BODY

The role of the body in relation to science and technology is complex. The first book on the philosophy of technology, Ernst Kapp's Grundlinien Einer Philosophie der Technik (1877), analyzes technologies in terms of body parts and organs. Stoves are technological "stomachs," machines are extensions of "arms and legs," and so forth. In contemporary times bodies and embodiment have become increasingly important. There is a great deal of discussion about "posthuman" and disembodied development with respect to "cyberspace" and electronic systems of communication such as the Internet and other virtual processes. Ironically, this discussion has brought the role of human bodies back into consideration.

From Ancients to Moderns

Twenty-first century discussions echo much older traditions with respect to the human body. Ancient Greek philosophers often distinguished between body, soul, and spirit (Plato), with the strongest distinction being made between the materiality of the body and the immateriality of soul and spirit. In early modernity those distinctions were simplified into variations on a body-mind dualism (René Descartes) that continue to motivate much philosophical debate.

In antiquity religio-ethical ideas also were associated with the distinction between bodily materiality and soul-spirit immateriality. Generally speaking, materiality was conceived of as being of lesser worth, clearly finite and mortal and perhaps evil. Whether merely restrictive of the higher tendencies of the immaterial soul-spirit or deceptive and actively negative, the materiality of body carried negative associations. The Platonist trajectory emphasized a learning process that involved movement from a kind of captivity in the body, its deceptive senses, and the "body as prison" to an ascent toward the ideal realms of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

The early modern simplification of that trajectory weakened the ancient religio-ethical associations and replaced tainted materiality with the "mechanical" as the interpretation of the body. Body becomes the mechanical means by which motion is possible, but mind is enclosed "inside" a body object as a subject aware only of its impressions, sensations, or ideas caused by things that are external to itself. The model for this notion of body, used by the philosophers Descartes (1596–1650) and John Locke (1632–1704), was the camera obscura, in which the body was a dark room inside of which was the subject or mind that could view the images or representations cast on the tabula rasa inside. In this formulation the mind was situated inside a mechanical contrivance and could know or experience only its own sensations or representations.

Later modernity began to develop two less dualistic concepts of the body. One direction was physicalist and attempted to reduce all mental phenomena to physical ones (Ryle 1949) and the other was existentialist, using phenomenology to analyze a "lived body" or experiential body (Husserl 1970, Merleau-Ponty 1962). Both schools of thought lessen or deny a body-mind distinction and drive the analysis toward oneself as body. However, physicalism retains a basically mechanistic view of body, whereas phenomenology elevates bodily experience to include materiality. In the phenomenological sense all intelligent behavior presupposes bodily activity.

Body in Science

With the rise of early modern science the role of body began to take on a different significance. After the seventeenth century science was both technological and observational; those dimensions usually were termed experimental: Science practice included devices both for measurements and for making new discoveries achieved through (perceptual) observations displayable.

Galileo Galilei's (1564–1652) optics—telescopes but also microscopes—were the means by which new celestial phenomena were sighted, inclined planes were used to measure acceleration, and experiments were developed as proofs of specific scientific insights. Through the use of the telescope sun spots, Jupiter's satellites, the phases of Venus, and the mountains of the moon became new phenomena for emergent science. However, the instrumental means were also those which mediated perceptions, in this case vision. Although as a scientist Galileo paid little attention to the body itself, he did proclaim the new vision made possible by the telescope to be superior to that of the body by itself. Scientific vision was enhanced vision, but it also was mediated by means of instruments.

The body in this sense remained a background phenomenon but one that nevertheless had to be taken account of. In contemporary science this is even more important. For example, in contemporary technologized observations, only since the twentieth century have imaging technologies been able to present phenomena that lay far beyond the limits of unmediated human perception. In astronomy wave frequencies ranging from gamma waves to radio waves can be imaged, whereas until the twentieth century only optical light imaging was available.

In the early twenty-first century, however, all such imaging must implicitly take account of human perception insofar as "false color" imaging, the transformation of data into images, and simulations and modeling with computerized tomography all produce visualizations that translate data into visual gestalts that are available for human perception. The body is thus the background referential focus for science imaging. Increasingly, philosophers of science have begun to take visualizations into account (Galison 1997, Ihde 1998).

Bodies in Technology

The role of body with respect to technologies is even more ancient. When Kapp analogized technologies by using organ and body-part metaphors, he was drawing on a much older convergence of body roles. The Medieval thinker Roger Bacon (1220–1292) began to imagine machines that could fly, go under water, and be protected with armor from arrows and missiles; those fantasy machines were visualized much later in Leonardo da Vinci's technical drawings. Many of those imaginary machines utilized amplified human bodily powers (and thus could not actually work) because engines and motors had not yet been invented. However, those fantasy machines also reflected a new attitude toward bodily work. Those which could work on the basis of ancient physics—the simple machines of screw, wedge, levers, and pulleys—did magnify bodily powers, and with that magnification one could do more than unaided bodies could.

As the historian Lynn White, Jr., pointed out, by medieval times technologies such as cranes, lifting devices, gears, and above all mechanical clocks had begun to transform what was possible through machine-aided work. Windmills pumped out the lowlands of Holland and cathedrals of astonishing heights were built with weight-lifting machinery that magnified human bodily power, but more powerful animal bodies also were enlisted. One can still see the large drum-powered lifting device in Mount Saint Michel, which used donkeys to make it rotate. Later still came the artificial engine that launched yet another revolution: the steam engine.

