Wolfgang Schirmacher - On the Inability to Recognize the Human Flaw
Schirmacher, Wolfgang. "On the Inability to Recognize the Human Flaw." In: Wolfgang Schirmacher. Just Living. Philosophy in Artificial Life. Atropos Press. New York, Dresden. ISBN 0981946269.
Wolfgang Schirmacher - On the Inability to Recognize the Human Flaw
A Critique of Science's Conception of the Human
1. Science and Society
The natural and information sciences intervene in society in an increasingly cavalier manner, thereby developing an explosive force traditional structures are unable to withstand. Historically developed modes of thinking and feeling are becoming obsolete overnight and losing the ability to decide societal questions. This process of destruction is taking place in the open, but it seldom becomes a topic of public debate, since it makes its appearance as the unavoidable adaptation to new scientific discoveries and technological advancements. Humans can learn from their mistakes, but they seem unable to resist their successes. The cultural critic Thomas Assheuer described the trend toward the "artificial human" (DIE ZEIT 12/ 2001), a trend that appears irresistible to science. He accused its proponents of making biological evolution the only measure of things. Questions of morality and ethics, political and social conflicts have disappeared from this sphere, and the emerging "hypermodernity" is prepared to subordinate even the "inalienable rights of the individual and the dignity of non-personal life" to the principle of functionality. A few catchwords shall have to suffice: computer science and robotics design the human being as a cybernetic machine, genetic technology asserts its unlimited right to the genome, and scientists from numerous disciplines investigating the human brain believe to have discovered at long last the true subject: the brain and its attendant self. It is not any single spectacular result that brings about a paradigm shift in society, but rather the scientific-technical mindset itself, the now-commonplace perspective of evolution. Yet the decisive difference to Darwin's time lies in the (near) disappearance of the line between nature and culture, and in man's development from a mere object of evolution to its skillful master.
It will take perhaps hundreds of years before this development achieves fruition, but even as a largely yet-unrealized blueprint project, human evolutionary thought develops a social dynamic of its own that must be subjected to critical inquiry. In this regard it is not very helpful to fall, as Assheuer does, into an old-European lament and to bewail the downfall of modernity and enlightenment. For the conception of the human being as a historical being for whom autonomy, morality, and democracy represent unimpeachable achievements is by no means a self-evident truth, but must remain justifiable even under radically altered circumstances. That some cultural critics then dismiss the human "wish for self-redemption" as a delusion, however, and go so far as to demand the recognition of ignorance, stupidity, fallibility, and maliciousness as human rights, borders on self-hate. How can there be a "right to ignorance," as the Lutheran bishops in Germany claim with regard to the possibilities of genetic diagnostics? And, shouldn't a technology like the internet be used to transform the rather dubious system of representative government into a genuine democracy (with minority protection)?
The touchstone in this paper for current scientific thinking and its social ramifications may appear a surprising one, but only at first glance: the phenomenon "Eigenmangel" ("one's own inherent flaw"). The concept is taken from the field of law but denotes a phenomenon central to the social influence of the sciences. An Eigenmangel is a construction flaw that is legally countered by a "Mängelrüge," a customer's complaint about defective quality. When understood as a human flaw, an Eigenmangel is more than a random defect such as occurs in an individual; it is the shortcoming par excellence, one that is my own because it also occurs as a flaw of the of all humanity. The sciences owe their power to prevail in society not primarily to their quest for truth, but rather to the technological promise they hold out to ameliorate and ultimately eliminate the flaws of human existence. The "reign of freedom without sickness or death, aging or worry" (DIE ZEIT 12/2001) is purported to characterize the age of "hypermodernity," which is to be made possible by science and technology, and ethical considerations will never be able to stand in the way of the curing of illnesses, or at least not for long. No euphemistic references to handicaps as "alternative body forms" or hereditary diseases as contributions to genetic diversity will be able to hinder humankind from exercising its new power to give form to a life modeled after its innermost imaginings. Significantly, it is not society that promotes eugenics and pays for it with state funds; rather, the demand stems from individual suffering, not abstract conformity à la Huxley's Brave New World. The shortcomings addressed by the sciences are inherent, genetically determined flaws such as illness, age, death, as well as structural flaws in the common life of society such as the monopoly on knowledge, the uncontrollability of institutions, and the caste mentality. Genetic technology and brain research do away with the inherent flaws of the biological individual, as media and the internet do away with those of the social being — this, at any rate, is the tendency. The poet Theodor Däubler expressed this outlook in verse: "But man must quickly recognize his inherent faults and harshly scorn them without long deliberation" (Parisian Hymns).
