Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism

Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences after Kant

Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, Leif Weatherby, Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, Leif Weatherby

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501335686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The literary and scientific renaissance that struck Germany around 1800 is usually taken to be the cradle of contemporary humanism. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism shows how figures like Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe as well as scientists specializing in the emerging modern life and cognitive sciences not only established but also transgressed the boundaries of the "human." This period so broadly painted as humanist by proponents and detractors alike also grappled with ways of challenging some of humanism's most cherished assumptions: the dualisms, for example, between freedom and nature, science and art, matter and spirit, mind and body, and thereby also between the human and the nonhuman. Posthumanism is older than we think, and the so-called "humanists" of the late Enlightenment have much to offer our contemporary re-thinking of the human.

One Introduction: Posthumanism after Kant

Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, and Leif Weatherby

Posthumanism—a discourse often understood to celebrate the “end of man”—is not so much an anti-humanism as an attempt to critically interrogate the status of the human as exceptional, as autonomous, as standing outside a web of relations, or even as a subject or object of knowledge corresponding to a determinate set of practices. Seen in this way, posthumanism can be found, perhaps, where one least expects it, including in putative humanisms in which thinking the human comes up against its limitations and attempts to transcend them.¹ Any genealogy of posthumanism—such as one finds in Stefan Herbrechter’s Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (2013)—thus encourages a closer examination of the novelty of some of the central posthumanist gestures.² Herbrechter mentions, for example, Jonathan Dollimore’s classic study of the Shakespeare and Renaissance culture. Dollimore noted already in the 1980s how a “crisis of subjectivity” was present in what he construes as the very beginning of individualism, i.e., in early Christianity. Fears and feelings of alienation about the individual (whether as a political actor or as a “subject”) are a constitutive part of modern, Western culture. From this vantage point, the postmodern collapse of Western subjectivity is but another mutation of a continuing dynamic that finds its latest iteration in posthumanism.³

Nevertheless, posthumanism is often conflated with anti-humanism: whatever counts or has counted as humanistic is to be avoided, rejected, disavowed. Thus, Immanuel Kant and the scientific, philosophical, and literary writings after Kant often serve as foils against which posthumanistic thought seeks to define itself. Precisely this gesture demands contextualization, and it is one of the goals of this volume to interrogate this glancing encounter. It seeks to refine and specify our understanding of the “post” in posthumanism by focusing on an age that many readily identify as the pinnacle of (Enlightenment) humanist thought.

Lack of methodological agreement among posthumanists has led social phenomena, technological developments, and heterogeneous lines of thought to come under the posthumanist rubric. Unlike the theory-centered schools of thought that dominated the humanities over the last four or five decades, posthumanism is not committed to a particular methodology or hermeneutic practice. This is perhaps most apparent if we consider how different proponents of posthumanism position themselves vis-à-vis the main theoretical paradigms of the last decades. While some wholeheartedly endorse the heritage of post-structuralism, media theory, or cybernetics (e.g., Elaine L. Graham, Donna Haraway, Stefan Herbrechter, Andrew Pickering, Cary Wolfe), others seem to favor a more eclectic approach to post-structuralism (Neil Badmington, N. Katherine Hayles, Pramod Nayar, Tamar Sharon), while a third group—including the anti-correlationists—take a directly adversarial stance toward this tradition (Rosi Braidotti, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Timothy Morton). This lack of methodological consistency might well be viewed as a strength. It increases the scope of inquiry and encourages interdisciplinarity. It also constitutes evidence of how posthumanism signals a paradigm shift, or at least a new vantage point from which to reassess the significance of the theoretical debates of the last decades.

The point of looking at posthumanism in the age of humanism, then, cannot be to work toward a comprehensive theory or to contribute to the development of a more coherent historical narrative organized around a before/after distinction. Our aim, instead, is to bring historical context and theoretical reflection to bear on these contentions. Our approach is historical because we recognize that the prefix “post” always also implies continuation. Anytime a past is used as a negative foil, the past continues to shape the “post” in some way. Inasmuch as transcending, modifying, and even rejecting humanism is a central and unifying concern of posthumanism, a careful examination of the remnants of this heritage is necessary.

This investigation of the posthumanist traces of humanism is a desideratum, not only because the term humanism is so broad, but also because posthumanist thought is often tempted to bypass or portray the past that it problematizes too simplistically. A certain caricature arises in posthumanist thought, contenting itself with repeating wholesale claims about conventional notions of subjectivity, dualistic modes of thinking, Kantian idealism, the separation of science and philosophy, or with the notion that the prehistory of posthumanism begins with Nietzsche.⁴ The aim of our volume is to expand the historical perspective and to avoid generalizations and instead offer more refined analyses of historical instances. This approach complicates stereotypical assumptions about the humanist tradition and points toward developments within this tradition that anticipate, accompany and even expand the register of contemporary posthumanism.

