CyberEmpathy Journal Issue 2/2016 From the Human to the Cyborg Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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Aleksandra Ĺ ukaszewicz Alcaraz REVIEW PAPER

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

www.issuu.com/cyberempathy

Dr Aleksandra Ĺ ukaszewicz Alcaraz Institute of History and Theory of Art Academy of Art in Szczecin (Poland)

Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture REVIEW PAPER Aleksandra Ĺ ukaszewicz Alcaraz REVIEW PAPER

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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CONTENT: INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................................................... 4 THE CHANGE IN HUMAN CONDITION. FROM THE HUMAN TO THE CYBORG ................................... 7 JOSEPH MARGOLIS' REDEFINITION OF THE HUMAN SELF/PERSON .................................................... 19 EVOLUTIONARY TRANSFORMATION FROM THE HUMAN SELF TO THE POSTHUMAN SELF ...... 27 CONCLUSIONS ......................................................................................................................................................... 34

ABSTRACT: Living life in contemporary times, everyone experiences the power of influence of new technologies. These technologies mediate our forms of life: work and leisure, social contacts and communication, forms of our mobility in an urban environment, forms of our self-identification. The changing human condition we experience nowadays is the subject of investigation by posthumanism, which is an interdiciplinary field of theoretical reflection on the posthuman. Margolis' definition of the human self embraces both the human and the posthuman, still allowing for theorization on the specific characteristics of each of them.

This fact not only resolves the problem of defining posthuman, but also serves to overcome the crisis of the Humanities,

TAGS: Cyborg, Culture, Philosophy; Aleksandra Ĺ ukaszewicz Alcaraz REVIEW PAPER

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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INTRODUCTION

First, before I begin the consideration proposed in the title of my lecture Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continnum of natureculture, I would like to define my point of departure for developing philosophical reflection. This point of departure is a lived experience, an individual and social one, the methodological pragmatist approach. I do not want to enter into the discussion on the character of this experience – if it is a “bare” experience, as called for by David Hildebrand and Douglas Browning1 –– and what that can mean. I follow instead

1

D. Hildebrand, Margolis’ Pragmatism of Continuity, in: Dirk-Martin

Grube and Robert Sinclair (Eds.) (2015). Pragmatism, Metaphysics and Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz REVIEW PAPER

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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Joseph Margolis' line of understanding experience, which is culturally and biologically defined, and from its beginning is submerged in an artefactually construed human world of culture.2 However, if I depart from the experience, if – in Dewey-an categories – I meet a problematic situation which provokes me to search for the possible solution,3 then what is it?

And why?

Living life in contemporary times, everyone experiences the power of influence of new technologies. These technologies mediate our forms of life: work and leisure, social contacts and communication, forms of our mobility in an urban Culture—Reflections on the Philosophy of Joseph Margolis. Nordic Studies in Pragmatism 2. Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network, pp. 37-51.

2

J. Margolis, Replies, in: Dirk-Martin Grube and Robert Sinclair

(Eds.) (2015). Pragmatism, Metaphysics and Culture — Reflections on the Philosophy of Joseph Margolis. Pp. 261-271.

3

J. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in: J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John

Dewey: The later works, 1925-1053, Vol. 12. Caebondale, IL: SIU Press.

[Originally published in 1938]. (1938/1991), pp. 181-182.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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environment, forms of our self-identification. I do not refer here only to visual technologies, or technologies of imaging, which are a very powerful tool in this aspect, but more generally to all technologies, including the medically invasive usage of technologies (such as implants, metal bones, artificial heart valves, and cosmetic surgery.) These have become a normal part of everyday life, technologies influencing our form of rational thinking, memorizing, our forms of actualization and expressions of emotional feelings, our directions of desire.

Reflecting on the influence of technologies on the human person, it is explicit that something is radically changing the human condition. Of course, I do not claim that each individiual experiencing the influence of technologies on his/her life is conscious about that fact, or analyzing and interpreting it critically. Still, this influence challenges philosophical consideration on the condition of the human person and its modes of functioning mediated by technologies.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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THE CHANGE IN HUMAN CONDITION FROM THE HUMAN TO THE CYBORG

The changing human condition we experience nowadays is the subject of investigation by posthumanism, which is an interdiciplinary field of theoretical reflection on the posthuman.

In this field, in order to define the new form of human self, two metaphorical figures are recalled: a cyborg and a hybrid.

'Cyborg' signifying the infection by technology of a human; 'hybrid' signifying both a new technologically defined form of a subject and a new form of conceptualization of the subject in the continuum of nature-culture, one that is neither purely animal nor purely human.4 These are figurative forms of the

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B. Blaagaard and I. Van der Tuin (Eds)., The Subject of Rosi

Braidotti: Politics and Concepts, London-New York: Bloomsbery Academic, 2014, p. 82.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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posthuman. However, in posthumanist writings trying to define posthuman, the point of reference for the understanding

of the human person is the idea of the human as it was developed during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The only human we can find in Haraway's, Braidotti's, Bennett's, or Warwick's writings is a ghost of the Vitruvian white male (rational, heterosexual, coherent, exercising power, possessing privilege and properties.) In order to consider deeply what it means to be posthuman, what the posthuman person is, we have to first exorcise that ghost.

Here I have to make a point about the terms I use as one can find them a bit confusing: a human (self), a cyborg (self), a hybrid and a posthuman. The confusion is understandable as these terms appear in different writings of different authors sometimes not being defined precesely and/or sometimes in a bit different way. One of the aims of my paper is to show them in a certain kind of relation, introducing – I hope sucessfully – Aleksandra Šukaszewicz Alcaraz REVIEW PAPER

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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an order. A human-self, which I perceive after Joseph Margolis, is a subjective actor construued in history of emergence from the natural world and active in the human, artefactual world.

From this point of view he/she can be perceived as a hybrid of natural and artefactual evolution. Therefore the term hybrid I understand in a broad way, referring to the entanglement of nature and culture. The broad way of reference to a hybrid is present also in posthumanist writings and encomapasses humans as already being hybrids, as explained above, and also specific mixtures of biology and technology that effects in the form of a cyborg as such or new kind of hybrids between species. Then, a cyborg is a specific form of a hybrid, the hybrid of the „natural“ human self and the invasice technology.

I also use the term „posthuman“, by which I refer to the change in a subjectivity and definition of a human self that we experience and try to understand nowadays. Therefore, I wish to show that a human self (which is already a hybrid) evolves into the form of a cyborg self (specific form of a hybrid). By

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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doing this I hope to answer both: the need to define the posthuman and the need to revive the idea of human self within Humanities.

Let’s start with some clues on posthumanism. The idea of human as presented in the writings of Donna Haraway (author of A Cyborg Manifesto) is extremely vague, often used as an adjective (as for ex. “human organism,” “human purity,” “human status,” and others) or in juxtaposition with a machine or animal.5 What it means to be human is not explained, but put into the form of myth, about which Haraway writes: “An origin story in the 'Western,' humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate.”6

5

D. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-

Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in: D. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York; Routledge, 1991, pp.149-181.

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D. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto..., p. 2.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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Haraway combines this myth with underlying human animality, in order to illustrate the difference, in the new subject appearing, a cyborg. Although since 1991, when she first published A Cyborg Manifesto, she has written another manifesto: The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness,7 we still do not find therein any specific definition of the human person, which seems to be crucial if the objective is to define the posthuman. One might say that Haraway's writings are visionary, combining facts, images, and theories taken from different fields in order to present the possibility of a different world. This vision lacks hard divisions between entities, subjects, people and animals, people and machines, and so offers more freedom and potential for network cooperation. Her aim, “to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism,”8 has

7

D. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and

Significamt Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.

