Abstract

My thesis concerns itself with the way we speak about life within the discourse of a culture dominated by scientific perspectives and values. Chapter Two, entitled "Motherdeath," forms the narrative core of my thesis; it is an account of my attendance upon my mother's dying of cancer, from which arise my larger questions about how science/medicine speaks of life and health. It was this experience--the medical treatment which my mother received from a well meaning doctor and medical establishment--that revealed to me how little our scientific culture recognizes and concerns itself with "quality of life." Parallel to this, I examine the treatment of nature in scientific discourse; the Cartesian splitting of mind from body, preceded by the banishing of sense experience as a means for gaining "true" knowledge of the phenomena , has accomplished human alienation from nature as well as alienation from the body. Our inability to address the question of "quality of life" because it falls outside the discursive structure of the science of medicine relates directly to the inability of technological science to assess and control the damage it has done to the environment. I argue that as long as we refuse connection between our bodies and the body of nature, refuse the union of our knowledge with the material life it seeks to understand, we are limited to a destructive course. Our language maintains a tragic loss of recognition of the quality of life ironically because such a thing is not described in, is not part of, scientific literature . ;Writing in a non-traditional form, I intend with my segments to break with an imposed discursive structure and with a conventional way of speaking. Personal experience with my mother's cancer forms a lens with which to orient my examination of the metaphysics of Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes as they influenced and shaped a new doctrine of knowledge which became modern science