2. The Human as the Flawed Being: Homo compensator
Significantly, in its large-scale attempt to do away with inherent human flaws, the hypermodern scientific mindset proceeds from fundamental anthropological assumptions that can be traced back to antiquity. The human being, in contrast to animals, was early on characterized as a flawed creature treated by nature as a stepchild. But the author and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder realized 200 years ago that "in the midst of these shortcomings" "the germ of substitution" must lie: reason and liberty make up for our faults. In the 1920s, philosophical anthropology, particularly that of Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, made the concept of the "flawed being" a central one. Opposing a popular pessimism that disdained cognitive man as a dead-end of nature, Scheler emphasized the compensatory drive: "Thus is man, as a spiritual being, the being superior to himself as living being and superior to the world" (Man's Place in the the Cosmos, 38). The Schopenhauer advocate Gehlen was somewhat less hopeful, asserting as he did man's need of lifelong discipline and training in order to compensate for his obvious flaws (cf. Man, his Nature and Place in the World, 32). Homo compensator sees itself as a being "not of nature," that with technology created a "second nature" for itself and that secures its identity with cultural achievements. Homo compensator defines itself in dialectical differentiation from nature, always seeking a synthesis that unites nature and spirit. As an anatomically flawed being man is at the same time the "prosthetic god" that Freud prophetically described. Marshall McLuhan consequently defined media as prosthetic human "enhancements," which in the complex forms of cyborgs (i.e. cybernetic organisms) populate science fiction films today.
Today's people-breeders and post-humans may have moved beyond the old differentiation between humans and nature, operating as they do within a sphere of synthesis of the natural and the artificial, but if anything this has made the Homo compensator drive stronger. Only now, it is not the supposed flaws compared to animals that are emphasized (even if one is willing to learn from nature), but rather it is inherent human flaws that are focused on: whatever one is incapable of wanting should be done away with, without regard to whether or not this is envisaged "by nature" (not to mention by God). Such a world view, which has largely prevailed in society, remains in an anthropological sense curiously undecided. On the one hand it is still indebted to the Homo compensator model and thus to the paradigm of an instrumental technology that distinguishes itself by the domination of nature. On the other hand, this scientific mindset points ahead to a conception of the human defined no longer by delimitations of any kind, but by self-interpretation.
3. The Self-Generating Human: Homo generator
The distinction between generating and manufacturing, so fundamental from the perspective of instrumental technology, and which plays a critical role in the current debate about human cloning, does not apply in the case of Homo generator. Homo generator generates world and things with the possibilities afforded by materials, and manufacturing is merely a sub-form of generating. My phenomenological diagnosis is: the human being has always been Homo generator, but for a long time the nomenclature of his self-characterizations has been insufficiently comprehensive: Homo creator (i.e. one who creates something from nothing), Homo faber (i.e. the user of tools), Homo sapiens (i.e. the rational being), Homo ludens (i.e. the being that plays). While creativity (which emerges almost completely from nothing), the use of tools, play, and our capacities for reason and compensation all belong without a doubt to the full vocation of man, no one of these is fundamental. We are above all and irresistably Homo generator, uniquely [eigens] self-generating beings with willfulness [Eigensinn] and self-love [Eigenliebe], who in the enownment [Ereignis] of technology live an artificial life. Such a life of complete responsibility does not make us lords and masters over other phenomena, but it does make us the anthropomorphic generators of such phenomena.
