touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
As neurologist-psychologist Erwin Straus once wrote, the truth that "only with eyes can we see" does not mean that we see with the eyes. On the contrary, it is the person, that unified living being, who sees. "Seeing is," as Straus put it, "located neither in the eye nor in the retina, nor in the optic nerve . . . the brain does not see." It is the person who sees. For certain limited purposes, we may think of or reduce the embodied person to a collection of parts, thinking of the person (from below, as it were) simply as the sum total of those parts. But we do not know either ourselves or others that way.
—Gilbert Meilaender
"The Giving and Taking of Organs," First Things (March 2008)
— Society — Commonplaces #11 — May/June 2020 —
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