Over at Critical Animal, James has a very nice post up critiquing human exceptionalism. Here’s a taste:
One of the reasons that I always find human exceptionalism problematic is that most people seem to skip the hard work of philosophical anthropology. Or to put it another way, most people take the human as given, without doing the conceptual work to draw a dividing line between all the variations of humanity on one side, and all manifestations of life on the other side. There is a sort of almost Supreme Court on obscenity feel to such discussions: we know humans when we see them. Of course, our track record of knowing humans is actually pretty bad. Slavery, sexism, colonialism and coloniality, racism, our treatment of the mentally disabled, peasantry and poor, the mad, physically disabled, and more and more. You get the picture, right? It was not uncommon in the histories of coloniality, for example, to believe that the languages of the colonized were not full languages, but existed somewhere between animal languages and full, human languages. Indeed, those colonized peoples were not seen as full people. As little back as the 1950s, it was fairly common to talk and think about people with autism as being not fully human, of not being capable of language, thought, and humanity. We have to have a certain level of hubris to believe that we have finally understood who are humans and who are not, when quite frankly this question of humanness is both old and recent. It haunts the boundaries of every project of philosophical anthropology, it haunts the boundaries of every claim of human exceptionalism.
There’s a lot more, so read the rest here. What James outline– and Alex Reid, to whom James is responding, has a great post up on the issue as well –is something that drives me up the wall about the discipline of philosophy. Not only do we begin from the default position of the subject and the object as if it’s self-evident as to what constitutes a subject, but philosophers seem to have a jaw dropping degree of ignorance when it comes to talking about these issues. Too many in our profession believe that we can just jump into discussion making all sorts of claims about humans without bothering to acquaint ourselves with various ethnographic studies, psychology, the lives and worlds of the disabled (at least read Temple Grandin folks), various histories of everyday life, and so on. In chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition Deleuze remarks that we always speak poorly when we say “we”. It is precisely this sort of issue he’s getting at. We make all sorts of generalizations and assumptions about what human nature is that are little more than repetitions of our own cultural and historical assumptions based on life in this historical moment. How can we even begin to properly pose ethical, political, and cognitive questions without having a rich background knowledge of these things? What makes someone like Jerry Fodor– not to mention socio- and psychobiologists –think that he can simply outline his modular theory of mind or the nature of human kinship structures without looking at the various ways in which people have lived and thought? There’s much more in James and Alex’s posts so be sure to check them out.
Larval Subjects . 
November 15, 2011 at 12:48 am
This is a really interesting debate and something I’ve thought a lot about lately. (This started out as a short comment but it’s gotten our of control so I’ll put it up as a post on my own blog too!)
This kind of problem always reminds me of a passage from Plato’s Statesman where the Stranger reproaches Young Socrates for failing to ‘carve nature at its joints’ and instead making hasty generalisations about kinds of things; of failing to perform the labour required for accurate classification.
“Stranger: The error was just as if some one who wanted to divide the human race, were to divide them after the fashion which prevails in this part of the world; here they cut off the Hellenes as one species, and all the other species of mankind, which are innumerable, and have no ties or common language, they include under the single name of “barbarians,” and because they have one name they are supposed to be of one species also. Or suppose that in dividing numbers you were to cut off ten thousand from all the rest, and make of it one species, comprehending the first under another separate name, you might say that here too was a single class, because you had given it a single name. Whereas you would make a much better and more equal and logical classification of numbers, if you divided them into odd and even; or of the human species, if you divided them into male and female; and only separated off Lydians or Phrygians, or any other tribe, and arrayed them against the rest of the world, when you could no longer make a division into parts which were also classes.”
Plato’s method of division and classification is particularly laborious in this dialogue and it has irritated more than a few classicists (I’m not one but I’ve read a few) who wonder why he doesn’t just make broad distinctions and jump to the end where everything is nicely carved up; why go through the process of division (which frequently goes off on tangents that are subsequently abandoned) if you can just state the end product and be done with it? I think Plato realised that that’s lazy and that philosophical method is as important as philosophical claims. In short he recognised the importance of working things through, of honouring the mediators rather than fixating on the end products, if you like. But I digress.
