Posthumanism
Posthumanism or post-humanism is an idea in continental philosophy and critical theory responding to the presence of anthropocentrism in 21st-century thought.
Overview
In general, posthumanism looks closely at how humans relate to other creatures, technology, and the world around them.This way of thinking can lead to a more detailed and accurate idea of what it means to be human. It involves rethinking old ideas about right and wrong and core beliefs to recognize that humans are connected to all life and systems, not just other people.Posthumanism posits that we must see that humans are tied to the nonhuman such as plants, animals, ecosystems, habitats and technology. This includes our likewise animal nature, our connection to the environment, and the tools and extensions we create. It also points out that we need to develop a new sense of care, duty, and modesty because nonhuman elements are increasingly seen as having an active role in the world. Afterall, the aim of posthumanism is not to escape reality in the future or rely only on technology. Instead, it seeks a deeper, more complex understanding of our present situation and where we belong within it.
Challenges for Posthumanism
Posthumanism is a new way of thinking that arose because traditional views separating human from nonhuman are breaking down. For example, over time, every argument for human exceptionalism has disintegrated in the face of cognitively creative animal behavior. Posthumanism has emerged as a critical framework. It directly questions the primacy of the human such as in anthropocentrism, species-based discrimination such as in speciesism, and life-controlling structures such as in biopolitics. This conceptual shift has tangible effects, informing practices like bioart and digital literature, and causes institutional reform across the life sciences and theoretical disciplines. As our worldview is revised by digitalization, globalization, and technological augmentation, posthumanism offers the necessary alternative viewpoints to address the significant uncertainty that current technological, economic, and ecological challenges pose to human, nonhuman, and planetary existence.Philosophical posthumanism
Philosopher Theodore Schatzki suggests there are two varieties of posthumanism of the philosophical kind:One, which he calls "objectivism", tries to counter the overemphasis of the subjective, or intersubjective, that pervades humanism, and emphasises the role of the nonhuman agents, whether they be animals and plants, or computers or other things, because "Humans and nonhumans, it proclaims, codetermine one another", and also claims "independence of objects from human activity and conceptualization".
A second posthumanist agenda is "the prioritization of practices over individuals ", which, they say, constitute the individual.
There may be a third kind of posthumanism, propounded by the philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd. Though he did not label it "posthumanism", he made an immanent critique of humanism, and then constructed a philosophy that presupposed neither humanist, nor scholastic, nor Greek thought but started with a different religious ground motive. Dooyeweerd prioritized law and meaningfulness as that which enables humanity and all else to exist, behave, live, occur, etc. "Meaning is the being of all that has been created", Dooyeweerd wrote, "and the nature even of our selfhood". Both human and nonhuman alike function subject to a common law-side, which is diverse, composed of a number of distinct law-spheres or aspects. The temporal being of both human and non-human is multi-aspectual; for example, both plants and humans are bodies, functioning in the biotic aspect, and both computers and humans function in the formative and lingual aspect, but humans function in the aesthetic, juridical, ethical and faith aspects too. The Dooyeweerdian version is able to incorporate and integrate both the objectivist version and the practices version, because it allows nonhuman agents their own subject-functioning in various aspects and places emphasis on aspectual functioning.
Emergence of philosophical posthumanism
, theorist in the academic study of literature, once stated: "Humanism may be coming to an end as humanism transforms itself into something one must helplessly call posthumanism." This view predates most currents of posthumanism which have developed over the late 20th century in somewhat diverse, but complementary, domains of thought and practice. For example, Hassan is a known scholar whose theoretical writings expressly address postmodernity in society. Beyond postmodernist studies, posthumanism has been developed and deployed by various cultural theorists, often in reaction to problematic inherent assumptions within humanistic thought and Enlightenment thought.Theorists who both complement and contrast Hassan include Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, cyberneticists such as Gregory Bateson, Warren McCullouch, Norbert Wiener, and thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Cary Wolfe, Elaine Graham, N. Katherine Hayles, Benjamin H. Bratton, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Francesca Ferrando, Peter Sloterdijk, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, Timothy Morton, and Douglas Kellner. Among the theorists are philosophers, such as Robert Pepperell, who have written about a "posthuman condition", which is often substituted for the term posthumanism.
