Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 22:26:04 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: JH as Mr. Natural ("l.e.," paragraphs 45-48)


PROVOCATION AT THE INTERFACE OF ORDINARY UNDERSTANDING & GENETIC
INTERVENTION (48)
["Liberal Eugenics," paragraph 48--4th para. from end of sec. III]

JH doesn't immediately follow up on what he means by a
post-metaphysicalist ethics-S "sustaining" a moral autonomy different
from ethical life and different from human rights; rather, he
speculates about how biotechnology might affect the "elementary
background assumptions" (45) of naive perception, and *presumes* the
rubric of "instrumentalization of human nature" as the only
interpretive frame for his speculations. The issue for JH isn't: IS
this instrumentalization. The issue for him is (1) Will possibility
become probability, and (2) what's the effect on "the ethical
self-understanding of the species," which now is re-predifferentiated
re: religio-metaphysicalist and postmetaphysicalist understanding
(It's simply "the ethics..."). 

But the instrumentalization thesis can't be merely presumed, because
it's given a central place in his doctrine's later inferences. JH
voices a  provincial reactionism to biotechnology (45-46) worthy of
newspaper opinion articles; and thereby promotes here the reactionary
side of the same conventionalism whose traditionalist side is
subordinated by his moral autonomy, IRT understanding a
postmetaphysicalist ethics of the species. This duplicity is good for
presuming the superordination of morality for regulatory purposes
(political opportunism?), but not good for understanding a
sustainable sense of autonomy that is moral in some extraordinary
sense. 

Anyway, his instrumentalist narrative has evidently given him
confidence to assert that "provocation [is] inherent to the advances
of genetic engineering" (48), even though he's just been waving off
all manner of things biotechnical (giving applied genomics no special
focus)--i.e., *merely* waving things off. Of course, he's going to
give lots of attention to applied genomics as embryonic
"intervention", but the inherency of provocation seems fait accompli.

Footnote 35 is noteworthy. Those Americans and their liberal eugenics
talk of "the eugenic self-optimization of the human species..., thus
jeopardizing the unity of human nature...," but the quote JH provides
here, from Buchanan et al., doesn't presume such a unity at all. This
is interesting, because (as I've shown in today's earlier posting),
JH hasn't yet asserted any post-metaphysicalist sense of
"anthropological universality", just *used* this rubric in other
assertions. I, on the other hand, would propose (as I did tacitly
today and yesterday) that human nature is--relative to the moment's
idiom--primordially *trans*-unifying; and has been so for millennia. 
Since our form(s) of life is/are inherently self-formative (in line
with the autopoiesis we share with non-human nature, which evolved
intentionally into the purposeful interests of our humanity),
so-called "self-optimization" is to be expected. 

Anyway, "Buchanan" begins (quoted in ftn. 35) "We can no longer
assume that there will be a single successor to what has been
regarded as human nature...." This of itself doesn't posit a unitary
human nature; *whatever* human nature is, that which we all have been
disagreeing about for the entire history of writing may have multiple
successors in an overt sense (now that we're growing to be able to
apply genomics). "We must consider the possibility that at some point
in the future, different groups of human beings may follow divergent
paths of development through the use of genetic technology." Lee
Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton, very dramatically
rendered this prospect in his _Re-Making Eden_, in 1998. To the
bioscientific community--which is far ahead of social theorists in
their engagement with bioethics--this distant prospect is not news. 
"If this occurs," Buchanan continues, "there will be different groups
of beings, each with its own ‘nature’, related to one another only
through a common ancestor (the human race), just as there are now
different species of animals who evolved through random mutations and
natural selection." Without a doubt, we are the species with
imagination we love to realize. 

In other words, a self-governing pluralization of human being is 
analogous to natural speciation. JH denies this, but Buchanan isn't
presuming a unitary human nature that will be "jeopardized". JH is
now presuming a unitariness that he hasn't characterized or
explicated.

So, back to his discussion: All this, "after all, uproot[s] the
categorial distinction between the subjective and the objective, the
naturally grown and the made,...." Here, we reach one of the
fundamental tenets of JH's doctrine. Despite the history of critique
of subject-object dualism in Western ideology, JH confronts us with
an insistent dyad of subjective growth and objective making. 

How might this compare with a dyad of subjective making and objective
growth? Re: objective growth, it's common knowledge in biology to
understand nature in terms of self-organizing systems--what JH
earlier called "autopoiesis". The autopoiesis which JH earlier
associated with our self-formative nature is often used in biology to
analyze natural growth throughout nature, from the first formation of
proteins to bioregional ecosystems. Re: subjective making,
constructivist human science (and, paradigmatically, cognitive
science) is has been articulating the constructive nature of
intentionality, learning, epistemic interest for a very long time. 

So, JH's differentiation has, prima facie, no critical merit. 

JH: "What is at stake is a de-differentiation, through
bio-technology, of deep-rooted categorial distinctions which we have
as yet, in the description we give of ourselves, assumed to be
invariant."

But this is not the case.  Preconventional worldviews depend on
"conditions...of nature-like growth which alone allow us to conceive
of ourselves as the undivided authors of our own lives," but
modernity is saturated with cultural and self-identical
constructivism. To associate being "equal members of the moral
community" with nature-like growth is, at best, recollective of the
transition to modernity; at worst, opportunistic IRT ordinary public
anxiety. 

It's difficult to know how seriously JH takes his own posture. Is he
merely narrating a genealogy of ordinary reflectivity--doing a kind
of emancipatory story? JH: "Knowledge of one’s own genome being
programmed might prove to be disruptive, I suppose, for our taking
for granted the fact that we exist as a body..." Is this the stance
of pop critical practice without philosophical pretense? In fact,
though, JH will insist upon the notion that we, "so to speak, 'are'
our body."

Beware the invasion of the body snatchers.

So far, JH has no plausible sense of instrumentalism,
subjective/objective differentiation, specieal ethics or moral
autonomy, going forward.  But I'm going to continue to take JH
seriously, yet look for philosophical significances rather than harp
on JH's instrumentalization of public anxiety. 


Next:  COGNITIVE EMPATHY FOR THE INHERENT DYNAMIC OF EMBODIMENT (55)
[sec. IV, para. 4]




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