Becoming Human by Design

Tony Fry

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857853561
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Conception
• Categoría: Histoire et critique de la conception

The last in Tony Fry's celebrated trilogy of books continues his radical rethinking of design. Becoming Human by Design 's provocative argument presents a revised reading of human 'evolution' centred on ontological design. Examining the relation of design to the nature of the human species - where the species came from, how it was created, what it became and its likely future - Fry asserts that current biological and social models of evolution are an insufficient explanation of how 'we humans' became what we are. Making a case for ontological design as an evolutionary agency, the book posits the relation between the formation of the world of human fabrication and the making of mankind itself as indivisible. It also functions as a provocation to rethink the fate of Homo sapiens, recognising that all species are finite and that the fate of humankind turns on a fundamental Darwinian principle - adapt or die. Fry considers the nature of adaptation, arguing that it will depend on an ability to think and design in new ways.

Part I

First Pass

Photography: Peter Wanny / Illustration: Tony Fry

I say the question of man must be revolutionized.

–Martin Heidegger

We are not one; we never have been. We come from others and have, in truth, constituted our selves from and as difference. Notwithstanding genetic commonality, ‘man’ is not the consensual naming of a species but a culturally specific imposition upon other designations of ‘our’ being created at other places and times by others. Thus, ‘man’ is an expression of the power of she or he who names. Yet, now, with its Enlightenment endowed universalized status, this naming folds into the language of generally accepted usage rather than predilection. But we still do well to remember that, in contrast to how in the past and in cultural difference ‘we’ have named our selves, what is erased by our collective name ‘human’ is the possibility of seeing ourselves, be it in various ways, as a being among the company of animals. Questions of what we were and are and what we are becoming are central to the task before us. But, first, we need to establish the context for posing these questions and why they need to be posed. To do this, we will follow two narrative paths.

Story One tells of the voice that speaks where and how ‘the human’ has been conceptually configured in the modern world. Story Two goes to the issue of where ‘the human’ is conjuncturally placed in this world (the condition of ‘the human condition’). Linking both stories is a meditation on questions of proximity that helps make sense of why there is a setting out to think ‘what we are’ in relation to where conditionally we now are in the plural ‘state of our being’. At this point, it should be acknowledged that, to date, Homo sapiens has occupied the given world in two ways.

The first and longest way was to dwell in the world with the world as home. Life so dwelt was to wander over large and small distances as the vagaries of climate and availability of food dictated, yet never to be homeless. For all the environmentally determined different types of nomadic hunter-gatherers, the world was often a harsh place. Notwithstanding the harsh times that often depleted populations, the species survived. The viability of nomadic existence is evidenced by the fact that it was the way of life for around 150,000 of the 160,000 years of Homo sapiens’ earthly habitation–this with mostly a stable population of forty million-plus humans. Of course, for many hundreds of thousands of years, nomadism was the form of existence of the hominid forbearers of Homo sapiens.

While there are still a few nomadic peoples, this mode of ‘being-in-the world’ was fated to end. The narrative of this transformation centres on events ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East.¹ As the climate changed in the West, where it became colder, and in the East, where it became drier, people converged on the Fertile Crescent, where food remained plentiful. In good seasons, people roamed, hunted and gathered. In bad seasons they harvested crops like wild einkorn (an early form of wheat). Slowly, small rural settlements were created and very basic forms of farming started to emerge, ushering in the practices upon which urban life would come to depend. Thus began the transformative process of making ‘a world within the world’ rather than the world being the home of human being; this opened the second mode of earthly habitation–human urban settlement. Unknowingly, this instigated those processes that were eventually to lead to contemporary conditions of material unsustainability, with the emergent prospect of mass homelessness.²

As we shall explore later, ‘we’ have now come full circle. Climate change (the very condition that first prompted human settlement to be established) now threatens the continuity of human settlement, as it currently constitutes our dominant mode of habitation.

