Commonly, we find the human body today treated as a possession, a something-other which is distinct from the self. This opposition of the “self” to the body may result in various forms of neglect or abuse of the latter. But it may also, in recognizing the importance of the body for life even as it regards it merely as an instrument, turn towards efforts at optimizing that body. Today, the growing optimization movement appears to place a high value on the body by rigorously tracking its operations, measuring and evaluating them over time, with the explicit aims of improving physical performance and alleviating or preventing bodily ailments or injuries. But in adopting this attitude, this movement often reduces not only the body but often other aspects of the self to a mere system of inputs, outputs, efficiencies, and performance metrics rather than as the living expression of a unified human person—a reduction revealed by the very word “value”.
Behind this reduction we find a rather complex philosophical difficulty, on which we will only touch passingly, here: namely, a difficulty concerning the meaning and reality signified by the word “self” and the subsequent conception of its relation to the body. Attaining some clarity about the nature of the self, however difficult a philosophical topic that may be, seems essential in our efforts at distinguishing harmful from helpful ways of treating the body, especially given our increasing capacities for technologically-mediated interventions.
I. The Appeal of Optimization
The contemporary fitness culture in the Western world has its most obvious proximate origins in the 1970s, when bodybuilding emerged from a fringe obsession of the few into mainstream awareness and popular imitation. Subsequent decades saw explosions of not only gyms but also fitness programs—many quick cash-grabs without any legitimacy to their claims—accompanied by increased scientific inquiry into nutrition, exercise, and the processes of bodily function. By the early 2000s, “wellness” had turned into a multi-trillion dollar per year industry. Since, “wellness” has become decreasingly conceived in terms of being naturally healthy and increasingly in terms of what can be done to “optimize” the body. Many popular podcasts and YouTube channels are dedicated to or focused upon this movement, with some exclusively concerning the physical, others incorporating some aspects of psychology or the mental, but all conceived in the same frame of mind.
The appeal is undeniable. Who among you would wish not only to be in good health, but great health? Who among you wishes to be weaker, when you can be stronger? Who among you does not desire to “have it all together”? Often, these optimizers’ advice works in at least some regard; and if fails, the failure—it can so easily be inferred—is due either to some particular condition of your body or your own misconception or error in following that advice. And so we keep looking for more insight, more guidance, more clarity—some secret key to unlocking the “next level” of our improvement. We might find it. We might feel better, look better. We might be stronger, more resilient. We might achieve our goals. We might achieve “optimization”.
II. Managing the Body
But what is meant by “optimization”? What is this “achievement”? It is a moment; nothing permanent. Anyone, having attained any fitness goals—a certain musculature, a level of leanness, an aesthetic figure—knows that it is easily lost. Physically, barring injury or ailment, maintenance is not too difficult over the span even of some years. But much quicker, it often becomes psychologically wearying. Day after day of discipline, month after month, year after year. “A constant fidelity in small matters”, goes an oft-misattributed saying, “is a great and heroic virtue.” And most of us, even in caring only for our bodies, are neither great nor heroic.
And so we turn to external instruments for assistance. We wear FitBits, Apple Watches, Oura Rings. We download exercise apps for our phones, nutrition tracking programs. We buy supplements. Some of us buy “supplements”. But the devices and the apps and even the supplements (without quotation marks) are not enough as our bodies age. And thus some turn to hormonal replacement therapies. Others, to cosmetic surgery.
These devices, supplements, and surgeries all cost not only money, but time and effort. That is, not only must we take care of our hearts and muscles, but our tendons, our fascia, our recovery. The advance of age corresponds to an increase in care. This increase corresponds not only to the body, but also to the mind. When we are 19 or 22—provided we have not drowned ourselves in digital devices—we feel our minds sharp, agile, ready to seize anything. By 40, we are slower (and God willing, also wiser; but of that, no guarantee). We rely on predictability, on well-established systems for structuring our activities. Routine is a handrail leaned on ever-more-heavily with age. However much money has been poured into products promising increased longevity and vitality, more yet goes into researching and developing newer and more effective treatments. We may be decades yet from any massive “breakthroughs” in such technologies.
Yet no matter how successful these technologies seem already to be, or how much better they might yet become, and no matter how much we succeed in outsourcing this management to external aids, there seems ever less time for anything else, ever-diminishing concern except for the project of the “self”.
III. The Self and Mechanistic Assumptions
The “self”. We all know what we mean by this—until we are asked to explain it. Simple reduction to a label, a set of categorical terms, seems inadequate. We reject this reduction. Who are you? Who am I? Who can find enough words to say who any person is?
