Research Seminar of the Faculty of Social Sciences with the theme ‘Situating the Self Ethically, Academically and in Society’ took place in Ranua, May 15-16. On the second day of the seminar a panel was arranged with the tittle ‘Discussion on Ethics, Species and Agents in the Posthuman World’ chaired by Associate Professor Outi Rantala with the invited panelists Veera Kinnunen, Florian Stammler, Nuccio Mazzullo, and Joonas Vola. Here is the post-scriptum of our NPE panelist based on his talk on ‘Ethics of the Post-human’.
For the ‘classical’ humanism the human nature is a universal, autonomous and rational state of being with free will. Post-human in contrast, in Donna Haraway’s (1991) approach, is a person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human, not as a singular, defined individual, but as someone who can become or embody different identities. For me, post-human(ism) stands a for position of the researchers partiality in the studied phenomenon, human(ity) as a condition of being in contrast to a quality of being, and as the emergence of situated and refigured ethics.
If one is ought to discuss about something that is ‘after’ (post) one needs to start what there is to begin with, and therefore to discuss about post-human(ism) it is profound to figure what is a human and therefore humanity all about? What is there that is fundamentally human? What if we ‘move’ beyond those fundaments? What if something is taken away, or if something is added, are we still having a human? Post-humanism dealing with the effect of technology could lead to a thought that human was born through the technology which enabled one to adapt into and transform the surrounding environment, as well as to adapt to the technology which one had developed. By modifying once body, and by acquiring abilities such as super-senses by “merging” together with the technology in the level of body, could be a stage of development where one could not be seen any more as a human, but as something which has moved beyond one’s biology, into the stage of post-human. If the human-biology as still considered as unchangeable in the level of species when it comes to the biological structure or organism, the stage in which we are at the moment of birth, biology bypasses technology. The privilege of technology as a belonging to human realm is as arguable as the nature/culture split. This ‘equality’ of human with other species, which falls under the tittle ‘animal’, would inevitable mean that we have never been human to begin with, and have therefore moved beyond the illusion of being human, into a post-human era. The post-human, non-human, more-than-human and Übermensch are all ethical positions which problematize and deconstructs the sources and sites of values and agency. What they commonly share, at least, are the material worldliness and the human. Whether how elusively these approaches understand human, it still has remained as their reference point.
Rather than stating the post-human ethics based on the biological refiguring of species-relations or technological development to cyborgs, we could define the post-human based on the emergence of radical change in ethics, which abandons those features which are seen as the dominant qualities of human nature, whether these are considered as positive or negative. In the filmographic version of Hanna Arendt’s lecture on the banality of evil, Arendt claims that in the court prosecuted Adolf Eichmann was “renouncing all personal qualities – as if there was nobody left’, expressing that “he had no intentions” in doing what he was prosecuted for. Arendt argues that by doing so he was “refusing to be a person” due to the fact that he “gave up the single most defining human quality, that of being able to think” and therefore was “no longer capable of making judgement” (Hannah Arendt 2012). This argument presented by Arendt followed Socrates’ and Plato’s description of thinking as ‘being engaged in a silent dialogue between me and myself’, which I claim to be a ‘split’ or ‘fragmentation’ of the so called subject. To commit a crime against humanity, in Arendt’s argument, is an act which denies the status of being a human, and adding from her description of the perpetrators, conducted by those who gave up their most human defining quality. So, to make a human into inhuman is an inhumane act and therefore qualifies the conductor as (if not inhuman) a non-person, incapable of autonomous and rational free will, and that the universality of being a human can be violated by the crime against the humanity. Here we can find another split: It is possible to give up from one’s personhood and to take away one’s humanity. Human is what human does, and what has been done to human.
If there is something fundamentally human, it is not within human, as solely corporeal being. Linguistically ‘I’ (personal pronoun) does not equate with ‘my (possessive pronoun) body (noun)’. If human is not an atom, but a composition of fragments, where can we locate the core of human(ity)? If it is not ‘in’ something, could it rather be ‘in-between’? This claim would mean that the individuality and identity are a collection from multiple fragments, and that the possibility for making judgement is based on the ontology of fragmentation. The ability to be a person, to think, is based on the fragmentation and that the judgements made according to thinking are recreating and reproducing fragmentation of the objects/other and the self/subject. Human is in-between pieces and species.
By Joonas Vola
REFERENCES:
Haraway, Donna J (1991). ‘Situated Knowledges’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Routledge: New York.
Hollingdale, R. J., Rieu, E.V. (1961 [1885]). Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche, F.). Penguin Classics: Penguin Publishing.
Hannah Arendt (2012). Dir. M. von Trotta. Zeitgeist Films, 2012.