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 BRENT DEAN ROBBINS

THE MEDICALIZED BODY

AND ANESTHETIC CULTURE
THE CADAVER, THE MEMORIAL BODY,
AND THE RECOVERY OF LIVED EXPERIENCE
The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture
 Brent Dean Robbins

The Medicalized
Body and Anesthetic
Culture
The Cadaver, the Memorial Body, and the Recovery
of Lived Experience
Brent Dean Robbins
Department of Psychology
Point Park University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA

ISBN 978-1-349-95355-4 ISBN 978-1-349-95356-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95356-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934665

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
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on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
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Cover image: © Nunzio Paci

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company

Nature America, Inc. part of Springer Nature
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
For my Father, John R. Robbins
 Acknowledgements

This book has been a long journey of over two decades of scholarship,
completed over a career as a graduate student in clinical psychology at
Duquesne University, and two tenure-track professorships at Daemen
College and Point Park University.
I am grateful to my mentors, Michael Sipiora and Eva-Maria Simms,
who introduced me to metabletic phenomenology through the work of
Robert Romanyshyn and J. H. van den Berg. At Daemen College, my
research on medical students would not have been possible without the
help of Ashley Tomaka, Gary Styn, Joel Patterson, and Cara Innus. At
Point Park University, my scholarship has been deeply enriched through
hours of conversation with my friend and colleague, Robert McInerney.
Seminal scholarship by others has been formative for my investiga-
tions, including Carolyn Merchant’s work on Enlightenment views of
women and nature, Martha Nussbaum’s taxonomy of forms of objec-
tification, Michael Allen Gillespie’s examination of the impact of nomi-
nalism on modern and postmodern thought, Nick Haslam’s theoretical
model of dehumanization, Katherine Park’s historical scholarship on the
history of cadaver dissection, Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman’s schol-
arship on liberation psychology, Ernest Becker’s existential theory,
and the many psychologists who have contributed to the empirical
­investigation of terror management theory, including among them Jeff
Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski, Jamie Goldenberg, and
my former student from Allegheny College, Matt Motyl. Continental
philosophers have also been deeply formative for my thinking,

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

especially Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

Emmanuel Levinas, Max Scheler, Paul Ricoeur, Erich Fromm, and Rene
Girard.
For shaping my critical faculties regarding critical psychiatry, I am
indebted to Daniel Burston, R. D. Laing, Robert Whitaker, Sharna
Olfman, Peter Kinderman, Lisa Cosgrove, Allen Frances, Sarah Kamens,
and many others.
I am also grateful to the many colleagues who have supported and
challenged me through my involvement in Society from Humanistic
Psychology, including Richard Bargdill, Harris Friedman, Frank Farley,
Jonathan Raskin, Gina Belton, Louis Hoffman, Shawn Rubin, Todd
Dubose, Justin Karter, Kevin Keenan, Chloe Detrick, David Cain,
Donna Rockwell, Scott Churchill, Fred Wertz, Rodger Broome, Candice
Hershman, Kevin Keenan, Connie Kellogg, Brent Potter, Amanda Lowe,
Kirk Schneider, Tom Greening, Robert Stolorow, Daniel Helminiak,
Krishna Kumar, Sarah Kass, Nathaniel Granger, Jr., Lisa Vallejos, Ilene
Serlin, Trisha Nash, Drake Spaeth, Theopia Jackson, Brian Hanna, Paul
Wong, David St. John, Heidi Levitt, and many others, who have been
like a second family over the years.
For spiritual formation, I must thank my pastor, Fr. Richard Infante,
Mike Aquilina, Don Fontana, Sam Arnone, David Mills, Andrew Purcell,
Jack Nelson, and Michael Liccione, to name a few guiding lights.
Most importantly, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my family,
who have sacrificed many hours of time with me so that I could com-
plete this work and who are the centre of my life. My wife, April, is the
one person without whom I cannot imagine where I would be. She’s my
compass, my heart. My son Dean is also a joy who always makes him-
self available for conversations about my work, and not only does he pay
attention and express interest, his own research has contributed substan-
tially to my thinking—a feat that is more than impressive considering he
is merely 14 years of age. My youngest, Dominic, deserves praise for his
patience, over the many times I had to delay a game or outing to finish
one last edit which turned into yet another and another. My mother has
been the most supportive and encouraging parent one could ask for and
always ready to lend an ear, emotional support, and even financial sup-
port whenever we needed it. This book is dedicated to my father, who
I cared for in his final days, often typing as I sat by his bedside. After
he lost his speaking voice to a mysterious neurological disease, I told
him this book would be dedicated to him. The memory of his smile will
 Acknowledgements    ix

warm my heart always. Thanks to Kelli (and many family members) for
taking good care of him (and me) in the twilight of his days.
Above all, I thank God, who like a patient father, puts up with my
protests in the face of human suffering and mortality, and gives me the
courage and faith, in the midst of it all, to hope and to love.
 Contents

1 The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture 1

2 Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial of Death in

Modern Medicine 19

3 Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative

Rationality: A Metabletic Entry Point 45

4 The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision 65

5 Applications of Terror Management Theory 85

6 Terror Management in Medical Culture 105

7 Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science 127

8 Objectification of the Body as a Terror Management

Defense 151

9 The Objectification of Women and Nature 167

xi
xii    Contents

10 The Role of the Medical Cadaver in the Genesis

of Enlightenment-Era Science and Technology 181

11 A Theological Context 205

12 The Changing Nature of the Cadaver 223

13 Anesthetic Culture 247

14 Psychiatry’s Collusion with Anesthetic Culture 275

15 Mindfulness—The Way of the Heart 301

Index 321
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Plate XXXI from the manuscript of Guy de Vigevano

of 1345 at Chantilly 30
Fig. 2.2 Vesalius, page xxi of De human corporis fabrica
(1543 edition) 31
Fig. 2.3 Anatomical drawing from page 174 of De human
corporis fabrica by Vesalius 33
Fig. 4.1 Drawing of horizon line and vanishing point
by Leon Battista Alberti 70
Fig. 12.1 Plate to Johann Dryander, Anatomia Mundini,
ad vetustissimorum, eorundemque aliquot manu
scriptorum, codicum fidem collata, iustoque suo
ordini restituta, Marpurg 1521, fol. 65r 238
Fig. 12.2 Title page to the second edition of Andreas Vesalius’
De Corporis humani fabrica, 1543 239

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

The Medicalized Body

and Anesthetic Culture

Pixar has long been known for their state-of-the-art animated films, from
Toy Story to Finding Nemo. More recently, a beautiful, heart-warming
film, Coco, has introduced an international audience to an annual
Mexican ritual to honor the dead, Dias de Muertos, or the Day of the
Dead. In the movie, a prepubescent boy, named Miguel Rivera, discov-
ers his great-great grandfather played a guitar that resembled that of
the famous pop singer, Ernesto de la Cruz. In his quest to discover the
man’s true identity, he is thrust into the netherworld of the dead, where
he undergoes a great adventure to retrieve his long-lost and forgotten
ancestor.
The fictional narrative of the film introduces the audience to the
practices and rituals that are familiar to the Mexican people. Altars to
deceased relatives honor the dead with photographs, decorations that
include Mexican marigolds, intimate possessions and ofrendas, offer-
ings of favorite food and beverages of the deceased (Brandes, 2009).
The Mexican people celebrate the holiday between October 31 and
November 2, the period of time established by the Roman Catholic tra-
dition for the celebration of All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween, All Saints’
Day, and All Souls’ Day, designated for remembrance of saints and loved
ones who have passed away.
In watching the film, I was reminded of similar rituals the world over,
most commonly found in indigenous cultures, and especially common in
South America, which honor the dead in a variety of ritual celebrations
similar to the Mexican tradition. For example, I recalled the Haitian

© The Author(s) 2018 1

B. D. Robbins, The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95356-1_1
2 B. D. Robbins

Vodou practice of offering animal sacrifices, a chicken for example, to the

Gods, or lwa, which include among them the dead who have passed on
into the spirit realm (Ramsey, 2011).
On May 5 of each year, the people of Bolivia celebrate Día de las
Ñatitas (Day of the Skulls), in which family members exhume the bones
of relatives three years after their interment. This ritual, dating back to
indigenous tradition, allows the family to preserve the skulls of family in
their homes, where they are believed to offer protection to the house-
hold throughout the year. In November, the skulls are gifted with offer-
ings, such as a crown of flowers, cigarettes, and alcohol (Arguinzoni,
2016).
In contrast, contemporary North American and European practices
related to the dead have shifted quite dramatically over the past several
centuries. Whereas the church cemetery had once been located in the
center of town, burials in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have
tended to occur in cemeteries located outside the commercial areas of
cities, in more rural and decentered locations, or the practice of crema-
tion has replaced the burial (Aries, 1975).
Prior to the nineteenth century, the family was primarily responsible
for care of the dying and dead. The process of dying and preparation
of the dead was a highly visible and ritualized process, even to children,
which by the twentieth century, with the proliferation of hospitals and
funeral homes, was largely taken over by professionals. As a result, prepa-
ration of the dead has become increasingly invisible and the relationship
to the deceased has become more distant, both spatially and emotionally
(DeSpelder & Strickland, 1992; Gordon & Marshall, 2000; Johnson,
2018; O’Connor, 1986). As late as early twentieth century, the liv-
ing room of the family home was known as the “Death Room,” due to
its role in housing the deceased during the funeral wake. Today, most
deaths occur in hospitals, and funerals are held in funeral homes where
embalming and preparation of the body occur out of sight and mind of
the mourning family. As a consequence, death has become more sani-
tized, and non-professional mourners are preserved from the encoun-
ter with the process of decay and dissolution of the body of the dead.
Obviously, there are practical benefits to these arrangements, not least
of which is sanitation and protection from potential contagion. But the
downsides are apparent, too, since the invisibility of death fosters, in our
daily lives, a different, more aloof relationship to death, and enables a
social pattern of death denial (Aries, 1975).
 1 THE MEDICALIZED BODY AND ANESTHETIC CULTURE 3

