Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Consequently, neither Descartes' idea of the soul nor Rousseau's sense
of freedom provides us with a ground to argue against genetic enhance-
ment, and indeed may even encourage arguments for it. If the intuition
that genetic enhancement is somehow dangerous and unethical is to be
defended, it is not on the grounds of the person as a soul (at least as res
cogitans) or as free (at least where freedom is taken as self-overcoming).
If a claim is to be made that genetic enhancement is a good to be vig-
orously pursued, the very idea that the soul is free may support the
contention.
Our Existence as Physical Beings
I wish to argue for a rethinking of the traditional Aristotelian view of
the soul. For Aristotle, an essence (
to ti hen enai
) was what the thing
is in virtue of itself.
4
This is an understanding of the experienced thing,
an individual of form and matter with a
telos
, or finality, that was intrin-
sic to, constitutive of, and evaluative of the thing itself. The modern argu-
ments of freedom and social constructivism have insisted that such a view
of the thing is simply wrong. The structure that such a telos implies, they
assert, can be better understood socially, as the historically based result
of social structure or individual choices.
Against such claims, I do not wish to return to a naively metaphysi-
cal view of, in particular, human nature. But I do wish to emphasize and
use some of the insights that remain enduring in Aristotle's view, and in
doing so, suggest that modern disputes over such distinctions as essen-
tialist-nonessentialist or teleological-nonteleological are not helpful.
Perhaps most important is Aristotle's insistence that the subject of dis-
cussion is the
tode ti
, the concrete individual that has some sort of iden-
tity. It is this individual that we experience, not the species (or if a human
individual, society or history). Aristotle preferred to settle arguments by
a return to our experience of the thing, separable and this, not by turning
to some theoretical criterion, even that of logical consistency.
5
He would
have little truck with the Parmenidean insistence that logic speaks more
loudly than experience, and it is this allegiance to the thing that sepa-
rates Aristotle from some of his greatest students, notably (for modern
sensibilities) G. W. F. Hegel and Marx.
