Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales

ISSN 1012-1587/ ISSNe: 2477-9385

Depósito legal pp. 198402ZU45

Portada: Allí estás!

Artista: Rodrigo Pirela

Medidas: 50 x 30 cm

Técnica: Mixta sobre tela

Año: 2011

Año 38, Regular No.97 (2022): 14-19

ISSN 1012-1587/ISSNe: 2477-9385

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7486057

Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. FEC-LUZ

EDITORIAL

LOOK AT BIOETHICS FROM THE FOUNDATIONS OF

PHILOSOPHY

What the Presocratics have to tell us

Gilbert Hottois, that swordsman of the magic word that

transmutes thought into action, has said with stupefying realism that

"philosophy came late to bioethics". This expression, said in a

decontextualized way, still reflects a world of circumstances that, around

the tasks that philosophy has always had as its north since its Greek

invention, reveals to us that the world of human life is always blurred

by sieves that are incomprehensible from action and reflection. Thus, the

relations between theory and praxis have come under the scrutiny of

philosophical thinking, especially when science was only concerned with

representing reality "as it is". The scientific method promoted the art of

representing reality in such a way that it came to be assimilated to the

"mirror of nature".

The late arrival of Philosophy to this appointment summoned by

the not so new interdiscipline that is Bioethics, means that this world

devised by the Hellenic culture did not imagine the transition from the

representation of the world to its transformation through technoscientific

interventionism. In simple language, it is not the same thing to represent

as to transform the world, a question that has been turning around at

great speed since the middle of the 20th century, especially with the

advances in molecular biology and quantum physics. We have already

commented on this aspect in previous editorials.

In these lines, I want to highlight the problem of temporality in

which philosophy is involved as a reflective task on a core issue of the

present century, populated as we know by technological devices and

creations that are not only the product of the transformation of nature,

but of the dynamics of the transformation of matter that they themselves

are the protagonists.

From this perspective of the late philosophical reflection, we think

contrary to what the Belgian master suggests, but let us be clear that this

opposition is only in one aspect. Although the dazzle caused by the

techno-scientific advances has meant an exponential increase in the

reflections that current philosophy sets itself as a task, it is also true that

we can find some significant elements from this philosophical thinking in

the Hellenic culture; or, better said, in the pre-Socratic culture, with its

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unifying thinking of the Universe, especially if we look at bioethics as an

interdiscipline that assumes its object of study in a different way from the

modernizing project of science.

As we have said on other occasions, bioethics is rooted in its work

from the fields of ethics, politics, law and science and technology, since it

emerges as a bridge "between the sciences and the humanities", as Potter

would say, it precisely spreads a mantle of interdisciplinary reflection on

the human endeavor. From this perspective, Bioethics is not only a

reflection from biomedicine, but also from all those currents of thought

and technology capable of transforming the world of human life,

especially emphasizing its reflections from the "humanities", as the

oncologist expresses it. This is where philosophical reflection enters the

arena, as it is at its foundations.

In accordance with the above, it is a matter of looking at reality

from the transit that goes from the representation and production of the

image of the world, to the reconstruction of a new order of non-existent

things, insofar as they are not the "given" of classical philosophy.

Therefore, it is not that philosophy has arrived late to the task of

reflecting on bioethics; what happens is that the technoscientific action

hid from the philosopher the mountain range that would ensue with the

transformation of matter that technoscience signifies. Philosophy did not

imagine it due to the separation between philosophy and science since

modernity, a unity that was present in the pre-Socratic philosophers.

Earlier we had also given some criteria regarding the contributions of

Heraclitus' philosophy to science, especially to the current social sciences.

The ideas of change and movement are keys to understand not only these

reflective aspects of science, but also of the reality they deal with.

The core issue in relation to this argument is that, reality being

one and multiple in Heraclitus' conception, this reality is now visualized

to the point that his understanding of the whole is just that: to

understand that the universe is one and multiple. And when this thinker,

together with Anaxagoras, Anaximenes and Anaximander, reveal to us

the unity of the Universe, his cosmology embraces from this techno-

scientific diachronic look to all that is. These are the lessons we are

receiving from classical philosophy to understand the ontological and

practical issues of the current techno-scientific endeavor. That is to say,

that the reflection on life and human "circumstances" that bioethics deals

with, reflecting from the theoretical and practical disciplines, is already a

subject of philosophy. In this sense, we think that the aforementioned

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Belgian Master could have revised his statement about the timelessness

of philosophy in the context of bioethics, although he may have said it in

a direct and operative sense; but it has always been so: "Minerva's owl

takes flight when the day has been lived".

Hegel's metaphor logically refers to philosophical thought; the owl

of Minerva, represented by philosophy, sinks its foundations on what has

happened: philosophical thought "operates" on lived life. And this is

what we think of when we say that bioethics is a reflection on the current

world of technoscience, which is the world of science elevated to the

power of its own transformation of the natural and human world (that is,

under the relationship of matter and spirit; of soul and body). The

philosophy that is assumed as a reflection on bioethics, in the sense of

Hottois, refers to the fact that the transformation of the world through

technique does not seem to have interested the philosopher. And this is

precisely a core issue. Technoscience, understood as the techné of these

times, did not have much place in philosophical thought, according to

this line of thought of the Belgian philosopher.

