Our bodies, ourselves? In one sense, of course. But the things we now do to our bodies, whether through tattooing, piercing, or sculpting, and the ways we attempt to perfect or transcend them, whether through extreme fitness regimes, self-tracking, or artificial enhancements, suggest new, if not fully articulated, conceptions of the human person and the ends and purposes of human existence.
These conceptions have a history, of course. They derive in part from a centuries-old confidence in the power of science to fix, extend, and possibly even “immortalize” our physical selves. They resonate with the American dream of self-remaking and the New Adam. And they recast the Protestant concern with the born-again experience in secular and material terms. But these ideas have been transformed and popularized through association with assorted projects reflecting our highly individualistic and commodified culture, from identity politics and transhumanism to the Quantified Self movement to assorted cults of body modification.
Despite the various attentions we now lavish on the body, the body itself may be losing its true magisterium. No longer a source of wisdom about human limits and potential, it is now seen as a means of self-transformation, an instrument in the pursuit of perfection—or an equally elusive immortality.
These questions are all explored in the newest issue of The Hedgehog Review, "The Body in Question." As always, we've put some essays and book reviews up in full for you to sample:
- “From the Editors”
- “A Disease Like Any Other,” Joseph E. Davis
- “The New Immortalists,” David Bosworth
- “Body and Soul,” Mark Edmundson
- “On Not Being There: The Data-Driven Body at Work and at Play,” Rebecca Lemov
- “The Witness of Literature,” Alan Jacobs
- “On the Value of Not Knowing Everything,” James McWilliams
- “The Great Accumulation,” Karl Shuve
- “A Prophet Restored,” James L. Nolan Jr.
For subscribers, we have Christine Rosen on tattoos and transgression, Gordon Marino on boxing, Chad Wellmon on the multiversity, Ronald Osborn on the Christian origins of human rights, Johann Neem on the Common Core, and more! If you aren't a subscriber, it's an easy problem to fix: click here and subscribe today.