Introduction. Against the Stream: Searching for a Concept of the Self in Posthumanist Contexts

      “Whoever finds himself is superior to the world”

      Syrian Thomas’ Gospel

The aim in the title may sound a mission impossible-like in the light of the post-selfhood turn¹ that has been observed over the last two decades not only in analytical philosophy and the philosophy of mind but also in the so-called posthumanism. If we no longer live in a human world, why care about this “central abstraction”² projected by our minds, i.e., our self-identity?

The problem is not only ontological and cognitive in nature – it is more anthropological, existential, social, and therapeutic. Philosophical anthropology used to formulate it with the Kantian question “What is man?” According to Robert Loaden, Kant’s approach to the human being put an end to “scholastic anthropology,”³ as it was useless for modern humans who had to revise their concept of human nature after the discovery indigenous nations with their different multicultural identities. However, Kant’s concept of man as an autonomous subjectivity delivered a powerful counterbalance to reductionist concepts such as that of La Mettrie (L’homme machine, 1747).

In contrast to these approaches, phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy rather asked ‘Who am I?’ – as a unique human being with interiority (mental life) and exteriority (corporeality, embodiment). Finally, analytical philosophy proclaimed non-egological and conceptions of the self.⁴ Contemporary transhumanist scholars seem to follow Peter Strawson’s concept, as they have begun talking about “postpersons” (Julian Savulescu) and post-selves in a radical human enhancement context. “We are not essentially selves (…) Being a self is ←9 | 10→just a ‘phase’ we pass through, like being adults. Nothing psychological is necessary for our existence,”⁵ Ingmar Persson argues.

But next to such reductionist or even nihilist claims as those of Persson,⁶ one can still find grounds for a non-reductionist, or at least a moderate conception, of the self. Without a doubt, Paul Ricoeur, Owen Flanagan, and Dan Zahavi contribute to this conception: “it is undeniable that the self plays a crucial role in our psychological and social life by giving it organization, meaning, and structure.”⁷ Those authors are not the only ones: the return to the non-reductionist self can also be supported by the naturalistic arguments found in the works of all those scholars who shifted the paradigm of selfhood from owning a body to be (own) a body, i.e. to be an embodied self. St. Aquinas belongs to this camp: “the union of body and soul is certainly a natural one, and any separation of the soul from the body goes against its nature and is imposed on it. So if a soul is deprived of a body, it will exist imperfectly as long as that situation lasts (…) Platonists who (…) believed also in reincarnation, though that is heresy (…) Secondly, what human beings desire by nature is their own well-being. But a soul is not the whole human being, only part of one: my soul is not me.”⁸ St. Aquinas’ position breaks with the tradition of St. Paul, which neglected the body as a contingent phenomenon that only disturbs one’s relationship with one’s true non-egological self, of Oriental provenience.

How far can the self be approached as something experiential and not substantial, and which kind of experience would provide such a recovered concept of the self with enough evidence? This is a difficult question, because re-identifying oneself (idem) again and again, persisting, remaining identical (ipse) without becoming estranged to oneself⁹ seems to be impossible in our auto-creative, ←10 | 11→auto-poietic and highly technological lifeworld. Humankind never had so many techniques to enhance and modify herself, not only to adapt the world for its habitat. Natural evolution did not assign any special life niche for humankind. They have to create their artificial “life field”¹⁰ (Lebensfeld) on their own, using their intelligence, freedom, language, technology etc. Their ultimate end is not culture as a “second nature” corresponding to their peculiar needs (der Mensch