To Exist is to Differ, Part Two

To Exist is to Differ

Difference as a Place of Study

Part Two


"I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences."
Isabel Allende

A cursory look over my more politically- or socially-minded posts in the last few years indicates how obsessed I am with a proper attitude toward difference, even if I was not aware that this was a theme in my writing. In what is easily my most popular post of all time, "Sexy Bodies, Disabled Bodies," I introduce my interest in atypical anatomy, though at this time I was not aware of that term (which is Alice Dreger's). However, it is with my ill-fated (because unfinished) series on The Boundaries of Self that I insist that any definition of "body" or "self" must fully account for atypical anatomies without simply designating them "exceptions." The way I run with McCloud's Four Campfires, which is really a kind of structuralism, is to make it about difference rather than sameness. My most recent concern with ethics has been about meta-ethics, the ethics of addressing differences in ethical beliefs. When I talk about political axes (here and here), I get anxious about categories (left v. right) that ignore other ways organizing political belief and activity. I defend the existence of many denominations insofar as they address differences in congregants' needs. I consider myself a heretic in most communities (heretic: a person who has beliefs unorthodox to the community of which zhe insists zhe is a part). Also, if you were to pay much attention to what I say in the comment sections of those blogs in which I participate--Unequally Yoked, Experimental Theology, Elizabeth Esther--you'd probably notice that many of my contributions, and most of my arguments, involve me saying that someone or another is over-generalizing. What may have started out as simple contrarianism during my years as a teenager--when my Grade 9 English teacher said that a first-person past-tense narrator must always survive the story, I immediately wrote and submitted a short story in which the first-person past-tense narrator dies--has become for me a political and social commitment to the appreciation of difference.

I think my academic career has played a role in this, which I outlined in my previous post, as has my extra-curricular reading of post-modernists and continental philosophers. You could also attribute this, maybe (but only maybe), to my habit of hopping between Protestant churches, or my taste for speculative fiction, or my interest in psychology, or my habit of imagining what it would be like to be a non-human animal. (For instance, did you know that the Common Octopus has semi-autonomous limbs? The octopus's central nervous system instructs a limb to complete a particular task, but the limb works out how to achieve the task using its own local nerve cluster. While humans have something like this going on with our ganglia, octopedes' limbs actually do some of their own problem-solving, which is far more extensive than what our ganglia do. It would be fascinating to experience semi-autonomy of one's limbs.)

OK. So what do I mean by "a proper attitude toward difference"?

1. Epistemology. I don't fully know. I have only recently figured out, after all, that this has been a general issue in my thinking. I am also phobic of completion, or certainty, in my personal philosophy, so even if I had been thinking about this for years I doubt that I'd have come to any kind of conclusion.

2. Axiology. What I don't mean is some form of total ethical relativism. I don't think that different ways of doing things are all equally valid. I would say that there are multiple ways of doing things that are just as good, but that doesn't mean that all things are equal. Some ways of doing things are very bad. It's just that there isn't a single best way of doing things. (You might think of this as a few local optima, but none of those local optima are a global optima.) So while I'm not an ethical relativist, nor a metaphysical relativist, I could maybe called a weak cultural relativist.

3. Axiology. Of course there are certain kinds of difference which I would condemn. For instance, certain kinds of criminal behaviour are unacceptable deviations from typical behaviour. I wouldn't celebrate difference without qualification. But my condemnation is based on ethical violations; whether or not the behaviour is different--or, in a more loaded term, deviant--from other people's behaviour is irrelevant to my condemnation. By the same token, I am willing to criticize normative behaviour (for instance, capitalist materialism).

4. Metaphysics, Axiology. What I am willing to say is that a lot of differences aren't comprehensible in terms of good/bad, or good/better/best. Bodies, for instances, are never wrong; no body is better at being a body than another. Some bodies are in more pain than others, of course, and that might well be a result of differences in those bodies. Social conditions make certain bodies more comfortable than others. But there is no Platonic form of "body" from which any given body deviates. No body is more typical of body-ness than another body. Any claim you make about bodies ought to apply equally to all bodies; if it does not, your claim is false (or at least applies only to particular bodies, but that distinction ought to be clear and appropriate). A failure to account for atypical bodies, in fact, is easily the biggest reason why a lot of atypical bodies are uncomfortable to have; the body itself is often not uncomfortable (cf. Dreger's One of Us).

5. Axiology. I would also be willing to say that the failure to account for atypical bodies, or atypical psychology (or even typical but non-normative psychology, like introversion), is endemic to Western philosophy, politics, art...really just Western culture generally. It is also probably a problem in lots of non-Western cultures, too, but I can only speak about Western culture with any reliability. I opened this post with the Isabel Allende quote because it is an example of a common attitude that seems to be in support of inclusion but must result in a failure to understand, and thus to include, people who are different from me. Focusing on similarity at the expense of difference is not a moral good, but so many people seem to think it is a moral good.