However, in accordance with the Heraclitean postulates, we see

that, from this perspective, philosophy has had much to express

regarding the transformation of the world, only that the philosophies that

have become followers of the current adverse to movement and change,

that is, of that which states that the world does not change, as expressed

by Parmenides, took sides, imposing a deterministic conception of reality,

with its positivist method: "That which is, is; that which is not, is not and

will not be". Everything that exists is already given. Hence, from this

conception there is no room for the current transformations of natural

and human matter, as occurs from biogenetics (this disrupts the

foundations even of the human soul, as the Mexican philosopher Juliana

Gonzalez Valenzuela puts it).

Therefore, the discussion through the Presocratics comes to

enrich the philosophical task of bioethics, since the conception and image

of the ancient world, now comes to coincide with the image and

conception of the world brought to us by technoscience, and,

consequently, as a task of Bioethics. Regarding the latter, it is worth

mentioning the work that philosophy has been doing as a task about

the transformation of the world in which the current technique

consists. However, it is good to note that none of the classical and

modern philosophers referred to bioethics as such discipline, but to the

consequences that the world of technology brings to human evolution.

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The cases cited by Paulina Rivero Weber (2021) of Nietzsche and

Heidegger are eloquent; both philosophers articulated their perspectives

of technical reason as a fundamental element to understand the process of

transformation; the former referring to instrumental rationalism, and the

latter, referring to the humanism of being. In the face of both positions,

we must also point out Ortega's reference, with his famous Meditation on

Don Quixote in which he wielded his also famous definition of "man" and

his "circumstances".

The other reference that I want to highlight in these lines, are the

approaches about the philosophical work around bioethics that the

aforementioned Master Juliana González Valenzuela teaches us. In a very

special way, she presents a retrospective about the intervention of

philosophy in the world of transformations, starting from the

conceptions of the Presocratic Philosophers. Let us highlight just one of

the multiple details that the aforementioned philosopher reflects on this

enigmatic world of antiquity, a sphere from which we must always think

philosophy: let us remember the special look that Heidegger makes when

unraveling the "forgotten question", that is, "the question of being"; a

question that is precisely what we are dealing with today from this critical

idea of the transformed reality that technoscience presents us with.

This idea that we want to highlight is the question about the

genomic revolution, since it is setting the guidelines of a new

transformed Universe; a world of life in which the relationships between

matter and form that make being are no longer seen in the same way: the

genomic question is permeating the interstices of reality in the infinite

world of DNA and the double helix that represents it. The capacity to

transform life through the recombinant technique of the genome leads us

to understand that the unity represented by the gene not only becomes

plurality by reproducing itself through the reduplication and binary

combination of the code that is embedded in its "program", but that this

process, which is natural in Nature, introduces elements of

transformation by means of that technique of intervention of the

genome (the recombinant technique).

This revelation of molecular biology, says González Valenzuela

(2017), shows us that DNA, in addition to the possibilities of

transforming itself by means of human intervention, has existed

throughout the eternity of life. Every living being possesses it, so that this

is the unity of which Heraclitus and the other Milesian thinkers speak to

us. This is a long- standing vision of the relationship between life and

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nature, which Bioethics deals with, but it was not until the middle of the

twentieth century that we were able to put it into scientific evidence. The

whole that is the genome is also the unity from which it proceeds.

Everything is one, and everything moves; the movement of the genome,

translated into natural combination but also into genetic engineering, is

precisely the intervening factor that the Greeks of the time could not see.

But they did imagine the relationship between ontos and ethos: between

being and good custom; scientific Modernity, by separating itself from

this premise, determined a course in the history of science that declares

nature as an object of intervention based on the power generated by

scientific action.

The that stands out from all this, is that the current state of the

art of biotechnology, not only invites us, but forces us to take that

attitude of the Presocratics: "astonishment" and "wonder". And this is

precisely because the matter of which all living beings are made, favors

the generation of the vital energy that is the soul; that is why it is found in

the foundations of all this scaffolding of the relationship between reality

and action; between ontology and ethics, what we have already expressed:

that biogenetics and technosciences, by generating new forms of matter,

even living matter, generates a new sense of the relationship with that

energy called soul, which Aristotle also three-dimensioned (vegetative,

animal and rational); the relationship between being and ought to be is

deeply reflected.

In this way, it can be seen that the relationships fostered by

ancient philosophical thought have already brought us the original

reflections necessary to understand the role of bioethics in the face of

techno-scientific development. There are new paths to follow from this

line of thought, but what is not new is precisely the idea that bioethics

has always been present in philosophical thought. The owl of Minerva,

before taking flight at the end of the day, had to nest in order to

reproduce its next generation. Only, unlike other birds, it hatches its

offspring in broad daylight, as does the techno-science of these

technically challenging times; however, at night, it flies at the level of the

stars.

Dr. José Vicente Villalobos Antúnez/Editor-in-Chief

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REFRENCIAS

GONZÁLEZ VALENZUELA, Juliana (2017). Bíos. El cuerpo del

alma y el alma del cuerpo. Editorial Fondo de Cultura

Económica, México.

HOTTOIS, Gilbert (2001). ¿Qué es la bioética? Universidad El

Bosque, Colombia.

RIVERO WEBER, Paulina (2020). Introducción a la bioética.

Editorial Fondo de Cultura Económica, México.

UNIVERSIDAD

DEL ZULIA

Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales

Año 38, N° 97 (2022)

Esta revista fue editada en formato digital por el personal de la Oficina de

Publicaciones Científicas de la Facultad Experimental de Ciencias, Universidad del

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