Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
What defines us is what we do, and we do things under the recogni-
tion of death, the recognition of the eventual triumph of the potential
for inertness of our body. Death is a break in the iteration of our days;
it may or may not happen now, so the recognition of our death, our fini-
tude, becomes an issue for us. Our body (as matter) as it is, is passive;
it is the true nature and source of our finitude. If there is a general desire
on the part of matter for form (as Aristotle suggests), then the matter
that we are seeks its actualization in the serendipity and energeia of the
soul that we are.
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The living body is the body of the activity of the soul;
the soul is the living of the body that is beyond the given. The recogni-
tion of our death is the threat of being nothing beyond the inertness, the
givenness, of our body. The recognition of finitude is the source of an
imperative to act and do so rationally because our existence indicates
itself only through such action. Thus, death is the ultimate human
closure, the recognition of which is the recognition that all possibilities
cannot be put off forever, and that priorities must be established and fol-
lowed. It is death that forces us to face the issue of an appropriate devel-
opment of content in our lives.
The threat of death forces content into our lives as the means of escap-
ing the inertness that remains a constant possibility of the body. Hannah
Arendt, for example, discusses action as the insertion of the individual
into the human world.
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Without such an insertion, the individual never
exists; thus, an ultimate motive for action is the fear of never having
existed. The difference is rooted in what we understand ourselves pri-
mordially to be. Arendt has the sense that there is a self, a force that
motivates our speech and is revealed to others in speaking, even if we
are unaware of that self ourselves. This supports the suggestion that there
is a spontaneity to each life, a sense that each life is a discovery waiting
to happen. This is not the assertion of a self-created self but a discovery
of a self, a discovery of what was already (potentially) there, by assert-
ing the need for it to exist.
The Possibility of Failure (We Might Be Heroes, but We Are Not
Gods)
Fall 2001 was the time of one of the most thrilling World Series in the
history of baseball. Games were won—and lost—in last inning, just
