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Neither Instrument nor Idol
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
The somewhat disturbing success of bioethics as a discipline is probably due to the unique nature of its subject matter. Indeed what is it that happens when scientific interest, with its particular resources and language, turns toward the study of the human body? Can this body be instrumentalized like any other object, or do the sciences have to give way here before a taboo subject? Have the sciences not, without their knowing it, taken on an unprecedented signification? The truly prodigious growth of new fields of biological knowledge has thrust biology into the public arena. Extending more than ever beyond the status of narrowly scientific knowledge, these new fields have taken on a mythological and normative character in the social imagination.
1. See the noteworthy remarks on this subject in A. Badiou's L'Ethique, essai sur la conscience du mal, Paris, 1993.
2. P. Legendre, Dieu au miroir. Etude sur l'institution des images, Paris, 1994, pp. 13ff., 261ff.
3. See M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol. I, Paris, 1984, p. 185.
4. I may be forgiven for this quick generalization which one could back up by ref erence to the history of science museums (in Paris: the Jardin des Plantes, the Palais de la Découverte, and the Cité des Sciences) or to medical handbooks.
5. D. Cerqui, "L'homme mis en pièces," in: Cahiers médico-sociaux, No. 39/1 (1995), pp. 33-37.
6. L'Inhumain, Paris, 1988, pp. 20, 64, 74-76.
7. In: Chroniques de l'Hypermonde, No. 20 (June 1995).
8. In a study on H. Jonas in which he establishes the links between Jonas's three great works (Gnostic Religion, The Phenomenon of Life, The Imperative of Responsi bility), P. Ricoeur (Lectures 2, Paris, 1992, pp. 306ff.) insists upon this relation ship between the gnosis of antiquity and scientific instrumentalization of our own time.
9. Writing in Cahiers médico-sociaux (No. 39/1 [1995], p. 7), a Calvinist author, moral philosopher D. Müller, has thus quite sensibly raised the objection that the juridical tendency to turn the body into a legal subject by overpersonalizing the subject matter, paradoxically runs the risk of instrumentalizing humans.
10. We must always resist the tendency to simplify the "genealogy" of cultures and mentalities by pointing out that the dualism is of purely Greek origin and that these kinds of categories were alien to the Hebraic world. All cultures origi nally are "blended."
11. When A. Rimbaud wrote that "les corps seront jugés," he fitted neatly into this tradition.
12. Particularly perhaps in Catholic culture. Protestant culture eulogizes the body more as a creature, as something God is to be thanked for that it exists and that it exists "to please" God. Pleasure in this sense is not subject to the penal or commercial logic of a payment for a sin or an effort. It is the experience of something that is given for nothing, something quietly absurd like divine grace. This eulogizing does not imply submission to "natural" suffering, but on the contrary is meant to reduce it.
13. Our "hedonism" does not amount to much if compared with that of Antiquity which sought pleasure in the resting or the movement of the senses - in the words of Aristip, "a sweet movement accompanied by sensation." We seek it, it seems to me, in the consolation and excitement of our imagination.
14. Antiquity ended in an explosion of therapeutic concerns: the quest for immor tality in the gnoses, the search for "pleasures" and the concerns about the body that would soon be codified in the new moral norms of Stoicism, medicine as an outgrowth of skeptical philosophies (Timon, Aenesimedes of Alexandria, Menodotus of Nicomede, Sextus Empiricus, Favorinus of Arles were all to become physicians.)
15. As it happens, all advances in the sciences and all ages of technological repre sentations of the world and of life were paralleled by the simultaneous development of a certain magic, vitalist or finalist romanticism. See, e.g., H. Bergson's L'Evolution créatrice.
16. R. Callois, L'Homme et le Sacré, Paris, 1963.
17. Or one fantacized about the transplantation of the brain into another body, as if the brain were the "subject" and its individuality were not related to a body in which it is embedded.
18. P. Legendre (note 2), p. 16.
19. This is the perspective adopted by the legal scholar J.-P Baud in Cahiers médico- sociaux (No. 39/1 [1995], pp. 62f.) who invoked Locke to criticize the entire trade in human organs and to see this ownership as a defense of the weak.
20. This is one of the main reasons why it is necessary to impose very strict time limitations on the freezing of embryoes.
21. P. Ricoeur (Temps et Récit, vol. 3, Paris, 1985, pp. 150ff., 160ff.) has shown that human history is a time of narrative and that in this narration that is transmit ted and continued from generation to generation the genealogical discourse serves to establish a bridge between life time and cosmic time, to "cosmolo gize" life time and to humanize cosmic time and to see to it that, through the narration and between individual memory and historical time, the memories of the generations overlap.
22. All interventions with the embryo or fetus that clearly have a medical purpose move, if they are to be accepted, in this zone of uncertainty as far as gene thera pies during the seventh month are concerned: they run the risk of causing an irreversible damage to the genotype, and without anyone knowing the conse quences; and thus, as far as these subjects are concerned, this would be a true deliverance.
23. Contraception, contragestion, and abortion are not of equal seriousness, even if Catholic moral teaching condemns them in the same breath.
24. I do not agree with the man who replied to his daughter when she asked him whether she could go to have her ears pierced that he had procreated his daughters with all the holes they need.
25. See for this interplay, P Ricoeur, La Métaphore vive, Paris, 1975, p. 253; idem, Temps et Récit, vol. 1, Paris, 1983, pp. 106, 108.
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