The Morehead-Cain

Two Faces of Posthumanism

I want to talk to you about an idea that’s getting a lot of play right now, not just in academia but in popular culture and the press: Posthumanism. And I want to suggest that the story has two sides.

The more familiar side of the story is probably this one:

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What do they all have in common? The hope—and the fear (as suggested by the Frankenstein image)—that human beings, by meshing life with technology can redefine the limits of life and can even, perhaps, perhaps, transcend the limits of life.

This view is often called “Transhumanism” which, as journalist Joel Garreau puts it, is: a movement dedicated to “the enhancement of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities, the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and the dramatic extension of life span. What this network has in common is a belief in the engineered evolution of `post-humans,’ defined as beings `whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to no longer be unambiguously human by our current standards.’

“`Transhuman means `those who are in the process of becoming posthuman.’”

Sounds pretty good, right? Eliminating disease, superhuman capabilities. . . .

But that’s only half of that half of the posthumanism story.

One of the most famous critics of the transhumanist vision is Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Joy—who is no luddite and knows a thing or two about engineering—foresees all sorts of problems.

For one thing, he fears, people with extreme views and violent dispositions will be empowered as never before with technologies that aren’t just powerful but widely accessible technologies: nanotech assemblers, computer viruses, and genetically engineered pathogens that could, for example, make possible a so-called “white plague” that targets only certain races or other genetically targeted groups.

And he fears the possibility that engineering our evolution might lead to many separate and unequal species, depending on who could afford to “buy enhancement.” So much for democracy.

Now, I’m not interested in either condemning or promoting this version of posthumanism for the moment—and I really don’t know enough about the science to do so—but I do know (as my picture of Frankenstein suggests) that this is a very familiar and very old desire that we find here: to transcend the limits of the body and mortality, to control life and transform it as we wish.

No, I simply want to draw your attention to one of the central contradictions of this type of posthumanism: on the one hand it radically decenters the human by enmeshing it in technologies—think of medical technologies such as pacemakers and artificial hearts, or communications technologies that keep track of where we are, what we spend, what we like—that obviously compromise the autonomy and intentionality of the human as traditionally conceived.

But on the other hand, it unabashedly espouses a traditionally humanist set of values when it comes to thinking about individual subjectivity, as transhumanist Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom freely admits—including the autonomy, rationality, and agency that would be needed to direct and control such technological advances and their unintended consequences.

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In other words, the kind of posthumanism associated with transhumanism is completely humanist. It’s not a rethinking of humanism; it is the use of technology to perfect humanism. Perhaps its desire to have its cake and eat it too should make us skeptical.

But be that as it may, I now want to turn to a different, less glamorous face of posthumanism.

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In this posthumanism, we’re not decentered from our privileged place in the universe by new technological developments, but rather by our growing realization that we share the planet with lots of non-human persons—what philosopher Tom Regan calls “biographical beings,” like the famous languaging gorilla Koko, shown here with one her pet kittens.

And we’re not encouraged to fantasize about some day being able to transcend the limitations of our bodies and our mortality. Instead, we’re reminded that our embodiment is precisely what links us to our fellow creatures, with whom we share not just a deep evolutionary past but also many characteristics that we used to think of as the sole domain of the “human.”

What are some of those characteristics?

Well, some of the most famous are rationality, then tool use, then tool making, then language use, and altruism. Unfortunately for the humanists among us, all of these characteristics have been found all over the place in the so-called animal kingdom, and not just among our more illustrious cousins, The Great Apes, such as the Bonobo Kanzi shown here working with Sue Savage Rumbaugh at Georgia State University.

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Or think about what we’ve discovered about birds, in Irene Pepperberg’s famous work with the articulate parrot, Alex, or the widely publicized case of “metatool” use—using tools to access other tools—in New Caledonian Crows that you may have read about recently in Science Magazine. The list goes on and on.

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Where you find these sorts of abilities, you are likely to find complex life-worlds and a rich phenomenology that we thought for years resided only in humans—and you find them for the very same biological reasons: the neurophysiological makeup that allows what biologists call “plasiticity” and “proportionate learning,” which leads in turn to beings who can have a sense of past and future, learn from their mistakes and problem solve, and engage in complex forms of social interaction and communication.