6. Epistemology. In the end, I would say that, as with texts, to exist is to differ. Humans have a lot of similarities, yes, but we are also idiosyncratic. Whether those idiosyncrasies are for good or ill I cannot say, but any theory or program or attitude that fails to account for those differences cannot really explain human behaviour, human need, or human dignity. Such an epistemological failure cannot help but produce metaphysical and axiological failures as well. This, for me, is the bedrock of a proper attitude toward difference. (So, with apologies to Eve Tushnet, I actually am a special snowflake, and so are you.)

It's important to note that I have other commitments than just this respect for differences, and some of these commitments might trump the commitment to difference, but ultimately I don't think I can explain and understand my own ideas without at least addressing the above.

(tl;dr: Just as the differences between texts must be addressed in any explanation of those texts, so too must the differences between people be addressed by any account of human behaviour; failure to do so results in other failures, usually ethical or political ones; these failures are really common in our culture; there are a lot of different kinds of difference and it turns out that I talk about them a lot.)

When the Model Doesn't Exist

or, Why Should We Find the Invisible Book of Invisibility?

Eve Tushnet just wrote a wonderful post comparing natural law theology and equality feminism (contra choice feminism), indicating that both rely on an ideal which will never directly encounter.

She describes natural law theology as an ethics based on an ideal body:

One cheap but useful definition of natural law is that it’s the belief that there is a universal human nature which is knowable by reason (and here we fight about what we mean by “reason,” but ignore that for now), and so our desires can be rightly ordered based on what would express and support this nature, even though we have never seen this nature instantiated anywhere in our lives or history, ever. You can see why this is both a tempting place to ground your ethics, and a tough sell to people who don’t agree!

After some discussion of the disagreement between choice and equality feminisms, she describes the latter as being based on an ideal (but nonexistent) society:

This is a vision of how the world should be–how men and women would be “if we had equality”–which we have never, ever actually seen. There are AFAIK literally no societies in which men and women make interchangeable choices around questions of sex, work, and family; there are societies with more than two genders but not less. It’s not a statement about how great the Peopleihaventheardof are, and how we should emulate them. It’s a statement about how men and women inherently are, according to their universal, precultural nature.

Tushnet goes on to argue that something like natural law is often used to explain that universal nature.

I generally get excited about this kind of theoretical work, making connections between seemingly unrelated lines of inquiry. This is particular caught my interest, though, because I find natural law theology incomprehensible and irresponsible, but the kind of vision given by equality feminism is one that I find very attractive. As much as I dismiss many telos-sightings as too blurry to be plausible, I am very guilty of positing ideal societies and offering them as a collective goal, despite the absence of any historical precedent. (Maybe this is why appealing to a lost Golden Age is popular; you can at least pretend to have a historical model.)

Human nature in its natural habitat!

In the end I'm not sure the comparison between natural law theology and equality feminism holds, however. I react negatively to natural law theology because it seems to make a mockery of the actual diversity of people's bodies and minds, and could very well require that people with notably atypical bodies or atypical psychologies act in ways that are not safe, possible, or sometimes even comprehensible given their bodily or mental situation. The problem here is that acting towards a counter-factual will never produce that counter-factual. No matter how much I act as if I were not near-sighted, or possessed of bad knees, or whatnot, I will never actually achieve such a state (and here I'm taking as given that there is a "right" eye strength, or a "right" way to have knees, or a "right" way to have a mind, for that matter, which I don't actually think is true). Of course there are particular things (mental illness, broken bones) which, in order to achieve a desired state, require you to act differently than you would if you were in that desired state. (So, in order for your leg to heal, you need to wear a cast and let it rest, etc.) But there are other cases in which the goal is merely surviving your current state, not achieving a desired one, because it is entirely unclear that the desired one will ever be possible (for instance, there is no way to make an autistic person non-autistic).

The reason the comparison doesn't hold is that equality feminism is talking about behaviour, not embodiment; as far as we can tell, all of its concerns are like broken legs and not like missing legs. They can all be brought toward the ideal, whether by acting as though the counter-factual were true or acting according to the current state of things. Either way, the primary focus is that the unseen-ideal will eventually be achieved, will eventually be see-able, which can not be said of natural law theology. Finding the Invisible Book of Invisibility is difficult to do, why bother if it is too invisible to read anyway?

Of course, I might be off topic slightly; Tushnet was describing the source of our ideal, not so much the desirability of either philosophy. Is equality feminism's ideal society actually based on a universal, precultural nature? I am not sure. I don't think that's the only option available. You could claim that there is a biological equality of some kind between men and women that is, therefore, empirically measurable; or you repudiate all claims that men and women are unequal (through, for instance, deconstruction) and come to the conclusion that we must act as though men and women are equal, even in absence of positive evidence of that fact. But this question is interesting to me not least because I find Platonism to be so absurd that I always find it shocking to see its face, or the illusion of its face, in my own thought.

