1 Otherwise Than Human
(TOWARD SOVEREIGNTY)
âMan Is a History and Has No Other Natureâ
In our present intellectual climate (and indeed for a long time now) it appears that what we call being human, human subjectivity, my relation to myself (and to others), being me (or not)âthese things, whatever they are, are without substance within most of our perspectives, whether conceptual or empirical, meaning that for philosophical and scientific research the concept of the human is either empty, or should be made so. The human has become a mythological or poetic concept, like Heidegger's âgods and mortals,â easily replaceable by more up-to-date fictions (âWe are all cyborgs now,â says Donna Haraway: anthropology gives way to anthropotechnology).1 The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard puts it neatly when he says that in our time the task of reason is âto make philosophy inhuman,â as if this were to be a kind of second-order secularization.2 In the introduction to a collection of his essays entitled The Inhuman, Lyotard frames two questions: âWhat if human beings, in humanism's sense, were in the process of becoming inhuman? And what if what is âproperâ to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?â3
What could these questions mean? Possibly no more than what social constructionists mean when they cite Michel Foucault's famous lineââMan is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.â4 Or perhaps they mean whatever eliminative materialists mean when they say that the concepts of folk psychologyâconsciousness, desire, feeling, self, and so onâare scientifically useless and should be got rid of.5 The philosopher Cora Diamond saysâand thinks of herself as alone in contesting the ideaâthat in our philosophical culture the human is at most a biological concept, or alternatively is no more than an information-processing device, that is, one kind of intentional system among many others; the category of the human as such is no longer of any philosophical or moral interest.6 Rather like madness (in its old, preclinical sense). But possibly the âend of manâ is only what philosophers have always meant by their arguments or intimations that doing philosophy, being philosophical, is incompatible with being (merely) human. In Western culture the human is a border of self-transcendence but otherwise nothing in itself. âCan a human being be free of human nature?â asks Stanley Cavell. Perhaps only by becoming a monster, where the most monstrous thing is a being that looks human but turns out not to be.7 As Daniel Dennett says, for all you know âsome of your best friends may be zombies.â8
Of course, Cavell must be thinking of someone like Socrates, barefoot in the snow, standing for hours in meditation without the slightest bother, drinking the night through without getting drunk, spending the night in bed with the most beautiful man in Athens without getting an erection.9 In Plato's Phaedo philosophy as ascesis is explicitly a disciplined emancipation from human finitude, a kind of virtual death. Modern analytic philosophy, with its logical obsessions, its desire that things should match their concepts, and its despair over the failure of things to do so, is ascetic in much the same way. Cavell thinks that âthere is inherent in philosophy a certain drive to the inhuman, to a certain inhuman idea of intellectuality, or of completion, or of the systematic; and that exactly because it is a drive to the inhuman, it is somehow itself the most inescapably human of motivations.â10 Recall Hegel's account of the violence that consciousness inflicts on itself in order to transform itself into Spirit (Geist)âa task that requires it to rid itself of everything that is not itself, including perhaps its human embodiment.11 After all, what happens when the task of Aufhebung is finished? In his lectures during the 1930s on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Alexandre Kojève extracted from Hegel a famous thesis: âAt the end of history man disappearsââbut not to worry, he adds in a footnote, this is not âa cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all eternity. And therefore, it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature as given Being. What disappears is Man properly so-calledâthat is Action negating the given, and Error, or in general the Subject opposed to the Object.â12 At the end of history we are at last free to enjoy our animal satisfactions.
