Revolts Against Humanity
Two modern opponents of humanism
Welcome readers,
This is the first installment of Ever Not Quite, a newsletter where I reflect on technology and modern culture against the prevailing tenor that has set good-faith and intellectually honest discourse into retreat. I have been sufficiently encouraged by the many good things I have seen happening on Substack to join the conversation. I am still new to this, so there is little doubt that Ever Not Quite will evolve as I find my footing here. For now, I welcome any thoughts and comments, recommendations or solicitations you may have, particularly concerning how the newsletter could be of more benefit to you.
Thank you for reading.
In the 1960s, the philosopher Hans Jonas sketched what he understood to be the principal challenge for his field in the decades that would follow. Modern thought, Jonas argued, had worked itself into what appeared to be an intractable dilemma: on the one hand, the scientific materialism that constitutes the modern worldview considers all things, including ourselves, to belong to a single undifferentiated category of matter coursing about in more-or-less predictable motions. This ontologically flat plane—on which rests the conceptual foundations of modern institutions and state policy—renders obsolete older hierarchies that had previously not only organized social and political relationships but also placed human beings in a position superior to the natural world: human beings and society now belong decidedly in the same category as the rest of nature. On the other hand, we haven’t quite been able to let go of the idea (and perhaps it would be dangerous to try) that human beings are nevertheless somehow distinct from nature, standing out against the level surface that gathers all other beings in the known universe—whether our specialness rests on the singular phenomenon of human consciousness and its capacity for reason, the complexity of the human brain, the unique concern we have with ourselves and our world, or something else altogether.
The seemingly irreconcilable split-screen that results from this discrepancy, Jonas thought, was the “metaphysical background” of the social, spiritual and philosophical problem that imbued his century.1 Nihilism, in Jonas’ appraisal, stems from the rift between ourselves and the rest of nature that followed from the discovery of modern science that the human phenomenon appears inexplicably (or, at least, without design or intention) within an otherwise homogeneous and purposeless mechanistic universe. “That only man cares”, Jonas wrote, “in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation.”2
Here is how Jonas concludes his account of this situation with some of my own clarification provided in the brackets:
The disruption between man and total reality is at the bottom of nihilism. The illogicality of the rupture, that is, of a dualism without metaphysics, makes this fact no less real, nor its seeming alternative any more acceptable: the stare at isolated selfhood, to which it condemns man, may wish to exchange itself for a monistic naturalism which, along with the rupture, would abolish the idea of man as man. Between that Scylla [the stare at isolated selfhood] and this her twin Charybdis [a monistic naturalism that eliminates the category of the ‘human’ altogether], the modern mind hovers. Whether a third road is open to it—one by which the dualistic rift can be avoided and yet enough of the dualistic insight saved to uphold the humanity of man—philosophy must find out.3
I interpret the challenge here, the development of what Jonas is calling a ‘third road’, to amount to this: can we articulate a coherent and meaningful place for humanity within the mechanistic universe described to us by our science—that most compelling and authoritative source of modern knowledge—without either allowing ourselves simply to be absorbed by and disappear into nature, nor insisting on our distinctiveness so resolutely that we end by entombing ourselves in a lonely and unbridgeable isolation from it? This challenge is not simply the negotiation of an academic or logical tightrope, but carries all the gravity and dimension of the spiritual and philosophical problem of nihilism itself—an experience which shades from an extreme of acute meaninglessness and hopelessness to what Charles Taylor has more benignly dubbed the “malaise of modernity.” In Taylor’s words, this uniquely modern anguish reveals itself as a “flat, empty, [...] multiform search for something within, or beyond [the disenchanted world], which could compensate for the meaning lost with transcendence”.4
But modern thought has done more than simply engender this impasse: the last fifty years or so have also produced several responses to the situation Jonas has described, whether or not their originators were considering the problem in the same terms with which Jonas articulated it. The Revolt Against Humanity, a short new book by the poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch, offers a most helpful intellectual taxonomy to the two major movements that Kirsch interprets as replies to the problem of modern nihilism. Rather than beginning with Jonas, however, Kirsch frames these movements as responses to the nihilistic situation articulated by Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century. It was Nietzsche, Kirsch reminds us, who perceived as early as 1887—the better part of a century before Jonas—that the modern world’s incredulity towards the idea of transcendence intimated that “the history of the next two centuries” would see the “the advent of nihilism”.5 While Nietzsche had his own prescription for this quintessentially modern malady, Jonas’ diagnosis of the nihilistic situation brings clarity to the problem by suggesting two possible paths that can be understood as templates for what would later coalesce into the two movements that form the subject of Kirsch’s book.
