On Limits

There is little doubt that if technoscientific developments were rapidly to transform long-customary limits that have defined human capacities, life-span, scarcity as a material hurdle to good will and so on, and all within the lifetimes of many millions of people now living, this might seem for those of us caught up in the transformation as a kind of bacchanal, a throwing off of human boundedness altogether.

It seems to me, however, on deeper reflection, that this impression would be terribly mistaken. I have to say I think it would be wrongheaded (if understandable) to confuse -- as some technophiliacs seem to want to do -- such a sudden arrival of unprecedented longevity and unprecedented material abundance, say, with an overcoming of human finitude as such (not that I expect these accomplishments to occur as soon as some of my optimistic friends seem to do). Needless to say, the bioconservative line that we must all of us accommodate the particular limits that they have parochially settled on for themselves (and usually to their comparative advantage) as the limits that define human "dignity" in some more absolute sense is even more foolish.

Actually, both attitudes involve a comparable misconstrual of finitude. Both mistakenly identify the given, and in fact contingent, limits that characterize the human condition in our own moment and on our own patch of ground with finitude as such.

And so, some foolish technophiliacs will sometimes imagine that overcoming these limits is to transcend all limits as such. Meanwhile, no less foolish technophobes will insist on the inevitability and necessity of just these limits, all in the name of an abjuration of the false and absurdly hubristic assumption of the arrival of an omnipredicated (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent) humanity.

It seems important to me to note that both of these attitudes will likely conduce to a certain conservatism in application: The technophobic attitude most obviously so, inasmuch as it defends a given order it mistakes as the "natural" order, but the technophiliac one, too, to the extent that the refrain "there are no limits!" or "there must be no limits!" translates so often, on the ground, to the smug assurance of the privileged that "there will always be poor slobs around to clean up my messes for me!"

So long as human beings are shaped by the accidents of their histories, so long as we must reconcile the contending aspirations of peers with whom we share a world, so long as we confront mysteries that frustrate our ends and unsettle our convictions, so long as we are incarnated materially (as even information always is), so long as we can be mistaken and so must be forgiven... then we are finite beings, not angelic ones, no matter how ingenious and powerful we may become.

As always, for the likes of us, what is wanted is to solve shared problems, to satisfy harmless ends, and to keep the space of freedom open for good.

Overcoming the contingent limits and problems that bedevil our own generation constitutes the struggle that will define our generation. Overcoming all limits, on the other hand, is a literally unintelligible proposition, a facile fantasy. It amounts to something like an itch after the denial of friction, rivalry, interdependence, plurality, determinateness, history, uncertainty, vulnerability, embodiment. It is a denial of life lived, and intriguingly often it is a denial of life clothed in the guise of a denial of death as intoned by the faithful.