Posthumanism

Abstract

Posthumanism is a mode of thinking about the intersecting human, nonhuman, and technological worlds that has gained theoretical currency in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially in the wake of ecological consciousness and environmental campaigns that call into question the role of humans in shaping the fate of the Earth. The interconnectedness of humans with other life forms and the planet has been a commonplace in Asian, African, and Aboriginal thought as embodied in Yoruba, the subcontinent’s tribal myths, folklore, creation stories of the Native Americans, and literatures from these continents. Posthumanism as a school of theory in the West draws on a Eurocentric tradition of humanism and its critique—some of which emerges from critical race theory—and disciplines as diverse as animal studies and social studies of technology. Euro-American posthumanism calls for a reevaluation of traditional humanistic myths, such as the human as the center of the universe, or the instrumental attitude toward other life forms and nonliving matter. A contribution of posthumanist thought has been to decenter the human and to demonstrate how all matter is interlinked, mutually dependent and co-evolved, whether this is the animal forms on Earth or the impact humans have on technology and vice versa. Gender, sexuality and social relations, and families and communities have all been reconfigured through the arrival and incorporation of technology. Posthumanism demolishes the Nature/Culture binary as it has been enshrined in the Euro-American tradition. Technologies and humans, it argues, co-evolve, just as humans and nonhumans do. It also examines the prospects of human enhancement, the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI), and the ethics of these developments as they affect humans, the law, concepts of “personhood,” and the social order. Popular culture, performance arts, and even architectural styles have been known to incorporate posthuman themes. Popular culture, in particular, has made cyborgs, chimeras, human-animal hybrids, and techno-dystopias—dwelling on rampaging artificial intelligence and cyborgs, usually—a commonplace motif. Finally, posthumanist thought treats animals and plants as companion species to humans, and numerous studies now explore “vegetal thinking,” animality, and the entanglements of humans with other life forms as well as nonliving matter. More recent work in posthumanism and the fiction of NK Jemisin and others seeks to link race in history with the history of particular practices that dehumanized humans (such as colonialism and slavery). Introducing race into the debate when speaking of, say, the Anthropocene or technology enables a provincializing of posthumanism.

Representation and Reasoning in Vedānta

“…The Vaiśeṣika system explains that four elements pṛthivī, āpas, tejas, and vāyu are atomic and gross matter consists of all four [12]. The example is given that gold normally is solid (seemingly, and erroneously, only pṛthivi atoms), but when it is heated it becomes liquid (āpas atoms get manifested), and further heating it starts to flame (tejas atoms manifested), and if the process is continued it will lose mass (owing to the working of the vāyu atoms).…”

“…Ordinary consciousness has time as a foundational element, but the time variable depends on physical phenomena. In contemporary discourse, it has been said that, someday, technology will make it possible for humans to become "post-human," that is, transcend the limits of the human condition [12]. There are others who believe that the only way to make sense of all the scientific facts is to take reality as a simulation.…”

Posthumanist stylistics

“…European humanism developed circuitously from Ancient Greek philosophy, Arabic-Persian philosophy, the Renaissance and The Enlightenment to contemporary enterprises such as 'Humanists International', which also embraces non-European humanist traditions. 1 Humanism's assumptions are not always explicit; for example, humans are the most important species ('anthropocentrism') and our consciousness distinguishes us from machines (Nayar, 2014). Many humans, unaware of humanist philosophy, take such assumptions for granted.…”

The New Mythology of the Body and the Transformation of the Therapeutic Space

“…The axial term that now stands in the vanguard of human enhancement is posthuman transhumanism 46,47 : an ideology and movement that, starting from posthumanist philosophy, 46,48 seeks to develop and make available technologies that enable immortality and greatly enhance intellectual, physical, and psychological capabilities of man to develop a "posthuman future. "…”