From Creation to Creativity.
The Human Condition and the Order of Being in the Age of Biotechnology

By Elisabeth List
(University of Graz Austria)

Contribution for:
September 7-12, 2002, St. Petersburg, Russia
The Fifth International Congress on Philosophy and Culture
CREATION – CREATIVITY – REPRODUCTIONS:
WISDOM OF CREATOR, REASON OF DEDALUS AND THE CUNNING OF THE HACKER

One of the most crucial changes of paradigm in contemporary understanding of culture and of the place of the human being in the process of cultural and cosmic evolution is marked by recent developments in biotechnology. Biotechnology today in its most extravagant presentations claims to initiate an age of a “second creation” because biotechnology today seems to be able to re-create living forms and even the human species according to new standards of perfection and effectivity. A news era of “post-biologcal evolution” is being proclaimed.
The cultural meaning and consequence of this paradigm shift amounts to the abolition of the traditional order of being which was, especially in the realm of religious beliefs and thinking, an order created by a transcendental creator, by God or “Mother Nature” herself.
In the context of modern science and technology the human being is no longer seen as the creature of a divine creator as in a religious frame of thinking, but as a being with the capacity and ability of self-creation. How to react to this proclaimed transformation of culture, and first of all: How to understand it?
In the face of a number of problematic and even dangerous consequences of the recent revolutions in technology one might propose to re-enforce or re-establish a safe religious order of being. From a philosophical point of view however the first step would be to rethink what it means to be a creature without presupposing the existence of a god. This would require developing a new framework of a philosophical anthropology that shows and explains how the genuine human faculties and properties could have evolved from the natural givens of human existence.
The American philosopher Susanne Langer was one of the thinkers in the last century who succeeded to provide such an approach to the understanding of the human being. In her writings (esp. Mind. An essay of human feeling, Baltimore and London: Hopkins University Press, 3 Vol. 1967-82) she demonstrates how human mind evolves from a natural need to create symbols and how this peculiar human capacity of symbolising enables humans to create language, myths, religious and cultural forms like art.
As a creature the human being is to be understood as the offspring of an autopoietic process of an “evolution creatrice” (Henri Bergson), that means, in first place not as the creature of somebody else, but as the heir of an open potential of evolving creativity, just as argued by recent research on processes of autopoietic complexity in the process of life. To resituate the human in the order of being it is necessary to refuse the mistaken claims of omnipotence of recent biotechnology, which reduces the richness of the human potential, the potential of life in general to a subtle mechanism.
In the face of the paradigm shift that brought about technological efforts to produce “Artificial Life” it is of crucial importance to bring into consideration the open potential of creativity of the living and of human living. Nevertheless the human is not in a position completely to master it own conditions of living, but is embodied in a larger context of living forms, that as a whole still lies beyond human capacities of understanding and control. This might invite arguments for the existence of God, but not as a matter of logical consequence. What is at place anyway is a high level of scientific insight in the process of natural and cultural evolution but also a new self-conscious attitude in the face of the inherent limits of modern science and technology.
This is however not the leading opinion of the day. Today the promises of revolutionary success, progress and profit of the new biotechnologies dominate the stock markets, university seminars and political debates. The 21st century has been proclaimed as the century of the biotechnologies.
A number of key issues must be addressed before we can think about the effects of biotechnology on both “the order of being” and of “human condition”: 1) the development of biology as life science in the 20th century, 2) the role of science in modernity in general, 3) the relations between science, technology and industry, the character and impact of biotechnogies and 4) the special role of biotechnologies of body and self for human self-understanding.

1)	The development of biology as science in the 20th Century

With reference to the changing profile and role of biology since Darwin a few remark on a huge topic are at place. Looking at textbooks and publications on theoretical biology, it is obvious that today all biologists are Darwinists, even when criticising Darwin in some of his opinions. This does not hold only for zoology, but also for psychology studies of animal behaviour and genetics. It holds also for molecular biology, the most advanced and successful branch of biology that was brought together with population genetics as presented in Wilson’s often quoted “New Synthesis” of socio-biology claiming to account for all phenomena of life, from the bacteria to human form of life and culture.
Darwin’s great achievement was to combine two strains of theory in biology – the idea of teleology as formulated by Kant and the causal-analytical paradigm of classical natural science, physics. Since the seventies of the 20th century, a third paradigm of theoretical biology is beginning to draw attention: The paradigm if self-organisation, first developed in the field of bio-chemistry, by Ilija Prigogine confirmed by research on enzymatic processes of catalysis, leading to new ideas about the origin of life, which put in question what till now has been said about the creation of life, of the universe in general.