Still, I want to draw a line between Platonism and Christian ideas of becoming Christ-like and ushering in the Kingdom of God. While the Christian ideas can be understood in Platonic terms, they needn't be; Platonism implies that the telos of a thing inheres in the thing itself, while trying to become like Christ, or trying to bring in the Kingdom, only requires that we can observe a difference between is and ought, and the movement from one to the other is possible. It does not need the mechanic of a thing's nature to operate. And I am not abashed to say that one reason I find equality feminism so attractive is that it follows the narrative of Kingdom-building.

(As a final caveat: I find choice feminism attractive as well. If I were a real activist, I would probably try to switch strategically between them in ultimate service of something like equality-feminism. But then, if I were a real activist I would be better educated in these questions, too.)

The Problem of the Augmented Body

or, What is our body? part 3

I return to this series somewhat more hesitant about it than when I began. Much of the reason there has been such a gap between instalments is that I realized I had little to say. Or, alternately, that what I had to say was not very well considered. In my discipline, literary analysis, there is a lot of discussion of bodies; how we relate to them, how they are represented, how they interact, and what they are. So when I say that I know nothing much about them, I do so in a field in which theorizing about bodies is taken very seriously and is done a great deal. Perhaps this in part explains my trepidation to proceed.

But proceed I will, because I still feel as though I can say something that will be new at least to some people, maybe even ones that will read my blog (especially if Leah continues giving it publicity). What I can perhaps offer is a sense of how the more postmodern, English department-style of thinking about things can impact such a question. I think I’d just like to bracket this post off as somewhat provisional, subject to revision. Or, even better, maybe we should think of it as a starting point for further inquiry.

And don’t worry. I will have a lot more to say, with more confidence, later in the post, once we move away from this issue of raw bodies.

Let’s catch up on the ground we’ve covered here. In my first post I considered a very biological, organic, cellular, genetic sense of body: bodies are made of continuous living tissue, distinct from one another based on disconnect. I used a number of case studies to indicate how this conception must fail. Continuous living tissue is not sufficient to any definition of a body, and I mean this in more than one sense: that which defines one body from another is not continuous living tissue. But I have not ruled out that it might be necessary. That is, it might be one component of a more complex picture.

In my second post I considered an instrumental sense of body: my body is that which I have motor control over. I used a number of case studies to indicate that this cannot be a necessary definition of body. There are things I do not have motor control over (my teeth, my heart) which are my body. I want to clarify, though, that I do not mean to say that instrumentality is not sufficient to being part of my body: perhaps motor control over something is enough to make it my body.

It cannot be the case that continuous living tissue is necessary but not sufficient and motor control is sufficient but not necessary because there is at least one instance in which people have motor control over an object but do not have a continuous living tissue connection. That instance is possession of a prosthetic limb. (Which is the issue that sparked the whole controversy over at Unequally Yoked.)

So let’s get some examples. We have limbs which replace typical human appendages and have some motor function determined by synapses. This is a fairly commonplace example and is fairly easily conceived. While you might from the outset disagree, I think most of us could at least understand why a person with a prosthetic might consider it part of his or her body: it replaces a part of the body which is formerly there. If you replace a computer component with a new one, that new one is now part of the computer. If you replace a body component with another one, we could analogously consider it part of the body. This breaks down somewhat when you realize that prosthetics are not necessarily replacements: they are sometimes function where a person did not already have a limb or they sometimes offer functions which the “original” limb did not have. However, I think it’s a good place to start thinking about prosthetics. We could also say that the addition of a new periphery becomes part of the computer when added even if it does not replace anything that formerly existed there. If you would consider a transplanted heart as now part of the new owner’s body, I think I can expect the onus to be on you to explain how a non-organic heart would be any different. (If you wouldn’t consider the transplanted heart to be part of the new owner’s body, I would like to hear you explain why. The idea is alien to me.)

Let’s move in another direction for a moment. Let’s consider the Emotiv EPOC, a console device which allows you to play the video game simply with your mind. You wear a device on your head and, after a calibration process, it lets you move characters around on the screen with your thoughts. It does this by reading your brain waves. I must admit that I am personally less comfortable taking the characters on the screen to be part of my body. I must also admit that I would be less comfortable taking distant objects also moved only by synapse/circuitry to be part of my own body. To suggest that a remote control car is “me” because I can move it with my mind seems deeply problematic. That such a situation isn’t unimaginable given the EPOC indicates that we must take it seriously.
(And to forestall any complaints that this is not the same as a prosthetic, I’ll point out that some prosthetics operate on this technology and not through nerve-circuit interface.)

The point I see being appropriate here is that the Emotiv is not part of my body because I do not identify with it. That is, I specifically disagree with the claim that identification is not relevant to the conversation. Certainly it is not sufficient: no matter how badly I may identify with your body, that does not mean it is part of my body. But I think it is a component of what is going on. The physical attachment of a prosthetic encourages the owner to define it as part of her body; even when removed, in fact, it may still be considered part of her body due to her identification with it over time. Motor control also plays a role in this, of course; sensory feedback would play even more, and is perhaps part of why the EPOC, lacking as it does in tactile response, does not have the same identification.