In summary, ‘nomadic life’ can be claimed as the first epoch of human world occupation, while ‘settlement’ can be named as the second. However, as will be shown, it is now becoming likely that this latter epoch will also come to an end. By human measure it will not happen quickly–yet the process has already started and is likely to run for at least a few centuries. As in the past, this change will be driven by climate and environmental events arriving from the future (as they have been thrown into the future).

1

End of the Story

I walk among men as among fragments of the future.

–Friedrich Nietzsche

This is ‘now’–the locus of where we currently are and will look back from.

Over the past few decades, announcements of ‘ends’ have proliferated within contemporary theory. In the West, one can cite the end of many discourses, including the Enlightenment, modernity, history, man, metaphysics, philosophy, narrative, the subject, art and the novel. Each of these ends was situated by its proclaimers within an aporia, judging the particular discourse terminal. Our concern here is not with assessing the validity of each of these claims. Rather, it is with shifting how the notion of ‘end’ is thought and then placing it in the same register of determinate circumstances that defines the slow termination of the present epoch of humanity (the epoch of settlement). However, in so doing, we will recast some of the discourses deemed to be at ‘the end’, not least as they impinge on how the future is viewed and potentially engaged. Triggering this situation is an emergent condition of ‘unsettlement’ as the opening of a third mode of habitation (after nomadism and settlement), which is now unfolding slowly, unevenly and universally. It is linked to both a changing climate and, as we shall see, a destabilization of the conceptual foundations of modern existence.

The Enlightenment

Specifically, as a starting point to engage modern existence, we need to understand the inextricable relation among the Enlightenment, human agency (and the loss thereof), singular truth and history. Over the past four decades, via poststructural theory, each one of these categories has been made problematic.

As Ernst Cassirer told us in 1932 in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (a text regarded as an ‘incomparable guide’ that ‘occupies a unique position’ in writing on the period),¹ the Enlightenment project created a sphere of reality of law and reason that generated the modern state and social order. Thereafter, ‘Man’ was ‘born into this world; he neither creates nor shapes it, but finds it ready made about him’.² Yet, in his being-in-the-world adaptively and productively, ‘Man’ is world-transformative. Henceforth, the notion of all power being ultimately vested in God and his creation (nature) was supplemented by the power claimed by an individuated ‘rational man’.

Prefigured by the Renaissance and the recovery of the Greek classics, the Enlightenment sought, from the seventeenth century onward, to go beyond the idea of system to become the ‘intellectual atmosphere’ in which all other knowledge existed.³ It initiated a series of discourses that were to form a culture that centred on the ascent of reason (and, by implication, science) over God and unrestrained nature, together with a universalized utopia based on the rule of ‘natural law’ bonded to the notions of progress, ‘civil society’ and a liberal political order. The intellectual ambition was to contain the sum of all knowledge and, in its actuality, constitute its own reality and truth. Above all, the Enlightenment provided the intellectual foundation and authority for the global imposition of modernity. No matter what is said about when, how or if the Enlightenment has ended, it laid foundations of thought and action that live on. Besides establishing the natural world as a primary object of scientific study, it placed absolute faith in the power of reason and presented ‘the world’ as a ‘standing reserve of resources’ for ‘man’ to exploit. But, more than this, Enlightenment thinking underpinned a model of development executed by the policies and practices of modernity that extended the inhumanity of sixteenth-century European colonial expansionism, accelerated productivism and, in so doing, tipped the dialectic of Sustainment toward destruction.⁴ Notwithstanding attainments in the arts and sciences, the Enlightenment and its interlocutor, modernity, created a quantum leap toward the unsustainable. This came not only from the destructive consequences of the ‘means of production’ facilitated by Enlightenment knowledge and practices but also from the underside of its universalization–its dark side.

