Human Nature and Modernist Ethics

I argue that the modernist synthesis of the higher self and dehumanized art prepares the way for the Age of Biotech. The high modernists went "out of nature" to recreate man and morality. The critical heirs of modernism, including postmodernists, inherit this ambitious effort — the modernist moral project. The roads of modernism run from the City of Art in Yeats's Byzantium poems, through the dehumanized aesthetic of Woolf and others, to the postmodernist deconstruction of character, as well as to the democratic vistas of John Dewey and Freeman Dyson.