Genetics and the Hermeneutics of the Human Condition

What microbiology and ethics brings together have been in a wide range of discourse ethical or moral questions touching our human existence. There is an intensive debate on applications, like gene-therapy, body-enhancement, data-governance, health-governance and reproduction techniques. These consequences have been debated mainly within the perspective of questions about moral or ethical limits concerning human governance about “our” human body or human “nature”, limits of our “human nature” in terms of its identity and the moral obligations related to it, obligations to preserve it. In the course of this debate it has happened an ongoing alteration of concepts, definitions and theories – e.g. of the “gene”, “genome”, “genetic development”, ”genetic heredity", "genetics" and "epi-genetics" etc., with the actual consequence of an open situation, in which it is necessary to discuss this process of discovery anew. There are also new discussions on the way concerning the methodological and linguistic approaches, e.g. the use of metaphors and models for the descriptive and interpretative scientific task. This task may be understood as a hermeneutical task related to “data”, “facts”, “texts” etc. which molecular biology provides. Here we find an area of an interdisciplinary work between molecular biology and “ethics”, philosophical and theological. “Ethics” seen in this perspective has not to deal primarily with moral or ethical “limits”, but following an interdisciplinary approach ethics has to discuss the extension and possibilities of knowledge. Ethical reflection has to ask in any respect what do “we” in molecular biology and ethics understand in relation to what. Understanding is their common task. It is their shared hermeneutical task. So we should define this common task as an essential interdisciplinary approach for a new understanding of the “conditio humana”. The concept of "conditio humana" is open or should be open to a more complex and deeper understanding of what we may identify then as the contour of our human existence as it is viewable and re-constructible on the level of microbiology. The ethical question is also about the "human condition" in its embodiment. This is the common subject of molecular biology and anthropology, theological and philosophical. There are many new experiences of their overlapping insights.