Introduction: Does the Body Matter?

Abstract

Does the Body Matter? James J. Bono (bio) In October 1996 the State University of New York at Buffalo hosted a remarkable one day university-wide symposium entitled “Does the Body Matter?” to mark the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the university’s founding. Chartered by the State of New York on May 11, 1846, the then-private University of Buffalo brought to the expanding Niagara Frontier, poised on the border of Canada and the United States, the immediate promise of care for the body and long-term prospects for disciplined expansion of the mind’s horizons. Fittingly, the 1996 sesquicentennial symposium sought to commemorate and reimagine this legacy by exploring how scientific and humanistic learning on the frontiers of contemporary research challenge the very borders separating academic disciplines, thus providing a tantalizing glimpse of possible new configurations of knowledge within the university of the twenty-first century. The Medical College of Buffalo, predecessor to the contemporary School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, was the university’s inaugural unit and remained its only faculty for forty years. 1 Given this fact, and the more recent history of the university’s noted reputation in the humanities, it is perhaps even more fitting that the subject [End Page 177] chosen for our symposium sought to explore the place and significance of the body within contemporary academic research. Until recently, the body has been more an object of detailed scientific scrutiny and biomedical intervention than a subject of critical inquiry. Elucidating the body’s mechanisms in health and in disease has frequently produced a skewed emphasis upon the body as simply a material mechanism subordinate to an underlying rational plan or genetic blueprint. 2 Western thought has not always been enthralled to such views. Although we can find their roots in aspects of ancient Greek thought, important countercurrents to dualistic subordination of body to “mind” ran through the corpus of classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophical and medical traditions. Aristotle’s biological thought, while sustaining now familiar hierarchies through deployment of such binary concepts as form-matter, activity-passivity, and masculine-feminine, nonetheless insisted upon the embodied nature of form and, indeed, defined the key principle of life itself, entelechia, as the activity of an organic body: that is, as the innate activity of a body possessing differentiated parts or organs—inherently active instruments of the body, rather than passive mechanisms. 3 New readings of ancient Hippocratic medicine reveal an at times amodern stress upon the agency of “natural,” nonartifactual material entities. 4 Such substances—and, indeed, the body itself—were not consistently deployed or conceived as abstract principles of a rationally apprehended system of nature. Rather, matter and the body were themselves efficacious agents and bearers of deeply embedded cultural meanings. 5 Galen, the late antique physician and source of [End Page 178] medieval and Renaissance medical traditions, not only railed against the doctrinaire simplicities of atomistic and protomechanistic interpretations of the body in favor of a recast Aristotelian-Hippocratic emphasis upon the body’s inherent harmony and activity, 6 but also insisted, in some of his works, upon the subordination of the “soul” to the body’s material temperament. 7 Finally, and more broadly, Martha Nussbaum, in a series of essays and books, has underscored the persistent importance of the body and the emotions to the ethical and philosophical traditions of ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophical thought. 8 A radical dualism and Western denigration of the body has often been attributed to the pervasive influence of premodern Christianity. While it is possible to point to recurring emphases within the Christian tradition that purportedly support such claims, this account of perceived Western attitudes toward the body is ultimately both inadequate and misleading. Medieval Christian theology and Western philosophy—not to mention medicine, alchemy, or poetry —were not simply “precursors” of Cartesian dualism. Quite to the contrary, various strains of medieval and Renaissance thought and socio-religious practices contributed to richly nuanced and divergent attitudes toward the body. Far from being decried and despised, 9 the [End Page 179] body was integral, if complexly related, to individual identity and personhood. And that identity, as Caroline Bynum argues, was neither abstract...

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