Unnatural Bodies: Disability as Metaphysical Threat

When, in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, a group of eighteen German physicians who participated in the killing of more than fifty disabled children at Rothenburgsort Pediatric Hospital were brought to trial on charges of crimes against humanity, the hospital director, Dr. Wilhelm Bayer, rejected the charge. As historian Jean Johann Chapoutot describes in his book The Law of Blood:

“Such a crime,” he asserted, “can only be committed against people, whereas the living creatures that we were required to treat could not be qualified as ‘human beings.’  Dr. Bayer, with great sincerity, kept reiterating that doctors and legal experts had for decades been advising modern governments to shed the weight of useless mouths…These beings were barely human, they asserted, they were corrupted biological elements, and their defects and pathologies risked being passed on if they reproduced.

The judges, moved by this defense, found the eighteen pediatricians not guilty, and Bayer was allowed to keep his medical license. His views—not just about eugenics, but also about the subhumanity of many disabled people—were widely shared. In a 1964 interview published in Der Spiegel, Werner Catel—the distinguished professor of pediatrics who had initiated the Nazi (so-called) euthanasia program, and who had described mentally disabled children as “such monsters…are nothing but a massa carnis”—remarked, “We are not talking about humans here, but rather about beings that were merely procreated by humans and that will never themselves become humans endowed with reason and a soul.”

As these statements, which were clearly meant to be understood literally, attest; disabled people qua disabled people have been (and continue to be) dehumanized. But their dehumanization has somewhat different dynamics than the kind of dehumanization that I have devoted the last 15 years of my life to studying. The form of dehumanization that I have been most concerned with is closely tied to racialization. That’s why I sometimes describe dehumanization as “racism on steroids.” But the dehumanization of disabled people does not conform precisely to this pattern. It works differently, and needs to be considered on its own terms.

Going through the historical literature, it is striking how often disabled people have been described as “monsters” and reactions to them have often featured the word “horror.” I believe that these words should not be taken lightly, but should be given serious consideration as a key to unlock the social and psychological inner workings of the dehumanization of disabled people. I contend that such words reflect a set of entrenched, and immensely destructive, folk-metaphysical assumptions about humanity, subhumanity, and the metaphysical status of disabled people as beings that are an affront to the natural order, and to the place of human beings within it.

My title is “Unnatural Bodies,” so I want to begin by clarifying the notion of unnaturalness, so as to get a fix on what it is for a body to be regarded as unnatural. If something is unnatural it is not natural, but not everything that is regarded as non-natural is also seen as unnatural. John Stuart Mill’s essay “On nature” is helpful for sorting this out. Mill distinguishes three senses of “nature,” and therefore of the natural, only one of which helps us with the notion of the unnatural.

Mill points out that in one sense, “nature” consists in all that exists. No existing thing is unnatural in this sense. To say that something is not natural, in this first sense, is to say that it is fictional. In another sense, “nature” consists of all that is not a product of or touched by human artifice. To say that something isn’t natural, in this sense, is to say that it’s artificial. It is Mill’s third sense of “nature” that is relevant to the unnatural. Used in this sense, the “natural” is the way things should be. Things that are not natural, in this third sense, are unnatural. They deviate from the way that things of that kind should be. So, an unnatural body is a body that does not conform to the way that human bodies are supposed to be.

To get a handle on this idea, I have found it helpful to turn to the anthropological classic Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas. Douglas points out that societies operate with concepts of the natural order. These frameworks have two components. They consist of a system of categories in which every natural kind of thing has an allotted place, as well as a system of relations that obtain between these categories.

This notion of the natural order consists of a view of how things should be, but from which they can deviate. Thinking through Douglas’ thesis, it is clear that deviation can occur in at least two ways. One of these concerns the relations between kinds of things. For example, if it is deemed natural for women to be subordinate to men, then women subordinating men or asserting their equality with men present an affront to the natural order. Second, and most importantly for the topic of this essay, the natural order is violated by anything that does not fit the categories that constitute that order, and instead seems to transgress the boundaries between them. In the first case, order is restored by putting the offending item in its proper place (to continue the example, by putting women in their subordinate place). In the second case, order is restored either by relegating the offending item to a place, or by obliterating it. In one of her very few references to disability, Douglas (drawing on Evans-Prichard’s ethnography of the Nuer) explains that the Nuer regard “monstrous births” as violations of the human/nonhuman binary, and categorize such babies as really hippopotamuses accidentally born to human beings. They place them in water where they supposedly belong, and where of course they drown or are eaten by predators.