But I am merely asserting that identification is relevant. I cannot, actually, back that up, but for two points which might be suggestive. The first is that many people with prosthetics say that those prosthetics are part of their body. While this doesn’t prove anything, I want to point out that we as a society have done a pretty bad job of listening seriously to minority groups. Once we do start listening, we often learn a surprising number of things from them. So maybe listening would be a good idea in this case; to simply say that they are wrong because they go against our own predetermined ideas is not a good idea politically, rhetorically, or epistemologically. The second point is also the destination of this post:

My opinion, as it stands and for whatever it’s worth, is that there is no way of determining, definitively, what a body is or who it belongs to. What we have instead are a number of competing ideas that almost work but that always, somewhere, break down. In the previous instalment I said that if we want a universal definition, it must apply to all bodies. Since I do not think we can find a definition that does apply to all bodies, then we cannot have a universal definition. I want to suggest, in fact, that we not only have no way of writing such a definition, but that the category of a discrete body might not exist outside of our idea of it anyway. There are not discrete bodies.

However, it is important that we act as if there are. (Imagine what rape would look like in a society which did not recognize discrete bodies.) But this doesn’t mean that we pick a definition of body and stick to it regardless of the consequences. Instead I suggest we ride definitions as far as they go until they break down. When they break down, we look around, see what the issue is, and draft a new definition that we can use until it stops working. What becomes crucial, then, is to listen very closely to what the people with those exceptional bodies are saying, because they’re the ones who have the best insight into what a body is in that situation. (And so I circle back to my first suggestion.)

So, to be clear: I would say that if people with prosthetics define body such that that prosthetic is part of their body, then it is part of their body. However, how we define bodies is not so simple because it must take into account the society we live in. I will address this a forthcoming section. In the meantime, I will spend a few instalments dealing with the opposite half of the dualist equation: the mind.

Series Index

Catch-Up

Looking through my archive, I see that I have not given you all an update of my life since 25 February. My apologies; I assure you that I have been quite busy. If you take a look at that last 7 Quick Takes, you'll see that I bought some journals, which means that I actually have a record of what happened in the meantime. Fancy that. Let's dive in.

1. I have become a sidesperson and a liturgical assistant-in-training at my church. I am a member of the church for real. In the instance of the latter, I get to wear an alb again. Regular readers will know that this pleases me. What's even more exciting is that my church does not have albs big enough for me, so I get to wear the priest's spare clergy alb. One of the unexpected privileges of being a liturgical assistant-in-training is that I am sometimes asked to serve the priest the Eucharist.

2. I gave up tea for Lent. It was difficult but I survived. I also planned to write a sonnet each week; I only got two written. Not so good. If you want to see someone who succeeded at a more daunting sonnet Lenten devotion, go visit Miss Lazarus' site.

3. I picked up a new webcomic, Order of the Stick. I'm no table-top RPG player but I still find it delightful. Genre-savviness makes me swoon, what can I say?

4. I went to a Contemplative Prayer service or two in the elapsed time. In the most interesting I was introduced to the Anglican Rosary. I am a fan; I wish I had one. I am not sure what makes it different from a Catholic Rosary.

5. For class I have read a number of interesting works, some new to me and some familiar: "Death and the Compass" by Borges, The Tempest by Shakespeare (as well as other things by him, but that's in my opinion the most interesting of them), Waiting for Godot by Beckett, a host of stuff on reported speech, including an article by one Wooffitt on mediums reporting (supposedly) the speech of spirits.

6. I have officially (for myself, at least) moved towards Universalism. I'm aware that it's not fully worked out, but I consider the problems with Arminianism and Calvinism more insurmountable than those of Universalism. This move was entirely instigated by the series over at Dr. Richard Beck's blog.

7. I have started running. Twice a week, that is, in the morning, with a friend of mine. Athleticism is such a strange concept for me yet I've fallen into this routine easily enough. The trick is, will I continue over the summer?

8. I saw a Green College production of The Importance of Being Earnest. If you can believe it, I'd never seen nor read it before. I quite enjoyed it.

9. I also attended the EndNotes conference, the UBC English Department annual graduate conference. This year's theme was "Beyond the Book." I heard friends and colleagues give papers on how the Twilight franchise has impacted the community of Forks, Washington; how Canadian history and archive is explored in the comics of Seth; how V's mask relates to reader identification and the genre conventions of melodrama (theatre) in V for Vendetta (the graphic novel); how narrative pornography has begun to rise with Pirates and what this has to do with the potential for feminist pornography (that one was a bit controversial, you can imagine); how Girl Talk enacts the Death of the Author; and how intertextuality and copyright operate in the Arthurian legend of Swamp Thing #87, in which Merlin draws Swamp Thing back in time to Camelot to defend the kingdom against Mordred. It was an exultation of grad student nerdiness and I loved it.