Posthumanism differs from classical humanism by relegating humanity back to one of many natural species, thereby rejecting any claims founded on anthropocentric dominance. According to this claim, humans have no inherent rights to destroy nature or set themselves above it in ethical considerations a priori. Human knowledge is also reduced to a less controlling position, previously seen as the defining aspect of the world. Human rights exist on a spectrum with animal rights and posthuman rights. The limitations and fallibility of human intelligence are confessed, even though it does not imply abandoning the rational tradition of humanism.
Proponents of a posthuman discourse, suggest that innovative advancements and emerging technologies have transcended the traditional model of the human, as proposed by Descartes among others associated with philosophy of the Enlightenment. Posthumanistic views were also found in the works of Shakespeare. In contrast to humanism, the discourse of posthumanism seeks to redefine the boundaries surrounding modern philosophical understanding of the human. Posthumanism represents an evolution of thought beyond that of the contemporary social boundaries and is predicated on the seeking of truth within a postmodern context. In so doing, it rejects previous attempts to establish "anthropological universals" that are imbued with anthropocentric assumptions. Recently, critics have sought to describe the emergence of posthumanism as a critical moment in modernity, arguing for the origins of key posthuman ideas in modern fiction, in Nietzsche, or in a modernist response to the crisis of historicity.
Although Nietzsche's philosophy has been characterized as posthumanist, Foucault placed posthumanism within a context that differentiated humanism from Enlightenment thought. According to Foucault, the two existed in a state of tension: as humanism sought to establish norms while Enlightenment thought attempted to transcend all that is material, including the boundaries that are constructed by humanistic thought. Drawing on the Enlightenment's challenges to the boundaries of humanism, posthumanism rejects the various assumptions of human dogmas and takes the next step by attempting to change the nature of thought about what it means to be human. This requires not only decentering the human in multiple discourses but also examining those discourses to uncover inherent humanistic, anthropocentric, normative notions of humanness and the concept of the human.
Hayles's theory
Posthumanistic discourse aims to open up spaces to examine what it means to be human and critically question the concept of "the human" in light of current cultural and historical contexts. In her book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles, writes about the struggle between different versions of the posthuman as it continually co-evolves alongside intelligent machines. Such coevolution, according to some strands of the posthuman discourse, allows one to extend their subjective understandings of real experiences beyond the boundaries of embodied existence. According to Hayles's view of posthuman, often referred to as "technological posthumanism", visual perception and digital representations thus paradoxically become ever more salient. Even as one seeks to extend knowledge by deconstructing perceived boundaries, it is these same boundaries that make knowledge acquisition possible. The use of technology in a contemporary society is thought to complicate this relationship.Hayles discusses the translation of human bodies into information in order to illuminate how the boundaries of our embodied reality have been compromised in the current age and how narrow definitions of humanness no longer apply. Because of this, according to Hayles, posthumanism is characterized by a loss of subjectivity based on bodily boundaries. This strand of posthumanism, including the changing notion of subjectivity and the disruption of ideas concerning what it means to be human, is often associated with Donna Haraway's concept of the cyborg. However, Haraway has distanced herself from posthumanistic discourse due to other theorists' use of the term to promote utopian views of technological innovation to extend the human biological capacity.
While posthumanism is a broad and complex ideology, it has relevant implications today and for the future. It attempts to redefine social structures without inherently humanly or even biological origins, but rather in terms of social and psychological systems where consciousness and communication could potentially exist as unique disembodied entities. Questions subsequently emerge with respect to the current use and the future of technology in shaping human existence, as do new concerns with regards to language, symbolism, subjectivity, phenomenology, ethics, justice and creativity.