The Mechanistic Metaphor in Transplantation: Blurred Identity and Objectified Corporeality

Abstract

This article analyzes the role of the mechanistic metaphor in communication between doctors and patients, as well as in social and philosophical contexts. It shows that this metaphor, a key part of medical language, conflicts with patients' feelings of alienation from their bodies after transplantation surgery. This conflict leads us to consider ways to change the mechanistic metaphor to help improve patients' adherence to treatment in the postoperative period. The article is divided into several sections: the first looks at the historical development of the mechanistic metaphor. Initially defined by Descartes as a specific view of life, it later became an important part of scientific methodology in biology and medicine. In modern biomedicine, it simplifies understanding biological processes. In transplantology, it describes the body as a machine with replaceable parts, influencing everyday views of the body. The second section focuses on narratives that highlight the mismatch between the machine-like body and patients' personal experiences after transplantation. Patients' feelings of losing their former selves are examined through the concept of numerical identity, used in bioethics to analyze how biotechnologies affect ideas of personhood. This approach reveals that it implicitly continues the machine-body metaphor. In the third section, we explore the distinction between Körper/Leib (the anatomical body/object vs. the lived body). This distinction helps guide our understanding of the philosophical aspects of the mechanistic metaphor. It outlines starting points for a socio-humanitarian analysis of the mechanistic metaphor as an external representation of corporeality. This analysis aims to make the use of the mechanistic metaphor more complex and to bring it closer to the experiences of recipients.