Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak
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one’s own natural brain with an artificial one to achieve a transtemporal identity.105 Thomas Nagel106 and Martina ←37 | 38→Nida-Rümelin developed related case studies to show human cognitive skills are limited, especially when confronted with inter-species reincarnation. Thus, becoming radically transhuman or posthuman would be a kind of anthropomorphic and anthropocentric illusion. In philosophy, using thought experiments remote from reality is a legitimate research method, as Nida-Rümelin admits.
Two case studies developed in the thought experiment convention will be presented below. Both related narratives were selected from modern and postmodern literature, namely Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) and T. Richard Brown’s The Face in the Mirror (2012). They report on the radically posthuman experiences faced by the two main characters. Both novels are originally structured as first-person narratives with elements of internal and external dialogism. In both novels, the sequence of narratives and the actual course of events are correlated. It allows a researcher to follow the changes in both biographies and to detect, on the basis of the narratives, when the human and personal self abruptly confronted with non-human experiences face discontinuity and disintegration, and whether their subsequent persistence leads to growth (i.e., becoming posthuman) or, on the contrary, to regression and degradation. Both cases will be complemented by Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Heart of the Dog (1925), which is briefly recapitulated, for the novel includes first-person and clinical narratives about a fictional experiment which involves turning an animal into a post-animal. Of course, applying narrative methods unavoidably implies expression and understanding trans- or nonhuman experience through the anthropomorphic and anthropocentric filter. The fiasco of the narrative method could not be more spectacular than at the initial moment of its application, which can only be hypothetical or literary (as literature can transgress the bounds science must respect).
3.4.1 Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka107 depicted, in a vivid way, the experience of a sudden and brutal reincarnation (Körperwechsel, Metamorphose)108 of a man’s soul into a body of a ←38 | 39→monstrous insect. In Kafka’s biographical context, his Metamorphosis portends the approaching exclusion of a fraction of people from the human world, their dehumanization and, finally, the Holocaust. Metamorphosis emits a profoundly tragic message which can also be interpreted as a posthumanist à rebours. Gregor Samsa’s experience does not spread any breakthrough-related optimism which permeates present-day posthumanist visions. Samsa’s features, his behavior, his human and interhuman way of life get completely annihilated through different, repulsive traits and behaviors of a primitive animal organism. Although able to cognitively and emotionally track his day-by-day experience, which characterizes Kafka’s literary style when he starts narratively reporting on Samsa’s metamorphosis from a first-person perspective, it is an animal identity which predominates and absorbs his original identities as a young man with his human embodiment. To emphasize the key stages of Samsa’s gradual transition from a human to animal condition, related excerpts are accompanied by my meta-comments such as ««human experience; ««animal experience (««non-human experience, respectively); ««transitory experience; ««being out of the place in the human world; ««posthuman experience109 to stress. However, taking Nagel’s conclusion seriously (that there is no possibility to cross the gap between human and animal first-person perspectives), transitory and animal experience remained out of Samsa’s cognitive and emotional scope. Let us track Samsa’s metamorphosis’ trajectory step by step, following the milestones of Kafka’s narration.
• “This morning Gregor was unable to get out of bed unaided. Lying on his back, he lifted his head with effort and saw some strange belly divided in brown segments (««non-human, animal experience). Several struggling legs (…) waved helplessly (…) against each other (…) before his eyes…” (««animal experience).
• “What has happened to me? he thought.” “Well, supposing he were to say he was sick?” (««human experience). “He felt a slight itching up on his belly (…) He was even unusually hungry” (««animal experience).
• “… there came a cautious tap at the door behind the head of his bed. ‘Gregor,’ said a voice – it was his mother’s – ‘it’s a quarter to seven. Hadn’t you a train to catch?’ That gentle voice” (««human experience).
• But “Gregor had a shock as he heard his own voice answering hers, unmistakably his own voice (…) but with a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it like an undertone, that left the words in their clear shape only for the first ←39 | 40→moment and then rose up reverberating round them to destroy their sense” (««transitory experience).
• “His immediate intention was to get up quietly without being disturbed, to put on his clothes and above all eat his breakfast, and only then to consider what else was to be done, since in bed, he was well aware, his meditations would come to no sensible conclusion” (««human experience).
• “And he set himself to rocking his whole body at once in a regular rhythm, with the idea of swinging it out of the bed” (««human experience).
• “Gregor was now much calmer. The words he uttered were no longer understandable, apparently, although they seemed clear enough to him, even clearer than before” (««transition experience).
• He “… laid his head on the handle to open the door wide… but immediately, as he was feeling for a support, he fell down with a little cry upon all his numerous legs” (…) “his legs had firm ground under them; they were completely obedient, as he noted with joy” (««transition experience).
• “But when at last his head was fortunately right in front of the doorway, it appeared that his body was too broad simply to get through the opening.” “Slowly, awkwardly trying out his feelers, which he now first learned to appreciate, he pushed his way to the door to see what had been happening there” (««transition experience).
• “For there stood a basin filled with fresh milk (…) he did not like the milk either, although milk had been his favorite drink” (««transition experience).
• “… his only regret was that his body was too broad to get the whole of it under the sofa. He stayed there all night spending the time partly in a light slumber” (««animal experience).
• “… a piece of cheese that Gregor would have called uneatable two days ago… Gregor’s legs all whizzed towards the food (…) and [he] sucked greedily at the cheese” (««human and animal experiences confronted).
• “One after another and with tears of satisfaction in his eyes he quickly devoured the cheese, the vegetables and the sauce; the fresh food, on the other hand, had no charms for him, he could not even stand the smell of it” (««animal experience predominates).
• “… crawled up over the windowsill (…) in some recollection of the sense of freedom that looking out of a window always used to give him. For in reality day by day things that were even a little way off were growing dimmer to his sight” (t) (««melancholic human mood accompanies becoming non-human).
• “… about a month after Gregor’s metamorphosis (…) he had formed the habit of crawling crisscross over the walls and ceiling. He especially enjoyed ←40 | 41→hanging suspended from the ceiling; it was much better than lying on the floor; one could breathe more freely; one’s body swung and rocked lightly…” (««non-human experience).
• “ ‘Come in, he’s out of sight,’ said his sister (…) They were clearing his room out; taking away everything he loved” (estranged and banned from the familiar world) (non-human experience as a radically estranged).