Wilberg: bio-ontology

The term ‘ontology’ derives from the Greek ontos – ‘being’. The ontological foundation of biological medicine is the reduction of the human being to the human body and its biological organs. The basis of human existence and experience, as experienced in the everyday process of living, is sought in a purely biological understanding of ‘life’. In the topsy-turvy world of medical science it is not   human beings that think and feel but their brains which ‘produce’ thoughts and feelings, ‘store’ memories etc. and in the process constitute the human being as a being. I term this reductionistic position ‘bio-ontology’. Heidegger questioned its basic metaphysical assumptions, arguing instead that the human being cannot be reduced to the human body. On the contrary, the human body and its organic functions can only be understood as an embodiment of the intrinsic potentials and capacities of the human being. Heidegger often remarked that our understanding of truth depends most essentially on correctly appreciating the obvious. The obvious, in this context, is that it is not ears that listen and hear, eyes that look and see, or brains that think but beings.

Bodily organs such as the human eye do indeed have functions in the same way that tools or instruments such as pens and computers do. The function of a pen is to serve as an instrument of writing — it is something to write with. But however sophisticated its functional design and operation, no pen is capable of writing. And seeing and hearing, like writing are essentially capacities not functions. As beings we possess a capacity for writing whether or not writing instruments are available, and this capacity belonged to us as a potential of our being even before such instruments were invented. As a functional instrument (Greek organon  ) a bodily organ is the embodiment of a capacity belonging to the human being — not the basis of those capacities. That is why the very development of our bodily organs depends on the exercise of these capacities. We learn to write, drive or swim by writing, driving and swimming. In the process of exercising these capacities — in however primitive a way at first — our brain functioning is itself stimulated, transformed and developed. We do not first alter our brain’s neurological functioning and then somehow find ourselves able to exercise a capacity. According to Heidegger “..we cannot say that the organ has capacities, but must say that the capacity has organs.” The organ does not ‘posses’ a capacity but is “in the possession of a capcity” — subservient to it in the same way that the pen is subservient to our capacity to write. For Heidegger life itself is essentially capability (Fähigkeit). “This capability, articulating itself into capacities creating organs characterizes the organism as such.” “It is not the organ which has a capacity but the organism which has capacities.”

Heidegger goes even further than this however, suggesting that the very ‘organismic’ capacities embodied in our organs and their functions are not essentially biological — rooted in our body’s genes — but rather ontological, having to do with intrinsic potentials of the human being?

“We hear, not the ear…Of course we hear a Bach fugue with our ears, but if we leave what is heard only at this, with what strikes the tympanum as sound waves, then we can never hear a Bach fugue…if we hear, something is not simply added to what the ear picks up; rather what the ear perceives and how it perceives will already be attuned (gestimmt) and determined (bestimmt) by what we hear, be this only that we hear the titmouse and the robin and the lark…(O)ur hearing organs…are never the sufficient condition for our hearing, for that hearing which accords and affords us whatever there really is to hear.”

“The same holds true for our eyes and vision. If human vision remains confined to what is piped in as sensations through the eye to the retina, then, for instance, the Greeks would never have been able to see Apollo in a statue of a young man….” (