Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the continual possibility of failure injects conditions into our energeia
(the activities of both our thinking and our life itself) and gives it content.
Any attempt to remove death or failure is an attempt to deny the
material cause of human life—that is, the need for and the accom-
plishment of development and growth. To do so through genetic engi-
neering would be exactly what it is described as: a triumph over our
nature.
Effects of Materiality: Birth, Death, Failure, and Serendipity
From the perspective of Aristotelian metaphysics, a full discussion of the
role of matter in human life centers on the possibility of substantial
change. We are born, and we die: that is the primary effect of our mate-
riality. There are, of course, a variety of additional effects of material-
ity: the need to eat, grow, and reproduce as conditions of life itself; the
opportunity to sense, imagine, and locomote as expressions of animal-
ity; and the possibility of speaking, learning, acting, and thinking as the
opportunities of human life. But all these activities take place within the
bookends of birth and death.
Birth makes it clear that we develop. It is a beginning, a setting off of
a person, a future of possibilities.
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But these possibilities are, for
humans, human possibilities. They are the first actuality of our bodies
(the entelecheia). It is at birth that our material humanness exists in the
raw, so to speak, without the complications of a history. The dominant
activities (energeia) are the ones basic to life: nutrition and growth.
The focus of genetic engineering is the body actualized: genetic engi-
neering attempts to control, or at least alter, the material humanness of
the person. The fallacy of genetic engineering is its claim to alter the
person (the energeia built on the entelecheia of the body) by altering the
body. Genetic engineering seeks to transform the body from a constant
possibility of inertness into a source of direction and development for a
person's life; it seeks to eliminate the need for a soul by substituting a
developed genetic code for the serendipity of the soul. The person, as
energeia built on the entelecheia of the body, is not defined by the struc-
ture, although it is confined by the structure. Function may be limited
by form, but it is not defined by form. There is still the need for the soul
as energeia.
