The Order of Things

The tenor of theocentric posthumanism is captured by its response to a landmark text of anti-humanism, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970). Often cited as a catalyst for post-colonial theory and politics, it has surprisingly little to do with a critique of humanism as a justification for oppression of the Other, despite containing Foucault’s famous declaration that man is a recent invention whose end is probably drawing near.

The humanity upon whom Foucault’s sites were set was actually the humanism of the Enlightenment, which attributes to human reason the potential to achieve universal and absolute knowledge in all domains of thought. As I understand it, Foucault’s argument against this humanistic hubris about our rational faculties relates to an inherent tension between humanity as both the subject and object of scientific inquiry. The subject is humanity regarded as the bearer of an autonomous mind with a potentially infinite capacity for objective knowledge. However, when these faculties are directed upon humanity as the object of inquiry, an embodied subject is discovered whose knowledge is dependent upon and constructed by local, contingent forces of social power. In Nietzsche’s terms, knowledge has a genealogy, in Foucault’s, it has an archaeology, and it is merely the expression of contingent fields of social force.

Now, Foucault takes this tension between humanity as subject and object to mean that humanity from the latter perspective is the true one, i.e. human reason is always situated and contingent, and therefore incapable of objective, universe knowledge. However, this exhibits the general problem with poststructuralist critiques, in that they undermine their own authority, which is, after all, grounded in the capacities of reason that they deny. There is no logical inconsistency in making universal claims that all universal claims are only true relative to a limited context, yet the universalising rationality of the Enlightenment human subject is dialectically prior to the contingent human object in Foucault’s argument, and he is clearly borrowing authority from the Enlightenment conception of human reason, despite going on to trash that source.

It would be nice if there were actually a solution to the paradoxical tension between humanity as the subject and object of inquiry. Indeed, there is, and it was put forward at the dawn of the Enlightenment in Descartes’ Fourth Meditation. At the beginning of modern epistemology, with Descartes’ methodological doubting of everything, there needed some basis to ground knowledge beyond the mere claim that the thinking subject exists. Descartes found that justification in an argument for the existence of a good God who would not deceive a human under normal circumstances. Unfortunately, Descartes’ argument includes certain humanistic assumptions about what goodness and justice are, and therefore what a good and just God would and would not do. Any critic of humanism is going to have to jettison these. Fortunately, Descartes’ standards of justification for any set of beliefs to count as knowledge were also way too high. So, the theistic guarantee of an Enlightenment-level human capacity for objective knowledge is available in another form, if we grant that we do know the everyday things that we seem to know.

Returning to the idea that Foucault seems to presume the Enlightenment subject in order to reject it, the theistic guarantee can be seen as a transcendental argument* for divine control. That is, human rational faculties capable of universal and objective knowledge are presumed, and theistic intervention is then brought in to explain away the tension between humanity as the subject and object of rational inquiry. After all, anyone thinking upon the successes of scientific inquiry into the physical universe should find it hard not to be amazed and start eulogising humanity like an Enlightenment dupe. It is only when that impressive gaze of our rational faculties is turned upon itself that the trouble starts.

So, here is the thought that unifies humanity as subject and object. God created the heavens and the earth, along with the physical laws that probabilistically determine the course of universal history. There is nothing intrinsic to the capacities of humanity, or humanity’s local environment, that would serve as a mechanism explaining the capacity of humanity to know the universe in all of its objective majesty. Even so, the development of the universal history and the evolutionary history of homo sapiens have been determined from the beginning, at all levels, to arrive at a period of knowing correspondence in the present. This parallelism explains our capacity for universal knowledge as a pre-established harmony, programmed into the patterns of history to arise in spite of the unreliable, local mechanisms available to deliver that knowledge as a matter of individual or collective interaction with our environment. As such parallelism requires something to coordinate the correspondence between knower and known, something sensitive to persons and with the power to determine the development of universal history at all levels, this provides the basis of a transcendental argument for theism.

This is just the first in a range of transcendental arguments that move from anti-humanist and posthumanist claims against humanism towards a theocentric posthumanism that agrees to stripping humanity of intrinsic value and potential, but disagrees that this is the end of an exclusive status for humanity. Instead, all that is stripped from humanity is attributed to God, and God’s otherwise ungrounded privileging of humanity is what satisfies our exclusivist intuitions… for those of us who still have them.

* A transcendental argument takes the form that some type of fact A is true because some other type of fact B is obviously true, and facts of type B can only be true if facts of type A are true.