Preparing for Life in Humanity 2.0

S. Fuller

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137277077
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Developing directly from Fuller's recent book Humanity 2.0, this is the first book to seriously considerwhat a 'post-' or 'trans'-' human state of being might mean for who we think we are, how we live, what we believe and what we aim to be.

1

Philosophy for Humanity 2.0

Abstract: The nature of the human and the scientific have always been intertwined. In various sacred and secular guises, the unification of all forms of knowledge under the rubric of ‘science’ has been taken as the species prerogative of humanity. However, as our sense of species privilege has been called increasingly into question, so too has the very salience of ‘humanity’ and ‘science’ as general categories, My understanding of ‘science’ is indebted to the red thread that runs from Christian theology through the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment to the Humboldtian revival of the university as the site for the synthesis of knowledge as the culmination of human self-development. However, the challenge facing such an ideal in the 21st century is that the predicate ‘human’ may be projected in three quite distinct ways, governed by what I call ‘ecological’, ‘biomedical’ and ‘cybernetic’ interests.

Fuller, Steve. Preparing for Life in Humanity 2.0. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137277077

The nature of the human and the scientific have always been intertwined. Throughout the medieval and modern periods, in various sacred and secular guises, the unification of all forms of knowledge under the rubric of ‘science’ has been taken as the species prerogative of humanity. However, as our sense of species privilege has been called increasingly into question, so too has the very salience of ‘humanity’ and ‘science’ as general categories, let alone ones that might bear some essential relationship to each other. I begin this chapter by tracing this joint demystification to recent developments in the philosophy of science, which are neatly captured by what I call the ‘Stanford School’. I then proceed on a more positive note to a conceptual framework for making sense of science as the art of being human. My understanding of ‘science’ is indebted to the red thread that runs from Christian theology through the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment to the Humboldtian revival of the university as the site for the synthesis of knowledge as the culmination of self-development. Especially salient here is science’s epistemic capacity to manage modality (i.e. to determine the conditions under which possibilities can be actualised) and its political capacity to organise humanity into projects of universal concern. However, the challenge that faces such an ideal in the 21st century is that the predicate human may be projected in three quite distinct ways, governed by what I call ecological, biomedical and cybernetic interests. Which one of these future ‘humanities’ would claim today’s humans as proper ancestors and could these futures co-habit the same world thus become two important questions that philosophy will need to address in the coming years.

1.1Introduction: the road back from Stanford to a rehumanised science

There used to be a field called ‘philosophy of science’ that was focused on the set of epistemic practices that were most likely to realise humanity’s deepest aspirations. It was concerned with defining and promoting the collective rationality of the species, otherwise known as ‘progress’. The decline of this field can be traced to the influence of Thomas Kuhn (1970) on a generation of scholars, born around 1940, who started to become prominent in the history, philosophy and social studies of science in the late 1970s (Fuller 2000b: chap. 6). Within ten years, a critical mass of these scholars were assembled at Stanford University, centred on Ian Hacking and Nancy Cartwright, and including such younger scholars as John Dupré and Peter Galison. Despite working in substantively different areas, they shared certain metatheoretic views: (a) anti-determinism and a more general scepticism about the reality of natural laws; (b) ontological pluralism as a pretext for methodological relativism and cross-disciplinary tolerance more generally; (c) a revival of interest in a localised sense of teleology and essentialism while renouncing more universalist versions of these doctrines; (d) a shift from physics to biology as the paradigmatic science and hence a shift in historiographical orientation from the Newton-to-Einstein to the Aristotle-to-Darwin trajectory; (e) a shift in empirical focus from the language of science to science’s non-linguistic practices; (f) an aversion to embracing a normative perspective that is distinct from, let alone in conflict with, that of the scientific practitioners under investigation.

The Stanford School published a landmark volume (Galison and Stump 1996) that extended the reach of its line to fellow travellers of a more postmodernist, even posthumanist approach, as represented by, say, Donna Haraway (1991) and Bruno Latour (1993). The result has been the establishment of a diffuse but relatively stable consensus of bespoke thinking in science and technology studies (STS) that considers science in all its various social and material entanglements, without supposing that science requires an understanding that transcends and unifies its diverse array of practices. For these anti-generalists, as long as there are people called ‘scientists’ who refer to what they do as ‘science’, science continues to exist as an object of investigation. Indeed, the scientific agents need not even be people, provided that they are recognised by other recognised scientists as producers of reliable knowledge. In effect, rather than using sociology to flesh out a normative philosophical ideal, the Stanford School cedes to sociology conceptual ground that philosophers previously treated as their own.

My own philosophical position – known as social epistemology – stands in direct opposition to the Stanford School (Fuller 1988; Fuller 2000b: chap. 6; Fuller 2007b: chap. 2). However, the Stanford School is a useful foil for my argument because they recognise – if only to reject – the integral relationship between scientific unificationism, determinism, physics-mindedness and human-centredness. In what follows, I reassert all of these unfashionable positions but in a new key that acknowledges that the recent changes in the conduct and justification of science have coincided with a new sense of openness about what it means to be ‘human’. I begin to explore this sense of openness in the next section, by considering how the rise of modern science has forced humanity to negotiate its species identity in terms of what is ‘necessary’ versus ‘contingent’ to our continued existence. In metaphysics this negotiation is the province of modality.

