ABSTRACT
Ricoeur (1995) said that to be human means being estranged from oneself. Although destined for fulfillment, all humans are inevitably captive to an “adversary” greater than themselves. He saw that although free and determined, human beings are both responsible and captive. What might be the “adversary” that captivates the human soul? What might be the sources of alienation from self ? Ricoeur located the estranged human being of today in a world that is empty of meaning and hope, in contrast to early humans who held fast to belief through powerful symbolism. I want to suggest that the adversary causing the estrangement can sometimes be relationships between humans and the very technologies they have created for purposes of fulfillment and control. He suggested that through the power of myth, the nature of the human being is elucidated, and contemporary technological humans can recover the sense of the sacred that has been irremediably lost.1 What it means to be human is a matter of constant and evolving social negotiation, as well as a matter of private, personal investigation. The meaning of being human, as a dynamic perception and ongoing search, is determined in part through belief, including the mythical and imaginative elements of it. Ricoeur maintained that wholeness of the soul is achieved through using metaphor as an ally for understanding and articulating faith. He saw the imagination as generating new metaphors for “synthesizing disparate aspects of reality that burst conventional assumptions about the nature of things” (p. 8). In its aim to more deeply understand and control material reality through language, Nanotechnology research has begun to burst conventional assumptions about the nature of things.
