There is a poem that was written some time ago. In it, some plastics conglomerate fellow was reminiscing in his old age about his high school love. He had fallen in love with a woman some 200 years older than himself. And it was the texture of this old woman's skin in particular that he fell for! How could this be? It was because this particular woman was an alien. The planet she had come from had very highly developed technology for recycling plastics, and it was capable of recreating fantastic skin by reusing plastic bottles, old tires and things like that. She was thus always able to maintain fresh and youthful skin. But as with all love stories, the days of happiness ultimately ended with the two of them having to say goodbye. One day, inevitable circumstances forced her to return to her planet. What became of the man left behind? Among all the memories he had of this woman, it was her tremendously beautiful skin that haunted him the most. After that, he began to study plastics. Just so that he could once again feel, if only just once, the touch of that soft skin created by the magic of recycled plastics! So did he succeed in recreating his beloved's skin? His passion for research, driven by his longing for this lost love, led him to become the greatest expert in plastics, and he ultimately came to have the greatest plastics company, producing plastics of staggering quality, unmatched by any other. But the science of Earth was some 200 years behind the alien science that recycled plastics to produce youthful skin, and he was never again able to feel the touch of her skin. No plastic could reproduce that feeling...

Why did I start with this absurd story? Let's try to avoid thinking about the preposterousness of this attempt to explore the possibilities of blatant melodrama by combining a B-grade sci fi movie with a third-rate love story. Let us talk instead about the truth of the human being, who shrouds any story he tells with some aspect of himself. Part of the fundamental nature of the human is the desire manifested in the man's relentless effort to study plastics in order to bring back the skin of his vanished love--the desire to get back what has been lost. This desire is expressed in a variety of ways. With Marcel Proust, for example, it took the form of efforts to recover "lost time." His efforts to this end were realized through "involuntary reminiscence." But were these efforts at using reminiscence to recover what has been lost not something already carried within the hopes of people in classical civilization? One classical form of such efforts is Plato's "anamnesis." Anamnesis allows us to recover the essence, the "ideal," that has been lost, flowing through the waters of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.

The effort to breathe life back into what can never be recovered, what has disappeared, may reach its apex in efforts to bring dead organisms back to life. In the myths of some peoples, for example, we find attempts to bring back the dead within the shapes of life. A good example of this is Orpheus, who attempts to bring the dead Eurydice back to life by taking her back from the Underworld. None of us are ever able to abandon those precious things taken from us by the play of fortune. The reader may recall the story of Joseph from the Bible. Joseph was despised by his brothers and sold to the Ishmaelites, before ultimately becoming the chief adviser to the Egyptian Pharaoh. The writer Thomas Mann turned this story into his greatest novel, Joseph and His Brothers. What lie do Joseph's brothers tell to their father Jacob after selling Joseph to traders? They say he was killed by a wild animal. Surprisingly enough, according to what Mann writes, the father bereft of his beloved son tries to bring that son back to life! Just like Orpheus: "I must go down to the Underworld where the dead dwell and bring Joseph back somehow, Jacob thought. 'Yes, producing him once again. Is it not possible? Producing him once again. Just the way he was! After I do so, can I not simply bring him here from down below?'" In response to this plan, Jacob's servant Eliezer warns him that nothing can exist twice, and that creation is the domain of God alone. Bringing back to life what has been lost: this is "God's domain."

Humankind is constantly challenging this domain of God's. Is it not also the case with Frankenstein? The dominant theme in this work has to do with taking mankind that has disappeared into the unpleasant hole of death and bringing him back out of that hole. Leaving aside issues of artistic quality, the relatively recent Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The 6th Day also deals with the human desire to breathe life back into what has been lost. This is shown by the companies that appear early on in the film, cloning cells to recreate departed pets.

This desire is also expressed without exception in spiritualism, which seeks to call back the dead. Another work by Mann, The Magic Mountain, is set against the backdrop of a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients. Joachim Ziemssen, once a courageous soldier, dies of the disease at this sanatorium, and the people ultimately use spiritualism to call forth his spirit. A similar example can be seen in a once much-read popular Korean novel. Park Jong-hwa's historical novel Dajeongbulsim (Tender Heart of the Buddha) also features a character striving to call the dead back from the Underworld. This is the Goryeo Dynasty's King Gongmin, who laments the death of Princess Noguk.

Everywhere around us the dead are coming back to life. And this stubborn desire of humans to recover what has vanished or died goes a long way toward explaining what causes the human to suffer. Humans suffer because of extinction. Fated to die, humans are pained by disappearance, and it may be fair in some sense to say that all of their efforts during their lifetime are focused entirely on resolving this pain and achieving immortality.