The idea of metaphysical boundary transgression is immensely important to my work on dehumanization. It is crucial for explaining how the process of dehumanization transforms dehumanized people into monstrous beings in the eyes of their dehumanizers. As I mentioned earlier, it has been quite common for able bodied people to refer to people with certain sorts of congenital disabilities as “monsters” (as Douglas does in the quoted passage). I believe that this is best explained by the hypothesis that such people are felt to violate the normative order of nature by transgressing metaphysical boundaries.

The connection between Douglas’ account and what has come to be known as “monster theory” can be found in Noel Carroll’s book The Philosophy of Horror, who uses Douglas’ work to analyze the monsters found in horror fiction. Carroll argues that monsters must have two properties. They must be physically threatening—intent on and capable of doing bodily harm. But there are plenty of things that are not monsters that are also physically threatening. To count as a monster, a being must also be what Carroll calls “cognitively threatening,” and I call “metaphysically threatening.” Metaphysically threatening beings are beings that violate the natural order. They are contradictory beings that straddle two or more mutually exclusive natural categories. The zombies of horror cinema are a good illustration of this thesis. They are physically threatening (they want to kill you, eat your brain, and so on). They are also metaphysically threatening in virtue of being both wholly alive (they walk and eat) and wholly dead (they are decaying cadavers).

Carroll’s analysis focuses on the aesthetics of art-horror. He does not extend it to the real-life horrors of genocide and oppression. But I have found it very helpful for understanding genocidal dehumanization. Typically, dehumanized people are represented as physically threatening (murderers, rapists, terrorists, and so forth) and also regarded as both human and subhuman, thus subverting a metaphysical distinction and transforming them into monsters. 

Why are category transgressions so disturbing? Why do they elicit a horrified response? The horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft gives us a clue when he writes that the essence of the horrific is the apprehension of “a malign and particular suspension of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the demons of unplumbed space.” The laws of nature—in other words, the regularities of the natural order—are violated, and this exposes us to the forces of chaos. 

Lovecraft specifies that this suspension of the laws of nature is malign and demonic. This is certainly true of horror fiction, and corresponds to the element of physical threat in Carroll’s theory of monsters. But a form of the horrific remains even when this element is lacking. Consider the following example from Arthur Machen’s The House of Souls. “What would your feelings be,” a character asks, “… if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents?” He goes on to say, “You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?”  Singing roses and blossoming pebbles are not physically threatening, but they are disturbing because they undermine the sense of security that the natural order provides. If rosebushes can sing, and pebbles can grow, then metaphysical solid ground vanishes from beneath our feet, and we are at the mercy of the irrational forces of chaos. If roses sing, anything might happen. 

The horror of art-horror is actually a cocktail of fear (of physical threat) and horror (of metaphysical threat). When physical threat is absent, a pure culture of horror remains. This pure culture of horror, stripped of the element of fear, is often referred to as “the uncanny.” The most important work on this subject is Ernst Jentsch’s pioneering paper “On the psychology of the uncanny.” Jentch argues that the feeling of the uncanny results from one’s mind being pulled in two incompatible directions at once—more precisely, when one is drawn to assigning a thing to two incompatible categories at once. One of his examples concerns figures in a wax museum. One initially responds to them as though they are people, but they also have characteristics of non-people (i.e., inert pieces of wax). As long as the viewer’s mind cannot settle on either one of these interpretations to the exclusion of the other, the figures are felt to be uncanny (Unheimlich).

Jentsch describes this psychological state a condition of “uncertainty,” but I don’t think that this is the best formulation for what he was reaching for. The visitor to the wax museum does not waver back and forth between seeing the figures as human beings and lumps of wax. Rather, the visitor thinks of the figures as simultaneously human and non-human, animate and inanimate, which renders them metaphysically threatening. He argues that movement enhances the disturbing effect, a point nicely developed by Masahiro Mori in his famous paper on the uncanny valley. “Imagine a craftsman being awakened suddenly in the dead of night,” he writes, “He searches downstairs for something among a crowd of mannequins in his workshop. If the mannequins started to move, it would be like a horror story.”