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D. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto..., p. 149.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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been and still is effective, as Haraway continues to inspire posthumanist theoretical reflection. Therefore, one may argue that Haraway's vision does not need to construct a definition of the human person, that which is transcended to embrace a cyborg. However, her definition of a cyborg is based on the machine and the animal: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction … creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.”9 This definition, in which there is nothing “human,” places humans and cyborgs in opposition. Differences between the two are strongly stressed, emphasizing that cyborgs are different kinds of beings than humans, with different bodies, with different modes of functioning and conducting relations, with different ethics and politics. More recently her emphasis has shifted to the continuity of nature-culture, exploring the historicity of human-animal relations in terms of common 9

D. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto..., p. 149.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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evolution of companion species; from this point of view she draws ethical and political conclusions.10 The ethical implications of a cyborg are also important to Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at The University of Reading, England.

He raises questions concerning the dilemma of artificially altered human consciousness11 and how cyborgs will regard humans – perhaps in the Nietzschean way, “rather akin to how humans presently regard cows or chimpanzees.”12 In this paper I do not try to address these questions, but rather aim to reconfigure the field of investigation in such a way that they are bypassed by considerations of the possible cyborgs' ethics and morality. This is the direction Warwick also points, which should not be explored before grasping the ideas of human, posthuman, and the transition between them.

10

D. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto..., pp. 50-54, 64-65.

11

K. Warwick, Cyborg morals, cyborg values, cyborg ethics, in: “Ethics

and Information Technology”, vol. 5 (2003), p. 131.

12

K. Warwick, Cyborg morals..., p. 132.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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Warwick defines a cyborg as “part human, part machine,”13 but although he analyzes machines and technologies with precision, he leaves the concept of human wobbling between something animal-like (with all specific sciences on the human organism starting from anatomy up to neurology and others) and something creative which possesses rational intelligence. The benefit of his reflection is that he demonstrates a certain kind of continuity between humans and cyborgs due to machines and invasive technology. The continuity he notices between humans and cyborgs is then horizontal, what means present in current relations between what is human and what is machine-like. However, I notice also a vertical continuity, the historical continuity between humans and cyborgs, the continuity (with discrepancy) of the emergence of cyborgs from humans. We do not change from humans to machines, we change from humans to cyborgs in the pass of time, or – as Haraway states – we've already become 13

K. Warwick, Cyborg morals..., p. 131.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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cyborgs. This interesting change is necessary to understanding the posthuman.

Warwick refers to a cyborg in more technological terms than Haraway, who creates a metaphor-laden image of a cyborg and its myth without a pure origin. For her, a cyborg is a bastard of technology with potential power to subvert the dominant system in a political and philosophical sense. For this reason she, between others, retells a story of La Malinche, Nahua princess and mistress of Cortés, presenting her as the mother of the mestizo “bastard” race of the New World, as Sister Outsider. In Haraway’s work the cyborg’s identity is used metaphorically to convey her mythical retelling in a way that confaltes it with Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider.

“Sister Outsider hints at the possibility of world survival not because of her innocence, but because of her ability to live on the boundaries, to write without the founding myth of original wholeness, with its inescapable apocalypse of final return to a deathly oneness that

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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Man has imagined to be the innocent and all-powerful Mother, freed at the End from another spiral of appropriation by her son (...) Malinche was mother here, not Eve before eating the forbidden fruit.”14

Inspired after Haraway's writings and imagery, posthumanist writers explore the concept of the posthuman more deeply from a theoretical point of view. One of the most prominent contemporary theoreticians is Rosi Braidotti, who has recently, in 2013, published a book titled The Posthuman, directly addressing the main question: “What is the posthuman?”15 The stakes are high, because the posthuman marks the crisis of the idea of human and of Humanities.16 For Braidotti, “[t]he idea of the 'Human' implied in the Humanities, that is to say, the implicit assumptions about what constitutes the basic unit

14

D. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto..., p. 176.