2)	Science and Modernity

Instead of going into details of this piece of history of recent biological theory, I want to situate them with considerations about the cultural implication of biological thinking in the larger context of the history of modernity, especially of science in modernity. The debate about the date of the birth of modern science is still open. Some see it in the Middle Ages before the period of high Scholasticism in the 12 th century, some, like Edgar Zilsel, an Austrian physicist and philosopher in the neighbourhood of the famous Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism, locate the origins of modern science in the culture of the wealthy city-states of Renaissance Italy, an the majority tends to date the origins of modern sciences with the time of Descartes, the 17 th century. In any case, the beginning of modern science marks a profound process of transition from the period of a medieval Christian culture to a new secular age of reason. Francis Bacon, most often quoted as the first hero and spokesman of modern science, has coined the famous dictum: Knowledge is power, is as a whole a renaissance figure. And the scientist as described by Bacon is still a obedient believer in God, bowing his head under the almighty eternal Lord, who will him finally lead to the secrets of nature he is searching after.
The process of scientific research is described by Bacon in terms of an inquisition, that in many respects shows a remarkable similarity to the processes of inquisition in which the church prosecuted witches and heretics, torturing them to force them to commitments of crimes against the holy believe. This cruel procedure to bring the hidden sources of evil to the surface of forced commitment were called “inquisitio”, which indeed means “investigation”. Bacon took sides in the processes against these people, who where following heretical ideas about life and about nature, pleading for the real scientists against heresies. Bacons writings are furthermore full of sexual, and indeed sexist metaphors, when he says that like in inquisition Nature has to be put under torture to force her to reveal her secrets. Indeed, Bacon talks about a “Masculine birth of time”, when proclaiming” a n new “science of deeds” against the scholasticism who for him is an idle “science of words”.
Renaissance is seen as the age of still another birth: the birth of the individual, no longer a child of God, relying on nobody else than his own capacities and potentials, especially on the use of reason in the form of the new sciences. Renaissance, in fact was more a period of art than of science. From the 15th to the 16th century the conditions of living, the forms of secular power, the relations between politics and religion as well as the material conditions of living were undergoing a radical change. It was brought about by a number of factors like the rise of the cities, the emergence of the national central state and the first forms of proto-capitalist production on the basis of a number of technical innovations. By the end of the Thirty-Years- War whole Europe was shattered and destabilised by war, as well as by natural catastrophes and epidemics like the plague that have killed at least a third of the population and frightened the rest to death. Thinkers like Hans Blumenberg, Peter Sloterdijk and the philosopher of science Steven Toulmin agree in the observation that the once so optimistic and self-conscious individual was drawn to the promises of science out of anxiety - anxiety about the very survival in a dangerous world. This is, according to Toulmin, the main source for a strong desire to control nature and life, a fierce need for security, that is most evident in the biography of Descartes and mirrored in the Cartesian paradigm of a deterministic and mechanistic image of the universe. At the end of the 19th century it was the Max Weber, who identified a similar anxiety about salvation or being condemned and a great anxiety about failing to fulfil the will of God – in the early writings of the Calvinists. The Calvinist or, as Weber calls it, the protestant ethics of an “inner worldly asceticism ” –“innerweltliche Askese” as the only way to salvation are mirrored in the ascetic attitudes of the “pure scientist” who is striving for cognitive control of his environment – for “truth” – by suppressing as his worldly drives, his erotic and bodily desires. This is no longer the image of the self-conscious autonomous individual of the Renaissance.
