Several times a week one hears that the body is a "meat suit," a "vessel," a "meat machine." The language is meant lightly. It is not light. It carries, embedded in the way we joke, a metaphysics that the older tradition would have refused — and, if pressed, would have explained why.
The "meat suit" theory says: the real you is some inner thing — call it consciousness, soul, mind — and the body is the costume it happens to wear. The costume is interchangeable in principle. If the technology arrives, the inner thing can be transferred, uploaded, or otherwise rehoused. The body is, finally, an objection to the self that the right technique will eventually answer.
Aristotle would have called this a confusion of substance with property. The body is not what you have; it is part of what you are. The soul is not lodged in the body the way a pilot is lodged in a ship. The soul is the organizing principle of THIS body, the form of THIS particular living thing. Try to extract one from the other and you do not free the soul; you destroy the person.
The body is not what you have; it is part of what you are.
Why the language matters
Once the body becomes a vessel, several practical conclusions follow without further argument. Sex becomes a hobby of the inner self, performed by the outer one. Death becomes a release rather than a wound. Suffering becomes a malfunction of the costume, to be silenced by adjustment. None of these conclusions is reached by serious argument; all of them are pre-installed in the metaphor.
The realist refuses the pre-install. Sex is not a hobby because the body is not a costume. Death is a wound because the body is not borrowed. Suffering presses on a self that is not elsewhere. The body cannot be the enemy of the person; it is the person's nearest face.
You will know the older view has been recovered when ordinary language stops apologizing for the body. The apology is the symptom. The cure is a cleaner sentence: not "I have a body," but "I am a body — and more, but never less."