Helping One’s ‘Self’: The Great Controversy of Cutlery
10th December 2024
few decades ago, and still kicking about in more American right-wing circles, the discussion of ‘bioethics’ took on national proportions. George W. Bush himself initiated a President’s Council of Bioethics, stacked with then-rockstar intellectuals such as Michael Sandel, Francis Fukuyama, and Leon Kass. The general message was, predictably, “No!”—with more or less embarrassed Biblical footnotes. ‘Transhumanism,’ one of the concerns of these bioethicists, is probably less a concept than a rhetorical device or the name for a vague cultural atmosphere, much like ‘globalism.’ The recent TERF wars have sparked renewed interest in the body and its malleability. J.K. Rowling is certainly an able rhetorician, and Mary Harrington has written what is almost a natural theology of the anatomy, even seeking to recast the post-war consensus on the pill.
There is likely little more exciting to 20th and 21st century political theorists than words like ‘embodied,’ ‘subjectivity,’ or ‘intersubjectivity.’ One really must control oneself. And it is certainly dramatic to write about transhumanism or cyborgs in Blade Runner-sounding jeremiads. What I want to present in the following is not more conceptual weed-killing. Rather, I want to suggest, in very undramatic terms, why technology—in the much more limited, much more Greek sense of craftsmanship—might be not only harmless, and be not merely useful, but be a help to being ourselves.