Max Weber, the classic theorist of modernity insists on his observation that some deep-seated premodern motives and images of life persist in the context of Modernity. But like Freud he was convinced that the pursuit of happiness or beatitude, that was the core of any religious culture before, has no place and no chance of fulfilment in a secular world and scientific world view. For both as representatives of Modernity like for Schopenhauer the pursuit of happiness has come to an end. Hannah Arendt has chosen the formula of “human condition” as title for one of her most remarkable books that she published after writing to volumes on totalitarianism in the 20th century. Writing as a Jew after Auschwitz, Arendt never gave up to figure out a more positive image of the human condition as Weber and Freud are presenting it. She is all her life looking for a substitute for the pursuit of happiness. From this perspective we have to understand the title of her book The Human Condition, where she is recovering the sphere of political action as a sphere of dialogue, where humans can exist and perceive each other in dignity. Arendt´s claim then is that in a civil society the human condition has its fulfillment in political action as she understands it, and not in the pursuit of happiness. Political action is for Arendt a form of life, a form of interaction with the others that respects them in their position, their whishes and goals. I think Arendt´s position should be kept in consideration when talking about the human condition today.
If one looks back at the historical origins of science one can assume that the pursuit of happiness was substituted still by also another motive – the pursuit of truth. This is because early science was deeply embedded in a religious world-view. From today it seems, that the sciences, and here I am speaking only about the natural sciences, succeeded to emancipate themselves from a religious worldview only after the breakdown of the great systems of philosophical idealism and idealistic metaphysics. This was the time of Nietzsche, of Marx and of Darwin. Charles Darwin, the founding figure of modern biology, this must be kept in mind, was for years hesitating to publish his main work, The Origins of Species, because, being himself a priest of the English church, he feared that the religious authorities would condemn his ideas. The foundig father of biology was a homo religiosus.
Therefore it is not surprising that biology in the 20th century had a certain quasi-religous background. The use and abuse or Darwin’s ideas under the label of Social Darwinism has given Darwinism a bad reputation. Nevertheless, in the course of the 20th century, Darwin’s theory of evolution became the guiding paradigm of biological theory. Among the other sciences, biology came to play a peculiar role in culture. In the days of Descartes and later Newton it was physics that held the place of the leading paradigm of natural sciences. In the 19th century, chemistry and physiology, because of their tremendous impact on agriculture and medicine, drew the most attention of the scientific world. In the course of the 20th century, biology became by and by the intellectually guiding disciplines among the sciences, claiming scientific authority for all the questions of life, animal and human life, questions of the role of the individual in society, question of culture, of life and death. Using metaphors of the bible, biology presented itself as new logos a bio-logos, according to the first words of the gospel of St. John - “In the beginning was the word” – namely the word of the biologist, for example of Richard Dawkins. In his book The selfish gene, one of its chapters begins with the words “In the beginning was the gene”. The title of a recent anthology on modern biology presents it as the “second creation”. By employing the images of the bible biologists indicate what they are by their scientific achievements are those to tell us what are the essentials of the human condition. Anyway there is no doubt of the political weight of the questions of life. As well known, biology was involved in politics in a number of problematic ways, as well in the Stalin era as in German National Socialism.

