Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
world and its inhabitants, it is no longer possible or desirable for
researchers to hide behind the veil of objectivity and value neutrality.
But more than that, as progress in both evolutionary and molecular
biology increasingly overshadows the achievements of mathematical
physics—which since Galileo has set the standard for what counts as sci-
entific knowledge—it is clear that the search for immutable and univer-
sal truths is finally giving way to a historical, evolutionary understanding
of nature.
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The inevitable question of humanity's place in such a world
consequently reasserts itself—albeit in a somewhat qualified and there-
fore tentative sense—in the Darwinian garb of adaptation and natural
selection. Our natural status now takes on a dynamic character with the
very order of the world reduced at best to patterns in a flux, that is, to
a kind of order within disorder, to employ a Bergsonian phrase. As Marx
so simply and presciently put it, we have now arrived at the point where
all that is solid melts into air. We have arrived at the point of
history
.
The rules of the game are thus in the process of changing. “Human
nature” is suddenly castigated by many as an outmoded, misleading, and
politically pernicious concept. Nor is it certain that a hundred years from
now we will even be talking about such a thing as “nature” at all. Still,
it is more important than ever to remind ourselves that despite the
upheaval of the Darwinian revolution, the ineluctable facts of our
humanness—natality and mortality, sociality and embodiment, tran-
scendence and facticity—remain, and must be reconsidered, carefully,
only now without resort to the kind of ahistorical, preevolutionary
picture of the human condition, especially in its Cartesian form, that has
defined Western humanity for well over two millennia. This will require
as well the revival of cosmology, as Toulmin wisely argues, but one that
will align human powers and possibilities with the historical character
of nature, exhorting us to work with, and no longer against, those forces
that pulse through our bodies and evolution as a species.
But we should be under no illusions about the difficulty involved in
such a reorientation of Western thought and life. Such, at least, was the
view of the philosopher of biology and technology Hans Jonas, who
quite rightly took a more pessimistic view than Toulmin about the
chances of achieving such a reconciliation with nature in the near term.
For while Jonas, too, proposed an environmental ethic grounded in an
appreciation and creative appropriation of Charles Darwin, he also