15

R. Braodotti, The Posthuman, Cambridge: The Polity Press, 2013,

p.3.

16

R. Braidotti, The Posthuman,......p. 10, pp. 143-185.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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of reference for the knowing subject, is the Vitruvian model. It is the image of Man as rational animal endowed with language.”17

This ghost, mentioned earlier, needs to be exorcised for us to understand the change that we as humans are undergoing, to recognize our human or already posthuman nature. We are haunted by philosophical traditions not critically examined for further development since the Enlightement and Modernism.

Haraway refers, in her understanding of the human as a category and a species, to the legacies of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Marx and Freud;18 Braidotti references critical theory, Friedrich Nietzsche,19 and Michel Foucault. Both feminist

17

R. Braidotti, The Posthuman,......p. 143.

18

D. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto..., pp. 15-16.

19

She refers critically, and shows that Nietzsche's proclaimed “death

of God” and idea of Man is “the end of the self-evident status attributed to human nature as the common sense belief in the metaphysically stable and universal validity of the European humanistic subject” - R. Braidotti, The Posthuman,... p. 6.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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writers, Haraway and Braidotti propose a new form of selfdefinition and self-understanding, posing it in juxtaposition to the old one, that is “the human,” “a Man.” The Man that Braidotti describes is a rational, dominative, European male, possesing coherent identity and power over matter, emotions, nature, animals, women, and other races. She is right in stating that this idea does not conform anymore to the contemporary, technologically inflected, globalized world, and also in her proposal that we should understand the human as indistinguishable from his/her interactions with technology, animals, and matter.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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JOSEPH MARGOLIS' REDEFINITION OF THE HUMAN SELF/PERSON

The distinction that arises between “the human” and “the posthuman” in posthumanist writings is too harsh from my point of view, and prevents the clear and appropriate definition of the posthuman for which Braidotti strives. Significative is that these terms appear mostly in the grammatical form of an adjunct, as an attribute, similarly to Haraway's usage. This definition should be replaced by more substantial perspective.

If we want to understand the change we are undergoing with the influence of technology on us as humans, we should instead ask: what does “human person” and “post-human person” mean? What is the relation between the two, between the human self and the cyborg self – not simply from the point of view of future possible differentation of “races,” the Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz REVIEW PAPER

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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technologically enhanced and the 'natural' human – the historical emergence of the posthuman person from the human person?

I consider that the definition of the human person or self proposed by Joseph Margolis, one of the most prominent contemporary pragmatist philosophers, can contribute to answering the above questions. Margolis defines his perspective as post-Darwinian, and he develops his reflection in discussion with Kant’s philosophy. In his terms, the human self has evolved from the human primate, due to the invention and mastery of language with all the consequences that it provoked (especially the emergence of the world of culture, as “the invention of language entails the invention of conceptual possibilities inaccessible to unlanguaged creatures.”)20 He elaborates: “the continuum of the animal and human; the

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J. Margolis, Towards a Metaphysics of Culture, HUMAN AFFAIRS

Vol. 23 (2013) Versita. p. 475. DOI: 10.2478/s13374-013-0143-3 Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz REVIEW PAPER

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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artefactual transformation of the human primate that yields the functional self or person; the novel reflexive powers made possible through the invention and mastery of language; the invention of language and the lingual infection (so to say) of the entire world, as a consequence of the mastery of language; the linguistic, semiotic, significative, meaningful, interpretable nature of whatever belongs to the human world, either by production, creation, deed, or theorizing or practical thought.”21

The evolutionary trajectory of modern Homo sapiens is inseparable from “cultural evolution of true language and its unique (hybrid) powers effecting the social transformation of hominid primates into artefactual persons.”22 Therefore, Margolis investigates the evolution from human primate to the fully developed, encultured, enlanguaged, artefactual person active in a world that responds to human actions. It serves him