Life Sciences, Technology and Industry

The decisive events for the development of biology occurred elsewhere. Encouraged by the work of Max Delbrück and Erwin Schrödingerrs famous book What is life? a couple of brilliant and ambitious scientists, Watson and Crick, succeeded to discover the molecular structure of the essential life molecules DNA and RNA. A new discipline was born, molecular biology, with massive financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Watson’s and Cricks discoveries about the double-helix-structure of DNA were the breakthrough. Processes of life from now on were analysed in terms of microphysics and chemistry, and this opened new possibilities of measurement and experiment. and the perspective of intervening in the structures of life on the molecular level and transforming them. Classical genetics as first formulated by Gregor Mendel was reformulated in terms of molecular biology and in this way provided the ground for a new technology, gene-technology.
These revolutionary innovations in biology led to a new “great synthesis” between Darwinian theory of evolution and molecular biology. Its technological impact seems to justify the word of a “second creation”, were one might ask who it is to take the role of a new creator – the biologist himself, or, in terms of self-organisation, nature itself. However, the cultural implications of the progress in life science are most evident. Closing the remarks about the development of biology in the 20th century it must be added that in the last decades a new paradigm of theoretical biology was established reaching beyond both the theory of evolution and molecular biology. It is the first effort to answer the question of the origin of life. Theory of evolution takes as an problematically given the existence of living beings with the capacity to selfpreservation and self-replication, but does not give any explanation of how such structures are possible. The answer of recent studies of the dynamics of the elementary molecules of life like enzymes, proteins and amino acids is given in one word: self-organisations. Theories of self-organisation allows explaining the emergence of life that does not presuppose any more the idea of a divine creator as the principle cause for the existence of life. It marks, in terms of biological theory, the transition from the principle of the creator to that of creativity as an attribute of living matter.
In sum: In the history of biology in the 20th century cultural images, political interests, economic forces and scientific ideas are neatly interwoven. The global turn of biology to biotechnology however makes evident that it is the innovations of molecular biology, especially of molecular genetics that in the long run were decisive. Turning to the field of recently developed biotechnologies however must be seen in the institutional and economic context in which it is situated. It is the context of the so-called military industrial complex. Now the widespread myth of “value-free” science has come to a definite end. Max Weber’s claim of value freedom was meant for the social and political science and he passionately fought for the separation a field of disinterested and rational discourse from ongoing political debates in society. Talking about natural sciences he regarded them as means of the mastery of the material world through calculation. As such, the natural sciences had always had their definite place in a field controlled by state power political power. This holds for the first scientists gathered in Royal Society in 17th Century in Great Britain, for the disciplines of chemistry and physiology when integrated into the universities in the middle of the 19th century.
Until the Second World War, the natural sciences where protected and controlled by the state. After that an era of direct cooperation between scientists and industrial companies began, and research was more and more oriented towards application of scientific results, and that means, toward technologies. This holds also for university research, and scientists became dependent in their work from financial support for their projects by private enterprises. A new kind of capitalism was born, academic capitalism. Most present is this development in the various branches of biology and biotechnology, for a number of reasons outside the academic field, because of some significant changes in the network of transnational economy. After primary industries have become the main branch of economic growth in the South-East-Asian national economies, western transnational companies were expanding their activities to other fields of production like communication technology and biotechnology.
So far for the facts of the historical, the political and economic context of recent biotechnologies. In their beginnings, they were concentrating on agriculture and the production of food in general. Today medical technologies are drawing much more attention. For many people biotechnologies are something like a new “promised land”, the means for a future overcoming any scarcity, hunger, and illness. In fact, the real situation is more complicated than these optimistic expectations, and many critics are convinced, that for instance new technologies in agriculture are much more for the benefit of the international companies who produce them than for the poor masses in the countries of the south. Instead of helping them, the enforced implementation of biotechnologies through a new agro-business is by and by destroying their own forms and resources of subsistence. This example shows that it does not make sense to ask for the benefits for biotechnology in a general form. The question is who is using them for whom with which purposes.

