Note on Anthropocentrism
December 27, 2020
Richard Rorty once paraphrased the criticism of relativism in terms of a dilemma it faces when confronted with the question of cross-cultural dialogue (Rorty, 1989). Since they deny the possibility of a universal perspective—a view from nowhere in which all cultural perspectives are assigned equal status—the relativist is forced to adopt either an attitude of quietism (maintaining that cross-cultural dialogue is impossible), or an ethnocentrism that assigns special status to the conceptual framework of their own culture. Rorty himself (the arch-sceptic of the view from nowhere) offered a simple answer to this dilemma: embrace ethnocentrism. For some this response is indicative of the absurd places to which relativism leads—either it implodes in self-defeating total scepticism, or it succumbs to an imperialistic impulse in its implicit granting of a privileged position to the culture of its proponent.
Rorty has a response to this too, however, which depends on drawing a distinction between two different kinds of privileging. The first is cosmological, and grants special status within the absolute order of things to one particular perspective. The other is methodological, and grants an ad hoc and revisable privilege to one’s own perspective on the pragmatic grounds that it is the perspective one inhabits. Cosmological ethnocentrism is the problematic view targeted in accusations of imperialism; methodological ethnocentrism is a corollary of the truism that you have to start from where you are.
Furthermore, if there is indeed no universal perspective then it follows that anyone who claims to speak from it is guilty of sophistry—of presenting positions necessarily conditioned by the particulars of their own situated perspective as if they were endowed with the authority of the view from nowhere. To do this is, of course, to be guilty of cosmological ethnocentrism. Thus Rorty contends that it is only by endorsing methodological ethnocentrism as an explicit value that one can dodge the cosmological ethnocentrism implicit in the pretence to universalism.
I was reminded of this discussion after reading the first couple of chapters of David Roden’s Posthuman Life (Roden, 2015). This book is centrally concerned with what we can and cannot expect from any future successors to humanity that may arise as a result of our technological activity. Roden takes a dim view of attempts to place a priori limits on posthuman weirdness, largely on the grounds that such limits depend on unjustifiably anthropocentric understandings of notions like ‘value’ and ‘agency’.
In the name of clarification Roden untangles several distinct threads in posthuman thought.
- Transhumanism—a normative stance holding that technological enhancements are desirable on humanist grounds (technology can make us better humans).
- Critical Posthumanism—a critical stance which aims to problematise the category of the human (and therefore humanism with it), by, for example, suggesting that we were always already posthuman.
- Speculative Posthumanism—an ontological stance that suggests simply that there could one day be posthumans.
Roden is particularly concerned with the third of these, and with something he calls Disconnection: the idea that future posthumans might be so radically different from us that we have no way, even in principle, of understanding what they might be like—other than by making or becoming them. Disconnection raises some conceptual issues: if they were really so different, then what would qualify them as ‘posthuman’ at all? If there are no boundaries on this concept other than that they are a product of human activities, then all human artefacts would qualify as posthumans—toasters, for example. But if there are boundaries then why can’t we know them?
Conceptually, [speculative posthumanism] requires us to justify our use of a term “posthuman,” whose circumstances of application are unknown to us. Does this mean that talk of “posthumans” is just self-vitiating nonsense? Does speaking of “weird” worlds or values commit one to a conceptual relativism that is incompatible with the commitment to realism? (Roden, 2015, p. 6)
The tension between conceptual relativism and realism is interesting in this connection, and shows up in Roden’s discussion of a line of thought he sees as representing a kind of arch-anthropocentrism: the transcendental tradition beginning with Kant, flowing through Hegel and then on into the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. According to Roden the transcendental approach places strong limits on the shape of posthumanity in its claim to uncover global invariants in the structures of the kind of things we might require posthumans to possess—paradigmatically, agency.
The transcendental approach involves making inferences from phenomena to their conditions of possibility. As such, a transcendental strategy always starts from an empirical premise. Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language, for instance, can be seen as a transcendental investigation into the conditions of possibility of communication—its empirical basis is just the fact that we do, in fact, communicate. Similarly a transcendental approach to agency starts from that fact that we do, in fact, act, and then tries to deduce what has to be invariably true for this to be possible.