10. I wrote two papers. One concerns a particular type of self-reporting speech which I examine in detail in order to learn more about self-reporting. The other concerns the constitution and perversion of the ideal male military body through its parodic inversion in the Coventry and Gloucestershire muster scenes of 1 and 2 Henry IV respectively. (Those are Shakespeare plays, in case you are not fully read up on your early modern drama.) The process of researching, writing, and editing was, of course, harrowing.

11. Immediately after submitting my papers I graded about 50 student essays (each of my 25 students had to write two essays for their final exam, as well as do an identify-and-state-the-significance-of section) and calibrate my final grades for submission. I did this perforce over the Easter weekend, which I found quite distasteful. During this process, I crashed a little bit.

12. For these essays, I read papers and books on the early modern English constitution of masculinty and on the dynamics of everyday speech. For the former, may I suggest Gary Spear's article "Shakespeare's "Manly" Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida" and Patricia Cahill's Unto the Breach; for the latter, may I recommend Goffman's Forms of Talk. (His Frame Analysis is also interesting and was written earlier, so perhaps you should skim it first. Both are tomes.)

13. I have given substantial thought to some things other than my papers during this time, among which has been what friendship is and what sorts of requirements come with it. Altruism has always been important to me but certain interpersonal issues seem different when framed by general ideas of altruism than when framed in a context of friendship. As I make and solidify new friendships here in a new city, these question gain some immediacy.

14. Some time in the midst of the above, I finished One of Us, which I wrote on before. I'd like to share another excerpt, one I thought worthy of copying out in my journal: "But what if we understood such twins as people who are no more broken than anyone else? What if we stopped thinking of biological anomalies as the sworn enemies of humanity, and started recognizing their full social nature, perhaps even their social potential? In the long run, we can do more than try to guarantee every child a 'normal' body. We can try to guarantee a just world. If you take seriously what conjoined people have said about their bodies and their lives, you realize they are still experiencing what Mary Wollstonecraft felt in the late eighteenth century: 'It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.' Let us now stop referring to children who undergo massive normalizations as 'real fighters,' and start recognizing that we are the ones who construct what they are fighting against." [emphasis mine]

Now I'm free; I'm very tired at the moment, but I'm loose in the world again. And, who'da thunk it, but it's spring! (Actually, it's been spring here for months now. Vancouver is like that.)

The Problem of the Obedient Body

or, What is our body?, part 2

If what does and does not count as part of my body is not determined by organic attachment (or at least not entirely), then is it possible that obedience does determine it? That is, can we say that whatever obeys our mental commands is part of our body? This is the sort of reasoning Leah at Unequally Yoked suggests, along with some commenters. Explaining why she thinks a prosthetic counts as a part of one's body, she says, "It's attached to me and serves my will." Presumably, then "regular" body parts are governed by the same principle: that which is obeys your will is part of your body. It is not this particular claim that I'm interested in refuting, but a similar one. That is, that our body is that which obeys our will. Perhaps (I'm not yet conceding this point) whatever we can command is part of our body, but I am going to suggest that not all of our body is especially obedient. In the course of this post, I am going to suggest that obedience can only be part of the story because our bodies have a knack for disobedience.

First I want to notice briefly that our bodies have physical limits. We cannot, for instance, bend our elbows beyond a certain angle no matter how hard we will it. We cannot bend where we do not have joints. We cannot expect our eyes to smell or our noses to hear. We can only will our body parts to perform the functions they can perform. This seems obvious and does not seem to me to suggest that the body is disobedient. One could easily enough stipulate that we're only refering to a body's normal functioning. (I am using "normal" deliberately because I plan to indicate later how big of a problem normativity is in this question.) Again, I am going to use a list to indicate ways in which bodies are disobedient.

1. Paralysis Bodies sometimes do not act when willed to act; they are paralyzed. This can be permanent or temporary, caused by nervous tissue damage, psychoactive chemicals, or psychosomatic disorders. Whatever the details, sometimes our bodies, even when physically capable of the action we will, do not move. If obedience alone determined what counted as our body, would we then be required to say that a paraplegic person's lower torso is no longer part of their body? This seems to me to be a highly problematic move.

2. Conjoined Twins and "Two Headed" Snakes You may recall that last time I worried that, by the definition of organic attachment, conjoined twins could not distinguish their bodies when it seemed clear that they should be able to. In this post I want to suggest instances in which conjoined twins actually cannot distinguish between their bodies. Since I do not know of any human twins to whom this applies, I will refer to snakes. (Note on phrasing: it is typical to refer to human conjoined twins as plural people but to refer to animal conjoined twins as a single two-headed organism. This seems an arbitrary distinction to me. Insofar as animals have consciousnesses, two conjoined animals would have separate consciousnesses and therefore be distinct animals. So I am continuing to use the phrase "conjoined twins" rather than "two-headed snakes" to emphasis that these are two snakes sharing a body, not one snake with two heads.)