The kind of science and society we generate in the end depends solely on the difference between anthropocentric and anthropomorphic life technology. Homo compensator with a science that wants to do away with every shortcoming, as though we were the center of life and the dictator of being, is obviously anthropocentric. Despite the general agreement today that relating everything to ourselves as a species and reacting to problems in a correspondingly paranoid manner is fatal lunacy, practical consequences are not drawn from this insight. But, a critique of this condition that throws the baby out with the bathwater and takes the perspective of nature, the environment, or the animal world, can be equally anthropocentric. For not only can we never escape our anthropomorphic disposition, it would be merely negatively anthropocentric not to accept it consciously, a kind of species-wide pouting. The manner of coming to terms with its inherent shortcomings is also a touchstone for Homo generator, this seemingly alien yet actually familiar self-interpretation. What follows, nevertheless, is a closer look at Homo generator, the imperceptibly succeeding human, together with a few of his life techniques.
A. Autopoiesis
Homo generator, the human that generates itself, bears the stamp of autopoiesis and enowns itself [ereignet sich] tautologically: I am who becomes. While my origin is determined from without, my blueprint, which carries out my enownment in beginnings that are decided upon ever anew, is not. Whether he wants to or not, man takes responsibility for all of his actions and omissions, with no ifs, ands, or buts. Whether my will is free matters to me not at all. Homo generator will answer for everything that was begun through this will: her fulfilling of the design itself] is my self evidence. The continuum of a dynamic existence, for which in its enownment this self is at stake, is determined by mortality and natality; not as poles, but in a strictly vague sense attuned as well as “enworldet” (verweltlicht). To be sure, the anticipation of death--memento mori--has in the post-industrial states long since lost the ability to inspire horror and has become a mere media sensation and theatre of cruelty. The simple caution of common sense and a streetwise circumspection, which is not necessarily attained in large cities, have nevertheless banished death from my active existence and recast the once horribly importunate grim reaper as a friend to those weary of life. Natality, too (Hannah Arendt), the explosive ability in politics and private life to start a new life at any moment, has become domesticated and is recommended universally as a way to enhance the quality of one's life. The violent wrenching-free from habit--from the poetic riddle all the way to the orgasm-happy Bataille--is now considered an exotic seasoning for a soup of life that would otherwise soon be inedible. Instead of fearing death and birth, we become ethically duty-bound to participate in the self-experienced formation of the highs and lows of our moods.
In contrast to Ludwig Feuerbach's emphatic determination of man as an earthly god, Homo generator is modest enough to preserve in his own form of life a harmony with all other cosmic modes. To be sure, we will never know how nature lives or how the universe develops, for all of our assumptions on that account remain--as one can never disregard--anthropomorphic and thus merely self-interpretations, for which we obtain confirmation from ourselves. Among the circumstances whose That my Being-in-the-World (Heidegger 1977) transforms into a How, and which for this very reason allow me to enown for the world (Deleuze 1995, 48), are things, fellow humans, and fellow creatures. The reliance upon the That of the shared world ([Mitwelt) and the environment does not entail a limitation for Homo generator (much less does it entail a deterministic dependency); rather, through the unrelenting challenge of the How it is an excellent opportunity to attain freedom. I can only be-for-the-world because facticity itself is powerless, and without my qualifying acting, (carried out in creative alliance with my fellow humans) it would have to remain diffuse material. In all their overwhelming and confusing variety, the material conditions remain a Homo-generator-centric starting position that is perceived as an opportunity for self-development as well as the danger, inextricably bound up with this opportunity, of the loss of self. Homo generator easily avoids anthropocentricism as well as self-destructive egoism when an anthropomorphic perspective is self-confidently brought into play and self-love (Erich Fromm) is experienced as the incubating warmth for every other kind of love.
B. Perception
Ethical systems as life technologies have traditionally strived disempower the egoistic self and call for an asceticism of the ego-subject, in the mode of altruism, in order to facilitate the processes of finding one's way and fitting in, as ways to attain the good life. Then, inquiry was not earnestly pursued, but rather the answer preceded the question and was authoritatively formulated by religion, tradition, and mores: self-generation took place by way of self-denial. Today, the media have largely taken over the role of the authorities who are never at a loss for an answer. Since they, have taken on the role as no-longer-so-secret educators of humankind, magazine aesthetics, television images, video and cinema stories, CD music, and countless other technically reproducible art works have undertaken a radical, sweeping standardization of our perception (Paul Virilio).
