vidal

Summer 2002
Volume 28, Number 4

Brains, Bodies, Selves, and Science: Anthropologies of Identity and the Resurrection of the Body
by Fernando Vidal

[...]

My goal is not to comment on Dante or examine the theology of resurrection. Rather, I wish to explore how discussions on the resurrection of the body may function as a fil conducteur for a history of notions of personal identity. As is clear from historical and anthropological studies, "modern identity"--characterized by radical reflexivity, a sense of inwardness, a first-person standpoint, and disengagement from body and world--would have been incomprehensible for people in the past or other cultures.27 We "have" bodies only in the perspective of the post-Lockean possessive individualism that makes us their owners; objectified and distanced from our "selves," our bodies are for us things we own, not entites we are. This observation, however, should not prevent us from talking, without anachronism, about self, identity, individual, or person and to try to understand the sources of the modern identity and what other peoples, past or present, consider essential in order to ask and investigate the question, Who am I?28

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the terms of resurrection debates were
See Also
Arnold I. Davidson: Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality (Autumn 1987)
Daniel Boyarin: "This We Know to be the Carnal Israel": Circumcision and the Erotic Life of God and Israel (Spring 1992)
Caroline Bynum: Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective (Fall 1995)
Debbora Battaglia: Multiplicities: An Anthropologist's Thoughts on Replicants and Clones in Popular Film (Spring 2001)
altered and, at the intersection of philosophy, theology, the life sciences, and psychology, participated in the emergence of new ways of thinking about the relation between persons and bodies. The study of these transformations helps trace the emergence of the presently dominant cognitivist, brain-based idea of personal identity and thus supports both a critique of the self-as-brain philosophy and a formulation of more phenomenological and experiential apprehensions of what it is to be human.

Problematic as it was and remains, the doctrine of bodily resurrection contradicts the dualistic understanding of the history of body and the self in the Christian West. Christianity is supposed to see the individual as a duality, torn between an immortal soul to be elevated and redeemed and a perishable body to be mortified and despised. Nevertheless, from an anthropological point of view, it holds the opposite of Descartes's fiction of a bodyless self.29 The idea that, for the Christian tradition, "being human meant being an embodied mind" is inaccurate.30 The common expression "embodied self" involves the idea of a (potentially) disembodied self. Christianity, however, rejects the possibility of a person existing otherwise than as a composite of body and soul. As Ludwig Feuerbach angrily remarked in 1846,

Seligkeit ist das letzte Wort der Religion und Theologie. Aber was ist Seligkeit? Sinnlichkeit als Objekt der Phantasie und des Gemüts. Die Behauptung, daß das Christentum nur eine geistige Seligkeit wolle, is eine schamlose Lüge der modernen Heuchler oder Ignoranten. Das Christentum unterschied sich gerade dadurch von dem philosophischen Heidentume...daß es eine fleischliche, d. i. sinnliche, Seligkeit und Unsterblichkeit als letztes Ziel und Wesen des Menschen aussprach.31

In the calmer words of a contemporary theologian, a person "is not someone who has a body but whose existence is corporeal"; as suggested by the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh, "the body is the whole man."32

Today, from artistic avant-gardes to popular self-help and personal development manuals, the body is omnipresent. The human sciences ponder the construction of bodies and the practices and discourses that govern them; body history is a blooming field.33 In contrast, the academic philosophy of personal identity often reduces, if only by way of a speculative exercise, the body to the brain.34 Most puzzle cases used to think about identity imply that only the brain is truly indispensable, and that seems validated by the cognitive neurosciences. If the brain of person A is transplanted into the body of person B, then A undergoes a body transplant, rather than B a brain transplant.35 This is a simple situation compared to the cases of fission in which each hemisphere is transplanted into a different body. Apparently, we can do without the rest of the body; in fact, "I am my brain."36 In spite of its apparent abstraction, the neurophilosophical reduction of self touches upon momentous medical and bioethical debates about the beginning and the end of life.

[...]

I see in the story sketched here at least two lessons to be drawn. One is methodological. When looked at from within philosophy, the history of the self tends to study the history of notions of the self; and it is further supposed that such notions, when not explicitly formulated, can be inferred from philosophical texts. Self thus appears to be a transhistorical object whose manifestations and metamorphoses the philosopher-historian can apprehend. It is in this vein that Paul Ricoeur remarks that the question of identity has always generated interest in puzzle cases and that humans have always been intrigued by religious beliefs about transmigration, immortality, and resurrection.129 By implying that such beliefs exist as puzzle cases about a preexisting underlying question, Ricoeur turns around what I take to be their significance. Discussions about transmigration, immortality, or resurrection were not epiphenomenal expressions of a latent interest in the question of identity; they were, I would argue, consubstantial to that interest itself.