The history of San Francisco offers a poignant illustration of the place

of the dead in contemporary North American society. During the gold
rush, the population of San Francisco 49ers ballooned so quickly, and
contagious disease spread rapidly and claimed many lives. Cemeteries
in the region quickly filled and were kept far from the living (Brooks,
2017; Trufelman, 2017). By the late 1800s, the demand for land and
the desire of the living to distance themselves from the dead led to an
outcry to remove the human remains from cemeteries within the city
limits of San Francisco. By the turn of the twentieth century, burial of
new dead within the city was outlawed by the Board of Supervisors of
the County of San Francisco (Trufelman, 2017). In 1814, the city passed
an ordinance to begin a process to remove the dead from the city, to
be relocated to the town of Colma, roughly 10 miles South of the city.
Hundreds of thousands of bodies were disinterred and moved to new
burial sites in Colma. For the dead without living relatives, bodies were
relocated into mass graves and their tombstones were repurposed for use
in the oceans to prevent beach erosion or as masonry along the pathways
of Buena Vista Park.
In the transfer of the dead from San Francisco to Colma, a process
that took decades, partly as a result of legal battles, many bodies were
left behind and even to this day remain buried beneath the city’s infra-
structure (Brooks, 2017). During construction of University of San
Francisco’s Gleeson Library in the 1950s, for example, roughly 200 bod-
ies were discovered in the area that had been the Masonic Cemetery. In
1966, during the construction of the Hayes-Healy residence hall, more
human remains were discovered, and in 2011, as builders excavated
land for the Center for Science and Innovation, dozens of coffins, skel-
etons, and skulls were unearthed (Brooks, 2017). In the area that was
the Golden Gate Cemetery, workers developing land for the Legion of
Honor found somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 bodies. The state
of the bodies suggests previous excavators operated without respect for
the dead. They “just plowed through burial sites, and plumbers laid
pipes right through bodies and skeletons,” and headstones were callously
thrown into the ocean (Kingston, 1997, n.p.).
The disregard for the dead of San Francisco and its contrast with
indigenous cultures, such as in Mexico and Bolivia, where the remains of
the dead are celebrated and kept close to family, couldn’t be more stark.
This clash of cultures between White North American and European
attitudes toward the dead and indigenous people has more recently
4 B. D. Robbins

played out in protests of Native Americans in response to the Dakota

Access Pipeline project. When the pipeline threatened sacred burial
grounds at Standing Rock Indian Reservation, Native American peo-
ples united to resist the threat to the sacred land of the Sioux (Enzinna,
2017; McKenna, 2017; Ravitz, 2016). The Sioux people of Standing
Rock Reservation offer Protection Prayers to the dead in order to aid the
deceased in their passage from the land of the living to the spirit world.
If the burial ground is disturbed, they fear, the dead may remain caught
among the living and wander the land (Ravitz, 2016). Moreover, the
pipeline, according to the Sioux people, would bring a potential danger
to their supply of water from Lake Oahe, since the transport of crude oil
through the line would travel within close proximity to the Lake on its
way under the Missouri River (Enzinna, 2017).
When the protesters, who deemed themselves “water protectors,”
were attacked with dogs by private security guards, the Standing Rock
protest gained international attention (Enzinna, 2017). However, while
President Barack Obama halted construction of the pipeline in order to
commission more environmental research on its impact, 470,000 barrels
of crude oil now (as of 2018) flows through the pipeline due to a rever-
sal of Obama’s order upon the election of Donald Trump (McKenna,
2017).
For the Sioux people of Standing Rock, and the hundreds of Native
American tribes who joined them for the protest of the Dakota Access
Pipeline, the approval of the pipeline by President Trump is much more
than a setback. Many experience the event as a re-traumatization, the
opening of a deep and festering wound suffered by Native Americans
due to past wrongdoings by colonialist white people against indige-
nous people of America (Itkowitz, 2017). The continuation of the
pipeline project, for example, is a bitter reminder of the building of the
Oahe Dam by the Army Corp of Engineers which led to the flooding
of 56,000 acres of farm land on the Standing Rock reservation in the
1960s (McKenna, 2017). The Sioux people experience the pipeline as a
violation of the 1851 treaty which provided the Sioux with a much wider
range of land that, just a few decades later, led to an even greater restric-
tion of land after gold was found in the Black Hills (McKenna, 2017).
The ongoing violations of trust have contributed to historical trauma,
which has been linked to high rates of mental illness, alcoholism, pov-
erty, and suicide among Native American people (Brown-Rice, 2013).
 1 THE MEDICALIZED BODY AND ANESTHETIC CULTURE 5

The callous treatment of Native American people and disregard for

the health of ecosystems in the name of material gain, driven by greed,
are symptoms of a cultural sickness that I shall refer to as “anesthetic
consciousness.” As a state of mind, anesthetic consciousness refers to a
form of psychic numbing and is characterized by symptoms of alexithy-
mia and experiential avoidance. Alexithymia refers to an incapacity to
gain insight into one’s emotional life and the emotions of others, and
is associated with diminished empathy (Taylor, Bagby, & Parker, 1997).
Alexithymia is, itself, associated with experiential avoidance, an aversion
to the experience of unpleasant or aversive experience that is character-
ized by defensiveness and various forms of psychopathology (Kashdan,
Barrios, Forsyth, & Steger, 2006).
In this book, I will examine anesthetic consciousness as a cultural
habit ingrained in White European and North American colonialist cul-
ture, and that can be traced to habits of comportment that emerged in
the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance as a response to a conflu-
ence of social and historical events. As a cultural habit, anesthetic con-
sciousness is characterized by tendencies to objectify self, others, and the
natural world. Through an attitude of dispassionate concern, anesthetic
consciousness is associated with empathic disengagement and tenden-
cies toward exploitative attitudes toward other people and nature, vio-
lence, and expressions that range between the extremes of hedonism
and asceticism. As a state of mind, anesthetic consciousness tends to
express itself in quasi-dissociative attitudes in which mind and body are
experienced as split off from one another, which amounts to a kind of
self-objectification. As a perceptual habit and epistemological attitude,
it orients itself to the world through ongoing attempts to gain mastery
and control, and it seeks to manage risk through the acquisition of power
and domination. Beneath ongoing and paradoxically counterproductive
attempts at control, lurks the unexamined fear of death and sophisticated
and elusive strategies to deny mortality. Cutoff from the embodied, expe-
riential wisdom of the living organism through psychic numbing, the
victim of anesthetic consciousness fails to appropriately orient him- or
herself toward enriching and nourishing intrinsic needs, instead remain-
ing insatiably geared to extrinsic goals, such as the acquisition of material
goods, power, and status, which ultimately fail to satisfy and therefore
only amplify desire toward destructive ends.
Anesthetic consciousness has become a culturally normative and
socially rewarded attitude through influential social institutions which
6 B. D. Robbins

have cultivated detached concern as an epistemological ideal. To under-

stand its cultural roots, I will draw upon phenomenological, qualitative
research of medical students working with cadavers in gross anatomy.
The findings reveal how medical culture institutes a kind of anesthetic
consciousness that begins with the suppression of the memorial body
of the cadaver, thereby reducing the body specimen to a mechanism as
a basis for acquisition of power to heal and ultimately with the aim to
defeat death. The memorial body, in this case, refers to the body of the
cadaver which recalls the personhood of the deceased and the living body
of the donor. The body of the cadaver invites the student to imagina-
tively engage with the dead in their private lives. The qualitative data
reveal how the suppression of the memorial body of the cadaver initiates
students into an attitude of detached concern toward living patients and
through which the living body of patient and self become appropriated
through a form of mechanistic objectification.
Once the phenomenology of the medicalized body is sketched out
through the descriptions of medical students, I turn to the method of
metabletic phenomenology to examine the cultural genesis of medical
culture as worldview that emerged as a means to cope with the ubiq-
uity of death and dying in medical practice. Through a close reading of
­historical evidence, interpreted through the lens of the psychology of
death denial, I aim to provide a range of evidence to support the hypoth-
esis that modern anatomy and its impact on medical practice has served
as an agent of cultural transformation. Medical dispassion, through the
suppression of the memorial body and the denial of the lived body of
everyday life, provided a template upon which the major innovations in
the arts and sciences would come to transform everyday life in ways that
would normalize and institutionalize anesthetic consciousness as a perva-
sive cultural pattern. I will trace the influence of anesthetic consciousness
on the birth of linear perspective art, the objectivist epistemology of the
new physics that gave birth to the Scientific Revolution, and the colonial
conquest of foreign peoples and their land which would radically trans-
form the world within just a few centuries of time.
Metabletic phenomenology interprets historical events through a
psychological lens. In this case, the history of the medicalized body is
informed not only by qualitative, phenomenological research on the
experience of the body; our cultural–historical analysis also draws
upon state-of-the-art empirical research in personality and social psy-
chology. The study of medical culture and its cultivation of anesthetic
 1 THE MEDICALIZED BODY AND ANESTHETIC CULTURE 7

