Between Two Nothings
Every existence entails an emergence from nothing, and the only prospect is to return to it someday. Life unfolds between two nothings. But the boundaries are blurred; it is very difficult to speak clearly about later, previously, down the way, before, and after. Nobody denies that a being comes from a spermatozoid and an ovum, but what are the philosophical statuses of those two separate objects? Half-alive things? Things that are potentially alive? Are there two complementary forces that are alive, but that must come together to produce another living being, one that is finally real, finally true?
Our millions of spermatozoids are alive, and they are rejected as soon as one of them penetrates the female gamete. The bacteria that go to work on the corpse after death are also alive. Before life, there is already life. After life, there is still life. In the swarm of reality, the mixing up of life and death, everything that emerges from the nothing and returns to its breast, how can we see anything other than multiple modifications of life?
Therefore, the human part of man is inscribed in that living being suspended between two nothings. It is not consubstantial with living itself; it emerges, and then disappears, as part of the vital process. Thus, just hours after its formation, the egg, while living, is not human. Christians speak of potential persons. But there is a world of difference between potentiality and reality. Everyone is very much alive, while their mortality is potential.
There is a hierarchy when it comes to giving respect to a potential person. It becomes a person when it becomes real. But its reality is pending, since it is potential. It is just a scholastic, Thomistic sophism. The potential person is missing something, which keeps it from becoming a real person, namely, humanity.
Sperm is not a person, neither is an ovum or an embryo. Humanity emerges in a person not through its (human) form, but in its (human) relation to the world. Mere existence in the world is not enough. Cockroaches also exist in the world. There must be a connection, an interactive relationship, a link to tangible reality.
Above all, a being’s humanity requires at least a basic capacity to perceive the world, to feel it, to have sensual apprehension. To have this, one must have a degree of nervous system development. The first days and weeks are not enough time for the aggregate of matter and cells to come together to render it more than something other than life without personal reality. The brain must be able to have two reactions to stimuli: the capacity to feel pleasure and the capacity to experience suffering. This is the foundation of Hedonism. Scientifically, this anatomical possibility shows itself around the twenty-fifth week of fetal development. That is the time that the person emerges from the nothing and enters into humanity, even though it had been alive since the spermatozoid first met the ovum.
Then, much later, an individual’s humanity is defined through the combination of a consciousness of self, other, and the world. It is further defined by interactions between self and self, self and other, and self and reality. Whoever loses sight of what he is, what others are, and what the world is abandons his humanity, even if they remain alive. But what precedes humanity and what comes after it do not carry the same ontological weight: a neutral embryo weighs less than a corpse saturated in memory, affection, and history.
In the stages before and after the emergence of humanity, all human actions are ontologically justified and legitimate. Before it, there may be genetic selection, embryonic treatment, sorting, contraception, abortion, and transgenesis. After it, as in the case of cerebral death, artificially prolonged life, and an exceedingly long coma, we may opt for euthanasia and organ donation.
Neuronal Identity
These are the novel worlds: constructing a new body out of exterior elements; mixing together the animal and the human; artificializing nature and transgressing it with surgery and genetics; abolishing the Christian flesh; distinguishing the nomadic body and the critical body, the sickly ideal body and the healthy materialist and vitalist body, the atomic body and the Dionysian body. These are what it would take for an expansion of the body, for the de-Christianization of the flesh, for the transcendence of humanity, for the creation of a metaphysics of artifacts. In this new metaphysical field, how do we define identity? Where is it found? What is it?
Theseus’s paradox furnishes a response: the Greeks piously preserved their hero’s boat. To repair the wear and tear on the wood, they changed one plank, and then another, and then more and more. They still venerated the boat even after they had replaced every plank of the original. When did it stop being the original boat? With the first piece of wood replaced? The second? The last? Exactly half?
Let us change the casuistry: we can cut off a man’s leg, and then the other, and then an arm and the other arm, and he does not cease to be. We can remove an ill organ from him and replace it with another one—a heart, a liver, a lung—and he remains himself. We can even graft a new face onto him if his is somehow lost, ruined, burnt, mutilated, or otherwise harmed. He still remains himself. So when does he lose his identity?