If you watch the video, you should be able to see that the two snakes here share (or, perhaps more accurately, compete for) control over their body. Both control the body; put differently, the body is obedient to both snakes, except when they compete. In this instance I think it would be quite fair to suggest that at least some of their body is shared. That is, it is part of the left snake's body and part of the right snake's body. However, obedience as an indicator of being part of a body is complicated by the possibility that your body could obey another. Further, it makes more complicated the idea of what a "body" is. The left snake's head is not part of the right snake's body, I shouldn't think. But both of these are attached to the parts of the body which the share. Conceptualizing the body as some sort of concrete "thing" is therefore pretty problematic. That human conjoined twins have never been reported to share motor control does not, to my knowledge, mean it could never happen. Further, conjoined twins do sometimes share tactile perception. (Abigail and Brittany Hensel, I have heard, can both feel touch on the skin between their spines. Do their bodies not just connect but overlap in this instance?) And what of internal organs that "obey" signals from both brains? Not conscious willing, no, but signals which help moderate chemical production in digestive and reproductive organs. This does occur in human conjoined twins, and suggests that we cannot simply write of these problems as ones belonging exclusively to conjoined animals.

Perhaps someone at this point will object that these are not normal bodies with normal functioning. There are two problems with this objection. The first is that if we want a universal definition of what constitutes a body, it needs to account for ALL bodies. The second is that we will have trouble defining what a normal body is. "Normal" is a problematic word, in the first place, because it has a normative element: that is, normal is how things should be. And just switching for "typical" isn't going to work. If we say that we're only talking about "typical" bodies and then define bodies as we are used to them, we're still saying that these atypical bodies are somehow uncategorizable according to the rules we've set up, recreating a standard by which bodies are considered "typical" or "atypical", with these terms functioning identically to "normal" and "abnormal." But if you remain unconvinced, I have two parallel examples remaining which apply to all bodies.

3. Inert body parts Some of our body parts do not obey our will. I was somewhat interested that in Leah's post on transhumanism she suggested that our teeth obey our will. Do they really? I haven't ever commanded my teeth to do anything at all. I don't think they would do anything if I did command them. And this is something slightly more than limits to their functionality: there is literally no way that they can obey my will. Neither can my bones or fat deposits. Like a person with paralyzed body parts, not all of my body can obey me. Therefore obedience cannot possibly be the only marker of what counts as my body, unless I wish to forfeit my bones and teeth and fat.

4. Body parts that do things "on their own" Sometimes body parts seem to act of their own volition. The other day I got into an argument and immediately afterwards I was shaking so badly I had to sit down. My legs buckled without my ordering them to; in fact, they continued buckling even when I tried to stop them from shaking. Of course I am sure this was a result of things going on inside my nervous system, but if we're defining according to will, then I must say they weren't obeying my will, even though they were fully capable of doing so. There are numerous physical states and phenomena which have the same effect; off-hand, I can think of nervous tics, hyperventilation, and unwanted physical arousal. In each of these cases, one or more organs act in ways counter to our conscious will. If you are still skeptical, let me suggest an exercise for you (don't actually do this). Turn on one burner of your stove range. Wait five minutes. Touch the burner. Don't pull back. See if your body obeys you. (Even if you succeed in keeping your body there, I am rather sure your arm and finger will be "attempting" to jerk back in ways you did not will.) In the case of paralysis or inert body parts, sometimes parts of our bodies do not obey our will but are nonetheless part of our body. In the case of some conjoined twins and some physical states/phenomena, our bodies will do things we did not will, either because a conjoined sibling willed it or because of a command given by the nervous system outside of a conscious will. While I might be able to say that something is part of my body if it obeys my will, I cannot say that obedience to my will is the only feature which could make something part of my body.

Series Index

The Problem of the Organic Body

or, What is our body? part 1

For most of us, this seems a fairly simple question because we have something to which we can refer. I can point toward my body and say, "This is my body." This is not a definition (description) but an indication. What happens, however, when we rely entirely on indication for our definitions is that we don't actually have a useful definition. Trying to determine what exactly defines your body as yours is a difficult question. (It might seem to be a useless question, too, if it weren't the case that a number of controversial ethico-medico-legal issues--abortions, amputations, and separation surgeries--are directly concerned with what is whose body. I'm not going to trace these particular problems out in this post, but if you're concerned that this is all fruitless philosophizing, I'd think again.) So I'm going to take a crack at it.

One of the positions I think I detected among the commenters on Leah's blog (see the introduction to this series for a summary) holds that what something (an organ, say) is part of your body because it is 1) attached with living tissue and 2) composed of living, organic cells. So my hand is part of me because it is attached and organic. If my hand were chopped off, it would no longer be part of me. If it were replaced with a prosthetic, that prosthetic would not be part of me because it is not organic. No matter how strenously I insisted that it was part of me, I would be mistaken.
I would suggest that there are people who would wish to add that those cells must be genetically identical (or at least genetically similar) to those that make up most of your body. I do not want to suggest that the commenters I mentioned have this requirement, but I imagine that someone does. After all, there are parasitic animals that fuse themselves onto their hosts (or live deep within their hosts) such that there is a band of continuous living tissue extending from one organism to another. Genetic markers could be a way of differentiating one body from the next.