The contributions in this volume focus particularly on ideas produced in Germany from the period around 1800 because they so often serve as either foundations or negative foils (or sometimes both) for much contemporary posthumanist work. The decades between roughly the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Hegel’s death (1831) saw a rethinking of the status of the human that continues to cast a long shadow. After all, it is Kant and his “age”—the one that leads from the Enlightenment to whatever comes after, the period around 1800—that recurs as the disavowed object, the safe other of posthumanist thinking. It is the age of Goethe whose Faust famously proclaims “here I am human/here it’s allowed.”⁵ And it is the age of Hegel, whose concept of Geist has often been read as the most outlandish of the humanisms, breaking even with its anthropocentrism in a further hypostasis of human categories and capacities. We can note that these figures are all German—and it is indeed the German cultural sphere, the specifically German Enlightenment, that is “classically humanist,” in accounts from Germanists and posthumanists alike. Any account of humanism tarries with Kant and Goethe; if we are successful here, any future posthumanism will have to avow a complex relation to the quasi-humanist modernity that arose in the German-speaking countries around 1800. This period so broadly painted as humanist by proponents and detractors also grappled with ways of challenging some of humanism’s most cherished dualisms: freedom and nature, science and art, matter and spirit, mind and body, and so also human and nonhuman.

Major and minor figures in Germany during this decisive period produced modes of aleatory and contingent scientific, philosophical, and literary thinking that can serve as instruments for pushing posthumanism further along its critical path. This is the crux of our volume. The wager is that the scholars who speak the language of posthumanism will gain historical perspective and critical tools in reading the following essays, while the field that focuses on and often defends the towering humanists of the age around 1800 will see a much-needed revision of our conception of that epoch. Our volume aims to integrate these audiences by addressing scholars who are familiar with the theoretical discussions surrounding posthumanism, but want to learn more about the origins of major tenets of posthumanism around 1800, as well as more traditional scholars of the period who are interested in a “posthuman” Kant, or a “posthuman” Herz, and so on; that is, who want to explore a new framework which has largely been left out of the field.

While humanism generally is viewed as a philosophical and literary movement, a majority of contributions to this volume focus on scientific texts or on philosophical and literary texts that address scientific discourses and practices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This focus is in line with posthumanism’s own interest in science and its willingness to incorporate scientific viewpoints into its philosophical, hermeneutic and literary/artistic productions. A historical perspective can help clarify contemporary contentions and add relevant scientific, philosophical, and cultural contexts. We are aided by the fact that the time period that first developed modern scientific research methods is also an age that reflects intensively on the philosophical implications of scientific work. Put more pointedly: returning to the beginnings of the life sciences, including cell theory, embryology, and neurophysiology, as well as of cognitive science, allows us to examine at their points of inception the challenges modern scientific discourses pose for the philosophical and humanist tradition.

The contributions in this volume subscribe to an understanding of the posthuman as an ethos that challenges the primacy of the human being in diverse discursive and practice-based domains (art, politics, science, and so on) and that employs corresponding discursive and interpretive technologies. For us, looking at posthumanism means examining instances and developments in which the human is not necessarily eliminated, but repositioned, conceptually redefined, physically refashioned or otherwise philosophically rethought when faced with certain “inhuman” others (e.g., geological time, the machine, the animal, the inorganic, social dynamics or power structures that exceed individual agency). From this broad perspective, posthumanism constitutes a transhistorical ethos that one can find already in antiquity, in Shakespeare, in German Romanticism, but that nevertheless has historical conditions of genesis. The philosophical, aesthetic, and scientific discourses of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries form an important and neglected historical context conditioning the emergence of the posthuman as such a transhistorical ethos.

We have organized the three parts of this volume around three primary contentions that emerge around 1800 and remain at the center of many debates within and about posthumanism today. The first part investigates how scientific accounts of perception, cognition and knowledge production in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries come to challenge philosophical notions of subjectivity and (self-)consciousness. The second part examines the divide between idealism, mind, and spirit on the one hand and what are viewed as their physical, materialist, or ontological foundations on the other. The third part looks at the boundaries that appear to separate humans and technology or humans and animals as they are drawn and redrawn in literary, philosophical, and scientific texts of the era. There are sizable areas of overlap between these topics, chapters, and sections. Challenges to mind/body dualism and an emphasis on notions of embodiment, for example, both of which represent key concerns of posthumanism, appear in all three sections, and often in rather unexpected places. While “embodiment” has a relatively recent history, what we call the age of humanism is rich with studies that investigate the very questions we associate with this term today: the role of physiology, human cells, neurological extensions for cognition; the body’s situatedness within an environment; even the relationship between human bodies and technology, all of which are topics that caught the attention of scientists and writers already two centuries ago.

