Human Freedom and the Technic of Nature: Culture and Organic Life in Kant's Third Critique

Abstract

In recent years, the impact of exponential technological innovation and globalization on all spheres of human life has led to the urgent questioning of the limits of the human and even to predictions about its imminent demise within the horizon of virtual reality and cyborg worlds where the boundaries of human bodies themselves seem to dissolve as they undergo limitless prosthetic extension. But the question of the end of man, or the posthuman, is not a new one. It is a grand old anthropologistic theme. As Jacques Derrida pointed out in 1968 (with special reference to Foucault’s prediction of the disappearance of man at the conclusion of The Order of Things), the end of man in the sense of the exceeding of the limits of the anthropos always involves a transcendence of human finitude that points toward a higher end in the sense of an infinite telos.