consciousness are particularly informed by an enormous body of evi-

dence that has been generated in support of terror management theory.
Influenced by the work of Ernest Becker, terror management theory
studies how human experience and behavior is shaped by the various
ways we cope with the fact that we are creatures who die and not only
that, we live with an awareness of death as a fate that we bear with us and
that will befall not only ourselves but those we love.
With terror management theory as a guide, given its sound basis in
empirical psychological evidence, the examination of anesthetic con-
sciousness is provided with a secure foundation. Understood through
existential theory, and by examining its role in medicine and modern cul-
ture writ large, anesthetic consciousness can be thoroughly disclosed as
a sophisticated and powerful method of coping with human mortality—
an approach to coping with death that yields great utility but at a heavy
price of severing us from the experiential wisdom discovered through
lived embodiment.
When coupled with existential theory, metabletic phenomenology
is fully equipped to operate more optimally in the service of a cultural
therapy. In existential and depth-oriented psychotherapy, the individual
patient examines his or her past through a deep and passionate engage-
ment in a fully present mode of awareness, to the extent possible. As
the past is rediscovered and relived in the present, the client discovers a
renewed understanding of the past in the service of opening new orienta-
tions to the future. An existential approach to cultural history, informed
by metabletic phenomenology, operates in a similar way. Through an
examination of the past in light of its existential import, insights into our
historical origins enliven our collective imagination and point toward
new possibilities for ourselves and our relations to one another within
the communal body within which we participate.
Our existential analysis of anesthetic consciousness, as a cultural ther-
apy, will strive to reorient the collective consciousness of Western cul-
ture toward a renewal of our lived, embodied experience. To accomplish
this task, as in individual existential therapy, the rekindling of sensuous
awareness must begin with the courage to face our mortality and to
rediscover our relation to the past through a renewed appreciation for
what the dead can still teach us.
As I have suggested already, indigenous cultures provide us with
examples of how cultures can institute practices to encourage its people
to reconnect with the past through honoring the dead. Over the past
8 B. D. Robbins

centuries, as anesthetic consciousness has become a habit, modern cul-

ture has tended to keep the dead, and death, at a comfortable distance.
Like the town of San Francisco, we have tended to export death to the
outer limits of our cities, and to the extent that cities mirror the inner
landscape of our collective imagination, we have likewise managed to
keep our mortality at a psychological distance. However, cultural heal-
ing from historical traumas of the West will necessitate a return to lived
experience in order to authentically confront our mortality. Through a
return to lived experience, and a recovery of the memorial body, there
is hope for cultivation of new habits of mindful awareness, includ-
ing the rediscovery of the relational, embodied beings we are, with an
innate capacity for empathic engagement to care for one another. In the
end, our cultural therapeutics aims at the recovery of lived experience
for the greater good of rediscovering the dignity of the person, the care
of whom is the implicit meaning and purpose of medical theory and
practice.
This book is structured in order to move back and forth between
qualitative and quantitative research in psychology, and cultural and his-
torical analysis, so that insight into the psychology of individuals may
shed light on the psychological import of our collective existence as a
culture and society. The ongoing return to the psychological import of
medical culture, and its influence on psychology and society, provides the
backbone of the work. With that said, I can now describe how this com-
plex and multilayered analysis will unfold over the course of the book.

Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial

of Death in Modern Medicine

Through a cultural hermeneutic interpretation of the cadaver in the

history of modern medicine, Chapter 2 will argue that at least some
medical interpretations of embodiment serve as a form of death denial.
This analysis will draw on four major sources of evidence to support
this contention: (a) the history of cadaver dissection in Western medi-
cine, (b) diary entries by medical students taking a course in gross anat-
omy, (c) responses to a panel on cadaver dissection held at Daemen
College, and (d) interviews with Gunther von Hagens, the creator of
the “BodyWorlds” exhibit, which features plastinated corpses for the
purpose of “edutainment.” In each of these cases, the data suggest that
 1 THE MEDICALIZED BODY AND ANESTHETIC CULTURE 9

medical education works implicitly to manage death anxiety through a

set of defenses which conceal the nothingness of death. Namely by mak-
ing death into a concrete event, preserved for example in the form of the
cadaver or plastinated corpses, and by speaking rhetorically about death
as a mechanical process, the medical model of death conceals the existen-
tial terror that comes with the lived experience of death as the termina-
tion of existence.

Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative

Rationality: A Metabletic Entry Point
While a phenomenological study of medical students in gross anat-
omy provides some profound insights into the ambiguous status of the
cadaver and the suppression of the memorial body in medical education,
a deeper and more penetrating analysis requires an understanding of
medical culture within its larger historical context. Metabletic phenom-
enology, a psychological and historical approach to understanding the
changing nature of lived experience, can be utilized to illuminate how
the medical body emerges from within a peculiar, Western worldview. By
turning to a phenomenology of time, Chapter 3 situates medical culture
within a radical shift in the conception and experience of time in Western
culture. As the experience of time underwent a profound change, the
Western world, and medicine, became increasingly ordered for the pur-
pose of risk management as a coping mechanism for dealing with uncer-
tainty and human mortality. However, the emphasis on calculative
rationality for the purpose of risk containment paradoxically threatens to
undermine the conditions that make life meaningful and give it direction.

The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision

The metabletic analysis of Western culture’s new conception and expe-
rience of time is further explored in Chapter 4. Time is examined for its
implications for an equally radical transformation in the conception and
experience of space and place. The emergence of the linear perspective
technique in Renaissance art, as developed by Brunelleschi and Alberti,
is systematically examined as a cultural artifact that uniquely discloses a
qualitative shift in the perception of spatiality, which in turn, implies a
transformation of lived embodiment. The lived embodiment of a culture
10 B. D. Robbins

informed by linear perspective vision is found to reflect the medical body

of the cadaver, whose memorial body has been neglected and suppressed
through a process of clinical detachment, expressed through an objectiv-
ist epistemology. The cultural myth of the zombie, within this context,
comes to be understood as a shadow of the neglected memorial body
and suppressed lived body that, within the cultural imagination, comes
to be replaced by the objectified body seen through the figure of the
medical cadaver.

Applications of Terror Management Theory

The suppression of the memorial body in gross anatomy is revelatory
of modern medicine’s overall coping mechanism for coping with the
ubiquity of death, dying and human suffering encountered in medical
practice. The cost of this style of coping includes a diminished capac-
ity for empathy in medical practitioners. A fuller comprehension of the
compensatory, defense mechanisms of modern medicine, as a means
of coping with mortality, requires a more systematic overview of terror
management theory, which is the focus of Chapter 5. In general, people
cope with death through two basic avenues, the enhancement of self-es-
teem and the protection of one’s cultural worldview. Neuroscientific evi-
dence has shown a brain area called the insula plays an important role in
the self-regulation of emotions associated with terror management, with
regard to both self-esteem and empathic engagement with others. These
principles of terror management theory provide a framework to unlock
modern medicine’s unique and rather ingenuous strategies for the man-
agement of death anxiety through cognitive and neurological manage-
ment of self-worth and worldview defense of medical culture.

Terror Management in Medical Culture

Chapter 6 explores the implications of terror management theory for a
deeper and more penetrating insight into the terror management func-
tions of medical culture. The contemporary physician finds him or herself
in a precarious position as a cultural hero who not only serves medic-
inal functions, but also is often expected to answer questions of deep
moral and spiritual import. Physicians, in this latter sense, function like
secular priests. A common motivation for entering medical school is a
desire for respect, an extrinsic motivation that, when dominant, tends to
 1 THE MEDICALIZED BODY AND ANESTHETIC CULTURE 11

be associated with surface learning driven by fear of failure, neuroticism,

and greater risk of exhaustion. In contrast, the motivation to enter med-
icine in order to help people seems to serve a protective function. These
research findings can be clarified in light of Ernest Becker’s theory that
self-esteem functions to protect the self against anxiety and mortal con-
cerns. In the case of medicine, the role of doctor can be understood as a
cultural hero-project. When the self-esteem of the physician is weakened,
the physician is exposed to increased risk of burnout. To protect self-
esteem, physicians can become prone to cognitive biases to protect self-
worth, which can lead to “medical narcissism” and “defensive medicine”
based on self-serving attributions that raise the risk of medical error.
Worldview defense in medicine is linked to racism, sexism, and stigma-
tization of certain out-groups by medical professionals. Finally, medical
scientism can operate as a form of existential dogmatism that, while serv-
ing as a worldview defense for medical professionals, can nevertheless
undermine the ends of science as an open-ended inquiry and put physi-
cians in conflict with patients and their families who differ in worldview.

Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science

In Chapter 7, the analysis explores how modern medicine and science
share propensities to objectify and dehumanize the person. The concept
of the person has been a neglected area of scholarship in medicine. This
neglect is related to the emphasis on third-person perspective method-
ologies that dominate the social sciences and medicine. A more ade-
quate comprehension of personhood requires holistic and non-reductive
approaches to science that integrate first-person and second-person per-
spectives of the person along with third-person perspectives. Resistance
to a paradigm shift in science, which would integrate qualitative and
quantitative methodologies, can be understood as defensive attempts to
maintain the existential dogmatism wedded to scientism and technization
as the dominant discourse of medicine, psychiatry, and psychology. This
defensiveness can, itself, be understood as a worldview defense that pro-
vides protection against anxiety linked to mortality concerns. However,
the dehumanization of the patient and indirectly the dehumanization of
the doctor and other medical professionals are unintended but devastat-
ing consequences of this existential dogmatism that reduces the person
to the status of a cadaver. Neuroscientific evidence demonstrates that this
reductive approach to the body is linked to the suppression of empathy
12 B. D. Robbins

and, consequently, is counterproductive to medical practice in which

healing relationships are essential for positive medical outcomes.

Objectification of the Body

as a Terror Management Defense

Cartesian subject–object metaphysics operative in medical discourse ren-

ders it impossible to grapple with the ambiguity of the cadaver. Within
this framework, the cadaver seems to present itself as an object, but an
object haunted by the subjectivity of the deceased. Chapter 8 seeks a
proper orientation to the ambiguity of the cadaver through an appreci-
ation of the distinction between the cadaver and the lived body. When
understood in light of the lived body, the cadaver can be more appro-
priately contextualized as an ambiguity that pivots on the dual axis of an
anatomical artifact versus a memorial body. When the cadaver becomes
too closely identified with the living patient, medicine tends to conflate
the object-cadaver with the embodied subject of the living patient. Just
as suppression of the memorial body serves a terror management func-
tion, however, the objectification of the living patient is also a coping
mechanism in the face of mortal risk; yet as a consequence, the patient is
dehumanized. The dehumanization of the patient in medical discourse
can be understood as the expression of a cultural neurosis by which
awareness of death is evaded by avoidance of bodily awareness.

The Objectification of Women and Nature

Chapter 9 explores how dehumanization as a terror management defense
is especially prone to impact attitudes and behaviors toward women. A
compelling body of evidence demonstrates that reminders of feminine
reproductive functions, including menstruation, lactation, and preg-
nancy, are typically associated with nature. Reminders of the creaturely
aspects of women and thoughts about nature tend to trigger anxieties
about death and dying. As a result, the animalistic or mechanistic objec-
tification of women serves a terror management function. Animalistic
objectification reduces the woman to an object that is less than human,
whereas mechanistic objectification idealizes the feminine body as a
means to suppress creaturely aspects of feminine reproduction that are
experienced as threatening. Objectification can take on various forms,
which are explored systematically.
 1 THE MEDICALIZED BODY AND ANESTHETIC CULTURE 13

The Role of the Medical Cadaver in the Genesis

of Enlightenment-Era Science and Technology

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a profound cultural shift

took place. In Chapter 10, a review of Carolyn Merchant’s classic text,
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, illu-
minates how the exploitation of the natural world hinged upon the iden-
tification of women’s bodies with the natural world. The cosmos of the
Middle Ages and Renaissance was understood to be an integrated, holis-
tic, and hierarchical order in harmonious relation, wherein the organism
of the body reflected the intrinsic natural order of the larger cosmos.
With the revival of Neoplatonism in the Renaissance, the intellectual cli-
mate placed increasing emphasis on the separation of matter and form,
the duality of appearance and form, and mathematical models geared
toward the manipulation of matter. The devaluing of the natural world
corresponded to the devaluing and persecution of women, including the
witch trials and exclusion of women from their previous role in medicine,
particularly in the role of midwife. A pervasive theme of objectification
provided the basis for the rationalization of cruelty and violence in var-
ied forms, including experimentation upon animals, the subjugation and
domination of women, the enslavement of black people, the exploita-
tion of workers, and the desecration of the natural world. The defensive
objectification of the body, women, and nature emerged as a cultural
strategy for coping with a religious crisis.

A Theological Context
Ernest Becker’s existential theory posits that an ideal society will provide
for its members an adequate symbolic action system to propel a cultural
hero-project. In his assessment, modern society’s crisis of meaning leaves
us vulnerable to death anxiety and neurosis. Consistent with Becker’s
evaluation of modern society’s shortcomings, Chapter 11 provides
an assessment of how modern culture in the West erupts from out of
a religious crisis. This crisis provided the background against which the
mechanistic and objectifying view of the body and nature appear as dom-
inant themes. In the Middle Ages, Trinitarian theology and Christology
informed a relational conception of the cosmos, in which the body was
experienced as sacred, infused with supernatural grace through the incar-
nation, and intrinsically harmonious with nature. The nominalist revolt
14 B. D. Robbins

against Scholasticism, as described by Michael Allen Gillespie, led to a

radical change in Western culture’s understanding of God, nature, per-
sonhood, and the body. This theological transformation was preceded by
major world events, including the Great Schism, the Hundred Years War,
the Black Death, and the Crusades, which challenged the Medieval view
of the cosmos and set the stage for the new mechanical philosophy of the
Enlightenment. Fundamental to this shift in worldview was a transfor-
mation of the Medieval view of the body as sacred into the profane body
described by modern anatomy.

The Changing Nature of the Cadaver

The first documented autopsies occurred in the late Middle Ages during
the thirteenth century. Based on research by Katherine Park, Chapter 12
outlines how dissection of the body in the Middle Ages remained an
operation performed upon the sacred bodies of revered saintly women
and family members. However, as dissection was adopted in the ser-
vice of medical education, and for the purpose of identifying normative
anatomical structures in the fourteenth century, anatomical dissection
focused on the dissection of foreign criminals. By restricting dissection
to unknown and stigmatized individuals, dissection in medical schools
lent themselves to a defensive style of psychological distancing from the
memorial body of the cadaver. Vesalius exploited the new linear per-
spective technique in art for his illustrations as a means to enhance an
attitude of detached concern in relation to his anatomical specimens.
Historical evidence linking Vesalius to Galileo through mutual influences
at University of Padua strongly suggests Vesalius’ attitude of detached
concern informed and shaped the epistemological orientation of the new
physics of Galileo. This epistemological attitude was also informed by
the nascent Neoplatonism emerging in the elite circles of learned men
in Northern Italy, especially through the influence of Toscanelli. As
Vesalius’ desacralized attitude toward the cadaver gained ascendency, the
Church began to emphasize the incorruptibility of saintly bodies.

Anesthetic Culture
By use of the historical phenomenological method of metabletics,
Chapter 13 traces the cultural habit of anesthetic consciousness to the
attitude of detached concern instituted through subculture of modern
 1 THE MEDICALIZED BODY AND ANESTHETIC CULTURE 15

anatomical medicine and medical practice. This cultural habit and its ten-
dencies toward mechanistic objectification nature, the body, and others
are seen through as a template for the objectivist metaphysics and episte-
mology of detached objectivity. This detached objectivity, in turn, forms
the basis of mastery through prediction and control in modern culture.
The metabletic analysis highlights two periods of history that illustrate
how a confluence of influences in medicine, art, theology, and the new
science gave birth to a cultural habit of anesthetic consciousness. An
examination of the figure of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli reveals his cen-
tral role as a cultural agent, whose influence contributed to the nomi-
nalist revolution, the revival of Neoplatonism in the Renaissance, the
development of linear perspective technique in art, the new anatomy of
Vesalius, the new physics of Galileo, and the launch of colonialism at the
Council of Florence, which contributed to Christopher Columbus’ dis-
covery of the New World. A focus on America in the 1830s reveals how
the anesthetic culture of the Enlightenment casted a shadow that cul-
minated in the invention of medical anesthesia, the genocide of Native
Americans, the emergence of the Temperance Movement, and the birth
of consumerism beginning with the first department story, A. J. Stewart
and Company. These historical developments are analyzed to reveal their
implicit connection as expressions of a new Gnosticism which functions
anesthetically to escape experience through psychic numbing.

Psychiatry’s Collusion with Anesthetic Culture

As a cultural habit, anesthetic consciousness can foster extreme, dys-
functional behavior in vulnerable individuals. The lone mass shooter is
among one of many examples of pathological behavior that can be linked
to anesthetic culture. In Chapter 14, an in-depth case study of Las Vegas
shooter Stephen Paddock will illustrate how anesthetic consciousness
likely played a key role in Paddock’s violent behavior. Anesthetic con-
sciousness can be linked to Paddock’s case, including his sociopathic
father, pathological gambling, aloof social behavior, materialistic val-
ues, conformity to toxic masculine norms, and violent behavior—all of
which have been associated with hypoactivity in the insula of the brain
and are associated with severely impoverished empathy and sympathy
for others. When Paddock’s physician prescribed him a benzodiazepine
drug to treat his anxiety, this likely pushed him over the edge into vio-
lent behavior. Paddock’s case is a microcosm of a larger, problematic
16 B. D. Robbins

cultural pattern in which psychiatry tends to collude with anesthetic

consciousness.

