Symposium II: Words, Bodies, War || What's So Great About Nature?

What's So Great About Nature?Author(s): JENNIFER HANSENSource: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Vol. 22, No. 3, Symposium II:Words, Bodies, War (2008), pp. 183-190Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25670711 .

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What's So Great About Nature?

JENNIFER HANSEN St. Lawrence University

This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as

it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.... The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction, and this question cannot be decided by scientific means; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians. ?Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958, 3; emphasis added)

For many years I have been thinking and writing about cosmetic psy chopharmacology (CP) precisely because it underscores Hannah Arendt's view above that technical

innovations, which enable us to remake ourselves, lead to important political questions about the kind of beings we wish to become?earth dwellers (the human condition), dwellers of the universe (solipsistic and worldless), or some unarticulated third option? Biotechnologies that promise to enhance human functions engender new public understandings of bodies. Written on our bod ies are the aspirations of any age. And the Prozac age?which is what I call our

current age?urges us to embody superhuman resilience in the face of enormous environmental threats.

In what follows, I will sketch out my observations about the essential

relationship between politics and embodiment. More specifically, I will articulate what I find problematic in most ethical criticisms of our human quest "to escape our human condition" (Arendt 1958, 2). Ultimately, what I hope to point out is that critics?such as Arendt herself?uncritically depend upon a concept of a "natural" or "authentic" body; the crux of their arguments is that enhancement

technologies threaten a "natural" or "authentic" body. While there may be a great deal to worry about in biotechnologies, I contend that we have yet to articulate

adequately the harms that lie therein because of our inability to transcend an entrenched cultural narrative of authenticity.

CP is a practice either identified or imagined by psychiatrist Peter Kramer, wherein consumers seek out biotechnologies such as selective serotonin reuptake

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2008.

Copyright ? 2009 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

183



184 JENNIFER HANSEN

inhibitors (SSRIs)?such as Prozac?to transform themselves into more socially rewarded persons:1 "Since you only live once, why not do it as a blonde? Why not as a peppy blonde? Now that questions of personality and social stance have entered the arena of medication, we as a society will have to decide how comfortable we are with using chemicals to modify personality in useful attrac tive ways" (1993, 15). Kramer coined this phrase in his best seller Listening to Prozac (1993), which he wrote to draw philosophers (or otherwise philosophically minded readers) to debate the permissibility of enhancement technologies that work specifically on our underlying temperament or personality.2 The point of the book is not to champion the effectiveness of the new generation of antidepres sants in treating clinically depressed patients but, rather, to document an intrigu ing off-label use of Prozac?its ability to turn socially awkward, melancholic

wallflowers into sanguine, superwoman seductresses. CP, argues Kramer, could

give women a much more aggressive and commanding persona in the macho

atmosphere of business without donning the shoulder pads and power suits of the bygone 1980s.3

While eventually ethicists responded to Kramer's book?albeit about ten

years later and most notably by the President's Council on Bioethics (2003)?the media jumped on his book, portraying Kramer as selling a "happy pill" that either made women less weepy and feminine or trivialized some of our greatest intellectuals as mere melancholies who had the misfortune of living before Prozac.4 The first real attacks on Kramer's work came from feminist scholars who challenged his premise that Prozac was a "feminist drug" (1993,40). David

Rothman, reviewing Kramer's book for the New Republic, presages the ensuing feminist work (see, e.g., Metzl 2003; Zita 1998), observing: "A feminist criticism of Kramer would rightly see Prozac as enforcing the values of aggression and

self-seeking ambition_In his stories, Prozac emerges as not only a male

gendered drug, but also as a quintessentially American drug. It does not enhance

pleasure or bring happiness, but promotes adroit competitiveness. It is not a street

drug that brings a quick high, it is an office drug that enhances the social skills

necessary in a postindustrial, service-oriented economy" (Rothman 1994, 36). Two main arguments emerge from the body of feminist criticism of CP, which I refer to as the "Mother's Little Helper" (MLH) argument and the "Band-Aid"

(BA) argument.5 The former sees CP as an upgrade of the "mother's little helper" of the fifties and sixties?Valium or Miltown?which physicians prescribed to

the women that Betty Friedan claimed in The Feminine Mystique were suffer

ing from the problem with no name (1997). Mother's little helpers quite simply medicalize women's dis-ease with patriarchal institutions; they treat social

problems medically. BA, alternatively, argues that CP masks lingering sexist

attitudes and institutional inequities by attributing women's failure to succeed in corporate America to biological features that can be effectively altered with

SSRIs. In both sets of arguments, the danger of CP lies in reifying dangerous cultural attitudes that see human sensitivity?so important to caretaking?as



WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT NATURE? 185

weakness. CP, in other words, is a kind of gender engineering that reinforces American worship of assertiveness, competition, extroversion, and egoism. The era of CP engenders a resilient body that can deftly withstand all sorts of environmental threats?ranging from the ramped-up demands of worker

productivity that deprive us of sleep and other restorative time to global threats of terrorism that instill in us a constant and abiding anxiety about threats from nowhere (see Heidegger 1962, 231).

