Transcending the Human
Ever since humans started humanizing themselves, they made themselves artificial, emancipating themselves from their natural condition. The first trepanations and cataract procedures proved that nature was not to be celebrated as a sweet and good provider of nothing but positivity, like some cornucopia. It also contains death, sadness, suffering, conflict, claws, beaks, and condemnation of the weak to death.
Transcending nature creates humanity. In its first stuttering movements, medicine rejected physical and psychic suffering; it invented conjurations involving different concoctions and crushed plants; it combined powders, herbs, and essences; it brought together brews with incantations and magical thinking; it used touch and ritualized gestures; it intervened, not leaving things to nature. It imposed human will. Antinaturalism is the essence of medicine.
What does it mean to transcend the human? It is not about ending humanity in favor of some sort of inhumanity or superhumanity. Rather, it entails a posthumanity that preserves humanity while transcending it. What is the point? It’s the sublimation, realization, and perfection of humanity. The old body that was at the absolute mercy of the dictates of nature remains just the same, but it is supplemented with tricks and culture; we inject it with human intelligence and Promethean substantiality so that it can liberate itself as much as possible from the determinisms of natural necessity.
What could be a means of achieving this posthumanity? One is transgenesis. Of course, surgery can also help us achieve it if we allow it to (ontologically), but the possibility of interfering with genes opens a radical new perspective in the global history of medicine. We should not sacrifice to a genetic cult or build a genomic religion. Genetics does what it can, which is to say, not everything, albeit quite a bit. However, we can find in it a great highway leading to the posthuman.
That said, we can now understand why the apostles of the heuristic of fear have such an interest in allowing magic thinking to proliferate around the subject of cloning. Cloning would mean the industrial production of identical individuals leading to the fascist dream of an oppressed mass commanded by a powerful elite. Bravo to this kind of science fiction! But it simply has nothing whatsoever to do with science.
Reproductive cloning would be content to artificially produce identical genetic capital. Yet we are not just our genetic capital. We are the product of its interaction with the substance and thickness of the world. If that were not so, in the case of twin homozygotes—which is how reproductive cloning works in nature—we would have nothing but absolute duplication. We know that it is not that way at all. Education in the large sense of the term, interactions, influences, chances, and formatting that happens in the first hour of birth sculpt our being more definitely than the modalities that, though essential, escape our understanding. Sartre knew this well when he attempted to dismantle Flaubert. The project eluded him and ended up filling more than three thousand pages, finding nothing.
What’s to be gained through a heuristic of fear? Conflating reproductive cloning—which is neither monstrous nor cost-effective and is thus without any future—with therapeutic cloning, which would allow us to prevent, fight against, take care of, or suppress illness. Under the pretext of precaution, we give free rein to the negativity at work in nature, even though it is in our power to slow it down, thwart it, and avoid it. Morally and juristically, this attitude manifests in not helping people who are in danger—millions of people.
A Preventative Eugenics
A Promethean bioethics does not propose the creation of monsters or chimeras. Neither does it wish for pure race. It does not in the least aspire to a cyborg humanity. It instigates not a project of abolishing nature (what a feckless plot!), but a continuation of the old Cartesian project of mastering it. It would make us like “masters and possessors.” René Descartes, not Adolph Hitler.
In itself, eugenics is a technique allowing us to produce offspring (genics) with the best possible conditions for the individual (personal health) or the community (public health). It could be capitalist if it acts for the profit of the laboratories that invent its processes; racial if, like the Nazis, it aims for a supposedly regenerated humanity that is purified of what is presumably holding it back; Catholic when it promotes a strict respect for life that in time gets transformed into a cult fetish of the peasant class, to the point of celebrating nature’s pathological productions as trials sent from God; consumerist when it is used for the production of skins that conform to the canons of the moment—the young and pretty blue-eyed blonde with larger mammaries than brains and the like. We can all agree pretty easily that any of these uses is indefensible.
If eugenics is condemnable, it is not so in itself, in some absolute sense, but because of the name that qualifies it. What about a libertarian eugenics? What would that mean? It would be a strategy of avoidance with a simple aim: to increase the chance of a happy presence in the world. It would do away with the idea that some sickness, suffering, handicap, or physical or psychological wretchedness vitiates any joy that might issue from our existential potentiality. Therefore, it is to decrease the chance of a wretched presence in the world.
