Hasan Hanafi
Cairo University, Egypt
  

In spite of the importance of genetic engineering and biochemistry showing the unlimited progress of science, the unlimited power of man and the unlimited hope for a controlled future, philosophers as usual whether foresee the event and become real precursors or warn against its occurrence. They are whether seers or reminders. Therefore, genetic engineering, in spite of its promises may be based on the following pre-suppositions:

1- Life is made of small units, genes, composed and decomposed, in order to create new organs, including plants, animals or human bodies. The gene is the unit of analysis as if the human being himself is not a unit of analysis, which cannot be decomposed to smaller units, cells, genes or atoms. The old atom theory since Democrats is coming back, the reduction of the whole to its small parts, material according to Democrats and Muslim theologians, spiritual according to Leibnitz, energy according to modem physics and genes in modem bio-chemistry. The world is a material world, which can be fabricated, industrialized and managed, not created from nothing. If God is the creator, man is the demiurge, returning back to the primitive concepts of creation. The soul, the realm of freedom and autonomy as a specific creature of human life is obliterated.

2- In spite of this atomic Worldview, and since all genes are alike, in plants, animals or human beings, genetic engineering looses the principal of individualization, that the raison d�etre of every being is its individuality against repetition, conformity and interchangeability. The natural yields to the artificial. Chemistry becomes a magic key to recompose and interact. Life can be understood by quantitative analyses, tables of statistics and diagrams of co-efficiencies. Once the principal of individuality is disregarded, individual responsibility and the law of merit are dissipated. Does the duplicate carrying the same genes assume the same moral responsibility of the original? How far moral behavior can be acquired through genes? Will moral determinism be the natural outcome of genetic engineering?

3- Nature is a continuous process of life. Genes are all over. Bifurcation in the law of development is minimal between the high chimpanzee and the human being. Conformity in nature excludes diversification. Conceiving nature as one block dispels its scale and levels of being. It prevails, continuity on discontinuity, development on emergence, Darwin on Bergson. In coning there is no difference between the original and the duplicate. Who is the individual? The individual is by definition one, a singular one, which does not repeat.

4- Life and death are almost an eternal cycle in plants, animals and humans. There is no eternal life through genetic permanent production. The value of life comes from death. A human being who does not die is a monster as Simone de Beauvoir described in her novel Tous les hommes sont mortels. The end is a natural outcome of the beginning. There is no beginning without end or end without beginning. Such an indefinite linear progress carries its own nihilism. Even modern geometry abandoned the linear concept of space to the curve concept.

5- Genetic engineering does intervene in the normal course of nature by deviating from its natural development, to embetter production, create new forms and overcome death. Nature is subtracted out of its own reason to be subjected to human will. Nature becomes cancerous, since the definition of cancer is the multiplication of cells outside their natural order. Genetic engineering may be one of the manifestations of post-modernity and the rejection of order. The old play with nature under the pretext of man master of nature ended to an environmental disaster, pollution. A similar play with life under the pretext of survival may end to another disaster, the equation between life and death.

6- Genetic engineering, through coning, may cancel the distinction between the self and the other. The duplicate, is he the self or the other? Is he identical or different? Is he similar or dissimilar? The confusion may extend to the self itself going outside proportion. The internal tension disappears in favor of external extension. The same confusion may extend to the other, the original or the duplicate. If the other is the original, the duplicated self and the original other will be unequal in time. In both cases reciprocity of consciousness will be impossible.

7- The medical use of genetic engineering is unquestionable. The use of blood analysis such as DNA in criminology is also undoubted. The multiplication of plants in tissue culture may help in solving the problem of security in nutrition. But, what emergency requires coming in an over populated planet? Why artificial multiplication of human beings in a world threatened by scarcity? Human generation has its natural course since pregnancy and infancy till old age, in a human and social context. Filiality and paternity are two human feelings. Progeneration is a natural outcome of love, the unity between male and female, not a simple biological process of multiplication.

8- Genetic engineering is an expensive process once practiced on human beings. Only the rich can afford it. What about millions and millions who cannot? What is better, to spend millions and millions on genetic-engineering to duplicate future supermen or to help millions of poor people, threatened by hunger, drought, and decease to survive? Genetic engineering may be one of the manifestations of over-developed and affluent societies for more abundance.

9- The whole genetic engineering is haunted by the idea of improving human race. It is tarnished by a high degree of racialism since Plato till modern Nazism. The elite rules. Why not the best? What about if the evils are duplicated and the goods did perish? Hitler can be perpetuated in several Hitlers forever. Minorities already suffer from extermination and physical liquidation. Conceiving life as genes is a leftover of social Darwinism responsible for modem radicalism. Life is the life of pure consciousness, the awareness of being, of moral existence. The code of codes in genetic engineering cannot spare the universal code of ethics.

10- Life is in time and space. It manifests in an environment. It cannot be planted outside its proper setting. No one can live outside his own generation. He will be like the Biblical story of seven sleepers who overslept more than three hundred and nine years. Once awakened, they were unable to survive in another century. Man is made of time. Time is the tissue of human consciousness. Genetic engineering is conceiving the genes outside time, as intemporal entities, while theory of relativity conceived time as the fourth dimension in reality.

These ten philosophical assumptions may warn genetic engineers to be less proud of the progress of science. Progress may include regression. Only a philosopher, with his sense of proportion and moderation, may have a better eye on eternity.