Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
It is therefore not enough to simply declare Cartesianism dead and the
“spectatorship” of an objective, value-free science a dinosaur. Nor is it
sufficient to announce our kinship with all living things along genetic
lines. Quite the contrary, it is only in the aftermath of the failure of Carte-
sian metaphysics that the real problem emerges: how to think a new rela-
tionship to nature without succumbing to a facile naturalism and a new
round of mechanism on cybernetic grounds. For surely there is no going
back
simpliciter
to anything like Aristotelianism or natural law in the
Roman Catholic tradition, that is to say, to any kind of ahistorical con-
ception of nature whose laws and structures are fixed for all time.
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Ethical appeals to the natural in this sense will simply run aground the
modern refutation of Aristotelian and Thomistic science as well as any
theological argument made on the basis of that science. In fact, any
serious attempt to counter a cybernetic account of human evolution will
have to begin by recognizing the complicity of Western metaphysics in
a cybernetic agenda, especially the role played by Christian voluntarism
and Neoplatonism in historically propagating and sanctioning a dualism
that led to and empowered the scientific objectification and technologi-
cal enframing of nature.
Indeed, if we have learned anything from thinkers like Marx and
Heidegger, it is that the demise of the transcendent, neutral observer, so
brilliantly articulated and defended by Descartes, signals not only the
end of modernity but the commencement of the final, technological stage
in the history of Western metaphysics. We are dislodged once again, but
in a more radical sense than occurred in the Copernican/Galilean revo-
lution. Disabused of answers given once and for all time to the riddle of
our cosmic place, we find ourselves no longer straddling the City of God
and the City of Man, but enmeshed, fully and without recourse, in the
turbulence of history (James Joyce's nightmare from which he believed
we are trying to awake). But rather than despair we can, as Heidegger
and Jonas and other thinkers have done, take up the problem of our
historicity as the clue to a mature and measured understanding of the
human predicament, an understanding that has expressed itself, however
inadequately, under a number of names—
Geist
, dialectic, evolution,
eternal recurrence, being in the world—as late modernity has struggled
with a phenomenon never encountered before in world history: a sense
of exile and dislocation in a sea of prosperity and power.
