Forschungsprojekt

A Brief History of Anthropocentrism

Are we the measure and center of all things? Should our interests receive moral attention above any other entity? Such questions have received different answers throughout history. In Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men (1755), Jean Jacques Rousseau wondered why only humans were capable of becoming imbeciles. He answered that while animals choose or reject by instinct, humans do so by an act of free will. While animals cannot deviate from the rules prescribed for them, humans deviate from the rules because of their freedom, often to their detriment. Beyond Rousseau´s criticism of the idea of progress, and recent research that questions this supposed fundamental difference between humans and non-human animals, the crucial point is that the capacity for perfectibility allows us to transcend the natural evolution of the species. Human beings have achieved such a detailed understanding of the functioning of the human machine that, for better or worse, it forces us to rethink what it means to be human in the third millennium. I am particularly interested in the idea of indeterminacy and perfectibility. But if we accept indeterminacy and perfectibility, even if restricted by our biological conditions, we enter a realm of conflict, problems, and uncertainty. I will focus my research at the Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies on the last century and a half of representations of the human. Of particular interest is the techno-scientific approach that advocates extending longevity, combined with the quest for immortality, a topic that raises a series of bioethical concerns due to its eugenic undertones, the modification of the human genome, and the creation of new genes unknown in nature. Death comes to be understood as a technical problem to be solved by our ingenuity, not as a basic and inevitable condition of our biology.

Guillermo Giucci