Posthumanism

Contextual Quote

"Aligning themselves with information science and Foucault’s proclamation of the death of man, posthumanism, inspired by Donna Haraway’s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) and Katherine Hayles’s book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), is replacing postmodernism as the defining form of political correctness in the humanities. This provides further justification for the elimination of the humanities, the raison d’etre of which is to cultivate the humanity of people. This is at a time when more humanity is needed than ever before to challenge the power of the global corporatocracy who have massively concentrated wealth and subverted democracy, and to avoid the catastrophe of a war of all against all as global ecological destruction destroys the conditions for civilization. Posthumanism is essentially a philosophical notion, and although the term did not originate in the work of philosophers, a good many philosophers have conformed to what is politically correct and embraced posthumanism."

- Arran Gare [1]

Discussion

Posthumanism as the successor of deconstructive postmodernism

Arran Gare:

"How should we understand posthumanism in this context? Posthumanism is the successor to deconstructive postmodernism. There are several reasons why postmodernism was superseded. First, it was associated with an extreme scepticism towards science, which, given the technological achievements evident all around us that were made possible by science, seemed absurd. Second, it led to intellectual stagnation. As Paul Mason (p.177) observed, citing the work of the Australian-Italian feminist Rosi Braidotti:

- postmodernist academia had entered a “zombified landscape of repetition without difference and lingering melancholia” which had run out of new ideas. A new theory beginning with “post” was needed to justify the usefulness of humanities departments and pay the rent. Post-humanism was the result. Its central claim was outlined by Katherine Hayles, an American literary critic: the human self is basically information, so whether it resides on a computer or a body doesn’t matter. Consciousness is in any case a “side show,” because the Libet experiment in neuroscience is said to have proved we take most of our decisions unconsciously. As a result, the human being can be “seamlessly articulated with a machine.”

Referring to Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1987), Katherine Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), offered a history of information science from its establishment in the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics from 1946 to 1953. Cognitive scientists embracing information science believed they had the concepts required to “mechanize the mind,” showing that organisms, including humans, are nothing but complex information processing machines (Dupuy 2009). By adding information to matter and energy, and even privileging information, some participants believed they had the basis for a metaphysical monism, a belief that was embraced by many others, despite the scepticism of major figures at the conferences (acknowledged by Hayles). For these ontological reductionists, the universe’s essential nature is digital, composed of bits of information (Zurek 1990; Floridi 2011: 91). It appears that the technological achievements made possible by information science persuaded Haraway and Hayles to accept the universalizing claims of this science, viewing human individuals as mere information processing nodes in a landscape dominated by information technology. They were left only to consider how we might rescue some remnants of humanity from this claimed revolution in science.

The oddity of this is that both Haraway and Hayles are historians of science, and Haraway had previously written a book on the history of embryology that discussed the work of Waddington and other anti-reductionist biologists. As I have pointed out above, the anti-reductionist philosophers and scientists from Schelling onwards have been struggling to align the sciences and the humanities, not only because they support the value of the humanities, but because the mechanistic conception of life and mind developed by thinkers influenced by Hobbes made science itself unintelligible. In doing so, these anti-reductionists have been enormously successful, as I have also argued above. The proponents of information science have been concerned to update reductionism to make it more plausible, but without success."

(https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp-4-2021-arran-gare-against-posthumanism-posthumanism-as-the-world-vision-of-house-slaves)

Who are the posthumanists

Arran Gare:

"Posthumanism amounts to a total rejection of the revival of humanism by the New Left, which reinterpreted Marx’s work on this basis to oppose the nihilistic, instrumentalist thinking dominating both Soviet Marxism and Western bureaucratic capitalism. The New Left in turn were recovering the heritage of German thought developed in opposition to the atomistic, utilitarian philosophies dominating France and Britain. They were defending a more exalted idea of humans and humanity that acknowledged their capacity for autonomy, and central to this, a more exalted view of reason and imagination, conceived to be creative in a way that empiricists and mechanists had refused to countenance (Engell, 1981). These Germans in turn were reviving and developing the civic humanism that emerged with the defence of democratic republicanism of the Florentine Renaissance, inspired by the Roman republicans and Ancient Athens, and reviving at the same time appreciation of Roman and Greek philosophers.

That all this should be rejected for an updated mechanistic conception of humans, which is now being used by Nick Land and others to argue that as artificial intelligence surpasses the intelligence of the most intelligent humans, humans should reconcile themselves to being displaced as the next stage of evolution, is something that calls for investigation. Can the posthumanists be seen as just Hobbes’s epigones, continuing the work of the reductionist tradition of thought to undermine the values associated with the humanities, perhaps now trying to advance their careers by disguising their alignment with ruling elites hostile to the very idea of democracy? It appears there is more to it than this. Although posthumanists have embraced information science, in characterizing themselves as posthumanists they refer to Michel Foucault’s work heralding the death of man. Like the postmodernists, their reference point is French philosophy, although they have tacitly accepted the social imaginary of the reductionists (to use the language of Cornelius Castoriadis) of gaining total control over the world through techno-science, with the ultimate goal being to overcome mortality. Why should they be subverting the humanities? To comprehend why posthumanism is being promoted and taken to be politically correct a broad historical perspective is required."