How do things stand with this perception? Do we construct reality in our heads, is the brain the true creator of humanity and the world? The millennia-old argument between monists and dualists about the connections between matter and spirit, body and soul, consciousness and brain seems to have been settled conclusively by the progress made in brain research. From the brute fact that brain death determines the moment of death of a human being, scientifically as well as legally, one can infer that essence, spirit, and character are bestowed exclusively by the brain. If the brain dies, there is no longer a person! For the dissenting notion, that the self is represented in the entire person, since our identity constitutes itself also through the perception of the body, leads in the end back to the brain as the organ in which these perceptions are consciously or unconsciously stored. If brain activity ceases for good, then these self-perceptions are lost forever. Christian Wolff, in 1719, was the first to call mind the natural product of a complex brain, which puts together a picture of the world by means of projections, and sorts incoming information with the help of variable maps provided by the appropriate sense organs. Mind and spirit differ from one another in their cultural topography, but are viewed as the products of a brain that observes itself: a narcotized brain is unconscious and incapable of any mental activity (Sentker 1996). The notion of a mind that is more than a brain function dissipates more and more for the guild of brain researchers with each new finding that is made: neurobiologists, physicians, computer scientists, and psychologists demonstrate in detail how the brain creates itself through its own handiwork. That said, the brain and its person (Jean-François Lyotard) are by no means to be understood in a grossly reductionist sense, comprising as the brain does within its kernel fear and anxiety as well as Freud's unconscious and its worthy sister, the cognitive unconscious (LeDoux 1996). Even the absence of mind (Langer 1997) is in its oft-useful forgetfulness (Weinrich 1997) a genuine brain process. Our perception of the world with a model of the brain as self (Metzinger 1995) is stored as a map of our own body and validates itself not through truth, but through efficiency. As an information processing system, the brain created itself in the light of its experiences. The mind emerges in the brain: sum ergo cogito (Edelman 1995)
Yet the American author and physician Walker Percy was by no means sure "To say that mind is a property or function of the organization of the brain is like saying that Raphael's Orleans Madonna is a property of paint and color." (1991 p. 275). Am I my brain? We can never know from our own experience that it is our brain doing the thinking; rather, we simulate a point of reference independent of our experience in order to make such assertions. It is only through the mediation of apparatus that science learns of the invisible world of microbes or the functionings of the brain. Patricia Churchland predicts, probably correctly, that brain researchers will not let themselves be swayed in their reductionist position, that mind is nothing more than a measurable brain function, by the worried objections of those from the humanities. It is equally unlikely that a society will forego the benefits to the advancement of brain surgery afforded by this violent oversimplification of reality. Without the least regard for any truth in the exact sciences, it will continue to fixate on their successful application. But outside their laboratories, the sciences and their allies are no longer gods, and even in the face of successful practical application they will be increasingly called into question. While their work is recognized as methodologically valid, it is of no use at all for our self-understanding, for our inquiry into the truth of human existence (Gadamer 1983). Certainly one should not simply dismiss the brain as the instrument of thinking, neither is the self simply the active programmer of the brain, (Eccles 1995), for such an instrumentalistic interpretation of our technology fails to recognize its character as life-technology. It is with our technologies that we generate the world. Thinking in all of its forms--from unconscious to discursive to intuitive--is influenced by my brain, by its flawless functioning or by its perceptible failure, but no more by my brain than by all other technologies. That we are incapable of thinking without a brain does not mean that thinking is nothing more than a brain activity, but only that it can be viewed in this way without thereby revealing its meaning. As a knowledge-sponge with an evolutionary feedback loop, the brain is a necessary, but by no means a sufficient condition for thought, and whoever says "I am my brain" has simply added one more fashionably new one to the long line of human masks.
