Posthuman Philosophy in 5 Minutes
A quick and easy guide to a quietly trending new theory of human identity
Photo by Taiki Ishikawa on Unsplash
Ever wonder what it’s like to be a thing? I’ll forgive you if you haven’t. Believe it or not, though, describing the experiences of things — boats, pencils, stars, universes, leptons, pond scum, you name it — is something of an intellectual hobbyhorse for American philosopher Ian Bogost.
That’s because Bogost contends that humans should not be the principal subject of philosophical inquiry. In Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s like to be a Thing, Bogost argues that humans constitute only a minute fraction of the “things” in the universe but have nevertheless claimed the undivided attention of western philosophy since Plato first pondered what it means to be a good human.
Furthermore, while the Humanist ideals of our philosophical tradition have inspired progress on many fronts, human-centered ethics, norms, values, and politics have also come with dire consequences.
One reason why is because to define the human — perhaps the central project of western philosophy — is to also define what is not human, and who. Thus, the Nazis dehumanized Jews ideologically and thereby rationalized their torment and mass extermination.
Likewise, American and colonial slave-traders and later US officials posited the inhumanity of African captives and their descendants as a pretext for their enslavement and enduring persecution.
Additionally, human-centered pursuits that do not countenance the moral worth of things are ruinous for the planet — the natural environment of humans and all other living things in our proximity.
Bogost, therefore, would have us renounce humanity and join the community of things. His “object-oriented ontology” is a perceptual shift in that direction and is just one of several approaches to articulating a Posthuman philosophy.
Posthumanism is a response to the Humanist conception of mind and body
Bogost is not alone in his quest to decenter the human in philosophy. Until quite recently, though, philosophers throughout history have assumed that the world, or materiality, stood aloof from human subjectivity as a distinct opposite.
That distinction set the foundations for notions of the human as a “rational animal” special in the material realm as a vehicle for immaterial consciousness.
To declare humans “special,” is, of course, to assert that everything else isn’t. And, as I mentioned before, many contend that the “second-class” status of “everything else” is precisely how human rights crimes and environmental ravages find footing in human society.
20th-century developments in cognitive science, however, have proved that the mind is not separate from the body but a function of it instead. We’ve also discovered that animals, too, have minds, and that the now visible horizons of Artificial Intelligence might one day make human knowledge look frighteningly primitive by comparison. In fact, those developments may alter human evolution in profound ways.
Neither can humans any longer lay claim to an abundance of rationality. A tour of world history isn’t necessary to disprove Aristotle’s hypothesis on the subject — a simple scan of this morning’s headlines will suffice.
In short, the human mind is not, as Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant thought, the wellspring of human moral worth over and above all other things. And that realization is the first point of departure for philosophical Posthumanism.
Three Key concepts of Posthuman philosophy
While there are as many ways to conceive of the posthuman as there are people, there are three key concepts that Posthuman theorists continually circle around. They are:
1.) Becoming
Things exist only in relation to each other. The Structuralist notion that words take their meaning from their differences from one another has migrated to the realm of social and physical sciences — nature and matter are dynamic and changing, rather than static and immutable. That’s true for the human body, too.
And, since the human mind is a function of the human body, it is always in a state of flux or “becoming” (if you’ll read this sentence carefully, you’ll see how difficult it is to articulate “becoming” without recourse to “being.” That’s how foreign the concept is to us).
Thus, for Posthumanist philosophers, defining the human is an exercise in futility, because nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, let alone across the broad expanse of history.
And, because humans are merely a part of the everything flux, they are not special among things. In fact, the very idea of “specialness” as a fixed quality is illogical in a world of pure becoming.
It follows, then, that the human should not be the arbiter of worth, but merely one valuable entity among many. Race, gender, class, and other systems of oppression get no oxygen in such an account, because humans can only claim equality in the community of things, and therefore can’t demote others to sub-human — or, more appropriately, sub-thing status.
2.) Biological Identity
In the words of American scholar Julie Rivkin, “from a biological perspective, identity is necessarily ecological and symbiotic.” Bacteria in the human body sustain our lives and vice versa. We depend also on the natural world and are made from its resources.
Moreover, life is dependent on inanimate objects — all organisms are composed of objects that are themselves inorganic and lifeless.
Humans, therefore, are not distinct from things, even non-living things. Contrary to the unchallenged philosophical assumptions of the past millennium, humans are not separate from nature — we are functions of it, just as the mind is a function of the body.
Like “becoming,” then, “biological identity” decenters the human and promotes “everything else” to a position of equality. Importantly, in such an ecosystem of value, it would be logically impossible to declare other people or the natural environment “less than” and then exploit them accordingly.
That makes “biological identity” ironically appealing to Humanist philosophers even as it challenges their most fundamental assumptions.
3.) Cyborg
In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Posthumanist philosopher Donna Haraway uses the concept of a cyborg to dispel myths of human identity belabored throughout the history of western thought, including feminist criticism, which Haraway expressly redirects.
Haraway contends that her posited cyborg would erase many of the dualisms that problematize human identity and serve ideological regimes that oppress women and racial and ethnic minorities.
The idea, for example, that a human consciousness born in a cyborg body would care about or even understand gender or race seems far-fetched at best.
Additionally, normative binary terms like nature/culture, organic/artificial, human/animal, etc. break down from the perspective of a cybernetic organism and thus no longer sustain humanist rationalizations for environmental despoilment.
And while Haraway acknowledges that her cyborg is a fiction, the advent of living cyborgs is closer than you may think, and so, too, is a complete reimagining of what it means to be human.
We’re stuck with ourselves for now
We’re still “merely” human at present, even though we don’t really know what that means, despite 2000+ years of deliberation.
Hopefully, though, Posthuman philosophy can help us think our way clear of toxic ideology about human identity so we can outgrow social constructs like race and gender and finally see ourselves as fully vested citizens in the community of things.