Humanism and Posthumanism – a Non-Dualistic Perspective

In this post, I intend to offer an alternative perspective to humanism and posthumanism through a non-dualistic Eastern perspective. I will primarily draw on Sian Bayne’s paper Posthumanism: A navigation aid for educators, and Norm Friesen’s response in Posthumanism = Post education

Liberal humanism rooted in the Western philosophy of “Descartes, Lock, Rousseau, Kant, Leibniz and other” Bayne (2018) suggests an anthropocentric view of the world, by claiming

“that the figure of ‘Man’ (sic) naturally stands at the centre of things; is entirely distinct from animals, machines, and other nonhuman entities; is absolutely known and knowable to ‘himself’; is the origin of meaning and history; and shares with all other human beings (Badington, as cited by Bayne p1).

Such a binary perspective Bayne argues is no longer sustainable, for one “The emancipatory impulse of liberal humanism has come to be understood as being unwittingly complicit in colonist, patriarchal and capitalist structures” (Simon, as cited by Bayne p2).

Bayne suggests a posthumanist perspective instead, in which the human is “inextricably connected to the world and only conceivable as emergent with and through it” i.e. we are ‘entangled’ with the world, both human and non-human. Such a view is supported by the findings of modern physics. For example, in Young’s double slit experiment, the intention of the observers determines who electrons behave: wave or particle. Friesen, on the contrary, argues the loss of humans being autonomous in will and choice as being detrimental to ‘the ways of acting and reflecting in education’ and goes on to cite the creation of a classroom as being normative and purposive constructed intentionally by a human, and the idea of it “constituted through … complex relations between entities is a collective field of engagement” (Russell, cited by Bayne), as missing the point. I think the issue which Friesen fails to address is that the creation of an industrial model of the classroom by an autonomous human, maybe purposive and normative but to what end if it is anthropocentric and what would a curriculum model look like if it wasn’t?

Going back to the issues humanism has lead to and which are elaborated further in Toward a Posthumanist Education, (Snaza et al.), let us take the idea of feminism. Citing Braun (2004), Bayne makes an important point, alongside the non-human “Jew, the slave, the barbarian, the foreigner”, it is those in power who define what it means to be human and that Feminism draws “attention to the way in which the human subject has been consistently identified with the human male”.

By suggesting an assemblage with no-ontological hierarchy, posthumanism offers a fresh perspective, which may not be susceptive to a reactionary power-play as a backlash against masculinity by replacing masculine power with feminine or to have less of it as some feminists are arguing. In his book King, Warrior, Magician and Lover – Rediscovering the Archetype of the Mature Masculine, Moore, makes an essential distinction between the immature and mature masculine:

“The patriarchal male does not welcome the full masculine development of his sons or his male subordinates any more than he welcomes the full development of his daughters or his female employees. This is the story of the superior at the office who can’t stand it that we are as good as we are. How often are we envied, hated, and attacked in direct and passive-aggressive ways even as we seek to unfold who we really are in all our beauty, maturity, creativity, and generativity! The more beautiful, competent, and creative we become, the more we seem to invite hostility of our superiors, or even of our peers. What we are really being attacked by is the immaturity in human beings who are terrified of our advances on the road toward masculine or feminine fullness of being. .. In the present crises in masculinity, we do not need, as some feminists are saying, less masculine power. We need more. But we need more of the mature masculine.” Robert Moore, King, Warrior, Magician and Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine.

I would argue concerning humanism: what is needed isn’t a loss of humanism per se, but we need more of the mature human as seen by non-dualistic Eastern traditions, which do not take the Western humanist view and wouldn’t fundamentally contradict posthumanism but has striking parallels and may add further to the discussion.

The first perspective non-dualist traditions offer, which neither humanism nor posthumanism has explicitly discussed with regards to human and non-humans is an understanding of the relative and non-subjective Absolute or the Principle. I am not referring to an anthropomorphic God to be believed in (who usually is male) and is the object of the human subject rather the That which escapes all conceptual definition but is intimately linked to consciousness and its various manifestations of which humans are but one. “The rootless root of the causeless cause” is how the Eastern non-dualist tradition of Advaita Vedanta points to it with the formulation of “That are thou”. Taoism, on the other hand, suggests “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao”. In Sufi metaphysics, the Absolute in His/Her manifestation is referred to the First, the Last, the Outer, the Inner. Is the human only subject to conditioning in serial time (horizontal) and therefore limited to a subjective experience, or is there a possibility of objectivity by open to something other than itself, e.g. the archetype, symbol and the collective unconscious as explored Jung and various civilisation before him? The contact between the ‘Infinite and finite’ and the role of knowledge is summarised by Schuon as follows:

Metaphysical knowledge is one thing; its actualization in the mind quite another. All the knowledge which the brain can hold, even if it is immeasurably rich from the human point of view, is as nothing in the sight of Truth. As for metaphysical knowledge, it is like a Divine seed in the heart; thoughts represent only faint glimmer of it. The imprint of the Divine Light on human darkness, the passage from the Infinite to the fine, the contact between the Absolute and the contingent – herein lies the whole mystery of intellection, of revelation, and of the Avatara.

