Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and not merely in the mind or, worse, in some far-off heaven. In fact,
this was the only kind of human freedom worth considering: a freedom
won through the struggle with natural forces and necessities. Concomi-
tantly, true nature can only be a “humanized” one, a raw material
worked over by human hands and made to serve every human need and
desire. Such “mastery and possession” is clearly intended as a riposte to
idealism, Cartesian or otherwise, as well as to the false dichotomy
between theory and productive praxis.
One can plausibly argue that Marx's real—if ironic—accomplishment
was to deepen the Cartesian definition of the real by expanding it beyond
the theoretical construction of mathematical physics to technological
production and creation. As a result, he proposed a radically new equa-
tion: to be is to be produced by human labor. Nothing can any longer
be said to exist outside the sphere of the human. And though Marx never
tired of emphasizing that humans are conditioned by their natural sur-
roundings, he always added that as the sphere of productive freedom
expands, they are conditioned by a nature already humanized by tech-
nological forces.
Even prior to Friedrich Nietzsche, Marx embodied the fundamental
metaphysical thrust of modernity in two distinct but related ways. First,
he clarified the telos of the modern subjectivization of being in its reduc-
tion of nature to a mere factor in the labor process of the proletariat and
modern technology. Here, being is not merely intelligible, as Hegel would
have it, but is technologically subsumable into human activity. The real
is the producible, and the producible is the real. Second, in his fascina-
tion with the seemingly limitless productivity inherent in the new instru-
ments of modern technics and the division of labor they necessitated,
Marx brought to the world's attention for the first time the centrality of
technology in human existence and what this means for understanding
historical humanity and the natural world as inseparable from that
history. The prospect of liberating this productivity through a universal,
planetary technique thus promises in his view not just the abolition of
scarcity but “the actual realization for man of man's essence and of his
essence as something real”
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—that is, as productively engaged with nature
and “real, sensuous objects” through which, and only through which,
one can autonomously express one's life as animal laborans. Neither intel-
lect nor sense perception—the false and misleading set of choices of a