(https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp-4-2021-arran-gare-against-posthumanism-posthumanism-as-the-world-vision-of-house-slaves)

The Role of Foucault

Arran Gare:

" Foucault, who was strongly influenced by structuralism while denying that he was a structuralist, played a crucial role in undermining the humanism of the New Left.

The observation from Foucault embraced by the posthumanists comes from the concluding two paragraphs of The Order of Things (1970, p.387; Wolfe, 2020, p.xii) where he wrote:

- As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises — were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea."

This claim echoed the conclusion Foucault (2008) had come to in his study of Kant in his complementary thesis for his Ph.D; and it concluded what overtly was a study of the human sciences; but there was more than this: it was essentially a rewriting of history of culture, portrayed as a sequence of epistemes that dominate for a time and then are replaced, with each episteme being characterized by a particular conception of order. The result was an account of history that excluded any place for dialectical struggle between competing research programs or political agendas, or the struggle between people understood as conscious agents. In giving a place to the Renaissance episteme, the classical episteme and the modern episteme, renaissance humanists, scientific materialists and proponents of the radical enlightenment were all accorded a place, but through a convoluted effort to describe all thinkers within each epoch as dominated by the same episteme with its assumed conception of order."

(https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp-4-2021-arran-gare-against-posthumanism-posthumanism-as-the-world-vision-of-house-slaves)

Reacting to posthuman philosophy

Mark Stahlman:

"Philosophy has gone “post-human.” Or, as the 2015 The Nonhuman Turn (a conference volume, edited by Richard Grusin, of the Center for 21st Century Studies) puts it, “This book seeks to name, characterize, and therefore to consolidate a wide variety of recent and current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social science. Each of these approaches, and the nonhuman turn more generally, is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a turn toward concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies.”'

'Decentering the human. In favor of . . . technologies. How long before the hue-and-cry for “robot rights” becomes front-page news? This is not exactly a fringe movement. A few years back IBM's Watson group (yes, they make robots) sponsored an event featuring post/transhuman proponents including sociologist Steve Fuller, who has published and lectured extensively on these topics. Fuller is noted for his statement that “If you take seriously that evolution has to do with the transition of forms, and that life and death are just natural processes, then one gets to be liberal about abortion and euthanasia. All of these kinds of ideas seem to me follow very naturally from a Darwinian perspective – a deprivileging of human beings, basically.”46 In 2013 a group of Russians took over the Lincoln Center for the “Global Future 2045 International Congress.” The event was dubbed “Towards a New Strategy for Human Evolution.” They want to “upload” the psyche into machines.47 In 2018, the 24th “World Congress of Philosophy” convened in Beijing with “Posthumanism” as one of its highlighted through-the-conference tracks, in which leading proponents from around the world participated.

Stanford University is busy with its “Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence,” where the obvious extension of “human rights” to “nonhumans” is being discussed.49 Although most involved are pained to minimize the “negative” consequences, Elon Musk personally wrote a $1M check to finance Max Tegmark's “Future of Life” group at MIT, ostensibly to campaign against weaponized robots.50 Trying to stop the deployment of Robocop. Signatures have been collected and pledges have been made. Few believe that will really work. Roman Yampolskiy, a computer science professor at the University of Lexington (Kentucky) and signatory of the “Asilomar Principles” believes that AIs must be “boxed” to be trusted.51 He just might be right. The alternative to all this “decentering” and “deprivileging” might be to return to the beginning of our effort to understand the human psyche. Aristotle “invented” psychology in the 4th-century BC. His Peri Psyche (De Anima in Latin and On the Soul in English) is little studied today and generally unknown to the typical psychology major.52 Indeed, repeated and detailed discussions of Aristotle appear to be rare nowadays. Thomas Aquinas famously brought Aristotle back in the 13th-century and his Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima (along with many others, including key figures in Islamic philosophy) really has to be featured in that renewed course of study. Today, academic followers of Thomas, particularly among Spanish philosophers, while few-and-far-between, continue to keep these topics alive. Until the “Enlightenment” these were wellworn paths both in Continental and Anglophone circles. The time has come to retrieve this largely forgotten wisdom."

(https://www.digitallife.center/images/dianoetikon/The_Inner_Senses_and_Human_Engineering_Dianoetikon.pdf)

More information

• Humanism