Recovering the Body: A Philosophical Story

7. The Legacy of Mechanism: The Fragmenting and Disappearing Body

chapter vii the legacy of Mechanism: the Fragmenting and disappearing Body one thing that becomes clear as we follow the philosophers’ thinking on the human body through the history of philosophy is that, in the final analysis, we can arrive at no consensus about what the body really is. in philosophical terms, this means that we are actually quite ignorant regarding the ontological status of the human body. at the same time, the sciences that are most particularly linked to the body (biology, physiology and medicine, for example) have all accepted as a presupposition the idea of the body as an object of nature, subject to the same physical laws as any other object of nature. explanations of soul or mind are excluded from these sciences, as they have been excluded from natural science since the seventeenth century. in spite of the many philosophical arguments that have been made against Cartesian dualism since descartes’ time, his mind-body dualism remains the basis of the sciences of the body today. this fact will be one of the principal points of argument in the chapters that follow, where the dualistic legacy will be demonstrated and an appeal made to a recuperation of some form of philosophical monism of the sort seen in the philosophy of the Stoics and Spinoza. the Body and Modern Medicine1 Chapter 5 demonstrated that, in relation to the body, dualism is only one prong of descartes’ dual legacy, the other being mechanism. it can be said that the first prong is metaphysical (dealing with what the body is) and the 198 the liMitS oF MeChaniSM second epistemological (dealing with what can be known about the body and how it can be known). as pointed out in Chapter 5, descartes’ lifelong goal was to establish a method that would work for all areas of inquiry, based on the fundamental mechanistic laws of nature that he had articulated. as he wrote in his Principles of Philosophy, near the end of his life: For i freely acknowledge that i recognize no matter in corporeal things apart from that which the geometers call quantity, and take as the object of their demonstrations, i.e., that to which every kind of division, shape and motion is applicable. Moreover, my consideration of such matter involves absolutely nothing apart from these divisions, shapes and motions…. and since all natural phenomena can be explained in this way … i do not think that any other principles are either admissible or desirable in physics.2 this meeting of descartes’ metaphysics and epistemology is succinctly expressed by hans Jonas: “to know a thing means to know how it is or can be made and therefore means being able to repeat or vary or anticipate the process of making.”3 this is the true legacy of Cartesian dualism and mechanism, which is particularly evident in biomedical technology today, where a human body can be divided into increasingly smaller parts and put back together in different ways. that this represents a slippage from the epistemological plane to the metaphysical is not immediately obvious, and Jonas points out the logical error involved when he states: “from the fact of machines working by natural principles entirely it does not follow that they work by the entire natural principles, or, that nature has no other modes of operation than those which man can utilize in his constructions.”4 in other words, knowing how the body works (and presuming that one gets this right) does not entail knowing what the body is. that the workings of the body follow certain laws of physics and chemistry does not entail that the body is only physical and chemical. if this distinction between knowing how and knowing what is accepted, then it can be suggested that modern biomedicine is operating from assumptions that are seriously open to question. But the error does not stop there. We have seen how mind-body dualism leads to the separation of the knowing subject and the known world of science. everything in the world becomes an object for the knowing subject or self, including its own body. notions of purpose, ends, feelings, knowledge—and the legaCy oF MeChaniSM 199 any other elements connected with consciousness—fall on the side of the subject, or the self, which has become the locus of all attribution of value in the human person.5 this self-subject is not considered part of the domain...