1.2Science as humanity’s means to manage modality

Grammatically speaking, modern science was born concessive, by which I mean that species of the subjunctive mood captured in English by ‘despite’ and ‘although’. The original image conveyed by these words was one of modal conflict between overriding necessity and entrenched contingency, conceived either synchronically or diachronically: on the one hand, the resolution of the widest range of empirical phenomena in terms of the smallest number of formal principles; on the other, the unfolding of a preordained plan over the course of a difficult history. In short: Newton or Hegel. In both cases, necessity and contingency are engaged in a ‘dialectical’ relationship. While the ‘necessary’ might be cast in terms of Newton’s laws or Hegel’s world-historic spirit, anything that resisted, refracted, diverted or dragged such a dominating force would count as ‘contingent’. What the Newtonian worldview defined as ‘secondary qualities’ or ‘boundary conditions’, the Hegelian one treated as ‘historically myopic’ or ‘culturally relative’.

Both the synchronic and diachronic versions of this dialectic descended from divine teleology, where the end might be construed as either God’s original plan (Newton) or its ultimate outworking (Hegel). However, modernity is marked by the removal of God as primum mobile, something that arguably Newton himself made possible once he defined inertia as a body’s intrinsic capacity for motion (Blumenberg 1983). To be sure, de-deification has turned out to be a tricky move, since human confidence in science as a species-defining project is based on the biblical idea that we have been created ‘in the image and likeness of God’ (Fuller 2008b). In that case, the project of modern science may be understood as the gradual removal of anthropomorphic elements from an ineliminably anthropocentric conception of inquiry. By ‘anthropocentric’ I mean the assumption of reality’s deep intelligibility – that is, reality’s tractability to our intelligence. In other words, over successive generations, organised science has not only repaid the initial effort invested but also issued in sufficient profit to inspire increased investment, resulting in a reconstitution of the life-world in the scientific image.

In the early modern era, the great Cartesian theologian Nicolas Malebranche provided a vivid metaphysical grounding for this sensibility by speaking of our ‘vision in God’, that is, our capacity to think some of God’s own thoughts – specifically, those expressible in analytic geometry through which the motions of all bodies can be comprehensively grasped at once. Secular doctrines of a priori knowledge descend from this idea of an overlap in human and divine cognition. Moreover, the repeated empirical success of physicists’ vaunted theoretical preference for the ‘elegance’ of mathematically simple forms cannot be dismissed as merely a tribal fetish. Those aesthetic intuitions are reasonably interpreted as somehow tapping into a feature of ultimate reality, the nature of which is not necessarily tied to our embodiment – but may be tied to some other aspect of our being.

Is the naturalist’s explanation for science’s success an improvement on the Cartesian one? After all, what exactly is the survival value of concentrating significant material and cultural resources on some hypothesised ‘universe’ that extends far beyond the sense of ‘environment’ that is of direct relevance to Homo sapiens? From a strictly Darwinian standpoint, a fetish that perhaps arose as a neutral by-product of a genetic survival strategy by a subset of the Eurasian population may only serve to undo the entire species in the long-term. Specifically, the mentality that originally enabled a few academics to enter ‘The Mind of God’ has been also responsible for nuclear physics and the massive existential challenges that have followed in its wake (Noble 1997; Fuller 2010a: chap. 1). In this respect, humanity’s bloody-mindedness in the pursuit of science reflects a residual confidence in our godlike capacities, even after secularisation has discouraged us from connecting with its source.

Two senses of freedom are implied in this theological rendering of humanity’s scientific impulse. On the one hand, we literally share God’s spontaneous desire to understand everything as a unified rational whole, which drives us to see nature in terms of the laws by which the deity created. The clear intellectual and practical efficacy of this project stands in stark contrast to the risk to which it exposes our continued biological survival, since at least for the time being we are not God. This serves to bias our cost-accounting for science’s technological presence in the world, whereby we tend to credit the good effects to the underlying science while blaming the bad effects on science’s specific appliers or users. On the other hand, our distinctiveness from God lies in the detail in which we seek a comprehensive understanding of reality, given our own unique status as creatures. This latter condition gives us a sphere of meaningful contingency, or ‘room to manoeuvre’ (Spielraum), to recall the phrase of the late 19th century German physiologist and probability theorist, Johannes von Kries, who greatly influenced Max Weber’s thinking about what distinguishes humanity from the other lawfully governed entities in nature (Weber 1949: 164–88).

Humans are self-legislating, in that even in a world that is determined by overarching principles (‘overdetermined’, as it were), we have the power to resolve any remaining uncertainty in how these principles are instantiated. Indeed, Weber appeared to suggest that our humanity rests on the fact that we treat overdetermined situations as providing meaningful choices – that the way or style in which something is done in the short-term matters, even if in the long term it simply reinforces the fact that the thing had to be done. Vivid examples are provided by the extraordinary ethical debates that continue to surround birth and death – the simple biological fact that people come into and go out of existence. More striking than the range of opinion that these debates elicit is that they are had at all, since regardless of where one stands on abortion, contraception, euthanasia, suicide or – for that matter – murder, mortality is a certainty that befalls natural biological selves (Fuller 2006a: chap. 11).