In other words, the very mechanisms that gave rise to “the human,” and that give rise to complex psychological and mental lives, are ones we share with plenty of other creatures.

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Of course, this has quite profound ethical implications, because the characteristics I have been describing, and the ability that they confer to be a “biographical being”—the capacity for pain and suffering, the ability to think and feel, to have expectations and disappointments—have traditionally been seen as central to the question of moral standing.

As you probably know, this has been since the 1970s a central theme of what’s called “Animal Rights” philosophy in the work of thinkers such as Tom Regan and Peter Singer.

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But the main problem with how animal rights thinks about this is that—like the transhumanist version of posthumanism—it turns out to smuggle back in the humanism that we thought taking other animals seriously would push us beyond.

Why? Because when you go down the list of morally relevant characteristics in the animal rights argument—some of which I’ve just noted—it turns out to look a lot like US, and so we end up valuing animals and granting them moral standing just because they are just diminished versions of a “normal” human being.

But of course, all sorts of animals possess specific qualities—think of a dog’s sense of smell, a hawk’s sense of sight, or echolocation in bats and dolphins—that are far superior to ours.

So maybe we should try to come up with a way of thinking in which we value elephants or orangutans (or New Caledonian Crows) not because they are “us” plus or minus a particular set of features and attributes, but precisely because of their difference from us, their unique ways of being in the world.

The issue here, in other words, is not that human and non-human animals are “the same”; on the contrary, maybe we should stop thinking of looking into the eyes of another animal as looking in a mirror—because that mirror’s always bound to be broken and distorted.

So we need to find a better conceptual toolbox to think about the real diversity and complexity of life on the planet. And for that, one of the central cornerstones of humanist thought—the fundamental ontological opposition of “the” human and “the” animal—“homo sapiens over here,” every thing else on the planet over here “—is far too blunt of an instrument to be of much use.

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As one of the most important figures for posthumanist thought, the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida, puts it, “Confined within this catch all concept [of the Animal]. . .within the strict enclosure of this definite article. . .are all the living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers. And that is so in spite of the infinite space that separates the lizard from the dog, the protozoan from the dolphin, the shark from the lamb, the parrot from the chimpanzee.”

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Posthumanist thought, then, engages this question not on just one level but on two. It doesn’t just fundamentally question one of the central cornerstones of humanist thought: the fundamental opposition of “the” human and “the” animal (after all, animal rights philosophy does that). It also wants to point out that there are humanist ways of questioning the ontological opposition of humans and animals, ways that, as with animal rights philosophy, reproduce the very problem they are trying to solve, despite the very best of intentions.

Let me end with two further implications of this shift in thought.

First, when you start thinking in this new way about the real diversity of ways of being in the world, the particular powers and attributes that different beings possess, then one consequence is that you are immediately led to rethink not just our relations to animal life but also who “we” are—what sorts of assumptions we make about what counts as a “normal” human being. And here, the case of someone like Temple Grandin—not that there is anyone like Temple Grandin—is really instructive in helping us to draw out the very direct connections between disability studies and animal studies that come to light with the move to posthumanist thinking.

In her case, we can see that what we normally call “disability” isn’t a disability at all; in fact, it’s a very special kind of ability (the ability to understand how animals experience the world, primarily visually) that “normal” human beings don’t have.

And secondly, if you take our connections to non-human animals seriously in this way, and think about how that bears upon the animals we raise for food, then we begin to get a glimpse of how posthumanism is related to issues of farming and ecology as those questions converge in the growing problem of factory farming, which is related in turn to the disappearance of the family farm, to a range of health issues stemming from what and how we eat—all questions that Michael Pollan, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer in Eating Animals have helped bring to the forefront—questions that some of our other speakers today, such as Monica Pope and Gracie Cavnar, are keenly interested in.

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In the end, then, posthumanism doesn’t encourage us to separate ourselves ever more from the bonds of our own bodies, other creatures, and the lifeworlds we share, but rather it returns us closer to home with a greater sense of responsibility and wonder not for what is over the next technological horizon, but for what is already here.

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And it means that we’re paradoxically decentered and recentered at the same time, as never before: decentered in terms of our growing realization of just how bound up we are with technology on the one hand and other forms of animal life on the other, but recentered in terms of our immense responsibility in the face of that very knowledge.

Thank you.