The first movement is what Kirsch calls Anthropocene antihumanism (often shortened simply to antihumanism), an extreme form of environmentalism composed of a family of views that share the aspiration of seeing human beings—either in literal or only theoretical terms—disappear in order to allow beings of other kinds to flourish as they did prior to the total human hegemony that has characterized the last few millennia. This group views the Anthropocene (the last 10,000 years or so) as a brutal aberration from the dynamic and delicate command of natural processes over the earth. Rather than seeking the middle course proposed by Jonas, this group of writers and theorists pursues one of the two extremes Jonas could not countenance: a naturalism so thoroughgoing that we ourselves are absorbed back into nature, relinquishing the starring planetary role which has come so totally to define our self-image and consenting to resolve ourselves back into the elemental background from which we sprang. Motivated by anxieties about climate, human population, and the general despoliation of the natural world, Anthropocene antihumanists range from human-skeptical environmentalists like E. O. Wilson, David Wallace-Wells, Dougland Hine, and Paul Kingsnorth to more extreme and literal-minded die-hards like David Benatar and Patricia MacCormack, who, in promoting some form of voluntary human extinction, have elevated misanthropy into theory, and put it to work in an eccentric brand of (anti-)social advocacy.
But among the more interesting representatives of Kirsch’s antihumanist crowd are philosophers like Graham Harmon and Timothy Morton, who attempt to reconceptualize the philosophical account of a ‘thing’ from a more traditional mode that, one way or another, prioritizes its relation to human beings to one that embraces both artificial and natural objects—including human beings themselves—with complete impartiality. While Harmon and Morton recognize much the same dilemma that Jonas had pointed out, they diverge from Jonas on the question of how the disjunction between human beings and the rest of nature might be handled. We can hear Harmon striking a note similar to the dichotomy articulated by Jonas in the passage quoted above in a blog post from 2011:
On the one hand, scientism insists that human consciousness is nothing special, and should be naturalized just like everything else. On the other hand, it also wants to preserve knowledge as a special kind of relation to the world quite different from the relations that raindrops and lizards have to the world [...] For all their gloating over the fact that people are pieces of matter just like everything else, they also want to claim that the very status of that utterance is somehow special. For them, raindrops know nothing and lizards know very little, and some humans are more knowledgeable than others. This is only possible because thought is given a unique ability to negate and transcend immediate experience, which inanimate matter is never allowed to do in such theories, of course. In short, for all its noir claims that the human doesn’t exist, it elevates the structure of human thought to the ontological pinnacle.6
Against this attempt to have it both ways, the movement which has come to be called ‘object-oriented-ontology’ (or, more succinctly, ‘OOO’) advances a much more ecologically democratic vision. Unlike Jonas, Harmon’s objective here is not to point out a middle course, but to rethink our very ontology in such a way that human beings are given no more precedence, and have no more special relationship to the world, than do raindrops and lizards. As Morton puts it, “it is indeed on the terrain of ontology that many of the urgent ecological battles need to be fought.” Here is a bit more on the ecological and political program of OOO according to Morton:
We are not going to try to bust through human finitude, but to place that finitude in a universe of trillions of finitudes, as many as there are things—because a thing just is a rift between what it is and how it appears, for any entity whatsoever, not simply for that special entity called the (human) subject. What ecological thought must do, then, is unground the human by forcing it back onto the ground, which is to say, standing on a gigantic object called Earth inside a gigantic entity called biosphere.7
In other words, the disappearance of the human being into nature—an outcome from which Jonas had recoiled—is the only way modern scientific materialism can be made to be consistent with itself, and also the only viable solution to the ecological crises that have been brought on by the long legacy of human-centered ontologies.
The second contemporary movement with which Kirsch deals are the technology-exalting transhumanists, who aspire to redeem modern human isolation from nature not by means of a practical or conceptual reabsorption back into the economy of nature, but much the opposite: by transforming and empowering ourselves by technological means against the givenness of nature to realize our self-given ends in ways that, however novel and extreme they may seem, are already largely foreseeable. Transhumanist manipulation of the human body and mind extends from the superficial and commonplace (wearing eyeglasses meets the minimum definition) to such profound and technologically sophisticated interventions upon the human person as artificial limbs, neural implants, and various procedures undertaken for the radical extension of the lifespan.
Jonas’ stare at isolated selfhood to which we seemed to have been condemned by the modern nihilistic situation may at first appear only to be exacerbated by a modern technological program that relentlessly pursues human ends without sanction by any external law, natural or divine. But the most far-sighted strains of the transhumanist movement hope to resolve the divide between human and nature first by having us merge so completely with our machines that any distinction between our biological and bionic selves no longer makes any sense. In the movement’s furthest speculative reaches, transhumanist eschatology has human, machine and nature ultimately melding into one, as bionic and artificially intelligent augmentations of human biology extend into the cosmos, requisitioning its matter and energy and culminating in a god-like and barely-imaginable universal superintelligence. Or some similarly grand sequence of events.
