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| ISBN-13: | 9780804772082 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/08/2010 |
| Pages: | 151 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.70(d) |
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On Ceasing to Be Human
By Gerald L. Bruns
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7209-9
Chapter One
Otherwise Than Human (TOWARDS OVEREIGNTY)
"Man Is a History and Has No Other Nature"
In our present intellectual climate (and indeed for a long time now) it appears that what we call being human, human subjectivity, my relation to myself (and to others), being me (or not)-these things, whatever they are, are without substance within most of our perspectives, whether conceptual or empirical, meaning that for philosophical and scientific research the concept of the human is either empty, or should be made so. The human has become a mythological or poetic concept, like Heidegger's "gods and mortals," easily replaceable by more up-to-date fictions ("We are all cyborgs now," says Donna Haraway: anthropology gives way to anthropotechnology). The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard puts it neatly when he says that in our time the task of reason is "to make philosophy inhuman," as if this were to be a kind of second-order secularization. In the introduction to a collection of his essays entitled The Inhuman, Lyotard frames two questions: "What if human beings, in humanism's sense, were in the process of becoming inhuman? And what if what is 'proper' to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?"
What could these questions mean? Possibly no more than what social constructionists mean when they cite Michel Foucault's famous line-"Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end." Or perhaps they mean whatever eliminative materialists mean when they say that the concepts of folk psychology-consciousness, desire, feeling, self, and so on-are scientifically useless and should be got rid of. The philosopher Cora Diamond says-and thinks of herself as alone in contesting the idea-that in our philosophical culture the human is at most a biological concept, or alternatively is no more than an information-processing device, that is, one kind of intentional system among many others; the category of the human as such is no longer of any philosophical or moral interest. Rather like madness (in its old, pre-clinical sense). But possibly the "end of man" is only what philosophers have always meant by their arguments or intimations that doing philosophy, being philosophical, is incompatible with being (merely) human. In Western culture the human is a border of self-transcendence but otherwise nothing in itself. "Can a human being be free of human nature?" asks Stanley Cavell. Perhaps only by becoming a monster, where the most monstrous thing is a being that looks human but turns out not to be. As Daniel Dennett says, for all you know "some of your best friends may be zombies."
Of course, Cavell must be thinking of someone like Socrates, barefoot in the snow, standing for hours in meditation without the slightest bother, drinking the night through without getting drunk, spending the night in bed with the most beautiful man in Athens without getting an erection. In Plato's Phaedo philosophy as ascesis is explicitly a disciplined emancipation from human finitude, a kind of virtual death. Modern analytic philosophy, with its logical obsessions, its desire that things should match their concepts, and its despair over the failure of things to do so, is ascetic in much the same way. Cavell thinks that "there is inherent in philosophy a certain drive to the inhuman, to a certain inhuman idea of intellectuality, or of completion, or of the systematic; and that exactly because it is a drive to the inhuman, it is somehow itself the most inescapably human of motivations." Recall Hegel's account of the violence that consciousness inflicts on itself in order to transform itself into Spirit (Geist)-a task that requires it to rid itself of everything that is not itself, including perhaps its human embodiment. After all, what happens when the task of Aufhebung is finished? In his lectures during the 1930s on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Alexandre Kojève extracted from Hegel a famous thesis: "At the end of history man disappears"-but not to worry, he adds in a footnote, this is not "a cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all eternity. And therefore, it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature as given Being. What disappears is Man properly so-called-that is Action negating the given, and Error, or in general the Subject opposed to the Object." At the end of history we are at last free to enjoy our animal satisfactions.
But what is "Man properly so-called," especially since he has begun to replicate himself? In an essay entitled "Machines as Persons?" Christopher Cherry writes: "It is virtually certain that machines which are on the face of it indistinguishable from human beings (and, doubtless, other creatures) will come on the scene sooner rather than later." Whenever they arrive, before as much as after, the major question will be: How should we treat these imitation humans? "The pressures to call them 'persons,'" Cherry says, "will be immense" (23)-and (he says) should be resisted on the grounds that if we begin to identify with these imitation humans we are likely to suffer a leveling that will leave us in a state of ontological indeterminacy (aliquids, whatchamacallits: neither human nor nonhuman but inhuman, or better-since the term "inhuman" is a moral concept that refers to acts of cruelty, of which animals are, according to tradition, incapable-ahuman; but who is "we"?). Cherry proposes that we treat machine-persons the way we treat fictional characters in plays or novels (23). Would this be humane? The philosopher Daniel Dennett thinks that it would not. After all, we (humans) are ourselves, he says, "the direct descendents of ... self-replicating robots," that is, micromolecular systems of a certain complexity. Dennett would side with Hilary Putnam's argument that the question of whether machine-persons are in some sense conscious or alive "calls for a decision rather than a discovery," and that now would be a good time (but of course he proposed this more than thirty years ago) to raise the question, "Should robots have civil rights?" (And, of course, if robots, why not other creatures as well? Animal rights advocates like Peter Singer have for a long time been well ahead of this question.)
