I taught a course this past Winter in the Honors Program where I teach I entitled Human/Transhuman/Posthuman. I wrote a post in its last week to summarize what I hoped to have achieved in teaching it. I thought it might provide something of a counterbalance to the rather pessimistic tenor of my most recent posts. It has, at least, an exhortatory intent for the generation that will probably have the most important impact on the future of what it means to be human:
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Course Wrap
My approach in teaching this course is different from most philosophy courses taught in an academic setting. In the Disenchantment Course I had students read Wm. Barrett's Irrational Man, and he made the distinction between academic philosophers and the kind of philosophers that interested him most. These are the thinkers who from Socrates, to Augustine, through Pascal, Dostoyevski, and to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Camus were deeply and personally engaged with their own impassioned need to think through big philosophical questions. I think that both approaches are important, but clearly my approach to philosophy in this class is more personal than academic.
And so that requires that the course itself be for me as well as for the students about issues that are critical, that have stakes, that matter for reasons that go beyond what might be intellectually stimulating or that arouse our curiosity. And there is no issue more important for humanity now than our coming to some clarity about what it means to be human. And because the forces of dehumanization are only likely to become stronger in coming decades, there is no more important philosophical project for your generation than to develop a meaningful collective "human" narrative. Such a narrative needs to establish how all humans have a shared destiny, that we are all in this together, and that justice for all is an ideal that must be continuously striven for.
So I see the challenge for your generation as follows: the best among you need to get some conviction because otherwise the worst among you, those driven by the intensity of their coarsest passions–ego, powerlust, greed–will win by default. It's a challenge because a thoughtful decency and awareness of complexity tend to promote a paralysis of will that does not afflict the thoughtless and the arrogant.
To assert the demand for 'conviction' goes against the tenor of the times. We live in the Age of Whatever, in a time during which, for good reason, there is deep skepticism about the legitimacy of any grand narratives. For good reason because we see how the grand narratives of the past have led to oppressive ideologies that have supported the interests of dominant factions rather than justice for all. But because some narratives have been oppressive does not mean that all narratives must be. Our capability to critique the inadequacy of past grand narratives is also the capacity to generate narratives that overcome those inadequacies.
It's extraordinarily difficult to imagine how such a compelling, believable narrative might emerge. The world is too complex and fragmented. The world is globalizing and becoming transformed by technologies at a pace faster than it seems possible for anyone to comprehend. Our political and cultural institutions seem to be completely inadequate in shaping any meaning narratives or any adequate practical responses to clear and obvious threats.
We look around and we see increasing levels of anxiety, alienation, social isolation, substance abuse, gun violence, collective delusional thinking, religious fanaticism, clerical abuse, economic exploitation and inequity, and political demagoguery everywhere. If there is any attempt in fiction or film to imagine the future, it is almost always a dystopic reversion to warlord barbarism after some cataclysmic nuclear or climatic disaster.
And yet there is also everywhere decency, thoughtfulness, compassion, and goodness. It's something that all of you saw abounding in your classmates in this seminar. The problem is that decency and goodness exists despite its not having a plausible culture-wide narrative to explain it, at least not one that most educated elites find believable.
It was a refreshing surprise for me to see in contrast to the apocalyptic, dystopic fantasies that seem to dominate Netflix listings a different kind of story in Russian Doll. Refreshing because the writers tell the story of Nadia's awakening to a goodness that lay dormant in her, and this telling had a deeply moving authenticity to it.
It's as good a dramatization of what Kierkegaard described as a movement from the aesthetic to the ethical as I've seen in recent popular culture. And it poses the bigger question, which is a metaphysical one: In what kind of world is such a plausible awakening to a deeper kind of lived goodness a possibility? What is it that draws people to goodness in a world that otherwise seems so militantly opposed to it?
As I suggested in my responses to some of your reflection essays, I believe that there is already an answer to that question. It lies dormant in the infrastructure of all the great world civilizations, i.e., what I've been calling the Axial traditions. What is worst in those traditions seems most visible to us now. What is best in them, while it is awake in small groups and in individuals, is otherwise corrupted in the broader societies that those traditions shaped. But anything that is dormant has the potential to be awakened.
But such an awakening can be effected only if there is a constituency of people who take seriously its possibility. And so this is a project that begins with acknowledging that we live in a society that aggravates the forgetfulness of Being, and so the effort to 'remember' is the means by which such an awakening might be effected.
We are all Westerners, and that means that we are deeply influenced by Western Axiality. Without it there would be no Ficino or Shakespeare, no Kant, no Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel. No Marx or Nietzsche, Freud, or Heidegger. No Durkheim, Baudrillard, or Kristeva. These are all figures to whom I wanted to expose you because in their different ways they are models for the intense, authentic ways they have grappled with the Western Axial legacy. It's important to understand that all their ideas have a genealogy, and that they trace back to the first millennium BCE. There is an ongoing story that's being worked out here, even if they or we don't fully understand the script and how it's going to turn out.
What they produced is important to understand not because it's true in any absolute sense, but because they each in their own way tried to push back against the forgetfulness of Being and so have something important to tell us about what they have remembered. They have contributed their chapters to this ongoing story, and now it's your generation's turn. What will you remember and write about? Will it be a story of the striving human spirit that might inspire future generations? Or will it be the same old, same old story of ego, powerlust, and greed?
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