Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
the option of treating containers as extensions of the contained opens up.
This is shown by how frequently in ordinary speech we are prone to use the
same word in one context as metonym and in another as synecdoche. The
word “body” is an example. Only the most insensitive person would fail
to recognize something demeaning in a factory foreman's declaration that
he does not “have enough bodies to staff the graveyard shift.” The “body”
metonym diminishes personhood by reducing it to mere biology, and it
turns upon a traditional dualism that enables us to think of a person as
being contained within the physical organism. But the alternative possibil-
ity of treating the “body” metaphor as synecdoche always lies close at hand.
If the container-contained relationship is read as a part-whole relationship
instead, the demeaning of “person” as mere “body” becomes the ennobling
of “body” as “person” that we detect in the title of the feminist classic,
Our
Bodies, Ourselves.
Once thought of as a symbol of the whole person, the body
finds itself elevated to a position of greater honor.
The inherent ambiguity within metonymy that enables it to shift into
synecdoche also enabled Comte and Saint-Simon to preserve a more sub-
stantial identity between science and religion. Just as the body might be
regarded as metonym in a dualistic understanding of human nature and
as synecdoche in a monistic one, the evolutionary reduction of religion to
science that would strip religion of its traditional public authority could just
as easily transform into synecdoche and become an identity capable of sus-
taining the priesthood of science. In this regard, Comte's claim that every
science first passes through a theological stage might mean that scientific
rationality had merely been
contained
within religious beliefs of the past that
were utterly distinct from science,
or
it could mean that science
coincided
with religion and that religious concepts therefore persisted as scientific
rationality gained ascendency.
Polysemy of this kind ensures that the aromas of pantheism that always
seem to arise from positivist discourses for some readers will go undetected
by others. It enables one to suppose, as Saint-Simon's chief biographer Frank
Manuel has done, that the philosopher's religiosity was strictly tactical,
while overlooking the fact that authorial intentions are never fully determi-
native of meaning. Even if Saint-Simon meant something reductive when he
claimed, as Manuel puts it, that “History was God and God was History,”
what was to prevent his followers from treating this as a genuine identity—as
they in fact did?
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Durkheim's answer to this question was to acknowledge
these pantheistic significations, but to do so only in passing so as to make
them merely so much background noise that had for a time diminished the
