Why I am opposed to Body Worlds.

We live in a culture where truth has been reduced to a faciendum. Or in the words of Joseph Ratzinger: "The truth with which man is concerned is neither the truth of being, nor even in the last resort that of his accomplished deeds, but the truth of changing the world, molding the world- a truth centred on future and action." (Introduction to Christianity, p.63)

Concerns of metaphysical being and existence and body are not our concerns. To this day I personally fellowship with not a handful of atheists who consider the concept of metaphysics in general to be a jejune monument of the past.

But, as Jean-Paul Sartre diligently says: "If every metaphysics in fact presupposes a theory of knowledge, every theory of knowledge in turn presupposes a metaphysics." (L'etre et le neant, p.10). Our culture deceives itself when it thinks that it lives without a concrete metaphysic of being and existence and body. In the following I shall attempt to humbly disclose what this metaphysic is.

My observation is that the metaphysical ontology of our culture delegates the human body to what I will provisionally call a being-as-pure-object. We no longer believe that the body across from us inhabits any other region of being than pure unconscious usefulness. It is no longer an object wreathed in subjectivity, but merely a synthesis of materials set before us as potential tools. In order to prove this one need only observe the disposition of selfishness acted out in oneself or in others. Daily we choose to determine our relations to others depending on the degree to which they are useful to us. Our eyes fixate on the human standing to the side, and immediately we ask ourselves,"What shall this person render unto me". This questioning procedure can be done almost instantaneously, as one may note in a school girl who glances over the sea of faces in the cafeteria, whose eyes will only rest momentarily on the fellow with acne before formulating a foundation of judicative rejection and swiftly moving on to the next face. This whole structure of high school rejection depends on an immanent ontology of pure-object or pure-resource for its sustenance. Confirmation of the fact occurs three months later when the schoolgirl turns to the fellow with acne and mimics a display of affection and interest in order for her to obtain mathematical help from him.

I have much more to build on this, and will carry on the post tomorrow if the Lord wills it. We still haven't arrived at the coupe de grace.