Rethinking Humanism An interdisciplinary conference

Rethinking Humanism
An interdisciplinary conference
Thursday 28 June – Friday 29 June 2012
ABSTRACTS
Panel 1: The origins of Western thinking about humanity
1. Elizabeth Pender, Classics, University of Leeds. ‘Human and divine reasoning from
the pre-Socratics to Plato’.
The boundary between ‘divine’ and ‘human’ is contested in many areas of ancient
Greek thought. In considering the power of rational enquiry, three philosophers offer
specific challenges to this boundary: the youth’s encounter with the ‘Daughters of the
Sun’ in Parmenides’ vision of logic, the ‘daimon’ of Empedocles, and Plato’s
‘charioteer of the soul’. While none of these thinkers can be said to be ‘humanist’,
their demand for scientific enquiry to push beyond conventional limits is relevant to
the history of humanism: showing how early Greek philosophy theologised human
reason.
2. Stephen Halliwell, Classics, University of St Andrews. ‘The human measure: the
Greeks and the problem of humanism’.
Most forms of humanism and neo-humanism have appealed to ancient Greek culture
as a touchstone of value. Moreover, the institutionalisation of classical scholarship as
a university discipline from the early nineteenth century onwards was in part an
expression of one particular form of humanism: German philhellenism. But since
Nietzsche’s radical critique of the kind of scholarship in which he had himself been
trained, perceptions of the Greeks have been caught in a conflict between humanist
and anti-humanist perspectives. This paper will examine some of the key issues
thrown up by this conflict.
3. George Boys-Stones, Classics, University of Durham. ‘Challenges to humanism in
later ancient philosophy’.
Humanist values are embodied in both the systems and the institutional structures and
practices of philosophy during the Hellenistic age (3rd – 1st Centuries BC); but one of
the consequences of the ‘decentralisation’ of philosophy at the end of this period was
a regrouping of identity around ‘authoritative’, and ultimately ‘divinely inspired’,
texts. Is it coincidence that strongly hierarchical models of thought predominate in
this new environment – the grounding for physics, ethics and anthropology now
regularly sought outside the human sphere?
Panel 2: Studia Humanitatis: Humanism versus Renaissance
1. Anna Lesiuk-Cummings, Mount Angel Seminary, St. Benedict, Oregon, USA. ‘The
humanist subject and its others’.
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While notoriously incompatible in their general understanding of Renaissance
humanism, Kristeller (the proponent of a narrow philological-erudite definition of the
movement) and Garin (the champion of an all-encompassing notion of humanism as a
method/philosophy) agree that its most enduring ‘contribution’ belonged to the
anthropological order. That idea that Renaissance bore a new concept of man has
been a sort of a staple of scholarly reflection on the period since Michelet and
Burckhardt and only recently has been seriously questioned (by Stéphane Toussaint).
An important element in this prevailing interpretation is the traditional reading (again
dating back to Burckhardt) of Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio as a quasi-manifesto of
the Renaissance, bringing forth in a more explicit manner the ideas already present in
both theory and practice of the Italian humanists. Combined with the standard
understanding of the Renaissance as the birthplace of modernity, it has often created
the temptation to read into Pico’s Oratio radically modern notions of subjectivity.
Nowhere is it clearer than in Cassirer’s The Individual and the Cosmos in
Renaissance Society, in which Pico’s piece however, is overshadowed in its role of
the incarnation of the Renaissance spirit by Charles de Bovelles’ De Sapiente. Finally,
although less often analyzed, Juan Vives’ Fabula de homine is sometimes interpreted
as one more case in point. In the present paper I am offering a reading of Pico’s
Oratio, Bovelles’ De Sapiente and Vives’s Fabula in which the central question is the
perspective they offer on the subject-object rapport. I maintain that these works
display a far greater openness to the otherness of what’s beyond the subjective than it
has been heretofore acknowledged.
2. Maude Vanhaelen, University of Warwick. ‘Marsilio Ficino: The humanist
philosopher’.
TBA.
3. Will Bain, University of Aberystwyth. ‘Renaissance, Reformation, and the road to
Westphalia’.
