Ethics and science
On the borders of DNA

Can Man Create Himself?
“Why is it that as I speak to you I want to laugh?” No discovery will ever explain this. After the announcement of the first synthetic cell, PIETRO BARCELLONA, a lecturer in Philosophy of Law, tackles the theme of “artificial life.” It is a paradox, because a “string of molecules” cannot ask itself what it wants to know: “The meaning of my life.”

by Paola Bergamini

The news echoed all around the world: The American biologist, Craig Venter had created a bacterium that possesses an artificial genome and can reproduce itself. On May 21st, almost all the newspapers, with more or less emphasis, carried the headlines, “The first artificial cell created,” “Artificial life is nearer,” “It’s artificial life.” Most explicit was the cover of The Economist, depicting a new version of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. But will science ever be able to “decipher” man in his every detail? Or is that “complex of original needs and evidences” that constitutes the essence of man unequivocably and always one step beyond all our discoveries? We spoke with Pietro Barcellona, Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Catania.

Venter’s discovery has aroused a debate about the nature of life.
This is an argument I have been looking at for 20 years. Since the arrival of neurosciences that reconstruct the mental processes that are the basis, for example, of image diagnosis, attempts are being made to explain the working of the human mind in biochemical terms. But I pose this question: can the human being be reduced to a generic “living being”? This is the key for tackling the problem. We can explain 99% of biological functions with neuroscientific knowledge, but we shall never explain why, in this moment, as I am speaking to you, I feel the urge to laugh; or the fact that I think thoughts that I then express. For, as Maria Zambrano says, we are the life that we know, that knows itself and knows that it doesn’t know. This is the peculiarity of human beings. What we have more than mere living beings is that we know both that we are living, and that we do not know all that we are.

Some theologians stressed that, from the theological point of view, one cannot speak here of creation, because creation is something that comes out of nothing.
If we affirm that the beginning of everything was a chance event, then scientifically this answer is irrelevant, but it is not irrelevant if we speak of man as something not reducible to a molecular chain. If he is not, then there is the problem of freedom, of explanations in terms of the good and bad in what happens. Moreover, if the individual chooses, takes up a position, and reflects, then this act transcends the purely morphological side of the combination that determined Venter’s artificial DNA. It is of another order.

So, it’s a problem of consciousness?
I prefer to speak of awareness–even animals possess knowledge in the sense of pure cognition. Being aware is not the knowledge of doing, but asking oneself about the meaning of doing, that is, life that knows itself and poses the problem of the meaning it has. An animal enters into a relationship with the outside world through a system similar to the immune system, that is to say, the deciphering of information. It has no awareness, that is, this strange thing by which, while I am speaking, I ask myself who I am and doubt whether I am what I see. Freud had discovered that not all we do is clear to ourselves, and never will be. Psychoanalysis can be a great ally of non-reductionist thought. Awareness is a questioning partiality. This is why man should have the humility to acknowledge that he does not know everything.

So, there is a threshold of mystery?
No, there is a road that is not a sequence of cause and effect. There is this reality of the psyche that is real. It is not imagination that we have thoughts that are not functional to life, that we have dream activity that is not functional to life. If they put things on this plane, then it’s easy to put them in crisis. Those who think that life is only a molecular sequence, that everything tends solely to survival, and that this survival can be determined by chemical processes, must answer these questions: “Who establishes that this discovery is functional, or that from an evolutionary point of view it would be better not to do it? Who measures its efficiency? But the point is not the discovery. All the discoveries in the world will not tell us what we want to know, someone will have to tell us.

What do you mean?
I want to know what meaning my life has, whether my passage through life where I suffer, love, and enjoy myself has a meaning that transcends me. If all I do is only the fruit of a causal chain, if these are molecular sequences or sequences of the brain or of other kinds, but only biological or biochemical sequences… then, frankly, I no longer have any interest in living. The problem is that if we have curiosity, it’s because we are never completely reduced to the object of research.

This idea of artificial life, of man’s possible omnipotence, has been bandied about a lot.
We live in an era in which, since man is incapable of facing suffering and death, he lives in a hallucination of immortality. Science, like a kind of magic, promises to resolve all the problems tied up with sickness, suffering, and pain. You just have to wait patiently; what is not clear today will be clarified tomorrow.

What about freedom, which you mentioned earlier…
Man’s freedom requires the mystery, it requires indetermination. Freedom is associated with pain, with loss; this is why men are afraid of freedom. It intimidates the one who commands and the one who is commanded. Ours is a world that wants to be commanded; the majority of men are undergoing an assault that produces a herd mentality, where what dominates is the consumerism that controls desire and exhausts everything in the instant.

If man cannot be reduced to his biological elements, then one is forced to think of a divine creation.
All the religions in the history of mankind have thought this. Creation must surely be intentional. As Einstein said, “God does not play dice.” Creation is a power that reveals itself by giving life to something new that, in any case, has been in some way imagined, thought, and wanted. Creation has an explanation in its Creator. It does not arise by chance. A painter, when he has a canvas before him, has in him a world that he wants to bring out. How can you imagine a painting of Van Gogh as pure chance? Creation is an act of love with which the author produces something in which he can mirror himself.

Creation leads us to the reason we came into the world; to the meaning of birth. This was the theme of a conversation between Giovanni Testori and Fr. Luigi Giussani, published some years ago.
An extraordinary book [La maestà della vita, Bur Rizzoli, 1998, Milano], with which I find myself particularly in agreement . In birth, there is all the fragility of that “lump,” as Testori calls it, which, little by little, develops and acquires the physical, fleshly sign of the relationship with the love of his parents, toward a loving father who is the one who truly wanted you to come into the world. We go back to the same point: creation is an intention. It is the intention of giving and of being acknowledged, to have a relationship with something that in a certain sense mirrors you, but is also different. This is the mystery of birth. Sons are sons, but at the same time they are fathers.

Many times in that book, the phrase “beings wanted and loved by God” is repeated.
This is the concept of birth, opposed to that of creation ex nihilo. Birth is “desired creation.” It is what I often repeat in my books: a man becomes mature when he wants a child, which is the meaning of life–but not in procreative terms, in order to perpetuate the species. He wants a child because he wants something that transcends him and at the same time continues him, without repeating him like a clone. Testori struck me when he affirmed that without the idea of birth we crumble into indifference, the fruit of materialistic culture.

Can you explain?
I am a Communist, but I have never been a materialist. We have here a culture that uses, manipulates, abuses, and strangles material because it does not consider it.

One last question, referring back to the first one. It has been said that this discovery, in the end, is one more proof of man’s intelligence…
There is a kind of obsession, that intelligence is what constitutes, in a specific way, the miracle of human life. I believe, instead, that intelligence belongs to the natural world. It is the pure capacity of the organism to calculate what it needs in order to survive. It is a rationality dedicated to life’s devices, whereas what is not dedicated to life’s devices, in the biological-evolutive sense, is love; and you can’t explain anything without love. I refer not only to the love between man and woman, but to the love of a loving father who has made us be born, producing freedom. We are destined and we are free. Love is what distinguishes our being in the world from all the rest. Recently, I wrote that the principle, “Do not do unto others what you would not do to yourself,” is the principle of intelligent utilitarianism. If I don’t have the strength to fight, then I’d better reach a compromise. Instead, “love your neighbor as yourself” is revolutionary. Whoever said this could only be a Son of man who is also Son of God. This is a revolution.