That the transcendental approach is supposed to yield invariants actually struck me as quite surprising, though I realise this has to do with my own idiosyncratic route into transcendental thought via philosophical naturalism—a stance that Roden sets in direct opposition to transcendental ambition. Naturalism holds that there is no domain of philosophical enquiry that can deliver results impervious to developments in empirical science. In terms of the outline sketched above, pressure from developments in science could thwart the invariance of transcendental claims in two ways:
- What we thought was an empirical reality turns out to be an illusion: our behaviours are not “actions” at all, rather we are shunted around aimlessly by blind causal laws (or whatever).
- We learn something new about a phenomenon that forces us to revise what we mean by the concept we apply to it: we still agree that we act, but our understanding of what “action” involves has changed, a revision with knock-on effects that may change the content of the transcendental conclusion or invalidate the deduction in some other way.
The second of these entails some degree of conceptual relativism: that the content of our concepts are subject to change as experience forces us to revise their conditions of application. That this threatens realism is reflected in the worry that if conceptual contents are unstable then there’s nothing to stop them being arbitrary, completely subject to choice and unbeholden to anything outside the sphere of human determination. This worry can be answered by considering that contingency does not imply arbitrariness—that despite harbouring an inherent instability conceptual change is nevertheless constrained. The conceptual system’s function as a tool, for instance—as an apparatus for dealing with the world and with each other—provides it with a steady stream of boundary constraints that ensure it is never frictionless. Conceptual relativism need not preclude a form of indirect realism.
Conceptual relativism is a consequence of applying a naturalistic attitude to human linguistic and conceptual practices as such. One way of thinking about this is as introducing a kind of methodological anthropocentrism into our meta-philosophy. When we talk about agency, for example, our understanding of what we’re talking about is conditioned by our own practices of attributing agency to one another—in a sense it can’t not be. But by exactly the same token, there are no a priori limits on the conceptual revisions that such understanding could undergo (since these practices are themselves things we can learn about). There may always be some murkiness in delimiting the boundaries between continuing an old conversation and starting a new one, and the question of historical succession will be crucial in establishing to what extent a concept can be modified before one has changed the subject.
One can wonder, then, if Roden’s Disconnection thesis is not merely a special case of a more general point about epistemic horizons deriving from the possibility of conceptual change. This suggests some different questions. Does prospective Disconnection imply retrospective Disconnection? Might future posthumans lying far outside our current conceptions of agency not nevertheless possess their own conception which makes sense not only of their own agency but also of ours—including our inability to understand it—retrospectively slotting it into a developmental story in which we appear as their direct ancestors in a logical progression that is apparent only in hindsight? Is the possibility of some such retrospective retelling (or something similar) not what would be required for this to count as a legit application of the category “posthuman” in the first place?
Following a Rorty inspired line of reasoning, we could argue that an explicit acknowledgement of methodological anthropocentrism is the best way to avoid the trap of cosmological anthropocentrism. I wonder what Rorty might make, for instance, of speculative realism’s desire to get beyond correlationism—to think beyond the correlation between thought and world. One suspects Rorty would view correlationism as a trivial truth. That thought might never grasp the world in itself is a corollary to the bland fact that tools are not the things they operate on, no more insightful than the realisation that hammers aren’t nails. That human knowledge of the world is irreducibly bound to conceptual shapes is, on this view, a bit like saying that elephants have to grasp things with their trunks. Rorty’s suspicions are more likely to be aroused by the insinuation that something significant is at stake in the question of thinking beyond the correlation—a commitment shared by both the grandiose correlationist and their grandiose detractor. Behind the attitudes of both lies a tacit cosmological anthropocentrism, one which privileges the human as either somehow responsible for imposing form on the world via our conceptual activities, or as having special access to the view from nowhere.
References
- Roden, D. (2015). Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. Routledge.
- Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Solidarity, and Irony. Cambridge University Press.