Teeth, hair, blood and organs were the order of the day last Wednesday, as the University Professor Lecture Series kick-started this year’s list of heavy-weights with a provocative talk by renowned philosopher Ian Hacking. The lecture, titled “Body Parts, Large and Small,” was held at the Koffler Centre.
Hacking, a U of T professor since 1991, presented an intellectual argument that would have pleased anyone who subscribes to the philosophy of René Descartes, who believed that mind and body were completely separate from one another. Hacking hypothesizes that technological advancements, particularly in the medical and biological sciences, are moving us to view the body as a machine.
“Most Western intellectuals now opine that Descartes’ two categories, mental substance and extended substance, were a terrible mistake. They may be forced on us again, as the result of our technological prowess,” said Hacking in his opening remarks.
Procedures like organ transplants or the transfer of genes between species are turning the body into an interchangeable factory of parts, to be added to and extracted from.
“These possibilities, only a few years old and still developing, may produce a complete change in the way in which we conceive of our relationship to our bodies.”
The selling of teeth and even hair were once seen as morally questionable-but no longer. The widespread commodification of organs and blood-a substance once thought integral to human “essence”-suggest an increased acceptance of our bodies as more mechanized than in the past.
Hacking cited the Western idea of “brain death,” meaning that one could be physically alive but mentally dead, as pure Cartesianism.
“We are content to say, ‘brain dead, so dead indeed.’ Note how Cartesian we are,” he said.
This is one of the reasons, says Hacking, that organ transplant is more controversial in Japan. The Japanese have never embraced the absolute separation of mind and body. They consider death as a slow process that ends only when the body begins to decompose. The idea of “brain death” is simply foreign. Hacking also raised other cultural differences, such as the Japanese gift-giving traditions, which prohibit organ donation outside the gift-circle.
With advances in biotechnology, genes (“small body parts”) are also seen as “other,” and can be transferred between fish and vegetable, tree and bacteria. “The inter-species transfer of large body parts has not worked very well. But the inter-kingdom transfer of small body parts is going on all the time in laboratories around the world,” he said.
And what is classified as “other” can be commodified. Take for example Iceland. Not long ago, the Icelandic government put the genetic information of Icelanders up for lease, eventually settling on an American pharmaceutical firm. The lack of popular resistance to-in fact widespread approval of-gene leasing in Iceland shows how far removed some body parts have become.
But what of the body-to-body relationships, asked one audience member. Does physical touching between two lovers challenge the notion of body as machine? Hacking paced the platform, deep in thought.
“I believe that’s a very idealized [vision] of our sex lives,” he said, to laughter. Hacking acknowledged the question’s merit, but added that sexuality belongs to a different realm from the technological one he was talking about.
“And what of zombies?” asked an elderly gentlemen, apparently without sarcasm. Where do zombies fit into the other half of the equation (all body no mind)? “Zombies are not part of our technological world,” answered Hacking, appearing a little flustered.
Cartesian dualism has fallen out of favour in recent years, but Hacking is confident it will come back. He ended the lecture with, “Here’s an unpopular inference: With the ongoing advances in technology, Cartesianism is bound to win in the end.”
