22
The Necessity of Functional Concepts
The popular understanding of gender rejects functional concepts as if functional concepts were
chains or shackles, like a man facing slavery. For example, Gayle Salamon, in her Introduction to
Assuming a Body, qualifies her argument with her overall intent not to focus on the material specificity
of the body. 79 Specifically, her work proposes a superiority of body schema above the actual, physical
contours of the body. She writes, “it is my hope that discussions of transgenderism and transexuality
might not be so problematically reliant on “the real,” a phrase that, it seems to me, never can quite shed
its normativizing and disciplinary dimensions.” 80 Clearly, Salamon believes that the human body ought
not to be idealized as man/male or woman/female. Rather, “felt” experience through the body schema
better explains and establishes the significance of the “lived” body. This view, however, blatantly denies
the normative condition of the human body as male or female, vilifying any notion of real association
between gender and sex.
Contrary to position held by the popular understanding of gender, functional concepts inherent
to the body need not be treated as chains or shackles to human freedom. The contours of my body are
not villainous to my personhood. The philosopher Hans Jonas suggests, to the contrary, that life in itself
presupposes functional concepts, because a living being cannot properly be said to live without them.
Living beings display their telos by way of aim. Aiming, however, can be defined in one of two ways. A
torpedo aiming at a target and the way living beings aim at sustaining their existence refer to altogether
different kinds of aiming: a torpedo can miss its mark and fail to hit the goal assigned to it with minimal
consequence; a living being that misses its goal dies. 81 Therefore, merely carrying out a purpose and
having a purpose attest to radically separate activities. Living beings cannot live without meeting the
purposes of the functional concepts inherent to their particular bodies. Functional concepts “embedded
at the heart of the living being’s needy freedom” 82 cannot be cast off by a mere thought or whim, as if
inconsequential. A heart, for example, needs to continue beating if the whole organism is to survive. To
79
Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010), 2.
80
Ibid, 3.
81
Gilbert Meilaender, Neither Beast Nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person (New York: Enconter Books, 2009),
13.
82
Ibid.