Trans-Humanist Anthropology
There are many species of beings that we humans will never see, and many that are in our daily ecosystems that we choose not to see. Yet, they are there—here—rather, constantly watching, looking, appealing—usually to we humans. We don’t see them because of our own systems of value that are informed by our narcissism: our egocentrism. This type of consciousness therefore closes itself in on itself, not seeing other life, other humans, and our very selves. This is the possessory, dominating subjectivity that instrumentalizes all others, and even in a system indoctrinated by rights and duties, fails to see the Other’s world on its own terms, as its unique manifestation. Both Levinas and Burggraeve see this, understanding all too well that the anthropology based on autonomy constantly struggles within the consciousness of a desiring, egocentric self. This is what leads to their formulations and developments of heteronomy (not a Kantian heteronomy but an existential, trans-human type that I describe earlier). I take this further, but I don’t think I see that far and I don’t know where this will lead. Perhaps it is in part a regulatory principle and, in part, a specifiable grounding. I am not sure. Let us proceed.
First, we must dismiss the notion that humans are better, of more worth, or higher on a value scale. We must substitute it with a new axiom of ontological parity. This is for the reasons I mention earlier.
Second, we must agree that in principle that most of us have little knowledge about the whole: about how all beings, processes, and structures work together in an ecosystem. We substitute it with a new axiom of rigorous inquiry.
Third, we must accept a new Archimedean point. We cannot pretend to be at the center of the universe or the planet earth. This means that we must render an accounting of all life forms, including ours, holding that all living beings have equal interests and rights. We must, therefore, have an axiom that recognizes we play a part in the whole but are not the whole, and that we must mediate and weigh our interests relative to those of other life forms.
Fourth, we must recognize that all life forms come from the same source. This leads us to the reconstituted notion of solidarity. This is a trans-human notion that includes the human equally with all other life forms.
Fifth, we must acknowledge and accept a new depth and breadth of our responsibility to others, including humans, other sentient life forms, additional life forms, and the environment in general.
Sixth, we must work diligently to formulate and articulate a new philosophical anthropology for human beings. This means we must strive for new meaning and understanding of the world and our place within it. This is neither the autonomous subject nor the heteronomous subject but it is a new human. This re-formulates the reality principle.
Let us discuss these axioms together. Presently, our collective view focuses on human desire in which there is an implied and sometimes stated thesis that the world revolves around the interest of humans. In this view, other life forms have lesser value; we wouldn’t want to argue that they have no value but to say “lesser” still gives us the same power to torture and destroy them, these other life forms. It actually goes even further than this: humans are so caught up in their desires, which creates a certain form of the way we see and perceive, that they most often just ignore the interests of other life forms. Because they ignore other life they don’t even come to the table enough to reflect on their interests. This is an unreflective life project with unreflective opinions. By definition an unreflective opinion is uncritical: it lacks thought. My intent is to interrogate this uncritical state in such a way that we deepen our understanding of it.
If the reader looks at these six axioms as a whole she can see that there is an isomorphism between individual narcissism (disregarding the Other human) and cultural/species narcissism (disregarding other life forms). Both include the same preoccupation with self or culture, and both ignore or actively trounce on the interests of Others. Moreover, we can see that there is an over-reliance on the law, which I explained earlier in this book. An over-reliance on the law is a retreat to the familiarity of the superego position, i.e., the dominant proscriptions of one’s society and culture. This is a denial of the transcendent in both the individual and in the social elements of a culture. There is also a compulsion to rely on the words used to taxonomically differentiate one type of being from another, which includes different levels of ontological value, rights, and protections. For example, in many jurisdictions wild animals are considered property, and become personal property once they are taken from the forest. This allows the human taker to do anything he wants to the “property.” Analogously [and curiously], there are historical examples amongst humans, in cases of race and gender, in which different categories of humans were assigned different value. It is the same kind of thinking. Although this is a change in name, it is not necessarily a change in action although this might be the first step in a long-term, developmental process of change.
