Annabelle de St. Maurice“We are obsessed by good health,” said Ian Hacking at Wednesday’s Assembly Series lecture, later pointing to the ability of the wealthy to alter the bodies on the large scale, as with organs and limbs, to the small, as with genes.
The philosopher, author, and professor delivered a lecture titled “Body Parts: Large and Small,” raising numerous rhetorical questions regarding medical philosophies, from transplantation to blood transfusions.
Hacking, perhaps best known for his 1990 book “The Taming of Chance” or 2000’s “The Social Construction of What,” has authored several non-fiction works on probability, logic, and the philosophies of mental illnesses and science. He currently holds joint teaching positions at the University of Toronto and Coll‚ge de France.
Addressing the means by which technology has expanded and clouded our views of the body, Hacking questioned organ transplantations, purchases of body parts, sex-change operations, sperm donations, and the concept of brain death. In a global context, Hacking said, such notions vary greatly.
In Japan, for example, citizens are wary of organ donations because they shun the concept of gift-giving to strangers, Hacking said. He added that they also don’t understand the Western notion of brain death, believing instead that death is simply the point when the body completely ceases to function. In Iraq, Hacking continued, the poor sell organs to the rich.
With these debates in place, Hacking raised similarly controversial notions in our own Western society, touching on cloning among other topics, stating of such physical manipulations, “Surgeons don’t like to have their work called engineering, but they have become [great engineers].”
“We imagine that engineers will be able to create the person who, in growing him, develops a character different from what it would have had if there had been no intervention,” said Hacking of genetic engineering. “Imagine a different soul growing into existence.” He also noted some of the wilder sides of body mutation, including optional limb amputation and sex change operations.
In his address, Hacking offered few answers to the many questions that he raised, and instead simply presented a wealth of information about such medical-philosophical debates. He advised further research into the field and into the notion of the Cartesian body.
“[The body’s] social role evolves all the time,” said Hacking as he closed his lecture. “We are experiencing a body revolution, of which the genetic revolution is only a part.[We are experiencing] a change in our relationships to our bodies as well as our energy processes.”