The Peace of Westhalia is widely understood to mark the consolidation, if not
inauguration, of the modern states-system. It was then, so the traditional narrative
tells us, that the once grand institutions of Latin Christendom collapsed, once and for
all, making way for a world composed of sovereign states operating in a condition of
anarchy. Fundamental to this narrative is the claim that Westphalia represents an
epochal change, ‘break-point’ or ‘rupture’, which sharply distinguishes medieval and
modern. The Renaissance and Reformation are typically portrayed as being at the
root of this story of epochal change. For it was the Renaissance, steeped in humanist
learning, which turned men’s heads to new ways of thinking man’s place in the
universe and his lot on Earth; and it was the Reformation, also aided by humanist
learning, which loosened the grip of ecclesiastical authority. Humanist
achievements—a vigorous individuality, a revival of classical culture, and advances
in scientific learning—vanquished scholastic ‘triviality’. This paper challenges the
veracity of this narrative, which is given to the misleading but pervasive claim that
humanist thought augured a divorce of faith and reason, and the emergence of a
genuinely secular world. The paper will proceeding in arguing that the transition
from medieval to modern, and hence its bearing on modern international relations,
can be meaningfully described as change within an inherited continuity. By this I
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mean: medieval theological ideas were utilised by Renaissance and Reformation
thinkers for diverse and often antagonistic ends, and yet they disclose an underlying
unity grounded in a common theological orientation.
Panel 3: Enlightenment humanism
1. Karen Green, Monash University, Melbourne. ‘Humanity and freedom of the will
in Catharine Macaulay’s Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth and Letters on
Education’.
The eight volumes of Catharine Macaulay’s A History of England from the Accession
of James I. to that of the Brunswick Line and her political pamphlets were important
contributions to the literature on republicanism, human rights and political legitimacy
during the second half of the eighteenth century. Her Letters on Education made a
profound impression on Mary Wollstonecraft, and its influence can be traced
throughout the latter’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. This paper outlines
Macaulay’s conception of human agency and the relationship between her discussion
of freedom of the will, and her defence of political rights and democratic institutions.
Macaulay’s perfectionist and intellectualist ideas led her to criticize Hume and Burke,
and to hail the French Revolution with delight, in her response to Burke’s Reflections.
It will be argued that, from a contemporary perspective, the perfectionist and
intellectualist underpinnings of her conception of humanity are difficult to sustain,
and her concept of human freedom is problematic, yet without these metaphysical
underpinnings her political radicalism would have been impossible to justify. At first
blush, this has interesting but troubling implications both for democratic theory and
feminism.
2. Eva Ulrike Pirker, Freiburg University. ‘Whose humanism? Humanist discourse,
the science of the ‘human’, and radical critique around the turn of the 19th century’.
The return of humanism in present-day culture and parlance is conspicuous. On a
superficial level, the term suggests a cosmopolitan openness and tolerance. This blurs
the fact that it has habitually gained currency in contexts marked by structures and
practices of inclusion and exclusion, arguably even depending on these structures and
practices. Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century England/Britain is a case in point:
That the humanist discourse should be at its peak during a time of heavy
industrialisation and a sustainable reorganisation of society (in terms of the formation
of new class stratifications as well as the exploitation of workforces in national and
colonial settings) makes an interrogation of its implications with regard to other
currents of thought necessary: Particularly revealing are connections, synergies,
convergences between humanist thought, the doctrine of liberalism and scientific
discourses aimed at differentiating between human ‘kinds’. Drawing on the writings
of one of the most radical and fervent critics of a quasi-humanist discourse, William
Blake, this paper inquires into the questions: Whose humanism is it that we encounter
in British and European enlightenment thinking? On what terms could this discourse
gain currency? Who qualified as ‘human’ in the humanist discourse of the
eighteenth/early nineteenth century? And who were humanism’s ‘others’?
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3. Nigel Wood, Loughborough University, UK. ‘Adam Smith’s thought from 1759
(his Theory of Moral Sentiments) to 1776 (his Wealth of Nations)’.
Any attempt to draw a clear line of development in Adam Smith’s thought from 1759
(his Theory of Moral Sentiments) and 1776 (his Wealth of Nations) actually obscures
several areas of inner debate about personal responsibility and social accountability;
Wealth of Nations is more persuasively regarded as an attempt to bridge
apparently alternative theories of humane identity in the one work. His sense of the
‘invisible hand’ lends social pressure a large role in economic development, yet this
was an idea that Smith often felt uneasy about and dramatises a salient difference
between his own theories and those of his early mentors, Hutcheson and Hume.
