Finger Food for Thought

A group of fingers was sitting around after philosophy class one day discussing the body.

“The body is the bones and the bones are the body,” said a materialist middle finger, who was taller than the others and a bit proud of his height. “It’s obvious. Without the bones what would we be? A drooping flap of nothing.” Then he added, “bones and nails, of course.”

An index finger, aware of his neighbor’s crudity, said, “Yours is too shallow a definition. The truth of the body is in sensation. What are the bones without the capacity of our tips to feel, and not only that but by feeling to distinguish among the subtlest of differences?”

“But we can all do that,” said an individualist thumb. “The real body is what is unique to each of us, never duplicated in a universe of fingers and thumbs. (I wish you’d remember to include us too. Thumbs are thumbs, not fingers.) The prints of our skin are our real bodies—no two alike.”

“All three of you have such mechanistic ideas about the body!” shouted the romantic ring finger, reddening with emotion. “Our bones and nails and skin are vessels for relating to others. It’s working together with others that being a finger is for, and all your structures and sensations and individuality are nothing without that. Our relationships are our true body.”

“Dreamer,” said the middle finger.

“You can always spot a ring finger,” said the thumb to the group. “It thinks it’s nothing till three or four other fingers put a ring on it and then it’s instantly the be-all and the end-all and expects to live happily ever after.” And turning to the ring finger, he demanded, “Where’s your self-respect, man?”

“Anyway,” added the index finger, “the whole point of being with other fingers is feeling with them. That’s the body of your so-called relationship. The rest is just cultural conditioning.”

The four went on wrangling for a while until, during a lull in the argument, a pinky said, “I’m not really sure, but I think none of us can say what the body is. After all, our vantage point is so limited. And if we could say, why would we be disagreeing about it? Why would we even need to discuss it? I think there’s more to it than fingers can grasp.”

When the chorus of guffaws died down, the middle finger observed, “Obviously the wishful thinking of a pip-squeak, about as convincing as the non-violence of a sissy.”

“All I’m saying,” continued the pinky, undaunted, “is that we can’t know what our true body is. Maybe we don’t have a body at all,” he added. “Maybe the true body has us.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” said the others as the bell rang, sending them all to their next lesson.