Even when looked at from within history (and to the extent that it is possible to give a single name to a prodigiously diversified field), the ontological basis of self sometimes seems to transcend historical contingency. This is not because it is thought to be stable across time but because it is seen as represented, expressed, or legitimized--rather than actually made--through diverse "life-writing" and self-dramatization pratices, such as confessions, memoirs, autobiographies, as well as novels and biographies.130 There is, of course, a large field of studies about the formation of embodied selves (individual, gendered, racial, and so on).131 In its most Foucauldian version, the history of the self deals with a "genealogy of subjectification" that, in Nikolas Rose's words,

focuses directly on the practices that locate human beings in particular "regimes of the person." It does not write a continuous history of the self, but rather accounts for the diversity of languages of "personhood" that have taken shape--character, personality, identity, reputation, honor, citizen, individual, normal, lunatic, patient, client, husband, mother, daughter--and the norms, techniques, and relations of authority within which these have circulated in legal, domestic, industrial, and other practices for acting upon the conduct of persons.

The object of genealogy is neither changing ideas of the person, nor the person as psychological entity, but the largely "technical" disciplines of mind and body whereby "human beings come to relate to themselves and others as subjects of a certain type."132 These techniques are not applied to the self but constitutive of it. This does not mean that human beings do not exist independently of those techniques but that, as highlighted by Ian Hacking's "dynamic nominalism," part of what we effectively are and do is connected with our descriptions.133

The constructionist Foucauldian orientation poses a challenge opposite to that of the philosophical. Philosophers' narratives focus on the concept of self or on discourses from which the concept can supposedly be inferred. Historians, in contrast, tend to overlook the concept, as if its history qua concept played no role in instituting the regimes of the self. Although I do not assume an underlying perennial self, what I have done here is obviously closer to the history of ideas than to genealogy. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that concepts have their own efficacy and should be incorporated into genealogy as active agents. In the same way that, say, child-rearing techniques are not about the self nor applied to it as a preexisting object, debates about the resurrection of the body were not about identity, nor were the issues discussed in connection with them contemplated as puzzle cases in the philosophy of mind. Rather, they were among the materials with which notions of identity were elaborated and through which, historically, such notions came into existence. This became apparent in the wake of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, when the resurrection of the body was explicitly linked to personal identity. The "modern" regimes of self, and the corresponding ways of experiencing oneself, were thus connected to the development of new concepts of the self. The redefinition of the resurrected identity belonged in the construction of new models of being based less on the hierarchical subordination of the body to the soul than on a generative subordination of selfhood to the brain and to an objectified self-consciousness. The glorious body was no longer necessary as ideal for the discipline of terrestrial bodies.134 The story sketched here thus suggests the need for bringing the history of ideas and the genealogy of subjectification together into an approach that will ultimately do for personal identity what historical epistemology is doing for the history of objectivity.135

A second lesson might be called inspirational. The idea of resurrection participated in the political functions of hell.136 Whether it is best considered, with Freud, as a symptom of a universal neurosis or, with Jankélévitch, as a form of the "hopeless optative," it has played, for those who believe in it, an important existential role.137 But political and psychological functions do not exhaust its historical meaning. Two millennia after its initial formulation, the Christian doctrine of the resurrection has a potential to question and to move that is more powerful and profound than considerations of wandering little fingers or hypothetical brain transplants. Resurrection discourses differ fundamentally from philosophical thought experiments.138 Indeed, they were not seen as concerning fantastical situations from which apparently relevant conclusions could be extracted but as meaningful matters of momentous real consequences. One of them was the certainty that bodies are essential to humanity and that a disembodied self does not rank as a human being. Thus, while the neuropsychological eschatologies science and philosophy produced since the seventeenth century moved us away from the Middle Ages, our era's questions and dilemmas about self and body take us back. In its own way, the Christian romance of the resurrection, with its assertion of the ontologically crucial place of body for identity and of community for human existence, may still be an inspiring story for those who, against the neurological reduction of self, would rather live with body, desire, history, and the other than inhabit the solitude of isolated brains.

27. I have followed Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989) for the characterization of "modern identity."

28. See for example The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (Cambridge, 1985); see also, as well as Taylor, Sources of the Self, esp. part 2.

