Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2001 17:14:34 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: Getting Intimate About Your Potential ("l.e.", late sec. IV)


EMBODIMENT (BEING) VS. BODY (CONCEPT), part 2 of 2
["liberal eugenics," remainder of section IV]


I'm with JH in not wanting you to have been the child of his
portrayed parents--enhanced or not!  Did we have ambitous
expectations because you're gifted? Actually, no; the joy of your
exuberant being--  from birth on--has been enough. And look at you
now!  

But, what if your giftedness had happened in light of genetic
enhancement? 

------------------------------------------------

It is not the case that: "The primary mode of experience, and the one
'by' which also the subjectivity of the human person lives, is that
of being a body." The primary mode of experience is being a *self* or
oneself. 

Consider the self as subject (felt "I") and the self as object
(represented "me"), which is a differentiation first theorized by
William James, which has been empirically demonstrated across child
developmental eras (William Damon & David Hart, _Self-understanding
in Childhood and Adolescence_, Cambridge UP, 1988). 

One dimension of their model is, of course, developmental eras:
"early childhood (categorical identifications)," "middle & late
childhood (comparative assessments)," "early adolescence
(inter-personal implications)," and "late adolesence (systematic
beliefs & plans)." 

The second dimension is "self-as-subject", what we might call the
felt self or embodied sense of being. D & H articulate this dimension
of the "I" in terms of 3 "general organizing principles" (or modes of
being): "continuity" (sense of being-in-time or anticipatory
background now), "discreteness" (felt spatiality or being "here"),
and "agency" (temperament, disposition, need, desire, causality):
Three modes of "I"/being, expressed in four eras of development = 12
model-theoretic, pragmatic aspects of embodied self or being. For
example, for "agency": an early child embodies agency as "external,
uncontrollable factors determine self"; middle/late child, "efforts,
wishes and talents influence self"; early teen, "communication and
reciprocal interaction influence self"; and late teen, "personal and
ethical evaluations influence self." Of course, brief description
simplifies the model.

The third dimension of the model is "self-as-object," what we might
call self-image or self-representation. D&H articulate this dimension
of the "me" in terms of 4 modes of representation (personhood) or
in-the-worldness: active self, physical self, psychological self, and
social self. Four modes of "me"/worldness reflected in four eras of
development = 16 model-theoretic aspects of in-worldness, personhood
or personality. For example: Early childhood understands active self
as "typical behaviors" (IRT felt external, uncontrollable factors);
middle/late, "abilities relative to others, self or normative
standards" (IRT felt efforts, wishes and talents); early teen,
"active attributes that influence social appeal and social
interactions" (IRT communication and social interaction); and late
teen, "active attributes that reflect choices, personal or ethical
standards" (IRT personal and ethical evaluations). 

I've indicated one mode of self (agency) IRT one mode of personhood
(active self) through the first 4 eras of identity formation or
self-understanding, but the eraic character of D&H's model of
self-identification is 4 modes of "me" (16 pragmatic aspects)
reflected through 3 modes of "I" (12 pragmatic aspects). 

So, "being a body" (JH)--discreteness--isn't the heart of our ongoing
 here now feeling. "Having a body"--physical self--isn't the key
image one has of oneself. Being in the world is at once
identification and identity, self and personality, enactive
understandING and given understanding. 

This applies to parents before it can apply to their child. Young
adults are highly individuated topologies of personal and
interpersonal active, physical, psychological and social standards
and choices reflected through self-identical and intersubjective
relations of future, past, and present identifications, experiences,
interpretations, and evaluations. So-called "ethical life". 

