based on values concerning relationality and aesthetics. For varied in-
sights into relationality, we may turn to sources including Åyurveda,
Neo-Confucianism, and indigenous religious cosmologies. Leder’s study
of medical and philosophical dimensions of the body utilizes Neo-
Confucianism as a tradition grounded in relationality, and draws on
Wang Yang-ming’s description of the universal empathy whereby we may
“form one body” with all things:
Everything from ruler, minister, husband, wife, and friends to moun-
tains, rivers, spiritual beings, birds, animals, and plants should be truly
loved in order to realize my humanity that forms one body with them,
and then my clear character will be completely manifested, and I will
really form one body with Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things.^68Leder invokes against the Cartesian mechanistic model of the body, the
Neo-Confucian principle of relationality. He recommends three ways
whereby we may “form one body”: morally, by compassion, aestheti-
cally, by absorptionor aesthetic openness to the world, and spiritually, by
communion, experiencing “interconnection with the ground of all
being.”^69
Descartes’ medical philosophy is mechanistic, yet at the same time
organic—in other words, relational. The human body as the subject of
medical science he conceived in terms of a machine, governed by the
principles of physics, and subject to physical manipulations to restore it
to proper functioning. However, Descartes has an organic view of the
inter-relation of the organs and systems of the individual body, and the
inter-relation of persons who together constitute the body of society.
Health in Descartes’ view depends on the concern of the mind to con-
serve the union of body and soul. According to Cartesian physics, God
created the world, and it continues to exist because God continually
“conserves” it.^70 The human body is fit to receive a soul by virtue of the
interconnection of its organ systems; the conservation of the union of
soul and body is afforded by the mind’s concern for the preservation of
life, and by supportive factors in the environment.^71 Along similar lines,
Descartes holds that political association is an instrument for the conser-
vation of its human constituents. Its institutions can be regarded as or-
gans of the body politic, and the body politic serves in turn to preserve
the soul-body unions of the persons who constitute it.^72 In addition to
relationality’s inclusion of ethical relations among persons, a vast topic
not undertaken here, relationality characterizes cosmologies envisaging
an interconnected web of life.
70 religious therapeutics