29. "Ie me considereray moy-mesme comme n'ayant point de mains, point d'yeux, point de chair, point de sang, comme n'ayant aucuns sens, mais croyant faussement auoir toutes ces choses" (René Descartes, première méditation, Méditations sur la philosophie première [1641], Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Ernest Adam and Paul Tannery [1896Ð1909; Paris, 1982], 9.1:18). 30. See Roy Porter, "History of the Body," in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park, Penn., 1991), p. 212; see also Porter, "Bodies of Thought: Thoughts about the Body in Eighteenth-Century England," in Interpretation and Cultural History, ed. Joan H. Pittock and Andrew Wear (New York, 1991), pp. 82Ð108.

31. "Beatitude is the last word of religion and theology. But what is beatitude? Sensibility as the object of phantasy and feelings. The assertion that Christianity wants only a spiritual beatitude is a shameless lie of modern hypocrites or ignoramuses. Christianity differentiates itself from philosophical paganism...precisely in that it formulates a carnal, i.e. a sensible beatitude and immortality as ultimate end and essence of humanity" (Ludwig Feuerbach, "Wider den Dualismus von Leib und Seele, Fleisch und Geist" [1846], Feuerbach, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Werner Schuffenhauer [Berlin, 1989], 10:147). The whole text is a forceful manifesto against propositions such as "Ich unterscheide mich von meinem Leibe" (p. 140), against the notion that "we" can differentiate ourselves from our body or our brain otherwise than by a logical or "imaginary" operation.

32. Antoine Vergote, "The Body as understood in Contemporary Thought and Biblical Categories" (1979), trans. Mark Muldoon, Philosophy Today 35 (1991): 96, 97. See also Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, "Caro salutis cardo: Shaping the Person in Early Christian Thought," History of Religions 30 (1990): 25Ð50. For recent discussions of these issues: James F. Keenan, "Christian Perspectives on the Human Body," Theological Studies 55 (June 1994): 330Ð46, and Bynum, "Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective," Critical Inquiry 22 (Autumn 1995): 1Ð33.

33. See for example Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi, 3 vols. (New York, 1989); Arthur W. Frank, "For a Sociology of the Body: An Analytical Review," in The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, ed. Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner (London, 1991); and Margaret Lock, "Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge," Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993): 133Ð55. On the neural, immunological, genetic, and phenotypic bodies and their politico-scientific contexts, see Scott F. Gilbert, "Resurrecting the Body: Has Postmodernism Had Any Effect on Biology?" Science in Context 8 (Winter 1995): 563Ð77. For useful samples of approaches and themes, see Gepeinigt, begehrt, vergessen: Symbolik und Sozialbezug des Körpers im späten Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Schreiner and Norbert Schnitzler (Munich, 1992); Disciplina dell'anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Paolo Prodi (Bologna, 1994). For recent studies about the "embodiment of knowledge," see Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, ed. Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago, 1998). For a valuable discussion of conceptual and methodological tensions within body history today see Philipp Sarasin, "Mapping the Body: Körpergeschichte zwischen Konstruktivismus, Politik und 'Ehrfahrung,'" Historische Anthropologie 7, no. 3 (1999): 437Ð51.

34. See, for a synthetic presentation, Harold W. Noonan, Personal Identity (London, 1989); for a useful anthology, see Personal Identity, ed. John Perry (Berkeley, 1975). See also Stephane Ferret, Le Philosophe et son scalpel: Le Problème de l'identité personnelle (Paris, 1993), which emphasizes the place of the brain.

35. Such an operation, of course, is not (yet?) feasible, but some individuals already protect themselves against it. The text of an older version of the Swisstransplant cards carried by potential organ donors explicitly excluded the brain and the organs of reproduction. Individual identity was thus doubly preserved for both the donors and for those persons whose identity would be partly defined by the fact of being their descendants.

36. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York, 1986), p. 40. Nagel describes this hypothesis of the brain's indispensability as a "mild exaggeration."

129. "la question de l'identité a toujours suscité l'intérêt pour des cas paradoxaux. Les croyances religieuses et théologiques relatives à la transmigration des âmes, à l'immortalité, à la résurrection de la chair, n'ont pas manqué d'intriguer les esprits" (Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, pp. 160Ð61).

130. For recent examples, see Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Patrick Coleman, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik (Cambridge, 2000); see also Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591Ð1791 (Cambridge, 1997).

131. For recent examples, see "Identity, Self, and Subject," a special issue of History of the Human Sciences 7 (May 1994); see also Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Porter (London, 1997).