Mindfulness—The Way of the Heart

Anesthetic consciousness is an obstacle to the organismic valuing pro-
cess by which people orient themselves to intrinsically motivated, felt val-
ues, which is the basis for experiential wisdom. As a coping mechanism
in response to the human finitude and mortality, it is a self-defeating,
maladaptive strategy. In contrast, Chapter 15 illustrates how the cultiva-
tion of mindfulness creates present-centered, embodied awareness of felt
values which enhances the organismic valuing process, and becomes a
basis for authentic life review by which we can come to terms with death
and dying. Through the cultivation of mindfulness as a style of being,
the person develops attentive awareness of interoceptive feedback from
the body, which cultivates compassionate and empathic engagement
with others. As a prescription for the detached attitude of medical cul-
ture, mindfulness cultivates a phenomenological orientation by which a
relational ontology can be recovered, and an experiential revolution in
science can be borne out. Through a phenomenological orientation to
the body, an anatomy of the relational body can rediscover the circuit of
intentional consciousness linking brain, heart, and others as the basis for
science and medical practices founded on ethical responsiveness to the
suffering of the other.

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 CHAPTER 2

Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial

of Death in Modern Medicine

With some consideration of the role of the cadaver in the history of

modern medicine, I aim to provoke the reader to seriously consider that
at least some medical interpretations of embodiment serve as a form of
death denial. I will point to several sources of evidence to support this
contention, including: (a) the history of cadaver dissection in Western
medicine (though, I will have more to say about this in Chapter 3),
(b) diary entries of medical students taking a course in gross anatomy
and responses to a panel on cadaver dissection I witnessed at Daemen
College, and (c) interviews with Gunther von Hagens, the creator of the
“Bodyworlds” exhibit, which features plastinated corpses for the pur-
pose of “edutainment.” In each of these cases, the evidence indicates
that medical education often works implicitly to manage death anxiety
through a set of sophisticated defense mechanisms which conceal the
nothingness of death. Namely, by making death into a concrete event,
preserved for example in the form of the cadaver or a plastinated corpse,
and by speaking rhetorically about death as a mechanical process, the
medical model of death conceals the existential terror that comes with
the lived experience of death as the termination of existence.
A key finding is that modern anatomy and medicine, by focusing on
the mechanical body of the cadaver, tend also to avoid recognition of
what I call the “memorial body” of the mourned person. The loss of dis-
tinction between the memorial body—a recollection of the lived body
of the deceased—and the cadaver has led to a tendency in medicine, and
in the larger culture, to deny the existence of the lived body. I contend

© The Author(s) 2018 19

B. D. Robbins, The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95356-1_2
Another random document with
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selves, and that the Absolute is therefore a society of selves? Our
answer to this question must depend, I think, upon two
considerations,—(a) the amount of continuity we regard as essential
to a self, and (b) the kind of unity we attribute to a society.
(a) If we regard any and every degree of felt teleological continuity
as sufficient to constitute a self, it is clear that we shall be compelled
to say that selves, and selves only, are the material of which reality is
composed. For we have already agreed that Reality is exclusively
composed of psychical fact, and that all psychical facts are
satisfactions of some form of subjective interest or craving, and
consequently that every psychical fact comprised in the whole
system of existence must form part of the experience of a finite
individual subject. Hence, if every such subject, whatever its degree
of individuality, is to be called a self, there will be no facts which are
not included somewhere in the life of one or more selves. On the
other hand, if we prefer, as I have done myself, to regard some
degree of intellectual development, sufficient for the recognition of
certain permanent interests as those of the self, as essential to
selfhood, we shall probably conclude that the self is an individual of
a relatively high type, and that there are consequently experiences of
so imperfect a degree of teleological continuity as not to merit the
title of selves.
And this conclusion seems borne out by all the empirically
ascertained facts of, e.g., the life of the lower animals, of human
infants, and again of adults of abnormally defective intellectual and
moral development. Few persons, unless committed to the defence
of a theory through thick and thin, would be prepared to call a worm
a self, and most of us would probably feel some hesitation about a
new-born baby or a congenital idiot. Again, finite societies are clearly
components of Reality, yet, as we have seen, it is probably an error
to speak of a society as a self, though every true society is clearly an
individual with a community and continuity of purpose which enable
us rightly to regard it as a unity capable of development, and to
appreciate its ethical worth. Hence it is, perhaps, less likely to lead to
misunderstandings if we say simply that the constituents of reality
are finite individual experiences, than if we say that they are selves.
The self, as we have seen, is a psychological category which only
imperfectly represents the facts of experience it is employed to
correlate.
(b) Again, if we speak of the Absolute as a society of finite
individuals, we ought at least to be careful in guarding ourselves
against misunderstanding. Such an expression has certainly some
manifest advantages. It brings out both the spiritual character of the
system of existence and the fact that, though it contains a plurality of
finite selves and contains them without discord, it is not properly
thought of as a self, but as a community of many selves.
At the same time, such language is open to misconstructions,
some of which it may be well to enumerate. We must not, for
instance, assume that all the individuals in the Absolute are
necessarily in direct social interrelation. For social relation, properly
speaking, is only possible between beings who are ἴσοι καὶ ὅμοιοι at
least in the sense of having interests of a sufficiently identical kind to
permit of intercommunication and concerted cooperation for the
realisation of a common interest. And our own experience teaches
us that the range of existence with which we ourselves stand in this
kind of relation is limited. Even within the bounds of the human race
the social relations of each of us with the majority of our fellows are
of an indirect kind, and though with the advance of civilisation the
range of those relations is constantly being enlarged, it still remains
to be seen whether a “cosmopolitan” society is a realisable ideal or
not. With the non-human animal world our social relations, in
consequence of the greater divergence of subjective interest, are
only of a rudimentary kind, and with what appears to us as inanimate
nature, as we have already seen, direct social relation seems to be
all but absolutely precluded.
Among the non-human animals, again, we certainly find traces of
relations of a rudimentarily social kind, but once more only within
relatively narrow limits; the different species and groups seem in the
main to be indifferent to one another. And we have no means of
disproving the possibility that there may be in the universe an
indefinite plurality of social groups, of an organisation equal or
superior to that of our human communities, but of a type so alien to
our own that no direct communication, not even of the elementary
kind which would suffice to establish their existence, is possible. We
must be prepared to entertain the possibility, then, that the
individuals composing the Absolute fall into a number of groups,
each consisting of members which have direct social relations of
some kind with each other, but not with the members of other
groups.
And also, of course, we must remember that there may very well
be varieties of degree of structural complexity in the social groups
themselves. In some the amount of intelligent recognition on the part
of the individuals of their own and their fellows’ common scheme of
interests and purposes is probably less articulate, in others, again, it
may be more articulate than is the case in those groups of co-
operating human beings which form the only societies of which we
know anything by direct experience.
On the other hand, we must, if we speak of the Absolute as a
society, be careful to avoid the implication, which may readily arise
from a false conception of human societies, that the unity of the
Absolute is a mere conceptual fiction or “point of view” of our own,
from which to regard what is really a mere plurality of separate units.
In spite of the now fairly complete abandonment in words of the old
atomistic theories, which treated society as if it were a mere
collective name for a multitude of really independent “individuals,” it
may be doubted whether we always realise what the rejection of this
view implies. We still tend too much to treat the selves which
compose a society, at least in our Metaphysics, as if they were given
to us in direct experience as merely exclusive of one another, rather
than as complementary to one another. In other words, of the two
typical forms of experience from which the concept of self appears to
be derived, the experience of conflict between our subjective
interests and our environment, and that of the removal of the
discord, we too often pay attention in our Metaphysics to the former
to the neglect of the latter. But in actual life it is oftener the latter that
is prominent in our relations with our fellow-men. We—the category
of co-operation—is at least as fundamental in all human thought and
language as I and thou, the categories of mutual exclusion. That you
and I are mutually complementary factors in a wider whole of
common interests, is at least as early a discovery of mankind as that
our private interests and standpoints collide.
 If we speak of existence as a society, then we must be careful to
remember that the individual unity of a society is just as real a fact of
experience as the individual unity of the members which compose it,
and that, when we call the Absolute a society rather than a self, we
do not do so with any intention of casting doubt upon its complete
spiritual unity as an individual experience. With these restrictions, it
would, I think, be fair to say that if the Absolute cannot be called a
society without qualification, at any rate human society affords the
best analogy by which we can attempt to represent its systematic
unity in a concrete conceptual form. To put it otherwise, a genuine
human society is an individual of a higher type of structure than any
one of the selves which compose it, and therefore more adequately
represents the structure of the one ultimately complete system of the
Absolute.
We see this more particularly in the superior independence of
Society as compared with one of its own members. It is true, of
course, that no human society could exist apart from an external
environment, but it does not appear to be as necessary to the
existence of society as to that of a single self, that it should be
sensible of the contrast between itself and its rivals. As we have
already sufficiently seen, it is in the main from the experience of
contrast with other human selves that I come by the sense of my
own selfhood. Though the contents of my concept of self are not
purely social, it does at least seem clear that I could neither acquire
it, nor retain it long, except for the presence of other like selves
which form the complement to it. But though history teaches how
closely similar is the part played by war and other relations between
different societies in developing the sense of a common national
heritage and purpose, yet a society, once started on its course of
development, does appear to be able to a large extent to flourish
without the constant stimulus afforded by rivalry or co-operation with
other societies. One man on a desert land, if left long enough to
himself, would probably become insane or brutish; there seems no
sufficient reason to hold that a single civilised community, devoid of
relations with others, could not, if its internal organisation were
sufficiently rich, flourish in a purely “natural” environment. On the
strength of this higher self-sufficiency, itself a consequence of
superior internal wealth and harmony, a true society may reasonably
be held to be a finite individual of a higher type than a single human
self.
The general result of this discussion, then, seems to be, that
neither in the self nor in society—at any rate in the only forms of it
we know to exist—do we find the complete harmony of structure and
independence of external conditions which are characteristic of
ultimate reality. Both the self and society must therefore be
pronounced to be finite appearance, but of the two, society exhibits
the fuller and higher individuality, and is therefore the more truly real.
We found it quite impossible to regard the universe as a single self;
but, with certain important qualifications, we said that it might be
thought of as a society without very serious error.[194] It will, of
course, follow from what has been said, that we cannot frame any
finally adequate conception of the way in which all the finite
individual experiences form the unity of the infinite experiences. That
they must form such a perfect unity we have seen in our Second
Book; that the unity of a society is, perhaps, the nearest analogy by
which we can represent it, has been shown in the present
paragraph. That we have no higher categories which can adequately
indicate the precise way in which all existence ultimately forms an
even more perfect unity, is an inevitable consequence of the fact of
our own finitude. We cannot frame the categories, because we, as
finite beings, have not the corresponding experience. To this extent,
at least, it seems to me that any sound philosophy must end with a
modest confession of ignorance.
 “There is in God, men say,
A deep but dazzling darkness,”

