We Have Never Been Human, or How We Lost Our Humanity: Derrida and Habermas on Cloning

Abstract

If the question of the relation of nature and history is to be seriously posed, then it only offers any chance of solution if it is possible to comprehend historical being in its most extreme historical determinancy, where it is most historical, as natural being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as an historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature. It is no longer simply a matter of conceptualizing the fact of history as natural fact toto caelo (inclusively) under the category of historicity, but rather to retransform the structure of inner-historical events into a structure of natural events. No being underlying or residing within historical being itself is to be understood as ontological, that is, as natural being. The retransformation of concrete history into dialectical nature is the task of the ontological reorientation of the philosophy of history: the idea of natural-history. Theodor W. Adorno1 It is not arbitrary that the chairperson of the President's Council on Bioethics, Leon R. Kass, has turned his attention to the book of Genesis in the so-called Old Testament. Leon Kass, a Straussian neoconservative, who was also influenced by one of Heidegger's children, Hans Jonas, and who often appeals to Heidegger's philosopheme of the Gestell, has been advocating a bio-ethics predicated on a form of philosophical anthropology that seeks its roots in biblical stories about the origins of humanity. Over the last two decades Kass has been arguing against the corrosive, nay apocalyptic, effects of all forms of reproductive technologies. Early in the seventies, he prophesized that in-vitro fertilization would open the way to the end of sex, the family, stable gender roles, and the stability of Western society as such. Artificial reproduction, that is artificial sex, he anticipated, would lead to the "abolition of man," in that memorable phrase popularized by the Christian moralist and writer C. S. Lewis.2 We must forgo discussion of what is real, i.e., natural sex, as opposed to artificial or technologically assisted sex. Even in Genesis we find traces of artificial sex. But this is a discussion for biblical scholars. Early this year, Kass published a gargantuan book entitled The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis,3 which is a lengthy commentary on Genesis. Above all, however, this book is a philosophical anthropology disguised as biblical exegesis. The goal of the text is to argue that in the allegedly oldest book of Judeo-Christian wisdom literature, we can find insights into what it means to be human, not just spiritually, but also, and most importantly, biologically. In order for Kass to argue that we must reject all forms of technological intervention into human reproduction (although he does waver when it comes to extremely debilitating diseases), he appeals to a basic human nature. In fact, over the last two decades he has been pursuing what was called early in the twentieth century philosophical anthropology.4 The goals of this enterprise are to derive fundamental insights about the structure of the human being from both social and biological aspects of human existence. Thus, from the invariance and pervasiveness of gender roles across history and human groups, philosophical anthropologists want to derive insights about fundamental and inescapable sexual difformism, or an existential analytics that says that human Dasein must come in two, which like electrical plugs, must fit nicely into each other. The philosophical anthropological project, however, is not merely descriptive; it is also and perhaps most importantly, prescriptive. The idea is to read down and backwards into the essential structure of the human being, in order to then derive some ontic-ontologically grounded normative principles. If artificial insemination violates natural sex, then we must proscribe it. If gene therapy circumvents sexual reproduction, then it must be banned, as it violates the most fundamental aspect of human nature, and precisely what makes us human, namely that we are children of "natural" sex. …