Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The most important elements in this tradition—important, that is, for
my purposes here—are the early modern quarrel with Aristotle and his
anthropomorphic conception of nature, the roots of this quarrel in
medieval industrial life, and the subsequent failure of Cartesian dualism
to rescue human freedom from the metaphysical determinism Descartes
and others quite rightly discerned in Galilean science and its rejection of
Aristotle. To keep the plot of this centuries-long story as simple as pos-
sible, the philosophical response to this dualism—which will bring us
finally to the question of genetic engineering and cybernetic humanity—
will be limited for the most part to the works of Karl Marx and Martin
Heidegger in their attempts to twist free of Cartesianism and its false
choice between a worldless idealism and a physicalism inhospitable to
human autonomy and spontaneity. In opposition to the Western philo-
sophical bias against productive praxis, a tendency that persisted even
after the modern Industrial Revolution, these two seminal thinkers
placed the technological mediation of human experience at the center of
their thought and reflected deeply on its implications for a new under-
standing of our humanness. The deeper affinities existing between Marx
and Heidegger, heretofore submerged in their obviously different politi-
cal orientations and even conceptions of philosophy, have become clearer
now that we have entered the ultimate technological frontier where we
ourselves become material to be shaped and reinvented through feedback
mechanisms echoing and reinscribing the Darwinian world of natural
selection and adaptation. Just how we got to this point and what it means
for our future is the burden of what follows.
The Medieval Prologue
Surprisingly, the technological side of our story begins in medieval
Europe, where an industrial revolution more far-reaching than even that
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries laid the groundwork for the
modern scientific revolution that was soon to follow. At the outset of the
Middle Ages, technology in the West lagged behind its counterpart in
the East and in fact looked to it for such essential items as ivories and
silks, glasswork and metalwork, and various mechanical devices like the
spinning wheel. Around 800 A.D., however, there occurred in northern
Europe an agricultural revolution most notable for its invention of the
