Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science by Dorion Sagan Read Free Book Online Page A

Danville, Kentucky, in the context of a discussion of life’s extent in the context of, among other things, abortion, many in the class raised their hands when asked if they believed microorganisms were not alive. For a sperm and an egg cell, fertilized or not, do not look that different from many microbes. Do they have feelings? Is the male masturbator guilty of wanton destruction of human life? The vegetarian (and Adolf Hitler was one) may think eating meat is murder, but thinks nothing of flying to an environmental conference, thereby adding to global warming that may trigger a wholesale climate collapse. Still others would argue that wiping humankind off the face of the Earth in the long run may be just what the biosphere needs to keep going.
    Somewhere Jacques Derrida writes that all of his work amounts to nothing but graffiti on the base of the monument that is the work of the rabbinical religious thinker Emmanuel Levinas. A friend of Maurice Blanchot and who at first admired Martin Heidegger, Levinas last century recognized that there is no possibility for a prescriptive ethics, a Mosaic tablet of writs set in stone that will guide us as to conduct, what is right to do, as we make our way through the ethical darkness. We need instead a descriptive ethics; we must engage with the other as other, falling without parachute through an abyss without bottom. The pointing finger has three fingers pointing back at the accuser. We have moral dyslexia. Who can guide us? For Levinas, it may be God, or what is left of him after Friedrich Nietzsche. We must be there with the face of the other, accountable, responsible to it. I read large sections of Levinas’s
Totality and Infinity,
and I thought this idea of grounding ethics in the face, before the face of the other, was a fascinating idea. I was in a rush to apply, to appropriate it. I did so, naively no doubt, 1 to the face of Earth so that we might have ethical accountability toward the planet, our mother, the biogeochemical matrix from which the flesh of our body comes but also the environment we co-opt and infect in our nonstop proliferation. There is a cool painting that shows a lunar-landed astronaut, the blue Earth reflecting off his visor, obscuring and replacing his face. The Levinasian ethics of the face also seemed to touch on the lack of accountability in technowarfare, dropping bombs on those we don’t see, death at a distance. Recently, however, I learned (during a lecture by Cary Wolfe, the editor of the University of Minnesota Press’s Posthumanities series) that Levinas didn’t even consider animals to have a face. That was strange. Animals don’t have a face? Dogs have no faces? What kind of a face is this? And I’m no Bible scholar, but I can’t help think what I’ve heard—that, although God never shows his face in the Bible, there is a key passage in which he flashes his backside.
    IF NATURE IS AMORAL and religion offers us no reliable moral code, where do we go for our ethics? In reaching for an affirmative biopolitics, I want to talk about the productivity of the agon and make a few probably unpopular comments about what we call war and the general climate from which it comes. I believe we are in a dysfunctional relationship with Big Brother, and it is nonconsensual. But I don’t agree that the strife that prevents an affirmative biopolitics can be laid simply at the foot of mononaturalism, as Bruno Latour argues, or that its roots are simply human. 2
    On the other hand, I think that facing the deep roots of what emerges as violence in the human realm can help us understand if not address it, and that this has a Spinozistic–Madame Curie virtue beyond activism. Curie said that nothing in life is to be feared, only understood; Spinoza argued that, with free will an illusion, true freedom lies on the way of knowledge.
    It is true that contingent human history shapes what we take to be universal scientific knowledge, but this contingent human