Failed animals: (long) postscript to “Ethics/Responsibility” chain.
1. Before we close the debate around issues in ethics and
responsibility
it is worth reflecting a little further on the “biological” premise
that Terry attempted to put into play in a post a couple of days ago.
“In real life, the ethics and worldview processes actually work
well enough a biological basis without any need to assume humans as
being/having a conscious identity.” (13/11/10). I doubt if many were
overly convinced by this attempt to assimilate the ethical into the
biological, but it is still worth asking why, particularly in relation
to ethics, this argument is so profoundly wrong. [**See below].
2. The fundamental reason is simple enough. It is that the historical
peculiarity of the human lies in our failure to remain in a condition of
instinctual or purely biological being, within ‘the allotted sphere of
the possible which everything follows, and yet nothing knows.’
Reflection has always pondered this fundamental break—often with
pathos. The story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is only one
variation (but perhaps the least enlightening) of the myth of loss of
innocence. Nonetheless, the coming-to-be of the human is as a result of
this break. Loss of reliance on instinct (which must now be
repressed—c.f., Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents) is
compensated for by development of that on which survival now depends,
the inter-twining of artifice and (self-) consciousness.
3. What we call the human emerges awkwardly and incompletely from this
peculiar matrix. The process is not without cost. The demand that we
reflect on actions is one (painful) price we (reluctantly) pay for this
break. (This fact that should remind us that the quality, range and
courage of the reflections that humans are prepared to undertake on
their condition is perhaps the most acute measure or register of the
human that we possess—need one add that on this criteria we are not,
at the moment, covering ourselves in glory).
4. Impurity is the second consequence. By impurity I mean that in
biological terms we are neither/nor. Biological at core, but overlain
and reconfigured in complex and unstable ways by artifice, we are
incompletely either animal or human. Forced to concede that artifice has
both entered into the deep constitution of who we are—and has forever
split us from any natural or simply given resonance with the conditions
of biological life—we might, at extreme, wish all this otherwise.
(Think here of Freud’s notion of the ‘death drive’ as the longing
to return to the state of the inorganic; or the hostility to the human
seen in some moments of “deep” ecology). But we cannot go back and
break the evolutionary chain. We are, irretrievably in the human.
5. To say this is not to (re-)assert the (all too dangerous) myth of
human as exception. Instead it forces us to recognize who we are—a
rather peculiar strand of failed animals, increasingly constituted,
though in ways we can hardly recognize, through the artificial. But the
complexity and incompleteness of the human explains why both
“mentalist” and “ethological” descriptions of the human are
profoundly inadequate. The intrusion of the artificial into the
“natural” makes the attribution of all purely biological
“explanations” for actions impossible. At the same time it
dissolves the claim that consciousness is simply “natural.” No
processes dependent upon complex and contingent means of symbol
formation and manipulation are simply innate.
6. But nor is it possible to seek for a closed model of the human. No
finalized picture of the human can be achieved since human beings have
no final essence. We are radically incomplete; incompletion belongs to
us. Erratic, inconsistent, contingent and wholly without telos, persons
are best characterized as erratic artifacts, ‘works in progress’;
as the not-quite or not-yet “fully” human.
7. This has two further consequences. The first is that any adequate
model of the human must include the factor that forces the break with
the givens of purely instinctual being, i.e., reflective consciousness
mediated by artifice. But closed or finished models of the human are
inadequate for a second reason, and that is that what matters, for the
human (and for the world(s) we inhabit) is less what “in essence” we
are than how we act. To put it better, as relational entities we are, in
effect, only as we act. This is why ethics has to be central to human
acting. What matters, for us, is how we act, immanently, towards the
world, vis-à-vis others, in terms of how we stand to ourselves. Ethics
is an attempt at modeling criteria or axioms for acting.
8. Thus, rather than models of biology or consciousness, the more
useful formulation for thinking ethically is perhaps the provocation
that Herbert Simon gives in the conclusion to his chapter on “The
Science of Design” from Sciences of the Artificial. “The proper
study of mankind has been said to be man. But I have argued that
man—or at least the intellective component of man—may be
relatively simple, that most of the complexity of … behavior may be
drawn from man’s environment, from [the] search for good designs.”
9. Simon’s formulation places the emphasis where it needs to be—in
the forms and modes of how we act vis-à-vis the world. Pointing as it
does to the necessary mediation with the environments (natural and
artificial) within which we exist, it indicates the basis—today the
only basis—from which an adequate ethics can be drawn, i.e., from the
manner(s) in which we mediate our relations via artifice to others and
to the world. (Remember here that one attribute of the artificial is
that the character of artificial worlds comes only from the character of
the acts that constitute them: there is nothing given or necessary in
artifice. Everything is dependent on the configuration that things are
given).
10. In this respect both philosophy—which still wants ethics to have
a subjective basis drawn exclusively from consciousness of the other as
its basis of ethics—and scientism (which wishes to reduce ethical
decision-making to instinctual impulse derived from calculation) miss
the point. Ethics “happens” neither in the mind nor in biological
processing; it occurs in the negotiations we undertake with
incommensurable demands and requirements; in the actions we enter into
as active subjects seeking (at best) equitable relations for all in
complex situations; in the modes of how we negotiate and mediate
relations with the “environments” we encounter (and in circumstances
‘not of our choosing’ but nonetheless of our making); in the ways of
attuning negotiated acting so as to secure, in complex situations,
‘preferred’ outcomes.
11. But as we encounter an increasingly artificial existence the
ethical takes on a particular—loaded—hue. Since all acting, all
relations (even the most inter-personal) pass through the
artificial—and since the latter now constitutes, effectively, the
horizon and medium of our world—then ethics is today bound to
artifice. (And is all the more so, of course, because today the
artificial is in acute crisis, to the point where it threatens the
continuity of anything that we might recognize as a future).
12. It is not therefore only that any adequate model of the human must
include (as it must) the factor that forces the break with the givens of
purely instinctual being, it is that ethically speaking it is only in
relation to, or through, artifice in the wide sense that an ethics that
is adequate to our times can be formulated. Consciousness, which
pretends a naturalism of the soul, is as blind in this respect as the
biological, which pretends a naturalism of the animal. Both remain in
fear of the ambiguity but centrality of the artificial.
__________
** For example, Terry’s point that ‘On a more real and less
cognitive front, one of the interesting biological systems of organisms,
including humans, is … the ability to biologically convert multiple
inputs into a single output as 'ethical' decisions [and that this] is
what provides the core underlying human processes by which it is
possible to make the judgments necessary to build a 'worldview,'’
while it obviously contains significant insight confuses on two grounds;
first, because it fails to acknowledge how, for us that ability is no
longer purely biological—that for us these decisions are not only even
colored by artifice, they are in effect constituted almost wholly on the
basis of artifice. (Biological ability is here merely the substrate of
the more complex and less perfect decision-making). Second, the
formulation confuses because it uses the notion of the ‘ethical’ in
a ways that are not tenable. For better or worse the ethical applies
only to human relations self-consciously thought. Impulsive,
instinctive, reactive,”biological” decision-making is many things
but it is not ethical.
Clive Dilnot
Professor of Design Studies
Parsons School of Design/
New School University
Room #731, 7th Floor
6 E16th St
New York
NY 10011
T. (1)-212-229-8916 x1481
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