Body Work and the Work of the Body

Journal of Moral Theology, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2013): 113-131 Body Work and the Work of the Body Jeffrey P. Bishop e cult of the body beautiful, symbolizing the sacrament of life, is celebrated everywhere with the earnest vigour that characterized rit- ual in the major religions; beauty is the last remaining manifestation of the sacred in societies that have abolished all the others. Hervé Juvin HE WORLD OF MEDICINE has always been focused on bodies—typically ailing bodies. Yet recently, say over the last century or so, medicine has gradually shied its emphasis away from the ailing body, turning its attention to the body Tin health. us, it seems that the meaning of the body has shied for contemporary medicine and that it has done so precisely because our approach to the body has changed. Put in more philosophical terms, our metaphysical assumptions about the body, that is to say our on- tologies (and even the implied theologies) of the body, come to shape the way that a culture and its medicine come to treat the body. In other words, the ethics of the body is tied to the assumed metaphysics of the body.1 is attitude toward the body is clear in the rise of certain contemporary cultural practices. In one sense, the body gets more attention than it ever has, as evident in the rise of the cosmetics industry, massage studios, exercise gyms, not to mention the attention given to the body by the medical community with the rise in cosmetic derma- tology, cosmetic dentistry, Botox injections, and cosmetic surgery. e body’s dry skin, its smelliness, its hairiness, its shape, and its health are an almost constant obsession of contemporary Western cultures. e clothing with which we decorate the body, the perfumes we create to mask its smells, and the dyes we use to hide gray hair all 1 I have elsewhere suggested that medical science and the drive of transhumanist medicine is the contemporary carrier of the kind of metaphysics that Heidegger critiques as onto-theo-logy. See J. P Bishop, “Transhumanism, Metaphysics, and the Posthuman God,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 35, no. 6 (2010). 114 Jeffrey P. Bishop demonstrate just how obsessed we are with the body, how it occupies our attention. On the extreme technological side, we find the transhumanist hope that we will exceed many of our bodily limitations, through body modification. e hope is: to reach intellectual heights as far above any current human genius as humans are above other primates; to be resistant to disease and impervious to aging; to have unlimited youth and vigor; to exercise control over their own desires, moods, and mental states; to be able to avoid feeling tired, hateful, or irritated about petty things; to have an increased capacity for pleasure, love, artistic appreciation, and se- renity; to experience novel states of consciousness that current human brains cannot access.2 e body is mere matter to be manipulated for pleasure and desire. Such statements illustrate a dualism between will and matter, a dualism more extreme than the mind-body dualism in that will is unfet- tered by the limitations of the body and the body is mere matter submitted to that will. In this world-view, the body is means to achieve our hedonic desires, and all bodies are ailing in the sense that they are limited by their materiality. According to this view, all treatment is a form of enhancement insofar as it overcomes material limitations. e dermatologist not only treats skin cancers and infec- tions, but also has techniques and creams to prevent wrinkling. e dentist not only treats tooth decay, but also whitens and straightens the teeth. Yet, with all this attention to the body, we hardly even think of— think on—the body. at is to say, the body seems to receive little attention as to the kind of thing that it is. We seem to think of the body in much the same way that we think of the bronze of the statue, the mere stuff that is molded. In this sense, we do not think the body is much of anything in itself, except insofar as it carries our meanings, meanings that are dualistically separated from the body itself. e body seems at best to be thought of as an instrument to achieve one’s psychological desires. At worst, it is mere canvas upon which one paints or parchment upon which one writes oneself into exist- ence. In health care ethics, that means that most ethical analysis and commentary focuses on things like informed consent, which is cen- tered upon the will—and not on the body—and on what one is will- ing to have done to one’s body. We find church program aer church 2 Nick Bostrom, e Transhumanist FAQ Version 2.1 (Oxford: World Transhumanist Association, 2003), 5. Body Work and the Work of the Body 115 program—many of which I have led—where the emphasis is placed on making sure that one has one’s wishes written into legal docu- ments like Living Wills or Advance Directives to Physicians or doc- uments where one names who will make decisions about one’s body in the case that one is no longer able to exert authority over that body. No one really thinks of the body per se at such times, but how it will be treated or disposed; no one is actually thinking of the body when getting one’s affairs in order. e body is just there, almost un- thought, almost without meaning; the focus is on the will and deci- sion. e body is just one of those affairs that one must get into order, like the other property that one has to dispose of in one’s will. e sort of thing that we think the human body is comes to in- form what it is that we think we can do, morally speaking, with that thing. Yet, there is little thought given to the body in contemporary bioethics and our ethical treatment of the body is thus affected. In modern bioethics, the focus is not on any integrity and meaning that the body carries as a body. Instead, we focus on the meaning that we—willful and intellectual beings that we are—have invested into the body post hoc. e body, in our contemporary understanding is just a neutral carrier of meaning, an instrument of my will or a canvas upon which I paint or create myself. ere is, then, an ontology implied in this contemporary mindset in which the body is an object of great importance both in health care and in contemporary society, and at the same time the forgotten stuff that we manipulate through various practices. I have elsewhere described what the body is for modern medicine.3 In e Anticipatory Corpse, I claim that the dead body is epis- temologically normative for contemporary medicine. at means that the body for medicine is a corpse, animated by metaphysics of efficient causation, a mechanism where dead matter is in motion by virtue of the force of its prior efficient causes. Not only is our first patient dead—literally patient to the medical student’s probing—but it was because of the rise of anatomical investigation that contemporary medicine was born. Even though we have been dissecting dead human bodies for more than 500 years without qualms, it was not until about 200 years ago that modern medicine began. At that time, there was a fundamental shi in our relationship to the body. It came to be seen as inanimate, dead material. As medicine evolved through the 19th Century, we find a shi in emphasis from anatomy to physiology—the so-called science of life. Still, death is the normative posi- 3 See Jeffrey P. Bishop, e Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power and the Care of the Dying (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2011). 116 Jeffrey P. Bishop tion of the body. Physiologists like Marie Francois Xavier Bichat could claim that, “[l]ife consists in the sum of functions by which death is resisted.”4 Or as the greatest physiologist of the 19th Century, Claude Bernard could claim, the term “life” has “no objective reality” in physiological science.5 Even the renowned Guyton’s Textbook of Medical Physiology states that “the human being is actually an au- tomaton, and the fact that we are sensing, feeling, and knowledgeable beings is part of this automatic sequence of life.”6 e dead material of the body in automatic, machine-like sequence takes precedence. In this paper—all too brief as it is to properly address the ques- tions—I shall begin to sketch the way that contemporary medical understandings of the body move into contemporary culture, rein- forcing, for those of us who live in the West, the bizarre position of the body as both the focus of our attention and yet at the same time that which is hardly even thought of. I shall do so by engaging popular culture. First, I shall engage the travelling bodies exhibitions that have become so popular in recent years. Second, I shall describe how cosmetic surgery perpetuates our cultural understandings of the body.7 If the body is just dead material, it is not different than marble that can be sculpted into whatever we desire. I shall conclude by claiming that, for the Christian, the body is not a static thing; nor is it easily a thing that can be separated in its nature from culture, as suggested by scientific reductivists, where we can derive the ought from knowing the naturalistic is.

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