Both positions?BA and MLH?also rely on a notion of a "natural" and "authentic" body. What I mean is not necessarily that these feminist critics embrace a kind of naive praise of the natural body, akin to the "go naive" romanticism of thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rather, the target of my criticism is the unstated and uncritical view that there are bodies that are more authentic,

more natural, more pure and unsullied by human intervention. At the root of most feminist criticisms of CP is an uncritical acceptance of "woman's nature" as complete and perfect in itself, only misunderstood or underappreciated in a

predominantly sexist culture that abhors intuition, sensitivity, and self-sacrificing caretaking.6 Such feminist arguments depend on a prior assumption that there is a way that things ought to be. Specifically, the assumption is that we need a

world that better accommodates the sexual differences between men and women and refrains from measuring women's nature in terms of what we think are ideal masculine traits. The point here is that if we attuned ourselves to the specific ways in which women differ from men and the different institutional needs that

they therefore require, then the profession of psychiatry could no longer play on women's deep sense of failure to live up to patriarchal expectations.

Before further unpacking my criticism of what I will call the Natural

Body (NB) position, I want to return to another camp of critics of CP, to which I alluded above?mainstream bioethicists. Kramer, lifting the phrase from

psychiatrist Gerald Klerman (1972), refers to bioethicists who denounce CP as

"Psychopharmacological Calvinists" because they tend to see value in suffering. Truth, for the Psychopharmacological Calvinists, requires spiritual struggle. Among the fruits of these Psychopharmacological Calvinists, I want to discuss, briefly, the work of bioethicist Carl Elliott and a report generated by the President's Council of Bioethics (PCBE) while Leon Kass was still its chairman. Both Elliott and the PCBE are indebted to phenomenology and existentialism and draw from these philosophical movements a view that CP is an inauthentic practice, what

Martin Heidegger would have called?with unfortunate theological overtones?

fallenness (see 1962, 219-24). Elliott (2000, 2003) expresses concern with CP because he believes?like

Heidegger and Soren Kierkegaard?that anxiety and melancholy are important forms of alienation precisely because they call us to confront our lives and stake out authentic paths, paths that we carve out after a genuine encounter with Being as opposed to paths already paved for us by das Man that we follow blindly. Elliott writes that existential alienation:



186 JENNIFER HANSEN

from our condition as mortal beings is never simply that; it is always a response to what our particular culture and age have made of our condition as mortal

beings. To say, as Heidegger does, that living well requires anxiety in the face of not Being presupposes a framework of understanding that sees death as not

Being (rather than, say, eternal life in the presence of God, or reincarnation, or

any of the many other ways that people have thought of death). The fact that we modern Westerners are alienated from our sexuality or our mortality does not

mean that all human beings at all times have been or must be alienated from them. When we are alienated from features intrinsic to human life, we are never

alienated solely from those features themselves but from the meaning that our culture and age have given them. (2000, 10)

Hence, biotechnological interference with the natural and authentic process of existential alienation abandons us to a "groundless floating" best captured in Heidegger's analysis of curiosity, wherein Dasein "seeks restlessness and the excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters" (1962, 216).

We seek sophisticated distractions, now in tablet form, to quiet the tempest of

alienation.

In Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness (2003), the PCBE advances Elliott's arguments in more overtly theological language (see Strong 2005). In a passage representative of its concern with CP, the PCBE

romantically praises anxiety and melancholy because "anxiety in the face of a

crucial meeting or a big decision registers the importance of the undertaking and

prods us to rise to the occasion. Shame at our own irresponsible and duplicitous conduct exhibits knowledge of proper conduct and provides a spur to achieving it. These emotional stings not only reflect the truth. If they do not crush us,

they make us better" (2003, 258; emphasis added). Again, moods are important processes that invite us to become more authentic. For the PCBE, to become more

authentic is to become more compassionate to human frailty and humble before

God's creation. Michael J. Sandel, a contributor to the PCBE during the writing of Beyond Therapy, argues in an essay for the Atlantic Monthly (a glimpse into

what became his recent book The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age

of Genetic Engineering [2007]) that "the deeper danger is that [enhancement]

represents a kind of hyperagency?a Promethean aspiration to remake nature,

including human nature, to serve our purpose and satisfy our desires ? And

what the drive to mastery misses and may even destroy is an appreciation of the

gifted character of human powers and achievements" (2004,54; emphasis added).