4) Technologies of body and mind as new tools to remake the human condition

Although the questions of material subsistence are fundamental also for what we might regard as the human condition, I want to focus on another branch of advanced biotechnologies - those of the biotechnologies of the body and the mind and their impact for the situation and self-perception of the self. Among all the many phenomena of life that where studied and perceived in the new light of the new and revolutionary perspectives of molecular biology and biotechnology the human body is the one that is of special interest, because it is not just this our human body, but it is us, who are under new scientific scrutiny. Leading biologists are very much aware of their new authority to tell us what we are. So the biologist Richard Dawkins tells us in his already mentioned book The selfish gene: It sounds like science fiction but it is truth: We are nothing but the survival machines for the selfish genes striving to spread in the gene-pool of the species. We are survival machines of something else that makes of our life what it is: genes. We, strictly spoken, our bodies are the “phenotypes” which are of secondary relevance from the perspective of the scientist Dawkins. After Copernicus who abolished the old geocentric and anthrocentric image of the universes, after Darwin who made humans to a last exemplification of animal evolution and after Freud who removed the Ego from its place as the sovereign centre of our existence, we a are confronted with another severe offence of human self-consciousness and self-estimate. We are nothing but accumulations of micro-components of life that are now the objects of new technologies. But exactly because of that the “we” speaking the language of advanced biology is also the “we” of potential users of these technologies. Of course this "we" is not the "we" of all humans. It is the "we" of the new elites who are able to master the new biotechnologies und who have access to them. Once again we hear the Baconian core message of modernity: Knowledge is power.
Despite of all criticism of science and technology after Horkheimers and Adornos statements about the Dialectics of Enlightenment, the optimist promises of progress and perfection and all their promises of for a better organisation of material life are resonating in all the statements of biotechnologists. Biotechnologies are expanding in a spectacular way, regarded as the sign of progress of the species, as the necessary outcome of evolution.
This is the way in which Ray Kurzweil, a successful informatic-engenier and in recent years the chief advisor in questions of science in the stuff of US-President Bush, explains the growth of technological progress. He situates this progress of technique in the context of cosmic evolution, taking as the first decisive step the emergences of structures of life – DNA, which he regards as a pattern, as a first “written protocol” of information, followed by to the evolution of humans, the evolution of writing and finally the technological means of storing and processing information – the computer. Technology then is just a further step of evolution, so to say the continuation of natural evolution with other means. The development of IT-technologies follows, according to Kurzweil, one principle with cosmic necessity. He names it “Moores Law” after Moore, the inventor of the microchip. This law says that the storage power of computers is doubling in a period of 18 month at stable costs. It is a law about rising growth- and profit-rates of IT – technology. In fact Moore´s law is a measure of the ratio of economic investment and profit of computing industry. In other words, the principle of cosmic evolution Kurzweil is claiming is a principle of economy. Kurzweils “theory of technological evolution” is nothing but the projection of an economic calculus on the whole cosmos. Stanislaw Lem, who many years before was writing about striking paralleles between natural and technological evolution, is more down to earth, stressing also the remarkable differences between natural and technological evolution. It seems however that Kurzweils expresses the dominant attitude toward technologies. It is no longer the pursuit of happiness like in the era of Christianity, and no longer the pursuit of truth as for science in modernity, but the pursuit of progress in terms of economical profit. This is, it seems, the underlying motive dominating human condition in the age of post-modernity.
Turning back to my last topic, the technologies of the body, it must be added that Ray Kurzweil in his recent book above mentioned speaks about the future of homo sapiens in the 21st century, writing an amusing science fiction scenario of development of technologies of mind and body in the next hundred years, were step by step human thinking is integrated into the world-wide digital data-network, and the human software, the brain, substituted by a machine, a computer. This is, according to Kurzweil, the future of Homo sapiens. Similar ideas are present in the writings of the Robotic-specialist Hans Morawec, and in many other statements of the new techo-imaginary about a post-human and post-biological evolution. One might ask, what, besides of economic interests, are the motives and underlying desires of such a kind of post-human technoid image of the future?
It is the desire for perfection, for technological perfection, led by the images of technical control and mastery not only of the outer world, but also of the body as the site and medium of human existence. It operates in a new ontological frame, envisaging thereby a new “order of being“. The reductionist attitude of molecular biology has tried to prove on the level of theory that the (molecular) forms of life are just matter, nothing but physical matter organized in a peculiar way. The recently discussed technologies of the body – prosthetics, plastic and cosmetic surgery, robotics – and technologies of mind like Artificial Intelligence are all operating on this premises. The Australian performance artist Stelark has given out the slogan: The body is obsolete! He is proposing to substitute step by step all parts of the body, all organic substance of flesh and blood including the human wet-ware of the brain by silicon and other artificial materials to be adequately equipped for future adventures in the interstellar space. Like the ideas of Kurzweil and Morawec this things are not more than science fiction.