21

J. Margolis, Towards a Metaphysics of Culture, p. 475.

22

J. Margolis, Towards a Metaphysics of Culture, p. 477.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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to redefine the notion of the human, which has been taken for granted since the eighteenth century. In the introduction to the influential article (which he has since developed into a book) Towards a Metaphysics of Culture, he points to that fact explicitly: “since the eighteenth century (certainly in Kant and Hume and certainly in contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosophy), the theory of what it is to be a person has played no more than a minor role among the claims of the most influential movements, and that knowledgeable discussants are perfectly comfortable in their professional indifference because they believe there’s no reason to think any sizable conceptual correction is needed along such lines.”23

Here we encounter again the Vitruvian male spectre, but the line of thought developed by Margolis allows us to exorcise it. He conducts a profound critique of Kant’s consideration on the nature of human cognition and an individual's agential

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J. Margolis, Towards a Metaphysics of Culture, HUMAN AFFAIRS

23, Versita, 474–494, 2013; pp. 474-475. DOI: 10.2478/s13374-013-0143-3 Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz REVIEW PAPER

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status from the realist standpoint, agreeing with the Kantian view on cognitive powers of reason, but persisting in the acknowledgement of the world as “independent.” This “independence” does not signify noumenal status of the world in Kantian categories, nor its constructed character.24 This externality, which actively responds to our actions and acts upon us in diverse forms, is true not only in biological terms, but also in a cultural sense. The cultural world exists and is real, although its ontology is different. It does not posit itself in a physical level of being, or in the ideal or transcendental levels, but rather on the Intentional. The concept of Intentionality is essential to Margolis' understanding of the human condition and the status of the world of culture. He develops it in several works: Historical Thought, Constructed World: a Conceptual Primer

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J. Margolis, Towards a Metaphysics of Culture, ... p. 476.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

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for the Turn of the Millennium,25 and in Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly. The New Puzzle of the Arts and History.26 He explains how he understands “Intentionally qualified phenomena as inherently apt for interpretation; they are the possessors of intrinsically interpretable properties.”27 These properties are “cultural-cuminterpretable, (…) 'incarnated' in physical or biological properties.”28

Margolis “suggests that the human primate has transformed itself gradually into a functional self or person

25

J. Margolis, Historical Thought, Constructed World: a Conceptual

Primer for the Turn of the Millennium, Berkeley-Los Angeles-Oxford: University of California Press, 1995, p. 197.

26

J. Margolis, Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly. The New Puzzle of

the Arts and History, Berkeley-Los Angeles-Oxford: University of California Press, 1995.

27

J. Margolis, Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly..., p. 14.

28

E. S. Casey, Joseph Margolis on interpretation, in: “Man and World”,

vol 30 (1997), Kluwer Academic Publishers. p. 132.

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whereby the mastery of language and its transmission between generations including the self-reflexive awareness of those evolving skills is most crucial.” This is why he criticizes Kant’s transcendentalism and “Darwinizes” it.29 The human person is not just the rational being, but the artefactual transformation of the human primate. We can draw here an evolutionary line that slowly increases as biological evolution proceeds, receives a disruption with the invention of language, and then continues, becoming entangled with cultural, lingual, and significative complexities of development. This perspective of the human person – encompassing the philosophical tradition of Kant, accounting for experience and the post-Darwinian real world – is pragmatically based, accurate, and can help to resolve problems of both posthumanism (as the theoretical field) and the Humanities (as the discipline.)

29

D.-M. Grube and R. Sinclair, Introduction, in: D.-M. Grube and R.

Sinclar (Eds.) (2015). Pragmatism, Metaphysics and Culture – Reflections on the Philosophy of Joseph Margolis. Nordic Studies in Pragmatism 2.

Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network, p. XI Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz REVIEW PAPER

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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Margolis' philosophical consideration elucidates the field of the investigation of posthumanism. If we consider the notion of the human self as presented by Margolis (artificial, enlanguaged, Intentional, and active within a culture) we have to acknowledge a spectrum between humans and cyborgs that can be understood in post-Darwinian perspective. Although Margolis focuses more on the emergence of the human self and culture from within a physical world, his reflection can be developed to reflect on the change from the human to the cyborg self and culture. The continuity between humans and cyborgs depends on artefactuality and culture, in much the same way as the continuity between animals and humans rests on the biological material. The evolutionary line proceeds on the cultural, lingual level, experiencing disruption on the biological level due to technological influence.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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EVOLUTIONARY TRANSFORMATION FROM THE HUMAN SELF TO THE POSTHUMAN SELF

As I have presented above, posthumanist writers such as Haraway or Warwick differentiate cyborgs from humans without defining what the human self is, disregarding continuity between human selves and cyborg selves, or referring to an obsolete idea of how to define “human.” This kind of oppositional distinction I claim to be unfounded, because cyborg selves evolve from human selves, as human selves have evolved from non-human primates, and it is important to recognize this evolutionary line in order to understand our contemporary position and status as (post)humans living with technology, or rather entwined in technology. Margolis' investigation on a metaphysics of culture, Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz REVIEW PAPER

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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his explanation of the human self – which is hybrid and technologically mediated – and reflections on the fundaments of our normativity (questioning Kant’s separation of a priori and a posteriori, and his erroneous dualism of causality and autonomous agency), allows us to argue for the ontological continuity between humans and cyborgs, and also to question the existence of radical change in the structure between humans' normativity and a cyborg's. Considering the fact that humans, as cyborgs, have no Umwelt, there is no natural or normal system of rules and norms. Normativity is artefactually construed, thanks to the existence of language ability.

Therefore, as Margolis argues, we “cannot (...) claim any normative standing beyond the 'second-best'”30 that is obtained in the process of socialization and growth in a community. If our normativity cannot be confirmed in any way other than sittlich (collectively shared and not transcendental), there is no

30

J. Margolis, Towards a Metaphysics of Culture, in: “Human Affairs”

Vol. 23 (2013), VERSITA, Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz REVIEW PAPER

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p. 489. DOI: 10.2478/s13374-013-0143-3 Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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radical difference between our ethics and the possible cyborgs' ethics, as both of them rest on intelligence, Intentionality, enlanguaged culture, and historically evolving patterns of social interpretations.

Stating that the human self is “a hybrid, artefactual transform of the primate of our species,”31 does not mean considering the human self to be “a Hybrid” or “a Cyborg.” We certainly cannot affirm them to be the same kind of being as the human person. The influence of technology, which is invasive in human bodies, rational minds, memories and emotions, and ways of moving/transporting in space, is crucial. It not only changes the way humans function in society, or modes of communication, but also ways of self-identifying, modes of thinking, directions of desires, and bodily feelings. The change is explicit and radical and has to be deeply investigated.

However, reflections from posthumanist writers do not provide

31

J. Margolis, Towards a Metaphysics of Culture..., p. 478.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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understanding of the nature of this change, as they propose too strong a differentiation between the human and the posthuman, between a Man and a Cyborg or a Hybrid. Joseph Margolis' concept of the human person as having artefactual and hybrid nature allows for reflection on the evolution between 'merely' human persons and cyborgs or cyborg persons as such, without placing them in conflict due to underlying differences in the “natural” mode of a human being and the “artefactual” mode of being of a cyborg.