The self is a deep topic. What seems most urgent, however, and necessary to discuss, is the common way in which people unconsciously conceive their “selves”. Apologies for this formulation, grossly inadequate to the complex neuroses of contemporary minds, but it seems to me that, in the United States (or Western world more broadly), many conceive the self as the vanishing point of our actions and choices. Put otherwise, the various attributes which we might include in our “self-picture”—being a man, a woman, a father, a mother, a husband, a wife, a mathematician, teacher, artist, Catholic, agnostic, etc.—are not regarded as the self in its ownmost proper being, but derivative lines which converge at a single point: “the self”.
With this separation between the self—infinitesimally small—and everything else that belongs to the self, everything that is not the self becomes something that can be manipulated, changed, ordered. Most especially is this true of the body. Psychological aspects of our humanity may be harder to distance and operationalize in contrast to the physical—they prove more resistant against direct and immediate efforts at control. When something goes wrong bodily, on the other hand, we can find a cause and an intervention which seems to circumvent the problem—through medicine or surgery or rehab. Even when nothing has gone wrong, we recognize that many of our bodies’ actions follow our choices, even if not with the direct immediacy exercised in controlling our limbs. One may improve his breathing and heart rate and capacity to lift heavy objects by exercise and training and practice.
This manipulability of the body often results in, consciously or not, importing certain mechanistic presuppositons about not only the body, but so too the other aspects of the self that may be changed. We seek to optimize our speed, strength, capacity; we seek to optimize control over our emotions, our desires, our focus. (Here, I note in passing, the recent interest in a “brand” of Stoicism.) Each aim presumes that there exists a mechanism other than the “self” which chooses to use it.
IV. Reforming the Unnatural
This presumption does great harm! Not least because it is partially both accurate and true. We are selves who must be responsible for our bodies, and what we are as selves is indeed irreducible to the biological matter that constitutes our boundaries of immediate corporeal awareness. The mind or soul which is responsible for the body is truly different from it; but they are not different as one thing and another. The self is not a vanishing point, and the body is not some mechanism inexplicably belonging to or controlled by this invisible, incalculable, inexpressible “self”. The body is a part of the self, as are the emotions, as are our habits. These parts may be integrated into the whole better or worse, but to treat them as separate in principle is to fracture the self.
When we fracture the self, we reduce its being, ultimately, to that vanishing point. Simultaneously, we convert the parts into mere instrumental, voluntary extensions of the self. In effect, we turn them into technologies—parts comprised within a managerial project. Control over the diverse elements of our lives might look, in many of its particulars, like taking care of our living. But the two are very different modes of thinking, with very different consequences. Generally speaking, we develop technologies for the extension of control. Every technology is good or bad, precisely as an instrument and considered apart from any other effects, insofar as it succeeds or fails at this extension. In rendering parts of our lives as technologies of a sort, we find, quickly, that many do not easily extend our control over life; often, to the contrary. We therefore seek to upgrade or improve them. How long before we can replace them with technologies that “perform better”?
Even a technology, however, is misjudged if considered only as an instrument apart from any other effects. This abstraction never exists in actuality. Technologies do not operate in a vacuum of other considerations. Their effects are never limited to the direct object of their instrumental extension. More always is involved.
Much more so, then, ought we to consider our bodies (or other aspects of our living) as more than mere instruments. The grip of my hand is not measured in the same manner as the grip of my vice clamps, even if they might overlap in their functions. The vice is replaceable; it is not part of me. But the grip of my hand is my grip, as it is my hand; as that hand belongs to me in a way far more intimate than any mere possession ever could. I can and indeed do try to improve the strength of my grip through training, exercise, practice. Sometimes, it fails; this, too, is a part of my own good. Taking care for our lives, that is, recognizes that these parts belong to our living such as to belong amidst a good which cannot be measured according to an extent of control.
In failing to conceive these attributes as parts of the self, that is, we not only conceive them wrongly, but even come to measure them incorrectly.
V. Conclusion: Resolving Our Measures
Measuring the body and its performance is not without good. Certainly, it renders great benefit to the science of medicine. It helps us improve our physical fitness. We may run faster, jump higher, lift heavier weights; and charting progress and performance can aid us in doing this optimally. But to what end? Are we improving for improvement’s sake? Chasing the desires of a vanishing self?
It is sad that we would destroy ourselves—unintentionally and even in some sense unconsciously—in misguided efforts to re-build it in our own (distorted) image. Again, I must ask: to what end? Our measurements must be properly subordinated to a good incalculable—not because it is too expansive—if they are to be parts truly of the whole.
Continue the Inquiry
This question is developed more fully in the Humanitas Technica white paper, “Technology of Biology and Biological Environments” which questions not only the physical effects but also the conceptual distortions which arise from a technologized view of the human person and the biological organism.
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