It may be the case that we are limited in new thought because the very language we use to think about and talk about these issues is already value-laden and therefore pre-figures the range of thinking we can engage in about it. For example, if we say that a breeding dog is a cash crop—a piece of property—and property cannot have rights, then a breeding dog does not have rights. In contrast, if we say that a breeding dog is a sentient being and that all sentient beings have rights, we must conclude that breeding dogs have rights. In these two cases, it is the language that foreshadows and determines the moral conclusions. Perhaps this is what explains why animals have not been included in various bills of rights. I venture the thought that if we reconsider the taxonomy and more so the language itself, we might come to new conclusions. This is not to say that behavior change would be easily forthcoming. We have many years of structural habits now embedded in the law, our minds, our moral thinking, and values. Making this radical shift will not be easy but changing language and therefore meaning, could have a profound effect on the way humans construct meaning and on the way they are predisposed to behave.
Another common theme at the foundation of these axioms is, either explicitly or implicitly, the requirement that we a) put huge demands on our quest for scientific knowledge so to understand the way ecosystems flourish and b) to engage in more rigorous hermeneutic inquiry of the meaning of these axioms and their competitors. In short, I propose a strong sense of the meaning of responsibility as I outlined earlier in this work. This implies a derivative duty to gain more accurate, deeper, broader, and truer perspective about the meaning of the human anthropology, and the way we fit in ecosystems in good ways. It might be argued that we already do that, but I am suggesting even greater critical awareness. I suggest this explicitly with those words, and I suggest it implicitly by arguing that through a phenomenological inquiry we can discover what is most human in humans [which implies an account of trans-humanist understanding of the whole]. I don’t think we are there yet.
I want to take up a different line of thought that may help us understand and reconsider why we assign humans a higher ontological value than other life forms. It is a phenomenological thought. In the contemporary world we have become aware that our sense of sight dominates other senses. This means that the sort of beliefs and values about the world come from this domination and subjugation. I hypothesize that there is correlation between this domination and the co-phenomena of individual and cultural narcissism, i.e., a debased Archimedean point. The things we desire we see, and we see the things we desire. That is, we reinforce a connection between what we learn to desire and how we see the world. Unfortunately, this prioritization of the ocular/specular de-prioritizes our other senses such as hearing. We become so sense dominated by vision that we do not notice our other senses as much. This hides and subjugates value.
In order to consider this idea we might engage in a reflective, phenomenological analysis of our everyday sensory experience. Of course, we bring with us proprioception. We also smell, touch, and taste, and these pathways are powerful guides in our hodological choices. Hearing seems a bit different intuitively, for we rely on it for our very survival, I think, more often that these other senses. Yet, our sensory experience of seeing is altogether in a different category. Although we would have a diluted existence without the first three senses, without hearing we compromise our safety (and this is not to say that we don’t use the three senses for our safety and survival). Without our vision, more so: our lives are in danger constantly. However, there is something more going on with sight—remember the adage seeing is believing—because we often connect our sense of truth and knowledge with our ability to see and what we see. One can easily understand how this is also connected with our very survival; however, it is also connected with our sense of value. What I mean is that our vision lies at the bottom of those things we value. Because we desire those things we value, one can make a rudimentary argument that what we see controls our desire, supplemented by parallel processes with other senses.
It is my belief, and I know this needs to be worked out further, that there is a close connection between our dominant human anthropology—the humanism of autonomy—and the priority of vision, i.e. the ocular. We might even call it the “specular,” because of our lack of engaged participation that arises from becoming spectators. Of course, there is the distinction between need and want, and we all desire the things we need. However, it is my belief that the motivational process is different from those things we are taught to desire through culture, media, society, and other people. In short, there is a different motivational network, which is largely reinforced by sight. These constructed “needs” carry with them a distortion of value and a distortion of sensation. The conclusion I am driving at here is that we overly rely on our vision to lead us to goods and experiences of value. Let’s tie these ideas in with the equalization rule in phenomenology itself, as follows.
