Alexis Carrel and Man, the unknown Japan
"The Man the Unknown" (in English Man, the Unknown), was published in 1935, twenty-three years after the award of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for its author, Alexis Carrel. It 'hard to explain who he was and what now represented the most advanced scientific community and the general public in those years Carrel: famous at home and abroad, was considered by many to be one of the greatest scientists of the modern era. Scholar, philosopher, biologist, physician, surgeon, professor of anatomy, inventor of methods and instruments for the preservation of organs and tissues outside the body, had been a member of major foundations, and American and European universities. Thanks to his research and technologies designed and produced in collaboration with Charles Lindbergh fly across the Atlantic, medical science could make great strides, opening the way for the modern technique of transplantation.
A doctor uncomfortable
Despite great successes in medicine, Carrel is far from being an advocate of progress at any cost and, after analyzing the evolution of knowledge and the development of human society recent centuries, comes to unexpected conclusions: the modern knowledge is a knowledge not only unnecessary but also harmful, because it is not based on the human reality, but on an ideal construction, an abstraction, the result of our mind, that with reality very little to do.
On this basis, the author makes a scathing examination of modern society and today's man, verging, in some passages, the cynicism, but that is the result of a profound philosopher of the revolt against a world of errors , falsehoods and contradictions. For example, after witnessing a miracle at Lourdes, and having studied the case, comes to challenge the science academic disciplines and welcomed some of the border. And yet he understands, among the first, the close link between physical and mental condition of the individual and the surrounding environment, providing the negative consequences of industrialization and urbanization wild on physical and moral integrity.
The great merit of Carrel was that he wanted to find a way to unite all the human sciences in a higher synthesis, represented by a medicine renewed, whose interest was not a single disease, or a single organ, but man as an individual, in all its complex features and functions, and as a social being, integrated into a society based on their real needs. To do this he supports the analysis of biological nature and its laws: in them, in their relentlessness, Carrel identifies some key issues for the survival of human biological every level, and then apply them to our species. It 'clear that this approach has serious risks: to extend the laws of nature and human behavior, without any necessary corrective measures, means not wanting to give due weight to morality as a system of values that can make interaction between humans them on a higher level than the laws of nature. The consequences can be dramatic: according to this approach, we could say that, like antibodies expel harmful bacteria or viruses, or how the body tends to expel or remove potentially dangerous foreign bodies, so the company could expel from your body who is a danger to society, even physically deleting it. This will be overly focused on the applicability of biological laws to man and society to create the biggest problem of the thinking of Carrel, to eugenics.
Lights and shadows
Many are willing to forgive the Carrel operated under the Vichy French government (in charge of a scientific foundation created especially for him by the collaborationist government), or his admiration for non-democratic regimes, which seemed to best embody the system of biological laws which he believed should be extended to the whole society. But one thing surely can not pass over in silence some of his positions today do not struggle to define reactionary or racist, as in the case of eugenics. Eugenics (or Eugene), the discipline that studies the improvement of the race through genetic tools (play through the selection of human or animal), at the time was considered the best way to build a human race without disease resistant and intelligent. We now know how these beliefs are nothing but illusions, as confirmed by the disappointing results of the application of eugenics in Germany before and during the Second World War. The positions of Carrel in this regard are particularly strong: convinced of the need to apply eugenics to the development of the human species comes to speculate on the possibility of procreation exclusion of individuals with hereditary, infectious diseases, mental illness or severe propensity to crime, some of which, he believes, may even be eliminated, at the same time points out, usually (though with some exceptions) it is easier to obtain an improvement of the breed by the descendants of families of high lineage, both for a genetic component, is for a different approach on education, compared to the situation in people of obscure origin.
Such beliefs are only partially true because while it is true that heredity plays a key role in the transmission of many characteristics of individuals, which can obtain in this way more or less pronounced tendencies toward certain behaviors, it is equally true that the family environment, social and cultural context in which the individual is developed to determine the size or pusillanimity: the children of rich and powerful families, but with a tendency to theft and dishonesty, not necessarily grow better educated young people in poor environments, but marked the rule of law and a sound moral code. A work by
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"Man, this stranger," is definitely a work in any case unique, even if controversial, and fascinating place analysis: in an attempt to create a higher science of man, it brings the reader to think carefully about what we are, in all our dimension (physical, biological, psychological, social and religious), and tries to give men a picture as possible complete, innovative, updated to current scientific knowledge. The result is a lengthy process, full of information and insights that are still useful in part, to the point that, despite many decades have passed since its writing, he feels the author's thought the lack of a single important scientific knowledge , to which the scientific community would come many years later: that of DNA and its mechanisms. It would have allowed Carrel in a new way to interpret the data in its possession and to explain what attracted him, appearing at every point of his research, and still could not grasp: the mechanism that determines the organism's development and coding. This work also constitutes a significant moment in the development of scientific thought and social history of the early decades of the twentieth century, and its widespread success indicates that the critical view of the modern world that was presented widely shared.
This translation was carried out on the new French edition edited by Librairie Plon in 1997, taking over the one published in 1935. (1)
Notes 1) Introduction to: Alexis Carrel, Man, the unknown, Luni Editrice, Milano 2008.
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