Contemporary Japanese Thought by Calichman Richard;

Author:Calichman, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS050000, History/Asia/Central Asia, LIT000000, Literary Criticism/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2005-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

The “I” That Is Nobody

Whether “brain death” is considered human death, whether “organ transplantation” is to some extent possible, or whether life support of the “personality-less” body is a viable possibility—these are all separate issues. As I have discussed, the latter two questions show that we have reached a certain level of complex medical technology, while the first involves thinking about man’s spirit, body, and death. In other words, this is a condition of human existence to which thought must respond, whether we like it or not. The thinking on “brain death” represents one such response. And yet, despite the fact that advances in technology have fundamentally changed the conditions of human existence, this thinking readily recycles a very traditional view of man, thus ultimately concealing the meaning of these changes. What Heidegger quite justifiably calls “uncanny thoughtlessness” is revealed here as a shameful and grotesque “knowledge.” For Heidegger fully knew that the situation man confronts goes beyond the framework of “humanist” thought. This is not to say, however, that Heidegger capably dealt with this situation.

Medicine has sought to distance man from illness and, in its turn, death. It was at one time self-evident that the phrase “to distance man from death” referred to one man’s life and death. Now, however, the extension of one life requires the utilization of another “death.” The prolongation of one man’s life is achieved through a partial compositing with other men, and is carried out by sacrificing the identity of the “individual” on at least the corporeal level. Here we can already glimpse a “communality” at the corporeal level of the “individual” itself.

Death was that which completed and concluded the being of the individual, constituting proper being as such. While death’s postponement delays the completion of the individual, the postponement of death through present technology as well as the “immortality” envisioned therein does not simply postpone the individual’s death, it also changes its identity. Such change takes place not only in the recipient, whose life is extended through organs that are not his own, but also in the donor, whose organs become, so to speak, recyclable parts. The possibility of organ transplantation is premised upon the understanding that the body itself is divisible, that its parts can at a certain level lose their propriety and be exchanged. Of course this is not to say that the universality of the concept of “organ” does not already imply this. Yet such implication (e.g., that a liver be any liver) only first took into account actual “exchangeability” through advances in technology. In order to liberate the exchanged partial body from personality and propriety, the idea emerges to assign the roles of forming man’s propriety and controlling personal identity exclusively to the brain. If, however, the loss of the brain’s integrating function does not result in the body’s becoming mere individual-less exchangeable parts, but rather parts with their own lives (even if this now seems like a frayed bundle), then it could be said that the brain’s integration

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