C. Autonomy
We experience ourselves as Homo generator and in thinking--intuitive, discursive, and active--we bring forth numerous worlds populated with their respective figures, we design the unexpectedly appropriate order that can be found with a retrospective glance toward chaos. This generating of worlds and unleashing of the event [Ereignis] in consciousness and thinking is, in accordance with its character, autopoietic, and autopoietic life-technologies are in and of themselves anthropomorphic, dedicated to the good life of the self and to nothing else. The self can never step out of its own perspective, and everything that the mind consciously, unconsciously, or intuitively generates, remains irrevocably anthropomorphic, autopoietic, and distinctively its own. Not zealously to assign a value to this, but [mit Gelassenheit] to acknowledge it as the basic condition of the human, would be an initial and essential step toward authentic self-understanding. The self is autonomous solely through autopoiesis: it is here in the enownment [Ereignis] of successful or unsuccessful life and nowhere else that I reveal or conceal myself. The autopoietic work of the self encompasses--as it does with Leibnitz's monads--the whole world, and thus can in no way be reduced to the self-satisfaction of a an intellectual act or the welfare of a self. No thought without the Realized, and intellectual conceit is nothing but an empty promise!
The human being is of necessity arbitrary, giver of his own laws, answerable to no higher authority, but this is not to be confused with Descartes' formulation of Lord and Master of nature. Autonomy is not about domination or servitude, for it is only through autopoiesis that it can be fulfilled: by the worlds it creates shall you know it. For some of these worlds--as Heidegger demonstrated for the craftsman-world of readiness-to-hand-ness (Zuhandenheit) or Hans Lenk did for the world of sports--mastership may be a key concept, but it is one that remains regional and must continually be validated anew.
But would an unprejudiced view, if such were indeed possible, not determine that there is no self, and that autonomy through autopoiesis in everyday life represents the great exception? For all their realism, plausible arguments against autonomy in life and death, such as is lived by the self, fail to address the situation under consideration here. For if one begins to plot out how the human being lives from within, the self reveals itself as a Proteus that can assume any imaginable form and represent any imaginable content. No fixed value can be extracted from the self, not even that of a full and self-determined life. Every choice--just as every refusal to choose--is carried out initially by the self, without exertion and without it having to decide, just like that, a constant flux that only death can dry up. The self exists in no other way than as engaged in form-giving, inventing, folding, unfolding, and refolding (Deleuze). Whether tertiarially this winds up against or for an authority, whether it means a turning toward the world or away from the world, depends on conceptual presuppositions on the secondary level, but can never influence the life techniques of Homo generator and its absolute autonomy-through-autopoiesis. Another assumption that would go astray is the one whereby initial generation is to be conceived of as neutral and requires--as Nietzsche postulated--a valuation beyond good and evil, in order to become life-friendly. Youths who find life not worth living, or those from the older generation who commit “balance sheet suicide” remain irrevocably Homo generator, authentic in the How of their self-destruction.
D. Ethics
The self-invention of Homo generator is uniquely inscribed into the otherness of materials, a vulnerable and nevertheless protected existence (Dasein) enowns [ereignet] the fullness of nothing in "Seyn" (Heidegger 1997). No identity, positivity, interpretation, but also no measure, value, not even a meaning can determine how my artificial life is to succeed. For this How of success--although and even because it is overwhelmingly there and exudes fascination as enownment--remains empty when it is boldly snatched up, transforms itself for the one in need into something unpalatable and dupes the theoretician with the legerdemain of its negations. What Homo generator elegantly sails over is the singularity of its generating, which causes the explanation of the world to belong wholly to him; to him as a first movement (Nietzsche 1994, 152). But this belonging is no identification, for it turns us at the same time into strangers. It is not through externalization or internalization, but through the generation of the unique, of the always antecedent [Vorgängig] of these psychic or social processes. A rearrangement of our relationships to people and things takes place as unconscious topology (Avital Ronell 1988) and all identification processes are subsequent constructions that seek in vain to dispel the terror over one's own strangeness and coldness.
The circumstance that the singularity of successful life is at the same time a uniquely stimulating enownment (Ereignis) is what provides an ethics of artificial life with its task. In this singularity, an imperceptible perception, a fading memory, a blurred impression, an unregistered sound are enabled, through eternal return, to strengthen and encourage, and are endowed with subtlety and releasement.
Such an anthropology and the ethics and aesthetics (i.e. as perception) that give rise to it are left unscathed by Heidegger's (1976) devastating critique of humanistic conceptions of the human and of presumptuous value ethics, since such an anthropology escapes the snares of the technological standing reserve: nothing is standardized, nothing can be scanned or planned out in advance, when Homo generator unexpectedly enowns [sich ereignet].
