its consequence. Consciousness does not hover above the world like a wraith; it arises from the flesh, from the nervous system, from the body’s living engagement with the material world. Being is material—the soil from which thought grows, the condition that makes us human not in abstraction but in lived, sensuous reality.
The objective world is not some realm outside of us, where events unfold beyond the perimeter of our skin. We are in it—of it. We interact with the world not because we stand apart from it, but because we are inseparable from its fabric.
We experience the world as bodies, and our bodies are the ground of all thought and feeling. We ourselves are sensuous realities in the minds of others, just as they are in ours. This reciprocity of embodied perception shows that subject and object are not two separate substances but two dimensions of the same material existence.
When light strikes the retina and evokes the experience of vision, we call it “subjective.” Yet the mechanisms of sight—the eyes, optic nerves, chiasms, tracts, and visual cortex—are features of objective reality. These structures do not belong solely to “us” as private subjects; they are part of the natural world, able to be studied like any other system. The eyes in our sockets belong to the cosmos as much as trees, rivers, or stars. They are not metaphysical windows, but anatomical organs—examined by opticians, dissected by surgeons, mapped by neuroscientists.
We feel, we think, we see—but we do so as concrete, sensuous beings whose capacities arise from our material structure. For Feuerbach, the subject (the experiencing self) and the object (what is experienced) are united in the human being. Humans are self-aware matter: they are objects to themselves through reflection and perception. This is not the abstract unity of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, but the immanent unity of a body that knows itself through its contact with the world.
There is no need, then, for metaphysical dualisms. The materialist vision of the human being is at once humbling and liberating. We are not spirits trapped in flesh—we are flesh, come to consciousness. Our lives, our thoughts, our passions—all emerge from the same elemental ground.
To be human is to be nature, aware of itself.
