Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Still, it does not follow that the conundrum of home and homecom-
ing, announced as long ago as Homer, simply vanishes into thin air, an
unfortunate but necessary fatality of the collapse of Aristotle's finite uni-
verse. Indeed, it reappears (as it always will), but now as the question of
whether limits ought to be placed on our technological rearrangement
of the natural order, which is nothing less than the question of our fate
in a scientific-technological civilization. These are the terms for posing
the question of the human condition at the end of modernity. Traditional
cosmologies, as Stephen Toulmin has eloquently argued, have always
revolved around the problem of the human condition, and this is no dif-
ferent today, even if we eschew essentialist categories and philosophical
talk of a human nature.
16
Unlike those traditional accounts, however, we
are haunted by a Cartesian metaphysics that disconnects us from the
world and, apparently, decides the question of our fate in advance by
presuming that we have no place in nature even though we exercise
immense power over it. Modernity insists that detachment and objec-
tivity are in fact prerequisites for the acquisition of such power, and that
any attempt to connect us to the world outside a power relation is pure
sentimentality and nostalgia. And it would be partly right, since nostal-
gia—properly understood as derived from the Greek verb
nosteo
,
meaning to return to one's home or country—is indeed the inescapable
longing for home—that is, for a world hospitable to, if not always res-
onant with, human aspirations and possibilities.
In addressing this hunger for some kind of reconnection to what the
U.S. writer Saul Bellow calls the “home-world,” Marx and Heidegger
stand out in the philosophical life of late, European modernity; and
though they make for strange bedfellows in many respects, they share
one enormously important presupposition: that Cartesian dualism must
be dismantled and deposed, but in such a way that neither discredits nor
rejects the genuine achievements of the technoscience that first gave rise
to it. Nonetheless, both are distinctive in the last century and a half for
having highlighted the human and environmental price to be paid for
mechanization and its ever-increasing demand for more powerful energy
sources and their utilization.
