QuestionsWho am I, really?I am not my body: I am the one who uses it
Who am I, really?A soul

I am not my body: I am the one who uses it

Man is his soul (the shoemaker and his tools)

Plato c. 428 BC · c. 348 BCBeyond appearances, the eternal Forms.
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What it claims

Man is neither his body nor the compound of body and soul: man is his soul.

Why

The user of a tool is not the tool: a man uses his body, so he is not his body but his soul.

In short

"I am not my body: I am the one who uses it" is an argument by Plato (Alcibiades I, 129b-130c; Phaedo, 115c-e) on the question "Who am I, really?" (answer: a soul). Its claim: Man is neither his body nor the compound of body and soul: man is his soul. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Alcibiades I, 129b-130c; Phaedo, 115c-e
Valid with an implicit premise

When I say "I", what am I talking about? In the Alcibiades, Socrates asks a young man with big ambitions. His idea starts from a trade: the shoemaker uses a knife, the harper his lyre, and each is something other than what he uses. Now a man uses his hands, his eyes, his whole body. So he is not his body. What uses the body and rules it is the soul. In the Phaedo, Socrates, condemned to die, says the same to his friend Crito, who asks how to bury him: you will not be burying Socrates, only his body. Note: scholars dispute whether Plato wrote the Alcibiades, and in it we mostly read Socrates asking questions; so we present it as a text attributed to Plato, backed by the Phaedo, which is certainly his.

P1Whoever uses a thing is not that thing: the shoemaker is not his knife, the harper is not his lyre.
P2A man uses his whole body: his hands, his eyes, his limbs.
P3Only one of three candidates can be the man: the soul, the body, or both together. But the whole cannot be the one that rules, since one of its parts, the body, is ruled.
P4 · implicit premiseWhat I am is the one who uses my body and rules it, not what is used. When I say "I", I mean the subject who acts and thinks, not its instrument.
Therefore man is neither his body nor the compound of body and soul: man is his soul.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where I use my body, where whoever uses a thing is not that thing, and where I am nonetheless the body: if I am not necessarily the one who uses the body, nothing prevents me from being what is used.
The argument is valid with the hidden premise P4. If I am the one who uses the body (P4), then since whoever uses a thing is not that thing (P1) and I use my body (P2), I am not my body. P3 also rules out the compound of the two. The soul remains. Objections target P4: they say that it is the whole man, body included, who acts and thinks.
Analogy. A guitarist plays her guitar: she uses it and controls it, but she is not the guitar. Socrates says the same holds between us and our body: we use our hands and eyes as she uses her instrument.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Aristotle 350 BC · attacks premise 4

It is better not to say that the soul pities, learns or thinks, but that the man does so with his soul. Thinking, loving and hating are states of the whole living being, of the "composite": when it breaks up, memory and love cease. What acts and thinks is therefore the complete man, not his soul alone.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Platon in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Aristotle was Plato's pupil, but this passage does not answer the Alcibiades in particular. A Platonist can say that "with his soul" keeps the soul as what thinks, and that Aristotle himself (Nicomachean Ethics IX, 8) takes the intellect to be what each person most is. The disagreement is about what "I" means: the thinking subject or the whole living being.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: an old disagreement, still alive. For Plato, man is his soul; for Aristotle, man is the living compound of a soul and a body. Neither position has been imposed on the other.
Thomas Aquinas 1268 · attacks the conclusion

What performs the operations proper to a thing is that thing. But sensation is not the operation of the soul alone: it is the operation of man. So man is not a soul only, but something composed of soul and body. Plato, because he supposed sensation to be proper to the soul, could maintain that man is a soul making use of the body.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1268, after the author's death (-348).
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Plato died sixteen centuries before Thomas. Thomas himself pinpoints where the debate lies: if sensing, fearing and desiring were acts of the soul alone, the Platonic thesis would stand. A present-day Platonist must therefore hold that these states belong to the soul, the body being only their instrument.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: Thomas does not deny that the soul survives death; he denies that the soul alone is "I". The debate remains open.
René Descartes 1641 · attacks premise 1

The comparison with a tool is not enough. I am not merely lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel. When I feel pain or hunger, I feel it, whereas a pilot would just see his vessel damaged. My mind and body are so closely joined that they make up a single unit.

a defender replies
René Descartes (the same, on the substance) defender of the argument · 1641 · What Descartes keeps of the thesis
Descartes rejects the pilot image but keeps the essential: the human soul is really distinct from the body, though so closely joined to it that it makes up one thing with it. So he stays Platonic about what the self is, and corrects only how the link is described.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: the objection targets the tool image (P1), not the thesis that the self is the soul. Plato's defenders can accept it and say: the soul is the subject, but a subject united to the body.