From Human Nature to Hominescence
Reading Michel Serres Hominescence
The ongoing story of our hominization unfolds within a single question: how do we get the world to do more of what we want? How do we free ourselves from the demands of Necessity, of Fate?
With highs and lows, woundings and curing, an unanalyzable mixture of the unpredictable and the rational , doesn’t our chaotic and contingent adventure deliver us, and with as much difficulty as you like, from Necessity? (9)
We do so by externalizing our intelligence, by embedding it in our technologies, and then we embed those technologies in our lives.
In our current externalization—let’s call it artificial intelligence—we are tempted to see ‘human nature’ as a stable referent against which we can take the measure of this externalization. Philosophy, in the face of this new externalization, doubles down on the question it has never satisfactorily answered: ‘What is human nature?’
But is this the right question? Perhaps a better question, which I argue has always been the true context of Philosophy’s ‘What is’ question, is this: What can our humanity become? Or, to phrase it as Michel Serres did over two decades ago: ‘so a process of hominescence has just taken place by our own doing but doesn’t yet know what humanity it is going to produce, magnify, or murder. But have we ever known this? (10)
Is our fear (or salvational aspirations) of artificial intelligence brought about by a passage through a new temporality of evolution? Are we, as Serres asks, ‘giving birth to another humanity’? (11). This observation—or is it an insight—changes the orientation of the questions we ask about ourselves. Our old questions sought eternal answers to time-bound questions—duties, obligations, virtues, and logics that exist outside of history, that are true for all places and times.
Serres’ Hominescence poses the moral and ethical questions of our time not by recovering ancient moralities and then judging us against them. You will never find him holding up Stoic or Epicurean moralities as fixed standards against which we judge our time. As always, the bigger picture of the changing human condition provides the context for his moral and ethical meditations on what we are capable of becoming.
Underneath the changing human condition, however, is no stable human nature that we could wish to preserve, change, or repress. The human condition itself is expansion of scope, overcoming of Necessity, and taking over the direction of history. Specifically, we have a tremendous and unprecedented capacity to model, predict, and influence the future. We also seem to be able to cultivate and expand it systematically.
These capacities are poorly captured by a static definition of ‘human nature’.
Old and New Bodies
From WW2 forward, we live in a new body—at least in the First World. This body, while genetically similar to what came before, is crossing a threshold. We can cure many ailments that would have killed previous generations or at least left them permanently disfigured. Rather than gratitude that one would think would naturally come from an appreciation of history, we experience our side of this threshold in two ways.
First, we believe we are permanently entitled to health. ‘Imagine the happiness of our bodies: formerly rare, now frequent, recovery becomes a right, and disease, once a daily thing, becomes intolerable’ (16).
Second, we have forgotten what came before. The speed of this threshold, largely occurring in a few decades in the middle of the last century, propelled us forward so quickly and abruptly that we have lost connection with the older body that more frequently suffered and saw that suffering as normal.
Our contemporary health therefore liberated itself form this harsh fate fairly recently and in such a way that we broke with what our health had been ever since our origins: a cut so decisive that it closes an era whose beginning we don’t even know except in myths and legends concerning the first gods. (20)
Together, these combine as another instance of our End of History thinking that occurred in the last quarter of the twentieth century—a way of thinking that we have yet to come to terms with.
Old and New Moralities
This passage through the threshold is not over. We have not arrived at the other side. But we risk getting stuck in the in between of the Tightrope Walker if we can’t reinvent our ethics and our moralities for this passage.
Hence the change of ethics. Our old moralities trained the will to live within the inevitable constraints of suffering and early death; the new morality emanates from the freedom acquired against them. (22)
At the heart of our inherited moralities is a hard boundary between ‘what depends on us and what doesn’t depend on us’ (23). This is crucial for Serres because we’ve made more of the things of this world dependent on us. Even the things that seem to be out of control—what I’ve called the Return of Fate—depend on us, and raise the possibility of our own self-extinction:
So the collective death haunting us comes in at least three forms: through our power of nuclear fire, first, were we to make war. Through out industrial pollution next, in the midst of peace; we fear and accelerate global transformations and, in particular, the disappearance of certain species without knowing just how far these changes or eradications will extend. Through our cruelty toward our own race, lastly, since the West puts the third and fourth worlds to death coldy, for money. Faced with these three responsibilities, how can we reorient our enterprises and perhaps our time? (3-4)
This is the return of fate, but of a different order from what our old moralities and ethics called fate, destiny, and necessity. These things that threaten us to the point of extinction are not gods and are not raw natural processes running unaffected by humans. These new elements of fate—the things beyond our control—are in fact our own byproducts of our success, our ‘accursed shares’ which he will use extensively in The Incandescent, borrowing the term from Georges Bataille.
In a key theme throughout Serres’ work, we are becoming the gods we once worshipped:
Everything depends on us. And through new and unexpected loops, we ourselves end up depending on the things that depend globally on us. Here, risks and chances grow as fast as our omnipotence.
This is the rhythm that we must tune into—the rhythm of our growing omnipotence, which is the human story unfolding time itself. As our power grows, so do the ‘unexpected loops’ and accursed shares we do not necessarily intend from the outset. Each expansion of the scope of our hominescent power includes promises and peril to which we must attend.
What is the moral orientation to these unexpected loops? This is Serres at his most subtle. We do not, as Nietzsche might have thought, need a new heroic vision of morality that is hard break from what has come before. But we can’t go back because those moralities emerged from a much different relationship between fate and our bodies: ‘The search for ataraxia or contrition depended on fearsome conditions whose insistency has been forgotten by the new body’ (20).