Here, as in science, the measure of the human body, extended technologically, lay in the background. Machines now produced work, leaving the felt sense of effort and power on the sidelines. The previous multiplication of powers through the use of slaves could take a different direction through the use of technologies. In this case the ethics related to bodies is a social-political ethics. From slavery to the working class, bodies are embedded in work practices that are mediated by technologies. Clocks were used to regulate social time, and the panopticon was used to regulate prison behavior (Foucault 1977).

Body in Medicine

In yet another dimension bodies play other roles, particularly in medical practices. Here the interplay between bodies as objects and subject bodies often becomes focal. Historically, as with early modern science, medical practice underwent significant changes precisely by displaying the body as object, particularly as visualizable object. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), later followed by Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), depicted bodies as visualized objects. Dissections and autopsies became favorite matters for those depictions. Corpses showed bodily biological structures. That knowledge could be used indirectly to treat living bodies. However, the delicate problem that led to technological trajectories involved finding a way to observe what was going on physiologically without destroying or making into a dead object a living body that was under investigation.

One can trace the history of changes in diagnostic techniques, beginning with direct hands-on examinations, which were late to arrive in modernity (eighteenth century), proceeding to perceptual mediating instruments such as the stethoscope, which produced ausculatory imaging through sound (nineteenth century), and ending with contemporary largely visual imaging (from X-rays to magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography scans).

This trajectory culminates in techniques that are used to display the internality of the body without using a physically invasive process. The preservation of health within this trajectory is one that recognizes that only a subject, or lived body, is the ethical object of therapeutic medical practice. The ethical considerations in this case involve the need to evaluate and preserve levels of healthfulness through the application of knowledge. However, respect and care for living bodies remains the implicit central focus.

In addition to the changing notions of the human body noted above, contemporary studies related to feminism are of importance. In early modern science visualism was prominent. Feminists have joined phenomenologists in taking account of perspectivalism and situatedness. Some authors, however, also have pointed out that observation not only is objectivistic but may include aspects from the human biological heritage; even scientific curiosity may harbor a predatory dimension (Haraway 1991). Moreover, vision may entail gendered differentiations, with the "male gaze" being a form of perception that is constructed differently from those found in other human gendered practices (Bordo 2004, Butler 1999). Here the questions of gender relations with associated questions of mutual respect and interpersonal relations move to the forefront of ethical concerns.

Response

Returning to the topic of technologies and human bodies, with the massive impact of transportation, information, and imaging technologies it becomes obvious that what is often a background role for bodies takes on more explicit form in the uses of those technologies.

The bodily-perceptual experiences of space-time transformations are perhaps the most dramatic. In science imaging the near distance of observation, made ordinary with the close-up imaging of Mars and Saturn, has changed the sense of "apparent distance," providing a near distance to those planetary bodies. In medicine the development of distance surgery that calls for eye-hand coordination using robotics and visualizations has changed the way in which bodily skills are utilized and thus has implicated body-technology relations. Even in debates about artificial intelligence and related neurological studies the role of bodily motility has become a prominent issue, one that also is related to contemporary robotics studies (Dreyfus 1992). With electronic and virtual communications the role of the human body has taken on yet different experiential qualities. Experiments with virtual reality equipment and later with augmented reality equipment have made the role of whole body movement, balance, and kinesthesia newly important so that cognitive science has become aware of how action is experienced at a distance through prostheses and other material extensions of technologies.

The overall result has been a renewed emphasis on studies of the body. Many disciplines show this, including philosophy, women's studies, cognitive sciences, and robotics, as well as new forms of sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.

DON IHDE

SEE ALSO Bioethics;Cosmetics;Phenomenology;Virtual Reality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bordo, Susan. (2004). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bordo's work draws from phenomenology and is sensitive to both sensory and social aspects of bodily experience.

Butler, Judith. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler is a radical thinker who has been able to introduce gender construction into many philosophical debates.

Dreyfus, Hubert. (1992). What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dreyfus's work has been particularly important for a current generation of computer designers interested in bodily motion and robotics.

Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipine and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. Foucault has been a primary author influencing those who would understand the institutional and social dimensions of discourses.

Galison, Peter. (1997). Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Galison's work in the history and philosophy of science is sensitive to the instrumentation and technologies of science, as well as its contemporary interdisciplinary social structures.

Haraway, Donna. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Haraway, whose background was originally in biology, has become a foremost "technoscience" thinker. Her figure of the "cyborg" has inspired a very large number of thinkers.

Husserl, Edmund. (1970). The Crisis in European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenonological Philosophy, trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Husserl's last major work became the inspiration for a number of contemporary styles of thought, including what became known as the "social constructionist" movements.

Ihde, Don. (1998). Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. This book begins a reframing of philosophy of science in hermeneutic terms by analyzing the "visual hermeneutics" employed in science imaging.

Kapp, Friedrich. (1877). Grundlinien Einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur Ensehungsgeschichte der Cultur au neuen Gesichtspunkten. [Foundations of a philosophy of technology]. Braunschweig, Germany: G. Westermann. The first major philosophy book to use the term, philosophy of technology.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. New York: Humanities Press. Merleau-Ponty's best known book which emphasizes the role of perception within bodily activity, taken as the basis for all intelligent behavior.

Mumford, Lewis. (1962). Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Mumford was an early twentieth-century intellectual historian, one of the few who focused upon the role and development of technologies in relation to human history.

Ryle, Gilbert. (1949). The Concept of Mind. London and New York: Hutchinson's University Library. This is one of the first books to attack the doctrine of dualism as proposed by Descartes; it was influential on later analytic philosophy and the physicalist directions taken.

White, Lynn, Jr. (1962). Medieval Technology and Social Change. Oxford: Clarendon Press. This book contended that there was a massive "technological revolution" in Europe that preceded the Renaissance and early modernity.