Panel 4: Religious humanism
1. Sarah Macmillen, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh.’The sceptical or religious
humanism of Moby Dick’.
Building on Liquete (1991) this paper argues that Melville’s Moby Dick emphasizes a
quasi-skeptical and religious humanism in response to both the terror and unmanifestation of God: ‘God, as life, may consist in that void which man must fill
every day’ (57). Melville’s theology of the whale will be discussed in combination
with phenomenological literature addressing the ‘surfacing’ of the Protestant-Judaic
(via Exodus 33) partial manifestations of the semi-revealed God in Moby Dick’s
‘spirit spout’. The partial manifestations of the whale are perhaps the way in which
God hides himself from the sceptic—namely, the presence is felt through absence, or
the void. What concerns Melville, then is that we find comfort in living as ‘humanly’
(Liquete 1991, 57) as possible, for ‘thus hits the universal thump’ and camaraderie is
what is left, as exhibited in Queequeg and Pip’s relationship. The paper will also
address the dimensions of sceptical versus religious humanism, arguing ultimately
that Melville championed the heart (religious-communal intimations) over against the
head (pure skepticism). Supporting this thesis, Melville stated in a letter to
Hawthorne (June 1851), defining one of the misfortunes of modernization and
rationalization, ‘cultivation of the brain eats out the heart’ and ‘I’d rather be a fool
with a heart than Jupiter Olympus with his head’.
2. Laurens ten Kate, University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht (paper); Willie van der
Merwe, University of Amsterdam (responding paper).’Posthumanism between
religion and secularity: Taylor, Nancy’.
The recent heated discussions concerning religious fundamentalism, public religious
symbols and rituals, and the relation between religious custom and democracy,
illustrate the fact that modern western societies maintain a complex and often
contradictory relation to religion. This is all the more true for humanism, the world
view that has become and still is the leading cultural, ethical and existential
framework of these societies. In our view, ‘posthumanism’ involves, among other
things, a rethinking of the relation between humanism and religion, between
humanness and spirituality, between immanent and transcendent beliefs.
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In this twofold presentation (paper and response), we want to explore an
important feature of the ‘posthuman condition’, that of a certain crisis in the paradigm
of secularity and secularization. Our aim is to contribute to a new, ‘posthumanist’
understanding of secularity, beyond its classic definition captured in the idea of
modernity’s ongoing emancipation and liberation from religion.
We will do so by discussing two prominent and influential thinkers in this
field: the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and his elaborate investigation into the
‘immanent frame’ of contemporary secular and humanist existence (esp. in his A
Secular Age, 2007), and the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and his remarkable
project of a ‘deconstruction of monotheism’ (esp. in his Dis-enclosure, 2008).
Whereas Taylor focuses on the possibilities for humanism to ‘design’ its own, secular
practices of spirituality, Nancy concentrates on the ambiguous persistence within
secular modernity of the so-called monotheistic legacy, thereby critically exploring
unexpected, ‘atheist’ features in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
We will compare both thinkers by ‘testing’ their re-treatments of secularity
and religion on a concrete level, taking as an example the way historical humanism
and monotheism share a preference for an ethics of authenticity, of an individual gift
of and care of the self, leading to self-abandonment as well as to self-determination. A
simple expression of this ethics may be found in the Christian ritual of the confession;
does humanism know similar practices of self-exposure? Or is this one of the future
challenges of ‘posthumanism’?
3. William Desmond, University of Louvain. ‘The Measure that is Beyond Measure:
Being Human between Ethics and Religion’
The human being has been said to be the measure of all things, by Protagoras most
famously in the ancient world. But even when not so explicitly stated in modernity,
such a view constitutes part of the open secret of the modern project. Supposing that
the human being were the measure of all things other in finite creation, one must still
ask if the human being is the measure of himself or herself. Is there something about
being human that exceeds measure, evident in our claim to be the measure of all
things? Does something exceeding measure emerge with the human being claiming to
be the measure? I will explore such questions, especially in so far as they point
towards the equivocal boundary between the ethical and the religious where the
human claim to be the measure is put under most severe stress.
