Page 10 - AECA.org.uk ¦ Koinonia 64

This means, secondly, that the patient is not in fact treated: the illness is
attacked, the diseased organ is singled out and worked upon, but there is no
attempt to help the patient understand or ?nd meaning in their su?ering. All
that is left to the a?icted is to turn to the physician, in whose hands their fate
resides. It is not the patient, as the su?ering one, who is treated, but the illness
which is attacked, while the patient su?ers the treatment of modern medicine,
hoping thereby to ?nd healing, relief, and, ultimately, hoping to regain life. The
physician has come to be, as Michel Foucault put it, the priest of modern
times, the one who can save lives, the one who has power over life and death.
Yet, the only life which such medicine can o?er is that of the perpetuation of
the biological functioning of the body; as to what life itself actually is—let
alone human life—modern biology has no answer. As Je?rey Bishop has pointed
out, in his excellent book, The Anticipatory Corpse, the epistemologically norma-
tive body for modern medicine is the corpse. As he puts it:

Under this epistemologically normative dead body, medicine’s
metaphysical stance has become one in which material and e?-
cient causes are elevated, while formal and ?nal causes are de-
?ated; put di?erently, the meaning and purpose of the body is
de?ated and the mechanical function of the body is elevated. …
the body is merely dead matter in motion; and if its healthy func-
tioning organs are not donated when they are no longer useful to
the patient, then that body is ordered to no good.2

The good, the telos, of the body—the human being as seen by medicine—is the
right mechanical function of the parts of the body, either in itself or, if not
there, in others. The bioethical problems into which this leads us are a quag-
mire, especially when, as is now suggested, we should regard “brain death” as a
euphemism and a legal ?ction so that organ donation could be practiced prior
to the declaration of death.3

So what, then, is life, and speci?cally what is human life? We think we
know what life is—after all, aren’t we living? And yet, as the French philoso-
pher, Michel Henry points out, when we begin to think about what it is that

2 Je?rey P. Bishop, “On Medical Corpses and Resurrected Bodies,” in J. Behr and C. Cunningham,
eds., The Role of Life in Death (forthcoming: Cascade, 2015). Idem. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine,
Power, and the Care of the Dying (Notre Dame, 2011).
3 cf. Bishop, “On Medical Corpses”, referring to Franklin G. Miller and Robert D Truog, Death,
Dying, and Organ Transplantation: Reconstructing Medical Ethics at the End of Life (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012).

8