Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

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СКАЧАТЬ level, beyond anthropomorphism and Cartesian reductionism. Underlying wholeness and individuality as core features of a living organism, Jonas provides a strong argument against the politicization and technicization of human and animal bodies: “for in real corporeal individuals the way in which the whole unites the parts and the parts form the whole is in all major respects diametrically opposed to what we found to be the case in a social whole.”¹⁷⁸

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      What are the implications of Jonas’ plea for organically invented individuality, in particular for humans? As I explained elsewhere¹⁷⁹ why an “Organbank” (allograft commercialization) would reduce human tissues and organs to a lower category of ordinary things¹⁸⁰ (Bereich bloßer Dinge), here my only purpose is only to highlight that, according to the reasons articulated above, a person has an “unconditional right to one’s own organs and one’s own body” but “nobody has the right to another person’s body.”¹⁸¹

      According to Jonas, organ donation and reception presupposes the active cooperation of the donor’s functioning organism as a source of wholesome organs. However, such interindividual cooperation is not just about the exchangeability and replaceability of tissues, and organs, including prosthetics and other kinds of crosscorporeal bodies. Jonas’ argument emerges not from the artificialism vs. naturalism controversy, but from individuality and identity as already prioritized by a living organism as a postdualist conceptualized whole: “The individuality of an organic being is self-centered (selbstzentriert, egozentrisch) and turned away from the rest of the world which is external to it (…). The whole integrates itself. (…) Sameness means self-determination (Selbigkeit ist selbstbestimmend, Selbständigkeit) (…). An individuality which lasts because of a creative process is a ‘living organism’ and not a ‘part of the world.’ ”¹⁸² However, being an individual organism does not imply isolation and full independence from “socio-material environments.”¹⁸³ Intended or not, the neuroscientists repeatedly confirmed the key role of organic homeostasis¹⁸⁴ and sameness for the conscious and autobiographical self of human beings. “The basic form of consciousness, core consciousness is placed in the context of life regulation; it is seen as yet another level of biological processing aimed at ensuring the homeostatic balance of a living ←57 | 58→organism; and the representation of the current organism state within somato-sensing structures is seen as critical to its development.”¹⁸⁵

      Serious, sometimes indefinable interdependencies (but not ‘by-play’ factors) must be involved when Jonas claims that cloning an individual organic body is impossible because its actual shape, condition, and character are determined not only by their genome which, unlike the organic body, can be cloned. “A body as a whole is so individualized and is so much myself that it remains unique and belonging to my identity in the same way in which the brain, fingerprints, or immunological reactions belong to it.”¹⁸⁶ It is not restricted to a sum of particular organs, properties, functions, and skills. It is thoroughly holistic, and that is how it should be perceived and respected by others. “My identity is the identity of the whole organism (…) even when the higher functions which have a seat in the brain have stopped working. How else can one fall in love with a woman and not only her brain? To love the expression of someone’s face? A delicate silhouette?”¹⁸⁷

4. Own Body

      It was Aquinas who pioneered the concept of one’s own individual body, which anticipated modern phenomenological approaches. In his polemic against St. Paul’s body-aversive, spiritualist doctrine, Aquinas claims that “any separation of soul from body goes against its nature and is imposed on it. (…) soul is not the whole human being, only part of one: my soul is not me.”¹⁸⁸ In other words, to Aquinas, my soul is not a whole and true me as it was in Pauline tradition: “For Saint Paul (of Tarsus) the true Self is the new man ‘called’ by a personal God, hence created by a vocation; he does not fall under the yoke of the Senses like the old Adam since the new life is both in and out of the world, manifested by his love.”¹⁸⁹ Aquinas initiated the first serious discussion on the embodied personal self. His statement is clear, and refers to its Aristotelian origins: “So if soul is deprived ←58 | 59→of body, it will exist imperfectly as long as this situation lasts.”¹⁹⁰ Although the refusal of reincarnation as incompatible with the resurrection dogma was the precise background for that discussion, Aquinas is to be recognized as a pioneer of the Western concept of one’s own body and embodied selfhood in at least two phenomenological aspects: namely as one’s own–hence–individual body, and as an embodiment inseparable from mental and spiritual lifeforms.

      In the Zen and Shinto tradition before its Westernization, as Hiroyuki Noguchi puts it, the formation of the body concept, its individuality, and identity, looked rather different. A meditative treatment of the Japanese body provides several steps to “switch from mental concentration to bodily concentration” in order to “separate the self from the body,” and finally to “encounter the pure body” belonging “only to nature itself: the body ‘as is’. To encounter the body ‘as is’ means that all sensations of the flesh disappear. What emerges instead, is a body of mist or air-like quality.”¹⁹¹ Its new nature “is one of total passivity; it can fluctuate with the true sense of being alive.”¹⁹² However, the life experienced is not that of an individual living organism, “but the life that flows through all beings in a world where everything is alive.”¹⁹³ Opening up to the life cycle should nourish and strengthen the individual life’s potentials, including the mind’s creativity. That practice is more of a therapeutic than of a sacral, esoteric, or celebrative character.

      In modern Western phenomenology, one’s own irreplaceable body often appears in twofold meaning, such as to have the own body (however, not as a physical object, but, rather, “as a work of art”)¹⁹⁴ and to be one’s own body. The first meaning still betrays a Cartesian externalist, objectivist, and mechanical touch, although exteriority remains one of the most important body aspects in phenomenology. Ownership is also found in Husserl, as he claims “my physical body to be preoriginally mine” (mein Leib als das ursprünglichst meine).¹⁹⁵ My body was widely explored by Merleau-Ponty who claims, “I am my body, I am my life” and leaves behind us, “once and for all, the traditional subject-object dichotomy” as well as the “traditional dichotomy of body and consciousness.”¹⁹⁶ ←59 | 60→Can my body cease to be mine? Having agreed with Jonas that “nobody has the right to another person’s body,” it is easy to recall a number of situations in which a subject is confronted with her ‘disembodiment’ or “closure of the self from the body.”¹⁹⁷ Bettelheim and Giddens refer to body and self dissociation reported by victims of tremendous horror in death camps. Biopolitical and disciplinary discourse powers may deprive persons of their inalienable right to their body. A changed feeling of the body and unusual existential feelings accompany a number of psychiatric disorders. In schizophrenia, one’s own body may disappear or appear as if it is alien body.¹⁹⁸ At the same time, phenomenology teaches “that the bodily self is a non-thing [Nicht-Ding], which is never ‘bodily present’ [leibhaft gegenwärtig], as things are.”¹⁹⁹ Furthermore, body shaming is explained as “out of the body” feeling while the latter is dominated by the oppressive body narratives or images.²⁰⁰ “The body becomes the focus of power and this power (…) subjects it to the internal discipline of self-control,”²⁰¹ which provides the right to own body with social sanctions. This conventionalized body was told to become our social skin, typical for modernity. In her book entitled The Body Multiple. Ontology in Medical Practice, Annemarie Mol shows human embodiment and bodily identity (including disease, pathologies, etc.) to ←60 | 61→be “done,” “enacted,” constructed or deconstructed by medical practices, social representations, biopolitical and normative discourses: “The vagina for instance. This organ is no longer capable, all by itself, of turning someone into a woman. A lot more is required to do womanhood: specific styles of talking, ways of walking, dressing, addressing.”²⁰²

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