Panel 5: non-Western humanism
1. Ronald Stade, Malmö University, Sweden. ‘Human incapability: Life before and
after eccentricity’.
The motif of mythical otherworlds appears frequently in the human record.
Otherworlds can be stories about beforetime orders or events, for example in the
genre of origin myths. They can also be mirror images of how an existing world order
is perceived, in which case the otherworld becomes a counter-world. As such it is
usually a projection of fragmented desires and an appetite for wholeness and closure.
Thus, counter-worlds betray something important about the worlds we inhabit: the
inversion of normality makes visible what is taken to be normal. The Land of
Cockaigne is a counter-world, which has served both as a moral tale and a dream of
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ultimate fulfilment. The myth of Cockaigne challenges bourgeois notions of human
nature with their focus on capability as action and reflection. Three types of humanist
essentialism – the natural rights paradigm, the capability approach and relational
ontology – can be contrasted with subaltern fantasies of Cockaigne. The question that
arises from such an exercise is whether the ‘eccentric position’ (Helmuth Plessner),
that is, reflection and self-consciousness, defines what is human and what is not.
From this question follow two further questions: What is eccentricity to humanist
essentialism? What is humanism if it is not essentialist?
2. Hayder Al-Mohammad, University of Southampton. ‘Being-alone-in-the-world: a
story of a kidnapping in Basra.’
Plato’s parable of the cave exemplifies the movement by which the philosopher turns
away from shadows and darkness to confront the light of reality and reason itself.
What if turning to darkness, however, is not seen as a deficient mode of inquiry or
being? What if in darkness, loneliness, and interiority different registers of human
truth and being dwell or emerge? In 2009 a friend of mine, Jabar, was kidnapped in
Iraq. In this talk I recount some of the stories Jabar told after his release of how he
attempted to block the world around him; how he hid tightly against the dark corner
of the room where he would remain captive for a week, and the freedom, terror and
hope which existed somehow both within the space of his captivity and outside it.
3. Charlotte Bruckermann, University of Oxford. ‘The unhomely interior of working
life projects’.
This paper seeks to break down the demarcation between work and life through the
prism of temporality in the home. While temporality is often seen as the result of
internalizing economic, social or environmental factors, taking into account the
interiority from which humans create their life projects questions this one-way, causal
process. Turning to the life of a woman in a rural north-central Chinese home, this
paper traces both her ethical life project and its enactment through everyday tasks in
the home as she works on behalf of others. Following a remark by E.P. Thompson
(1967) on how women’s time within the home ‘attends to other human tides’, the
ethical implications of orienting work towards others will be explored. In doing so,
work done on behalf of others cannot be reduced to a functional field of reciprocity,
but emerges as part of ethical life projects in which we are both a part of and apart
from each other.
Panel 6: Humanism and sustainable development
This panel aims at situating the field of Sustainable Development studies firmly
within the realm of the Humanities. Sustainable Development emerged as a field of
practice from the merging of interests and actions of the environmental and the social
justice movements. Over the past thirty years, debates on sustainability have shifted
from an exclusive concern with political actions to protect the environment narrowly
defined as ‘the natural world’, to the acknowledgment of the impossibility to separate
natural issues from human ones, to a more recent awareness that any long-term
strategy for the sustainability of the Earth needs to both address the role of beliefs and
values in people’s environmental behaviour, and the critical analysis of the economic,
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social, and humanistic project that lays at the core of this crisis (Orr 2002; Speth
2008; Assadourian 2010). As the global ecological crisis accelerates at an
unprecedented rates, and despite the huge Governmental and private investments over
the past 5 years (IPCC 4th report, the Stern Report, Millennium Development Goals),
there is an increase awareness within the field of Sustainable Development that the
transition required to more sustainable societies in the North of the world can be
achieved only in the context of a major change and reorientation of lifestyles;
consumer patterns; models of behaviour and values; modes of engaging with one
another and societal values.
An essential part of this ‘new’ thinking is the explicit acknowledgement for the need
of a deep change of the kind Albert Einstein was referring to when he said that the
same manner of thinking that created problems cannot solve them.1 Scholars like
Leopold, founding father of land ethics; cultural historian and theologian Berry, but
also renown economists like Ehrlich, Kennedy and Korten explicitly state that the
environmental crisis is indeed a spiritual crisis that demands humanity to develop a
new understanding of its existence on Earth, and that the transition to sustainability
must seriously pay attention to the realm of consciousness (cf. Orr 2002; Speth 2008).
