Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
With this in mind, Casey discusses at some length the responses of
Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger to our emerging technological age and
the concomitant problem of world alienation it poses. For Marx, humans
are no longer the rational animal of the Aristotelian tradition nor the
thinking spectator of Western philosophical idealism. Instead, humanity
is recast as the
animal laborans
, the toolmaker who has incorporated
nature into human history in the historically necessary pursuit of the
abolition of scarcity. As the producer of its own existence, the modern
proletariat exemplifies the productionist metaphysics initiated by René
Descartes and developed further by such thinkers as David Hume and
Immanuel Kant. In this metaphysics, humanity has become the measure
of being and the creator, quite literally, of a new reality amenable to the
satisfaction of basic material needs. Hence, for Marx, production is not
a mere means to human life but is in fact the expression of humanity's
“species-essence,” insofar as such production finally overcomes human-
ity's historical alienation from nature and the worst aspects of Cartesian
dualism. Heidegger's take on this metaphysical situation is remarkably
similar, but in the end he is not as sanguine about what this portends for
the human condition. The Heideggerian account of modern technology
is to view it ontologically as a mode of revealing that challenges humans
to assault nature with the intent of reducing it to a standing reserve
of energy and information subject to our control and manipulation.
The deeper question posed by this analysis is whether such an assault
threatens not only nature but humanity in its very essence.
Of particular concern to Casey is whether the human body itself is to
be taken up into the standing reserve and treated as just so much raw
material. His central argument is that such reductionism is leading us to
the final technological frontier where we ourselves will become material
to be shaped and reinvented through feedback mechanisms that jibe with
the Darwinian emphasis on adaptive behavior as part of evolutionary
progress. Utilizing the critique of cybernetics by Hans Jonas, Casey
contends that the danger of a cybernetic humanity, armed with the
powerful new tool of genetic enhancement, is in truth a more radical
displacement than Cartesian dualism and that such a threat can be coun-
tered, not by attempts to restore what is left of more traditional concepts
of human nature but rather through a reconsideration of our humanness
that takes seriously our technological power and prowess without,
