…the question at first emerges of whether and how we ourselves will protect our historical determination, even when the path of history—upon which the historical determination becomes our destiny—still remains so concealed.
–Heidegger, “Introduction to Philosophy”.
Abstract
The twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger distinguished “meditative” (besinnlich) and “calculative” (rechnende) modes of thinking as a way of highlighting the problematique of modern technology and the limits of modern science. In doing so he also was prescient to recognize, in 1955, that the most significant danger to the future of humanity are developments in molecular biology and biotechnology, in contrast to the post-World War global threat of thermonuclear weapons. These insights are engaged here in view of recent discussion of the need for international regulation of heritable human genome editing and the announcement in 2018 of the birth of the world’s first gene-edited babies in China. Heidegger’s call for meditative thinking requires modern medicine and the life sciences to appropriate the phenomenological conception of the human “way to be” (Seinsweise) such that it is not restricted to the “present-at-hand” (vorhanden) physiology and pathology of the human body (Körper).
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Notes
See here, Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (2012).
Baugh, referring to Heidegger’s concepts, speaks of a “kind of thinking, a thinking rooted in the earth [Bodenständigkeit] and open to letting the earth be [Gelassenheit]…”.
Marx had written in 1845, in what was published as an Appendix to Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), in Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1, trans. W. Lough (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 13–15: “Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kömmt drauf an, sie zu verändern.” [“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.].
See here also Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz (1999); State of Exception (2005). trans. K. Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). For an extension of Agamben’s perspective in the context of transnational violence, the war on terror and the “exceptional” space of Guantánamo, see in particular Gregory (2006).
Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, 76–77, clarifies: “Genuine critique is something other than criticizing in the sense of faultfinding, blaming, and complaining. Critique, as ‘to distinguish’, means to allow the different as such to be seen in its difference. […] In other words, true critique, as in letting-be-seen [Sehenlassen], is something eminently positive.”.
See, e.g., Fazal and Wahab (2014).
Oppenheimer spoke these words from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita. See here Temperton (2017).
Kaiser explains (p. 6) that she uses the term ‘biological (research) practice’ such that “Biological practice comprises…narrowly ‘practical elements’…but also elements that may be characterized as more ‘theoretical’ (e.g., building theories, modeling, or developing explanations).”.
Galitski comments: “Traditionally, science has taken a reductionist approach, dissecting biological systems into their constituent parts and studying them in isolation. Entire scientific careers have been devoted to studying only one gene or protein in order to understand its function. Although scientists have made progress using this method, this reductionist approach limits biological insights into the human body. As a result, efforts to treat many complex diseases have also faced limited success.
Reductionism, by its nature, cannot comprehend the complexity of biological systems, the properties of which cannot be explained or predicted by studying their individual components. Scientists now understand that the individual components of biological systems such as molecular pathways never work alone—they operate in highly structured and integrated biological networks.” For an informative historical overview of the development of systems biology, see Kesić (2016).
For a phenomenological account consonant with Heidegger’s thinking, see Svenaeus (2010).
Ciocan, 469. For further discussion on medicine’s connection to modernist metaphysics, see Leder (1992). Given the importance of the basic science of anatomy and its connection to Cartesian science, Leder reminds insightfully (p. 117): “I consider modern medicine to be based, first and foremost, not upon the lived body, but upon the dead, or inanimate, body […] I will suggest that the figure of the dead body played a threefold role within Descartes’s project, serving to motivate his scientific explorations, crucial to his investigative methodology, and lying at the heart of his metaphysics.” He adds further that one of Descartes’ “stated goals for the Meditations is that this treatise provide [sic] grounds for the belief ‘that the human soul does not perish with the human body’,” following here the Discourse on Method’s claim that “our soul is in its nature entirely independent of body, and in consequence that it is not liable to die with it.”.
Heidegger does not mean ‘essence’ (Wesen) in the sense of Greek and medieval metaphysics, philosophers conceptually contrasting “essentia” (what something is) and “existentia” (that something is), both of which are grounded in a notion of “actuality/reality.” Since Aristotle, this metaphysical sense applies to animals, e.g., insofar as they are (as Heidegger says) “beings present-at-hand” (Vorhandensein), entities actually present to our perception as material objects. But, such presence (with its focus on the temporal present) does not characterize the human way to be. Heidegger speaks of the human ‘essence’ as ‘ek-sistence’, thus to distinguish his sense of the word from that of metaphysics. Precisely because humans are temporal beings, they “stand out” (are ek-static, ek-sistent) futurally in time. They cannot accurately be conceived merely as bodily beings (in the sense of Körper). A reductionist approach methodologically fails to attend to this uniquely human element of being temporal. A human being has his and her own projections of his and her potentiality for being, which is always far more than what is manifest merely in the present. The consequence, ontologically and methodologically, of the reductionist attitude is to reduce the human being to the objectified general category of a mere thing present-at-hand. For further discussion, see Grieder (1988).
Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, 77, commented concerning “the psychosomatic”: “What different things stand in question regarding their difference? In respect to what sameness and unity do the different things [psyche and soma] show themselves as different? Is it already determined? If not, how is it determinable in the first place?”.
For an overview of the CRISPR-Cas9 technique, see F. Zhang (no date).
For analysis on this issue, see Li et al. (2019).
See here, Chen Zhang […], Yi Chen. (2016).
He’s motivation was mixed, of course, given his personal ambitions “for fame and fortune,” even as he took advantage of the cultural condition of HIV stigmatization. Chinese scientist Yangyang Cheng (2019) accounts for “He’s scientific career and personal wealth” built “on solid work, but also on the publicity he sought, often with the assistance from state propaganda organs and the manipulation of less reputable media.” Antonio Regalado (2018), writing in the MIT Technology Review, cited He in his remarks that, “‘In this ever more competitive global pursuit of applications for gene editing, we hope to be a stand-out’…They predicted their innovation ‘will surpass’ the invention of in vitro fertilization, whose developer was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2010.”.
See here Novembre et al. (2005) on the geographic distribution of the CCR5 Delta 32 HIV-resistant allele, which natural mutation is found “principally in Europe and Western Asia.” The authors report that, “Homozygous carriers of the Delta32 mutation are resistant to HIV-1 infection because the mutation prevents functional expression of the CCR5 chemokine receptor normally used by HIV-1 to enter CD4 + T cells.” It is this natural mutation He Jiankui sought to duplicate through the gene editing he performed, with the hope of making the technology more widespread in use in China to create a technologically induced mutation where none currently occurs. He Jiankui’s scientific comportment, thus, was to innovate with a technological fix, such being his reductionist approach to a sociocultural problem of stigmatization.
For a further review of this criticism, see e.g., Li et al. (2019). For video of He Jiankui’s presentation at the Hong Kong Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, 27 November 2018, see “Live: Geneticist He Jiankui on claim he altered twin’s genes,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH57-YO9Eso, accessed 24 September 2020.
Cheng comments further that, in a posting on 26 November 2018, “the People’s Daily online, the Chinese government’s official mouthpiece…went on to state the significance of the news” of the birth of “Lulu” and “Nana”: “These are the world’s first genome-edited babies who are immune to HIV. This also means China has achieved a historic breakthrough in applying gene-editing to the prevention of disease.” Clearly, the posting raised further questions of the extent to which the Chinese government was in fact aware of He’s research and tacitly accepted it.
I acknowledge an anonymous reviewer’s comment suggesting this as He Jiankui’s methodological reductionism in this particular experiment, to be distinguished from “a molecular/genetic reductionist conception of human nature.”.
A “fateful” account that appreciates the limits of technological fixes is not the same as genetic essentialism. Problematic with the latter is its assumption of genetic determinism—“not necessarily a belief in a causal world in which only genes have a determining effect on human health and behavior. It could rather be the belief that the world is best served through emphasizing the role of genes and seeking to order life accordingly” (Australian Government, 2002). Since “scientists participate in, and can influence, a number of different discourses through which they (have responsibility to) choose what sort of subjectivity they will express,” therefore, for example, if one conceives the human genome as “information” or “data” structure found in DNA, then one “abstracts” conceptually such that “human-ness” is construed as “without a body, without a gender, without a history, and without personal and collective narratives.”.
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §23, says: Die Räumlichkeit des In-der-Welt-seins, p. 108. Heidegger says: “Die Verräumlichung des Daseins in seiner ‘Leiblichkeit’, die eine eigene hier nicht zu behandelnde Problematik in sich birgt, ist mit nach diesen Richtungenausgezeichnet.” See Being and Time, p. 143.
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Swazo, N.K. “Un-Promethean” science and the future of humanity: Heidegger’s warning. HPLS 43, 33 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00380-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00380-z