is a truth which the metaphysician’s natural desire to know as much

as possible of the final truth, should not lead him to forget.
§ 5. This is probably the place to make some reference to the
question whether the self is a permanent or only a temporary form in
which Reality appears. In popular thought this question commonly
appears as that of the immortality (sometimes, too, of the pre-
existence) of the soul. The real issue is, however, a wider one, and
the problem of immortality only one of its subsidiary aspects. I
propose to say something briefly on the general question, and also
on the special one, though in this latter case rather with a view to
indicating the line along which discussion ought to proceed, than
with the aim of suggesting a result.
It would not, I think, be possible to deny the temporary character of
the self after the investigations of the earlier part of this chapter. A
self, we said, is one and the same only in virtue of teleological
continuity of interest and purpose. But exactly how much variation is
enough to destroy this continuity, and how much again may exist
without abolishing it, we found it impossible to determine by any
general principle. Yet the facts of individual development seemed to
make it clear that new selves—i.e. new unique forms of interest in
the world—come into being in the time-process, and that old ones
disappear.
And again, both from mental Pathology and from normal
Psychology, we found it easy to cite examples of the formation and
disappearance, within the life-history of a single man, of selves
which it seemed impossible to regard as connected by any felt
continuity of interest with the rest of life. In the case of multiple
personality, and alternating personality, we seemed to find evidence
that a plurality of such selves might alternate regularly, or even co-
exist in connection with the same body. The less striking, but more
familiar, cases of the passing selves of our dreams, and of temporary
periods in waking life where our interest and characters are modified,
but not in a permanent way by exceptional excitements, belong in
principle to the same category. In short, unless you are to be content
with a beggarly modicum of continuity of purpose too meagre to be
more than an empty name, you seem forced to conclude that the
origination and again the disappearance of selves in the course of
psychical events is a fact of constant occurrence. No doubt, the
higher the internal organisation of our interests and purposes, the
more fixed and the less liable to serious modification in the flux of
circumstance our self becomes; but a self absolutely fixed and
unalterable was, as we saw, an unrealised and, on the strength of
our metaphysical certainty that only the absolute whole is entirely
self-determined, we may add, an unrealisable ideal. We seem
driven, then, to conclude that the permanent identity of the self is a
matter of degree, and that we are not entitled to assert that the self
corresponding to a single organism need be either single or
persistent. It is possible for me, even in the period between birth and
death, to lose my old self and acquire a new one, and even to have
more selves than one, and those of different degrees of individual
structure, at the same time. Nor can we assign any certain criterion
by which to decide in all cases whether the self has been one and
identical through a series of psychical events. Beyond the general
assertion that the more completely occupied our various interests
and purposes are, the more permanent is our selfhood, we are
unable to go.[195]
These considerations have an important bearing on the vexed
question of a future life. If they are justified, we clearly cannot have
any positive demonstration from the nature of the self of its
indestructibility, and it would therefore be in vain to demand that
philosophy shall prove the permanence of all selves. On the other
hand, if the permanence of a self is ultimately a function of its inner
unity of aim and purpose, there is no a priori ground for holding that
the physical event of death must necessarily destroy this unity, and
so that the self must be perishable at death. For Metaphysics, the
problem thus seems to resolve itself into a balancing of probabilities,
and, as an illustration of the kind of consideration which has to be
taken into account, it may be worth while to inquire what probable
arguments may fairly be allowed to count on either side.
 On the negative side, if we dismiss, as we fairly may, the unproved
assertions of dogmatic Materialism, we have to take account of the
possibility that a body may, for all we know, be a necessary condition
for the existence of an individual experience continuous in interest
and purpose with that of our present life, and also of the alleged
absence of any positive empirical evidence for existence after death.
These considerations, however, scarcely seem decisive. As to the
first, I do not see how it can be shown that a body is indispensable,
at least in the sense of the term “body” required by the argument. It
is no doubt true that in the experience of any individual there must
be the two aspects of fresh teleological initiative and of already
systematised habitual and quasi-mechanical repetition of useful
reactions already established, and further, that intercourse between
different individuals is only possible through the medium of such a
system of established habits. As we have already seen, what we call
our body is simply a name for such a set of habitual reactions
through which intercommunication between members of human
societies is rendered possible. Hence, if we generalise the term
“body” to stand for any system of habitual reactions discharging this
function of serving as a medium of communication between
individuals forming a society, we may fairly say that a body is
indispensable to the existence of a self. But it seems impossible to
show that the possibility of such a medium of communication is
removed by the dissolution of the particular system of reactions
which constitutes our present medium of intercourse. The dissolution
of the present body might mean no more than the individual
acquisition of changed types of habitual reaction, types which no
longer serve the purpose of communication with the members of our
society, but yet may be an initial condition of communication with
other groups of intelligent beings.
As to the absence of empirical evidence, it is, of course, notorious
that some persons at least claim to possess such evidence of the
continued existence of the departed. Until the alleged facts have
been made the subject of serious and unbiassed collection and
examination, it is, I think, premature to pronounce an opinion as to
their evidential value. I will therefore make only one observation with
respect to some of the alleged evidence from “necromancy.” It is
manifest that the only kind of continuance which could fairly be
called a survival of the self, and certainly the only kind in which we
need feel any interest, would be the persistence after death of our
characteristic interests and purposes. Unless the “soul” continued to
live for aims and interests teleologically continuous with those of its
earthly life, there would be no genuine extension of our selfhood
beyond the grave. Hence any kind of evidence for continued
existence which is not at the same time evidence for continuity of
interests and purposes, is really worthless when offered as testimony
to “immortality.” The reader will be able to apply this reflection for
himself if he knows anything of the “phenomena” of the vulgar
Spiritualism.[196]
When we turn to the positive side of the question, it seems
necessary to remark that though the negative considerations we
have just referred to are not of themselves enough to disprove
“immortality,” provided there is any strong ground for taking it as a
fact, they would be quite sufficient to decide against it, unless there
is positive reason for accepting it. That we have no direct evidence
of such a state of things, and cannot see precisely how in detail it
could come about, would not be good logical ground for denying its
existence if it were demanded by sound philosophical principles. On
the other hand, if there were no reasons for believing in it, and good,
though not conclusive, probable reasons against it, we should be
bound to come provisionally to a negative conclusion.
Have we then any positive grounds at all to set against the
negative considerations just discussed? Pending the result of
inquiries which have recently been set on foot, it is hard to speak
with absolute confidence; still, the study of literature does, I think,
warrant us in provisionally saying that there seems to be a strong
and widely diffused feeling, at least in the Western world, that life
without any hope of continuance after death would be an
unsatisfactory thing. This feeling expresses itself in many forms, but I
think they can all be traced to one root. Normally, as we know, the
extinction of a particular teleological interest is effected by its
realisation; our purposes die out, and our self so far suffers change,
when their result has been achieved. (And incidentally this may help
us to see once more that dissatisfaction and imperfection are of the
essence of the finite self. The finite self lives on the division of idea
from reality, of intent from execution. If the two could become
identical, the self would have lost the atmosphere from which it
draws its life-breath.) Hence, if death, in our experience, always took
the form of the dissolution of a self which had already seen its
purposes fulfilled and its aims achieved, there would probably be no
incentive to desire or believe in future continuance. But it is a familiar
fact that death is constantly coming as a violent and irrational
interrupter of unrealised plans and inchoate work. The self seems to
disappear not because it has played its part and finished its work,
but as the victim of external accident. I think that analysis would
show, under the various special forms which the desire for
immortality takes, such as the yearning to renew interrupted
friendships or the longing to continue unfinished work, as their
common principle, the feeling of resentment against this apparent
defeat of intelligent purpose by brute external accident.[197]
Now, what is the logical value of this feeling as a basis for
argument? We may fairly say, on the one hand, that it rests on a
sound principle. For it embodies the conviction, of which all
Philosophy is the elaboration, that the real world is a harmonious
system in which irrational accident plays no part, and that, if we
could only see the whole truth, we should realise that there is no final
and irremediable defeat for any of our aspirations, but all are
somehow made good. On the other side, we must remember that the
argument from the desire for continuance to its reality also goes on
to assert not only that our aspirations are somehow fulfilled and our
unfinished work somehow perfected, but that this fulfilment takes
place in the particular way which we, with our present lights, would
wish. And in maintaining this, the argument goes beyond the
conclusion which philosophical first principles warrant.
For it might be that, if our insight into the scheme of the world were
less defective, we should cease to desire this special form of
fulfilment, just as in growing into manhood we cease to desire the
kind of life which appeared to us as children the ideal of happiness.
The man’s life-work may be the realisation of the child’s dreams, but
it does not realise them in the form imagined by childhood. And
conceivably it might be so with our desire for a future life. Further, of
course, the logical value of the argument from feeling must to some
extent depend upon the universality and persistence of the feeling
itself. We must not mistake for a fundamental aspiration of humanity
what may be largely the effect of special traditions and training.
Hence we cannot truly estimate the worth of the inference from
feeling until we know both how far the feeling itself is really
permanent in our own society, and how far, again, it exists in
societies with different beliefs and traditions. In itself the sentiment,
e.g., of Christian civilisation, cannot be taken as evidence of the
universal feeling of mankind, in the face of the apparently opposite
feelings, e.g., of Brahmins and Buddhists.
I should conclude, then, that the question of a future life must
remain an open one for Metaphysics. We seem unable to give any
valid metaphysical arguments for a future life, but then, on the other
hand, the negative presumptions seem to be equally devoid of
cogency. Philosophy, in this matter, to use the fine phrase of Dr.
McTaggart, “gives us hope,”[198] and I cannot, for my own part, see
that it can do more. Possibly, as Browning suggests in La Saisiaz, it
is not desirable, in the interests of practical life, that it should do
more. And here I must leave the question with the reader, only
throwing out one tentative suggestion for his approval or rejection as
he pleases. Since we have seen that the permanence of the self
depends upon its degree of internal harmony of structure, it is at
least conceivable that its continuance as a self, beyond the limits of
earthly life, may depend on the same condition. Conceivably the self
may survive death, as it survives lesser changes in the course of
physical events, if its unity and harmony of purpose are strong
enough, and not otherwise. If so, a future existence would not be a
heritage into which we are safe to step when the time comes, but a
conquest to be won by the strenuous devotion of life to the
acquisition of a rich, and at the same time orderly and harmonious,
moral selfhood. And thus the belief in a future life, in so far as it acts
in any given case as a spur to such strenuous living, might be itself a
factor in bringing about its own fulfilment. It is impossible to affirm
with certainty that this is so, but, again, we cannot deny that it may
be the case. And here, as I say, I must be content to leave the
problem.[199]
 Consult further:—B. Bosanquet, Psychology of the Moral Self, lect.
5; F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chaps. 9 (The Meanings of
Self), 10 (The Reality of Self), 26 (The Absolute and its
Appearances,—especially the end of the chapter, pp. 499-511 of 1st
ed.), 27 (Ultimate Doubts); L. T. Hobhouse, Theory of Knowledge,
part 3, chap. 5; S. Hodgson, Metaphysic of Experience, bk. iv. chap.
4; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, bk. i part 4, §§ 5, 6; W. James,
Principles of Psychology, vol. i. chap. 10; H. Lotze, Metaphysic, bk.
iii chaps. 1 (especially § 245), 5; Microcosmus, bk. iii. c. 5; J. M. E.
McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, chap. 2 (for a detailed
hostile examination of Dr. McTaggart’s argument, which I would not
be understood to endorse except on special points, see G. E. Moore
in Proceedings of Aristotelian Society, N.S. vol. ii. pp. 188-211); J.
Royce, The World and the Individual, Second Series, lects. 6, 7.

