metaphysics of presence

Cloning life is possible. But you cannot clone consciousness.
Cloning humans is inevitable. But you cannot clone "being human."

The ineffable quality of being human is the great inheritance of humanity that each of us carries. It's a vast catalog of significance about self, other, and world. It first courses through our off-on switch board as oughts and naughts: do this, don't do that. Why? Because the authority figure who lended you her breast milk said so. This, like so many beginnings, is a study in contradictions: affection and authority, creation and destruction, sacred symbol and desecrated object. Each of us babes, passing through a tube centimeters away from another, the conveyance for shit, a denatured world.

No greater meaning exists outside of the poetry with which we make sense of our existence. The poetry, itself, is a supernumerary, nonessential to the organism's abject survival on earth. The poetry issues from our voice, which itself must be silenced while the body eats. And to see a body for what it is--to undress that violent sea creature, that writhing tube, which must ingest its world to remain organized amidst a universe of chaos--is to recognize that any activity aside from its survival function is simply fancy for the sake of enrichment. Every thing else is violent appropriation.

But that's what makes us human, angels, beings in transcended time, speaking as if from no where to no place. We, the denatured object before its own regard, weighted by a history that gives meaning its force.

What makes us human cannot be cloned. What makes us human exists in none of our DNA. What makes us human gets stored, over time, in our reflex nets of nervous activity. The gait of the walk, the cadence of the voice: these make us human. They are an achievement of the organism to organize culture into a repertoire of habits and aptitudes. Yet what makes us human is not so much our rote replication of the culture into which we are born. That's the stuff of automatons, which we are for greater and greater parts of our day.

No, what makes us human is the way in which each of us tries to carve an "I" specifically out of those features of our culture which are the least tractable. "Features" is a starving analogy. Features are those indurate structures of human sense making, which marshal the forces of matter, existence, and temporal sequence. Meaning is a moment frozen in time and carried out in the present as a moral about how to act when in the presence of its object.

This body, that terror from the deep, paraded about like a perverse fantasy, a dragon parade float, the body as such. Its is the logic of complex organization, afforded by matter slowly decaying through varying elemental states, each with profiles of interactivity that mark them as different states of existence.

More poetry is all we find. The deeper we go, the more 'fundamental' we get. The more fundamental we get the closer we come to disrobing the very nature of of our inquiry: the organizing principles of our dialectical mentality lie barely concealed behind this tapestry. Science is a wet t-shirt contest for gazing indirectly at first principles while allowing them to remain concealed.

These scientific eyes on their empirical wet t-shirt trek will not find what makes us human. Humanity is in a meaning, which is achieved through time, exists through time, and finds home in no specific place but our own.