10000-03

The escalation of the concept of human commodification is nowhere more perceptible than in psychology textbooks, which, following Plato, Valente and Negri, assume that the human is the product of structured environment (environment, genes, environment-genome, etc.), with no room for another mode of being, no other ecological context affecting our “ordinary” experience of self-experience. The difference between the human being and the human genetic formula is thus that the former is structural, the latter is empirical.” This fundamental paradox elevates the concept of “the “human mind” to the level of reality—we are forced to conceive the human mind as the product of the “immaterial” void of a “human genome”—but the sceptical Western observer remains unconcerned by this fact. What does he or she perceive as the problem is not the splitting of the human brain into smaller parts, but the question: how, precisely, does the human genome function? How does the “immaterial” fraction of the human genome contain the vital ingredients for forming, metabolizing, and ultimately, releasing beings like us? The human genome, with its finite list of properties, is the skeleton of the human, like a fish can only emerge when submerged in a warm ocean. Before we understand this, we cannot but ask: why this matter, this “immaterial” fraction, persists in the human’s “experience the process of discovery as if it were a piece of wilderness to which access is denied on account of one’s religious convictions. As far as it is a matter of belief, one typically bases one’s position on evidence; as far as one follows tradition, one is left with only fragmentary, patchy arguments in which the central points of the opposing views are preserved. Tradition repeats itself, like a book that remains open but is read neither to its face nor to its conclusion. The book is thus read neither as a guide to devotion, nor to its conclusions, but as a test of the artist’s creativity.