As an analogy, if we can liken the human to a computer for a moment, one may ask if a computer can connect to the internet (either through wifi or network) to download an update and alter the way it operates. It is this ‘vertical-dimension of thinking’ which allows for a more fluid identity from one rooted in the self to other possibilities in an assemblage (Wegerif, 2011); it also opens human-consciousness to inner meanings and by implication makes the ‘autonomous liberal human’ dependent on something other than itself. Dante alluded to such meaning when he wrote his Divine Comedy can be read at four different levels: literal, historical, moral and anagogical. In his book The Secret of Shakespeare, Lings suggests, such level of anagogical meaning which is universal and perennial yet contained within the symbolism of the play (relative), can be applied to all great inspired minds, including Shakespeare. In Sufi-metaphysics everything in the cosmos is a symbol, including the human being, participating in productive play on the stage of the Cosmos.

Secondly, in re-thinking human subjectivity in posthuman terms, Braidotti proposed of nomadic subjectivity which enables us to take account of “the inter-connection between self and others…by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism“ (Braidotti, 2013, as cited by Bayne). This can be seen as an integral part of the Sufi tradition and from the most widely selling poet in America in recent years, BBC (2014):

The tart and hearty grapes, destined to ripen,

will at last become one in heart

by the breath of the masters of heart.

They will grow steadily to grapehood,

shedding duality and malice and strife.

till in maturity, they rend their skins,

and become the mellow wine of union. (Rumi, M, II, 3723-25)

The above quote is taken from the chapter Grapes Ripen Smiling at One Another, Knowing Heart, Helminski (2000), and reflecting on the Mevlevi tradition, he goes on to explain a process of education which sees an interdependence of humans with nature and inanimate objects- which are often treated as animate. For example, in the Vedantic tradition, the musical instrument is seen as Sacred or equally alive, and the musician playing a raag composition is dependent on ‘the other’, recognising an assemblage between everything present: instrument, musician, listeners and the environment together make the music. So on a different occasion, the same raag will manifest differently.

Thirdly, a subject-object non-duality, as alluded by Edwards, “the outside-inside binary has collapsed alongside that of the subject-object” (Edwards 2010, quoted by Bayne), is an essential perspective in non-dual traditions. There are countless teachings on the observer being at one with the observed or the wine-bearer, drunkard, wine and cup sharing an ontological unity. To quote Rumi again

“There came one and knocked at the door of the Beloved.

And a voice answered and said, ‘Who is there?’

The lover replied, ‘It is I.’

‘Go hence,’ returned the voice;

‘there is no room within for thee and me.’

Then came the lover a second time and knocked and again the voice demanded,

‘Who is there?’

He answered, ‘It is thou.’

‘Enter,’ said the voice, ‘for I am within.”

Or in the words of Meister Eckhart: “The eye by which I see God, is the eye by which He sees me”. Where non-dualist Eastern traditions may differ from the posthumanism perspective, is that there not only unity outwardly in the planes of manifestation between subject and object in a non-binary entangled relationship, (horizontal) but also within (vertical); where there is transcendence there is also immanence; ‘the part’ is not only interdependent on the whole but mysteriously contains it. “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop” – Rumi. The Sufi tradition is filled with metaphysics of the macrocosm and microcosm sharing an interdependent relationship by mirroring each other:

“While looking at a smudged mirror the viewer sees the glass. If the mirror is polished, a shift occurs. The glass becomes invisible, with only the viewer’s image reflected. Vision has become self-vision. Sufi mystics used the polishing of the mirror as a symbol of the shift beyond the distinction between subject and object, self and other’.Sells (1994)

Inspired by modern physics such paradigms are also alluded to in the holographic model of the cosmos, Tablot (1996).

Conclusion:

Snaza et al. end the paper on Toward a Posthumanist Education with an interesting line “While we cannot offer any specific vision of what a new posthuman curriculum studies will do, we are at the dead end of humanism, and now, together, we have to burrow in other directions”. Non-dualistic Easter traditions can play a role here in shaping a vision of a posthuman curriculum, partly because they have a long tradition of seeing the human as an integral part of mother Nature and has models of education which require connecting with ‘the other’, human and non-human, by reconsidering the subject-object duality.

References

Bayne, S. (2018). Posthumanism: A navigation aid for educators. On Education. Journal for Research and Debate, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.17899/on_ed.2018.2.1

BBC 2014, Why is Rumi the Most Widely Selling Poet in America http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140414-americas-best-selling-poet

BBC 2019 Instagram helped kill my daughter https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-46966009/instagram-helped-kill-my-daughter

Friesen Norm 2018 Posthumanism = Posteducation: A Reply to Siân Bayne’s Posthumanism: A Navigation Aid for Educators

Sells, M (1994) Mystical Languages of Unsayings

Schuon F, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts

Talbot 1996, The Holographic Universe

Wegerif R,(2011) Towards a dialogic theory of how children learn to think https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S1871187111000435