Biogenetics, with its reduction of the human psyche itself to an object of technological manipulation, is effectively a kind of empirical instantiation of what Heidegger perceived as the “danger” inherent to modern technology. Crucial here is the interdependence of the human and nature: by reducing the human to just another natural object whose properties can be manipulated, what we lose is not (only) humanity but nature itself. In this sense, Francis Fukuyama was right: humanity itself relies on some notion of “human nature,” as what we inherited as simply given to us, the impenetrable dimension in/of ourselves into which we are born/thrown. The paradox is, thus, that there are human beings only insofar as there is impenetrable inhuman nature (Heidegger’s “earth”).

¶ 1:29 AM