The uncanny is not simply about the kind to which a thing belongs. There is more to it. Suppose you enter a hardware store and see a piece of equipment that looks at first glance like a lawnmower, but then you notice that it also looks like a snowblower. You are plunged into a state of uncertainty: is it a lawnmower, or is it a snowblower? Unlike the wax-museum spectator, you do not experience the machine as metaphysically threatening in virtue of violating a metaphysical boundary. The two interpretations—lawnmower or snowblower—do not exclude one another, as the animate/inanimate binary does. The categorical ambiguity that elicits the metaphysical threat response concerns natural kind categories only. There is a large body of psychological research with a bearing on why this is the case. Research into the phenomenon of psychological essentialism shows that we are disposed to essentialize natural kinds—that is, to attribute to them a set of unobservable properties possessed by only and all members of the kind. These essences are supposed to be mutually exclusive, and to delineate sharp, impermeable boundaries between kinds. But artefacts are not essentialized, and do not have to categorically exclude one another. A machine can be a lawnmower and a snowblower at once, but a single entity cannot be a human and a non-human all at once.

One final point before moving on. The response to metaphysically threatening things consists of two, seemingly contradictory strands. Such things are repellent. But they are also fascinating—they galvanize one’s attention. “Monsters,” writes Carroll, “the anomalous beings…are repelling because they violate standing categories. But for that same reason, they are compelling of our attention.” He goes on:

They are attractive, in the sense that they elicit interest, and they are the cause of, for many, irresistible attention, just because they violate standing categories. They are curiosities. They can rivet attention and thrill, for the self-same reason that they disturb, distress, and disgust.

I submit that when Werner Catel described disabled children as soulless lumps of flesh, he was representing them not as the monsters of horror fiction, or the racialized superpredators of dehumanizing propaganda, but rather as disturbingly unnatural, uncanny beings. This has been, and unfortunately still is, a common response to certain forms of disability.

Going into detail about the mechanisms involved would exceed the limits of this presentation (see my 2021 book Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization). Suffice it to say that in the case of racial dehumanization, the dehumanizer recognizes that the racialized other is a human being, but is also convinced by the testimony of those in positions of epistemic authority that the other merely appears to be human, but is not really human on the “inside” (they do not possess a human essence). The dynamics underpinning the dehumanization of disabled people strikes me as more varied, particularly with regard to the distinction between physical and intellectual forms of disability. To Nazi physicians like Catel, mentally disabled children were merely “shells” of human beings: pieces of matter with a human appearance but lacking a human essence, like the animate mannequins described by Mori. In other cases, the form disabled person’s body departs from what their culture regards as the form of the human, and thereby transgresses the metaphysical categories that are endorsed by their society. There are also clearly variations pertaining to the form taken by the disability. Because, as I have argued elsewhere, the sight of the face is a very important trigger for representing the other as human, congenital variations in or acquired damage to the face is particularly likely to elicit dehumanizing reactions.

Mary Douglas lists five ways that category violations are managed by traditional societies, all of which are applicable to the oppressive treatment of disabled people. The first strategy is to eliminate dissonance by assigning the ambiguous item to a singular category (recall Douglas’ example of the babies who are “really” hippopotamuses). This is the strategy of men like Werner Catel, who regarded disabled infants as merely animate lumps of flesh accidentally born to human beings. Another strategy is to exert control over anomalous beings. In the case of disabled people this is evident in the full range of eugenic policies, from sterilization to murder, the incarceration and torture of those regarded as psychologically deviant, and other practices. The third strategy is avoidance of transgressive items, in the case of people with disabilities by segregating them and confining them behind institutional walls. The fourth is through labeling—in the case of disability, using terms like “idiot,” “imbecile,” “freak,” and so on. Finally, Douglas’ fifth strategy is mastery through ritual practices—magical means of restoring metaphysical order. Although this may be—or seem to be—more relevant to traditional societies that take supernatural facts for granted, I think that it is also pertinent to our own, secular societies—not just with respect to the spectacles of humiliation that disabled people have been forced to undergo, and the association of disability with impurity and sin in some pockets of fundamentalist communities, but also—perhaps most significantly—with respect to the quasi-magical purificatory powers—the capacity to set nature right—that science is invested with in the popular imagination.

David Livingstone Smith

David Livingstone Smith is professor of philosophy at the University Of New England, in Maine. He is author of three books on dehumanization, the most recent of which, Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization, was published last year by Harvard University Press.