Can we thinking of Sustainability as ‘the arts of longevity’2? If so, it means we need
to think of society, nature and the economy in radical different terms in ways that
challenge deeply the paradigm of economic growth and its concomitant praise of
individualism and consumerism, as well as its manner and strategies of intervention
upon the world. Sustainability-as-Longevity calls for a radical change in the way the
West conceives of the relationship between society and nature, between people and
their environment. It demands a deep rethinking of the nature of humankind and its
role in the universe.
1. Tony Crook, Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews. ‘Undermining
Humanism.’
Sustainable Development provides an enabling technology for the mining industry,
and the relational framework for engaging indigenous peoples: negative
environmental effects are ‘balanced’ by positive human effects. Ahead of the 2002
Earth Summit Rio+10, the industry commissioned the Mining, Metals and Sustainable
Development project, formed the Global Mining Initiative and the International
Council of Mining and Metals, and subsequently issued several laudable recognition
statements about the particular characteristics of ‘indigenous peoples’ and the ways in
which their well-being is connected to the land. Ahead of last week’s Earth Summit
Rio+20, the industry issued a ‘Good Practice Guide to Indigenous People and Mining’
for respectfully engaging in dialogue, valuing people’s own aspirations, and which
also appreciates that the generic term ‘indigenous’ is not universally applicable, selfascribed or a substitute for specific cultural differences.
Subsequently, having made these recognitions, the mining industry sees no
need to enquire into specific cultural differences or understand how it’s actions are
perceived locally or measure the impacts of its interventions on existing relational
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2
Quoted in Cortese 2003, The Critical Role of Higher Education in Creating a Sustainable Future
D. Orr 2002, The nature of design, 11.
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fields or accurately price the risk to which it exposes it’s shareholders. But these
denials of responsibility do not appear as negligent acts of omission.
Humanism provides the underpinnings here: the 1948 UN Universal
Declaration on Human Rights recognizes the ‘equal and inalienable rights of all
members of the human family’, and the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples sets out their ‘individual and collective rights’. Of course, people
impacted by mining quickly realized the value of appearing in the required legal
guises of ‘human’ or ‘indigenous’. What does it say of Humanism that recognition
provides for and requires these acts of denial, and that it enables the degradation of all
that Sustainable Development asserts to uphold?
2. Susan Morrison, Department of English, Texas State University, San Marcos.
‘Reading Waste: Metaphor and Obligation’.
My project defines a new area of inquiry: the application of meditations on the ethics
of waste (rubble, rubbish, trash, garbage, litter, filth, excrement) to literature. Core
works on the ethics of waste influencing my project are Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted
Lives, Gay Hawkins’ The Ethics of Waste, and John Scanlan’s On Garbage, which
varyingly interrogate the history and philosophy behind waste in Western culture.
Literature enables culture to acknowledge what it has to deny, such as, I would argue,
bodily, cultural, and societal waste — material and metaphorical aspects of our world.
Literature reflects the ways humans commonly perceive waste, yet can also offer
complexly textured models for ethical individual and communal behaviour and
relationships with the world around us. My work is inspired by Ottmar Ette’s call for
the humanities to ‘conceive of themselves as sciences for living
[Lebenswissenschaften].’ Potentials for the ‘sciences humaines’ include reflecting
upon their obligations including the initiation of a dialogue with ‘the biosciences.
This dialogue has to include literary and cultural knowledge, thus making possible a
more complete understanding of life and of the humanities as part of the sciences for
living’ (Ette). Sustainability Science and Sustainable Development discourse can
speak to the humanities, with specific focus on waste. Sustainable development calls
for a radical change in the way the West has conceived the relationship between
humankind and its role in the universe. The ‘humanistic’ dimension of Sustainability
Science, to which my project contributes, is becoming increasingly urgent in this
period of global climate threats and economic instability. It is vital to bridge the
humanities and sciences, so that the ‘two cultures’ C. P. Snow wrote about over fifty
years ago can be in dialogue. The study of waste and of waste in literature contributes
to this dialogue. Ethically-informed literary criticism may help us to understand how
we theorize, manage, and are implicated in waste.