Either way, I'm going to suggest that this is the wrong way of finding the edges of your body. Once again, I am not looking so much to prove through syllogism as provide instances in which this sort of definition seems entirely unhelpful.

1. Organ and tissue donation

I cannot systematically prove that a transplanted heart becomes part of the new owner in some metaphysical sense. What I will suggest is that we have a number of reasons for wanting to think so, primary among them practical and legal concerns. I will spend more time discussing this issue in part 3, but let's for the moment identify a few traits: the new organ was formerly part of another person (or their body, at any rate), and most likely carries a quite different genetic signature. If we say that a new heart is part of the person who received it, we must conclude that at the very least the genes do not determine what is or is not part of your body. I suppose you might want to argue that the transplanted heart isn't really part of your body, in which case my next example might prove harder to refute.

2. Chimeras

No, I don't mean the Greek mythological monster. I refer to tetregametic chimerism, in which a person has two genetic lineages. Chimerae are people (or animals) who either developed from an egg fertilized by two sperm or from two non-identical zygotes which fused into one. This means that some of their cells have one genetic code and some of their cells have another. This could result in pigmentation or hair-growth unevenness or in intersexed anatomy, but it may very well go undetected. (Which is to say, you could be a chimera and not know it.)
I hope you can see what I'm driving at. This is one body, satisfying the connected living tissue requirements, that contains multiple genetic markers. Unless you want to claim that a chimeric person has two blended bodies, genetic material cannot constitute a useful distinction.
If you really want to push it and say that at least the cells are related on the level of siblings, I'll observe that researchers have created chimerae lab rats from two non-related zygotes... and other chimerae from zygotes of different species.

3. Conjoined Twins and Parasitic Twins

(Some people may not be surprised to see this example come up. I assure you that it will appear again in this series.)
The connected living tissue requirement is a problem when there are people (genetically identical) who are connected with living tissue. Consider Violet and Daisy Hilton (right), connected at the base of the spine. At their point of connection it would be exceptionally difficult to determine which tissue was Violet's and which tissue was Daisy's. Furthermore, since they (along with most if not all conjoined twins) have connected circulatory systems, it would be impossible to say whose blood is whose. We might want to make some kind of argument based on whose "side" the blood is on, but ths is a problem (and here's the real kicker) if we're defining bodies based on connected living tissue because under this definition Violet and Daisy Hilton have one body. You could trace a path of continuous connected living tissue from the centre of Violet's brain through to Daisy's brain. Under this definition, there is no way to distinguish Daisy's body from Violet's.
I think it might be worth distinguishing the instance of conjoined twins from supernumary limbs or digits. An extra thumb or arm does constitute (I would suggest) part of your body. Additional pieces don't fall outside this category. This is interesting because parasitic twins are like supernumary organs in some respects and are like conjoined twins in others (origin, say). Parasitic twins do not have brains or consciousnesses, so do they count as separate bodies? However, we are here moving into a new way of defining body or self, and so I shall rest with the observation that it seems that connected, genetically identical, living tissue is at the very least not sufficient in defining where your body ends. I will return to this topic again in the part 3.

Finally, I will point out an interesting piece of etymology that will help segue into the next post. Organic, according to the Oxford English Dictionary On-Line, can mean a number of things. The entry most representative of common use seems to be the following:

Having organs, or an organized physical structure; of, relating to, or derived
from a living organism or organisms; having the characteristics of a living
organism (OED).

However, there are other meanings, some of which are obsolete. One of these offers a second way of thinking about what does or does not constitute part of your body (the one advocated in some form or another by both dbp and Leah):

Serving as an instrument or means to an end; instrumental. Obs. (OED)

To Series Index

Reading One of Us

I recently got One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal from the library. It is apparently the kind of book I would get from the library, or so I've been told. If you want to see details, here's a link to the Amazon site. The official blurb on the back is very minimal:

One of Us views conjoined twins and other "abnormalities" from the point of view of people living with such anatomies, and considers these issues within the larger historical context of anatomical politics.

The rest of the back is quotations from book reviews.

It's the sort of book one would encounter in academia, so for those of my readers missing university thought, perhaps you can indulge yourselves vicariously through me here. I haven't even finished the introduction yet, but I want to quote portions of what I have read. There's a lot, but I wanted to preserve something like the thrust of the discussion. It's fascinating.