In this vein, Part I, “Dissecting the Human Body: Embodiment, Cognition, and the Early Life Sciences,” explores how the question of “embodied cognition” emerges around 1800. Scientists such as Markus Herz, Johannes Müller, Lorenz Oken, Jacob Schleiden, Theodor Schwann, or Reinhold Treviranus, who developed the foundations of the modern life and cognitive sciences, show a keen interest in better understanding the relationship between human physiology on the one hand, and cognition, fantasy and human intention on the other. As they develop revolutionary scientific tools and concepts that come to define our modern understanding of physiology, they also are aware of the philosophical implications of their scientific work, and of the limits of philosophical modes of inquiry for science. Jeffrey Kirkwood’s “Vertiginous Systems of the Soul ” examines eighteenth-century inquiries into vertigo and dizziness as a point of convergence between philosophical and emerging physiological discourses. For researchers such as Marcus Herz (a deeply conflicted disciple of Kant), dizziness suggested a union between the physiological and the representational functions of the psyche, while simultaneously demonstrating their independence.

In “Brain Matters in the German Enlightenment: Animal Cognition and Species Difference in Herder, Soemmerring, and Gall,” Patrick Fortmann turns to the Viennese physician and anatomist, Franz Joseph Gall, the inventor of what is now known as phrenology (but which he called “organology”). Instead of a strict boundary between species, Gall envisioned a continuum based on brain structure. Assuming specialized, yet largely autonomous, organs in the brain, manifesting themselves in cognitive faculties, early phrenology opened the possibility for both a new understanding of species as a category and a radically revised conception of species cognition.

Kant—posthumanism’s favorite bogeyman—plays a crucial role for these scientists. Unlike some of our contemporary posthumanists, however, the researchers of the early nineteenth century did not run away from the Kantian heritage, but rather saw themselves as exploring and implementing its consequences through different, i.e., scientific, means. Christian Emden’s “Agency without Humans: Normativity and Path Dependence in the Nineteenth-Century Life Sciences” looks at a broad range of experimental and theoretical innovations in German cell theory and embryology to argue that what we can witness in the period between the 1790s and 1880s is the emergence of the problem of biological agency, that is, a kind of agency that lacks the intentional stance attributed to human agency.

Edgar Landgraf’s “Embodied Phantasy: Johannes Müller and the Nineteenth-Century Neurophysiological Foundations of Critical Posthumanism” examines how Johannes Müller, one of the most important nineteenth-century physiologists (and the teacher of such prominent students as Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Haeckel, Theodor Schwann, Wilhelm Wundt, Rudolf Virchow), confronts with the eyes of the experimental scientist the material border (what he identifies as Sehsinnsubstanz, “visual sensory substance”) between body and mind. His analysis of phantasmatic phenomena reveals a seemingly paradoxical relationship of simultaneous dependence and independence of the psychological from the physiological which breaks with a reductionist and, more generally, a mechanistic view of the body. Müller’s research suggests that the Kantian legacy within the life sciences is not “correlationist” but constructivist, a difference that carries, Landgraf argues by drawing on Jacob von Uexküll’s book The Sense of Life, important political consequences.

Part II, “Who’s Afraid of Idealism? Materialism, Posthumanism, and the Post-Kantian Legacy,” focalizes the binary philosophical terms that gained major currency around 1800 and continue to organize speculation today. Posthumanism has generally found itself on the side of a broadly conceived materialism. Hayles’s concept of embodiment—central as it is to the early articulations of the posthumanist paradigm—opposes both “idealist” conceptions of ontology from Locke and Kant onward and their putative counterparts in the digital world: those who believe in “disembodied” information.⁶ Mark Hansen has extensively explored the digital organizations of this embodiment in his phenomenology of aesthetic experience.⁷ Claus Pias has gone so far as to argue that the digital is a “transcendental illusion,” modeled on Kant’s notion that ideas of reason are unavoidable but also ungroundable.⁸ The curious result of the materialism of posthumanism, then, is that idealism is only an error of perspective. By investigating the historical semantics of terms like “spirit” and “matter,” this section forms a first comparative exploration of German Idealism and posthumanism with the aim of bringing Kant and Hegel (and also Goethe) into philosophical conversation with the posthumanist movement that rejected their legacy.

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