Without engaging in Byzantine debates, most of us can agree on what makes a happy or wretched presence in the world. For any future being in the world, it would seem that health is preferable to sickness, ability to disability, form to deformity, normality to abnormality. Anyone who would prefer sickness, disability, debility, deformity, or abnormality, that is, whoever would deny the existence of those categories, seems to me to be ontologically criminal in their refusal to act when given the possibility of transgenetic avoidance.
Health, which is at a minimum understood to be the absence of illness, offers us the sweetest ataraxia. Why, then, would we opt for trouble when it is within our means to have corporal peace instead of a suffering body? Why, before a being is even born (no need to speak of the suppression of a being that by definition does not yet exist), would we deny election so that someone could have the best possible existential potential among the millions of combinations available?
This libertarian eugenics would produce not subhumans or superhumans, but simply humans. It would rectify the injustices of nature and begin an era of cultural fairness. Subsequently, once the being finds itself in the world, it would provide a kind of medicine that would predict the onset of an illness and be able to prevent it. Thus, it would do away with painful and debilitating treatments, many pathologies that result from treatments, and the side effects that are ignored by the pharmaceutical industry.
The transgenetic medicine that would accompany libertarian eugenics would undermine the domination of agonistic medicine, which most of the time fights pain with another inversely proportionate pain. It would provide an alternative, peaceful medicine that would neutralize, in the style of the martial arts, the appearance of negativity in the world.
The power of this Promethean bioethics creates new lands populated with completely novel philosophical objects. Outside of physics as we have habitually understood it—the kind used by cartographers for a long time—we can discover a series of original topics that bring up brand new questions and lead to future answers.
Such a new metaphysics—in the etymological sense of the word, “what is beyond the physical”—has the strange feature of being able to define what are actually very physical themes, because they are totally immanent! There is no pretext for new nebula or verbal sophistications, nor is there a need for neologisms. Rather, we need a new orientation to solve the problems generated by our unique epoch.
Thus, we have the creation of a new epoch—an era of frozen genetic material. When we extract spermatozoids, ova, or embryos, they act according to the law of time as it works in our planetary system. Each cell’s vessels will expire—they are within time. Since the advent of cryogenics, they obey two laws of time simultaneously: the law within the incubator and the law outside of it. The living being’s time ends, giving way to the trick of a frozen and suspended but still social time. The arrested cell enters into an open time, which preceded the social time it enters upon reimplantation.
In concrete terms, a donor’s sperm escapes natural time and enters an artificial suspension of time during which the donor persists in social time. Hypothetically, a century after his death, once the body that had carried him has become a skeleton, his nomadic body continues to live. Hence, the introduction of new metaphysical problems.
In these new times we have new configurations. Living persons are conflated with machines when, for example, we speak of neurons as if they were information cards. We implant machines into living beings in the case of prostheses—steel screws in titanium hearts, cardiac stimulators, and arterial stents. Or we incorporate parts of a living being into our human being as we use loanwords: pig mitral valves in human hearts or the use of skin and insulin—no need to speak of the inverse compatibility. We are surrounded by the animalization of man and the humanization of animals—there are lab mice that are physiologically compatible with homo sapiens…
In the same way, we can rethink the pharmacopeia that asks chemical molecules to produce behavioral effects. With the rise of such soul-chemistry, psychoanalysts watch nervously while their territory shrinks. This conflict signifies a partial decline of shamanic techniques—those that are useful, though unscientific—in the face of the irrefutable and irrecusable evidence of postmodern pharmacology.
These new forces can be put to the service of the death drive just as much as the drive to life. All the anxiolytics, antidepressants, and sleeping pills are less about treating manifest pathologies than about subjects’ general incapacity to exist at peace in a civilization that indoctrinates or destroys those who resist. This chemistry achieves the submission and subjection of the recalcitrant through chemically transfiguring them into zombies.
A libertarian bioethics would apply the hedonist perspective to the manufacture, prescription, and consumption of these substances. The point is not to negate, extinguish, or pacify someone to the point of rubbing out their subjectivity, but to increase the possibility of having a joyous presence in the world. Viagra, for example, insofar as it gives spirit to the flesh, demonstrates something like a Dionysian pharmacopeia oriented toward the drive for life.