Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
absolute. This freedom is constitutive of our natures. Theologian Robin
Lovin helps us to appreciate a specifically Christian freedom that is not
opposed to the natural order but acts in complex faithfulness to it.
5
One begins by taking human beings as they are, not as those fanciful
entities sometimes conjured up by philosophers in what they themselves
call “science-fiction” examples.
6
To be sure, as Lovin observes, the
freedom of a real, not a fanciful, human being means, among other
things, that one can “project oneself imaginatively into a situation in
which the constraints of present experience no longer hold.”
7
One can
imagine states of perfection or nigh perfection. At the same time, actual
freedom is always situated; it is not an abstract position located nowhere
in particular. Freedom is concrete, not free-floating. Freedom is a “basic
human good. Life without freedom is not something we would choose,
no matter how comfortable the material circumstances might be.”
8
Our
reasoning capacity is part and parcel of our freedom. But that reasoning
is not a separate faculty cut off from our embodied selves; instead, it is
profoundly constituted by our embodied histories and memories.
Christian freedom, in Lovin's words, consists in our ability to “avoid
excessive identification with the surrounding culture, since that tends
both to lower ...moral expectations and to deprive [persons] of the
witness to alternative possibilities.”
9
If the horizon lowers excessively,
the possibility that we might exercise our capacity for freedom is cor-
relatively negated. So the denial of freedom consists, in part, in a refusal
to accept the freedom that is the human inheritance of finite, limited crea-
tures “whose capacities for change are also limited, and who can only
bring about new situations that are also themselves particular, local, and
contingent.”
10
To presume more than this is also problematic, launching
us into dangerous pridefulness, often, of course, in the name of great
ideals like choice or justice. So our freedom is, at one and the same time,
both real and limited.
With this as backdrop, let us examine several contemporary projects
of self-overcoming that involve a negation of (or an attempt to negate)
finitude and that rely on uncritical endorsement of dominant cultural
demands.
11
Such projects, remember, are tricky to approach critically
because they present themselves to us in the dominant language of our
culture—choice, consent, control—and promise an escape from the
vagaries of the human condition into a realm of near mastery. Consider
