The Human Body in Western Thought: From Mechanization to Dehumanization

The tradition of regarding the human body as an instrument goes back to Plato and Aristotle, yet during the Renaissance it took a dark turn that manifested itself in the macabre fascination with human anatomy and its mechanization. Over time, speaking abstractly about the body as an instrument was replaced by literally seeing and treating it as such. In this article, I examine the efforts of Renaissance anatomists to understand the human body as a machine and argue that it is their legacy that underlies the dehumanizing and mechanizing tendencies of modern science. By drawing on the theories of R. D. Laing, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, I discuss the psychological and phenomenological implications of treating the body as a machine. This phenomenological approach provides a perspective through which scientific and philosophical views that regard the body as a machine are understood as a form of psychosis. I conclude by proposing that what is needed to counterbalance the dehumanizing tendencies of modern science is a phenomenology that is unrestrained by the demands currently placed on research in the humanities or in related fields such as psychology.