Date: Sun, 04 Apr 2004 20:35:58 +0100
From: "steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: Re: what it is to be human ...


Eric,

Actually I don't agree that the eating of meat is necessarily 
hypocritical - the requirements of survival and diet depend as much on 
where the specific human lives as anything else.  To clarify I live on 
the edges of a major city in a very temperate climate - consequently 
it's relatively easy to survive as a vegetarian, whereas if I was living 
in Siberia with its extreme climate it would be probably be essential to 
eat meat to survive. If you include the non-human in my immediate social 
group(George the cat for example) then the acceptable diet must include 
meat...

Whilst I appreciate the tradition you are raising  - it remains as 
unstable a solution to the problem of 'rights' and human and non-humans. 
We simply don't know how to incorporate the non-human into the 
structures. Two thoughts occurred to me after reading your response 
which I am sympathetic with - after all it is much closer to my own 
general background than Singer's utilitarian approach (which i'm 
experimenting with...) The first is related to:  GiorgoAgamben's 
observations on the 'declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen', 
which are that it did not make it clear enough whether the two terms of 
man and citizen 'were to name two distinct realities...' or 
alternatively whether the former term was 'already to be contained in 
the second...' All to often the rights have only been granted to the 
citizen,  how then could such rights be extended to the non-human and 
always to be non-citizen ? The lack of certainty was noted by Hannah 
Arendt when she understood, in a world filling up with refugees and 
displaced person, how the earlier premonition that the recognition of 
being 'nothing but human' remained perhaps the greatest danger. For the 
rights were an abstraction and nobody could expect that much protection 
unless they live inside the flesh of a Frenchman. "The rights of man, 
supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable whenever people 
appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state..." Some 
time later when writing about Karl Jaspers she argued that whilst for 
earlier generations humanity had been an ideal, perhaps even a 
philosophical concept (but sadly never a call for social and political 
action ) 'it had now become a matter of urgent reality'. Few truer words 
have ever been said - the urgency as the socio-economics of the West 
have not only filled the world with the products of development, but 
also supplied the rest of the world with its alienating processes of 
disintegration. Including of course the metaphysical structures and 
religious beliefs, wonderful developments in the sciences and the 
development of the state as the only form of government. In the west 
this process had taken hundreds of years whereas elsewhere it 'took only 
a few decades to break down beliefs and ways of life in all other parts 
of the world...'

What Arendt proposes is not dissimilar in terms to your own resolution- 
that is to suggest that the unification of humanity that resulted, the 
'solidarity of mankind' is in fact 'entirely negative'. Everything is 
made dependent on each and every other part, so that we are at best 
painfully aware of the unifying factors of the dangers and fears that we 
produce.  I think therefore that I'm looking for a way to think a merger 
between the two traditions enabling the non-human entrance,  hopefully 
before the genetic structures of the Bonobo are privatised...


steve

>Beyond the ethical schools such as Aristotelian virtue and character
>ethics which forms the basis for traditional theistic accounts of
>humanism (man being interpreted here as the steward of the earth as if
>he were simply another white plantation owner in the deep American
>South), the utilitarian ethics that forms the basis for Singer's
>appraisals, and the postmodern quasi-religious ethics of alterity
>derived from Levinas, there is another tradition which might be
>developed regarding these issues. 
>
>I am referring of course to the deontic tradition of Kant, especially as
>this has been radically re-interpreted by contemporaries such as Adorno,
>Lyotard, and Badiou.  In this tradition, the categorical imperative
>differs from virtue the way a modern historical open society differs
>from a closed mythic tradition-bound city-state. Ethics becomes a
>creative practice in which the realization of the good is left
>undetermined. It is no longer merely the reproduction of the old social
>norms, but the transformation of the existing order in the name of an
>emerging ideal or principle.  Likewise, this ethics, unlike
>utilitarianism, is not consequential in its outlook, but negative and
>sublime. Even if the idea is never realized, it remains valid as the
>principle that must structure our actions, simply because it is the
>right thing to do. 
>
>This ethics also differs from a post-Levinasian celebration of the
>animal as the ultimate form of multicultural otherness (which lends
>itself paradoxically to merely subjective self-valorization in the form
>of a 'desire that can never be satisfied' which in turn leans towards
>theological solutions, even in its secular guises such as those who
>'celebrate diversity'.)
>
>The deontic tradition I am upholding argues that it is necessary to
>change the means/ends relationships that govern the prevailing orders,
>to undo the domination of one species over another, to reconcile both
>the human with the animal as well as the human with nature; a kingdom of
>ends where the Bonobo chimp may become another face of the human.  
>
>This cannot be accomplished merely by the individual actions of humans,
>even though these remain quite necessary. Ultimately, it can be achieved
>only through the transformation of existing orders. Therefore, such an
>ethics explicitly extends itself as well to the demand for political and
>social change, in a way that remains undetermined, transforming itself
>reflexively through its own evolving praxis. 
>
>The negative humanism I am proposing is another possible philosophical
>stance one might take with regard to this issue. For me, the crucial
>issue of this negative humanism is not our difference from the animals,
>but the difference between the scope of our inherent possibilities and
>the very limited range of forms which the present age of global
>administration allows to occur, while it creates a economic machine
>which undermines the long-range sustainability of the planet for the
>sake of short-range advantage of certain elites. A machine which unlike
>Chronos doesn't merely eat its children but whose ultimate wish is to
>consume itself.
>
>eric 
>
>
>
>  
>


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