Crisis and Culture

Abstract

The more science tends to make its own knowledge objective, that is, to formulate objectively valid paradigms and laws, the more the other branches of learning dealing with worldly matters (aesthetics, ethics, jurisprudence, sociology, political science) tend to make theirs subjective. Art has always been a great symbolic communicator of the values and meanings that identify a community. Nowadays the artist is closed inside his own subjective world, an experimentation in forms that do not open to any sort of communication. The very idea of a work of art's universality can now be thought of as having been substituted by the technological globalisation of communication. The crisis in artistic communication has brought about a crisis in dialogue, in language which establishes differences and identities, which is responsible for describing and interpreting, which possesses an ethical character. Through genetic engineering we lose the old distinction between what comes about spontaneously and what is "technically" produced, between what is subjective and what is objective, and thus the traditional "ethics of kind" ceases to exist. While we need to establish a precise boundary that enables us to exploit the curative advantages of genetic engineering in such a way as to avoid trespassing into the field of eugenics, scientifically speaking this appears to be a very difficult thing to do. The notion of art for art's sake, where the artist's subjectivity dominates objective, existing reality, can be found structurally reproduced in the freedom that science invokes for genetic engineering research. Contemporary ethics maintains that what we understand as the doctrine of a morally just life cannot be formulated. In other words, we cannot create binding maxims and use them as a basis to justify the principles of the education and upbringing of an individual or society. The superseding/cancellation of the morally just life as a doctrine accords well, in political terms, with contemporary democracy. And so we have two rules: it's clear that the democratic claim to scientific freedom is in conflict with the respect for the traditional ethics of kind, where human organic nature is recognised as an objective fact and not subject to manipulation. But scientific knowledge is assuming the role of metaphysics by presuming to decree what is morally just or unjust, even though its knowledge is by no means all-encompassing, as in a traditional metaphysical system: it is incomplete, as befits the laws of science. Just as we need to recognise the objectivity of beauty in aesthetics, so in ethics it is necessary to recognise the objectivity of a boundary, one that guarantees the ethics of kind on the basis of man's objective organic/natural reality.