While waste is understood differently in various places over various time
periods, certain aspects remain constant: waste is always material (first) and
figurative (second). Metaphors and similes create new characteristics for objects,
feelings, people, nature, and animals. Through the introduction of an unexpected
comparison and linked image, a previously neutral or unmarked entity becomes
transformed into a marked or non-neutral one. This bond highlights difference and
similarity. A metaphor or simile allows you to see the affinity between two things or
states of being not previously noticed, producing a perception of connection.
Metaphor bridges cultures and can open us to ethical understanding, what Martha
Nussbaum has ‘called metaphorical imagination,’ ‘the ability to see one thing as
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another, to see one thing in another.’ While the metaphor of waste has often been
used for destructive purposes, it can also reveal the humanity we share.
3. Tim Ingold, Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen. ‘Knowing from the
Inside.’
In this paper I propose a radical reconfiguration of the relation between practices of
inquiry in the arts, humanities and social sciences, and the forms of knowledge to
which they gives rise. Its most fundamental premise is that knowledge is not created
through an encounter between minds furnished with concepts and theories, and a
material world already populated with objects, but rather that it grows from the
crucible of our practical and observational engagement with beings and things around
us in the very processes of thought. In a word, knowledge comes from thinking with,
from and through beings and things, not just about them. As a general philosophical
point, this remains contentious but it is not new. My aim, however, is to take it
forward into specific arenas of policy and practice, in order to show how research
underpinned by this premise could make a difference both to human wellbeing and to
environmental sustainability.
Panel 7: Posthumanism
1. Veronica Hollinger, Trent University, USA. ‘The post/human “I” in science fiction’.
Several influential discussions of ‘the posthuman’ have raised the spectre of potential
‘relapses’ into some of the less desirable features associated with earlier humanisms,
in particular the Cartesian devaluation of embodiment (for example, Hayles’s How
We Became Posthuman and Vint’s Bodies of Tomorrow). What I would like to
explore here is the question of what might be thought of as ‘textual embodiment’ in
some science fiction stories about posthuman subjects. Science fiction is in the
business of literalizing metaphors and so it is not surprising that theorists of the
posthuman such as Hayles, Vint, and Haraway have turned to science fiction for
examples of ‘literal’ posthuman figures such as cyborgs and artificial intelligences.
The metaphor I want to explore here is that of the posthuman as it is constructed
through the narrative strategies of stories that demonstrate the ongoing hold on our
imaginations of what Derrida has termed ‘the metaphysics of presence.’
In one of science fiction’s most famous challenges to conventional ideas of human
essence and exceptionalism, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(1968), human beings are faced with the uncanny experience of doubling in the
creation of humanoid androids that are sentient as well as intelligent. While this is not
news in science fiction – Asimov’s Golden Age robots are also sentient and intelligent
– what appears original in Dick’s novel is the boundary-blurring between human
beings and technological artifacts that threatens the stability and identity of the human
subject. Rick Deckard, Dick’s ‘bounty hunter,’ experiences the vertigo of ontological
uncertainty at moments when he realizes he cannot tell whether he himself is human
or android (‘everything about me has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural
self’). To add to the confusion, the ‘chickenhead’ J.R. Isadore, site of the novel’s ‘real’
humanity, envisages bounty hunters as relentless killing machines. Nevertheless, by
the end of the novel, Deckard is safe in the arms of a loving wife and the androids are
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all dead. The line between human and artifact seems to have been safely reestablished.
What Derrida’s refers to as ‘the I-effect’ is a very powerful counterforce in
science fiction’s stories of posthuman subjects. Science fiction’s posthuman ‘I’s at
once maintain and destabilize the full presence of the speaking subject, just as Dick’s
novel seems at once to destabilize the human through the possibilities of false
memory implants and to re-establish the ‘I’ as a requirement of narrative. Androids
posits empathy as the essence of the human, in distinction to the coldness of the
posthuman androids. In fact, empathy is the requirement of all fiction – writers must
have empathy in order to tell convincing and engaging stories; readers must have
empathy in order to appreciate and be engaged with stories (exceptions such as the
French nouvelle roman merely prove the rule).
