Abstract
To rediscover the non-human animal as a plural geography (which requires being aware of the many hermeneutical frameworks surrounding the concept of animal) it is therefore necessary to reflect on the human. To rediscover the non-human animal we must free it from the antinomic concept of animal, but to do so we must extract the disjunctive operator from the bundle of fractalic recursivities. I will dwell on the humanistic paradigm, considering it not so much a XV century line of thought but rather a philosophical mindset excluding nature in general and non-human animals in particular. In my reading, humanism was defined in philosophy and post-sophistry, then grew between the I century B.C. and the I century .A.C. through stoicism and monotheism, later feeding on neo-Plato nism and gnosticism and finally being definitively affirmed in Italian humanism.
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Notes
- 1.
For “mythopoietic ” see glossary.
- 2.
For “autopoiesis” see glossary.
- 3.
For “anthropo-metrism” see glossary.
- 4.
For “anthropo-plastics” see glossary.
- 5.
On the one hand, man tends to elevate and emancipate himself from the world using the animal as a representative of the latter, on the other there is a phagocytosis annihilating or removing meaning from everything that is not human, transforming it into a more or less usable object.
- 6.
G. Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, Henry Regnery Company, Chicago 1956, p. 7.
- 7.
The problem with the humanistic paradigm lies in its anthropocentric project based on exalting man as the sole protagonist endowed with existential activity, as opposed to the inert and passive non-human. The humanist paradigm is grounded on a substitution that, respecting the canon of Medieval theocentrism, simply puts man in God’s place. In this perspective, the human being can have an outopia: an ontopoietic goal placed elsewhere thus devaluing nature, regarded as dystopic with respect to human predicates. Thomas Moore’s utopia, which blends eu and ou, is not necessarily placed elsewhere. But in being assimilated into humanist thought, it loses the suffix eu and becomes synonymous with Neverland (which demands from man an inevitably anthropocentric formalization). The outopia (henceforth “utopia”) thus becomes a negation of nature or an urgency to get rid of nature.
- 8.
I. Kant, Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
- 9.
J.H. Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language” in Herder. Philosophical Writings, ed., Michael N. Forster, publ. CUP.
- 10.
J.H. Herder. Outlines of a philosophy of the history of man, London 1800.
- 11.
P. Tort, L’effet Darwin, Sélection naturelle et naissance de la civilisation (Editions du Seuil, Paris, 2012).
- 12.
Martin Heidegger writes in The Issue Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Garland Publishing, New York and London 1977, p. 4: “We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. […] The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance, or, in Latin, an instrumentum. The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.” This is an instrumental view of technology as a mere activity reifying any human production. However, Heidegger seems to imply that it also represents a dialogue between the outside world (to which being is open as being-in-the-world) and the subject itself, in a performative and binding relation. In this perspective, techne appears to be able to craft the human, modifying and hybridising its body, predicates and perceptivity of the outside world. The non-human partner, be it technological or animal, makes the human referable, in constant need of external support to define its predicates and its being-in-the-world.
- 13.
Think of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism or Francis Galton’s eugenics.
- 14.
A hypothesis that goes in this direction is that made by Lodewijk Bolk , who believes that the human predicative primitivism can be attributed to neoteny, that is, a delay in the development process for which the foetal conditions persist until the adult age. Another similar proposal can be found in the concept of “proterogenesis” by Otto Schindewolf and in that of “domestication” by Konrad Lorenz . For “neoteny” see glossary.
- 15.
Patrick Tort precisely and accurately defined this view of masking in the concept of revertive effect operated by pre-social behaviours.
- 16.
M. Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos, Northwestern University Press, 2009, p. 39.
- 17.
Plessner, Helmuth. 1928. Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.
- 18.
For “technosphere” see glossary.
- 19.
In Gehlen’s hypothesis, the original human lack makes man a foetal being devoid of protection and thus exposed to a number of expressive vanishing lights, which the philosopher interprets as ambivalent qualities. In fact, on the one hand they allow for the virtual action that underlies human creativity, on the other hand they represent social and adaptive dangers if they’re not kept under control—hence the idea of Prometheus.
- 20.
J. Habermas, Theory and Practice, Beacon Press 1975.
- 21.
E. Coreth, Was ist der Mensch?: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Anthropologie. Innsbruck, Wien, München: Tyrolia 1973.
- 22.
F. Cimatti, Filosofia dell’animalità, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2013, p. 34.
- 23.
M. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Here we also read “Not even the lark sees the open”, a metonymical expression indicating that non-humans cannot see beyond their Umwelt .
- 24.
J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
- 25.
Lacan makes human subjectivity emerge precisely from this gap in which mirroring is self-reflection of the human, as it is completely bound to the human itself. Thus the Promethean ends up defining he who looks at himself in order to emerge.
- 26.
F. Cimatti, Filosofia dell’animalità, p. 40.
- 27.
It then becomes clear that the most important aspect of Prometheism is the concept of human autarky I have already explained in Post-human. Verso nuovi modelli di esistenza, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2002 and in Il tramonto dell’uomo. La prospettiva postumanista, Dedalo, Bari, 2009.
- 28.
Ch. Darwin, The Descent of Man.
- 29.
As we have seen, for Heidegger language is the house of being, the place that allows the environment to become world.
- 30.
Consider the research by Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt , clearly showing that the evolutionary legacy of Homo sapiens is far from deficient. In fact, our species is phylogenetically tied to a group of animals (anthropomorphous primates) that are some of the most complex ones in terms of ethographic structure. See Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Human Ethology, Aldine Transaction, 2007.
- 31.
For “zoomimesis” see glossary.
- 32.
This is the hypothesis underlying Merlin Donald’s . Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1991). The idea is that the human mind evolved differently from the primates through adaptations that have led to a new representative system. Instead of replacing the previous modes, the latter has sedimented them, giving rise to a mosaic made up of different structures. For Donald the first transition happened with the passage from an “episodic” culture to a “mimetic” culture typical of Homo erectus and characterised by shared knowledge, rituality, the reproduction of events in writing, etc. The second passage would be from such “mimetic” culture to a “mythical” one present in all humans and identified by the use of verbal language and a highly developed semiotic skills. The last sedimentation allegedly took place with the advent of “theoretical” culture characterised by graphic invention, the formulation of theories and so forth.
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Marchesini, R. (2017). The Promethean Condition. In: Over the Human. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62581-2_2
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