This post continues from my last post, which was really an argument for a theistic metaethics, i.e. there are no ethical or moral truths without theistic coercion enforcing moral obligation. That was more like an apologetic argument and less like an argument relating to posthumanism, but that is about to be addressed.
Next, let’s return to a spectrum of views about essences or natures, which was discussed in an even earlier post. Thomas Aquinas is the poster boy of the High Middle Ages for one end of the spectrum, which regarded both descriptive and prescriptive essences as being objectively present in things out in the world, over and above the concepts of those essences in the minds of observers. Prescriptive essences are the telos or final cause of a thing, i.e. its inherent purpose and reason for being. William of Ockham is the poster boy of the same period for the other end of the spectrum, regarding both prescriptive and descriptive essences as mere concepts, including in the mind of God (the story is more complicated than that, but the details matter little for my purposes).
Arguably, Ockham won the argument when it came to natural philosophy, but Aquinas won the argument when it came to moral and political philosophy… until recently. Modern science progressed by rejecting the explanatory relevance of final causes in favour of efficient causes, only, influenced by Descartes’ definition of matter as res extensa. However, the tacit philosophical humanism of the Renaissance, as it became the explicit philosophical humanism of the Enlightenment, drew heavily on a Thomist (Aristotelian) metaethics, grounded in the notion that the prescriptive aspect of each thing’s essence determined its good in its objective conditions of flourishing, or eudemonia. A whole ethical system can be derived from this principle, though, being a metaethics, such a system requires further elaboration as to what the conditions of human flourishing are and how they are achieved, which would then entail ethical principles.
This Thomist metaethics has been floating in the background of the history of ideas ever since. The Enlightenment involved a specific project of humanity’s rational development that assumed both a rational human nature and that the good involves the development of rational faculties and pleasure maximisation. Kantian ethics was purportedly derived from pure reason, but its maxims declaring humanity as the end of ethics merely imported substantive commitments to human flourishing into a deontological or duty-based system. The Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment expanded the means and meaning of human flourishing, but it remained the measure of the good. Hegelian and Marxist theories relativised the human essence to epochs of development, but a commitment to human flourishing as the objective measure of the good remained a motivating idea, even as the idea of objectivity was historicised.
It was not until the twentieth century that the influences of Aquinas and Ockham finally interacted with each other, again, with humanity as an object of scientific inquiry increasingly displaced the explanatory power of final causes or telos in human affairs, in favour of the more fruitful explanation of humanity in terms of efficient causes alone. The resulting tide of anti-essentialism made a metaethics originating from objectively prescriptive essences untenable by the end of the last century. However, this has not stopped the spectre of essentialist metaethics persisting beyond the death of humanism as an essentialist cultural force, including in the discourse of critical posthumanism. I will use Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism as an example, in order to elaborate on this claim.
Braidotti (The Posthuman, 2013) is to be respected for acknowledging the fruitfulness of a measure of realism about matter, rather than the frictionless spinning in a void of textual of interpretation that often characterises poststructuralist critiques of contemporary culture. Braidotti’s is a monistic philosophy, framing matter in vitalist terms of being inherently intelligent and self-organising, thereby rendering culture as continuous with nature rather than as categorically distinct from it. to In her Spinozan view of matter, Braidotti regards it as being suffused with a dynamic and generative force of life to which she refers as ‘zoe’.
Braidotti regards her view as supporting a posthumanist ethics, or rather the potential becoming of a posthumanist ethics. She criticises Europe’s “narrow-minded self-interest, intolerance and xenophobic rejection of otherness,” and “imperial, fascistic and undemocratic tendencies.” She valorises a “pan-human cosmopolitan bond,” as well as valorising “non-human or a-personal life” and “zoe in itself.” She advocates for the “need to become the sort of subjects who actively desire to reinvent subjectivity as a set of mutant values and to draw our pleasure from that, not from the perpetuation of familiar regimes.” She advocates for the need to continue questioning “difference and power disparity” and for “compassionate acknowledgement of [our] interdependence with multiple others most of which, in the age of the anthropocene, are quite simply not anthropomorphic.” And neo-liberal capitalism is bad, especially as it takes the form of “bio-piracy.”
What grounds, then, are we given for sharing this range of ethical responses?
Braidotti has some theoretical resources to play with in developing an ethical framework. Firstly, there is the potential of zoe as a force for creative (and destructive) becoming. Then there is the non-unitary nature of subjectivity, with the individual always already containing a radical diversity, which might suggest that self-interest is an interest in the ‘other’. Next, there is the fundamental ontological role played by the interrelationships between manifestations of zoe, which might suggest a need to embrace relationships to the other in order to flourish. Finally, there is an emphasis on experimentation with hybridity towards finding new ways of establishing egalitarian relationships of which we currently cannot conceive.
