Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 Galen and Herophilus described the nervous system as the origin of motion and as a kind of “power which Galen himself defines as a ‘soul’, i.e., vital force, for all the motion of muscles and nerves ceases when soul departs.”¹⁶³ With ancient physicians the nervous system and the psyche met together and become to a unified, central organ within the human organism. Mapping the latter, they determined organs with life-supporting roles. The liver, pulmonary system, and “the heart as the centre of the blood system and the connection between the heart and the pulse-beats”¹⁶⁴ were considered as principal organs. Charged with six hundred vivisections and embryosections enumerated by Celsius and condemned by Tertulian, Herophilus contributed to the organic body definition as an integral, hierarchically organized, living totality.

      The body’s first organizational principle was considered to be incorporated in two central organs, namely the heart and brain, and called hegemonicon: “One says the heart, another the meninges, and one that the brain contains the hegemonikon of the soul.”¹⁶⁵ “The hegemonikon was therefore regarded as not being dependent on a single or fixed location,”¹⁶⁶ but flexible. Interestingly, its proponents were divided in two parties: “those who maintained that the hegemonikon was found in the head (encephalocentrists) and those who argued that it was located in the heart or its immediate vasculature (cardiocentrists). Apart from Galen, on the encephalocentric side can be placed, among others, Ptolemy, Herophilus and Erasistratus, Plato (…) and certain of the Presocratics.”¹⁶⁷

      Sappho was the pioneer of the soma organikon’s wholeness, complexity, and integrity. She found the archaic, preorganic concept of sṓma as “body in pieces”¹⁶⁸ ←54 | 55→inappropriate. Sappho’s body concept assumes interconnections between organs as parts of an organism and morphemes as parts of a body. She was one of the first to recognize the continuity between the external and internal, the somatic and mental (experiential, emotional and intellectual) aspects of organic life. Distinguishing these aspects, a beholder’s perception must not destroy the wholeness as it would be typical to monism and dualism. In a living organic being, there is “a knot of being” (der Knoten des Seins), which subverts dualism (zerhaut den Dualismus). Materialism and idealism attempt to untie the knot by pulling it to their respective sides – however, “in vain.” According to Jonas’ holistic ontology of organism “part of an organic body exists only in the whole as a part of the whole (…) Only as parts of the functioning whole do they remain what they are.”¹⁶⁹

3. Organic Identity and Individuality

      To Jonas, an organism as “the identity that constitutes itself” shows “the ceaseless creativity of self-continuation.” It is “a constant challenge to mechanical nature,”¹⁷⁰ “open to interference, in its delicate balance of functions, which is effective only as a whole, [it is] vulnerable, and mortally so in its centre.”¹⁷¹ Thus “the existence of the organic individual is that of function and not of substance.”¹⁷² Jonas is convinced an individual organism maintains itself: and “in this polarity of self and world, of internal and external (…) the basic situation of freedom with all its daring and distress is potentially complete.”¹⁷³

      The “initially problematical nature of life”¹⁷⁴ is that of every single living organism. Beyond its unique and finite existence, organic life is going to strive for immortality, however, not the immortality of ancient metaphysics. Metaphysical ←55 | 56→immortality “is here replaced by the immortality of the germ-plasm as a continuous existence in itself.”¹⁷⁵

      What makes the organism an individual? It is not only its unique phenotype, but its self-maintenance, internal homeostasis, intentionality, functionality, and ecological openness, i.e., an intelligent interplay with the environment, and “inwardness.” The latter represents “the outward” constantly interacting with it or using its resources. According to Jonas, that activity is “one form of the self-transcendence of organic being. (…) The transcendence, the being a self by going beyond the self, is ever more elaborate and opens up new horizons as we proceed to the higher forms, and the horizons are always horizons of transcendence, not sticking to the mere empty self-identity of a material body (…) Organic individuality and organic identity are themselves teleological facts (…) Therefore, process character, transcendence, identity by means of change, goal-directedness in terms of teleological structure of being are all one and inseparable in the ontology of the living thing.”¹⁷⁶ Jonas’ philosophical biology radically raises the value or even the dignity of living organisms, which originates from their intrinsic teleology (whereas it is obvious to him that the molecular particles of brute matter do not show any). “For the complex organic parts (e.g., cells in a multi-cellular organism) (…) the fact is that not only their membership but their existence СКАЧАТЬ