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though, do not reduce the human person to a mere physical body;
rather they facilitate and perpetuate the bodily aspect of being
human.
The notion of being grounded in a physical body (as
functional concepts are in human bodies) is not the same as
physicalism or strict materialism, which treats the human body as
a piece of matter. Functional concepts exist as brute facts.
Alexander Pruss claims that Aristotle accepted and taught the
brute fact of purposes inherent to a thing when he wrote that “Teleological properties, the directedness
of things towards an objective purpose – a telos – are properties just as basic as mass and electric
charge are.” 77 Of course, Aristotle did not know what mass and charge are; this point simply poses the
brute fact nature of functional concepts. But, it also hints at the “lived” experience of functional
concepts, distinct from the sense held by the popular understanding of gender. Functional concepts in
the human body are brute facts, because any and every human person lives them. Is it truly so difficult
and onerous to believe that eyes are for seeing, minds are for knowing, and teeth are for cutting or
grinding, depending on what type of teeth they are and where they are located in the mouth? 78
In a manner similar to how the popular sense of gender appeals to “felt” experience as the basis
for the body schema, an appeal to “felt” experience can also be established for the “lived” reality of
functional concepts. Is not my heartbeat informative of my lived life, influencing me in those moments
when I hear it in my ears while exhausted from exercise, or a source of terror when I perceive an
unusual skip in its beating? Functional concepts are lived. What my organs do – how they function –
matters to me, because the particular way I experience these functions alters my worldview, even if
ever so slightly. These functions, taken for granted, are common, human, lived experiences and people
live them through the physical body. A telos, therefore, cannot be in itself biologically reductive, if
biology acts as a medium through which human nature, and thus human personhood, reaches human
senses.
77
Alexander Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2013), 105.
78
Alexander Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2013), 105.