Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
realm of freedom by technologically breaking the yoke of necessities
imposed by nature on humanity proves to be a cruel illusion. The belief
that modern productive forces can “get around” nature signals for
Heidegger the “errancy” of modern technology in its disregard for limits,
lending it its fateful quality.
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Whether this illusion is leading to some
ultimate catastrophe is an open question and not really Heidegger's
point. Instead, he wants to ask, Can humanity continue to feed on this
illusion and still remain human? It is in this sense that Heidegger's
philosophy can be characterized as the sounding of an alarm regarding
a “supreme danger” threatening the human condition, which for
Heidegger is to be at once ecstatically and freely beyond ourselves toward
the world while keeping both feet firmly planted on the earth. For
errancy in its chronic ignorance of this “condition” gives rise today to
the intoxicating fantasy that we are now enlightened enough to order
the world according to a ground plan projected in the technoscientific
securing of complete objectivity and calculability.
To the obvious danger inherent in this fantasy of crowding out other
modes of being, and thus other, less power-oriented human possibilities,
belongs the risk of including our bodies in the standing reserve in the
hope that in subjecting our genetic makeup to radical manipulation,
we might gather our destiny into our own hands under the benign,
Baconian intention of the “relief of man's estate.” Do we realize the
momentousness of this occasion? Do we grasp that our treatment of
nature cannot be disconnected from the question of our humanness and
place in the world? And so Heidegger urges us to ask these and other
unsettling queries: Is it possible to overcome the inhuman submission
to scarcity in all its hideous forms—poverty, ignorance, sickness—by
removing ourselves from the world as the precondition for exercising
power over it? Indeed, can we craft a new home or second nature, con-
fident in the technical knowledge and expertise necessary to create and
sustain such a nature? And if we answer in the affirmative to these ques-
tions, on what basis do we possess that confidence? Unpopular as such
questions may be, they cannot simply be dismissed as intending to return
us to a nonexistent, premodern idyll. Rather, they are meant to provoke
us into thinking about the high stakes we have wagered in the modern
project that, although just over four hundred years old, is only now
coming into its own.
