Detachment, Genomics and the Nature of Being Human

Abstract

Human self-understanding and our presuppositions about nature are surely mutually implicative and inseparable, even if the reciprocal lines of influence can be complex and subtle. While we’ve come to fret quite a bit about the ethical poverty, and arguably catastrophic consequences, of our modern Western (but increasingly global) technologically-driven ‘vision of nature’, we may have lost sight of the extent to which our human self-understanding is an inextricable part of that ‘loop’. While there are many who feel sickened (on behalf of nature?) by even the suggestion of a need for any further anthropological self-reflection (haven’t we obsessed about ourselves enough?), it could well be that such sickness is itself a symptom of the same disease. Our understandings, tacit or otherwise, of nature and of ourselves, will influence and implicate each other whether we choose to become conscious of such influences or not, so surely better that we make this more explicit as opposed to less. If my intuitions (and the strategy of this chapter) are correct then any ‘high road’ to a new and better (and in any sense more ethical) vision of nature can only begotten through an interplay of ‘nature’ and ‘human nature’ concepts and considerations. Many contemporary ‘naturalists’ celebrate the idea that Darwin brought us closer to the animal world, i.e., to ‘nature’, but they ignore (at our peril) the concomitant dialectical implication, brought to our attention by Hans Jonas—that Darwin equally brought animal nature closer to us. But to reap thatbounty of potential naturalistic insight we have to also be getting it right about us. Dialectics, of course, can well resemble the logic of a ping-pong match. Following an introductory (and hopefully contextualizing) excursus on Aristotle, the strategy of this chapter will be to borrow a concept—that of ‘detachment’—from the lexicon of ‘philosophical anthropology,’ put it to use as a basic organizing concept for rethinking the ostensible ‘purposiveness of nature’ in modern terms, re-situating ourselves, anthropologically, in such a reconfigured nature and finally reflecting on that vision of a nature which has (once again) become ‘closer to us.’