Future of Phenomenology

The Body of Phenomenology; Unforeseen Phenomenological Outcomes of Biotechnologies

Martin G. Weiss

Preliminary Remark

Just as rationalization, with its tendency to objectivity, in the end leads to the destabilization of any kind of substantialism (at least for Nietzsche), the biotechnologies, which were originally intended as an extreme method of bodily control, are becoming the most blatant example of how this domination is not possible. That is to say, there can be no totally autonomous subject completely cut off from whatever historical-bodily determination. The desire to absolutely control human animality by way of reason, as expressed in the biotechnologies, transforms itself into the inconfutable demonstration of humanity's constitutive finitude and of the unsustainability of the dualistic mind-body-concept. So biotechnologies paradoxically became a hint for the up-to-datedness of the phenomenology of the body established by Edmund Husserl and developed further by Jean-Paul-Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hermann Schmitz und Bernhard Waldenfels.

The Body-Nature-Equation and its Dissolution by Biotechnologies

   Starting with Plato and enforced by the Christian tradition, on the one side the body has been opposed to the mind and on the other side identified with “nature.” In the history of philosophy it is possible to identify three main concepts of nature: First, the word “nature” designates the “essence” of things. Second, the term “nature” is used to indicate the realm of the inorganic given death matter, which results from itself and cannot be ascribed to human acting. Third, the term “nature” is used to designate the realm of live, of the beings which have the principle of their motion in themselves, as Aristotle puts it, whereas Aristotle's concept of motion includes local movement as well as becoming and dying. All these traditional meanings of nature, essence, matter and life, coincide in one aspect: what is natural is independent of the human subject. Nature is objective, the other in relation to the human being, that which resists the human will, which again is the essential attribute of reality at least for Schelling, one of the fathers of German Idealism.
   Now the contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (1 ) identifies “reality” with power, or with violence, and this in turn with the kind of speech that allows no contradiction. By reality, Vattimo means the violent immediacy of the “direct force of the given, an incontestable self-obtrusion of the an sich [‘as such’ or ‘in-itself’].” (2 ) This reality is violent, as violence is definable only as the evident ground that excludes all contradiction. Vattimo identifies violence with naked actuality, with an ultimate “resort, which one does not transcend and which silences all questioning, as it terminates the conversation.” (3 ) Here, Vattimo does not locate violence in the dominance of the general over the particular, as existentialism had, but in the rendering impossible of free contradiction in the widest sense of the word. According to Vattimo, this non-questionable, and therefore by definition violent real, i.e., the objective, is being increasingly weakened by the findings of modern science: “Modern science, heir and completion of metaphysics, is that which transforms the world to a place where there are no (more) facts, but only interpretations.” (4 )
   The same dissolution of objectivity is currently occurring in anthropology, because new biotechnological practices are undermining the concept of a stable and given human nature (i.e., the body) as biological basis for human ratio.
   Defined as animal rationale, or rationabile as Kant puts it, the human being is considered as the animal, which is not yet what it is, but has to become what it is. Up to now this process was limited to the ratio, whereas the natural side remained untouched. The human being was manipulable, but never producible; and this because the biological nature remained untouchable. But with the rise of biotechnology, also this last constant term is no longer something fixed. In the age of biotechnology the expression “human nature,” in the sense of “biological substratum” as well as in the sense of “essence,” has lost its meaning. What consequences does this loss of “essence” have for the human self-conception? When the difference between grooving and producing becomes unclear, then it's impossible to consider the human nature as something given. Is this the beginning of posthumanity?
   Concerning this question, the actual philosophical discourse offers two different approaches. The first could be described as “conservative,” driven by the fear of losing the “essence” of what is human. The exponents of this approach try to maintain the concept of human nature as some sort of unchangeable norm. This concept is very similar to the old-fashioned metaphysics of substance and is therefore not very satisfying. The “progressive” position instead embraces the dissolution of human nature as ultimate liberation and emancipation from the biological boundaries, which obstruct human freedom, which for this position is the very essence of man. In this view the human animal represents only a transitory stage in the evolutionary history of this species, which has not yet reached its end. The human animal is not yet what it has to be, but must achieve his very essence by enhancing his proper nature. This thesis, commonly labelled as “Posthumanism” is surprisingly also the core of the classical Humanism, which identifies man as the animal whose specific essence consist in not having a given essence at all. Man is the only being, which is not what it is, but, as essentially free, has to decide by himself what to be. In his “Oration on the Dignity Of Men,” a sort of humanist manifesto published in 1486 Pico della Mirandola writes:

