38
vitally important. The human body, he wrote, is given to each person as his or her one and only intimate
connection to the wider world. The great and tremendous problem here is that if the body can be
radically other than what it truly is, then the last element of the human person that could
philosophically be trusted (the physical body) will lose its trustworthiness. Any ground for arguing the
objectivity of the human person would cease, to be replaced by fleeting things. Embodiment, therefore,
is necessary to human life and love. The human body is a gift to each human person. Its nature as a gift
constituting the person as an embodied bei ng testifies to the profundity that “[t]he body I have and am
is my most intimate entry point into the world” 135 and it belongs to me because it is me and I am it.
Though I suffer through it, my body and I do not reduce to particular sufferings.
The Triviality of Body Parts?
The popular understanding of gender trivializes the human body by laying the body’s
importance on a mental image of oneself. Contrary to this spirit, both body and mind are essential to
the human person. According to Wittgenstein, “[t]he human body is the best picture of the human
soul.” 136 This means that the human body expresses the human person. The very ability to know another
human person depends upon bodily communication, signification through the body. Catholic tradition
stands upon this principle, understanding from a philosophical perspective that the life of the body is an
activity of the soul. 137 It appears to me that the popular understanding of gender, breaking from this
principle, treats the body like special clothing adorning the human person. Effectively, the human body
suffers cultural trivialization, wherein individual body parts are only as important as popularly believed
to be. Certainly, biological functions are important and essential for overall health. But it appears as if
135
Erazim Kohak, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1984), 105.
136
nd
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2 ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999),
178, as cited in Alexander Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2013), 197.
137
Alexander Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2013), 198.