This opening meditation on modality suggests that science relates to our humanity in a rather sophisticated way. We are dualistic beings, which in the first instance may be understood as our ongoing enactment of some version of spirit persevering in the face of recalcitrant matter. However else they differ, Newton and Hegel both belong to this moment. In that case, science’s steadfast focus on necessity appears indifferent, if not cruel, with respect to the contingencies of particular human lives. But Max Weber – no doubt moved by the popular determinisms of his day (Marxism, psychoanalysis, energeticism) – recognised that these contingencies were precisely the means by which humans, even after conceding certain overriding tendencies in nature, express their distinctive identities. In that sense, for Weber, humanity is a variable by-product of the exigencies of the life-situations faced by our species. But there may also be collective by-products of those exigencies – and this is where what Karl Popper (1972) called ‘objective knowledge’, including science as a unique human achievement, belongs.

1.3Science: a by-product of life that becomes its point and then imposes its own sense of justice

Karl Popper stood apart from most modern epistemologists and philosophers of science in refusing to identify knowledge claims – hypotheses and theories – with the formal expression of beliefs, which he took to be irreducibly subjective and more about self-affirmation than knowledge as such. Popper had an admirably literal, thing-like understanding of ‘objective knowledge’ as external entities one’s contact with which is generative of systematic thought (Popper 1972). An attractive feature of this conception of knowledge is that its sense of objectivity is studiously neutral on the metaphysical debate between idealism and materialism (Fuller 1988: chap. 2). Thus, both Plato’s forms and Popper’s own example of the last library left standing after a nuclear holocaust would count as objective knowledge, in that each would enable thinking beings – whatever their provenance – to create a civilised world. Considering that, as we shall later see, humanity may proceed in at least two distinct directions in the future, Popper’s view usefully refuses to tie science, understood as humanity’s distinguishing feature, with our current biological makeup.

Popper’s account of the origin of objective knowledge follows a line that in his youth had been advanced in the Vienna Circle as a transformation in the concept of ‘economy’. It amounted to a definition of civilisation as the reversal of means and ends, once a means has achieved its end (Schlick 1974: 94–101). Thus, the practice of counting arose to solve problems related to survival but then, once those problems were solved (or at least managed), they became a project pursued for its own sake in the form of number theory. In the transition, the relevant sense of ‘economy’ shifted from producing ideas that minimise effort to a more focused concern for the minimal ideas needed to account for effort as such. Moreover, this long-term pursuit came to be seen as providing the basis for a still deeper economisation of effort that could be imparted in pedagogy. Here I mean the subsumption of the ‘practical arts’ in their broadest sense under ‘science’ – that is, the relation in which engineering, medicine, business and law currently stand to physics, biology, economics and the socio-political sciences, respectively, in the academic curriculum.

This general relationship is traceable to William Whewell’s insistence that science requires properly trained ‘scientists’, not simply amateurs who happen to stumble upon epistemic breakthroughs. His philosophical legacy, the privileging of the ‘context of justification’ over the ‘context of discovery’, came into its own in the second half of the 19th century. The distinction is ultimately about devaluing the contingent features of scientific achievement, so as to avoid a sense of ‘path dependency’ to science that would lose sight of its ultimate aim of universal knowledge (Fuller 2007b: chap. 2). In the short term Whewell’s policies aimed to undercut the mechanics and inventors who over the previous century had flourished outside the clerically controlled academic networks. But in the long term his policies staved off – if not ensured – that scientific knowledge would be, at least in principle, made available to everyone, specifically those who had not undergone any idiosyncratic creative process or belonged to the right social network (Fuller 2000b: chap. 1). In effect, in trying to reassert the authority of Oxbridge in the face of interloping parvenus, Whewell struck a blow for epistemic justice (Fuller 2007a: 24–9).

In broadest terms, epistemic justice is about ensuring that individual inputs into the collective pursuit of knowledge are recognised in proportion to their relevance and credibility. Curiously, analytic philosophers frame this problem as one of epistemic injustice, namely, identifying and remedying presumptively clear cases in which the requisite sense of proportion has been violated (McConkey 2004). To be sure, such cases are easily conjured: medical research that studies only men but then pronounces on everyone; intelligence testing that fails to recognise its own cultural biases; psychological research that samples only students to draw inferences about all age groups. Research designs that systematically ignore significant segments of humanity and undermine science’s aspiration to knowledge of universal scope and respect. Who could disagree? But the way forward is far from clear, which suggests that we need to get clear about what is meant by ‘epistemic justice’ before speaking of ‘injustice’.

Consider the options available fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1  Philosophy for Humanity 2.0
• 2  Political Economy for Humanity 2.0
• 3  Anthropology for Humanity 2.0
• 4  Ethics for Humanity 2.0
• 5  Epilogue: General Education for Humanity 2.0 – A Focus on the Brain
• References
• Index