The ideas of our bodies: Spinoza’s monism and Vygotsky’s multi-disciplinary sex education (Las ideas del cuerpo: el monismo de Spinoza y la educación sexual multidisciplinar de Vygotsky)

ABSTRACT Spinoza believed that minds were merely ideas, and ‘ideas of ideas’ held by bodies. Vygotsky presented it the other way around: bodies are minds that act on the environment and on themselves. In this paper, we combine these two perspectives to tackle three questions teachers, parents and adolescents themselves often have. First, what role do interests and concepts play? Second, what about emotion? Third, what does love have to do with sex? To answer, we analyse some telling classroom anecdotes, seek a synthesis of Spinoza’s monism with Vygotsky’s materialist version of Soviet ‘sexual enlightenment’ and undertake a linguistic analysis of recent sex education material in South Korea. We also offer a few sample lessons that take an expansive, Spinozian view of health/ethics and a Vygotskyan view of the adolescent transition from mere ideas of bodies to bodies of ideas such as profession, personality and partnership.