Other than Me
Would these "rights" be the Rights of Man? The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas remarks that the concept of the "Rights of Man" entails the paradox of the absolute alterity of every person. The human is what is refractory to categories and distinctions of every order, including the humanity of every humanism: "Each man is the only one of his kind" (as if "man" were the word); there is no essence of man or human nature or human species. The human is the absolutely other as such (Autrui): "non-interchangeable, incomparable, unique, and irreproducible." As in Plato's Parmenides-this is the late Plato who seems to have abandoned the theory of Forms-we are the others of each other, not of any One. So we cannot be contained within a logic of identity or of exclusion or any bivalent (either/or) logic. The problem with humanism, Levinas thinks, is that with respect to human alterity, "it is not sufficiently human" (AE, 203/OTB, 128). Humanism is concerned chiefly with the productive autonomy of the ego and the self-transparency of a consciousness exercising rational control. In an essay on "Humanism and Anarchy," Levinas says that since Descartes and Kant-that is, in the philosophical culture of modernity-"man" is chiefly the name for the logical subject of objectifying consciousness, the representational-calculative "I" that produces an order of "anonymous structures" in which the human being as a singular and irreducible creature remains invisible. Levinas writes: "As a setting into place of intelligible structures subjectivity can have no internal finality. We are witnessing the ruin of the myth of man [as] an end in himself, and the appearance of an order that is neither human nor nonhuman, one that is, indeed, ordered across man and across the civilizations he is said to have produced, but ordered in the last analysis by the properly rational force of the dialectical or logico-formal system" (CPP, 130). As if the "human" subject were simply the indeterminate medium ("neither human nor nonhuman") of a cybernetic or rule-governed rationality: a thinking thing, as Descartes figured it, with no need of a body.
By contrast, for Levinas, and for a number of his contemporaries in European philosophy, the human at the level of the singular-that is, "prior to the distinction between the particular and the universal" (AE, 130/OTB, 108)-is not a what but a who; it is not the nominative I (Je) but the accusative me (moi). The logical subject of cognition, rational deliberation, justified true beliefs, and conduct beyond reproach-this subject is pure spirit, and is purely theoretical. The who or the me by contrast is corporeal, made of flesh or skin; it exists as a mode of sensibility or exposure to the touch. For Levinas, being me consists in being in a relation that he characterizes famously as "face-to-face." It is an encounter with another in which the other is not just an object of perception, consciousness, or cognition, nor is it an adversary in a struggle for dominance, as in Hegel's originary dialectic of master and slave. Being face-to-face with another is precisely the interruption of this dialectic as it is of every form of objectification; it is a relation in which I find myself (prior to any decision on my part) existing for the good of the other, responsible for his or her welfare. In Levinas's thinking, I experience myself (for the first time) not as a cogito but in the claim that others have on me.