The recognition of an evolutionary transformation from the human self to the cyborg self shows the underlying continuity between them on the level of language and culture, with the difference appearing bodily – continuous biological evolution disrupted by means of invasive technology. The evolution that the human/posthuman undergoes is biotechnological, as remarked upon by many contemporary writers. One example, William J. Thomas Mitchell, developing

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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from Walter Benjamin’s analysis on mechanical reproduction, writes about bio-technological reproduction as the paradigm of the present-day. Although Mitchell deals with images, bioimages, and clones (as images of the attack at WWT, of a Hooded Man and sheep Dolly)32 he treats images as quasiagents, as quasi-persons acting in their environment.33 The biotechnological reproduction leads to bio-technological evolution, which we should perceive in a post-Darwinian way, as evolution of the intertwined technological, cultural, lingual, material, and bodily elements composing the contemporary

32

W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror. The War of Images, 9/11 to the

present, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

33

The example taken from William J. Thomas Mitchell of images in

bio-cybernetic reproduction treated as quasi-agents can be – in another place and time – deveolped, showing its analogy with Margolis’s approach, whoc defines artworks in the same way as human persons.

W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures “Really” Want?, in: “October”, vol. 77 (Summer, 1996), The MIT Press, p. 81.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778960 Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz REVIEW PAPER

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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form of the human self as the posthuman. Recognition of continuity with the difference (as I may paraphrase Gilles Deleuze) between the human self and the posthuman self or a cyborg self, prevents posing them in contradictory positions underlying only differences. It also helps fulfill the demand within posthumanism to define “posthuman.”

Margolis' definition of the human self embraces both the human and the posthuman, still allowing for theorization on the specific characteristics of each of them. This fact not only resolves the problem of defining posthuman, but also serves to overcome the crisis of the Humanities, which (in the absence of its basis, a coherent definition of the human within a presentday context) has dispersed in a number of subdisciplines or subfields, interdisciplinary in their approach, such as “gender, feminism, ethnicity, cultural studies, post-colonial, media and new media and human rights studies,”34 among others. The

34

R. Braidotti, The Posthuman..., p. 144.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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renewal of Humanities as advocated by Braidotti is an important task; we should redefine philosophical notions of humanity and culture so that they can be meaningful in our lives and help to understand/interpret ourselves and the world around us. The task of renewing the Humanities can be developed along lines drawn from Margolis, who re-interprets Western philosophy with a post-Darwinian orientation and proposes “a new form of 'pragmatism' (so to say), freed from its own parochial beginnings, an answer that depends on a fresh conception of the metaphysics and epistemology of culture.” 35 Doing so devises a new social, ethical, and discursive scheme of subject formation, matching the profound transformation we are undergoing.36

35

J. Margolis, Chapter 1: Towards a Metaphysics of Culture, p. 45

[before publishing].

36

R. Braidotti, The Posthuman..., p. 12.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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CONCLUSIONS

Examining the continuity between human persons and cyborg persons in light of Margolis' notion of the human self as hybrid and artefactual opens the door to deliberate consideration about our future as a society of cyborgs within an ethical system. This is the alternative to thematizing, in different forms, the old fear of living-machines which can turn against humans. Reflection on the ethical limits of developing technology and technological interferences with human bodies, and on moral problems that may arise in the future between different races (of humans and of cyborgs) is rather common in posthumnist writings. I do not underestimate the scale of these problems, but argue that we might eschew them entirely, if in place of differentiating humans and cyborgs as different races, we underline the spectrum between them as defined by

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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language, culture, and technology. Taking up this much broader perspective opens the philosophical investigation to reflections on normativity, relevant to both human and cyborg society.

These themes also have, apart from philosophical importance, a political dimension, referring to human rights for example. Because the life form of humans is open to new technologically engineered changes and rapidly, with the development of artificial intelligence and bio-medicine, even androids will need a recognition as full-fledged agents.

In this short paper I cannot fully develop all the ethical, moral, and political consequences surging from the recognition of evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs, based on Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continnum of nature-culture.

However I point to it as an important task for future investigation.

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication ISSN 2299-906X Vol 6, No. 2 / 2016 From the Human to the Cyborg

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The paper was first presented at the Conference of Central European Pragmatist Forum, University Ca’Foscari, 5th of June 2016

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Evolutionary continuity between humans and cyborgs on the basis of Joseph Margolis' concept of the human self as enlanguaged cultural being emergent from the continuum of nature-culture