Body

The short definition is doing quiet, deliberate work. By calling the body one of five elements of a person, Marsh demotes it from being the whole of a person to being a single component alongside others, in her framework the self, life, will and consciousness. The context makes the point sharper: she holds that a scientific taboo against any mention of divinity forced every aspect of a person into some generic materialist concept, so that disturbances of self, life, will or consciousness all get treated as bodily ailments. Naming the body as just one element among five is a correction of that flattening. The body is real and physical, but it is not identical with the person, and problems of will or consciousness are not simply problems of the body, however much a materialist frame prefers to file them there.

The relation of body to mind, self and soul is one of the oldest questions in philosophy, running from dualism, where mind and body are distinct, to materialism, where the mental reduces to the physical. Marsh's five-element account of a person is neither standard dualism nor standard materialism. It treats the body as one real component among several and resists collapsing self, life, will and consciousness into it.