The equalization rule (or rule of horizontalization) requires us to catalog the contents of our consciousness while giving the same value to each element of our experience, in all dimensions. At the same time we bracket our regular, everyday experience, which includes our valuations. This allows us to compare the neutral view with our normal and regular view, which leads to more reflective inquiry and understanding. If we apply this type of thinking to sensory experience we can immediately see three things: One, how we so clearly allow vision to outrank other senses; two, how this distortion leads to further distortions on valuation; and three how we are inexorably led to construct the autonomous, egocentric, narcissistic self I have outlined. In short, this over-reliance on our vision has far-reaching effects in our ability to critically reflect on our attitudes, choices, and behaviors. In our current schema, this leads to our tendency to construct a certain kind of self; this is the kind of self that does not see the whole; this is the kind of self that overlooks the obvious facts and values that present. By considering the axiom of ontological parity and the descriptive phenomenological rule of equalization we can re-align the way we utilize our sense experience. This can help us not be so tied to the ocular and therefore not so tied to autonomy as our foundational interpretation of humanity. There is much more thinking that must be done on this issue, but I leave it for now and take up the topic of anxiety, relative to the main interpretations of what it means to be human.
Before we move on this text, I’d like to consider another piece of the humanist puzzle, which turns on the issue of anxiety. Humans do many things with their anxiety, both on an individual level and on a cultural level. We understand both of these dimensions through complex discourses like psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and critical theory, which can give us valuable clues to the meaning possibilities of our humanity. I like to think of anxiety as the human experience that emerges from our (future-oriented) ontological field. It is the apprehension of our possibilities in conditions of uncertainty, which emanates in our mind and ripples through our embodiment. Because of the ontological unsettledness and sometimes terror that comes to awareness from these fields of possibility, we are driven to reduce and ameliorate it. These attempts always originate in the mind and involve distortions in thinking, that is, false beliefs that reduce anxiety. At least this is the goal, even though it is not always successful. Nevertheless, I think there is something going on at a deeper level. This is the level of the construction of the self, which I have been exploring and discussing throughout this book. It is my contention that there are cultural and social factors, along with intra-psychic, indigenous personal factors that structuralize our anxiety. In short, we think, feel, and do things with our anxiety, both as individuals and as societies. It is how we structure our being.
If what I am suggesting has merit, then we can think of philosophical anthropology—the constitution and structuralizing of our humanity—as phenomenal forms of our anxiety. In this view, therefore, the humanisms of autonomy, heteronomy, and vivantonomy are different archetypal structures of anxiety, formed by many complex, intricately related factors. I think it is safe to say that we can analyze the structures of anxiety, both individually and culturally in a number of ways. For example, we can look at health, functionality, consequences, existential expression, and many more aspects. In terms of the three main structures I have been examining, we can make value judgments about their effects, as I have been outlining. Levinas himself argues that Eros is as strong as death. It is not fusion, struggle, or knowledge but is an insurmountable duality. It is a relationship with what always slips away as a mystery. It never becomes us or ours but its alterity is preserved in the relation. For Levinas, sociality is thus founded on a dyadic relationship, transformed from a theological to a secular ethics. This relational alterity, which is dyadic in character, became the bedrock of Levinas’s later, more mature ethical thought. What is more, it is phenomenological in method, as we will continue to see, as we explore his developed account of ethics.
I think this notion of Levinas’s is most important—his calling attention to the idea of Eros. It is my belief that Eros is the antidote to anxiety and to resentment, the kinds that come from anxiety. More strongly, as I have argued in the past, most humans have a false relationship with their consciousness. They reject transcendence and the possibility of change, not because it is to difficult [that is the red herring], but because it opens an ontological field that creates terror. Thus, instead of choosing an orientation in being that is trans-humanist we opt for the kind of alienating and possessive structures of autonomy that lead to either sado-masochistic human dynamics, or annihilating behaviors toward Others (humans, animals, self). Thus, how we transform our anxiety into courageous acts of self-development becomes paramount. This exploration is worthy of a whole book, which I will leave for another time. However, I’d like to make a few additional comments, in terms of various discourses that attempt to understand conflict, which I find quite helpful. People often think about conflict and difference as a dilemma. In this either-or fantasy, people believe that either they gain the object of their desire or they don’t, which puts us into direct competition with others.