Finally, the Great Artisan mandated that this creature who would receive nothing proper to himself shall have joint possession of whatever nature had been given to any other creature. He made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him: ‘Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose. All other things have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by our laws. You, with no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of your nature. We have placed you at the world's center so that you may survey everything else in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine. (5 )

   Whereas the conservative faction tries to save a normative concept of nature, risking thereby falling into the naturalistic fallacy which deduces norms from facts, the posthumanist or genuine humanist position forgets the constitutive contingency of the human being and is based on the latent idea that the human body is only the accidental substratum of human freedom. This is because only if one thinks that the free subject is something different from his physical incarnation, is it possible to identify the control over the body as liberation of the subject.
   So both positions are problematic. The first one because it tries to maintain a concept, which risks being overruled by the developments of biotechnologies; the other because its concept, standing in the tradition of Descartes and the Enlightenment, is subject to the “dialectics of enlightenment” described by Adorno and Horkheimer: What started as liberation from the boundaries of the biological nature of man turns into reification of the human being. So the pretended liberation from nature results in a new form of manipulability, as the alleged liberation of the subject from its corporal limitations finally proves to be a new sort of suppression of the human being, who thus tragically learns that the body is not the grave of the soul, to quote Plato, but the only mode in which the mind exists. Given that, perhaps there is a third way to read Biotechnology.
   In fact, the dissolution of human nature, which is an effect of pharmacological, prosthetic and genetic manipulations of the human bios, can be read as an aspect of the weakening of being diagnosed by Vattimo. In this view, the dissolution of human nature caused by biotechnology corresponds to the general tendency toward a weak ontology. In this view biotechnologies would only realise in the field of philosophical anthropology the same dissolution, which already has taken place in epistemology. But this weakening also of the biological nature of man, which on the one hand leads to a new form of oppression, could on the other hand, according to Vattimo, also be interpreted as another sort of liberation: not as domination of nature through reification but as liberation from unquestionable objectivity. This is because the paradoxical effect of the technical attempt to control human nature through reification operated by biotechnologies finally results in the intuition of the essential “Unverfügbarkeit,” i.e., “unavailability” of the human “physis,” as Heidegger puts it. The effort of biotechnology to manipulate human nature, which represents the acme of reification, leads paradoxically to the insight that this ultimate reification, which aims at total control of the objective nature by the human subject, is not possible, as the alleged liberation of the subject through domination of nature (the classical program of the enlightenment), shows that in the case of biotechnology it is not a subject to take control of a mere body, but that what here is manipulated is the human being as a whole. So the unintentional effect of biotechnology, which is based on the uncritical assumption of a dualistic model of man — which defines man as connection between objective nature and subjective ratio — consists in the demonstration that this dualistic model is no longer suitable. Begun as consequence of the mind-body-dualism, biotechnology finally leads to the conclusion, that the human being is an indivisible unity, which also means that the aim of total control over the human bios ends in the demonstration of the constitutive “unavailability” of human nature, here in the sense of human essence. What becomes evident is the fact that biotechnologies cannot be seen as a sort of manipulation of the mere body perpetrated by a pure subject, because biotechnologies show that the object of manipulation is always the human being as a whole.