Psychopharmacological Calvinists, therefore, reject CP because it interferes

with a spontaneous, natural, and somewhat painful process of reckoning with

our greater purpose.

While the feminist critics worry more about the misuse of Prozac to make

women more tolerable and useful in the macho marketplace, their arguments share some features of the approach of Psychopharmacological Calvinists.

Notably, both sets of critics are uneasy about tampering with natural bodies




or natural processes (read: spontaneous and unsullied by human technology). Both sets of critics, furthermore, consider such tampering immoral or at the

very least impermissible. While feminist critics are not necessarily collapsing the distinction between morality and reverence for God's grandeur as the more

overtly theologically minded PCBE does, they do seem to put greater stock in woman's nature than man's technical mastery over nature. And this is where I part company with the major critics of CP, who argue for the impermissibility of a

technological practice precisely because it interferes with a natural body. Morality, however, as a civilizing tool (technology?) is, as Arthur Schopenhauer puts it, "in direct opposition to the natural will" (2003, 108; emphasis added). What

Schopenhauer has right here is a view that nature is not benign. Hence, criticiz

ing human technological intervention as marring our nature?the redesigning of the self into more socially attractive traits?wrongly puts faith in the idea that "mother nature" knows best. And such a view is at odds with a scientific (and one could say, by extension, secular) study of nature.

We are indebted to phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt for conceptualizing human embodiment as the proper point of access into subjectivity. We are inextricably intertwined with nature as the stuff of our projects; we are instrumental beings. And these human projects make up the world?its facts and values. However, both Heidegger and Arendt assign an

important role to nature?in Arendt's case as the conditions of our terrestrial existence and what gives us something in common with other humans and in

Heidegger's case as the mysterious source of genuine encounters with truth?that

gives ethical priority to nature. I am not arguing that Heidegger's and Arendt's works are ultimately the source of error in the criticisms of CP but, rather, that we can read Heidegger and Arendt as capturing a deeper prejudice of humanity?a belief that what is natural is better or more authentic. Not all phenomenologists, for example, Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), share this

prejudice. But it is a strong current nonetheless and is indicative of what above I called our entrenched cultural narrative of authenticity.

What happens if we make this natural body explicit and ask of it, "What's so great about nature?" What grounds?if any?do we have for expressing our discomfort with CP in particular and human technical innovations in general? One possible answer to this question is hinted at in Arendt's preface to The Human Condition. If we take away a natural order as the ground of our moral

claims, we must replace it with political decisions. Then, debates over the ethical

permissibility of CP must transform into political conversations about the kind of

people we want to be, the kind of values we want to embody. If we now have the technical power to make ourselves coincident with our deepest cultural aspira tions, then it is time to reflect on why these cultural aspirations. Since we do not have a natural order to point to as a destination or the path we have strayed from, we are forced to turn to how political processes work?how they may or may not

generate shared meanings and goals about our human condition. We can also pay



188 JENNIFER HANSEN

close attention to the experiences of past communities and the wisdom they have

gleaned about valuable social traits. Are we better off engineering ourselves into

hypermasculine, resilient, and less sensitive subjects who barely sleep in order to

push themselves beyond all known boundaries of productivity? What, perhaps, the PCBE has right is a concern for developing our moral qualities, particularly compassion. Does CP make us less compassionate, and if so, is that casualty of enhancement replaced by something better or worse?

Another possible route for criticizing CP is to appeal to another important insight of phenomenology?the limitedness of our perspective on the world, the

future, and our own subjectivity. Bioethicist Frances Kamm (2005) articulates the "Lack of Imagination" objection to CP, which claims that humans are lim ited in what they can imagine as "better" selves or "better" communities. If we are limited in this way, then looking to other existing communities that seem to

be better off?that have maximized social welfare?is a prudent practice for

evaluating CP politically. We can look backward to sources of inspiration for

building future communities. Of course?and this probably goes without saying for Pragmatists?whatever we try to articulate collectively would be experimental and provisional once we give up the NB position.

A final possible grounds for objecting to CP, which I believe avoids the

pitfalls of the NB position, is to criticize the specific political stance implicitly

adopted by proponents of CP. That is, the ethical harm of CP is that it reifies a

political stance that has abandoned hope. I am fully aware that invoking "hope" in the course of an argument that has painstakingly unearthed the problematic theological concepts embedded in the NB position appears to be inconsistent. I should therefore clarify that I am not opposed to all theological concepts but,

rather, a specific Thomistic theological view that attributes a telos to nature.

