FYI: Posthumanism Debate

[Bennett]

Posthuman/Animal Studies debate currently happening over on the if any of you philosophy types feel like jumping in. I'm pretty much all Frankfurt School critical theory and Hegelian Marxism so I don't (really) have a dog in the fight, but maybe some of you could add some nuance to the discussion.

[Strong Flat White]

Close cousin (or maybe overlapping sibling?) to the posthumanism debates is some OOO, which I've been excited about and posting on the English threads, too...and yeah, I've actually been curious to know how OOO is received on the more philosophical side of things (as opposed to the lit theory side of things), so thanks for getting the ball rolling, Bennett!

[BernardJOrtcutt]

I had to google this to figure out what it is. I suppose you mean "Object Oriented Ontology." According to wikipedia: "In contrast to Kant's view, object-oriented philosophers maintain that objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans."

 

If that's it then just call it analytic philosophy and come join the dark side. We've been doing it for over 50 years and it's awesome.

[Strong Flat White]

I had to google this to figure out what it is. I suppose you mean "Object Oriented Ontology." According to wikipedia: "In contrast to Kant's view, object-oriented philosophers maintain that objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans."

 

If that's it then just call it analytic philosophy and come join the dark side. We've been doing it for over 50 years and it's awesome.

It's interesting that you called it the "dark side." I just saw a keynote speech at an OOO-themed conference in which Timothy Morton merged 2 Pink Floyd album titles and gave us "The Darkside of the Household Object." I love the rhetoric of darkness surrounding this (sub)field. And - as for just calling it analytic philosophy, I was kind of gravitating that way...or, to put it another way, I had the thought that there is a sense in which ontology is object-oriented by definition, making something of a tautology out of "OOO."  Still, you say it's awesome, and my theoretical headspace at this exact moment in time is quite ready to agree with you. But, cool to get some philosophers' views, thank you both, blumenbergian and BernardJ! I guess my follow-up would simply be, what of posthumanism, then, in philosophy?  Does this fall under the same rubric?  I am seeing OOO as an extension of posthumanism, but I also realize I'm insulated.

[BernardJOrtcutt]

I was actually being sarcastic. There is this (perceived?) chasm in philosphy between continental and analytic philosophy. Basically most analytic philosphers think that much of the continental stuff is utter bullshit, and many continentals think that analytic philosophy is trying to reduce life to math. Since OOO seems like a deeply continental project (being Post-Kantien and all) going over to the analytic side would be sort of intellectual treason, hence the dark side reference.

 

What I am saying though, is that analytic metaphysics (Quine, Lewis, Stalnaker, Sider, Williamson, Chalmers, Nolan etc.) OBVIOUSLY don't put any special status to human experience, and haven't ever done so. In other words, to a philosopher in the analytic tradition OOO is either trivially true and uninteresting, or bullshit.

 

About humanism: In ethics and metaethics there are few questions about what it means to be human, but usually the question is: What are the necessary and sufficient condition for something being a person (Person's being the kind of things with high moral status). Posthumanism also seems like a pretty boring topic. Given evolution, the concept of "species" is maybe useful to biology, but there are no deep ontological devides between them. You could pretty much arrange matter in any way you like, and if you get something that isn't quite homo sapiens enough, you could ask about the psychology of those beings and what they would like and dislike, but that doesn't sound like a very interesting question for philosophy.

[antihumanist]

As an English person I couldn't tell you what posthumanism brings to philosophy Bernard J.  However, the fact that you have things, animals, and such that are "almost" human is the very thing that posthumanism embraces.  It's also about the fact that without language, tools, and things anything recognizably "human" wouldn't exist - so the very idea of human is bound up in posthumanity.  The focus on cognitive ecologies and spaces is similarly bound up in the fact that the essential core of "humanity" itself is tenuous at best.

 

If you want to get the crashcourse - Donna Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs," Andy Clark's "Natural Born Cyborgs," and N. Kathrine Hayles's "How We Became Posthuman" are all great starting points.

 

There's also a great essay by Gorgio Agamben called "What is an Apparatus" that takes a very posthuman view of power and subjectivity.

[Billy Goehring]

About humanism: In ethics and metaethics there are few questions about what it means to be human, but usually the question is: What are the necessary and sufficient condition for something being a person (Person's being the kind of things with high moral status). Posthumanism also seems like a pretty boring topic. Given evolution, the concept of "species" is maybe useful to biology, but there are no deep ontological devides between them. You could pretty much arrange matter in any way you like, and if you get something that isn't quite homo sapiens enough, you could ask about the psychology of those beings and what they would like and dislike, but that doesn't sound like a very interesting question for philosophy.

 

I keep reading over these sentences. I'm not sure if I understand the point you're trying to make. If anything, what you've described here is "pretty boring," but I don't think it describes the problems of humanism (or anti-/post-/whatever- humanism), philosophically or otherwise. And to claim that humanism doesn't interest philosophy is to pretty much spit in the face of five hundred years of European philosophy (if not thousands of years of Greek, Chinese, and Indian philosophy). 

 

And while I'm not really into OOO myself, come on--it's obviously more complicated than that. It's more than just denying any special status to human experience: OOO is making an ontological claim; if the above analytic philosophers have made the same claim, it's only by omission (viz. they don't privilege the human because they don't bother asking those sorts of questions). This might be a formal equivalence, but they're clearly very, very different projects. And I don't think our only options are, "It's either trivially true or utter bullshit." 

[Strong Flat White]

I was actually being sarcastic. 

It sounds like you were to some degree unwitting, BernardJOrtcutt! I appreciate the elaboration of your previous comments, and while I'm pretty happy to just sorta concede not having any clue about the philosophical world (hence my questions!), I do have a clue about the language of darkness and OOO. Your sarcasm notwithstanding, I repeat: it is interesting that you mention the "dark side." More so, now, actually. The darkside of objects is given special treatment by Graham Harman, at least...so even if you didn't intend a double-entendre, there it is.

[BernardJOrtcutt]

I had a really witty reply, but my post got deleted through browser crumminess, and now I'm sad...

 

Just this: I was being overly snarky analytical with the BS claim. I think the main thing analytic philosophers dislike about continental philosophy is that it often doesn't involve clearly stated positions and arguments. I tried to read that Manifesto for Cyborgs... wow, I have seldom seen so many unclear undefended premises arguing in such a convulated fashion. And I have certainly never seen it reading anything I consider good philosophy.

 

So, for example, what is the central claim of humanism, and what is the central claim of posthumanism? If the earlier is "humans are the things most deserving of moral consideration" and the later "humans are not the things most deserving of moral consideration," then these are certainly interesting claims within the area of normative ethics. It just seems to me that most contemporary ethical theories have already decided the latter to be correct, with natural law theory and more traditional Kantien ethics being the odd ones out. But this is a sub debate in a specialized field, not anything particularly central.

 

Also, for OOO, I really just read a little of the wikipedia article. It seemed to me that the central claim is: "In contrast to Kant's view, object-oriented philosophers maintain that objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects." I don't understand the second half of that sentence (what is "ontological exhaustion"?) but the first half doesn't sound like a very stunning or surprising view.

Another central claim accordingly is "Thus, for object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans distort their relata in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal footing with one another."

Ok, I understand relations and relata. And yes, they are all, human or not, on the same footing. I suppose that is true so long as we are talking about physical objects. I also don't understanding the phrasing of "the relata destort one another like human consciousness." I suppose this is a badly written intro, but so far it sounds like "there is stuff out there, the stuff is all kindof the same, relates the same, and humans are some of the stuff." That's just plain ontological realism, isn't it?

 

 

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