Of Jews and Animals by Andrew E. Benjamin

Author:Andrew E. Benjamin [Benjamin, Andrew E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Criticism & Theory, Philosophy, Aesthetics, Religion, Judaism, General
ISBN: 9780748640539
Google: qwnYwAEACAAJ
Publisher: Edinburgh UP
Published: 2010-09-15T20:53:14+00:00

Disease and the animal

Disease for Hegel involves the movement in which one system or organ isolates itself and ‘persists in its activity against the activity of the whole, the fluidity and all-pervading process of which is thus obstructed’ (PN §371). Health, in contrast, is the fluidity of the totality working in unison. Disease, moreover, even though it is linked to the particular, is such that it can take over and dominate the whole. The effect of this form of particularity is its universalisation through the whole. What this means is that disease then becomes the domination of particularity positioned on the level of the organic.4 It is not surprising therefore that Hegel understands ‘Therapy’ in the following terms:

The medicine provokes the organism to put an end to the particular irritation in which the formal activity of the whole is fixed to restore the fluidity of the particular organ or system within the whole. (PN §373)

This discussion both of disease and therapy brings with it an inevitable philosophical determination. In the course of developing a philosophical understanding of disease, and in order to establish a connection between disease thus understood and geography, but also and as significantly to account for the clear variation in the specificity and location of diseases, Hegel draws on the volume Reise in Brasilien … in den Jahren 1817 bis 1820 by Dr J. B. von Spix and Dr C. F. P. von Martius. The passage in the extract that Hegel quotes which is of greatest interest identifies the relationship between disease and civilisation (where the latter is understood as a state of development).

The physician who compares some of the diseases in Brazil such as smallpox and syphilis, with those in other parts of the word, is led to observe that just as each individual is subject to particular diseases in each phase of his development, so, too, whole nations, according to their state of culture and civilization are more susceptible to and develop, certain diseases. (PN §371)

What allows the connection between the individual and the state of civilisation to be established is the philosophical position that underpins the connection between particular and universal that is played out in the discussion of disease. While the passage in question was not written by Hegel it should not be thought surprising that it is deployed in order to identify the differing parameters of the complex interrelationship between disease, place and the movement of historical time. The passage indicates that the analogy is between on the one hand the history of the individual, thus the individual's development, and the history of ‘culture and civilisation’ on the other. What needs to be given greater detail is the location of this generalised sense of development within what could be described as the logic of disease.

Within the operation of that logic disease marks the moment in which particularity dominates a conception of possible universality. Development therefore is the overcoming of susceptibility to diseases in which susceptibility is defined both geographically as well as racially.

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