Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution”
XII
There may be in the offing another, still deeper-reaching, feat of the technological revolution. When we check what sciences have successively contributed to it — mechanics, chemistry, electronics, and, just beginning, nuclear physics — we notice the absence of one great branch of natural science: biology. Are we, perhaps, on the verge of another — conceivably the last — stage of that revolution, based on biological knowledge and wielding an engineering art which, this time, has man himself for its object? This has become a theoretical possibility with the advent of molecular biology and its understanding of genetic programming; and it has been rendered morally possible by the metaphysical neutralizing of man. But the latter, while giving us the license to do as we wish, at the same time denies us the guidance for knowing what to wish. Since the same evolutionary doctrine of which genetics is a cornerstone has deprived us of a valid image of man, the actual techniques, when they are ready, may find us strangely unready for their responsible use. Our being, if a mere de facto outcome of evolution, enjoys no definitive and defining essence, by whose light — if visible to us — we could choose or reject suggested engineering goals; or whose acknowledged though undefined presence would at least hold us to respect for a status quo which our ignorance must take to embody that hidden essence. The anti-essentialism of prevailing theory surrenders our being to a freedom without norms. Thus the technological call of the new microbiology is the twofold one of physical feasibility and metaphysical admissibility. Assuming the genetic mechanism to be completely analyzed and its script finally decoded, we can set about rewriting the text. The specifications for the rewriting can come from any quarter, interest, or well-meaning belief of the hour. I do not know how close we are to the capability. Biologists vary in the estimate of its imminence. Most seem to expect its eventual arrival, few to doubt the right to use it; but no one can contend that we must use it. Under no Baconian pressure of coping with human necessity, which justified all previous technology, biological engineering — of the melioristic or creative sort — would be wholly gratuitous. So we could desist. But, judging by the rhetoric of its prophets, the idea of taking our evolution into our own hands is intoxicating even to men of science, who should know better. In fact, no science is needed to tell us that “to navigate by a landmark tied to your ship’s head is ultimately impossible.”1 Imagination boggles at what this Pandora’s box might release. Speaking for myself, I fear not the abuses by evil power interests: I fear the well-wishers of mankind with their dreams of a glorious improvement of the race.
In any case, the idea of making-over Man is no longer fantastic, nor interdicted by an inviolable taboo. If and when that technological revolution occurs, if technological power is really going to tinker with the central and elemental keys on which life will have to play its melody in generations of men to come (perhaps the only such melody in the universe), then a reflection on what is humanly desirable and what should determine the choice — on “the image of man,” in short — becomes an imperative more urgent than any ever inflicted on the understanding of mortal man. Philosophy, it must be confessed, is sadly unprepared for this — its first cosmic — task.
Donald M. McKay in Man and His Future, a Ciba Foundation Volume (London, 1963), p. 286. Sec also C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947) pp. 69ff. ↩