Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
enlargement of the sphere of “control-over” (her example here is the
elimination of Down syndrome as an acceptable human type). But even
more important is what underlies this urge to dominate the corporeal
world—namely, the unstated though powerful theological presumption
that nothing in God's original creation is good, but rather that every-
thing must be redeemed and transformed according to images that rein-
force the dominant cultural ideals, most especially the notion that it is
culture itself (and not nature) that now generates our moral ideals and
projects. It is for this reason that Elshtain believes it impossible to over-
state the significance of the technocratic mentality of our time and, in
particular, the growing sense that we are duty bound to exercise control
over our descendants, including deciding which culturally determined
types of humans should be allowed to exist at all. The goal in all this is
the elimination of imperfection, inconvenience, and risk; and the danger
of this denial of our essential finitude is a moral one, since it goes to the
heart of human nature as well as to the very meaning and being of such
a thing as nature at all.
What is lacking in this denial is an appropriate ontological under-
standing of the human body and its centrality to our humanness and
genuine exercise of freedom. Specifically, an ontology grounded in our
Jewish and Christian traditions teaches us that embodiment is a given,
not a construction or cultural product, of human being itself, and that
any conception of human freedom grows out of the basic indeterminacy
of this embodiment as an image but not a replication of God's perfec-
tion. What is more, this limited freedom exists only in relationship, not
in a radical autonomy disconnected from the creation and its existential
demands. Sin is thus understood by Elshtain as the abuse of this freedom,
and its expression today is to be found in the enhancement of human
power over the creaturely world—an enhancement that predicates itself
on the rejection of a natural order of things and the situatedness of the
human being in the world through its body. But the proper use of this
freedom, Elshtain maintains, arises from a moral understanding of
nature where the very givenness of creation serves as a standard against
which we might measure the claims and pretensions of whatever Platonic
cave we happen to inhabit. The freedom of finitude, in other words, can
bring us back from our absorption in the world, providing a perspective
on our culture and history from which we might imagine alternative
