Bioethics as one of the variants of object-oriented anthropology: Between “here” and “it’s about to come”

In connection with the development and ubiquity of digital technologies, numerous developments in the field of biomedical human improvement, the introduction of biotechnologies and informatization, the problem of distinguishing the human from the nonhuman is coming to the fore, the line between them is rapidly thinning. In the light of all technological advances, we are assimilating new terminology imperceptibly, gradually, together with a new style of thinking about a person. One of the directions of such assimilation and shift of emphasis in the understanding of the specifically human is the biotechnological approach to humans. The origins and consequences of the approach are convincingly discussed in works by P.D. Tishchenko, who was the first to notice the tendency of “destruction of the human in a human”, characteristic of this approach. The biotechnological approach can be accepted or rejected, but it will not be possible to ignore it today, since it is not even that a new field of research has appeared along with a new terminology, but that a new existential experience has appeared that requires appropriate reflection. Moreover, in the situation with bioethical problems, we deal not only with new experience in terms of experimental data about a person and not just with terminology, but also with the development of a special type of representation of a person, which is characterized in the presented article as “object-oriented anthropology” (by analogy with Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology). The author of the article identifies two basic concepts for the biotechnological approach to a person that form the understanding of a person in the bioethical paradigm: “here” and “it’s about to come”. Analyzing both the understanding of the concept “here” and the attitude to the body in works by R. Descartes, M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, M. Foucault, M. Merleau-Ponty, as well as modern research in the field of bioethics by B.G. Yudin, O.V. Popova, P.D. Tishchenko, S.Yu. Shevchenko, S.V. Lavrentieva, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that a person as “here” in modern bioethical discourse is completely objectified and is actually inhuman or “Dasein” (using Heidegger’s terminology) way of being, while “it’s about to come” loses its remoteness and gets as close as possible to “here”, thereby supporting the initial understanding of a person as a thing, as an object for manipulation. The danger of any improvement and manipulation of the human in a human, associated with a technological, body-oriented and object-oriented understanding of a person, is that, thanks to the paradigms “here” and “it’s about to come” that merge in the biotechnological approach to a human, with the general tendency of body orientation and inattention to the fact that a person cannot be understood as “cash” equated to a class of objects without losing their own essence, this leads to the inevitable appearance of the topic of “subhuman”, also characteristic of bioethical research. The “person” as “here” or as “it’s about here” becomes a “contractual” person. Thus, in search for the improvement of a human and the expansion of the horizons of human existence, object-oriented anthropology brings a person into the sphere of the inhuman and turns out to be not a way of one’s own rediscovery and affirmation, but another way to abandon oneself and avoid the human in a human. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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