But what draws our interest is this desire toward immortality, or what in the world the human has to lean on to resolve this pain over mortality. The answer is none other than "science." Science was what was needed to bring Frankenstein's monster back to life. Science was called upon to clone those dead pets. Science was what had to be studied for the man to recover the skin of his lost love. It is through science that we take on the challenges of God's domain.

This is not a setting for rashly broaching ethical issues of science, targeted by questions such as whether it is acceptable for science to take on God's domain. Rather, what draws our interest in the story up to this point, in which the desire for immortality calls for science, is the "source of scientific exploration." When exactly does scientific exploration begin? When do we come to ask questions about the world and the universe? The possibility of posing the question in such a way depends, according to Immanuel Kant, on the "constitution" of human reason. At the beginning of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant puts it like this: "Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer." Why in the world does reason suffer? It does so because of problems that it cannot answer. To put it within the context we examined above, reason is troubled because it does not know how our immortality--what we could also call the "eternal quality" of our spirit--can be attained. To express it somewhat differently, we are frustrated because we do not know how we can "experience" immortality. Yet reason cannot do away with this individual interest in immortality, which belongs to the nature of reason itself.

Could we not call this state "ignorance"? That is, the state in which we cannot know something, but neither can we eradicate our interest in it. It was this ignorance that Socrates always emphasized as the starting point for investigation. One could say it was the very skill that enabled him to harbor doubts and question the world. Gustave Flaubert too was well aware of the benefits. In his novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, which tells the story of passionate intellectual exploration, he writes, "A pitiful faculty then emerges in their minds, that of being able to see stupidity and no longer tolerate it." Because we cannot tolerate our ignorance, we begin to question the world and explore. So is ignorance not the cognitive ability that underlies investigative activity?

Let us try to get a bit closer to the identity of what forms this ignorance of ours. As we saw before, reason cannot have "experiences" corresponding to particular concepts (for example, our own "immortality" or "eternal quality"). Like Jacob, we cannot hold onto our dead son within eternity, nor can we recreate the beautiful skin of our alien love using cutting edge plastics technology. But neither can we ever completely forget these concepts. It is our destiny to always think about them. What is a suitable name for these things that can never be the objects of knowledge (the objects of experience) but that make it so that we must inevitably keep thinking about them? The answer is "ideals." Things emerging from our thoughts, things for which we can never have a corresponding experience, are suited to the word "ideal"--that which remains merely the stuff of thought. And the ideal is an element of our minds that makes us ignorant, in that it does not allow us a sensory experience of it.

If we did not hold these ideals in our minds, it would not occur to humans to harbor doubts about the world or to engage in scientific thinking to resolve those doubts. If we did not have the ideal of eternity, there would be no research into whether we can extend life forever, and if there were no ideal of wholeness, it would not occur to us to attempt to understand the whole universe comprehensively, how it began and how it will meet its end. As this shows, the mind as a "innate ability dealing with ideals" assumes a place at the origin of all scientific investigation.

Here is an interesting problem we could consider here: Is the ideal simply a driving force for scientific exploration, or could the ideal itself be the object of scientific knowledge? Let us pose this question again in a slightly more specific context. Ideals such as eternity and immortality spur our interest in the question of whether humans can have eternal life. In this regard, they occupy the status of driving forces in the life sciences. But is such eternal life really something we can experience? In other words, could we ever secure scientific knowledge about the eternity of life? It would be foolish to attempt in this short space to ascertain whether the ideal occupies the position of driving force in scientific exploration or whether it is possible for it to go a step further and become scientific knowledge in itself. I would simply like to go beyond a perspective like Kant's that abandons from the outset any attempt at securing scientific knowledge on the ideal, and to speak simply about the human destiny carried within the attempts that ceaselessly expand the limits of scientific knowledge.

Since Plato's attempt at "anamnesis" of the ideal, humans have continuously sought to transcend their limitations and attain the ideal. Their intent was not simply to stop at thinking of the ideal but to experience it and actualize it. Like Icarus plummeting from the sky, countless sciences have collapsed, unable to reach their ideals. Can science ever attain the human's "ideal"? Or do attempts to turn the "ideal" into scientific knowledge represent an arrogation on the part of reason, something forever disallowed to humans? We still have no answer for this. Human destiny is to continue testing whether science is exceeding its bounds in chasing after ideals or devoting itself "legally" to the objects of knowledge permitted to it. Could this potentially lead us to a starting realization? That is, the realization that there is no reason we cannot have a true court "within science" to judge whether scientific exploration is exceeding its bounds or traveling in its own suitable orbit, that there is no need for it to necessarily stand upon ethics "outside of science"?