Although Kirsch doesn’t mention it, one of the earliest and most succinctly imaginative examples of this can be found in Isaac Asimov’s 1956 short story “The Last Question”, a transhumanist source-text in which the progress of human technological advancement culminates at the end of the story in the creation of a God capable of speaking life back into an entropically run-down universe. The key difference from the biblical account is that Asimov’s God creates the universe not in the beginning, but in the end—and only after first being set into motion by human technological ambition. Thus, notwithstanding the specifics of how and what exactly the supposed sequence of events might be, I would suggest that transhumanism in its maximalist form imagines that, pursued to its conclusion, the technological enterprise has the power finally to re-spiritualize our scientifically disenchanted cosmic endowment and to overcome the human alienation from nature that vexed Jonas.
Dealing as he does with two groups who are motivated by such disparate considerations and also have such diverging visions for the future, Kirsch seems to be aware that his book’s premise teeters on the brink of incoherence. But while these two groups oppose each other in many profound ways—the technological innovations that transhumanists root for, to take just one point of contrast, may never be compatible with antihumanists’ radical environmentalism—what joins them and supplies enough common ground to hold the book together is that each cheers for humanity, at least in anything resembling its current form, to come to an end. In both of its forms, Kirsch writes in his opening chapter, the revolt against humanity “is a spiritual development of the first order, a new way of making sense of the nature and purpose of human existence”.8
This means that, whatever we may think of the likelihood of any of these predictions coming true—to say nothing of the desirability of these outcomes—the cultural and political significance of posthumanism (a broader term with which I name both Anthropocene antihumanism and transhumanism) is already coming into view. Both groups are motivated by a vision of the good that takes for granted no divine or transcendent sanction—especially one that would affirm the centrality of human beings as such, either in the cosmos or on the earth—underwriting human endeavor. If the problem of nihilism that emerged with the scientific materialism of the modern age was a crisis of meaning, these posthumanisms manage to salvage meaning while also affirming the scientific worldview of which we are the inheritors: But that recovery of meaning comes at a grave price. Comparing Anthropocene antihumanism and transhumanism to some of the emerging traditionalist and post-liberal voices on the political right, Kirsch writes:
The revolt against humanity has a great future ahead of it because it makes a similar appeal to people who are committed to science and reason, yet yearn for the clarity and purpose of an absolute moral imperative. It says that we can move the planet, maybe even the universe, in the direction of the good, on one condition—that we forfeit our own existence as a species. In this way, the question of why humanity exists is given a convincing yet wholly immanent answer. Following the logic of sacrifice, we give our life meaning by giving it up.9
I consider the prize for meeting Jonas’ challenge still to be awaiting its rightful claimant, and I suspect Kirsch would too. The third road which Jonas sought lies somewhere between the two horns of the dilemma that seem to rend modern thought: either the total human assimilation into nature, or absolute isolation from it. For those who are not enamored with either of these modern programs for human abolition, it remains to be clear-eyed about how these two movements stand to influence culture and politics in the coming decades. “[T]he accuracy of a prophecy is one thing”, Kirsch warns, “its significance another.”10 “Profound civilizational changes begin”, he continues, “with a revolution in how people think about themselves and their destiny. The revolt against humanity has the power to grow into such a revolution, with unpredictable consequences for politics, economics, technology, and culture.”
The glaring differences between Anthropocene antihumanists and transhumanists need not stand in the way of a substantial and lasting cultural and political coalition that aims to realize some of the goals of posthumanism. Kirsch concludes:
This leaves humanists in a bind when it comes to the revolt against humanity. Transhumanism and antihumanism attack the very achievements that humanists cherish; neither literature nor liberalism can flourish in a posthuman future. [...] But attempting to preserve the past by setting an arbitrary limit to progress, insisting that any further change would upset the natural order of things, is the classic posture of the reactionary. It is fundamentally incompatible with the principles humanists claim to honor—freedom, reason, moral autonomy.11
This seems to me the next step in this conversation: how might a political and cultural alliance among the various posthumanisms take shape, and on what terms? And how might those who consider themselves to belong to that capacious and difficult-to-define category of humanists respond?
This is an appropriately provocative place to leave this first post. With this as a starting point, I hope to say something about the third humanistic road in installments to follow. Even when this framework is not mentioned explicitly, it will continue to sound in the background of my thinking in posts to come.
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, pg. 232
Ibid., 233
Ibid., 234 (Italics mine)
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, pg. 302
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Morton, Hyperobjects, 18
Adam Kirsch, The Revolt Against Humanity, pg. 12-13
Ibid., 90
Ibid., 85
Ibid., 96