Now that I have laid out some preliminary axioms, though I do not think my list is exhaustive, being more of a starting point, I would like to continue to explore some ideas about what this trans-humanist perspective is. Formerly, I used the term pantheonomy with great hesitation. I temporarily replace it with the term vivantonomy, which suggests a foundation that is concerned with life, not myself (as autonomy) and not myself only in relation to other human beings (as heteronomy). This would require that we overcome the desirous, narcissistic, egocentric consciousness that primarily valorizes autonomy. This would require us to shift the source of meaning from the subject to the object but not in the scientized way of the Enlightenment. The clues to engage this are already extant in Levinas and Burggraeve. It requires us, as I have stated here in this text and in my Essays on Phenomenology and the Self to shift the source of meaning away from our current forms of subjectivity to a) a new construction and interpretation of objectivity and then to b) a dimension beyond objectivity (as the polarized opposite of subjectivity. This is so because I take it that humans are primarily meaning-seeking agents. We have consciousness so we are self-aware. We have moral consciousness in that we evaluate our behavior. We are driven to understand the world and who we are. This is all meaning-seeking behavior. Unfortunately, the primary ways that we have sought meaning in the modern world result in two cultural modes, as I shall explain.
One of the ways we seek meaning is through our own subjectivity: we look at our own experience, albeit narcissistic and ego-centered, and construct a sense of meaning. As we have shown, this type of meaning supports power relations, desire, possession, and violence, requiring that we enter into cooperative pacts and alliances to stave off these drives—usually toward ownership and accumulation. Even in those more benign forms of subjectivity, the ones that are not abusive, we end up neglecting others simply because we don’t regard them. We don’t regard them because don’t see or hear them. In this state we become so embedded inside ourselves that we lose attention on others and don’t even see the rest. This source of meaning is wanting, therefore, because it doesn’t found a social or political community based in solidarity, rights, and responsibility. In contrast, seeking meaning through scientific naturalism and universal claims to truth, i.e., that which comprises much of modern science, errs in the opposite direction but in a way that is tied to an over-reliance on the subject. In this mode, we find meaning in a type of objectivism that also comes from the same narcissistic, egocentric type of self that lands in subjectivism. This is the kind of thinking that takes a teleological and instrumental view of other people, all sentient beings, other things, and the environment in general. To be sure, modern science is useful and powerful, and great things have come from it. However, we are subtly and not so subtly paying a price for it that comes from its destructive effects. This type of objectivism does not discover things as they are in themselves. Instead, it discovers things-as-they-can-be-useful. These are two different things, the latter based on a lack of ontological parity.
Nevertheless, we are not merely meaning-seeking beings. Our will moves us in a number of ways, for example, toward power, the construction of a self, the need to be recognized, and more. Thus, we can say that humans have a will toward a number of dimensions. I believe that these alternative articulations can also be used to develop an account parallel to that of meaning, in which we understand that their goal and their method constitutes a distorted subjectivity or in the reverse is constituted by a distorted subjectivity. This is a joint problem of the wrong noematic focus and the wrong noesis.
If we use Professor Brentano’s important axiom that human consciousness always has intentional structures toward the world, along with the joint concepts of noesis and noema, we gain some clarity about what I am proposing. (See his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint or his Descriptive Psychology.) The basic idea is that we always have intentionality in consciousness, even in the sorts of mediation practices that try to empty the mind of its contents. In those cases, we intend to empty the mind. In all other cases, too, we apprehend the world in terms of a subject-object polarity. Noema is the object toward which we are directed, which could be an external physical object like a tree or a dog. Noesis is the way we direct ourselves toward objects. For example, we can see an object as something to use instrumentally for our own purposes; in the alternative, we can see an object as something of beauty and value, as something to respect and protect. Of course, there are more ways of seeing, but these two demonstrate the tension that happens often between a purely humanist conception and a trans-humanist conception. In humanism, there is usually a lack of regard for animals and the environment except by accident. This is intrinsic to this type of noesis. In contrast, in a trans-humanist orientation in being, intentionality regards animals and the environment with the same value as humans. You can see two different types of noesis here, and this where we must focus. Professor Burggraeve shows us the difference between the egocentric, desirous type of intentionality and the non-egocentric, responsible sort of intentionality. These are two different noetic structures with highly different ways of approaching the world, and with different ways of seeing the same objects. We could go even further and propose that these different types of noetic structures actually see two different types of object.
We need a different type of basic noetic in the constitution of our human beingness. In this different noetic structure in consciousness, I propose that a couple of changes occur. For all these changes, we must turn away from focusing on our own desirous subjectivity, and refocus on the Other, Others, the objective world, but in a new way—with a different noetic. The first change in this refocus is to reflectively outline this different noetic in a way that proposes new values for animals and the environment. As I have been saying this is the axiom of ontological parity. This process would be a hermeneutic exercise in which we substitute in the new value, see the object in a new way, reinterpret our sense of the value, then refine our noetic clarity. This is a back and forth process that qualitatively shifts our noetic structure and method. When we compare this type of “objectivity” with the type we are criticizing, we notice profound differences. No longer are we searching for universal structures that we attempt to control and manipulate. Instead, we are searching for the object world as it is in itself free from our egocentric need for control. This requires the shift in value I mentioned, a shift in intentionality, and ultimately a shift in our human anthropology: we actually become different human beings. Our orientation in being transmutes; our behavioral choices vary. Our very consciousness becomes different.
The second change in this refocus is much more radical but inclusive of the first change. While it requires a different noetic structure, as I state, this radical change also requires us to reconsider the very way we construct the subject-object polarity. Imagine that it was not always the case that we saw the world in terms of such a rigid subject-object polarity, and moreover, that we didn’t see the world in such a radically instrumental sort of a way. We can imagine all sorts of different variations of this. This is a part of the reconstruction of how we see the object world, as I state, but it is more. It requires us to unsettle the way we pare out the dichotomy between the subject and the object, and perhaps re-envision what we think of as subject and what we think of as object. It is clear to me that they—the subject and the object—co-constitute each other. They are constructions that come from culture, society, and from our own personal history. Thus, we can reflect on this ontological space which gives rise to the very subject-object distinction in the first instant. This is the space of life itself that acts as new, more original, more accurate foundation for rights, solidarity, responsibility, and the constitution of the self: one that takes into account the whole and not just the [human] dimension.
Thus, we transform human-centered anthropologies into trans-human ontologies that move us from egocentric, desirous, possessive, unmindful beings into a complex constellation of elements that constitute a new kind of humanity based on a new sort of autonomy that is grounded in vivantonomy. These new self-constitutions include the self-as-responsible, the self-that-lives-in-solidarity, the self-who-promotes-rights-of-all-that-lives, and the self-who-lives-in-underlying-ontological-space. We could formulate these elements with more finesse, I am sure, but leaving them in their rough state articulates them with crispness and accuracy. The second moment of this transformation comes from the replacements of egocentric values and action potentials with a whole new set of values and action potentials that are virtuous within this new worldview. The values and virtues come from a new anthropology that we become more identified with through the practices that constitute them. This trans-humanist foundation re-constitutes, therefore, what we mean by autonomy and heteronomy. In the last short sections in this book, I will make some additional comments about the relation of virtue to both freedom and responsibility. I will also consider some preliminary questions and inquiry into the contrast between a phenomenology of reverence and a phenomenology of violence and murder. The reason I include these last sections is to provide some additional ideas about the development of this new anthropology. They are also an early inquiry into a book I shall write about reverence and violence from a phenomenological point of view.
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