Kapitel 21: TRUE EMOTION.
Due to biotechnologies, we are able to master and transfer the phenomena
of life itself in a way that we seem to be soon capable of deciding about its quality, length, form
and character. Life as a phenomenon, including human life, is not the most valuable thing
anymore, because it is becoming the subject of almost ordinary manipulation within the visions
of trans-humanists insomuch that our common sense, enhanced by traditional and modern forms
of humanism, loses its capacity to absorb that at all.
Thus the question of the value of human life invokes serious concerns today. Our ability to
manipulate the structure of living material at nano-level does not necessarily show that we are
aware of this value. In fact, the contrary seems to be the case. We are faced with the question
what a living human means to another living human on an everyday basis not just because of
mass communication technologies due to which we recede from other living humans with whom
we sit in the same room (or even share the same bed with), whereas, on the other hand, we get
closer to other living humans on the other side of the world via our "online" connections. The
same question occurs again more radically when we face the news of terrorist attacks. What is the
concept of human life for a terrorist who blows himself up with the primary intention of killing?
What is the concept of human life for a thug who, in cold blood, lets himself be recorded while
cutting the throat of someone else? Or of the person who deliberately planned yesterday and
rashly performed his "race to death" into a crowd today? We can paraphrase Bruno Latour along
with Rosi Braidotti: "we have never been humane" at least not as far as the Western world is
concerned. Humanism in terms of "universal humanness" was once our ideal, but has never been
accomplished; on the contrary, crimes "against humanity" have been committed in the name of it
as well as still are being committed on in the name of explicitely anti-humane doctrines. Human
history so far has been enacted in a way that certain groups of people have lived at the expense of
other groups (and what has mattered from the point of view of an individual has solely been
his/her group membership). There has been no "universally unified humanity" and neither, it
seems, is there any historical path leading to it. The line between the humane and the anti-
humane has never been clear enough, and has become even vaguer in our time, along with other
frontiers. This "posthuman situation" of contemporary humanity poses the question: what have
we made of ourselves and what are we still able to make?
Wöchentlicher Energiestatus
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Rangliste 
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Stein