Leibniz provides a useful fable in response to this: he imagines transplanting the brain of a shoemaker into the head of a king, and vice versa. After the operation, who would know how to repair shoes? The one with the body of a cobbler and the brain of a sovereign? Or the other way around? Which one would be able to attend to matters of State? The flesh of the powerful man and the grey matter of the old boot maker? Or vice versa?
In the era of German philosophy, this fable was merely a thought experiment, but today it can almost be a laboratory reality. Brain transplants are feasible, and quadriplegics may one day disappear when neural grafts are made possible with the aid of cell transplants that reconstitute the physiological conditions of neural integrity.
In light of this example, we can make a conclusion: we are our brain. We can change everything else, or almost everything. All those modifications change our bodily schema, but the brain, in fact, is what reconstructs and reappropriates this new image. It’s not possible for another brain to impede it from going through these reconfiguring operations.
Our brain is the site of memory and habits; it’s where neuronal formatting occurs in small infants and in adolescents; it contains all habitus, all memories, and the factors needed even to recognize faces and places; it stores up everything so that we don’t have to learn the most basic, banal, or elementary functions again every time that we do them. All the traces of individual and collective time get folded into it. Language is wrapped in it, as well as culture. Our entire body then encloses it, manages it, lives for it, contains it. It is thus the site of identity, the fundamental element of being. All else follows it.
The Pedagogy of Death
How do we broach the subject of death in regard to this Faustian or Promethean body? For centuries, religion tried to answer the problem of death. Their answers are well known. Once mythology no longer satisfies even those who are still committed to the scraps of such children’s stories, what ontological solutions are there to this cardinal terror? Must we fall back, conspiratorially, on creating gods and heavens?
Theology must give way to philosophy; Christianity must efface itself so that more ancient wisdoms—chiefly Stoic and Epicurean—can have their say. Thus, we support voluntary death: necessity exists, but there is no obligation to live according to necessity, and one is free to choose to abandon life of one’s own volition. Our body belongs to us and we can use it according to our understanding; an existence is judged not by its duration, but by its quality; it is better to die well than to live badly; we must live only as long as we must, not as long as we can; a good death that is chosen is worth more than a (bad) life that is merely submitted to.
In light of the ancient teachings, euthanasia is part of a lineage running from the Stoic Colonnade to Postmodernism’s desire for sovereignty. By contrast, the Judeo-Christian calls for palliative care, which brings up old religious tools: salvific suffering; redemptive pain; death as a passage demanding permission and reconciliation with one’s entourage, the only thing keeping you from the serenity and inner peace that will allow you to be comfortable after death; and agony as the existential Stations of the Cross. Would you prefer Seneca’s suicide or the Passion of the Christ? The choice is easy.
Recourse to ancient pagans also allows us to confront death, which we cannot master. Twenty-three centuries later, Epicurus’s argument maintains its force: Death should not be feared, because when it arrives you are no longer around. In the same way, as long as you are around, death is not. Death should really not concern us at all. For my part, I wouldn’t say at all, but it concerns us only as an idea.
Epictetus distinguishes between that which depends on us (and on which we must act) and that which does not depend on us (which we must learn to love). We can extrapolate from this valuable idea: We are powerless because we must die one day, so deal with it. On the other hand, we can act on the reality of death, which Epicurean reasoning shows us is always just an idea, a representation. So let us act on this representation: It’s not here yet, so we should not give it any due before its time. We can show contempt for it by activating all the forces that resist it—the forces of life. We should live it fully, completely, voluptuously.
Materialism leads to serenity. Death entails the dismantling of any conditions for enjoying or suffering. Thus, there is nothing to fear about death. Yet its effects precede it: it terrorizes us with the thought of what awaits us. But there is no need for this negativity. It will come in a single moment, which will be quite sufficient. The most important thing is to not die while living, not to have a living death—which is precisely what happens to many people who have never learned to live and therefore have never truly lived.