“Listening” to Nature: The Significance of Leon Kass for Catholic Moral Theology
In the event of a power failure in the twentieth century it is, for many, as if time comes to a halt and one is stripped naked stripped, that is, of all the modem accoutrements that have become as much a part of one's life as one's own clothing and reduced to "primitive" some would 'say unbearable conditions. And yet a power failure is also an opportunity to face one's own humanity in quiet and darkness. One of my favorite activities during a power failure is thinking about people like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, and other great thinkers whose living conditions were much like those during our modem power failures and yet whose accomplishments in such conditions surpass those of most of us even with our heat, electricity, and running water. Human beings are remarkably adjustable. Over the past three hundred years we have adapted to modem science and technology so amenably and have become so easygoing about it that we find it difficult to imagine how anyone could have lived without it. At the same time, however, we also tend to be generally unconscious of the impact of modem science and technology on the very meaning of living humanly. This is particularly the case in the field of medicine and health care. We tend to forget, for example, that the first accurate knowledge of human anatomy came only in the sixteenth century, that the discovery of the circulation of the blood emerged in the seventeenth century, the anatomical concept of disease in the eighteenth century, and anesthesia in the nineteenth century. It boggles the mind to consider the fact that for the overwhelmingly greater portion of history the human race did without what we regard as the elementary fixtures of medicine and health care. l Yet all of this pales into insignificance in the light of developments in the twentieth century; for there have been more developments in medicine and