bring about a transformation of civilization. Okay, so this is, Prometheanism is being espoused by the right. The advocates of this kind of transformation are advocates of neoliberal capitalism. And the claim that neoliberal capitalism is simply the victor in the narrative about the possibilities of human history. So why does it have this transformation? Why does NBIC technology have this transformational, this radical transformational capacity? Because it renders possible the technological re-engineering of human nature. This is the claim made by its advocates. So in this paper, Dupuis lays out a very interesting kind of,
a sophisticated philosophical critique of the fallacies and confusion that he takes to underwrite this kind of Prometheanism, this technological Prometheanism. And for Dupuis, the utilitarian prejudices of contemporary bioethical discourse are what prevent it from grasping the properly ontological dimension of the problem of the uses and misuses of NBIC. In other words, He claims that there's a quote from Dupuy. He claims that the advocates of NBIC and of human enhancement
systematically conflates ontological indetermination as epistemic uncertainty. They convert what is in fact an ontological problem, a problem about the structure of reality, into an epistemic problem, a problem about our knowledge. And Dupuy writes, It sometimes happens that human creative activity and the conquest of knowledge prove to be a double-edged sword, putting in danger the very pursuit of the processes to which it is nonetheless indispensable. In short, it is not that we do not know whether the use of such a sword is a good or a bad thing.
It is that it is good and bad at once. Now, the key influence... So, in other words, what does he mean by this? This account of ontological indeterminacy is tied to an account of the nature of human existence, which characterizes it in terms of transcendence. And this characterization of human existence and what distinguishes humans from other beings, other types of entities, is principally associated with the work of Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. And in fact, this is the root of Dupuis' philosophical inspiration.
So, what is it that at the root of this, this conflation between an epistemic and an ontological register is based on confusing the human condition with human nature. In other words, claims about the radical malleability of human nature or the fact that the partisans of human enhancement refuse any theological delimitation of what is proper and improper for human beings to become is tied to this distinction between nature and condition and essence.
The human condition and human nature. And here Dupree writes Hannah Arendt in her book, the book that was translated into English in 1958, I think, called The Human Condition. And Arendt writes, In addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own self-made conditions, which, their human origins and their variability notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things. so it follows then for Dupuis who's you know a disciple of Arendt in this debate that the human condition is an inextricable mixture of things given and things made you know in other words of
what human beings generate and produce through their own resources and constraints which are simply which they find, the way, constraints which transcend their own practical and cognitive abilities. This means that man to a great extent can shape that which shapes him, condition that which conditions him, while still respecting the fragile equilibrium between the given and the made. So in other words, this hostility, the roots, you know, I think what is fundamental to this philosophical critique of Prometheanism is the claim that there is an equilibrium between what is given and what is made. This fragile equilibrium between what human beings can imminently generate
and produce through their own resources and what simply transcends their own those resources. what is made. Made by God in pre-modern times or made by nature after the Enlightenment. So here again, there's a crucial citation from Arendt again, which is illuminating here. And Arendt writes, the problem of human nature, which is the Augustinian question mihi factus sum, a question I have become for myself, seems unanswerable in both its individual psychological sense and its general philosophical sense.
It is highly unlikely that we who can know, determine, and define the natural essences of all things surrounding us, things which we are not, should ever be able to do the same for ourselves. This would be like jumping over our own shadows. Moreover, nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things. In other words, if we have a nature or essence, then surely only a God could know and define it. Now, this is referenced now here. What Arendt is doing, I'd like to suggest, is she's simply, you know, recapitulating Heidegger's ontological
radicalization of Kant's claim about the intrinsic finitude of human cognition. Okay, Kant says the human mind is not simply, is not like God's mind. We are prevented in principle, we're precluded in principle from being able to know the world as in the same way in which God, who created the world, knows the world. Because we do not have the faculty of intellectual intuition. God knows everything absolutely because his thoughts about a thing creates that thing. He has a generative or productive intelligence. So God's knowledge of the world is absolute
and incorrigible. For Kant, because we lack this faculty of intellectual intuition, because our access to reality is mediated by our sensory capacities, we can only represent objects, we can only represent things insofar, according to the forms of space and time, and using these basic concepts and categories of the understanding, the human understanding. What transcends human cognition for Kant is simply the created nature of things.
The nature of things insofar as they would be understood by their creator, their divine creator, who can grasp everything in its infinite complexity. Our minds are finite, so we have a finite access to the world, and we can only represent things partially, incompletely. Now, what Heidegger does is that he takes this for Heidegger. Heidegger gives a remarkable account in which it's the fact that human beings have transcend themselves, transcend any objective determination that can be given of their
character or essence that explains the fact of finitude. In other words, Heidegger ontologizes finitude. He makes finitude and the finitude of human existence into an ontological datum as opposed to an epistemic condition. So the difference between, so Heidegger also says we can't know things in their infinite and eternal essence as they were created by God, but human beings have this remarkable capacity in that human beings are the locus or the sites of a new kind of transcendence. Human beings can't be turned into objects
because every process of objectification depends upon the human existence, upon the ways in which we are ecstatically open to the world. And for Heidegger, this involves a kind of an analysis of existential time. Now, the basic idea, again, what I want to say is that what Arendt says about the distinction between human nature and human essence is simply what Heidegger says. Human beings don't have an essence precisely because they transcend every objective determination that can be given. Human beings exist, but in existing they transcend every determinate objectification.
This is why human existence cannot be an object of scientific study for Heidegger. There's a straightforward kind of, you know, ontological argument against this. So it follows then, if one accepts this ontological radicalization of epistemic finitude, that every positive characterization of human nature, whether it's psychological, historical, anthropological, or sociological, is ultimately determined by unavowed metaphysical, and for Heidegger this means theological prejudices. So in other words, it's very easy for Heideggerians to examine biology, psychology, sociology, and cognitive science and to expose their latent metaphysical prejudices. In other words, the metaphysical
presuppositions which determine their basic concepts which they are themselves incapable of articulating. So then it follows then that Heidegger, the interesting move here is that philosophers who attributed an essential plasticity to human beings, philosophers who claim that human beings can radically re-engineer themselves, like Marx, like the young Marx, or even Sartre in a sense when he espouses his existential humanism, are actually metaphysicians. Okay? So, Marx's claim that
man is a species being, this is a quote from Marx's economic and philosophical manuscripts, man is a species being and free conscious activity constitutes the species character of man, end quote. So, for a Heideggerian, for the Heideggerian that Dupuis is, this Marxian account of, this Marxian claim about the essential plasticity of human species being is itself a reification of human transcendence. It reifies transcendence as production, okay? The claim that man is an agent, is a maker, a producer of things is a metaphysical reification. of human existence, according to Heidegger.
Similarly, Sartre claimed that man, quote, that man is nothing but what he makes of himself, reifies transcendence in terms of the annihilating power of self-consciousness, or what Sartre called the for itself. And Heideggerians have made careers out of denouncing these spurious metaphysical reifications of what is in Heidegger characterized as an unobjectifiable transcendence, the transcendence of Dasein, which, as some commentators have pointed out, has weird, itself is laded with latent theological residues. You know, the way in which theologians talked about God, Heidegger talks about Dasein often as being an absolute.