4. On the In/Ability to Recognize One's Inherent Shortcomings
The ability to recognize one's own inherent human shortcomings forms a trait absolutely necessary to scientific thought as it materializes in genetics, computer science, and neurology. The very difference between anthropocentric conceit and justified anthropomorphic self-interest can be demonstrated by the treatment of the phenomenon of one's inherent shortcomings. Homo compensator wants to recognize its own shortcomings for the sole purpose of eliminating them. That man is his own wolf, even at times his own worst enemy, that profound mistrust and feelings of inadequacy poison his life and depression overshadows it: these situations are supposed to disappear just as physical disease and--the most outrageous demand--death are supposed to be done away with. Shortcomings are above all the shortcomings of others, whose deficiency seems to stand in the way of their own happiness. But even when one's own shortcomings are stoutly and squarely faced, Homo compensator does not want to recognize them as anything but temporary and in principle reversible. Such a world view is far removed from recognition of one's inherent shortcomings. At best it camouflages its unwillingness to acknowledge its shortcomings' right to existence as the inability to recognize them.
Homo generator, on the other hand, acknowledges with releasement his own shortcomings. He is capable of recognizing that life as a "constant vacillation between suffering and boredom" (e.g. in Arthur Schopenhauer's grim formulation) is something he has generated himself. The limits of the feasible and the limitations of our knowledge are not forced upon Homo generator from without, but are rather integral to the success of his own world-generation. The inappropriate anthropocentric drama that in existence always concerns itself with the decision between life and death, is relinquished in favor of an anthropomorphic wisdom that has learned to distinguish between necessary and accidental suffering. Essential to Homo generator is its ability to recognize, without fear, what can be generated in individual life and what remains beyond reach; in other words, the ability to conceive of historicity as a praxis of the right moment. In clear contrast to the anxiety-driven being fraught with shortcomings, the experienced world-generator is not concerned with mere survival, but rather with a good life, whose contours are not predelineated, but constantly formed anew. To be sure, such unqualified acknowledgment of the blind spot and of the happenings behind our backs is not without danger, constituting as it does an inroad to all forms of what Kant calls "Schwärmerei" (i.e. wild-eyed enthusiasm, fanaticism), including such forms as religion and ideology.
Yet something curious reveals itself. The willing acknowledgment of one's shortcomings as a necessary element of successful life, as genuine openness and "clearing," without which surprises and future developments remain impossible, bears unpredictable consequences. For if one has overcome the unwillingness that led to inability and if one's cognition is willing to acknowledge one's inherent shortcomings, these shortcomings withdraw from view. What remain knowable are multiple shortcomings, including one's own--which, however, are easily perceived as self-engendered and thus changeable. To be sure, Homo generator, with his leniency toward recognized shortcomings, turned his back not only on the hysterical search for flaws, but also on the chimera of perfection. But this means that one's inherent shortcomings now function as a black hole in the human universe.
He who is willing to acknowledge will learn that there is nothing to know, and that that which is incapable of being brought to closure is just perfect. It is only indirectly, by way of their ethical consequences, that the phenomenon of one's inherent shortcomings, which are a genuine part of human existence, can be accessed. Homo generator not only contends, but demonstrates by living example, that its inherent shortcomings are a part of a successful life. This sounds like Kant's dictum, that man is carved of warped wood, but has completely different ethical consequences. One's inherent shortcomings, in their undiscoverability, guarantee that Homo generator, despite its irresistible dynamism and absolute responsibility, will never be a creator, a temporal god, with or without a prosthesis. A creation of worlds from nothing and the attendant indifference toward the material can never be "human," but merely a deficient, anthropocentric mode of the human--and our entire existence demonstrates this. No outside measure is necessary--call it God, nature, or fate--for the inability to recognize one's inherent shortcomings is completely sufficient, not to limit our autonomy, but to determine it authentically. We shall let no one, least of all science, take from us our ethical duty to be a fool, and our right to be a "holy idiot" (Ronell 2001).
Translated by Daniel Theisen