Human Dignity and Bioethics

Modern and American Dignity | 233
ability to transform nature to give to ourselves what nature did not
give us. There is, in fact, no life according to nature that is worthy
of my particular freedom and dignity. From the individual view, the
natural life that the undignified species are stuck with living is nasty,
brutish, and short, not to mention untranscendent or unfree.*
There was an attempt to revive natural theology or “Nature’s
God” in the modern world. But it was disabled from the beginning
by a basic contradiction: the modern view of nature, like the one of
the Greeks and Romans, is of an impersonal principle that governs all
that exists. But that view that we’re completely or eternally governed
by fixed principles of eternal natural necessity really can’t capture the
existence of the free individual—the being who has the right to use
his reason and his will to free himself from his natural limitations.
“Nature’s God” returns us to the ancient thought that the world
is the home of the human mind, and the Americans today who most
firmly believe in such a God might be the physicists who believe
that their minds have cracked the cosmic code. But can the mind
really grasp as a whole a world in which the individual is distinguished
in his self-consciousness and his freedom from everything
else? The physicist may be able to comprehend the mind or the body
of the physicist, but not the whole human person who, among other
things, engages in physical inquiry. That’s one reason why the more
characteristically modern view is that the mind is for transforming
nature to make the individual genuinely at home or secure. Insofar
as Nature’s God is taken seriously, it mostly undermines the individual’s
sense of his irreplaceable and unique dignity. If, as Tom Wolfe
explains, the dignity of the individual (which we can see with our
own eyes) is taken seriously, then we can’t help but conclude that the
integrity of the natural world—or the rule of nature’s God—came to
an end with the mysterious emergence of the free and self-conscious
individual. 5
For the modern individualist, the truth remains that our dignified
pretensions still point in the direction of a personal God, but, for
* The discussion of transcendence here is indebted to Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness
(New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2006). The present essay as
a whole is an Augustinian reflection on manliness or a manly reflection on St. Augustine.
What is it that causes human beings to claim the dignity of irreplaceable
personal significance? Does that claim make any sense beyond human assertion?