Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

139 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 114.

140 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 87.

141 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 326.

142 Reinhard Merkel et al., Intervening in the brain. Changing psyche and society, Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer Publishers, 2007, p. 219. Brown’s novel, however, miraculously spares Todd to be confronted with side symptoms resembling on those of lobotomy: “in the early 1950s lobotomies were still performed at a rate of 5.000 per year in the United States notwithstanding their side effects, which include inertia, apathy, decreased attention, social inappropriateness, and seizures (…). How drastic a change in personality can result from brain surgery has been famously depicted by Jack Nicholson in Milos Forman’s movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Nicholson played McMurphy, a rebellious patient in a psychiatric ward, who in the end is subdued by lobotomy, thereby turned into an apathetic wreck. With Nicholson’s performance in mind one might wonder if a person’s identity can get ‘extinguished’ without it being replaced by a new one, but also without the person ceasing to exist altogether,” p. 191.

143 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 370.

144 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 424.

145 Richard Shusterman, Body consciousness: A philosophy of mindfulness and somaesthetics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 113; see also Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the body. Essays in somaesthetics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012. And vice versa, our bodies are dependent on our mental life, e.g., some thought, memory – even if not fully conscious yet – or the words spoken by other people result in a blush, pounding of a heart, catching of a breath.

II. The Evolution of Body Concept

      Although modern man’s attention is often considered to be reoriented from spiritual and intellectual aspects towards the bodily aspects of the human (and trans- or posthuman) condition, the body reveals impressive complexity. It had been explored from early antiquity until today; in biology, the medical sciences, philosophy, art, and religion. Autocreative and technopoietic activities addressed human embodiment in its all micro and macro dimensions. Revisiting body concepts from the basic to the most complex allows one to make the body’s trans- and posthumanist ‘evolution’ more comprehensive. However, although the concepts listed above suggest the state-of-the-art in the living and lived body-related expertise has already broken the body’s opaqueness and became “transparent” to technological and medical imagery tools,¹⁴⁶ a lot of open-ended questions are still emerging, such as the following one: Do our bodies really evolve according to the invented schemes of the posthumanist scholars? Is it just body concepts and theorizations that evolve across disciplines and explorative or experimental human practices? What position does an embodied self have today “between animal and angel, past and future, condemnation and redeeming?”¹⁴⁷ (zwischen Tier und Engel, zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft, zwischen Verdammnis und Erlösung)? Let us revisit and revise the body concepts necessary to provide at least a provisional answer.

1. Objective Material Reality, Brute Body, Fleshness, Corporeity

      The term ‘brute body’ means objective materiality or simple corporeity. Nowadays, the sense of this originally Aristotelian category reflects itself in a fleshy “container for the mind”¹⁴⁸ or physical “hardware in which cognition is realized.”¹⁴⁹ To Aristotle, brute body was not even a container, but “merely ←51 | 52→substratum, indeterminate,” a “material cause of something else.”¹⁵⁰ Brute body is more than an aggregation of physical molecules, but less than a colony of cells, which, for example, make up a tissue. This term, used in technical and scientific contexts, is completely depersonalized, desubjected, deindividualized, amorphous, as it belongs to material objectivity along with dead matter, natural or artificially synthetized, mechanically – and liberally – used and reused, replaced, transformed, annihilated, etc., thus, instrumentalized. Applying such terminology to the human body implies radical reductionism and dehumanization, as illustrated by Gärtner’s “container” with no individual, or even human, features. But thinking such brute materiality in the form of a container-like exteriority would also be thinkable for radical idealism and spiritualism, dualism, materialism, and naturalism. The brute matter seems like an all-purpose, universal category, for it is “indeterminate,” plastic, easy to shape, manipulate, measure, quantificate, and distribute. “In fact ‘matter’ in the sense of ‘body’ becomes more rational an object than ‘spirit.’ ”¹⁵¹ Applied to the human body, the brute matter becomes material to shape and re-shape liberally, with rational and technological tools. It is just a Cartesian “res extensa or external reality,”¹⁵² and Husserl’s objective corporeity: Leibkörper, Raumkörperlichkeit, Gegebenheit, “physischer Dingleib,” “reales, substantiell–kausales Ding.”¹⁵³ According to Aristotle, a formal cause is shaping the brute physical matter in analogy with marble or bronze: “This is a clear case where form denotes the essential aspect while the matter is a necessary condition for representation but is more or less interchangeable. The same form could be embodied in a different lump of bronze, or even in a different material altogether.”¹⁵⁴

2. Living Matter and Soma Organikon

      Every living being is built not just of solid, amorphous flesh matter (fleshness, according to Merleau-Ponty), but has natural, “organic equipment”¹⁵⁵ which is to ←52 | 53→be understood as an organized aggregation¹⁵⁶ of cells living together as a colony, or making up specific tissues (cells of the same type and function connected together), organs, and, finally, an organism as a whole. There is life in cells in terms of ongoing biochemical and physiological processes defining living matter (zoe). A single somatic cell is a microcosm with its own ‘self,’ as Jacky Stacey shows. “The cells are personified,” and a particular cell may change its identity and endanger the life of the whole body or an embodied individual.¹⁵⁷ “Both conventional and alternative accounts represent the cell as a metaphor of the self. In the scientific accounts cell are given individual identities: like us, they desire, they fear, they have intentions, they triumph, and they are satisfied.”¹⁵⁸

      An organic body of a single living being is made up of organs, and organs are made up of living cells organized in tissues. Unlike the brute body, “an organic body is the necessary material for the presence of an active soul.”¹⁵⁹ To Jonas, who was inspired by the concept of soma organikon from Aristotelian philosophy, even the most primitive organisms manifest some kind of an individual vegetative ‘soul.’ “Not just any amorphous matter is a potentially living body, but a very special organization of materials in very particular proportions, shapes and conditions, which represent the potential site of life, i.e., the soma organikon – something that is articulated in the mode of organs or which as a whole is an interrelated system of instrumentalities. Soul is that which assures the actualization of that potential.”¹⁶⁰

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      Soma organikon was also explored by Herophilus of Alexandria, Soranus, Galen, etc. due to the hierarchy of organs, their functions, and their interrelations within the human organic body. While the Aristotelian tradition claiming the heart to be the seat of human soul was revised,¹⁶¹ Herophilus “places the dominant principle of the ‘soul’ in the ventricles of the brain.”¹⁶²