On Ceasing to Be Human - Softcover

Bruns, Gerald L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804772096 ISBN 13: 9780804772099

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

The philosopher Stanley Cavell once asked, "Can a human being be free of human nature?" On Ceasing to Be Human examines philosophical as well as literary texts and contexts, in which various senses of Cavell's question might be explored and developed. During the past thirty or so years, the very concept of "being human" has been called into question within such fields as cybernetics, animal-rights theory, analytic philosophy (neurophilosophy in particular). This book examines these issues, but its main concern is the link between freedom and nonidentity that Cavell's question implies, and which turns out to be a major concern among the thinkers Bruns takes up in this book: Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Jacques Derrida. Each of these is, in different ways, a philosopher of the "singular" for whom the singular cannot be reduced to concepts, categories, distinctions, or the rule of identity.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gerald L. Bruns is William P. & Hazel B. White Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent books are On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy (2006) and The Material of Poetry (2005).

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On Ceasing to Be Human

By Gerald L. Bruns

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7209-9

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................ixAbbreviations.......................................................................xiPrologue: On the Freedom of Non-Identity............................................11 Otherwise Than Human (Toward Sovereignty).........................................132 What Is Human Recognition? (On Zones of Indistinction)............................313 Desubjectivation (Michel Foucault's Aesthetics of Experience).....................474 Becoming Animal (Some Simple Ways)................................................615 Derrida's Cat (Who Am I?).........................................................79Notes...............................................................................99Works Cited.........................................................................119Index...............................................................................133

Chapter One

Otherwise Than Human (TOWARDS OVEREIGNTY)

"Man Is a History and Has No Other Nature"

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)-these 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 "gods and mortals," easily replaceable by more up-to-date fictions ("We are all cyborgs now," says Donna Haraway: anthropology gives way to anthropotechnology). The French philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard puts it neatly when he says that in our time the task of reason is "to make philosophy inhuman," as if this were to be a kind of second-order secularization. In the introduction to a collection of his essays entitled The Inhuman, Lyotard frames two questions: "What if human beings, in humanism's sense, were in the process of becoming inhuman? And what if what is 'proper' to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?"

What could these questions mean? Possibly no more than what social constructionists mean when they cite Michel Foucault's famous line-"Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end." Or perhaps they mean whatever eliminative materialists mean when they say that the concepts of folk psychology-consciousness, desire, feeling, self, and so on-are scientifically useless and should be got rid of. The philosopher Cora Diamond says-and thinks of herself as alone in contesting the idea-that 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. Rather like madness (in its old, pre-clinical sense). But possibly the "end of man" 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. "Can a human being be free of human nature?" 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. As Daniel Dennett says, for all you know "some of your best friends may be zombies."

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. 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 "there 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." Recall Hegel's account of the violence that consciousness inflicts on itself in order to transform itself into Spirit (Geist)-a task that requires it to rid itself of everything that is not itself, including perhaps its human embodiment. After all, what happens when the task of Aufhebung is finished? In his lectures during the 1930s on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Alexandre Kojve extracted from Hegel a famous thesis: "At the end of history man disappears"-but not to worry, he adds in a footnote, this is not "a 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-called-that is Action negating the given, and Error, or in general the Subject opposed to the Object." At the end of history we are at last free to enjoy our animal satisfactions.

But what is "Man properly so-called," especially since he has begun to replicate himself? In an essay entitled "Machines as Persons?" Christopher Cherry writes: "It 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." Whenever they arrive, before as much as after, the major question will be: How should we treat these imitation humans? "The pressures to call them 'persons,'" Cherry says, "will be immense" (23)-and (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 better-since the term "inhuman" is a moral concept that refers to acts of cruelty, of which animals are, according to tradition, incapable-ahuman; but who is "we"?). 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, "the direct descendents of ... self-replicating robots," that is, micromolecular systems of a certain complexity. Dennett would side with Hilary Putnam's argument that the question of whether machine-persons are in some sense conscious or alive "calls for a decision rather than a discovery," and that now would be a good time (but of course he proposed this more than thirty years ago) to raise the question, "Should robots have civil rights?" (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.)

Other than Me

Would these "rights" be the Rights of Man? The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas remarks that the concept of the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804772096
• ISBN 13: 9780804772099
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 151
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande