Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak
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became autopoietic a long time ago: with ambivalent implications for selfhood and identity. It is not just the ship of Theseus but humans themselves who confront more and more advanced technological improvements today. Before introducing them more systematically and showing their effects on self and identity, one more anthropologist should be mentioned here.
Hans Jonas describes the ambivalent effects that technology and technological freedom have on identity and selfhood, which he conceptualized in a naturalized, but non-reductionist way. Jonas defended the self, even in simple living organisms. In the case of human beings, the potential of their selfhood is open-ended and should remain so, he argues. So asking “who do I want to become?” – which is also a great subject of the philosophy of life and hermeneutics – should be accompanied by responsibility for one’s self and identity. Interpreting Jonas’ imperative of responsibility in such a context suggests that self and identity are meaningful. In other words, they are values with some autotelic aspect. The latter is to be understood as a solely human, open-ended potential which should remain out of the reach of determination and power of all kind. Even one’s own freedom might produce power and oppression, and that occurs by means of technologies, Jonas claims. He argues that there are many reasons to be concerned about the condition of the self during the age of excessive technology use. The contemporary narrative self-conceptions seem to respond to Jonas’ concern, for example with Dieter Thomä’s question “how am I doing”11 (wie geht es mir) as it combines experiential and therapeutic aspects with a first-person perspective and the careful relation to one’s own self. It is experiential because no one can respond to it without drawing from self-experience and socially mediated self-experience; and it is potentially therapeutic because it ←11 | 12→searches for an authentic self-experience in a world becoming increasingly artificial, virtual, and fictional.12 As Maurice Merleau-Ponty warned decades ago, it is our “thinking ‘operationally’ which has become a sort of an absolute artificialism, such as we see in the ideology of cybernetics, where human creations are derived from a natural information process, itself conceived on the model of human machines.”13
As will be shown below, Jonas’ methodology still represents the phenomenological tradition, but also provides evidence for biological and experiential foundations of selfhood. If “an absolute self-reference”14 is quite impossible, humans can at least refer to their living and lived embodiment instead.
Association, disintegration, and “self-negation” were diagnosed as traumatic symptoms of the late modern age by Anthony Giddens15 and the Polish post-war psychologist Kazimierz Dąbrowski. The Holocaust survivor Jean Améry described “the loss of the position of selfhood”16 as a catastrophic existential experience. There is something paradoxical in the modern dialectics of self-negation and self-affirmation. Apparently, when they are existentially endangered, confronting a cultural crisis or clash, human beings show more interest in strengthening their selves and identities.
The same can be observed in the recent age of radical human enhancement when humans started facing their posthuman or transhuman future. But technological developments and critical discourses are not enough to provide the contemporary (and still) human condition with sufficient support. It is the philosophers’ task to resume the search for adequate – and affirmative – narratives, supportive discourses, and therapeutic tools. They cannot be the ←12 | 13→same as discourses with universalist claims,17 which assert that the essentials of humanity and human nature endangered by advanced technologies and progressive cultures. Despite the fact that humanity’s survival relies on technological progress, it is neither humanity nor human nature, but rather an individual human that experiences – but not necessarily “has!” – her outdated corporeality and being-in-the-world and tries to update herself. Those two phenomena: one’s own changing condition and the world changing faster and faster have only been sparingly problematized by scholars exploring the “no-self-self.”18 Simone de Beauvoir was one of the last authors who thematized being-in-the-world as the proper phenomenal field, as an interactive sphere in which a human being experiences the loss of the self. She said that the ability to experience oneself increases in line with age, but that kind of aging may affect everybody regardless of her metrical age: “According to de Beauvoir, for the elderly man who lives in a world that is changing fast, it becomes easy to find himself out-of-date, useless (…) unproductive,”19 socially estranged and unattractive. To summarize: we grow old living faster in a world that is changing fast. In the past, there were technologies of the self20 (or self-examination) developed to integrally strengthen the human self.21 Today advanced technologies are being developed to recover, ←13 | 14→rejuvenate, or to enhance manifest abilities, traits, qualities, and areas of the self.22 We are able to track the manifest results of those interventions. What we cannot track, it is the hidden after-effects, spiritual, artistic, and metaphysical in their nature. This, however, is nothing novel in humankind’s history. In this sphere, we always already constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed, idealized, deluded, and disenchanted ourselves.
Scholars who incline towards naturalized, but non-reductionist phenomenology and philosophy of mind employ some methodologies to approach selfhood, even in the unfavorable opportunities of today. They propose “a representationist and functionalist analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective is”23 when a human psychosomatic condition confronts radical changes. Among the three core theories of the self, e.g., the Kantian-Husserlian transcendental, the Ricoeurian permanently re-storied ego (be it a string-like or stringless series of biographical episodes),24 and the naturalized but non-reductionist phenomenological approach to “the Self as an experiential dimension,”25 the latter offers the most impressive and still underexplored heuristic potential. However, in this book, I will be drawing on all three theories to justify the notion of the self. Undoubtedly, not all mature and clinically sane persons show a conscious, existential, or psychological requirement for being a diachronic self, as Derek Parfit expresses it in reference to his own biographical experience, e.g. as an “episodic”26 self embodiment.
But let’s speak in the name of those who permanently recover, reidentify and reconfigure themselves, balancing between experiences that synchronize mental states with the experienced world. Scholars are focused on such questions as “what is the relation between the reality of experience as we have it from moment to moment and physical reality as we take ourselves to know it in everyday life ←14 | 15→and in science?,”27 while medical professionals, therapists, and their patients are concerned with crisis, disintegration,28 or, at least, with tension between actual and ideal, past and future selves, between statics and dynamics, sameness and otherness, identity and alterity:
Despite the fact that he is always the same (he has the same name, and the same identity), the individual is the subject of life pressure, of the bios- and