Who is more ‘barbaric’: the multitude of peoples chatting away to each other in their various tongues or the puzzled-looking philosopher who, as if to subconsciously repress his shame and incomprehension, waves his hand and decrees them all ‘the same’?
Etymologically, the word barbaric connotes ‘babbling’ and the sensation of hearing someone talk a language you don’t understand. The TRULY barbaric reaction is to take this incomprehension as a sign of homogeneity – not of the inadequacy of one’s comprehensive capabilities but of the uniformity of the phenomena presented.
Such is the phenomenological experience of any anthropologist at the start of their journey: they are clumsy, awkward, incompetent, thoroughly stupid when placed among their tribe. Their genius lies in correctly deducing that this is an inadequacy of THEIRS, not of their hosts! Such powers of intuition allow them to gradually become less clumsy, awkward, incompetent and stupid – the generic babbling becomes a flooding plurality of clearly articulated and endlessly diverse conversation. Eventually their hosts become literally FAMILIAR – family. They become beings capable of stating their own differences; their babbling disappears as they impress THEMSELVES upon their own categorisations. They become subjects, endowed with depths and agencies, possessing unique characteristics.
I’m keen to ontologise this principle.
The reason why we need a conceptual vocabulary that can articulate the qualities and relationships of all things – human and non-human – i.e. the reason why we need a metaphysics, is not because all things (human and non-human) are the SAME; on the contrary, it is because they are ALL different. Not just the human and the rock but the rock and the tree, the tree and the … etc. etc. etc. We can’t have a separate conceptual scheme for every possible relationship so we are left with only two options: have an abstract scheme that is vague enough that it can accommodate any thing or engage in the arbitrary bifurcations whereby we have one language for one side and another for the other and then sit around wondering how the two can ever be reconciled.
The reading of Plato’s/Socrates’ ‘cutting of nature at its joints’ is always that there are natural kinds that can be rationally deduced. And this has always been used to justify hard-boiled naturalisms that say we must scrub away any trace of our pitiful subjective perceptions from our definitions of objects, etc. etc. On the contrary, I understand it to mean that we should try to LEARN from things, open ourselves to things, RISK ourselves in front of things as Stengers might say. Let them define themselves, let them cease to babble. But don’t expect them to suddenly ‘speak our language’! This isn’t Star Trek – the aliens won’t miraculously have a grasp of American English. It takes work to turn that head-spinning babbling into comprehensible conversation.
This, for me, indicates what an object-oriented epistemology would be: a theory of becoming-sensitive to things, of how we can allow things to define themselves while acknowledging that they won’t just speak our language as if by some miracle. This would show us that we don’t need to purge subjectivity to have objectivity. On the contrary (and my Latourianism is coming out here), becoming-sensitive is an object-loaded activity!
Anyway…
The moral of the story?
One is barbaric when one suppresses one’s own ignorance and incompetence by ontologically homogenising all that which one has not gone to the effort of telling apart. If a phenomenon’s nuances are elusive this could simply mean that the phenomenon is entirely disinterested in you! The ultimate narcissism is to assume that this disinterest reflects badly upon the phenomenon! Maybe it wants you to think it’s babbling!
Indeed, this is a precautionary principle for all metaphysics: beware babbling, things might be plotting against you and your ignorant ways! Ignorant in every sense of the word.
The real barbarians were the Hellenes and we are their heirs so long as we worship Kant and weep over the white man’s burden (homogenising things or peoples, it matters not). Neither things nor folks have any problem differentiating themselves or going about their lives without us. We struggle to keep up – and then we blame it on them!
Carving nature at its joints doesn’t indicate that nature is a neatly segmented totality just waiting for the cut and thrust of our instruments. (One surely needn’t point out the phallic implications of this modern interpretation!) On the contrary, I think it means that we need to learn how to segment and how to carve.