...The truth is, most of us go through minor anatomical 'normalization' procedures every day, changing our bodies ever so slightly to fit the identity we wish to present socially. We brush the plaque off our teeth, in part to keep them healthy but also so that they won't disgust others with a smell or appearance that would signal we are unclean (and therefore, by the rules of anatomy and identity, slovenly or poor or ill). We wash and style our hair and put on clothes meant to signal who we are underneath (man, woman, corporate team player, professor, artist, rebel). We add a wristwatch to enhance our imperfect internal clocks, to keep our bodily movements well timed in relation to others'.
We shave various parts of our bodies depending on what kind of sexuality we wish to signal. We put on eyeglasses or slide into a wheelchair to compensate for the anatomical deficits that might otherwise keep us out of the stream of human life, which largely requires sight and autonomous movement. We worry about getting too fat, knowing that fat is widely equated with weak will and ill health, and we so [sic] step on the scale, choose the diet soda, go to the gym for a workout.
[...]
Nevertheless, some people are born with anatomies that don't fit the social rules so far as anatomy and identity are concerned and that cannot be "normalized" by any simple procedure like shaving or the donning of glasses. These people are born with anatomies that complicate efforts to easily categorize them. Cheryl Chase, for example, was born with mixed sex anatomy, internally and externally, which made it hard for people to figure out whether to expect her to become a boy or a girl. Lori and Reba Schappell were born conjoined at the head, an anatomy that can make a new acquaintance unsure whether they are to be approached as one person or two. Ruta Sharangpani is profoundly nearsighted but can see just enough to manage without an obvious aid like a can or dog; she also has an eye that can't quite meet your because it shakes and wavers. Danny Black has achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism, and though he is middle-aged he inhabits a body whose proportions are supposed to characterize only the immature.
[...]Most of us are so used to dealing with people who fit invisibly into the standard categories of anatomy and identity that it is jarring when we meet someone who doesn't. And it is the recognition of this awkwardness, the recognition of how comfortable it can be to be considered normal, how uncomfortable it can be to be considered abnormal, that motivates adults to want to surgically normalize children born with unusual anatomies, to separate the Loris and Rebas, to make the Cheryls look like "real" girls, to stretch the limbs of the Dannys, to make the Rutas look fully sighted.

Often the adults who impose such a normalization understand it as a charitable manifestation of pity. And no doubt it is. But "pity" is defined as sorrow for another's suffering and misfortune, and that's exactly why it is experienced by many people born with unusual anatomies as not only unsupportive but actively oppressive; for pity implies that the subject must be suffering and unfortunate. When I asked Lori Schappell how she felt when people treated her with pity, she bristled, saying that as soon as she saw such a "pity conversation" starting, she would end it or leave it. Trying to fight the degradation of puty, Ruta Sharangpani told me once, is "like trying to climb a glass wall. There are no handholds, no way to talk to a pitying person, because she or he does not see the disabled person as a competent individual." So, however unintentionally, pity silences the person who might otherwise speak to defend the value of her person and her life.[...]
[...]
By considering conjoined twinning and other "deformities" within the larger historical context of anatomical politics, [this book] argues for a more radical understanding of "abnormal" bodies. It seeks to change assumptions made about people born with unusual anatomies, and by doing so it seeks to change the context built around those people. The typical story told about such individuals is one in which the child's anatomy is changed to fit the social context. This book seeks instead to change the social context by exposing the breadth and depth of that context. It endeavors to show what something as rare as conjoinment could have to do with the rest of us.

In the next part of the Introduction, Dreger focuses on conjoined twins. [Boldface mine.]

...But the reason [conjoined twins] are treated so differently from others is not simply that they are rare; it is that people in general expect, quite reasonably, that any individual they meet will be the only person inhabiting his or her skin. Because most singletons--by which I mean people born with no anatomical bond to anyone but their mothers--understand psychosocial individuality as requiring anatomical individuality, they tend to assume that conjoined twins are trapped in such a way that makes a happy, normal life impossible. Only surgical separation could truly make them free.

New York Magazine vividly exemplified this assumption when it printed a photograph of infant twins Carmen and Rosa Taveras in November 1993--several months after they'd been surgically separated--under the headline "FREE AT LAST." But as Chapter 1 demonstrates, such a headline would make little sense to people who are conjoined, because most people who are conjoined do not feel physically entrapped. They do not wish they had been born into singleton bodies. Indeed, Laleh and Ladan Bijani, who chose to be separated in 2003 at the age of twenty-nine, were the first conjoined twins in history to consent to separation surgery. Though it may seem shocking, in none of the hundreds of previous separation operations performed were surgeons givern permission by the patients themselves to do the surgery. This is not simply because most conjoined twins fear the risks of separation. It is because [...] people who are conjoined typically feel that their bodies and lives are perfectly normal and acceptable--sometimes even preferable. They don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with being conjoined. Thus, one of the ways in which conjoined twins are like almost everyone else is that they tend to readily accept, and even prefer, the anatomy with which they were born.[...]

A friend of mine (Sunny) was unsurprised that almost no conjoined twins want to be separated. While some may think that conjoined twins could not be happy, she would think you couldn't be happy with major physical trauma. Well put, I think.