Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2001 16:24:45 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: Embodying Nature ("l.e.", early sec. IV)


COGNITIVE EMPATHY FOR THE INHERENT DYNAMIC OF EMBODIMENT (55)
["Liberal Eugenics," 4th paragraph of sec. IV]

According to JH, inasmuch as "evolution...comes in reach of the
interventions of genetic engineering,...categories...in the
life-world...de-differentiate" (55). The categories he has in mind
are suggested by Aristotle. But a keynote of Aristotle is missing in
JH's account (52): eudaimonia. 

The practical attitude of prudence and ethics is oriented generally
toward human flourishing, which corresponds to JH's earlier authorial
emphasis IRT ethical life and its orientation toward
self-actualization. Ethical life is as much involved with care of the
self as it is with JH's new (here) Aristotelian emphasis on care of
the other. The two foci of JH's discussion--the present Aristotelian
focus on care of the other and his existential focus elsewhere on
self-formative (self-optimizing) ethical life--together represent a
sense of ethical life that is as involved with the other as with
oneself. I've characterized this earlier in terms of degrees of
engagement with the other, bredth of comprehension of engagement, and
a self-formative interest that (I will add) belongs to the fullness
of ethicality: flourishing in the world. In other words, ethicality
is composed of intersubjective as well as subjective interests--as JH
would expect, given his theory of communicative action. 

Therefore, JH's de-differential focus on categories of subjectivity
and objectivity either suppresses the categoriality of
intersubjectivity or assimilates intersubjectivity to subjectivity.
In either case, he's working contrary to his own theory of action.
The problem here is drawing on Aristotelianism for an analysis of
action in modernity--an action background shaped through
metaphysicalism IRT activity in a post-metaphysicalist world (It's
simply untenable to claim for oneself a postmetaphysicalist mode of
thinking but deny the other the possibility of being read from a
postmetaphysicalist point of view. When such a reading of the other
is untenable, this is a case that has to be made. Declining the
attempt or the question is neither fair nor good practice).

So, we must look at the complex phenomenon (applied genomics) with at
least a 3-fold understanding, like JH's own theory. When JH refers to
"The 'logic' of these forms of action which, in Aristotle, were still
tailored to corresponding regions of being..." (53), the pertinent
forms of action are at least what JH indicates in his formal
pragmatics (which presumably were working as well in Aristotle's era,
as these forms are de-transcendentalized evolutionary features of our
species being). Therefore, that which "has lost the ontological
dignity of opening up specific perspectives on the world" (53)
*gains* the formal-pragmatic dignity of our cognitive form of life
which--quite pervasively in JH's philosophy--IS the condition for the
possibility of "specific perspectives on the world." THERE IS NO
DE-DIFFERENTIATION with modernity, rather a de-transcendentalization.

Though, indeed, "modern experimental sciences....combined the
objectivating attitude of the disinterested observer with the
technical attitude of an intervening actor producing experimental
effects," the scientific enterprise takes place in a scientific
community whose identity is non-reductionistic, i.e., it recognizes
that its character is not reducible to its logic of inquity.
Theorization (relative to a metatheorized field), research project
formulation (relative to a theorized domain), and research practice
are interpersonalized, encultured, discursive and pervaded by
analytical and critical protocols, and peer review. One may find
fault with all of this, relative to a given enterprise, but one would
have to find fault with *this*, not merely a reductionist caricature
of science as engineering, as JH does when he narratively moves
immediately from reference to de-ontologized science to claims that
pertain to engineering (53)--a move which becomes the hallmark of his
remaining discussion, de-differentiating applied genomics from the
scientific-community background (by occluding the latter) which
applied genomics shares with the clinical practitioner, as the two
(applied genomics and clinical practice) work together in closeness
with the evolving science and its discursive culture. (very long
assertion, sorry).

The tired critical theme of the scientization of modernity was
premised on a physicalism of engineering that was more interested in
countering authoritarian and Cold War politics--rightly so--than
interested in understanding science. That counter-hegemonical
tradition doesn't translate well to a contemporaneity that grew up in
that critical culure. To say today that "the imperatives
of...instrumental action [have]...become dominant [for]...the
societal modes of production and interaction" (54) is just an
untenable empirical claim that suppresses the multi-dimensionality of
economic life (a multi-dimensionality present in JH's "serious"
work), i.e., it's an instrumentalization of the notion of
modernization suiting his polemical purpose.

It's convenient, then, to next introduce a notion of practical life
that is focused on control--morally controlling the instrumentalists
(and which occludes the distinction between ethical and moral that JH
has earlier made): "Nevertheless, the architecture of the modes of
action has itself remained intact. To the present day, morality and
law still function as the normative controls for practical life in
complex societies" (54). JH is narrating at a social-systemic level,
conceptualizing action from the perspective of systemics, begging the
complementary narrative of practical life that makes Aristotle still
appealing, which makes ethical life a keynote of JH's problematic,
and which provides a basis for understanding without systemic
distortion. 

"The decrease in social relevance of the 'clinical' modes of action
in the broadest sense" (54) is certainly an empirical generality that
JH can't validly presume and which is not at all evident in medicine
itself, where "an increase in their legitimacy" is a clear theme of
medical education and medical practice, in the U.S. at least. 
Applied bioethics in medical practice is defined by clinical issues.
Genetic counseling is a clinical practice. There's no evidence that
this is declining. 

Of course, health care is also an industry. But its complexity of
self-understanding about relations of business vs. clinical practice
can't be captured for fair public policy discourse in broad-stroke
terms like "bio-political goals" (54) (which an embarrassing
Foucaultian, Paul Rabinow, discovered when he presented at a recent
symposium on bioethics I attended). It's ignorant to follow
broad-stroke claims about clinical medicine with agricultural
rhetoric about "breeding practices...no longer governed by the
clinical mode of adjustment to the inherent dynamic of nature." This
simply begs the issue of what being human means; it says nothing
tenable about how practitioners understand their clients or
bioscientists understand their research. Let's talk about "the
inherent dynamic" of human nature, i.e., what is "constitutive of our
self-understanding as species-members" (54). 

JH: "To the degree that the evolution of the species, proceeding by
random selection..." (55). What species?  Nothing in agriculture is
relevant here. Is JH referring to humans?  It's obscene to associate
human culture with agriculture, but broad-stroke rhetoric invites
dangerously undifferentiated thinking. Anyway, human evolution is not
proceeding by natural selection (discussed briefly earlier). 

I share JH's "empathy, or 'resonant comprehension'...[of] the
violability of organic life," I believe, but this occasional stance
is *not* "obviously grounded in the sensitivity of our own body."
Rather, it's grounded in the *intersubjectivity* of empathy, which is
transposed onto life. Such personification of nature is ancient and
modern, pantheistic and ecopsychological. It originates in the
child's disposition to personify living things (as well as stuffed
animals, etc.), as expression of (and imaginative, constructive
practicing of) the self's growing capacity for *initiated*
intersubjectivity (beyond the receptive intersubjectivity initiated
by mother). THIS is the basis for "the distinction we make between
any kind of subjectivity, however rudimentary, and the world of
objects which can merely be manipulated."

Next: EMBODIMENT (BEING) VS. BODY (CONCEPT)
[remainder of section IV, esp. mid-paragraphs 61-63 and the last]



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