Even a corpse won’t cede so easily to the wild flailing of the butcher’s apprentice – he too has to learn his trade, knife in hand, babbling to himself.
November 15, 2011 at 12:24 pm
While it’s true that philosophers tend to have an extremely shallow notion of what “the human” entails, their understanding of the myriad different forms of life that actually exists is far, far shallower. In fact, it’s basically nonexistent, and thus discussions of human-animal relations focus exclusively on human exceptionalism, relegating “the animal” (always in the general singular) into a mere background whose only purpose is to be what “the human” is not.
The first step towards better philosophy of human-animal relations is to realize that any comparison with the category “animals” is automatically a mistake. One example I usually give is to say that while everybody thinks statements such as “humans are smarter than animals” are at least legitimate (even though they may disagree with them), all such statements are in fact logically identical to the statement “My Ford Escort is faster than cars”, an obvious nonsense.
November 15, 2011 at 3:43 pm
Levi, thank you for this.
Silver R., “My Ford Escort is faster than cars” is a brilliant example. I think I may use it in class today.
November 15, 2011 at 7:55 pm
excellent, and this is why multiple ways people (or other beings) live (or non-live) should be open/looked at for ideas moving forward through the Anthropocene.
November 16, 2011 at 1:38 pm
I come across very similar problems in theological circles. I think Freud makes an essential point in his Civilization and its Discontents about the difference between addressing the god of philosophers and theologians, and the god of the everyday, prosaic religious person. The latter is his concern. Very often theologians do much the same thing as you discuss here—they race towards such an abstract “humanity,” and then make all of these theological subtleties and explanations that, I think, are very often far removed from the average experience of religious people in the pews, synagogues, mosques, etc. At the very least (not commenting on its merit or political value) movements such as the liberation theologies is a step in a better direction in moving away from dogmatic assertions about “the human,” and addressing these particular humans here-and-now, in this time and space, and what they are struggling against. (As a side note, the fact that many liberation theologians have been officially or unofficially criticized or outright rejected by the theocratic aristocracy of Rome is a sign, for me at least, that they hit a sore spot there).
The route you take is, of course, the lesser taken, and it is no doubt thornier, but I think ultimately more the point and more productive—what are human beings in their day-to-day existence, what do they believe, what do they hope for, struggle for, etc, rather than addressing a very abstract kind of “human subject” which seems to exist in an cultural vacuum (or, which simply takes the prejudices and proclivities of the philosopher for granted).
November 17, 2011 at 1:25 am
This group likes stories: let me try one.
I was talking today to one of our economists. She admitted that the structure of most economic calculations is so reductionistic as to be insupportable as they do not even pretend to meter the various — what I would call downstream — consequences of economic activity. However she claimed that “we” were doing better: for instance, economists now often calculated disposal costs in comodity modeling.
I pointed to lead as an example: used in paint etc. through the 1970s. Its secondary and beyond “costs” were and still are incalcuable. No modeling can anticpate the complex, chaotic, and emergent epiphenomena of large scale capital nor will there ever be such. Whether or not we develop philosophies that are more sensitive to non-human requirements, the scale of our activity is too large to be managed. Indeed, I think humanity has already passed the bearing capacity of the planet and shows no sign of slowing.
If philosophy and science can never — as I believe — reach any significant understanding of becoming, then their basic responsibility is not to ontology or epistemology but an ethics and politics of modesty based on appreciation and local responsiveness and consequence. I see no chance of this change becoming possible as a real revolution. It less important — though not unrelated — that humans become less self-centered than that our numbers and production shrink in a way opposite to the global Ponzi scheme dominant since the enlightenment made humility unfashionable.
November 17, 2011 at 12:22 pm
Dan:
I largely agree. But isn’t this “ethics and politics of modesty” itself concordant with an epistemological modesty that recognises the fundamental limitations of calculation (which in turn rests on the ontological principle that reality is incalculably complex in itself and not just in our representations of it)?
