The Meaning of Thought. Markus Gabriel
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If we can dissolve ourselves into information, it is seemingly possible to install our minds onto some superior hardware, to upload consciousness and our personality onto digital devices. This idea is brilliantly explored in the American TV series Westworld. The series is set in a futuristic theme park called Westworld, in which visitors encounter robots indistinguishable from humans. The humans can use them entirely for their own pleasure. In the second series (spoiler alert …) it transpires that the firm operating the theme park extracts behavioural data from the visitors, which they then use to perfect the robots. Behind the entire enterprise is the mind of Westworld’s creator, which has been uploaded onto a server and plans to co-opt one of the perfected robot bodies, thus merging inforg and cyborg. But this whole fantasy could never in fact be realized. Let’s not forget that the TV series Westworld does not show us a single robot. What we actually see are human actors playing robots who at some point begin to play humans! This is the reality displayed by Westworld: the human wish to become a robot who becomes human.
To combat this flight from reality, I make the case for an enlightened humanism. Enlightened humanism is based on an image of the human that, from the very outset, allows no room for doubt that everyone, whether foreigner, native, friend, neighbour, woman, child, man, coma patient or transsexual, counts as human in the full sense. This is important to emphasize, because the classical humanist positions developed since the Renaissance have usually, implicitly or even explicitly, taken white, European, adult, politically significant and well-to-do men as the standard of being human. Even Kant’s writings are unfortunately filled with racist and misogynistic assumptions, which is why in practice he denies people who were deeply foreign to him, such as the inhabitants of the southern hemisphere, their humanity, explaining for example how ‘humid warmth is beneficial to the robust growth of animals in general and, in short, this results in the Negro.’7 Yet Kant is by no means just a racist. He is above all a theorist of the universal dignity of human beings, which raises the question of how he could combine both sets of views in a single personality. The good news is that we enlightened humanists of the twenty-first century need not follow him, as we are the heirs of moral progress and of insights into the disastrous shortcomings of the first-wave enlightenment project – a project that was deeply implicated in other pathologies of modernity (such as colonialism). However, none of this entails that moral universalism is flawed, as one of the verdicts of universalism is precisely that colonialism, violent Eurocentrism, racism, and so on, are morally unacceptable forms of radical evil.
The second anthropological principle says that the human is a free, specifically minded animal (freies geistiges Lebewesen). This means that we humans can change ourselves by changing our image of what it means to be human. The specific freedom of the human mind lies in how our human life form is self-determining. We define our being human, and on the basis of our self-definitions we discover the moral values around which to orient our actions. Other animals have only a dim understanding of morality, and they certainly do not participate of their own accord in the enlightenment project of moral progress. There is absolutely no gender equality in most animal societies, and there is not even a hint of the notion that they should cooperate in order to help foster other species. Cooperation in the animal kingdom is typically a matter of symbiosis and not of rule-governed moral thought designed to enhance the living conditions of everyone. Lions do not consider becoming vegetarians, and we do not blame them for their culinary preferences, because we know that they lack a sufficiently explicit grasp of the standing possibility of moral insight and perfectibility.
This is not to say that humans always act as their values dictate, or even that there is a high probability that they will. Freedom means precisely being able to act in this way or that way – morally or immorally. Yet our freedom also means that we cannot do anything at all without regulating and directing our behaviour. In modernity, therefore, the ultimate horizon of our self-determination, the highest value, is given through our conception of the human. We no longer seek the highest value beyond the human being, in a divine sphere, but we look within ourselves. This does not mean that we are steered around by the voice of conscience; rather, it means that we can steer and control ourselves, by recognizing that we are all united in being human. In this way, modernity is oriented around humanity as the bearer of reason and, if it is to be consistent, naturally has to recognize the value of non-human life too. Enlightened humanism therefore also demands the recognition of animal rights and the careful cultivation of the environment, to sustain the conditions of human and animal life quite generally on our planet.
Nothing less than this already lies in the expression Homo sapiens, which was introduced by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus (1707–1778) in his Systema naturae. In Linnaeus’s classification, the human differs from all other life forms in being the creature subject to the Delphic oracle’s demand: ‘Nosce te ipsum, know thyself’.8 Wisdom (sapientia) is the capacity to determine oneself. The problem is that wisdom does not automatically entail that one does the right thing. This is why the Delphic oracle, whose dictum is quoted by Linnaeus, designated Socrates as the wisest of all men.9 For Socrates understood the structure of the oracle’s invocation: to the question of what the human being is, the answer is not fixed by pointing to any norm set by God, the gods or the cosmos; rather, it is determined solely by how we determine ourselves. We are condemned to be free, as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) put it, somewhat misleadingly.10
This book is an act of self-determination. Human self-determination occurs at two levels: at one level, what matters is that humans – whether we like it or not – are animals of a certain kind. It is only thanks to our being the animals we are that we are in a position to know reality in the first place. Cognition is not a process that takes place in some ethereal realm; it is one that is tied to ineliminable biological parameters. We are neither gods, nor angels, nor computer programs run on wetware, the slimy matter of our nervous systems. At another level, though, we are not just animals of a certain species. Unlike the ‘last pre-human mammals of evolution’, as the German poet Durs Grünbein (b. 1962) puts it, we are not ‘creatures halfway between humanity and the rest of the zoo’.11 As minded beings who, thanks to language and reflection, have a particularly developed sense of thought, we humans are in contact with infinitely many immaterial realities.
As the American philosopher Saul Aaron Kripke (b. 1940) rightly notes, reality shouldn’t be confused with the ‘enormous scattered object that surrounds us’.12 Reality as we know it is just not identical with the material-energetic system of the universe. The real is what we can be wrong about and what – for that very reason – we can grasp as it truly is. Our thinking belongs to reality. It is itself something real – just like our feelings, unicorns (in films such as The Last Unicorn), witches (in Goethe’s Faust), stomach aches, Napoleon, toilet bowls, Microsoft and the future. This was the idea I set out and defended at length in my book Why the World Does Not Exist.
Because of the globalization of commodity production and the digital interconnectedness of our news services, we are currently experiencing a dangerous ideological shift. By an ideology, I understand a distorted conception of the human that fulfils a socio-economic function, usually the implicit justification of an ultimately unjust distribution of resources. These days we are continually encouraged to believe that reality could be entirely different from how we believe it to be. And this notion is only nourished further by political sloganizing about a ‘post-factual age’, fake news and alternative facts, right through to ‘post-truth’.
We have thus arrived in an age of a new metaphysics. By metaphysics, I here understand a theory of reality as a whole, which distinguishes between a real world (being) and the appearance and deception that supposedly has us humans caught in its snares. Our age is metaphysical through and through. It builds on the illusion that, in its most important facets, our entire life is an illusion, one we can see through only with great difficulty, if at all.
Yet the illusion that reality is an illusion is ultimately a distraction from what’s really going on: the digital revolution of the past decade is a consequence of the modern knowledge-based society. In the age of first-wave enlightenment, the combination of all forms