Yet we can’t abandon these as our inheritance. Any engaged reading of the body of Serres’ work would necessarily complicate understanding the march of History as a series of ruptures and renewals.
The move Serres makes is more subtle than abandonment in the name of the new. To understand this move, we have to understand the relationship between time and hominesence.
Time and Hominescence
In the final two sections of the introduction, ‘Deaths’, we find a remarkable crystallization of Serres’ thoughts on time, morality, and the massive change through which we are moving.
To reiterate, this change is abrupt, potentially catastrophic, and truly new. But to understand it, Serres wants us to step onto a broader stage than History. Only by moving onto this broader stage can we even begin to devise moral and ethical orientations that can navigate the turbulence ahead of us.
Here a close reading of these final pages of ‘Deaths’ will help us to understand the importance of this move to a broader stage:
Behold here, in sum, our newness: it forms a sum, and we encounter it everywhere. (10)
Let’s pause here to dwell on the movement of the language. Our newness is not a break; ‘it forms a sum’ that we encounter everywhere. Our newness, in other words, is a summation of what has come before, which means Serres is pointing to a continuity in History. But this continuity has somehow yielded a newness. To say that this newness is encountered everywhere is crucial—the global We (which was a substantial focus of his earlier work, The Natural Contract) is the effect of a species that can bend the world to its purposes. We have covered the globe with our technology and our lives, and thus we encounter ourselves everywhere.
Since this has never happened to us before, we don’t know what we are to do with all these powers; the philosophy they require is forever not being born, hesitates, vibrates, trickles, flickers. (10)
We should read this as Serres running up to the limits of philosophy as a way of knowing this summation that is a newness on a global scale. The philosophical (and theological) lineage that asks these moral questions, is accustomed to grounding its answers on a hard difference between the human and what remains external to it: ‘Effective knowledge and practice change moralities and their constant foundation, which has always distinguished between what depends on us and what doesn’t depend on us’ (22).
If we are to reorient morally and ethically to our newness, then philosophy and theology must swim in unfamiliar lanes. But in the swimming, the other lanes themselves must change—they must confront their own philosophical lineage and the structure of the questions that inform them.
Here we arrive at one of Serres most enduring concerns: the relationship between philosophical knowledge, the social sciences, and the exact sciences.
In order to think this differential [i.e., hominesence], I am attempting to dig underneath the time of history towards the times opened up by biology and the exact sciences.
Again, let’s pause to take the measure of this single sentence. History is not up to the task of explaining our newness. Its challenge is that it sees human history from within a narrow a lane that gets stuck in an understanding of time as the march of human accomplishments. The move he wants to make—and arguably is the key move of the entire series of books that he will retrospectively title le Grand Récit—is to tell the story of history through hominesence. This does not reduce history to biology, but it does say that the biological and other hard sciences have provided an understanding of our hominization that should complicate our understanding of traditional history that concerns itself only with politics, economics, and culture.
Our social knowledge would lose out by cutting all ties with them [i.e., biology and the other exact sciences]. In fact, we don’t merely communicate in cities and amid concerns that are of an economic, political or cultural order, but our bodies also live in the world in company with other species and things. (11)
To see a bigger picture, we need a wider vantage point—wider in time than what categories like culture, economics, and politics can provide. These categories are the lineages of our Western ways of knowing that somehow have become the natural swim lanes of professionalized knowledge production. While they have provided tremendous insight, they do travel along narrow lanes and therefore struggle to see more broadly the summation that is our newness.
In order to understand a few current events, let’s put them back into the long periods assessed poorly by our fathers [i.e., our Western intellectual lineage]. In proposing this word ‘hominescence’, I am attempting to apprehend the newness assailing us today in this immemorial light. (11)
We find here the importance of different time scales through which Serres wants our experience to pass—and to be transformed in the passage. This is the purpose of his written works: not merely to explain, but to sensitize our experience to multiple time scales: ‘Already immersed in several types of space by our communication networks, we likewise plunge into several times, certain ones of which are counted in millennia, or even, when evolution is at issue, in millions of years.’
Thus the road in front of us doesn’t resemble any of the one’s History has followed, so it hardly can serve as a support for us: hence this book, which plunges underneath its time, so as sometimes to return there [return to History?]. The word ‘hominescence’ says these hopes mixed with worries, these emergences, fears and tremblings. (11)
To situate our understanding of the present as a summation, a newness, an acquired omnipotence, and as all too human, requires the ability for our experience and our knowledge to experience the multiple scales of time that make us who we are—but also obscure the kind of species we are becoming.
This is not, however, a philosophy of becoming. We should be sensitive to Serres never wanting to ground his work on essential binaries—being/becoming, internal/external, human/nature. This is not Existentialism, therefore it is not a philosophy of being or one of becoming.
This is an engagement with our present that brings all of our accumulated knowledge—and its different scales of time—to bear on the moral and ethical questions that face us today: ‘we may be giving birth to another humanity. Nothing can arouse our concern more than this arrival. The least of our thoughts, the most humble of our actions are drawing today, little by little, the silhouette of this particular humanity and deciding in real time how future generations will survive’ (11).
Indeed, nothing can arouse our concern more than this arrival, especially when we have come our own creators.
Read more from the Wednesdays series.
This essay is part of my series on the work of Michel Serres.
This essay is also part my series on Rejuvenation and Orientation.
For more on cultivating out power of purpose, see ‘Cultivating Purpose and Discernment in a Computational World’.