The Roots of Guilt and Responsibility in Shusaku Endo's The Sea and Poison

^The Roots of Guilt and Responsibility in Shusaku Endo's The Sea and Poison* Hans-Peter Breuer ι Not much has changed since Dr. M. H. Pappworth twenty years ago called attention to the anti-humanistic spirit pervading the medical sciences: at the time the patient was all too often regarded as the " 'material / " and " 'solving the puzzles of nature' " tended to take precedence in teaching hospitals over the art of healing and justified a cavalier attitude toward the rights and sensibilities of the sick.1 Recent breakthroughs in biochemistry, genetics, and embryology allow us for the first time to penetrate to the core of our being and interfere radically with the warp and woof of life itself; and it is the astonishing success of this penetration, as reflected in the now almost commonplace fertilization and embryo transplantation procedures, that has encouraged this tendency to regard human beings as so much raw material upon which to exercise our scientific ingenuity in the name of scientific progress. Yet to establish positive and binding moral values by which biological and medical research and practice might be guided is made difficult, indeed virtually impossible, because of the dogmatic positivist pandeterminism inherent in all branches of the biological sciences. Within its framework no moral value or belief can be admitted that is not empirically verifiable or practically useful, because, so it is assumed, empirical knowledge , that is to say, scientific knowledge, is the only objective knowledge * Shusaku Endo, The Sea and Poison, trans. Michael Gallagher (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1980). All quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. Reprinted by permission. Literature and Medicine 7 (1988) 80-106 © 1988 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Hans-Peter Breuer 81 we have. The late Jacques Monod, in his 1970 work Chance and Necessity provided one of the most forceful and highly regarded descriptions of what the evidence of neo-Darwinist biology has taught us about our place in the economy of nature. The philosophical side of his argument was by no means new or original, but the then recent biological discoveries made by Francis Crick and James D. Watson concerning the structure of chromosomes and the details of the genetic code furnished it with a most persuasive context. The modern biologist, Monod declared, realizes fully the irrefutable truth of the Darwinian understanding of life's origins and development: life is ruled rigorously by blind, directionless chance, by forces indifferent to the hopes and ambitions of the individual. Chance alone is the first cause of all innovations in the biosphere, and hence life in its essence is pointless, pure organic process divorced from any sort of purposiveness. No "ought"—no moral imperative whatsoever—can be deduced from the contingent "is" of our existence; it is indeed full of sound and fury signifying nothing.2 We are gypsies on the boundaries of an alien world. The old convenant, the Mosaic law, lies in shambles; we can now be certain that nowhere has our human destiny or duty been promulgated or written down.3 As humans we are forced by necessity to choose our values in a valueless world, to live, in other words, by whatever fiction we choose in the full awareness of its utter objective baselessness. Monod made some practical suggestions about how to frame a new moral (and elitist) outlook. But the point is that he has proved with apparently unambiguous empirical evidence that the God of our Western religious heritage, which has underpinned our moral tradition, is dead, as Nietzsche had already decided in the last century, and in consequence so is (in B. F. Skinner's phrase) "autonomous man." Matters of guilt, sin, virtue, and redemption, which have exercised the consciences of our forebears, are much ado about vain and insubstantial imaginings. Men and women are definable not by what their self-reflective experience and understanding teaches them, but by the DNA template of their physical constitutions. In a little fairy tale satirizing biological materialism, Alfred Döblin, the German writer and neurologist, has his Greek tiger, after learning Democritus has concluded that the earth's magnificent pageantry resolves itself into a meaningless dance of elementary particles, roar in...