Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak
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ceases when soul departs.”163 With ancient physicians the nervous system and the psyche met together and become to a unified, central organ within the human organism. Mapping the latter, they determined organs with life-supporting roles. The liver, pulmonary system, and “the heart as the centre of the blood system and the connection between the heart and the pulse-beats”164 were considered as principal organs. Charged with six hundred vivisections and embryosections enumerated by Celsius and condemned by Tertulian, Herophilus contributed to the organic body definition as an integral, hierarchically organized, living totality.
The body’s first organizational principle was considered to be incorporated in two central organs, namely the heart and brain, and called hegemonicon: “One says the heart, another the meninges, and one that the brain contains the hegemonikon of the soul.”165 “The hegemonikon was therefore regarded as not being dependent on a single or fixed location,”166 but flexible. Interestingly, its proponents were divided in two parties: “those who maintained that the hegemonikon was found in the head (encephalocentrists) and those who argued that it was located in the heart or its immediate vasculature (cardiocentrists). Apart from Galen, on the encephalocentric side can be placed, among others, Ptolemy, Herophilus and Erasistratus, Plato (…) and certain of the Presocratics.”167
Sappho was the pioneer of the soma organikon’s wholeness, complexity, and integrity. She found the archaic, preorganic concept of sṓma as “body in pieces”168 ←54 | 55→inappropriate. Sappho’s body concept assumes interconnections between organs as parts of an organism and morphemes as parts of a body. She was one of the first to recognize the continuity between the external and internal, the somatic and mental (experiential, emotional and intellectual) aspects of organic life. Distinguishing these aspects, a beholder’s perception must not destroy the wholeness as it would be typical to monism and dualism. In a living organic being, there is “a knot of being” (der Knoten des Seins), which subverts dualism (zerhaut den Dualismus). Materialism and idealism attempt to untie the knot by pulling it to their respective sides – however, “in vain.” According to Jonas’ holistic ontology of organism “part of an organic body exists only in the whole as a part of the whole (…) Only as parts of the functioning whole do they remain what they are.”169
3. Organic Identity and Individuality
To Jonas, an organism as “the identity that constitutes itself” shows “the ceaseless creativity of self-continuation.” It is “a constant challenge to mechanical nature,”170 “open to interference, in its delicate balance of functions, which is effective only as a whole, [it is] vulnerable, and mortally so in its centre.”171 Thus “the existence of the organic individual is that of function and not of substance.”172 Jonas is convinced an individual organism maintains itself: and “in this polarity of self and world, of internal and external (…) the basic situation of freedom with all its daring and distress is potentially complete.”173
The “initially problematical nature of life”174 is that of every single living organism. Beyond its unique and finite existence, organic life is going to strive for immortality, however, not the immortality of ancient metaphysics. Metaphysical ←55 | 56→immortality “is here replaced by the immortality of the germ-plasm as a continuous existence in itself.”175
What makes the organism an individual? It is not only its unique phenotype, but its self-maintenance, internal homeostasis, intentionality, functionality, and ecological openness, i.e., an intelligent interplay with the environment, and “inwardness.” The latter represents “the outward” constantly interacting with it or using its resources. According to Jonas, that activity is “one form of the self-transcendence of organic being. (…) The transcendence, the being a self by going beyond the self, is ever more elaborate and opens up new horizons as we proceed to the higher forms, and the horizons are always horizons of transcendence, not sticking to the mere empty self-identity of a material body (…) Organic individuality and organic identity are themselves teleological facts (…) Therefore, process character, transcendence, identity by means of change, goal-directedness in terms of teleological structure of being are all one and inseparable in the ontology of the living thing.”176 Jonas’ philosophical biology radically raises the value or even the dignity of living organisms, which originates from their intrinsic teleology (whereas it is obvious to him that the molecular particles of brute matter do not show any). “For the complex organic parts (e.g., cells in a multi-cellular organism) (…) the fact is that not only their membership but their existence itself is organic, i.e. (…) a product of the teleology of the whole, which therefore cannot be derived from theirs.”177 Jonas’ reassessment of a living organism’s intrinsic value occurs on a definitory and descriptive 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