Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
logical consequence, which now confronts us: the technological creation
of a new or “second nature,” including the engineering of our bodies
toward an earthly perfection that evolution might promise, but like the
Christian creator-God, has so far failed to attain without our active inter-
vention. The cultural and political will to create this second nature, a
nature made utterly determinate and thus amenable to human desire,
was thus, we can now see, born out of a technological imperative reli-
gious and metaphysical in origin that gave rise to a scientific revolution
as its perfect expression.
As Descartes knew full well when he sought justification for Galilean
science in its promise of a “mastery and possession of nature,” the math-
ematical character of this science makes clear what mastery in this
context means—namely, the suppression of all ambiguity, spontaneity,
and chance.
13
It became imperative, then, to protect the core of our
humanity from such a conception of the world, imperative, in short, to
construct a self detached from such a world, a self displaced and alien-
ated, yet still free. Prior to modernity, humans were assured of a quite
specific place in the world. In Aristotle's physics, the meaning of cosmic
place is determined by a conception of motion grounded in the
inner
nature
of particular things. Everything in this world moves toward its
proper place as the way of actualizing its inherent and permanent onto-
logical possibilities: fire goes up and earth moves down simply because
that is where they belong in a hierarchical universe structured along the
lines of perfect and less-perfect beings and kinds of motion. But modern
science, Sir Isaac Newton in particular, exposed the inadequacy of such
explanations by positing the
external
and ontologically neutral forces of
gravity and inertia in order to account for all movement in the cosmos,
celestial as well as terrestrial. In this overall scheme, places lose their
quality of uniqueness and become mere positions in relation to other
positions, points on a mathematical grid, thus undermining the natural
status of a humanity now cast into a vast homogeneous space where, as
Alexandre Koyre slyly observes, “everywhere is nowhere.”
14
Even
Newton's understanding of this space as the sensorium of God was soon
to be discarded in the relentless march of disenchantment, resulting in a
vast, empty container that Koyre describes as “the frame of the absence
of all being” and depriving humanity of its traditional cosmic home.
15
And, as they say, there is no going back.