184. “Bodily identity” itself, of course, might give rise to difficult

problems if we had space to go into them. Here I can merely suggest
certain points for the reader’s reflection. (1) All identity appears in the
end to be teleological and therefore psychical. I believe this to be the
same human body which I have seen before, because I believe that
the interests expressed in its actions will be continuous, experience
having taught me that a certain amount of physical resemblance is a
rough-and-ready criterion of psychical continuity. (2) As to the ethical
problem of responsibility referred to in the text, it is obviously entirely
one of less and more. Our moral verdicts upon our own acts and
those of others are in practice habitually influenced by the conviction
that there are degrees of moral responsibility within what the
immediate necessities of administration compel us to treat as
absolute. We do not, e.g., think a man free from all moral blame for
what he does when drunk, or undeserving of all credit for what he
performs when “taken out of himself,” i.e. out of the rut of his habitual
interests by excitement, but we certainly do, when not under the
influence of a theory, regard him as deserving of less blame or
credit, as the case may be, for his behaviour than if he had
performed the acts when he was “more himself.” On all these topics
see Mr. Bradley’s article in Mind for July 1902.
 185. So “self-consciousness,” in the bad sense, always arises
from a sense of an incongruity between the self and some
contrasted object or environment.
186. Though, of course, it does appear in the process of framing
and initiating the scheme of concerted action; the other self is here
contrasted with my own, precisely because the removal of the
collision between my purpose and my environment is felt as coming
from without.
187. It might be said that it is not these features of the
environment themselves, but my “ideas” of them, which thus belong
to the self. This sounds plausible at first, but only because we are
habitually accustomed to the “introjectionist” substitution of
psychological symbols for the actualities of life. On the question of
fact, see Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 8, p. 88 ff. (1st
ed.).
188. A colleague of my own tells me that in his case movements of
the eyes appear to be inseparable from the consciousness of self,
and are incapable of being extruded into the not-self in the sense
above described. I do not doubt that there are, in each of us, bodily
feelings of this kind which refuse to be relegated to the not-self and
that it would be well worth while to institute systematic inquiries over
as wide an area as possible about their precise character in
individual cases. It appears to me, however, as I have stated above,
that in ordinary perception these bodily feelings often are
apprehended simply as qualifying the perceived content without any
opposition of self and not-self. At any rate, the problem is one of
those fundamental questions in the theory of cognition which are too
readily passed over in current Psychology.
189. Of course, you can frame the concept of a “self” from which
even these bodily feelings have been extruded, and which is thus a
mere “cognitive subject” without concrete psychical quality. But as
such a mere logical subject is certainly not the self of which we are
aware in any concrete experience, and still more emphatically not
the self in which the historical and ethical sciences are interested, I
have not thought it necessary to deal with it in the text.
190. That we cannot imagine it does not appear to be any ground
for denying its actuality. It is never a valid argument against a
conclusion required to bring our knowledge into harmony with itself,
that we do not happen to possess the means of envisaging it in
sensuous imagery.
191. I venture to think that some of the rather gratuitous
hypotheses as to the rational selfhood of animal species quà species
put forward by Professor Royce in the second volume of The World
and the Individual, are illustrations of this tendency to unnecessary
over-interpretation.
192. Is it necessary to refer in particular to the suggestion that for
the Absolute the contrast-effect in question may be between itself
and its component manifestations or appearances? This would only
be possible if the finite appearances were contained in the whole in
some way which allowed them to remain at discord with one another,
i.e. in some way incompatible with the systematic character which is
the fundamental quality of the Absolute. I am glad to find myself in
accord, on the general principle at least, with Dr. McTaggart. See the
Third Essay in his recent Studies in Hegelian Cosmology.
193. It would be fruitless to object that “societies” can, in fact, have
a legal corporate personality, and so can—to revert to the illustration
used above—be sued and taxed. What can be thus dealt with is
always a mere association of definite individual human beings, who
may or may not form a genuine spiritual unity. E.g., you might
proceed against the Commissioners of Income Tax, but this does not
prove that the Commissioners of Income Tax are a genuine society.
On the other hand, the Liberal-Unionist Party probably possesses
enough community of purpose to enable it to be regarded as a true
society, but has no legal personality, and consequently no legal
rights or obligations, as a party. Similarly, the corporation known as
the Simeon Trustees has a legal personality with corresponding
rights and duties, and it also stands in close relation with the
evangelical party in the Established Church. And this party is no
doubt a true ethical society. But the corporation is not the evangelical
party, and the latter, in the sense in which it is a true society, is not a
legal person.
I may just observe that the question whether the Absolute is a self
or a person must not be confounded with the question of the
“personality of God.” We must not assume off-hand that “God” and
the Absolute are identical. Only special examination of the
phenomena of the religious life can decide for us whether “God” is
necessarily the whole of Reality. If He is not, it would clearly be
possible to unite a belief in “God’s” personality with a denial of the
personality of the Absolute, as is done, e.g., by Mr. Rashdall in his
essay in Personal Idealism. For some further remarks on the
problem, see below, Chapter V.
194. I suppose that any doctrine which denies the ultimate reality
of the finite self must expect to be confronted by the appeal to the
alleged revelation of immediate experience. Cogito, ergo sum, is
often taken as an immediately certain truth in the sense that the
existence of myself is something of which I am directly aware in
every moment of consciousness. This is, however, an entire
perversion of the facts. Undoubtedly the fact of there being
experience is one which can be verified by the very experiment of
trying to deny it. Denial itself is a felt experience. But it is (a)
probably not true that we cannot have experience at all without an
accompanying perception of self, and (b) certainly not true that the
mere feeling of self as in contrast with a not-self, when we do get it,
is what is meant by the self of Ethics and History. The self of these
sciences always embraces more than can be given in any single
moment of experience, it is an ideal construction by which we
connect moments of experience according to a general scheme. The
value of that scheme for any science can only be tested by the
success with which it does its work, and its truth is certainly not
established by the mere consideration that the facts it aims at
connecting are actual. Metaphysics would be the easiest of sciences
if you could thus take it for granted that any construction which is
based upon some aspect of experienced fact must be valid.
195. This is why Plato seems justified in laying stress upon the
dreams of the wise man as evidence of his superiority (Republic, bk.
ix. p. 571). His ideal wise man is one whose inner life is so
completely unified that there is genuine continuity of purpose
between his waking and sleeping state. Plato might perhaps have
replied to Locke’s query, that Socrates waking and Socrates asleep
are the same person, and their identity is testimony to the
exceptional wisdom and virtue of Socrates.
 If it be thought that at least the simultaneous co-existence within
one of two selves is inconceivable, I would ask the reader to bear in
mind that the self always includes more than is at any moment given
as actual matter of psychical fact. At any moment the self must be
taken to consist for the most part of unrealised tendencies, and in so
far as such ultimately incompatible tendencies are part of my whole
nature, at the same time it seems reasonable to say that I have
simultaneously more than one self. Ultimately, no doubt, this line of
thought would lead to the conclusion that “my whole nature” itself is
only relatively a whole.
196. Compare the valuable essay by Mr. Bradley on the “Evidence
of Spiritualism” in Fortnightly Review for December 1885.
197. Death, however, though the most striking, is not the only
illustration of this apparently irrational interference of accident with
intelligent purpose. Mental and bodily disablement, or even adverse
external fortune, may have the same effect upon the self. This must
be taken into account in any attempt to deal with the general
problem.
198. Dr. McTaggart’s phrase is more exactly adequate to describe
my view than his own, according to which “immortality” is capable of
philosophical proof. (See the second chapter of his Studies in
Hegelian Cosmology.) I have already explained why I cannot accept
this position. I believe Dr. McTaggart’s satisfaction with it must be
partly due to failure to raise the question what it is that he declares to
be a “fundamental differentiation” of the Absolute.
199. I ought perhaps to say a word—more I do not think necessary
—upon the doctrine that immortality is a fundamental “moral
postulate.” If this statement means no more than that it would be
inconsistent with the rationality of the universe that our work as
moral agents should be simply wasted, and that therefore it must
somehow have its accomplishment whether we see it in our human
society or not, I should certainly agree with the general proposition.
But I cannot see that we know enough of the structure of the
universe to assert that this accomplishment is only possible in the
special form of immortality. To revert to the illustration of the text, (1)
our judgment that the world must be a worthless place without
immortality might be on a level with the child’s notion that “grown-up”
life, to be worth having, must be a life of continual play and no work.
(2) If it is meant, however, that it is not “worth while” to be virtuous
unless you can look forward to remuneration—what Hegel,
according to Heine, called a Trinkgeld—hereafter for not having lived
like a beast, the proposition appears to me a piece of immoral
nonsense which it would be waste of time to discuss.
 CHAPTER IV