Understood thus the moral and political modesty goes right along with the epistemological modesty and ontological pluralism (in the sense of a plurality of things that withdraw from each other, etc. etc.). I don’t think we need to give up asking how we know or how we can know better; we just have to give up on the silly idea of knowing everything such that things, once known, can never surprise us.
I think the crucial point here is in fact ontological: things are incalculable IN PRINCIPLE rather than just IN FACT. Everyone can accept that, for example, economic models always have externalities. However flawed their models (and however much they recognise these flaws), don’t the economists still think that some variables just don’t matter and that one day they’ll have internalised everything of any significance?
In a pluralist ontology there are externalities as a matter of principle. The ontological, epistemological, political and moral aspects needn’t be separated or hierarchised (though I agree that the former pair cannot do all the work of the latter, nor, I would argue, can the latter pair stand in for the former).
So long as we hold out the hope that what is possible in principle just needs to be realised in fact the whole house of cards remains standing.
Incalculability, unknowability, unpredictability – these all seem to go hand in hand with the recognition of human non-exceptionality; of humans being one species among others that rely on other species to make this planet inhabitable. So, with respect to anthropocentrism, according non-human things the status of ends rather than purely means is by no means a cure-all but it goes along with this cluster of assumptions that run across politics, morality, and philosophy. I’m not sure that it’s sensible to abstract from any one category hastily.
Non-anthropocentrism seems to be a condition of possibility of the anthropocene not being the end of the anthropos!
November 17, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Circ, I do not disagree with most of what you say: I think we have to play our instruments as the boat sinks. However, I do not think the liberal concept of amelioriation or rational discourse is viable against capital’s inertia.
November 17, 2011 at 5:42 pm
Dan,
I think the term “inertia” hits the nail on the head. I believe that those critical theorists that focus on discourse, belief, and ideology critique are misidentifying the problem. Clearly these are elements of the problem, but I think far more profoundly there’s the problem of material intertia. A person can clearly see that this system is unjust and unsustainable, but life is so deeply intertwined with the material universe of technologies, feul, agriculture, jobs, etc, that we’re trapped like flies in a spider web. The real political issue is not so much one of changing beliefs, as it’s one of finding ways to create sustainable material alternatives allowing us to escape the spider web. Because of the idealist orientation that pervades the humanities, we barely even have a discourse on this issue.
November 17, 2011 at 5:48 pm
Do some research on psychopathy and you’ll discover that capitalism almost perfectly fits the psychological profile. Psychopaths are profoundly narcissistic, amd are emotionally color blind, having no compassion and empathy for others (and, in referring to others, I am referring not just to other people, but also animals and non-living material beings). The psychopath has no regard for moral rules (they lack the affects that would motivate them to follow them), and encounter everything and everyone in terms of the gratification of their own desire. Interestingly, they also have a very limited ability to engage in long term planning. The psychopath lives in the “now”, responding here and now and thinking not about the future. Isn’t this the very essence of the capitalist system? Don’t we live not in the age of schizophrenia but psychopathy?
November 19, 2011 at 8:42 am
Idealism is certainly a political problem. I’ve lost count of the number of times some media outlet or other has pulled some bumbling NYU humanities graduate student on camera at the Occupy protests to ramble on through the most cringe-inducing faux radical cliches about the need for alternative, counter-hegemonic discourses and the creation of emancipatory thinking space, etc. etc.
It’s not that they’re wrong as such but that their horizons are so absurdly claustraphobic. The discourse of academic discourse is one that few are prepared to countenance except to denounce positivism or something equally pointless.
I mean, who would stand up in a humanities department and say ‘Yes, okay we know that art and music and so on – these are all important, but they’re really not as important as you’re all making them out to be. Farmers are far more politically significant – why don’t we have a debate on where our food comes from and how we can alter our nutritional conditions of existence rather than fixating on symbolic gestures all the time? Why don’t we go and visit a farm instead of the art gallery this afternoon?’ I think that person would be burned at the stake in some places! (There are many places you can talk about such things but don’t try telling people that these things have anything to do with philosophy.)
