Abstract
This chapter enlists the Heideggerian concept of enframing along with Aristotle’s distinction between nature and art, in order to attempt to discern where control over the spark of life lies in human reproduction through in vitro fertilization (IVF): with nature or with medical technology? I argue that if we continue to think of IVF technologies as giving us a piece of nature, as we currently do, the truly technological and revolutionary dimensions of the machinery and of the cultural outlook remain submerged and invisible. Finally, the chapter questions the patriarchal attachment to parenthood as biological ownership that is presupposed by the proliferation of human conception through IVF.
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Notes
- 1.
There are other notable passages in Aristotle that resist the dominant interpretation that equates nature with form due to the view that potentiality ultimately resolves itself into actuality. For instance, see Aristotle’s De Anima, book 2, where he underscores the unity of natural entities, the ontological coupling between matter and form. He writes, “Hence, too we should not ask whether the soul and body are one, any more than whether the wax and the seal are one, or universally whether the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter are one” (412b6–9).
- 2.
I am sympathetic to Carol Bigwood’s critical reading of Aristotle’s putative ontological misogyny, whereby the male semen in particular and the active, form giving, male principle, more broadly can be seen to appropriate (primary) matter, to potentialize it and so to delete it altogether. Potential matter is masculinized and as a result the woman’s presence, traditionally associated with matter, is deleted. She becomes a fungible resource. However, the disappearance of matter, as posited by Bigwood, is not consistently borne out by key passages in Aristotle’s Physics. Aristotle seems to equivocate between matter as “relative” and “special” (194b10) and the more general description of matter as “the primary substratum of each thing, from which it comes to be without qualification, and which persists in the result” or “the immediate constituent…that taken by itself is without arrangement” (193a10). Thus, pre-enformed matter seems to endure and to be significant, albeit not as significant as its corresponding form.
- 3.
I am indebted to Professor J. J. Glanville’s graduate course on Aristotle (San Francisco State University, 1994) for the clarification of this important point. See also Trish Glazebrook, “From φúσις to Nature, τéχνη to Technology: Heidegger on Aristotle, Galileo and Newton,” in The Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (2000): 95–118. In the same context Glazebrook adds that “A thoughtful account of Aristotle looks not to prime mater to think the enigma of generation” (103). This can be seen as a criticism of Carol Bigwood’s account of prime matter as the maternal element that is suppressed in Aristotle’s account of generation (see Bigwood, Earth Muse, ch. 5).
- 4.
While techné is said to imitate nature, Aristotle sometimes tries to makes sense of nature by looking at techné. See book 2 of Aristotle’s Physics, especially ch. 8, 199b 25–30; Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).
- 5.
Schummer’s basic point seems to be that humans, for instance, learned to become effective hunters and build effective hunting tools by watching animals hunt other animals.
- 6.
On the relationship between telos and peras, see Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of φúσις in Aristotle’s Physics, B 1” (192, 206).
- 7.
Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse on the Catastrophe and Redemption of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2005), 7.
- 8.
For a detailed account of this harnessing, see the first section of Chapter 3, above.
- 9.
For more details on the decontextualization, reduction and fragmentization in technical processes, see Andrew Feenberg, “Impure Reason,” in Questioning Technology (New York: Routledge, 1999).
- 10.
Quoted in Wendy Lynne Lee, “Reproductive Technology and the Global Exploitation of Women’s Sexuality,” in Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism: Six Global Issues (Broadview Press, 2010), 64.
- 11.
Karen Dawson and Peter Singer, “IVF Technology and the Argument from Potential,” in Embryo Experimentation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 78.
- 12.
See Joachim Schummer’s account in “Aristotle on Technology and Nature,” Philosophia Naturalis 38 (2001), 113. According to him “there is no ontological difference between these (artificial) products and natural products, because both in chemistry and in nature the dominant principles of generation, i.e., material cause and efficient cause, are the same (i.e., heat and cold).” Pace Schummer, the efficient causality in nontechnological conception and conception through IVF differs widely.
- 13.
Dr. William Gibbons in the documentary film My Future Baby: Breakthroughs in Modern Family (2012), directed by Brigitte Mueller.
- 14.
On the responsibility of the doctor see L. Rapaport, “IVF Linked to Birth Defects and Childhood Leukemia,” in The Huffington Post, February 4, 2016. See also J. Kluger and A. Park, “Frontiers of Fertility” in Time magazine, May 30, 2013. It seems that IVF babies who are born of parents who could not reproduce themselves without technological intervention owe their being to their biological parents as much as they do to the fertility doctor. The two are co-archic.
- 15.
Martin Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” in The End of Philosophy, ed. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 104.
- 16.
See Richard Rojczewicz, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 68.
- 17.
See Hans Jonas, “Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Task of Ethics,” in Society, Ethics, and Technology, 4th ed., ed. M. Winston and R. Edelbach (Wadsworth, 2012), 121–132.
- 18.
Karey Harwood, The Infertility Treadmill: Feminist Ethics, Personal Choice, and the Use of Reproductive Technologies (University of North Carolina Press), 12.
- 19.
Michael Sandel, “The Case Against Perfection” in Society, Ethics, and Technology, 4th ed., ed. M. Winston and R. Edelbach (Wadsworth, 2012), 329–340.
- 20.
- 21.
See, for instance, G. Pennings, “The Right to Choose Your Donor: A Step Towards Commercialization or a Step Towards Empowering the Patient?” in Human Reproduction 15, no. 3 (2000): 508–514 The ongoing debate about whether or not it is best to tell children born of donor eggs the truth about their genetic origins indicates that secrecy is widely preferred. The literature on this debate is vast, including personal, medical, and academic accounts. See www.dreamababy.com and http://www.abc.net.au.
- 22.
See Robyn Ferrell’s Copula: Sexual Technologies, Reproductive Powers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 32.
Bibliography
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Feenberg, A. (2005) Heidegger and Marcuse on the Catastrophe and Redemption of Modernity (New York: Routledge Press).
Glazebrook, T. (2000) “From φúσις to Nature, τéχνη to Technology: Heidegger on Aristotle, Galileo and Newton” in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. XXXVIII, 95–118.
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Belu, D.S. (2017). Mastering the Spark of Life: Between Aristotle & Heidegger on Artificial Conception. In: Heidegger, Reproductive Technology, & The Motherless Age. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50606-7_4
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