While this may simply be a kind of entrapment in the strategies of story-telling,
its effect is also to ‘humanize’ the posthuman, for better or worse. This points us back
to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and to the ‘embodiment’ of the Creature through his
self-narration, which both challenges the category of the human and expands the
‘cogito’ into the posthuman. It is this double-bind of science fiction’s constructions of
‘literal’ posthuman subjects which I will explore in stories by Greg Egan (‘Reasons to
Be Cheerful’), Shariann Lewitt (‘A Real Girl’), Walter Jon Williams (‘Daddy’s
World’), and Paolo Bacigalupi (‘The People of Sand and Slag’).
Philip Leonard, Literary Studies and Critical Theory, Nottingham Trent University,
UK. ‘A Posthuman Community?: Technology, Globalization, and the Literature of
Being-in-Common’.
2. Philip Leonard, Nottingham Trent University, UK. ‘A Posthuman Community?:
Technology, Globalization, and the Literature of Being-in-Common’.
The global community announced by McLuhan avant la lettre became more
substantially articulated in the 1990s, when the set of discursive practices that now
shape ideas about technology came to forge a sense of the networked world as a
unified system. Despite announcing the arrival of humanity’s universal connectedness,
however, early accounts of network culture (such as Rheingold’s The Virtual
Community, Negroponte’s Being Digital, and Dyson’s Release 2.1) are rooted in an
ambivalent metaphysics and an anxious articulation of who or what comes together
online: here, the self that seeks online communion is conceived as a solitary figure
that both enters ‘a community of individuals’ and is completed by online association.
In literary and theoretical work by Jeanette Winterson (The.PowerBook),
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas), Indra Sinha (The Cybergypsies), and Jean-Luc Nancy
(Being Singular-Plural), this paper will argue, the tensions that underpin this
persistent humanism are exposed and challenged. Here, however, the human is not
replaced by a decorporealized or deterritorialized post-subjective, machinic, or global
self, but is seen to be both inscribed and interrupted as an entity that is both singular
and a being-in-common.
3. Robert Pepperell, Cardiff School of Art and Design, UK. ‘Rethinking
Posthumanism’
It’s almost twenty years since I published the first version of the Post-Human
Manifesto and seventeen years since the first edition of the book, The Post-Human
Condition. In terms of the pace of recent technological change, two decades is a long
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time. In many ways we are living in a different world to that of the early 1990s, where
we managed to survive without mobile phones, Internet, or social media.
Much of the original impetus for the development of the post-human thesis
was the perceived confluence between a number of emerging ideas, such as chaos
theory, catastrophe theory, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cyberpunk,
biotechnology, the prosthetic enhancement of humans, and the digitization of
information in general. Collectively they suggested a sufficiently significant shift in
our behavior and understanding to require a new term that reflected the depth and
breadth of the changes underway.
The choice of ‘post-humanism’ (it was then felt necessary to hyphenate the
term) was intended to convey not so much the end of humans, as some apocalyptic
interpretations suggested, but rather the end of Humanism as the defining intellectual
paradigm of our epoch. For all the progress and benefits associated with Humanism as
a historical movement, it had by the late twentieth century begun to conflict with
some of the implications of the very scientific developments it had done so much to
encourage. Not least among these were the implications of quantum physics, which
imposed fundamental limits on our capacity to determine the behavior of reality at the
sub-atomic level and thereby exposed the bounds of human knowledge.
In this paper I will review developments in science and technology over the
last two decades and consider what they mean for the original posthuman thesis. In
particular I will focus on the neuroscientific ‘quest’ to locate and explain human
consciousness, which is making startling progress, yet also opens up deep and often
uncomfortable questions about the essence of human nature, potentially undermining
some of our most cherished beliefs about what makes us unique.
Panel 8: Humanism and the political present
1. Amanda Beattie, Aston University. ‘Jacques Maritain’s integral humanism and the
twenty-first century’.
TBA.
2. Alexis Crow, Royal Institute for International Affairs, Chatham House. ‘Humanism
and humanity’.
TBA.
3. Adrian Pabst, University of Kent. ‘The return of “Integral humanism” and the rise
of post-liberal politics”.
