The Weekly Screed (#561)

Metaphysics comes to Mississippi
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Pro-choicers are apoplectic over the latest anti-abortion wrinkle, now unfolding in Mississippi. It’s a referendum, facing voters on November 8, declaring that “personhood” begins at the moment of conception. If passed, this law would grant a fertilized (but not necessarily viable) egg all the rights that attach to a full-grown, multi-cell adult American with a driver’s license.

All forms of abortion would be outlawed, including emergencies that threaten the life of the mother, her baby or both. It would render illegal many types of contraception.

But here’s the bright side. Over the next two weeks, ‘til election day, Mississippi is going to be a veritable hotbed of philosophical ferment, with names like Immanuel Kant and Baruch Spinoza buzzing through beauty shops, taverns and front porches from Olive Branch to Gulfport. This sort of heady talk is inevitable because the concept of “personhood” isn’t just a matter of abortion politics or even Roman Catholic orthodoxy.

I mean, this is metaphysics, man. It’s ontology. This issue penetrates right to the heart of philosophical thought about the question of existence. What exists and what doesn’t exist? What’s real and what’s not? What’s physical or spiritual, substantial or merely ethereal — and unworthy of being accepted into what we call the real world?

As we know from our junior-high philosophy courses, ontology keeps all of us sane by determining whether something — like, for example, “school spirit” — “can be properly said to exist but only if conceived as some complex whose constituents are the things that really exist.” Go, team! But let’s face it. Most of us have forgotten a lot of our grade-school ontology. In Mississippi, some curricula don’t even include philosophical basics like logical positivism, apriorism, monism and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

That’s why this referendum is such a Wittgensteinian breath of fresh air! Right now, I picture thousands of Mississippians jamming the libraries, crowding bookstores, poring through the Web and boning up on their metaphysics just so they can vote intelligently on November 8. I mean, surely in a situation where half the population (women) are about to be stripped of a basic choice (which they’ve been free to exercise since 1973), the conscientious citizens of Mississippi will seek to be as ontologically literate they possibly can. Surely!

Besides, this a cerebral quest so juicy it would be hard for even a redneck dropout to resist. Just for one example, consider Kant’s concept of “noumena” or “dinge-an-sich.” Of course, if we view the barely fertilized egg as a noumenon, we are stretching Kant’s definition, because — as we all know — noumena aren’t objects of possible experience but in fact the things that underlie our experience both of the physical world and our own mental states. In Kant’s sense, a noumenon is an ineffable presumption that helps mere humans make sense of reality.

But when you consider the fertilized egg, a single cell pierced by a second cell, each dependent upon each other to achieve existence, Kant’s concept loses just a fraction of its clarity. Each cell is microscopic and one, the sperm, ceases to exist almost instantly. For weeks, the invisible egg has no certainty of continued existence. The infinitesimal egg will vanish forever — with no other creature ever aware of its incipience – if it fails to attach itself to another, larger, more substantial organ, the uterine wall.

If there’s any physical object closer to Kant’s definition of noumenon, it must absolutely be that minute cell teetering not only on the brink of life and death, but on the faint ellipse that borders existence and non-existence. Is this cool, or what?

On the other hand, thousands of thoughtful Mississippians might justifiably reply, “No! You’re wrong, transcendence-breath! If the egg exists at all, even as a microscopic speck, even for only a half-hour before racing past the uterine wall and withering into nothingnesss, still it is far too substantial to fall within the bounds of Kant’s apriorism. Kant himself would not accept this heresy. How could Mississippi?

To which, perhaps, other more liberal-minded Mississippians might counter that even Kant might pause to consider the egg’s “personhood,” because the fertilized embryo, at its first moment of profoundly tenuous life is truly more conceptual — even spiritual — than it is actual, empirical or universal.

Indeed, from this remarkable referendum, it’s possible that a whole new philosophy could emerge — a form of dualism not just referring to time and space, but to the borders of life itself, of existence in its most abstract form. Is it possible, we might wonder, for a thing to exist and not exist at once, to live and yet not live because its potential life is so uncertain that it is death-in-life or life-in-death? In this case, how do we then define abortion? At which point does life-in-death transform itself into just life, or only death?

Is there any clear, Kantian point in the ontological realm of the womb where the metaphysical becomes the unquestionably and mundanely physical?
What a great debate lies in store for the folks down in Hattiesburg, Starkville and Biloxi. Oh, to be in Mississippi now that Spinoza is abroad in the Delta!

Of course, it’s possible that a simpler argument will prevail. Advocates of the new law have said that defining “personhood” at “conception” — a word that’s a philosophical can of worms all by itself! — derives from faith that “we are made in the image of God.”

But this is sloppy philosophy. It assumes that the standard vision of God is a featureless speck on a microscope slide, surrounded by an army of itty-bitty wiggle-worms.

I think most Mississippians are more sophisticated! These are folks, after all, who took only 129 years after the Civil War — with the conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the murder of Medger Evers — to recognize Negroes as human beings deserving of the same legal rights and protections that white people always took for granted.

On abortion, there’s a chance that the Christians of Mississippi are going to be even quicker to get their ontological heads out of their metaphysical ass!