Suppose clinically reliable options for genetic enhancement, assuming
*proven* genetic procedures (nothing experimental). Suppose
completely reliable options to increase lifespan (e.g., prevention of
chromosomal telomere shortening while virtually erasing cancerous
risk) and increase mental potential (e.g., immensely increasing
neuronal density in the brain and neuron growth/connecting rates),
which together result in gifted longevity. Suppose that harmful
side-effects are unknown in many years of experimentation with mice
and chimps. Such a completely reliable research background would be
absolutely required by clinical services, for those first parents
have these procedures available. But in time--rather quickly--it
would be known increasingly to be the case that harmful side-effects
are unknown with other children (first tens, then hundreds,
etc.)--something which would have been scientifically predictable
from animal models before clinically available, but which "proves"
this to the public. So, I'm stipulating a situation, as does JH,
where only parental intentions relative to their future child is the
relevant consideration.  

In the event of counseled choice for genetic enhancement, JH presumes
that "the parents were only looking to their own preferences, as if
disposing of an object" (63), rather than, say, thinking about what's
best for their child, as if enhancing their capability as
child-centered parents. He *presumes* this because he doesn't
consider other options, doesn't argue why this one "looking" is the
situation. Another way of looking at JH's situation, though, is that
his previous subject-object argumentation compels his sense of the
parents (which is bogus) or that he is concerned *only inasmuch as*
the parents act egoistically. But the latter begs the question of
evaluating the parents' intentions (probably good parents vs.
probably bad parents) and begs the liklihood that JH is confronting
us with a key problem (that requires control by prohibitive law),
rather than understanding how to create ethical conditions of
enhanced parenting and how to prevent conditions of unfairness. JH is
working toward prohibitive public policy rather than preventive
public policy. It's like a criminological approach to lack of
education. It echos a police state with authoritarian citizens. Is JH
arguing with his own adolescence?

JH's parents have an apparently duplicitous relationship with their
child, as if making an adoptive child dependent on *dutiful* beliefs
about her birth and then "confronting" her with the fact of adoption.
But the reality of good parenting is that child-centered love all
along creates the conditions of trust that make understanding the
care of the other natural--caring about how our child will realize
her giftedness (without narcissism) and appreciation by the child
that her giftedness was *deliberately* given to her, not by God or
"nature", but by *her* parents (*and* nature, via the marvels of
applied genomics, thanks to services through the family obstetrician,
followed-up by long-term mid-wifery of the parenting sojourn by the
family clinic and education). Will our child someday passionately
question her origins, as bright youth commonly question God and
what's natural, what's good, what's mine, what's possible?  We hope
so!

My discussion has been less attached to JH's specifics this time than
earlier. But my charactization of his discussion is pretty
straightforward, especially given his dependence on earlier terms of
analysis that have earlier proven untenable.

But look now at what's become of the traveling notion of the moral;
in the last paragraph, it has switched places with the ethical (if
not consumed the ethical), as a matter of "autonomous conduct of
life" (earlier: authorship of life) and "moral self-understanding"
(earlier ethical self-understanding). "Liberal eugenics needs to face
the question of whether the perceived de-differentiation of the grown
and the made, the subjective and the objective, is likely to affect
the autonomous conduct of life and moral self-understanding of the
programmed person. In any case, normative evaluation is not possible
unless we ourselves adopt the perspective of the persons concerned"
(66). Of course, the notion of autonomy has always been ambivalent,
as it buys its cogency from both cognitive-competential psychology
and Kant. 

But if we *do* adopt the perspectiveS of the persons involved, we may
appreciate that normative evaluation is "vertical" (life-centered)
*and* "horizontal" (socio-centric); AND pertains *primarily* to
long-standing, life-historical intersubjective self-understanding
(the province of ethical life) for *both* perspectives, parents and
child. JH is evidently not ready to fairly consider this, relative to
his sociocentric sense of self-understanding (that has fallen into a
subject-object dualism). 

But could it be that, in the end, JH and I will be in some
fundamental agreement? Could a better sense of the ethics of the
species--a better species of the ethic--better respect parenting and
clinical medicine *as well as* provide for good public policy?

Next week: ETHICALITY OF AUTHORSHIP CALLED TO ASPIRE (PARENTS AS
EXEMPLARS *AND* AS OFFSPRING) [69]
["liberal eugenics," sec. V, para. 3]



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Find a job, post your resume.
http://careers.yahoo.com


     --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---