What sort of claim might this be? Jean-Paul Sartre in his famous analysis of the look treats this as an event of cognition, or more exactly a reversal of cognition in which I become another's representation, part of the furniture of another's consciousness: in other words, a mere object (being looked at, like being brought under a category, is an event of dehumanization). Levinas maps onto this encounter another model-not the Greek or philosophical model of knowing and being known but the Jewish or biblical model of election, the prophetic experience of being summoned out of one's place of comfort and security and placed at the disposal of others. In this situation, I can no longer comport myself as a cogito, a subject of reason whether pure or practical, a consciousness conceived in terms of concepts and intentions. Gone likewise are all the basic characters of traditional moral philosophy: the moral spectator, the self-legislating rational actor, the calculator of means and ends, the emotive self, the theorist of the right and the good, the well-formed inhabitant of moral communities. The "ruin of the myth of man," indeed. In the relation of face-to-face, Levinas says, "the word I means here I am [me voici: see me here]," without shelter, no longer in a position of control, answerable to (and for) another (AE, 180/OTB, 114). The logical subject grasps the world conceptually (that is what the word "concept" means: Begriff in German derives from greifen, to grasp); being human is the reverse of this: "I am 'in myself' through the others," Levinas says. "The psyche is the other in the same.... Backed up against itself, in itself because without any recourse to anything, in itself like in its skin, the self in its skin both is exposed to the exterior (which does not happen to things) and obsessed by the others in this naked exposure" (AE, 178/OTB, 112). From a Greek standpoint (just to call it that) Levinas's thinking, as he himself put it, "is simply something demented" (AE, 178-79/OTB, 113):
Vulnerability, exposure to outrage, to wounding, to passivity more passive than all patience, passivity of the accusative form, trauma of accusation suffered by a hostage to the point of persecution, implicating the identity of the hostage who substitutes himself for others: all this is the self, a defecting or defeat of the ego's identity. (AE, 31/OTB, 15; my emphasis)
Think of the cogito turned inside out and reincarnated:
It is because subjectivity is sensibility-an exposure to others, a vulnerability and a responsibility in the proximity of the others, the one-for-the-other ... that a subject is of flesh and blood, a man that is hungry and eats, entrails in a skin, and thus capable of giving the bread out of his mouth, or giving his skin. (AE, 124/OTB, 77)
Not surprisingly, in "Signature" Levinas gives us an autobiography without an "I" or any self-reference: "heteronomy through and through."
Self-Creation
Stanley Cavell has, by contrast, what looks like a straightforwardly Greek approach to this issue: the human is not a natural kind, and in particular my humanness, my being anyone, is not a given; it has to be created (we are not beings but creatures). And after the death of God there are only two alternatives, neither of them certain of success: Either I am a cultural product like any other, woven out of the stuff or tissue of material conditions, social relations, ideological systems, family romances, the law of the father, the cultural fabric (what Martin Hollis calls a "plastic man"-"a socially programmed feedback system"); or I am my own creation, self-authored, responsible for my own existence, whatever I am. Cavell affirms "the absolute responsibility of the self to itself," which for him is the main thesis of what he calls "Emersonian perfectionism," where the idea of having a self entails the obligation of self-formation, freeing oneself from the repetitious inertia of social construction. As Cavell says, "the move from the state of nature to the contract of society does not, after all, sufficiently sustain human life" (CH, 52). Insofar as I'm simply shaped from the outside-in, I do not exist. Unless I "enact my existence"-that is Cavell's phrase-I merely haunt the world, like a ghost. How to enact one's existence is not self-evident-there is no program, no set of spiritual exercises-but Cavell takes Descartes's cogito as an instance of self-authoring, which is what Emerson makes of it in his essay "Self-Reliance," with its idea of self-creation from within a social environment of "bugs" and "spawn." The cogito in this respect is not just an argument or an inference; it is an act that we must perform, an originary task, a necessity of existence, but this is not just solitary singing. I do not exist until I am intelligible to others on my own terms (CH, 46-47). "Self-Reliance" is nevertheless about how we fall short. Likewise the theme of Thoreau's Walden is that none of us is human (or, indeed, anything) yet, that the existence of the human has not yet occurred. The difficulty is: Who would recognize it (and how?) if and when it does occur? In fact, the question of recognition is complex and, indeed, full of uncertainties as to consequences. (We'll see in the next chapter how Cavell, among others, addresses this question.)
For some thinkers, self-recognition is what seems to matter. Jean-Paul Sartre's idea, for example, is that in modernity we are all sub- or partially human, shaped from the outside by roles, functions, positions, offices, ranks, rules, types, and ready-to-wear name tags of every kind. Hence the existential double bind. As Sartre says: "I am in the mode of not being what I am and of being what I am not" (BN, 365). In this event no one is in a position to say what a human life might be. There is no universal concept or principle in charge here (which is all that the motto "existence precedes essence" means). But-importantly-Sartre takes this absence of any given as a condition of freedom in which the individual, given what is possible in finite situations, faces the task of creating him or herself by way of decision and action: "The doctrine I am putting before you," Sartre says, "is ... that there is no reality except in action. It goes further and adds, 'Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only insofar as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.'" Being passive with respect to one's existence is just bad faith.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On Ceasing to Be Human by Gerald L. Bruns Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Prologue: On the Freedom of Non-Identity 1
1 Otherwise Than Human (Toward Sovereignty) 13
2 What Is Human Recognition? On Zones of Indistinction) 31
3 Desubjectivation (Michel Foucault's Aesthetics of Experience) 47
4 Becoming Animal (Some Simple Ways) 61
5 Derrida's Cat (Who Am I?) 79
Notes 99
Works Cited 119
Index 133