From Creation to Creativity.
The Human Condition and the Order of Being in the Age of Biotechnology
By Elisabeth List
(University of Graz Austria)

Contribution for:
September 7-12, 2002, St. Petersburg, Russia
The Fifth International Congress on Philosophy and Culture
CREATION – CREATIVITY – REPRODUCTIONS:
WISDOM OF CREATOR, REASON OF DEDALUS AND THE CUNNING OF THE HACKER

One of the most crucial changes of paradigm in contemporary understanding of culture and of the place of the human being in the process of cultural and cosmic evolution is marked by recent developments in biotechnology. Biotechnology today in its most extravagant presentations claims to initiate an age of a “second creation” because biotechnology today seems to be able to re-create living forms and even the human species according to new standards of perfection and effectivity. A news era of “post-biologcal evolution” is being proclaimed.

The cultural meaning and consequence of this paradigm shift amounts to the abolition of the traditional order of being which was, especially in the realm of religious beliefs and thinking, an order created by a transcendental creator, by God or “Mother Nature” herself.

In the context of modern science and technology the human being is no longer seen as the creature of a divine creator as in a religious frame of thinking, but as a being with the capacity and ability of self-creation. How to react to this proclaimed transformation of culture, and first of all: How to understand it? In the face of a number of problematic and even dangerous consequences of the recent revolutions in technology one might propose to re-enforce or re-establish a safe religious order of being. From a philosophical point of view however the first step would be to rethink what it means to be a creature without presupposing the existence of a god. This would require developing a new framework of a philosophical anthropology that shows and explains how the genuine human faculties and properties could have evolved from the natural givens of human existence.

The American philosopher Susanne Langer was one of the thinkers in the last century who succeeded to provide such an approach to the understanding of the human being. In her writings (esp. Mind. An essay of human feeling, Baltimore and London: Hopkins University Press, 3 Vol. 1967-82) she demonstrates how human mind evolves from a natural need to create symbols and how this peculiar human capacity of symbolising enables humans to create language, myths, religious and cultural forms like art.

As a creature the human being is to be understood as the offspring of an autopoietic process of an “evolution creatrice” (Henri Bergson), that means, in first place not as the creature of somebody else, but as the heir of an open potential of evolving creativity, just as argued by recent research on processes of autopoietic complexity in the process of life. To resituate the human in the order of being it is necessary to refuse the mistaken claims of omnipotence of recent biotechnology, which reduces the richness of the human potential, the potential of life in general to a subtle mechanism.

In the face of the paradigm shift that brought about technological efforts to produce “Artificial Life” it is of crucial importance to bring into consideration the open potential of creativity of the living and of human living. Nevertheless the human is not in a position completely to master it own conditions of living, but is embodied in a larger context of living forms, that as a whole still lies beyond human capacities of understanding and control. This might invite arguments for the existence of God, but not as a matter of logical consequence. What is at place anyway is a high level of scientific insight in the process of natural and cultural evolution but also a new self-conscious attitude in the face of the inherent limits of modern science and technology.

This is however not the leading opinion of the day. Today the promises of revolutionary success, progress and profit of the new biotechnologies dominate the stock markets, university seminars and political debates. The 21st century has been proclaimed as the century of the biotechnologies.

A number of key issues must be addressed before we can think about the effects of biotechnology on both “the order of being” and of “human condition”: 1) the development of biology as life science in the 20th century, 2) the role of science in modernity in general, 3) the relations between science, technology and industry, the character and impact of biotechnogies and 4) the special role of biotechnologies of body and self for human self-understanding. [...]

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