But what is âMan properly so-called,â especially since he has begun to replicate himself? In an essay entitled âMachines as Persons?â Christopher Cherry writes: âIt is virtually certain that machines which are on the face of it indistinguishable from human beings (and, doubtless, other creatures) will come on the scene sooner rather than later.â13 Whenever they arrive, before as much as after, the major question will be: How should we treat these imitation humans? âThe pressures to call them âpersons,ââ Cherry says, âwill be immenseâ (23)âand (he says) should be resisted on the grounds that if we begin to identify with these imitation humans we are likely to suffer a leveling that will leave us in a state of ontological indeterminacy (aliquids, whatchamacallits: neither human nor nonhuman but inhuman, or betterâsince the term âinhumanâ is a moral concept that refers to acts of cruelty, of which animals are, according to tradition, incapableâahuman; but who is âweâ?).14 Cherry proposes that we treat machine-persons the way we treat fictional characters in plays or novels (23). Would this be humane? The philosopher Daniel Dennett thinks that it would not. After all, we (humans) are ourselves, he says, âthe direct descendents of âŚself-replicating robots,â that is, micromolecular systems of a certain complexity.15 Dennett would side with Hilary Putnam's argument that the question of whether machine-persons are in some sense conscious or alive âcalls for a decision rather than a discovery,â and that now would be a good time (but of course he proposed this more than thirty years ago) to raise the question, âShould robots have civil rights?â16 (And, of course, if robots, why not other creatures as well? Animal rights advocates like Peter Singer have for a long time been well ahead of this question.)17
Other than Me
Would these ârightsâ be the Rights of Man? The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas remarks that the concept of the âRights of Manâ entails the paradox of the absolute alterity of every person. The human is what is refractory to categories and distinctions of every order, including the humanity of every humanism: âEach man is the only one of his kindâ (as if âmanâ were the word); there is no essence of man or human nature or human species. The human is the absolutely other as such (Autrui): ânon-interchangeable, incomparable, unique, and irreproducible.â18 As in Plato's Parmenidesâthis is the late Plato who seems to have abandoned the theory of Formsâwe are the others of each other, not of any One.19 So we cannot be contained within a logic of identity or of exclusion or any bivalent (either/or) logic. The problem with humanism, Levinas thinks, is that with respect to human alterity, âit is not sufficiently humanâ (AE, 203/ OTB, 128). Humanism is concerned chiefly with the productive autonomy of the ego and the self-transparency of a consciousness exercising rational control.20 In an essay on âHumanism and Anarchy,â Levinas says that since Descartes and Kantâthat is, in the philosophical culture of modernityââmanâ is chiefly the name for the logical subject of objectifying consciousness, the representational-calculative âIâ that produces an order of âanonymous structuresâ in which the human being as a singular and irreducible creature remains invisible.21 Levinas writes: âAs a setting into place of intelligible structures subjectivity can have no internal finality. We are witnessing the ruin of the myth of man [as] an end in himself, and the appearance of an order that is neither human nor nonhuman, one that is, indeed, ordered across man and across the civilizations he is said to have produced, but ordered in the last analysis by the properly rational force of the dialectical or logico-formal systemâ (CPP, 130).22 As if the âhumanâ subject were simply the indeterminate medium (âneither human nor nonhumanâ) of a cybernetic or rule-governed rationality: a thinking thing, as Descartes figured it, with no need of a body.
By contrast, for Levinas, and for a number of his contemporaries in European philosophy, the human at the level of the singularâthat is, âprior to the distinction between the particular and the universalâ (AE, 130/OTB, 108)âis not a what but a who; it is not the nominative I (Je) but the accusative me (moi).23 The logical subject of cognition, rational deliberation, justified true beliefs, and conduct beyond reproachâthis subject is pure spirit, and is purely theoretical. The who or the me by contrast is corporeal, made of flesh or skin; it exists as a mode of sensibility or exposure to the touch. For Levinas, being me consists in being in a relation that he characterizes famously as âface-to-face.â It is an encounter with another in which the other is not just an object of perception, consciousness, or cognition, nor is it an adversary in a struggle for dominance, as in Hegel's originary dialectic of master and slave. Being face-to-face with another is precisely the interruption of this dialectic as it is of every form of objectification; it is a relation in which I find myself (prior to any decision on my part) existing for the good of the other, responsible for his or her welfare. In Levinas's thinking, I experience myself (for the first time) not as a cogito but in the claim that others have on me.