Notwithstanding an exception that recognizes the fact,⁵ the dark side of the Enlightenment rests with an anthropology that designated the world of the Other. The classificatory system of ‘natural law’ was used to distinguish between the human and the nonhuman, placing an Other outside ‘the human’. This law, initially defined by the Church, designated the human by what it regarded as civilized conduct (wearing clothes, not painting the body, not practicing wild rituals, and the like); people who were deemed not to conform to natural law were not regarded as human and could be treated as subhuman, as animal. Such behaviour toward indigenous people was especially common where colonists were out of sight of the institutions of civil society.⁶

Natural law was used to absolve the colonizer from moral judgement for enacting violence against the colonized by making such action a matter of compliance to the law. ‘Natural law’ effectively legitimized genocide and exploitation, a universal ‘war on savagery’, and ‘civilizing missions’ (like those in Latin America, as well as the Crusades in the Middle East). ‘Natural law’ rested on a set of principles drawn from reason, taken as universal and mobilized to underpin ‘the law of nations’. A body of thinkers, not least St. Thomas Aquinas, advanced its theoretical foundations.

Simply being a member of a culture designated as outside the natural law and the Law of Nations (as it was derived from natural law) was sufficient to warrant the punishment of extinction or complete subjection to the rule and will of ‘the master’. Eurocentric theory from the birth of the Enlightenment to postmodernism has never adequately acknowledged the complexity and contradictions of its relation to colonialism. Early and late exceptions are few and mild, and, while Kant made critical comments, perhaps the most vocal and critical was Denis Diderot (1713–84).⁷

Unquestionably, the Enlightenment became deeply implicated in the formation of the modern mind, the hegemony of reason, the authority of scientific enquiry and the philosophical dominance of metaphysics. Likewise, it constituted what was to become a dominant aesthetic disposition. But, even more than this and overarching all its other facets, the Enlightenment established and enhanced anthropocentrism bonded to an economy based on the attempt to dominate nature. This perspective is encapsulated by Francis Bacon in his New Atlantis of 1626, where he expressed his ambition as to ‘endow the life of man with infinite commodities’. Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) was one of the foundational texts in the elevation of science and proto-systems thinking.

Cassirer pointed out how the Enlightenment created what retrospectively looks like an iron cage of metaphysics–a cage from which a good deal of modern philosophy has relentlessly striven to break free. It constructed a view of knowledge based almost totally on the products of its own activity. While it is now obvious to us that the Enlightenment was a thoroughly Eurocentric undertaking, the nuances of this are not always seen. Across several centuries, European thinkers drew a veil over the value of the domains of knowledge of Others that they themselves had appropriated (as they extensively drew, directly or indirectly, for instance, on the mathematical and scientific knowledge of the Middle East and Asia). Moreover in their proto-humanism, Enlightenment thinkers, especially anthropologists, designated mankind as a dominant object of study with significant ongoing consequences. Likewise, the Enlightenment asserted that ‘reason’ should become the unifying and central intellectual reference point of the century.⁸ Reason should therefore be acknowledged not merely as the ability to think rationally but as a particular discourse that created a mode of thought ‘according to its own rules’.⁹

What even a brief critical review of the Enlightenment makes clear is that it was not sufficiently rational; even more important, it was insufficiently relational. While forming specialist disciplines and divisions of knowledge claiming to produce universal knowledge, it failed to make vital ‘horizonal connections’. In so doing, it was blind not only to its own and wider causality but also to the inhumanity that accompanied its humanism and against which modern ‘civilization’ was defined.¹⁰

Nietzsche and Nihilism

One of the Enlightenment’s transformations was the establishment of a general condition of compliance enacted by a normative individuated subject who increasingly acted to displace social agency by the powerlessness of legitimized self-interest. This characteristic of the modern individualistic subject became linked to what Friedrich Nietzsche was to name ‘nihilism’–a concept he redefined in his own terms.¹¹ Such a secularized individual lost a religious foundation of value without gaining anything to replace it, while also feeling helpless in the face of the scale and nature of worldly problems. Notwithstanding a century of resistance by class collectivism, this subject has now gained hegemonic and normative status in the late-modern and postmodern world. Helplessness lives with boredom and takes solace in entertainment.

For Nietzsche, nihilism was the diagnosis of an unrecognized and very specific crisis within Western culture. He viewed this crisis as stemming fr...