Introduction: Modern Heritage and the Puzzle about Persons in Medical Practice Hans Jonas has broken new ground in the history of Gnosticism and modernity, medical ethics, and philosophical biology. He has been embraced by people on the...
moreIntroduction: Modern Heritage and the Puzzle about Persons in Medical Practice
Hans Jonas has broken new ground in the history of Gnosticism and modernity, medical ethics, and philosophical biology. He has been embraced by people on the political left and others on the political right. Our presentation draws on his interpretation of modernity and his attempt in his philosophical biology to provide a new path out of some of the dead-ends of modernity. As Jonas knew, these concerns have a direct bearing on how we think about medicine.
Modern medicine has enjoyed much success by drawing on those sciences which study the most elementary components of living beings, namely, the sciences of physics, chemistry, genetics, and others. There can be no doubt that these basic sciences do and will play large roles in helping to explain and treat diseases and injuries of various kinds. However, such sciences fall far short in providing for medical practitioners, especially clinicians, a conception of the patient as a living human self that is needed for the practical purposes of healthcare.
Approaches to this Puzzle
In its approach this chapter is divided into two main sections: historical background and conditions for life. The two sections are continuous with one another by drawing on the philosophy of living beings developed by Hans Jonas.
In historical background , we shall briefly sketch the history of modern conceptions of human life which lead to our present-day puzzlement. This sketch will lead to the recognition of the mind/body problem as the persistent intellectual framework from which we still have not succeeded in escaping. As the new sciences of nature emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, a philosophical framework for trying to unify the ever-expanding multiplicity of theories and concepts took shape. This framework consisted in a hierarchy of the sciences, each higher level science being theoretically dependent upon the concepts and laws of sciences of the lower levels. This hierarchy of the sciences, however, gave rise to an attempt to simplify them all by proposing an all-encompassing naturalism, the philosophy that all the sciences would (and must) someday be reduced to physics. Reductionistic naturalism has never proven to fully satisfy the modern mind, however; and consequently the mind/body dualism persisted to thwart attempts to see living beings – human beings in particular – as unified wholes. Present-day efforts in medicine to make overall sense of the patient as a person thus encounters road blocks.
In this second part of the chapter, we seek to lay out conditions for being alive that are found in both the mental and the more physical dimensions of life. These conditions are the following: (1) the necessity for living individuals to constantly act in order to sustain their ongoing existence; (2) the separateness of the individual living being from its environment while at the same time maintaining an openness to the environment and engaging in transactions with it; (3) the necessity for the organism to undergo constant change while always making a sameness of self throughout this change; (4) the directedness of the organism’s activity toward its own future being, hence the teleological orientation of organic processes; (5) the origin of feelings in higher life forms. These five conditions of life can serve as a framework within a unified conception of the person which for the purposes of medicine includes both the more physical and the more mental dimensions of patients.
