The Human Body. The role of symmetry in animate
life is both crude and subtle, disquieting and incom-
prehensible.
The human body is outwardly endowed with a
bilateral symmetry which seems to be a near
prerequisite for most physical activities, such as walk-
ing, seeing, hearing, using one's hands, etc. In the
internal anatomy, some organs, like lungs and kidneys
conform to this symmetry, but others, very basic ones,
the heart and the alimentary canal do not. Why this
should be so is most baffling, to the general reader at
any rate. Even the outward symmetry is not very
rigorous, especially in the adult. In fact, the outward
deviation from symmetry, especially in facial contours
frequently bespeak character and personality, even
superiority.
For the comprehension of those things it is not at
all helpful to read in a very scholarly (and equally dull)
book that “all asymmetries occurring [in the human
body] are of secondary character” (cf. Weyl, p. 26).
More helpful is the suggestion, which, in depth, may
have been articulated by Weyl himself, that “the
deeper chemical constitution of our human body shows
a screw, a screw that is turning the same way in every
one of us.” But some of the explanatory details bearing
on this vitalistic “turning of the screw” are very
disquieting, inasmuch as a “wrong” turn of the screw
may be vindictively lethal (Weyl, pp. 30-38).