What sort of claim might this be? Jean-Paul Sartre in his famous analysis of the look treats this as an event of cognition, or more exactly a reversal of cognition in which I become another's representation, part of the furniture of another's consciousness: in other words, a mere object (being looked at, like being brought under a category, is an event of dehumanization).24 Levinas maps onto this encounter another modelânot the Greek or philosophical model of knowing and being known but the Jewish or biblical model of election, the prophetic experience of being summoned out of one's place of comfort and security and placed at the disposal of others. In this situation, I can no longer comport myself as a cogito, a subject of reason whether pure or practical, a consciousness conceived in terms of concepts and intentions. Gone likewise are all the basic characters of traditional moral philosophy: the moral spectator, the self-legislating rational actor, the calculator of means and ends, the emotive self, the theorist of the right and the good, the well-formed inhabitant of moral communities. The âruin of the myth of man,â indeed. In the relation of face-to-face, Levinas says, âthe word I means here I am [me voici: see me here],â without shelter, no longer in a position of control, answerable to (and for) another (AE, 180/OTB, 114). The logical subject grasps the world conceptually (that is what the word âconceptâ means: Begriff in German derives from greifen, to grasp); being human is the reverse of this: âI am âin myselfâ through the others,â Levinas says. âThe psyche is the other in the same.âŚ. Backed up against itself, in itself because without any recourse to anything, in itself like in its skin, the self in its skin both is exposed to the exterior (which does not happen to things) and obsessed by the others in this naked exposureâ (AE, 178/OTB, 112). From a Greek standpoint (just to call it that) Levinas's thinking, as he himself put it, âis simply something dementedâ (AE, 178â79/OTB, 113):
Vulnerability, exposure to outrage, to wounding, to passivity more passive than all patience, passivity of the accusative form, trauma of accusation suffered by a hostage to the point of persecution, implicating the identity of the hostage who substitutes himself for others: all this is the self, a defecting or defeat of the ego's identity. (AE, 31/OTB, 15; my emphasis)25
Think of the cogito turned inside out and reincarnated:
It is because subjectivity is sensibilityâan exposure to others, a vulnerability and a responsibility in the proximity of the others, the one-for-the-other âŚthat a subject is of flesh and blood, a man that is hungry and eats, entrails in a skin, and thus capable of giving the bread out of his mouth, or giving his skin. (AE, 124/OTB, 77)26
Not surprisingly, in âSignatureâ Levinas gives us an autobiography without an âIâ or any self-reference: âheteronomy through and through.â27
Self-Creation
Stanley Cavell has, by contrast, what looks like a straightforwardly Greek approach to this issue: the human is not a natural kind, and in particular my humanness, my being anyone, is not a given; it has to be created (we are not beings but creatures). And after the death of God there are only two alternatives, neither of them certain of success: Either I am a cultural product like any other, woven out of the stuff or tissue of material conditions, social relations, ideological systems, family romances, the law of the father, the cultural fabric (what Martin Hollis calls a âplastic manâââa socially programmed feedback systemâ); or I am my own creation, self-authored, responsible for my own existence, whatever I am.28 Cavell affirms âthe absolute responsibility of the self to itself,â which for him is the main thesis of what he calls âEmersonian perfectionism,â where the idea of having a self entails the obligation of self-formation, freeing oneself from the repetitious inertia of social construction.29 As Cavell says, âthe move from the state of nature to the contract of society does not, after all, sufficiently sustain human lifeâ (CH, 52). Insofar as I'm simply shaped from the outside-in, I do not exist. Unless I âenact my existenceââthat is Cavell's phraseâI merely haunt the world, like a ghost.30 How to enact one's existence is not self-evidentâthere is no program, no set of spiritual exercisesâbut Cavell takes Descartes's cogito as an instance of self-authoring, which is what Emerson makes of it in his essay âSelf-Reliance,â with its idea of self-creation from within a social environment of âbugsâ and âspawn.â31 The cogito in this respect is not just an argument or an inference; it is an act that we must perform, an originary task, a necessity of existence, but this is not just solitary singing. I do not exist until I am intelligible to others on my own terms (CH, 46â47). âSelf-Relianceâ is nevertheless about how we fall short. Likewise the theme of Thoreau's Walden is that none of us is human (or, indeed, anything) yet, that the existence of the human has not yet occurred.32 The difficulty is: Who would recognize it (and how?) if and when it does occur? In fact, the question of recognition is complex and, indeed, full of uncertainties as to consequences. (We'll see in the next chapter how Cavell, among others, addresses this question.)
For some thinkers, self-recognition is what seems to matter. Jean-Paul Sartre's idea, for example, is that in modernity we are all sub- or partially human, shaped from the outside by roles, functions, positions, offices, ranks, rules, types, and ready-to-wear name tags of every kind.33 Hence the existential double bind. As Sartre says: âI am in the mode of not being what I am and of being what I am notâ (BN, 365). In this event no one is in a position to say what a human life might be.34 There is no universal concept or principle in charge here (which is all that the motto âexistence precedes essenceâ means). ButâimportantlyâSartre takes this absence of any given as a condition of freedom in which the individual, given what is possible in finite situations, faces the task of creating him or herself by way of decision and actio...