Meanwhile, the powers that be are laughing all the way…well…to the bank!
(There you go choir, consider yourself preached to!)
November 20, 2011 at 7:54 pm
@circusqu
I kind of see what you’re saying but why are alternative discourses so cringe inducing? That isn’t claustrophobic is it?
And I remember studying ‘Politics and the Third World’ (which included debates on food production) at the Univ of Kent at Canterbury in 1973….Admittedly this wasn’t in a humanities dept. I think it might have been ‘social sciences’ (it was an early attempt at interdisclipl….).
Who would stand up in a ‘media studies’ or physics dept and to ask for a debate on food production….
But I do realize that humanities are v. often ‘claustrophic’…and as for phil depts!!!
November 24, 2011 at 1:07 am
These sorts of things do indeed get debates in the social sciences but rarely in any kind of dialogue with more ‘humanities’ oriented scholars. It’s normally pretty straight laced ‘policy oriented’ stuff (with some exceptions, admittedly). For the most part they’re kryptonite to each other. The only overlap really comes from Foucauldian biopolitics kind of stuff.
Perhaps it’s just my own personal prejudices that make me cringe but it really doesn’t come across well on the news when students are going on about ‘opening up emancipatory, transversal spaces to counter hegemonic discourses’ and so on when they’re really just squatting in a park and occasionally getting interviewed by MSNBC. Taking nothing away from their achievements so far (which I’m really impressed by here in the UK anyway) but the whole cultural politics lingo just sounds a bit daft sometimes. It does seep out of the academy and into the rest of the world sometimes, that’s the thing.
Thinking about the food supply, it’s so unglamourous as to be ridiculous to even suggest it, I agree. But how many journals, seminars, are given over to the politics of art, film or photography or somesuch. It isn’t that such things aren’t important (they are, very much so), it’s just that they’re not nearly so important as academics convince themselves that they are. It’s much more fun (and easy) to write theory articles deconstructing war movies than it is to get your feet dirty in the field (or, in the case of a farm, a field!). So a philosophical milieu in which ‘representations’ and ‘symbolism’ dominate is likely to appeal to those who would rather fixate on that kind of phenomenon.
If capitalism collapsed tomorrow who would put food in our mouths? These are fundamental questions that few are prepared to ask because everyone has become so myopically obsessed with ‘symbolic spaces’ and so forth. Isn’t this what the whole ‘object oriented’ thing has done for political and social theory so far?: shown that anything can full under the purview of these disciplines. They are not limited to specific phenomena or pre-determined ‘spheres’.
Ultimately, subversive politics, if successful, will need to lead to a subversive economy – a whole ecology, in every sense of the word – and the dominance of the cultural studies crowd prevents such questions even really being thought of, let alone asked.
November 24, 2011 at 7:52 am
yep. I pretty much go with what your saying…i doubt whether ‘subersive politics’ will really happen in humanities depts. Altho Stengers’ ‘Capitalist Sorcery’ is worthwhile – even if it didn’t come out of a humanities dept.! It is her and Pignarre.
and yes, the language about ‘countering hegemonic spaces’ is kind of ridiculous in the context of media interviews…
It is a bit daft….but maybe anythings better than nothing….
http://www.ulb.ac.be/rech/inventaire/unites/ULB716.html
‘The PHI – Research Centre in Philosophy supports a conception of philosophy as a living practice deeply engaged in the present. It is from this perspective that not only the different fields of philosophy (logic, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, theory of science, ethics, aesthetics’), but also its history and its various trends, are approached. The members of the PHI consider this diversity as a crucial condition for both teaching and an active and relevant involvement in the contemporary issues and debates as well as in the problems developed from other fields (art, law, politics, sciences, as well as the production of knowledge in general). http://phi.ulb.ac.be/‘
December 12, 2011 at 11:09 am
[…] Contributions such as these have been responded to, for example this post on Critical Animal and this one on Larval Subjects are responses to the following quote from alex reid. Humans are unique […]