THE PROBLEM OF MORAL FREEDOM

§ 1. The metaphysical problem of free will has been historically created by extra
ethical difficulties, especially by theological considerations in the early
Christian era, and by the influence of mechanical scientific conceptions in the
modern world. § 2-3. The analysis of our moral experience shows that true
“freedom” means teleological determination. Hence to be “free” and to “will”
are ultimately the same thing. Freedom or “self-determination” is genuine but
limited, and is capable of variations of degree. § 4. Determinism and
Indeterminism both arise from the false assumption that the mechanical
postulate of causal determination by antecedents is an ultimate fact. The
question then arises whether mental events are an exception to the supposed
principle. § 5. Determinism. The determinist arguments stated. § 6. They rest
partly upon the false assumption that mechanical determination is the one and
only principle of rational connection between facts. § 7. Partly upon fallacious
theories of the actual procedure of the mental sciences. Fallacious nature of
the argument that complete knowledge of character and circumstances would
enable us to predict human conduct. The assumed data are such as, from
their own nature, could not be known before the event. § 8. Indeterminism.
The psychical facts to which the indeterminist appeals do not warrant his
conclusion, which is, moreover, metaphysically absurd, as involving the denial
of rational connection. § 9. Both doctrines agree in the initial error of
confounding teleological unity with causal determination.

§ 1. The problem of the meaning and reality of moral freedom is

popularly supposed to be one of the principal issues, if not the
principal issue, of Metaphysics as applied to the facts of human life.
Kant, as the reader will no doubt know, included freedom with
immortality and the existence of God in his list of unprovable but
indispensable “postulates” of Ethics, and the conviction is still
widespread among students of moral philosophy that ethical science
cannot begin its work without some preliminary metaphysical
justification of freedom, as a postulate at least, if not as a proved
truth. For my own part, I own I cannot rate the practical importance
of the metaphysical inquiry into human freedom so high, and am
rather of Professor Sidgwick’s opinion as to its superfluousness in
strictly ethical investigations.[200] At the same time, it is impossible to
pass over the subject without discussion, if only for the excellent
illustrations it affords of the mischief which results from the forcing of
false metaphysical theories upon Ethics, and for the confirmation it
yields of our view as to the postulatory character of the mechanico-
causal scheme of the natural sciences. In discussing freedom from
this point of view as a metaphysical issue, I would have it clearly
understood that there are two important inquiries into which I do not
intend to enter, except perhaps incidentally.
One is the psychological question as to the precise elements into
which a voluntary act may be analysed for the purpose of
psychological description; the other the ethical and juridical problem
as to the limits of moral responsibility. For our present purpose both
these questions may be left on one side. We need neither ask how a
voluntary act is performed—in other words, by what set of symbols it
is best represented in Psychology—nor where in a complicated case
the conditions requisite for accountability, and therefore for freedom
of action, may be pronounced wanting. Our task is the simpler one of
deciding, in the first place, what we mean by the freedom which we
all regard as morally desirable, and next, what general view as to the
nature of existence is implied in the assertion or denial of its
actuality.
That the examination of the metaphysical implications of freedom
is not an indispensable preliminary to ethical study, is fortunately
sufficiently established by the actual history of the moral sciences.
The greatest achievements of Ethics, up to the present time, are
undoubtedly contained in the systems of the great Greek moralists,
Plato and Aristotle. It would not be too much to say that subsequent
ethical speculation has accomplished, in the department of Ethics
proper as distinguished from metaphysical reflection upon the
ontological problems suggested by ethical results, little more than
the development in detail of general principles already recognised
and formulated by these great observers and critics of human life.
Yet the metaphysical problem of freedom, as is well known, is
entirely absent from the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy. With Plato,
as the reader of the Gorgias and the eighth and ninth books of the
Republic will be aware, freedom means just what it does to the
ordinary plain man, the power to “do what one wills,” and the only
speculative interest taken by the philosopher in the subject is that of
showing that the chief practical obstacle to the attainment of freedom
arises from infirmity and inconsistency in the will itself; that, in fact,
the unfree man is just the criminal or “tyrant” who wills the
incompatible, and, in a less degree, the “democratic” creature of
moods and impulses, who, in popular phrase, “doesn’t know what he
wants” of life.
Similarly, Aristotle, with less of spiritual insight but more attention
to matters of practical detail, discusses the ἑχούσιον, in the third
book of his Ethics, purely from the standpoint of an ideally perfect
jurisprudence. With him the problem is to know for what acts an
ideally perfect system of law could hold a man non-responsible, and
his answer may be said to be that a man is not responsible in case
of (1) physical compulsion, in the strict sense, where his limits are
actually set in motion by some external agent or cause; and (2) of
ignorance of the material circumstances. In both these cases there is
no responsibility, because there has been no real act, the outward
movements of the man’s limbs not corresponding to any purpose of
his own. An act which does translate into physical movement a
purpose of the agent, Aristotle, like practical morality and
jurisprudence, recognises as ipso facto free, without raising any
metaphysical question as to the ontological implications of the
recognition.
Historically, it appears that the metaphysical problem has been
created for us by purely non-ethical considerations. “Freedom of
indifference” was maintained in the ancient world by the Epicureans,
but not on ethical grounds. As readers of the second book of
Lucretius know, they denied the validity of the postulate of rigidly
mechanical causality simply to extricate themselves from the position
into which their arbitrary physical hypotheses had led them. If
mechanical causality were recognised as absolute in the physical
world, and if, again, as Epicurus held, the physical world was
composed of atoms all falling with constant velocities in the same
direction, the system of things, as we know it, could never have
arisen. Hence, rather than give up their initial hypothesis about the
atoms, the Epicureans credited the individual atom with a power of