Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences after Kant ed. by Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, and Leif Weatherby

Abstract

Reviewed by: Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences after Kant ed. by Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, and Leif Weatherby Howard Pollack-Milgate Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, and Leif Weatherby, eds. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences after Kant. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. 337 pp. The diverse group of theories known as "posthumanism" shares perhaps but one characteristic: the belief that humanism, in our historical moment, has been, or needs to be, overcome. This collection, containing an introduction and a series of fourteen papers, many by frequent contributors to the Goethe Yearbook, might well have been entitled: "On Humanism: Essays for its Cultured Despisers." Its greatest virtue (and source of delight) is its construction of fascinating and often unexpected interfaces between, very broadly speaking, (post-)Kantian writers and natural scientists and various directions of today's posthumanist thought. These connections work both ways: not only do they provide new windows into older texts, more and less familiar, but also offer different ways of understanding the most contemporary of themes, from computational neuroscience to global capitalism. Another virtue of the collection is its very varied discussion of the different species of posthumanism; though names like N. Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, and Rosi Braidotti recur in many papers along with the terms "speculative realism," "critical posthumanism," and "object-oriented ontology," each author has a different take on the nature and balance of these different approaches. Most significant is the question everywhere in the background—but left as an exercise to the reader to answer—what do these texts and authors from the "Age of Humanism" have to tell us today? The essays in this collection are uniformly lucid, balanced in length, and each addresses from its particular angle the relationship between present and past. Since there is not enough space to do justice to them all, perhaps a partial catalogue of the intriguing connections made within and implied between them can demonstrate the richness and breadth of coverage. First, we read of relationships between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers and natural scientists and contemporary cybernetic, systems, and posthumanist theories that demonstrate the constancy of fundamental questions at distinctly different levels of physiological and technological sophistication: Kant's friend, the doctor Markus Herz on vertigo and Marvin Minsky guiding electronic rats through mazes in the 1950's (Jeffrey Kirkwood); Fichtean intersubjectivity and the Turing-test robots of Ex Machina (Alex Hogue); the physiologist Johannes Müller and enactive autopoesis (Edgar Landgraf); Hufeland and Braidotti on the role of death in life (Jocelyn Holland); Gall's phrenology and Derrida's deconstruction of the human/animal distinction (Patrick Fortmann); Hegel's nonhuman Geist and Bateson (John H. Smith). Second, we see classic Goethezeit authors and philosophers [End Page 372] who offer posthumanist insights: Kleist and the limits of the human in the animal and the mechanical (Tim Mehigan), Kantian and Humboldtian natural beauty beyond the human (Peter Gilgen, Elizabeth Millán), and Hegel's dialectical overcoming of Kant as a model for a necessary overcoming of what today's data engineers mean by "ontology" (Leif Weatherby). In their useful introduction, the editors divide the essays into three parts based on subject matter (embodiment and subjectivity, the material and the ideal, the inhuman in technology and animals). It is also useful to parse the basic divisions in terms of the relationship of the past to the present: is this relationship evidence of what the editors call a "transhistorical ethos," or a study of (more or less hidden) influences and anticipations, or rather is the past useful as a resource to challenge, enrich, or bringer farther today's theory? Some essays argue that their proto-posthumanist authors were isolated dissidents in the Age of Humanism, but especially intriguing are those chapters which use the resources of nineteenth-century philosophy and biology to push back against the caricatures produced by and sometimes overarching claims made by recent theory. In particular, various forms of "speculative realism" are the focus of critique, especially the "flat ontology" often posited by these approaches. Quentin Meillassoux's indictment of Kant's original sin of "correlationism" is strongly refuted by Carsten Strathausen's...