Am I a Man… or a Machine?
Contemporary man boasts of living in a scientific-technological civilization. He is convinced that he has lived in a privileged historical situation that is moving towards the achievement of a happy and conflict-free humanity.
Following this order of ideas, contemporary man visits a doctor’s office with the same attitude with which he takes his car to be repaired or his television to a technician, that is, he treats his own body as a machine. In conclusion, the man of our time is a fanatic about technology.
Indeed, scientific discoveries and technological advances from a little over a century ago until today have been something truly extraordinary. However, it happens that the division of such a broad knowledge does not allow science to have an overall vision, and the worst thing is that philosophy has been pushed aside almost to the point of oblivion. Knowledge is studied only from the point of view of its technical utility, it is studied in fragments, separating it from a total vision of the world and, therefore, it ends up being deprived of its true scientific character.
A similar case happens to the scientist: he lets himself be dragged along by the environment that demands utility, he becomes spiritually impoverished, loses originality and the true desire for the search.
The University can serve as an example. People go to it to seek a degree for the advantages it provides in practical life, science is reduced to a program of obligatory studies that are digested without any critical spirit, the important thing is to pass the curriculum. Who cares about the healthy and stimulating concern of the ancient adventure of knowledge?
Even more disappointing could be to talk about the training of doctors. The teaching of Medicine is something like training in the analysis of machines with signs and symptoms; it is getting used to seeing human pain in public hospitals — eternal puppets of unjust political situations.
To delve into the study of medicine is to become insensitive over the years; universities practice the teaching of medicine in such a boring way that it causes people to run away from the hospitals.
Modern man seems to have diverted his belief in God towards science. He believes that science with its discoveries will give him the key to happiness. Goethe had predicted it with despair: “Humanity will be wiser and more penetrating, but not better, happier or more active. I sense the arrival of a time when God will withdraw his complacency and he will have to destroy everything to renew creation.”
A character from André Malraux seems to echo him: “For you God has been everything. We have had confidence in man. With God dead, man only finds death. And now we look around us terrified without knowing who to entrust our tremendous inheritance to.”
A contemporary scientist, the Englishman Harrison, agrees with the general disillusionment of contemporary man and writes: “Science was considered a wonderful asset that distinguished us from our predecessors… science has disillusioned us with respect to other systems of opinion and belief. Today, science itself is becoming an object of disillusionment.”
The philosophy that is the mother of science has been forgotten and this is why it happens that we are only interested in knowing the physical, chemical, radiological and anatomopathological symptoms of the patient: making the human visible and measurable in order to measure everything, classify everything… like computers and thus dominate everything.
Logically, of man, as Carrel will say later, we only capture what is less human in him. The spirit, the feeling, the living, personal and intimate history are forgotten, pushed aside, because the idea is to act as objective people, to be scientists and not philosophers.
