The German Genius

post–World War II example of the German philosophical genius, recent developments in the world of biotechnology suggest that Heidegger, duplicitous, self-serving, and unapologetic as he was for his Nazi involvement, may have had a point all along: he perceptively anticipated the threat that technology would ultimately pose and, moreover, he did so in the very language that we now need to contemplate if we are to consider seriously where we are headed.
    In his book Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur ( The Future of Human Nature ; 2003), Habermas reflects on and himself anticipates the new forms of “damaged life” (Adorno’s phrase) that we may be about to inflict on ourselves. He notes that recent developments in biotechnology allow, or will very soon allow, prenatal genetic intervention, giving parents the choice to select not only for characteristics they don’t want their children to have (major handicaps, “negative eugenics”) but also for characteristics (eye color, hair color, sex, higher intelligence, musical ability) that they do want their children to have—“positive eugenics.” Habermas cautions us that here a line may be being crossed, a Rubicon he calls it, with profound implications for our understanding of freedom, and that it requires a philosophical resolution, not a technical-scientific-psychiatric one. 52
    In the future, children of one generation will be given characteristics by another generation (their parents’) that are irrevocable. What, he asks, will this do to an individual’s understanding of him- or herself, his or her sense of—as Heidegger put it— being ? For Habermas, this new technology blurs the line between the “grown” and the “made,” between chance and choice, all of which are essential ingredients in who were are, who we feel ourselves to be. For Habermas, if these processes are allowed to continue, future generations risk becoming things rather than beings. Any new generation will, to an extent, have been selected by its parents’ generation and will, to that degree, be less free. As he puts it, again using Heideggerian language, the ethics of “successfully being oneself” will have been compromised. The inviolability of the person, “which is imperative on moral grounds and subject to legal guarantees,” for him is something we can never “dispose over.”
    For Habermas, not only does this pose a threat to our essential “sense of being,” it poses a threat to our capacity to see ourselves as equally free and autonomous as the next individual, to the idea of “anthropological universality,” that man is everywhere the same. 53 For Habermas the evolution of the species is a matter for nature; to intervene in this process at the very least marks a new epoch in the history of mankind and perhaps something much worse. 54 Evolution, he insists, should not be a matter of “bricolage,” however well-intentioned parents may be.
    His worry is that such intervention amounts to nothing less than a third “decentration” of our worldview, after Copernicus and Darwin, so that a person’s sense of “I” and his or her understanding of “we” would be changed irrevocably, with incalculable consequences for our shared moral life. 55 People, he warns, may feel that they are no longer “ends in themselves,” no longer irreplaceable, no longer so completely at home in their bodies, no longer have the same relationship to such emotions as shame or pride, not weighing human life in the same fashion, no longer having equal respect for each other. Most fundamentally, Habermas worries that for genetically preprogrammed people the initial conditions of identity-formation will have been altered and the “subjective qualification essential for assuming the status of a full member of a moral community” will be affected beyond recall. 56 “The technicisation of ‘inner nature’ constitutes something like a transgression of natural boundaries.” 57
    Habermas does wonder whether he is being oversensitive here. To an extent, genetic intervention already exists, in China, where the one-childper-family policy has resulted in a heavy preponderance of male children and entire villages where there are no partners for young men. This has produced social problems but, so far as we know, no clinical-psychiatric epidemics. But Habermas feels this is a special, atypical case, where the whole individual has been chosen, so there is no specific intervention regarding