The fact that this view persists in the work of many phenomenologists might be

explained by the indebtedness the tradition has to Aristotle and the concomitant lack of appreciation of the work of Darwin. In the case of "hope," teleological

pretensions do not seem to stow cleverly themselves away in this concept in the same way they do in uncritical conceptions of "nature."

I suggest that hope is a kind of temperament that serves as the condition

for the possibility of envisioning profound political change. The Prozac age is

an age that has abandoned hope for collective, political change?guided by the

articulation, debate, and, finally, coordination of shared political ideals. Because

we seem to have so fully lost hope, we seek remedies to cope with the status quo rather than imagine a different way of living, working, and being-in-the-world. CP disconnects us from our more compassionate selves and plays up our

hypermasculine resilience. This kind of neurochemical alteration, therefore, interferes with the temperament of hope and thereby locks us into a specific

political course rather than inspiring us to engage not only our imagination but also our future-orientedness that just might bring about a different world:

a world wherein CP is unnecessary. Hence, an investigation of the ethical harm




of cosmetic psychopharmacology ultimately points us toward a deeper question about the nature of politics and its role in articulating our collective existence? a question that we should not, as Arendt says, leave to professional politicians or scientists.

Notes 1. After considering the only two studies that set out to test Kramer's hypothesis that SSRIs made

patients "better than well," Michael Cerullo asserts that "it is clear that the SSRIs are not a form of

cosmetic psychopharmacology" (2006, 518). 2. Personality is not always synonymous with temperament. In fact, many psychologists believe

that our personality is our inborn temperament plus the particular life experiences and environmental

features that shape us. However, part of what motivated Kramer to write Listening to Prozac is a

hypothesis that our personalities are really biology all the way down. Even if specific life experi ences have contributed toward making us who we are?our personality?those experiences become

biologically encoded. Hence, biography becomes biology. 3. All but one of the case studies, which serve as the occasion of Kramer's philosophical musing

in Listening to Prozac, are women.

4. The New Yorker ran a series of cartoons making fun of Kramer's book, most memorable

among them the cartoon entitled "If They Had Prozac in the 19th Century," which features Karl Marx

exclaiming, "Sure, Capitalism can work out its kinks," and Friedrich Nietzsche saying to his mother, "Me too Mom. I really like what the priest said about all the little people."

5. I develop this analysis more fully in chapter 2 of my manuscript Gender Engineering in the

Prozac Age. 6. Jacqueline Zita (1998) comes at issues of embodiment from a postmodern perspective and

hence does not refer to an underlying female nature.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cerullo, Michael. 2006. "Cosmetic Psychopharmacology and the President's Council on Bioethics."

Perspectives on Biology and Medicine 49, no. 4: 515-23. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1948. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel

Press.

Elliott, Carl. 2000. "Pursued by Happiness and Beaten Senseless: Prozac and the American Dream."

Hastings Center Report 30, no. 2: 7-12. -. 2003. Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream. New York:

W. W. Norton and Co.

Friedan, Betty. [1963] 1997. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton.

Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper Collins.

Kamm, Frances M. 2005. "Is There a Problem with Enhancement?" American Journal of Bioethics 5,no.3:5-14.

Klerman, Gerard L. 1972. "Psychotropic Hedonism and Pharmacological Calvinism." Hastings Center Report 2, no. 4: 1-3.

Kramer, Peter. 1993. Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores the Antidepressant Drugs and the

Remaking of the Self. New York: Penguin Books.

Metzl, Jonathan Michel. 2003. Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder

Drugs. Durham: Duke University Press.



190 JENNIFER HANSEN

President's Council on Bioethics. 2003. Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Washington, D.C.: President's Council on Bioethics.

Rothman, David J. 1994. "Shiny Happy People: The Problem with 'Cosmetic Psychopharmacology.'" New Republic, February 14: 34-38.

Sandel, Michael. 2004. "The Case Against Perfection." Atlantic Monthly 293, no. 3: 50-61. -. 2007. The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. Cambridge,

Mass.: Belknap Press.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2003. "The World as Will and Idea (in Part)." In Nineteenth Century Philosophy, 3rd ed., ed. Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann, 100-124. Upper Saddle River, N.J.:

Prentice Hall.

Strong, Carson. 2005. "Lost in Translation: Religious Arguments Made Secular." American Journal

of Bioethics 5, no. 3: 29-31.

Zita, Jacqueline. 1998. Body Talk: Philosophical Reflections on Sex and Gender. New York: Columbia

University Press.



Symposium II: Words, Bodies, War || What's So Great About Nature?

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