as being an absolute, okay? So, here again, there's another... The root of this conflation of human condition with human essence can be illuminated with another very significant quote from Arendt. Arendt writes, The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environments. but life itself is outside this artificial world. And through life, man remains related to all other living organisms. Now here, life in the early Heidegger is a term for Dasein, for human existence. So when Aaron is talking about life here, she's talking about this kind of radical transcendence,
which can't be turned into an object of scientific study. And Aaron continues, The future man projected by Promethean scientists seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given. The fact that human beings are living beings. A free gift from nowhere, secularly speaking, which he wishes to exchange, or the Promethean wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. Okay? So, in other words, the sin of Prometheanism or what is kind of reprehensible about Prometheanism is its attempt to eliminate or destroy the precarious equilibrium between the given and
the made. or between what human beings imminently generate through their own resources, and what the way the world is. Whether cosmologically, biologically, or historically characterized. So, you can draw some certain kind of, and certain interesting consequences follow from this denunciation of Promethism. So, first of all, the fact that birth, suffering, and death are ineliminable constants of the human condition. So here Dupuis cites Ivan Ilyich, another thinker who, again, lays out a similar critique. Ilyich writes, we will never eliminate pain.
We will not cure all disorders. We will certainly die. Therefore, as sensible creatures, we must face the fact that the pursuit of health may be a sickening disorder. There are no scientific or technological solutions. There is only the daily task of accepting the fragility and contingency of the human situation. There are reasonable limits which must be placed on conventional healthcare. Now, okay, I mean, there's a couple of things to say here. One is that, interestingly, like, reason is unreasonable. This is the first objection made against Prometheanism, is that rationalism is pathological because it is unreasonable, according to a standard of reasonableness, which is actually conjured as the antithesis of rationality.
So what exactly is reasonable about accepting the ineluctable facts of birth, suffering, and death? how much suffering should be accepted as an ineluctable or ineliminable feature of the human condition. In the 13th century, you can be sure that the standard was less acceptable than it would be now. You need to think only of dentistry, to think about the issues raised about the relationship between quantity and quality in Ilyich's ontologization of these kind of biological facts.
And here's a commentary by one of Ilyich's disciples. Again, a very interesting quotation. It says, What Jesus calls the kingdom of God stands above and beyond any ethical rule and can disrupt the everyday world in completely unpredictable ways. But Ilyich also recognizes in this declaration an extreme volatility. The fact that there's something radically unpredictable or something that transcends, there's a degree of contingency, for instance, in the fact of suffering, that transcends anything we can do about controlling and manipulating it.
For should this freedom itself, i.e. should the indetermination of suffering as an existential datum, ever become the subject of a rule, then the limitless would invade human life in a truly terrifying way. So in other words, once again, this is another interesting characterization of the pathology of Prometheanism. It tries to formulate a rule for what is without rule. It tries to conceptualize or organize that which is unconceptualizable or that which is beyond every register of organization. And this is why then someone, you know, Dupuis, I think, you know, formulates this kind of perspective in its, you know,
most kind of powerful form. when he writes, man's symbolic health lies in his ability to cope consciously and autonomously, not only with the dangers of his milieu, but also with a series of profoundly intimate threats that all men face and will always face, namely pain, disease, and death. The sacred played a fundamental role in this. The modern world was born on the ruins of traditional symbolic systems in which it could not see anything but arbitrariness and irrationality. In its enterprise of demystification, it did not understand the way these systems fixed limits to the human condition while conferring meaning upon them. When it replaced the sacred with reason and science,
it not only lost all sense of limits, it sacrificed the very capacity to make sense. In other words, our ability to make sense of our lives. of our own existences. One cannot make sense of what one seeks only to extirpate. If the naturally unavoidable finiteness of the human condition is perceived as alienation and not as a source of meaning, do we not lose something infinitely precious in exchange for the pursuit of a puerile dream? What is, in other words, what is infinitely precious is the facticity of human existence that exposes us to disease, to suffering, and death. This is infinitely precious.