Across the West and beyond, the mark of contemporary politics is the twin of triumph
economic liberalism and social liberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, the liberal left won
the social and cultural argument. And from the 1980s onwards, the liberal right won
the political and economic argument. Both forms of liberalism champion ‘negative
liberty’ (Isaiah Berlin), i.e. unfettered individual choice and freedom from constraint
except the law and private conscience. Decades of liberalisation have led to the
gradual transgression of moral codes and traditional taboos as well as the erosion of
the social bonds and civic ties on which vibrant democracies and market economies
depend. Paradoxically, socio-economic liberalism engenders societies that are
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simultaneous more atomised and more interdependent. As the philosopher Michael
Sandel puts it: “In our public life we are more entangled, but less attached, than ever
before”. As such, the collusive convergence of economic and social liberalism has
produced a liberal or perhaps even libertarian political consensus.
This evolution is part of a wider and deeper change in global geopolitics and
geo-economics. The dominant modern conceptual dualities and ideological paradigms
since the French Revolution have entered a zone of ‘in-distinction’ where nominal
differences remain in place but real distinctions between the state and the market, ‘left’
and ‘right,’ and democracy and authoritarianism have begun to dissolve. Just as in
many Western countries and elsewhere the central state and the ‘free market’ have
colluded at the expense of intermediary self-regulating institutions and local
government, so too the left and the right are converging and increasingly becoming
the same. This convergence tends to replace a real contest of ideas with a postideological managerialism, which nevertheless masks a more profound commitment
to the centrist status quo embodied by the neo-liberal orthodoxy whose conspicuous
failure is now plain for everyone to see.
The spectre of post-democracy coincides with the spectre of post-humanism.
Arguably, we already live in a post-humanist world where unbridled capitalism and
technology – aided and abetted by the central state – conspire to redefine the origins
and boundaries of human and natural life. In the name of modernisation and
boundless progress, social and economic liberalism transgress old taboos on both life
and death and remove ethical limits on the use of human power. Linked to this are
unprecedented attempts to liberalise not just marriage but also abortion, euthanasia
and other profoundly problematic practices such as genetic manipulation. Decisions
over life and death are either taken by the sovereign state, including extraordinary
rendition and torture as part of the ‘global war on terror’. Or else such decisions are
reduced to matters of individual will and negative freedom and subcontracted to
private corporations. By thus removing legal and moral provisions to defend the
inviolability and sanctity of human (and other animal) life, post-democratic ‘marketstates’ betray the humanist legacy that contemporary liberalism purports to uphold but
fails to protect.
Amid the current clash of oligarchy and populism, two ‘traditions’ are coming
to the fore of contemporary politics: integral humanism and post-liberalism. In
different yet complementary ways, both focus on the excesses and unintended
consequences of socio-economic liberalism, as evinced by the crisis of capitalism and
democracy. Far from being nostalgic or reactionary, both emphasise the glue that
holds society together – the social bonds and civic ties that are more primary than
either abstract rights or commercial contracts (or indeed both at once). Integral
humanism suggests that both natural and social life is fundamentally relational and
that identity is the outcome of relationships, not some individual substance or essence.
Likewise, post-liberalism seeks to overcome the abstraction from the relational
constraints and possibilities of family, community and tradition that the postdemocracy market-state has exacerbated. Both accentuate principles of reciprocity
and mutuality that translate into practices of reciprocal giving and mutual assistance
in order to bring about a balance between rights and responsibilities or duties and
deserts.
Just as the two liberalisms have represented merely the interests of the
metropolitan elite (which is mobile, secular, graduate, working in liberal professions
and affluent), so too integral humanism and post-liberalism reflect the values of a
silent majority (which is rooted, often religious, vocationally trained and struggling to
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make ends meet). Arguably, this majority is increasingly alienated from formal
politics precisely because politicians speak about abstract rights, unilateral
entitlements and communities in name alone. By contrast, many of the people outside
the elite care as much about responsibilities, contribution and real, embodied
communities. For example, there is growing demand for a contributory element in
welfare, integration on the parts of migrants and a fair system of social housing.
By emphasising real relationships within and across localities, regions and
nations, integral humanism and post-liberalism offer an alternative vision to the
hegemony of social and economic liberalism. The new humanist, post-liberal agenda
is to reconnect politics and business with the idea of a good society and a moral
economy.
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