A Philosophical Anthropology of Medicine: The Split Subject

Abstract

Spain’s most distinguished philosopher of medicine, Pedro Laín Entralgo (1908-2001), believed that philosophical anthropology should be the fundamental basis of any history and theory of medicine, since it could give us a general theory of the human being as a whole, including both the biological and cultural dimensions of human essence; this general anthropology should be both philosophical and medical, multidimensional and systematic, deeply trans-disciplinary. The aim of this contribution is to pose a hypothesis about the double sidedness of human thinking and language, a basic point for any medical-philosophical-anthropology. This hypothesis is based on three classic 19th and 20th Century authors from quite different disciplines: a novelist (Marcel Proust), an anthropologist (J.G. Frazer) and a linguist (Roman Jakobson). From very different points of view, they all present the same basic idea: human thinking and language is the combination of two different processes coming from two different levels of the human mind. The first level, which we shall call ”classical rationality”, allows us to communicate in a clear and distinct way. It is the component of human language that transmits voluntary information. Its ideal models are mathematical and logical language. The second level, which I shall call ”associative rationality”, allows us to introduce the poetical dimension of language, particularly metaphors and metonyms. It is the component of human language that transmits partly involuntary information. Its purer models are dreams, delusions and some expressions of children’s language. The final product of the indivisible activity of both simultaneous processes would be what we call ”human rationality”. If this problematic hypothesis were true, medical philosophy, like any product of human logos, could only be understood as the synthetic result of these two essential components of reason and language.