Two Concepts of Body-Mind-Relation. Materialism vs. Phenomenology

   Even if one concedes that biotechnologies undermine the traditional dichotomist mind-body-concept, forcing us to conceive the human being as a mind-body-unity, still we do not know how to describe this unity, as both a phenomenological and a naturalistic description are possible. A strong version of the naturalistic conception can be found in the “Identity-Theory,” which stresses the identity of “mental states” with biochemical processes of the brain. (6 ) From a phenomenological point of view this naturalistic position is not very satisfying because it is not able to explain the fundamental psychic activity, i.e., “intentionality.” “Intentionality” here means the “Korrelationsapriori” of “noesis” and “noema,” i.e., that psychic acts always refer to an object. To think means always to think something. The materialistic theories are not able to do justice to the mental, because all they can do is detect a concomitance of mental phenomena and certain biochemical processes. The mental as such can’t even be detected in this model. Maybe, someday, Physiology will be able to describe exactly what biochemical processes happen, when I see something red, but this information doesn’t say anything about what it means for me to see this color. The phenomenon as such remains outside this description.
“Intentionality” and “Phenomenality,” the two aspects the naturalistic model of the mind-body-unity is not able to explain, are at the core of the phenomenology of the body, that represent a more convincing concept of mind-body-unity. Phenomenology of the body, inaugurated by Husserl and developed by Jean-Paul Sartre, (7 ) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hermann Schmitz and Bernhard Waldenfels, (8 ) does not try to reduce the mind to an epiphenomenon of the body, like the materialistic theories, but conceives the “living body” (Leib) as the way in which the human being exists. From an phenomenological point of view the body is the medium of our existence, i.e. “in-der-Welt-sein.” The body is both the medium of human acts and the place where the World appears. The description of the Body as medium of existence also clarifies how it is possible to be a body and at the same time to have a body. (9 )
   If biotechnologies have paradoxically resulted in undermining the tradition mind-body-dualism, the question arising of how to conceive the newly discovered unity of man shows the importance of the phenomenological approach to the mind-body-problem, especially because the naturalistic model of the mind-body-identity is not able to explain all aspects of this unity.

Notes

(1 ) Cf. Weiss, M. G., Gianni Vattimo. Einführung (Wien: Passagen, 2006).
(2 ) Vattimo, G., Oltre l’interpretazione (Laterza: Roma-Bari 1995), p. 116.
(3 ) Ibid., p. 107.
(4 ) Ibid., p. 34.x
(5 ) Pico della Mirandola, G., On the Dignity of Man (New York: Hackett,1989), p. 4.
(6 ) Cf. Smart, J.C.C., “Sensations and brain process” in The Philosophical Review 68 (1959),141-156; Lewis, D. K., “An argument for the identity theory” in The Journal of Philosophy 63 (1966), 17-25; Pitcher, G., Theory of Perception (Princeton 1971); Armstrong, D. M., Perception and the Physical World (London & New York: Brill Academic Publishers, 1961); Armstrong, D. M., A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London & New York: Routledge, 1993); Runggaldier, E., Was sind Handlungen? Eine philosophische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Naturalismus (1996).
(7 ) Cf. Weiss, M. G., “Die drei Körper des Jean-Paul Sartre. Zur Phänomenologie des Leibes in Das Sein und das Nichts” in Matthias Flatscher (ed.), Heidegger und die Antike. Reihe der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Phänomenologie Bd. 12. (Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 2005):182-195.
(8 ) Cf. Merlau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2002); Schmitz, H., Das System der Philosophie, Vol. I Die Gegenwart, II/1 Der Leib, vol. II/2 Der Leib im Spiegel der Kunst, vol. III/1 Der leibliche Raum, vol. III/2 Der Gefühlsraum, vol. III/3 Der Rechtsraum, vol. III/4 Das Göttliche und der Raum, vol. III/5 Die Wahrnehmung, vol. IV Die Person (Bonn: Bouvier,1964-80); Waldenfels, B., Das leibliche Selbst. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Leibes (Frankfurt: a. M. Suhrkamp, 2000); Fuchs, Th., Leib, Raum, Person. Entwurf einer phänomenologischen Anthropologie (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2000); Galimberti, U., Il Corpo (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2003); Mörth, E., “Der Leib als Subjekt der Wahrnehmung. Zur Philosophie der Leiblichkeit bei Merleau-Ponty” in List, Elisabeth & Fiala, Erwin (ed.), Leib Maschine Bild. Körperdiskurse der Moderne und Postmoderne (Wien: Passagen, 1997):75-88.
(9 ) Cf. Plessner, H., Philosophische Anthropologie (Frankfurt: a. M. Fischer, 1970).