Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

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СКАЧАТЬ Herrmann, Neuroästhetik. Perspektiven auf ein interdisziplinäres Forschungsgebiet, Kassel, Kassel University Press, 2010, p. 108.

123 Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Dramaturgie des Denkens. Gespräche 1988–1990, H. L. Arnold, A. von Planta, J. Strümpel (Eds.), Zürich, Diogenes, 1996, p. 115; also Hoimar von Ditfurth, Der Geist fiel nicht vom Himmel. Die Evolution unseres Bewusstseins, Wien, Verlag H. Bauer – Medien, 2003.

124 Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of the Dog, transl. A. Pyman, Moscow, Raduga Publishers, 1990 (e-version).

125 M. Bulgakov, The Heart of the Dog.

126 T. Richard Brown, The face in the mirror. A Transhuman identity crisis, Own Edition, 2012, p. 17.

127 See Carla Bluhm, Nathan Clendenin, Someone’s else face in the mirror, Westport, London, Praeger, 2009, pp. 93–94; Jennifer Swindell Blumenthal-Barby, “Facial allograft transplantation, personal identity, and subjectivity,” Journal of Medical Ethics 2007, vol. 33.

128 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 334.

129 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, pp. 232, 59.

130 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 377.

131 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 19.

132 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 39.

133 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 113.

134 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 24.

135 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 24.

136 Christian Gärtner, “Cognition, knowing and learning in the flesh: Six views on embodied knowing in organization studies,” Scandinavian Journal of Management 2013, vol. 29, p. 340.

137 T.R. Brown, The face in the mirror, pp. 113–114.

138 T. R. Brown, The face in the mirror, p. 113.

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 СКАЧАТЬ