Is this enough to satisfy our concept of the normative with regard to ethical or moral reasons and behaviour?
Well, the problem with Braidotti’s monistic philosophy, and many poststructuralist theories that reject binaries for evaluative reasons, is that the category of normativity, including the sub-category of morality, is dualistic to its core. The normative always divides possibilities into the ways that things should go and the ways that they should not. This division is available on the Thomist/Enlightenment model of humanism, because humanity was regarded as being autonomous from the natural environment and capable of realising a distinctly human state of affairs by applying the human will, and faculties such as reason and intuition, to bring about the good of human flourishing in contrast to the alternative possibility of human languishing if human potential were to lie dormant. It is because human nature is transcendent that it can provide a distinction between the way the good and its alternative turn out in the material environment.
When considering the distinction between the good and the otherwise available to Braidotti with her critical posthumanism, she becomes caught in a dilemma. The first horn of the dilemma is that the objective potential of the universe lies not with humanity, or any broader category of life form, but with the fundamentally self-organising and intelligent aspect of a vitalist universe: zoe or life itself. However, this potential cannot fail to be realised, no matter what happens. The universe is fundamentally life becoming in myriad forms, so there is no way that its potential could fail to be manifest in order that an ethics might be built around the steps needed to ensure the manifestation of the good.
The second horn of the dilemma arises from the alternative option of grounding ethics in the possibilities for flourishing of specific forms of life, such as humanity, albeit not limited to any particular conception of humanity. I think that Braidotti actually vacillates between both horns of the dilemma, in a futile attempt to overcome it. Despite the focus on the potential of zoe, she also acknowledges the continuing need for subjects with ethical agency, even if they are non-unitary selves, because this is a pre-requisite of political and ethical accountability. This is certainly true, but in what does this accountability consist? It is none other than the intuition of unavoidability that I discussed in my last post, and ultimately that unavoidability is grounded in overwhelming consequences for an individual person who fails to satisfy normative requirements.
Let me unpack that some more. Either individuals are accountable in the sense of linking their conduct to their individual flourishing (an option rejected by Braidotti), or to the regulation of individual agency in a network of relationships that brings about some overall (yet to be defined) improvement in conditions for the nodes in that network. According to the Thomist/Enlightenment model of humanism, not only is there a privileged way for humans to flourish, which defines a universal measure of the good, but the natural environment is regarded as being responsive to the proper employment of human faculties, achieving a harmony that results in human flourishing when humans behaved according to their prescriptive essence. Humanity’s place at the centre of universal potential guarantees the path of progress if we behave authentically and, thus, ethically.
It would invoke the spectre of humanism for Braidotti to continue to rely on this guarantee in any way. There is no guarantee that any kind of behaviour, interdependent or otherwise, will lead to any kind of objective improvement in conditions, because the universe is no respecter of persons. The guarantee appears to be the opposite: despite virtue or vice you will die; your offspring will die; your species and co-evolved species will either die out or evolve further through mutation and adaptation to a point of radical otherness that represents the very antithesis of the way of life for which you stand. Furthermore, without any guarantee that individual conduct of a given kind will necessarily contribute to individual or social betterment, in some sense yet to be defined, there can be no accountability beyond being answerable to bare power.
So, to recap, the dilemma for Braidotti is that either life as a whole is the measure of flourishing, and it achieves its potential inevitably, without any possibility for it or its various forms going wrong, or specific forms of life are the measure of flourishing, and there can be no accountability for unethical conduct (no unavoidability) because there is no necessary link between ethical conduct and flourishing. Yet, each of these possibilities denies something seemingly central to any recognisable concept of ethics and normativity. The one theoretical resource available to Braidotti that could provide a path between the horns of the dilemma is her appeal for experimentation and openness to the possibilities of zoe. However, this appeal to the unknown merely delays the need for a response to the dilemma. It gives no confidence that the kind of experimentation in ways of becoming recommended by Braidotti could lead to anything in answer to the dilemma, or any clear picture as to what an answer might look like.
What is the alternative? Once we abandon prescriptive essences as a way of grounding the good, what is left? Well, as I stated above, without any guarantee that individual conduct of a given kind will contribute to social betterment, there can be no accountability beyond being answerable to bare power. If we abandon Aquinas, in the absence of other viable options, we must consider Ockham. The good is determined by the power of God, by divinely personal prescription backed by the guarantee of ultimate outcomes notwithstanding a contrary natural order. The duality between the good and the alternative is provided by the difference between the divinely transcendent prescription and the ways that the world can deviate from that prescription in the medium term. Thus, a truly posthuman ethics is viable only from the perspective of theocentric posthumanism, incorporating voluntarism about normative truths and reasons. I intend to elaborate on that claim in my next post.
Theocentric Posthumanism 