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Soma and Psyche
Richard Shusterman
florida atlantic university
I
In the ancient legend of Cupid and Psyche, Venus was jealous of Psyche’s
beauty and plotted to punish her by binding her through love to a hideous
creature that would appear once Cupid scratched Psyche with his arrow
of desire while she slept, so that she would fall in love with the next thing
she saw upon awakening. But when Cupid saw her beauty, he was so over-
whelmed that he accidentally wounded himself with his own arrow and
thus fell deeply in love with her. The tale then describes how Venus unsuc-
cessfully tried to keep Cupid and Psyche apart, which makes a nice allegory
for the difficulty of separating the soul from desire. Though this mission
may seem as undesirable as it is unlikely to achieve, we should recall that
philosophers have frequently embraced it, seeking a therapy from desire.
But this tale of desire and soul evokes an equally difficult mission that has
been even more central to our philosophical tradition: the separation of
Soma from Psyche, of body from soul. Because so many thinkers see the
body as the irrepressible source of problematic desires (including erotic
ones), we could identify soma with Cupid in this legend. But in another
journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 24, no. 3, 2010
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