But there is another field of technologies of the body more embedded in reality, namely medical technologies. They are obviously of a different kind. They are properly speaking technologies of life, because they select, isolate specific components of organic life to repair and substitute ill, non-functional parts of clients in hospitals. Take as one much-discussed example organ-transplantation. There is a lot of promising and fruitful research done in the field of medical technology that does not evoke criticism as organ transplantation does: For example the use of body cells to cure illness. But if the materials required for medical technologies are gem cells, stem cells, embryos or even whole organs taken from bodies declared as “brain-dead”, yet still vital, such procedures appear as highly problematic from an ethical perspective. “Brain death” is constructed as criterion accepted by law to allow for organ transplantation, and critics insist that nevertheless it is murder, because explantation destroys a still vital body.
All the invasive technologies of the body, how different they may be, have something in common: They rely on a Cartesian framework, treating the body as machine, as matter, separating it from mind and self – a separation that in fact is not possible. From a certain legal and the economical standpoint today the body is regarded as a piece of property of which every individual has the right to dispose of according to his or her own interests, according to his own will and possibilities as provided by the advanced bio-technologies. This is the message of neoliberalism: One also has the right to change the genetic outfit of ones children and to use biotechnologies to produce better children, brighter, with bodily strength and fitness.
To be a human being however means not only to have a body, but also to be this body. When the body is transformed into material for technologies, what is at stake is not just this our body, but what is at stake is what we are, what it means to be human. Till now it has been the phenomenologists and the feminists who insist on the crucial role of embodiment for human existence. Recently also Jürgen Habermas, author of one of the most influential models of discourse ethics and of a theory of communicative action has added to his program of ethics a similar claim: Self-determined, autonomous and free action as the basis of any ethics is only possible for a embodied individual, and it requires that any persons identifies himself or herself with his or her own body. But to serve as the condition of possibility of free and autonomous action it must be perceived and experienced as a natural given, beyond the disposition or control of any power from outside, except the person him- or herself. Habermas wants to make explicit the moral and ethical implications of the recently most discussed project of medical biotechnologies, Pre-Implantation-Diagnosis (PID) and research on embryos. He claims that against the growing tendencies of a total “technification of nature”, especially the technification of the human body a step of moralization of human nature is necessary.
Both the mentioned technologies – still forbidden in Germany and Austria – go beyond the goal of “healing”, the medical treatment of disease. They are employed to eliminate “wrongful life” – embryos with inherited defects are eliminated. And there is the idea to improve the genetic outfit of those which are selected for reproduction. Embryo research is making use of early human life for purposes of research and experiment using it instrumentally as a means for some end and does no longer, as Kant claimed, regard it as a purpose in itself. PID operates on the basis of In-Vitro-Fertilisation that allows for the production of a number of embryos, that all are diagnosed to find out if they are bearers of an inherited disease. If this is the case, they are excluded from reproduction. Then, out of the remaining embryos the fittest, the best is selected and re-emplanted to the uterus of the mother. This is the first step towards a new form of Eugenics, a “positive Eugenics” as it is called.
In both cases the difference between what counts as natural and what is artificially constructed is no longer considered. The consequences according to Habermas: Bio-technological use of life is fundamentally shattering our normative self-understanding as humans. Free, self-determined action of the individual under biotechnical treatment is for such purposes no longer of any relevance. Because it is plainly the total instrumentalisation of human life. If we get used to such practices, they will fundamentally change the way we perceive ourselves and our relation to others. Intervention into the genetic inheritance of humans is on the way, and thereby a perspective for a new Eugenics, that is no longer a matter of a state and an ethnic collective, but for everybody who wants to improve his bodily outfit and genetic potential.
But what in the end are the criteria for perfection and improvement looked for? American and Japanese parents are ready to do anything to have their kids cleverer, healthier, stronger. In a word anyone wants to be more efficient and successful. These are the requirements to survive in a competitive environment dictated by an overall economic calculus of a liberal society. So in the end, the economic calculus of rising growth of surplus value Ray Kurzweil claims to be the principle law of evolution in the whole cosmos, is coming to its final destination. Human efficiency in the context of advanced capitalist world-society and the values of Neo-Liberalism seems to set a new frame of the human condition in the age of post-modernity. This is reality we already living in. Productivity has taken the place both of the creater and of creativity

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