This is the root of all religion, the claim that you're suffering for a reason. Be very wary when someone's telling you you're suffering for a reason. So the nub of Dupuis's philosophical case against the Prometheanism he detects in this NBIC program can be traced back not only to Sartre but to Cartesian dualism and the mechanical philosophy to which it gave rise. So the component and the contemporary philosophical complement to this metaphysical research program is the attempted mechanization of the mind, which underwrites much of cognitive science.
Now, there are lots of debates about, you know, degree to which, you know, there are lots of different paradigms competing in cognitive science. And the, you know, the computational paradigm has been subjected to, you know, numerous influential philosophical critiques. But, you know, Dupuy is aware of this, but he still thinks that even things like connectionism still concede too much to this computational paradigm of the mind. and this mechanization of the mind this attempt to naturalize the mind by understanding it as a part of nature in other words, if nature itself is just this vast mechanism or this kind of if one has a liberal sense of machinery
you can allow for very sophisticated and ingenious understandings of mechanical causation but you can integrate the mind into this mechanized nature through this computational paradigm. But it generates an immediate paradox. And a paradox is this. And again, this is Dupree writing. The mind that carries out the mechanization and the one that is the object of it are two distinct, albeit closely related entities, like the two ends of a seesaw, the one rising ever higher into the heavens of metaphysical humanism because it says that human beings should be able to kind of understand and explain everything
as the other end descends further into its deconstruction the deconstruction of humanism and of the privileges of the human being as traditionally conceived for man to be able as subject to exercise a power of this sort over himself it is first necessary that he be reduced to the rank of an object, able to be reshaped to suit any purpose. No raising up can occur without a concomitant lowering and vice versa. So the upshot is this, is that the more we, and it's very simple, the more we understand ourselves as part of nature, the more we successfully objectify ourselves,
as mechanisms, as very complicated mechanisms, the less able we become to delimit ends or purposes for ourselves. Because we no longer know if we're no different from any other more or less complicated natural mechanism, then what is the point of all this explanation and understanding that we're engaged? Why are we trying to understand everything? What is the point of understanding ourselves if by understanding ourselves we understand that all the points that we elaborate to make sense of ourselves, the purposes through which we traditionally
oriented ourselves towards the future, are themselves senseless. They're just mechanisms. So this is the paradox, is that the more human beings understand themselves, the more we understand ourselves as just another kind of contingently generated natural phenomenon, the less able we're able to define, say, what we should be. because you've deprived yourself of the normative resources you need to be able to say, this is better than that. It's better to be like this than to be like that. So, and again, this ultimately,
and what is, you know, again, being elided in this, you know, the disruption of this equilibrium between the given and the made is the distinction between what is true for human beings insofar as they can control and manipulate it, and what is made, what is the way it is by virtue of its essence. The true and the made become convertible. Because only what is made can be truly known. This is, again, why Marxism, a philosophy that asserts the primacy of practice and of cognition as another kind of practice,
is guilty of eliding the distinction between what is made and what is known. Only what is humanly knowable must have been humanly made. okay so can I how much time do I have I can wrap things up fairly okay I'll just try and kind of come to some kind of conclusion now okay Now, what I want to insist is that, okay, I want to, you know, this is unfolding in a pretty abstract register, okay?
But this claim about Dupuy insists that there's a paradigm, there's what is kind of genuinely kind of valuable in Judeo-Christianity is the positive analogy it establishes between divine creativity and human creativity. But in order to do this, he has to claim that everything has a distinct essence. and he reiterates the tale of the golem. He says it's a mistake. What's wrong with Prometheanism is not that it's human beings arrogantly claiming to be able to do what God does
because he says the point about what's good about religion is it teaches you that there's a positive analogy between human creativity and divine creativity. So therefore, human beings might be able to produce life, a golem, a living creature. But in the parable that Dupuis cites, which is...