Gotham Diary:
No Contact Sports!
14 May 2014
You tell me. How did the work of Adolf Portmann, a Swiss zoologist who specialized in marine morphology, come to the attention of Hannah Arendt? There’s a great story there, I’m sure, but it’s not really why one asks the question when, out of the blue (her trademark blue), Arendt introduces a discussion of Portmann’s thinking about appearance and reality in the third section of the first part of The Life of the Mind. The book has hardly got off the ground, and already it’s off on a tangent.
But Arendt’s tangents are never really tangents; they’re her new thinking on old topics. Portman, Arendt starts off,
has shown that the facts themselves speak a very different language from the simplistic functional hypothesis that holds that appearances in living beings serve merely the two-fold purpose of self-preservation and preservation of the species. From a different and, as it were, more innocent viewpoint, it rather looks as though, on the contrary, the inner, non-appearing organs exist only in order to bring forth and maintain the appearances.
Okay… And we’re talking about this because….? (Questions the experienced reader of Arendt doesn’t bother asking. It will all come out soon enough.) We’re talking about this because Arendt wants to reverse the polarity of Kant’s distinction between being, which is “real,” and appearance, which is possibly deceiving. Arendt doesn’t believe in inner realities, at least to the degree that they might be somehow superior to apparent realities.
Two facts of equal importance give this reversal its main plausibility. First, the impressive phenomenal difference between “authentic” and “inauthentic” appearances, between outside shapes and inside apparatus. The outside shapes are infinitely varied and highly differentiated; among the higher animals we can usually tell one individual from another. Outside features of things, moreover, are arranged according to the law of symmetry so that they appear in a definite and pleasing order. Inside organs, on the contrary, are never pleasing to the eye; once forced into view, they look as though they had been thrown together piecemeal and, unless deformed by dseas or some peculiar abnormality, they appear alike; not even the various animal species, let alone the individuals, are easy to tell from one another by the mere inspection of their intestines.
I thought of this as I lay on my left side — something I never do in life; it was most uncomfortable — while the cardiologist pressed a wand into my chest, and we watched my heart beat. Hannah Arendt was unfamiliar with the possibility that a beating heart could be exposed to view without damaging it; in another passage, she reminds us that to show the roots of a plant apart from the “ground” in which it grows is to kill it. To see the roots is not to see something more “real” about the plant than the parts that nature has made visible.
I daresay that heart surgeons see the appearance of beating hearts all the time, unmediated by technology — an experience that I hope and expect to be spared. Watching my own heart on the screen, in a vision made possible by the miracle of ultrasound, would have been unsettling and even gross if I had not felt completely detached from it. It was my heart in a technical sense only. I can have no direct dealings with it — just as I cannot flit through my lungs, sponging up mucus. I can “take care” of my heart, but only indirectly; and there is no diet or way of life that is guaranteed to protect me from heart disease. Why have I developed atrial fibrillation? Possibly because my blood pressure runs high, which in turn is possibly the result of excess weight. But not necessarily. Considering what I do eat, there is no explaining my “slightly better-than-average” cholesterol numbers. It’s possible that my very picky sweet tooth — desserts have to be extraordinarily interesting to appeal to me — and the small role that processed foods play in my diet have combined to protect me from diabetes. But maybe not.
What goes on inside my own body is private from me. It makes sense to the doctors — hallelujah! — but it seems to have its own life story. To a great extent — to the extent that I’m healthy — that story is, as Arendt points out, just like everybody else’s. That’s what makes medicine possible.
When Portmann defines life as “the appearance of an inside in an outside,” he seems to fall victim to the very views he criticizes, for the point of his own findings is that what appears outside is so hopelessly different from the inside that one can hardly say that the inside ever appears at all. The inside, the functional apparatus of the life process, is covered up by an outside which, as far as the life process is concerned, has only one function, namely to hide and protect it, to prevent its exposure to the light of an appearing world. If this inside were to appear, we would all look alike.
But do we? A further conundrum is produced by my skin. My skin is, of course, visible. Here we can talk about a privacy that divides me from everyone else: it’s up to me to decide who sees what. Again, though: except for the doctors. The doctors look at my skin, and they see all sorts of problems — mainly various kinds of nasty pre-cancer cells in my scalp. I participate directly in the treatment of my skin by applying creams to ever-shifting crime scenes. But, when I do, my skin is no longer my skin, but a medical problem.
Have I ever told you about my femur? Yes, I know I have two, but it was the X-ray of one that excited a wave of what I can only call primitive narcissism. “Is that actual size?” I asked the doctor. Yes, it was. Really! Wow! That was one big bone. It was over two feet long and as thick as my forearm. At each end, a colossal knob. It was impossible not see my femur as an amazingly impressive weapon. It makes you wonder: did primitive human beings size up the oldsters for post-mortem harvests? It seems not — very much not. Only the alienation of modern medicine has made such fantasies possible. Barring a freak accident, I will never hold even one of my two femurs in my grip. It is mine — technically. It is mine, but I can’t have it. The things inside my body are not individual things, but a mass that keeps me alive.
And then there was the time that I had to stand very still for an hour while a radioactive isotope coursed through my bloodstream, causing an image of the vessels in my bones to appear on a screen. Eventually, I beheld my skeleton.
Eventually, my body will stop working, and that will be the end of me — whatever becomes of my remains. There will be no me to stand opposite and apart from them. I will die just like everybody else; but: just like everybody else, there will never be anybody else to be mistaken for me.
Meanwhile: no contact sports. I’m taking a blood thinner, to prevent the one considerable side-effect of the atrial fibrillation (clotting). I am still very much in the zone.