Abstract
This paper investigates the question of what an organ is from a phenomenological perspective. Proceeding from the phenomenology of being-in-the-world developed by Heidegger in Being and Time and subsequent works, it compares the being of the organ with the being of the tool. It attempts to display similarities and differences between the embodied nature of the organs and the way tools of the world are handled. It explicates the way tools belong to the totalities of things of the world that are ready to use and the way organs belong to the totality of a bodily being able to be in this very world. In so doing, the paper argues that while the organ is in some respects similar to a bodily tool, this tool is nonetheless different from the tools of the world in being tied to the organism as a whole, which offers the founding ground of the being of the person. However, from a phenomenological point of view, the line between organs and tools cannot simply be drawn by determining what is inside and outside the physiological borders of the organism. We have, from the beginning of history, integrated technological devices (tools) in our being-in-the-world in ways that make them parts of ourselves rather than parts of the world (more organ- than tool-like), and also, more recently, have started to make our organs more tool-like by visualising, moving, manipulating, and controlling them through medical technology. In this paper, Heidegger’s analysis of organ, tool, and world-making is confronted with this development brought about by contemporary medical technology. It is argued that this development has, to a large extent, changed the phenomenology of the organ in making our bodies more similar to machines with parts that have certain functions and that can be exchanged. This development harbours the threat of instrumentalising our bodily being but also the possibility of curing or alleviating suffering brought about by diseases which disturb and destroy the normal functioning of our organs.
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Notes
See Straus [1].
See Tilney [4].
See Hayles [5].
See Waldby and Mitchell [6].
Regarding the phenomenology of inner organs, see Leder [9]. Leder calls the recession of the body in healthy life, versus the making themselves known of the organs in illness, the disappearance of the body and the dys-appearance of the body.
Please note that the issue of brain transplantation is also different from other organ transplantation scenarios in that the person offering her brain for transplantation becomes a receiver and not a donor of organs. To be brain transplanted would mean to be given a whole new body (except for the brain). How this new body might look and how it would feel to the receiver are fascinating topics for which we presently lack the relevant empirical evidence with which to consider its phenomenology.
This is analysed by Held [10].
As a matter of fact, Heidegger did not always believe the body to be contingent to the world-opening of Dasein. In 1924, three years before the publication of Being and Time, in his lecture course on The Fundamental Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, he addresses the ways of the body in a more fundamental manner [11, pp. 191–208]. Paragraph 18 about pathos (feeling) in this lecture course is clearly the beginning of the two famous paragraphs 30 and 40 in Being and Time about fear and anxiety (this is evident not only from the content of the texts but also from the footnote on page 140 in the latter work). In his interpretations of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, and De Anima, Heidegger not only says that human being is always attuned in the manner of a being-together-in-the-world, which is not to be captured by any psychology that reduces feelings to qualities of a subject, but he does this in a way that stresses the central importance of our embodiment for how this attunement is structured. We do not just happen to have bodies, which is an impression you might sometimes get in reading Being and Time; our attunement is anchored in our bodily being, which is ‘co-constitutive’ (‘mitspricht’) in the genesis of our attunement [11, p. 203].
See here the excellent book by Gallagher [12].
For a substantial and critical analysis of Heidegger’s claims regarding animality, see Calarco [14].
Nancy explores this phenomenology of receiving an organ in [19].
Foucalt offers interesting analyses of the instrumentalising forces of neoliberalism in fusion with the ones of modern medicine; see Lemke [20].
See Scheper-Hughes [21].
See Gordijn and Chadwick [22].
See Nancy [19].
If we were to apply the ethical language of Heidegger, we could say that organ transplantation offers new opportunities for a shared authenticity in being-towards-death. Critchley and Schürmann [23] offer an interesting (and critical) reinterpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of authentic being-towards-death in this regard. For a phenomenological analysis of the dilemmas of transplantation ethics considering the ontology of the organ in relationship to the concepts of gift, resource, and commodity; see Svenaeus [24]. For a Heideggerian approach to the related thematics of embryo research, see Svenaeus [25].
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Svenaeus, F. What is an organ? Heidegger and the phenomenology of organ transplantation. Theor Med Bioeth 31, 179–196 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-010-9144-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-010-9144-y