Some nights ago, in front of an hot cassoeula (a northern Italy dish made of savoy cabbage and pork) I was discussing bioethics with a pathologist and a mathematician.

The pathologist argued that, without doubts, we have human life since the two gametes meet. The mathematician shifted the beginning of human life a little later, accepting as a compromise three months since conception. He pointed out the fact that we are faced with a complex system uterus-embryo and that the embryo can’t be described as if it had an autonomy that it has not. I was a little bit disappointed that the pathologist had not taken in account the aristotelian distinction between potentiality (embryo) and actuality (human being).

The day after the debate was continued on Facebook, and another friend, a lady, wrote that, in order to understand the beginning of life, we have also to think at the time of its end.

It has been a lightning strike. I suddenly reminded a book in which was described the elaborate funeral of Attila, king of Huns. Physical death happened some day before the social one. This is the so-called “liminal phase”, when death is still in the making. The “physical” truth, in this case, differs in some way from the social one.

The way we describe the reality is in some sense part of the truth itself: language and meaning are social facts. This fact is put in evidence in liminal statuses, where our habits and customs lead us to some difficulties in providing shared definitions. And, for what concerned our discussion, the embryo is indeed in a liminal state: hence the focus must be shifted from whether the embryo is or is not a human being to the inquiry of what means to be human. An agreement on such topic requires the understanding of the language that we use.

Wittgenstein pointed out that we can portray facts, not things, and that facts are just states of things. Maybe human life is a “fact” and man is just a “thing”, at least under this point of view. If so, our cognitive process will lead us to make use of our reason in a way similar to a courtroom debate. Hence truth is limited, humanly ascertainable and humanly acceptable, as it was stated in an italian high court sentence (Cass. pen. Sez. VI 5 settembre 1996 n. 8314 — ud. 25 giugno 1996).