In Antiquity, Body and Mind were not yet explicitly viewed as separate entities. This is reflected by the fact that the Greek word soma in Homeric verses referred to a corpse, not a living body. Neither the living body as an entity nor the Mind as an entity had a name. (see Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature.) But For Aristotle, thinking is the one specific activity of the human soul which is capable of separate and independent existence from any connection to the body.
In Love's Body, Norman O. Brown proposes an alternative to the dualism, established by the reality principle, between inside and outside, between the Lockean and Cartesian notions of mental events as distinct from external, material reality. He rejects the " simple location" of the body as a thing which is here in space and here in time. (see p. 154. see also ego and play)For Brown, the alternative to dualism is dialectics, that is to say, love.
Body thinking is " unconscious knowledge," a proto-mental system in which physical and mental activity is undifferentiated. "Unconscious ideas" are concrete ideas, that is to say ideas of things, and not simply of the words or images inside the mind corresponding to the things outside. Concrete ideas are cathexes of things. (see Freud, "The Unconscious")
John Schumacher's inquiry into posture asserts that "to experience the world is the very nature of body inside out." (p.155) From inside out, separation is always already overcome. "We can trust our bodies, exactly as the Greeks did." The body is the source of the somatic sense of place: For instance, the way a good farmer will pick up soil and feel the dirt in his hands...(Is this a "blue collar" kind of knowledge? cf. the way Shoshanna Zuboff describes the ways that workers at a paper mill taste the paper and kick the door to the computer room..."bah, thus I refute it.")
cf "becoming animal becoming intense" of D+G....body and animality as resistance to abstract thinking ...animistic cultures listen to the natural world. "The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited." (Thomas Berry) --cf. Martin Buber "I-thou" vs "I-it"
E.O Wilson calls our affinity for life biophilia: the idea that humans have an innate urge to affiliate with other forms of life.